Editorial, October 2015

John Joseph Adams | 872 words

Welcome to issue sixty-five of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month, we won another Hugo! The Hugos this year were presented at Sasquan, the 73rd annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), held August 19-23 in Spokane, Washington. 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.

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.)

• • • •

This month is 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), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. It’ll be available starting October 6. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

ICYMI, in August, 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 our September issue. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more.

And then in September, Saga Press published 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. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed.

• • • •

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

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 feature interview with security expert and futurist Marc Goodman, and of course the latest installment of our book review column.

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.

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 two-time 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.

A Letter to Myself at Age Twelve

Wendy N. Wagner (Managing/Associate Editor) | 500 words

Publisher’s Note: The following piece first appeared on Wendy’s blog following our Hugo win at Worldcon this year. It was such a great way to express how we all feel about winning the Hugo, and being a part of this wonderful community, that we thought we’d reprint it here.

Dear Me at Age Twelve:

Hi, it’s Me! I’m writing at age thirty-six. Yes, that is old. No, you don’t have an awesome motorcycle. Or a sword. No, no trench coat, either. Trust me, you’ll actually stop wanting to dress like Connor MacLeod someday, as impossible as that might sound right now.

Anyway, I thought I’d just make a list of some of the good stuff that’s happened the last couple of years, because it’s going to blow your mind. And because sometimes there will be kind of lousy days and you’ll want to have a list of your accomplishments. (That’s just a normal part of being a grown-up.) So here goes.

Remember how last summer you decided you wanted to be just like Margaret Weis and write those Dungeons and Dragons novels? Well, guess what? That totally happened! I mean, it’s a slightly different game, but it was born from D&D and it’s still all magical and stuff, and your heroine is super tough and has a sword and everything. No, her eyes aren’t purple. That trend died in the ’90s.

Oh, and I know you’re still thinking about Powell’s Books. Aren’t you glad your sister took you there last year? Anyway, your book is on their shelves, and you’ll be part of a big signing there in November. And that awesome yellow column with all the signatures? Yours is up there now, too. You should probably work on your penmanship.

I know that ever since you started reading that Fairy Tale series that you’ve wanted to be an editor like Terri Windling. No, I’m sorry. You don’t work in New York at a big publishing company. But you are an editor, and you got to work with Terri Windling last year! And you know what? She’s just as awesome as you thought she’d be. (Oh, and word to the wise? You should start reviewing the rules about using commas now, because they can be pretty confusing. Don’t worry about semi-colons, though; you’ve got those.)

And remember how you wrote down in your journal that someday you want to win a Nebula or a Hugo award, even though you’re not really sure what they are, but you know Anne McCaffery won them and she’s even cooler than Margaret Weis? Well, brace yourself, because this happened this weekend:

You won a Hugo award!

It’s for being part of the editorial team at Lightspeed Magazine, which was named the Best Semiprozine Magazine of 2014. (Trust me, that will all make sense in twenty-four years.)

Just one more thing, little Me. I want to thank you for dreaming big. I don’t think there are a lot of kids out there who know what an editor is or want to write gaming tie-in fiction or would sit down and write “I want to win a Hugo award.” You’re kind of big weirdo, and I love that about you. I’m so glad I got to make your dreams come true.

Now I have to get back to work, because I didn’t stop dreaming when I was twelve, and dreams don’t keep coming true if you don’t keep fighting for them. And don’t forget: You’re destroying science fiction, and that’s pretty great.

Hugs and kisses,

Wendy N. Wagner, age thirty-six

© 2015 by Wendy N. Wagner.

Originally published on winniewoohoo.com.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of Skinwalkers, a Pathfinder Tales novel inspired by Viking lore. She’s published more than thirty short stories in anthologies like Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Armored, and The Way of the Wizard, and magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Farrago’s Wainscot. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Solder and Seam

Maria Dahvana Headley | 4,310 words

Solder & Seam by Maria Dahvana Headley
Art by Reiko Murakami

There was a man who built a whale out of wood.

He built it in the middle of a field out in the dry country, where nobody bothered him but birds and a couple of farm cats. The whale was white, and it took two years to build. He made it out of planks from old barns, which he stole in the night. He didn’t steal them from anyone who’d miss them. Most people were gone. There were a lot of things falling down. Nobody made a living at farming anymore. He was new to the place, and so he stayed. He didn’t mind. His own home was obliterated and all his friends were dead.

A hundred years earlier, there’d been a city in this spot, but they’d mined the ground until there wasn’t any gold left, and so the city picked up its buildings and took them down the river. Before they went, they buried the town under piles of dirt, and that dirt was what the man built his whale in now. Sometimes he dug and found old things, teacups, whiskey bottles, and he sorted them and looked at the way the glass had changed color underground. He had a heap of green bottles and one of purple, a smaller one of blue. He had a pile of tin cans dating from the middle of the last century, before most of the world had fled the world, some of them swollen with poison. All these things were going into the whale’s body.

A few thousand years before the city had died, there’d been a lake, and the man found things in the dirt from that too, fossilized freshwater fish. Before the lake, there’d been an ocean, and deep in the ground, far beneath everything else, there were bones of saltwater swimmers larger than the whale.

The man took rusted tractor parts and twists of metal, and loaded them into his truck. His hound sat in the front seat and crooned at the sky every time they drove to a new barn, every time he used his tools to pry off more planks and bits of silo. Some of the silos were full of rats, and others mice. If he stood his whale on end, it would be as tall as a silo, and even look like one. He might fill it with grain and use it to keep things safe from the weather.

The cats rode along and hunted, and the dog hunted too, and when they went back to the field where the whale was, they brought ratskins and mouseskins, and the man nailed the skins into the whale’s interior to make a soft place for himself to live when the whale began to swim. He’d made plans.

He was caulking his whale’s devilseam with pitch. He had white marine paint, which he’d brought hundreds of miles inland. The whale would be albino. There was a carpet for its tongue, and he’d enter through the teeth. The man had diagrammed the whale. There was a neat bunk inside, a clever piece of carpentry that folded down from the wall, just wide enough for one. There was a portal with a ladder in case he wanted to climb on to the whale’s head and look out over the sea while he fished.

Some afternoons, on the highway to the north of the field, a school bus passed the whale, and the remaining kids leaned out the windows, screaming and pointing because there it was, a whale swimming through the wheat, twice as long as their bus. Not even the kids thought the whale was likely to actually swim. It was a roadside attraction, but no one cared about it. It wasn’t in guidebooks. Whales were dead.

The man sat on his heels looking at his whale. He hadn’t had any kind of dream of angels. No one had told him about a flood. He’d come out his front door one morning and thought it was time to do something. It wasn’t a summons, not the kind he’d been waiting for, but he felt like he’d been called.

There were windfarms around him, and oil wells. He could see their spigots pouring out the black blood of dinosaurs, and at the horizon, the mills gobbled the sky, grabbing it bit by bit, tugging it out of place and chewing it. The sun had developed a ring of red around it, and one day a flock of geese fell out of the clouds, each one of them nothing but bones and feathers. He harvested their skeletons and added them to the whale, feathering the inside with their wings.

A long time before all this, he’d been a revolutionary. He’d overthrown a government and gone on the run for thirty years. No one knew his real name. He’d been married twice to women who thought he was somebody else. He had a son he’d lost track of. He was that kind of father, and maybe he was that kind of man. It was hard to say. No one ever thought of themselves that way, but statistically, it had to be true that some people were exactly what they thought they weren’t.

He cleaned himself up time to time and drove out to a casino, bet on something, drank a drink at the bar, ignored the people who thought he didn’t speak their language. He spoke their language. He spoke eleven languages, though he was out of practice. He’d had a life before this one. His neighbors thought he was a farmer, but his cellar was full of weapons. He grew grain because he could. At night, he assembled and disassembled. Sometimes he built a bomb, because he could do that too. Sometimes he built other kinds of firearms, ones less known here, and then broke them down again.

In daylight, he built his whale.

The afternoon he painted the whale, there was a storm. It wasn’t raining where he was. It’d stopped raining on the dirt. Now storms took place above the ground and if you were watching, you could see rain disappearing fifty feet above you, sputtering out like it had hit some invisible drought. He watched the storm roll across the sky like his first wife had rolled across his bed and out the other side. He’d done that one wrong. He probably could have told her who he was, but he had a new face, and why take responsibility for his old soul when he looked like someone who hadn’t been born into it?

The government he’d helped to overthrow was far away. It’d been corrupt. Thousands had died before his part in the revolution, and thousands died during his part, and thousands died after it. At night, even in his new identity as a farmer of failures, he still saw faces that belonged to the dead.

He saw one of his soldiers running, turning to look back at him, calling him to come, another shuddering as he aimed at the head of the President. He saw the details of their jawlines, the spaces beneath their eyes, the way their hands moved quickly and then slowly on their weapons.

He saw a footprint sometimes, right before he slept. He could see it very clearly. A bare foot, just one, printed in blood on a white floor. The foot had eight toes.

That revolution took place in the winter and everyone bled into the snow the occupiers had manufactured when they took the city. The cabarets were full of the occupier’s women wearing red satin, and drinking champagne. The occupier’s men wore white tie and drank Bordeaux, and when they spilled, it didn’t matter to them. They threw their clothes off and someone from the city picked them up and cleaned them.

There were three snow leopards in the entryway of the palace, brought from Earth, kept in cages. There was a table in the center of Great Room made of the many-limbed skeletons of murdered nuns from the mountains, and in one of the cabinets there was a collection of mummified babies, stolen from their mothers, each of their hands eight-fingered.

After the triumph, he and his rebel faction—they were not all men; some of them were women—sat in the occupier’s palace exhausted, and drank tea out of cups made of solid gold. They thought they’d won their country back. It wasn’t wrong to kill the people who’d stolen power. It was necessary.

The man painted his whale white. The carpet that led into its interior was red, something claimed from a movie theater gone out of business. Moth-eaten, but moths would eat everything in the end. Moths could be found at sea and on land. Weevils in the flour. He had a manual of seafaring necessities, and a series of novels about ships.

“The lesser of two weevils,” he muttered to himself, but he didn’t understand why it was funny. It was supposed to be. Everyone in the book laughed when it was said.

The man worked his brush along the planks, and the whale paled before him, until, as the moon rose, the whale came into being beneath it, a yellowish silver shape in the center of miles of wheat.

For a moment, the man looked up, not at the moon but at one of the bright planets, embedded there like a white monogram in a sail made of black. It looked like a name to him, but it was only a lonely light.

• • • •

The whale was dry by dawn, and the man embarked. He hitched it to the back of his truck and attached a set of wheels. He wouldn’t ride in his compartment, not yet. He watched the sun rising as he drove out of the place he’d been all this time, through what had been Oklahoma and was now part of Texas, through the dividing line between New Mexico and Colorado, where he was pulled over, his whale searched for drugs, though who was smuggling what these days, and how, he didn’t know. He didn’t feel afraid of police catching him. His new face bore no resemblance to any photos that’d ever been taken. The compartment in the whale’s head wasn’t found. No one knew anything about whales. No one even knew how to open its mouth.

The freeways were nearly empty. People had left in the last few years, on ships, en masse, but the man hadn’t considered it. There was nothing up there but night. He’d been on one of the outgoing ships once, and it had comforting screens showing images of the history of Earth. There was an idea that the world that had already been would be again, that a flag planted in a new planet would mean everything could comfortably stay the same.

He looked at himself in a filling station mirror, his face completely tattooed with a language that had been eradicated, his eyes the color of nicotine. He’d almost died back there and it had been enough for him. Coming down had been a peril. None of the other revolutionaries had made it. Eventually the government he’d lost everything in order to overthrow had taken power again.

It was women in red dresses and men in white tie, and though that had been in another place, the man drove through the cities in this country and didn’t stop. He was going to the ocean, as everyone always tried to do. He knew it was foolish. The land was dry and the water dead, but he went anyway. There was still gasoline. There were still cars. There were still radios that played music and on them he listened to people singing, even if he saw no people on the sides of the roads.

In the sky above him there was a storm, and along with the storm, a fleet of ships taking another set of occupiers up. They weren’t called occupiers. They were called colonists. Not everyone wanted to go. The dark station rumors had the place up there full of disease, no immunity to germs, poxes, and plagues, epidemics where skin turned from pink to green to red to purple, where lungs liquefied.

There was life on the planets, the news said, and the life was wet and gleaming. There was ice so cold that human skin burned at half a mile. The sun was the same, but that was all.

It seemed to the man that all this exploration of the universe was like putting the population of Earth into a catapult and shooting it into the sky. It was an act of war, humans substituting for flaming arrows being shot into enemy tents. There was no reason for exploration without an enemy. He knew that much. The humans weren’t the only ones dying of plagues. No one had immunity to everything. All creatures in the universe were like poisonous insects. They stung and bit and killed one another.

He’d been the enemy in his time, but now he was here on Earth, driving a whale along the highway, faster, faster, the whale catching wind and propelling him along. There were few other cars. The people in them looked out the windows, curiously, watching him go. He didn’t acknowledge them.

In a snowbound diner in Nevada he drank a cup of something hot. A waitress looked at his face and said, “How come I’m not going with you?”

“Don’t know,” he said, summoning the right language with only a little effort.

“I like that big fish you got,” she said. She was as old as he was, a wide mouth with a scar beside it. An arrow pointing toward her ear.

She ran a finger over the tattoos on his cheek, and started when she felt things beneath them moving.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Everyone left,” he said, being honest. He was never honest.

She leaned back and looked at the pie case. “I guess I hear that,” she said. “My family’s all up there. My kids are with their dad. I don’t know what I’m doing except waiting to see what happens. You been up?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I figured,” she said and went back to filling ketchup. “You got the look of one of those.”

He was surprised. No one else thought so. He passed. Everyone had tattoos here now. Not everyone’s tattoos contained their armies and families, their old loves and old enemies, the ones they’d been able to find. His were special down here, though where he was from, they weren’t anything unusual. Memories of grief were kept on display back home. He’d taken great pains to make himself look as humans did.

“What do you mean?” he asked and wondered if he’d have to kill her. He hadn’t killed anyone in thirty years.

“I was married to one of you,” she said. “That’s all. I know it when I see it. I don’t care who you are, and you don’t care who I am, and we can leave it like that and pretend we’re both the same thing. You drink your coffee, and I’ll pour you another.”

She brought a flask out from behind the counter and dripped some of it into his cup, then drank a slug herself.

“Safe travels,” she said. “Take that fish out somewhere it can swim.”

• • • •

When he got to the coast, the sun was setting, and the brightness blinded him. He drove down a rattling road to get to the sand. There were waves still, white and green and blue, and he made a sound he wasn’t expecting to make. He thought about red oceans and orange caverns.

It was twilight as he pushed the whale into the water, still on its wheels. He was thigh-deep in the surf, his clothing wet. It had been thirty years since he’d touched salt. The language of his dead was all over him, the tattoos wriggling and stretching, when the creature rose up out of the water fifty feet from shore.

He couldn’t tell what it was. A long and trembling shape, a serpent and then another. It was a nest of rattlesnakes, he thought, and then his whale pushed into the waves, insisting on floating, and he barely clasped its jaw before he was swimming too.

The wooden whale had seen it too, the thing in the ocean, and it swam faster, in pursuit. It was a wooden whale. It wasn’t alive. It wasn’t dead either. Its body contained everything left, and it hungered. He had given it some of his talents. There was no use for them here on Earth, but there were things he knew how to do.

The man threw himself into its mouth, down its throat and up a spiral stair, into his neat little compartment, where he closed himself off. From there, he looked out through an eyeball made of bottles and old windows, feeling his ship launching.

Outside the eyeball, he could see the other creature moving. There were tentacles and arms, he understood them now, swooping sections of metal and rubber, suckers made of old tires and shards of broken glass. It flared and beckoned to him. He could not see its mantle nor its beak. Only its limbs, quavering over the surface like seaweed.

His ship pushed deeper into the water, and finally dove, his window abruptly full of first green and then black.

Night was not night to him and never had been. The man sat beneath the water inside his ship lined in feathers, and watched the ocean around him, the deep and forgotten places left behind by the humans in favor of the stars.

His white whale passed a shipwreck drifting like the bones of those birds, flying all alone under the surface. A tentacle clutched at his window, pressing suckers against it. It didn’t give. The man wasn’t afraid. He’d worked on his whale a long time, and though he hadn’t expected to meet any others, he knew he should have. He’d felt called. It made sense that others would too.

His ship was strong. He’d done something, and if it was not revolution, it was a thing anyway, a reclamation of the lost, a celebration in the way his place had celebrated before the rise and fall.

Only for a moment did he think about a red footprint on white snow. Only for a moment did he think about blood spurting from an artery, he and his rebels fighting their way into the palace.

The squid passed close beside him and he saw through its eye to its interior, only a glimpse, but one that made him lean closer to the window.

There was a pilot at the helm. He saw her in profile and then the dinner plate eye was gone, and he saw only mantle and arms again, swishing and twisting, moving like a scarf with fringe.

The squid was silver and red, not painted but made of cans slicked together and welded, the smoothness of spoons, pounded into a surface. It was made of braided electrical cables and sheets of metal, and its tentacles wrote alphabets in the water, a sign language of forgotten words. He didn’t think he knew them.

He didn’t want to know them.

He watched it move, each arm and tentacle engineered, articulated.

His whale had teeth made of the bones of cows and horses. He’d sharpened them until they were keen as swords. This squid had a beak. It rolled in the water and he saw it as the tentacles began to wrap around his whale. The beak was bright and golden, goblets, something made of teacup—.

He recognized what it was made of.

The squid rolled again and he saw into its eye. There she was.

She was a ghost. He stared, his body pressed to his whale’s eyeball.

He wondered if he should make his whale attack the squid. That was what the whale was meant to do, in this world. But his whale was only a wooden whale, and though it had weapons, they were in its head.

She couldn’t be there. She was tattooed on his skin. He touched the place she was supposed to be, over his heart, a moving scar full of her burned body, a place her soul could stay captured and inked into him. She was a memory, but suddenly, she wasn’t.

She was inside the squid.

She looked out the eyeball at him, her mouth tight. Her face hadn’t changed. She’d done nothing to correct her revolutionary identification. She’d overthrown alongside him and been killed even as she killed the invaders.

The squid moved its tentacles, pulling the whale through the water, and the whale resisted, lashing its tail. The man crashed into the wall as his ship barreled to avoid the squid. His whale didn’t attack anything. It flipped and rolled, very slowly, over and then over again.

Inside the eyeball she looked out, unapologetic.

There had been a footprint. Eight toes in blood. Fake snow made of chemicals. A holiday for the occupiers. A tree and lights, singing and a suckling pig brought from their own planet. Outside the revolution began, quietly, creeping, and then louder, screaming, and then louder still, running through the streets, all the revolutionaries’ skin covered in memories of those who’d died of plague and violence, a country taken over by something fallen out of the sky.

He was the leader and she was the leader. They weren’t friends. They led opposite factions. They ran through the snow, screaming, knives in the air.

The invaders got her. One footprint where she’d tried to leap and been caught on a blade. The other leg severed. The ashes from that leg were inked into his tattoo. In the palace, drinking tea, all but her. The invaders took her and kept her. Surely she was dead. She’d been dead all this time.

Her squid pulled his whale closer. She was the captain of her ship and he was the captain of his and they navigated, separated by solder and seam.

Her squid used its tentacles to sign the words for You again in the language they’d shared, before the other languages he’d learned, before he came here, before he became this farmer.

His whale flipped and twisted, tail in the water, its skull an echo chamber, the walls around him strung with gut, a harp in the dark. You again, his whale sang.

The man let the squid take his whale’s jaw and open it, and he exited his compartment. The squid’s beak opened for him and he swam through it like swimming into a cave, salt, predator and prey at once, uncertain. He’d been in a field of wheat for thirty years.

His whale waited, white and solid, swimming in place. He scaled a staircase, up, and up, the curving walls of silver, the cool and unliving certainty of the ship’s mantle. The taste of salted licorice in the water, something she’d done to make the squid correct. He felt the tattoos on his back and arm moving in appreciation.

She’d died fighting. He’d fought the dying. The government was overthrown. He told himself it didn’t matter, that it was all in pursuit of a common goal. They’d won until they lost.

On his chest her ashes moved, shifting, reaching for their owner, and she turned in her chair, this woman he used to know, and looked at him as his chest tore open.

What was left of her returned to the rest. Her own body was covered in tattoos as well, but he wasn’t written on her. He was alive.

She was older. He was older too. She’d lost more of her people since he’d last seen her. Her arms and face moved with ink made of the dead. Thirty years ago, she’d been nearly unmarked. A sister on one arm. A mother on the other. Thirty years ago, he’d wanted to kill her himself. She was in the way of victory, until victory was nothing. Time had passed. He’d changed himself.

She held out her hands with all their sixteen fingers. His own fingers had been hidden all these years. She opened her arms to him, and there they were, her dead family, inked on her skin. Welcome, she said to him.

Welcome, he said. To Earth.

They weren’t where they’d come from. They owed each other nothing.

Her skin, he realized, showed the outlines of their whole planet, ash taken from something burning. Had she set it all on fire?

He looked at her. He thought about storms high in the sky, water never touching the ground. Geese falling.

We lost everything, he said, excusing himself from sins he wasn’t certain he’d committed. I left only when I was sure we’d lost forever.

Her face was not amused, exactly, but tolerant.

You left early, she said. We won. I kept fighting. We burned their palaces. We took their ships. We left them behind. Now we’re here. I came to find you.

She reached out her hands and wrapped her fingers around his arm. He looked down. She was missing one leg and her other had split into two to replace it. Underneath everything he’d hidden himself inside, he was missing an arm, and part of a foot, from the same battle. He was never naked. His tattoos covered the living with the dead. Her eyes were the yellow of the clouds of their home, and her mouth was black and written on with prayers so that they needn’t be spoken. Her tattoos were raised bodies, shadows burned into silhouettes.

Her body was a relic of the war, but she was smiling at him.

Outside the squid’s eyeball the man could see his whale. It was only wood and paint, but it let the metal squid tow it with its tentacles.

Silently then and swiftly, the squid and the whale dove together, down through the water the humans had called an ocean, and into an unsettled new world.

—For CTM, of course.
September 6, 2014

© 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and has recently appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction 2012 & 2013, Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Laird Barron’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

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

Children of Dagon

Adrian Tchaikovsky | 2,700 words

The south of the city is ours. London Bridge has fallen down, and Waterloo has gone under. Borough, Lambeth, Fulham, these are our places, and east all the way to the sea. Your little island enclaves are almost all gone now. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s bleached bones are emptied of you. We starved you out of the Passport Office on Belgrave Road, and when we came in force to the Victoria Palace Theatre you left of your own accord, paddling frantically on rafts made of doors and tables. Even the Natural History Museum is ours, and we crawl up from the shallows to step into its vaulted fastnesses and stare at the collapsed wreckage of its model whale. We will take better care of its relics than you.

We are on the move again. The sounding song echoed its call to arms through the drowned arteries of the Underground. The clans are gathering to take back Knightsbridge from your unwashed hordes. These are our places now; you have forfeited your stewardship of them, but still you come down to the water’s edge, ragged and starveling. Still you come to net our fish, to break open our crab pots and our traps with your hungry hands. You come to the edge of the water and look south towards the sunken treasures of Sloane Square and try to pretend that it is all yours again.

Well: We are coming for you, all our warriors. We hump and sluice along the city’s new canals of Lyall Street and Lowndes Place, and we gather within the broken shell that was the German embassy. These names you bequeathed to us—we read them on your monuments and street signs. I wonder, when you see those letters, do you also know the sounds they make, the history they hide, or are they just markings on a wall, now? Do you have even so much of your past left to you as that?

But better than the surface streets, where the water runs shallow and where some of your clever monkey people might yet ambush us, better than this is the Underground, the lightless sunken net cast beneath the streets of London. We flurry through its great arteries, rising at each station to catch our breath, moaning out our low sounds that let us feel our way along the walls. Calling out to each other in voices too deep for you to hear and that sound the width of a borough; we take in air at South Kensington and plunge into the darkness.

Some of us will erupt from the surf at Hans Road and Walton Street; the rest of us will be at your back, crawling from the abyss that is Knightsbridge Station with our spears and our crossbows and our sharp, sharp teeth. And we will cut a wound deep enough into your collective memories that not a one of you will dare come back within sight of Tyburn Brook or Kensington Road for a generation. And when that generation is gone, the waters will have swallowed Knightsbridge whole, colonised it for our way of life.

• • • •

They called him Doctor Deacon, the man who brought us into the world. You have another name for him now; he has become part of the impoverished pantheon of devils that comprise most of what you remember about the world before the waters. Back when your ancestors were still denying that the ice was melting, Doctor Deacon was hard at work: creating us; a legacy fit for the future that everyone saw coming and nobody professed to believe in. We have our stories of those times: how the wise men told you of the flood, but you were too mired in sin to so much as built a boat. We keep a library high and dry near Vauxhall, and I have seen the writings from those days. You were always complaining about the weather. “Who wouldn’t want a few hotter summers?” you said.

All the land was yours, and back then that was an unthinkable bounty. You didn’t know what you had. You ransacked the seas and you tore up the earth and covered it with the concrete and the tarmac that will long survive you. You forgot, as the ice began to melt, how your whole civilisation was built about the rim of a bowl, all your great coastal cities, and what happens when the bowl begins to overflow?

Doctor Deacon knew, and so, even back then, long before the tipping point was reached, he was hard at work. You laughed at him, the stories say—though later, when you found out what he had done, the laughing would stop. In those days, sunk in deep history now, your wise men were capable of many things. You could take the living features of one creature and gift them to another: immune systems, tissue regeneration, the glow of a jellyfish in a cat or a rabbit.

Our progenitor sequenced the life-code of your mammal cousins who took the waters as their home. And he took your children and he started his terrible work, his wonderful work, the work for which we and you both remember him. We remember him more fondly, I rather suspect. In our stories he is a shaman, and his totems are Seal and Sea Otter. In yours he is malevolent and mad and, whilst I know that he loved us, I cannot wholly argue with the second. He must have been a little mad, but mad in the way that those touched by God are mad.

• • • •

We mass at Knightsbridge Station, just below the surface, taking turns to breathe at the half-sunk steps. Knightsbridge is a peninsula now, caught between the burst north bank of the Thames and the Serpentine. You should know better than to go there, really, with your escape route narrowed to that single land-bridge, but the waters there are fertile, some of the best of all that great expanse of shallows that was Central London. We farm there, our weed and our fish, our shells and our crabs, and where we farm, you come to steal from us. Shallow seas are paradise for my people, and the world has so many of them now, where the rich earth has been taken from you. It wasn’t as if you were taking care of it, after all. If you had been better custodians, we wouldn’t be here. There wouldn’t have been a need for us.

I go ahead, hauling myself up the ridges of the stairs. Out in the open air, the red sun in the west silhouettes the broken skyline. Evening is upon us, and you have outstayed your welcome. I am awkward on the hard ground for a moment before I find my feet. There is still something of you, in the way I stand. My spine is more flexible, my posture more bowed; my neck is long, my head streamlined. My eyes are huge dark pools that pierce the gathering dusk far better than yours. Where you scavenge rags to hide your bare bodies, I have my oil-thick fur.

My hands are like yours, though: part-webbed, but I have your fingers and your thumb, dark and naked. Or perhaps they are otters’ hands, after all. I would prefer that to be the case.

I slink from the toothless maw of Knightsbridge Station, humping my lithe body from cover to cover: not as nimble now I am on the land, but I can stalk two-legged prey with the best of them. Your sentries do not see me, between the drawing dark and the glare of sunset.

There are so many of you! I am always shocked to find there are so many left, and these are just the mass of you in this one place and time. There are numbers we have learned, for how many humans lived on the earth when Doctor Deacon began his work, but they are meaningless. They are numbers that nobody should have any use for. I know there must be far less of you now, but still . . . so many, crawling like maggots across the Knightsbridge peninsula, netting and clawing at the water’s bounty, stripping the littoral of everything edible. Your habits have not changed since the waters came.

I wait there, watching you, trying to see you as something other than a composite, consuming mass. You are pale and filthy, and I can smell the thin, sour reek of you from here. And you are thin—limbs like sticks, faces like skulls. You cluster together in your little clans: You have brought your whole families for this day at the seaside. I smell the smoke of your little fires, but many of you just tear at the fish with your teeth, too hungry to wait.

I watch your children. Even hungry, even desperate, at this trailing loose end of your history, they are still children. They play and jump as ours do; they fight each other as ours do; they splash in the water, eyes bright with curiosity. No doubt you love them, just as we love ours. You want the best for them, now that your parents and their parents have ensured that you will have only the worst.

I wait too long, watching your young. For all that we are children of a different god, I cannot see your children without feeling the stir of pity in me. We were all human once, and our creator left alone those things that let us think and feel. My heart, my lungs, my blood, my bones, these he improved, but that part of me that loves, he left alone.

But all these lands under the water’s shadow are ours, and we have hungry children too. Your busy hands are taking the food from their mouths even now. I shake off my pity. I stop watching your children and instead I mark your guards and your sentries. The dusk has set in, and it is our time.

• • • •

You tried to wipe us out, when you discovered us. Deacon was an old, old man by then, but you took him up and paraded him to his show trial. You raided his laboratories and you destroyed his samples and you confiscated his machines. This was even when the waters were rising, even when you were staring into the mouth of your apocalypse. If you had stepped back then; if you had looked into the future and seen something you might share, then we might not be killing you and driving you away from every shore. But you called us abominations. Some of you invoked divine writ and some of you invoked medical ethics, but none of you could countenance the idea that you were no longer unique. You scorned Doctor Deacon for playing god.

But by then, he was not alone. Persecute as you might, there was always someone carrying on his work. He never knew, by the time you hounded him to his death, but his task was done. His future race was already multiplying in the waters of the world.

I wonder, sometimes, how he saw it. Unhappy though the thought is, he probably did not expect this war. Perhaps he hoped that we would live among you, that we would help you and feed you and protect you when the waters swallowed your cities. Perhaps we would have done, if you had only let us.

Some of us wonder, still, if we might reach some accord with you, but we can barely even communicate any more, and each generation brings more reasons for hate on both sides. And we do not need you. You have nothing to offer us but more mouths to feed.

• • • •

So I go back to the dark waters of Knightsbridge station and give the signal, booming into the tunnels that will amplify the resonance of my voice. My orders rumble through the sunken fastnesses of the underground, and roll out across the drowned flats of Belgravia, coursing between the jutting teeth of all the buildings you abandoned, or that we drove you from. With the echo of my own words buzzing in my ears and on my skin, I launch myself across the trivial boundary that separates land and water. We are going to war.

We flood from the station. I can already hear the screams and cries as you spot us. My crossbow is cocked and loaded: made of bone and plastic, strung with sinew, the quarrels headed with shards of glass or found metal. The wealth of a fallen civilization is beneath the waves for us to salvage.

Most of you are fleeing, funnelling down the peninsula back towards your land, towards those parts of London that the waters have not yet blessed. You live out there, in your teeming, starving hordes, in your rookeries, your brutal, feudal kingdoms: Hallfield, Marylebone, Soho. You spend more time fighting each other than troubling us. I watch you squabble and panic and get in each other’s way. The main wave of our people is already bursting from the water’s edge. Spears jab at your pasty skin; clubs whirl.

For just a moment I stop. My earlier empathy has a hook in me still. I see you scoop up your children in your thin arms. I see that some of you stay behind to cover for the rest, a noble sacrifice. I see you do all the things that we would do—that we have done—with our positions reversed. And we were you, once. Before Doctor Deacon reworked us for this new world, our ancestors were your ancestors. We were only human.

Then I hear the roar of a gun, and I shake myself from my trance and go to work. The sounds are dull to me—being out of the water is like being half deaf. I see the flash: My cousin Enzo goes down, and a couple of others, before the shooter is silenced. You have more of those ancient weapons, but not so many more, and how many bullets? And how many weapons have been maintained in the long age since their manufacture? You brandish plenty of them, but I hear few shots, and each one is ammunition you can no longer replace. How long before those precious firearms you are so fond of are nothing but talismans, their true use forgotten?

I aim, loose, reload, and aim again. This is my seventh skirmish with your kind. I have learned to fight out of the water, to judge distances, to ignore the dry air, the heat, the dust. It is for you that I endure these things, because you will not know your place. Your place is inland. Your place is in the past.

The waters run red. You will steal no more of our labours. Those who survive will remember the terror that came from the sea. We will not find you here again this year, perhaps the next. The year after, maybe Knightsbridge will be under as well.

I watch the last of you run. Our wounded, our dead, are being pulled back to the water, to be given all honours and cast into the current. Your dead must be disposed of as well. We will haul them to the broken heights of your buildings; let the things of the air pick at you; let the flies hatch from you. At least that way you will give something back to the world.

We will drive you into the parched places, the barren places. Should we have sympathy? This is the world that you made, after all. Some of us say, how could you have realized that you were making it for us to live in? But those of us who retell the old histories know better. You could see the dam groaning with the weight of the waters, even before Doctor Deacon set out to build his species anew. You could have stopped this; you didn’t have to offer us the world. Don’t cry to your dead gods now that we come to take it from you.

© 2015 by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Society Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist. Guns of the Dawn, his new fantasy novel, is out now.

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

Time Shards

Gregory Benford | 2,836 words

It had all gone very well, Brooks told himself. Very well indeed. He hurried along the side corridor, his black dress shoes clicking hollowly on the old tiles. This was one of the oldest and most rundown of the Smithsonian’s buildings; too bad they didn’t have the money to knock it down. Funding. Everything was a matter of funding.

He pushed open the door of the barnlike workroom and called out, “John? How did you like the ceremony?”

John Hart appeared from behind a vast rack that was filled with fluted pottery. His thin face was twisted in a scowl and he was puffing on a cigarette. “Didn’t go.”

“John! That’s not permitted.” Brooks waved at the cigarette. “You of all people should be careful about contamination of—”

“Hell with it.” He took a final puff, belched blue, and ground out the cigarette on the floor.

“You really should’ve watched the dedication of the Vault, you know,” Brooks began, adopting a bantering tone. You had to keep a light touch with these research types. “The President was there—she made a very nice speech—”

“I was busy.”

“Oh?” Something in Hart’s tone put Brooks off his conversational stride. “Well. You’ll be glad to hear that I had a little conference with the Board, just before the dedication. They’ve agreed to continue supporting your work here.”

“Um.”

“You must admit, they’re being very fair.” As he talked Brooks threaded amid the rows of pottery, each in a plastic sleeve. This room always made him nervous. There was priceless Chinese porcelain here, Assyrian stoneware, buff-blue Roman glazes, Egyptian earthenware—and Brooks lived in mortal fear that he would trip, fall, and smash some piece of history into shards. “After all, you did miss your deadline. You got nothing out of all this” —a sweep of the hand, narrowly missing a green Persian tankard— “for the Vault.”

Hart, who was studying a small brownish water jug, looked up abruptly. “What about the wheel recording?”

“Well, there was that, but—”

“The best in the world, dammit!”

“They heard it some time ago. They were very interested.”

“You told them what they were hearing?” Hart asked intensely.

“Of course, I—”

“You could hear the hoofbeats of cattle, clear as day.”

“They heard. Several commented on it.”

“Good.” Hart seemed satisfied, but still strangely depressed.

“But you must admit, that isn’t what you promised.”

Hart said sourly, “Research can’t be done to a schedule.”

Brooks had been pacing up and down the lanes of pottery. He stopped suddenly, pivoted on one foot, and pointed a finger at Hart. “You said you’d have a voice. That was the promise. Back in ’98 you said you would have something for the BiMillennium celebration, and—”

“Okay, okay.” Hart waved away the other man’s words.

“Look—” Brooks strode to a window and jerked up the blinds. From this high up in the Arts and Industries Building the BiMillennial Vault was a flat concrete slab sunk in the Washington mud; it had rained the day before. Now bulldozers scraped piles of gravel and mud into the hole, packing it in before the final encasing shield was to be laid. The Vault itself was already sheathed in sleeves of concrete, shock-resistant and immune to decay. The radio beacons inside were now set. Their radioactive power supply would automatically stir to life exactly a thousand years from now. Periodic bursts of radio waves would announce to the world of the TriMillennium that a message from the distant past awaited whoever dug down to find it. Inside the Vault were artifacts, recordings, everything the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian thought important about their age. The coup of the entire Vault was to have been a message from the First Millennium, the year 1000 A.D. Hart had promised them something far better than a mere written document from that time. He had said he could capture a living voice.

“See that?” Brooks said with sudden energy. “That Vault will outlast everything we know—all those best-selling novels and funny plays and amazing scientific discoveries. They’ll all be dust, when the Vault’s opened.”

“Yeah,” Hart said.

“Yeah? That’s all you can say?”

“Well, sure, I—”

“The Vault was important. And I was stupid enough” —he rounded on Hart abruptly, anger flashing across his face— “to chew up some of the only money we had for the Vault to support you.”

Hart took an involuntary step backward. “You knew it was a gamble.”

“I knew.” Brooks nodded ruefully. “And we waited, and waited—”

“Well, your waiting is over,” Hart said, something hardening in him.

“What?”

“I’ve got it. A voice.”

“You have?” In the stunned silence that followed Hart bent over casually and picked up a dun-colored water jug from the racks. An elaborate, impossibly large-winged orange bird was painted on its side. Hart turned the jug in his hands, hefting its weight.

“Why . . . it’s too late for the Vault, of course, but still . . .” Brooks shuffled his feet. “I’m glad the idea paid off. That’s great.”

“Yeah. Great.” Hart smiled sourly. “And you know what it’s worth? Just about this much—”

He took the jug in one hand and threw it. It struck the far wall with a splintering crash. Shards flew like a covey of frightened birds that scattered through the long ranks of pottery. Each landed with a ceramic tinkling.

“What are you doing—” Brooks began, dropping to his knees without thinking to retrieve a fragment of the jug. “That jug was worth—”

“Nothing,” Hart said. “It was a fake. Almost everything the Egyptians sent was bogus.”

“But why are you . . . you said you succeeded . . .” Brooks was shaken out of his normal role of Undersecretary to the Smithsonian.

“I did. For what it’s worth.”

“Well . . . show me.”

Hart shrugged and beckoned Brooks to follow him. He threaded his way through the inventory of glazed pottery, ignoring the extravagant polished shapes that flared and twisted in elaborate, artful designs, the fruit of millennia of artisans. Glazes of feldspath, lead, tin, ruby salt. Jasperware, soft-paste porcelain, albarelloa festooned with ivy and laurel, flaring lips and serene curved handles. A galaxy of the work of the First Millennium and after, assembled for Hart’s search.

“It’s on the wheel,” Hart said, gesturing.

Brooks walked around the spindle fixed at the center of a horizontal disk. Hart called it a potter’s wheel but it was a turntable, really, firmly buffered against the slightest tremor from external sources. A carefully arranged family of absorbers isolated the table from everything but the variable motor seated beneath it. On the turntable was an earthenware pot. It looked unremarkable to Brooks—just a dark red oxidized finish, a thick lip, and a rather crude handle, obviously molded on by a lesser artisan.

“What’s its origin?” Brooks said, mostly to break the silence that lay between them.

“Southern England.” Hart was logging instructions into the computer terminal nearby. Lights rippled on the staging board.

“How close to the First Mil?”

“Around 1280 A.D., apparently.”

“Not really close, then. But interesting.”

“Yeah.”

Brooks stooped forward. When he peered closer he could see the smooth finish was an illusion. A thin thread ran around the pot, so fine the eye could scarcely make it out. The lines wound in a tight helix. In the center of each delicate line was a fine hint of blue. The jug had been incised with a precise point. Good; that was exactly what Hart had said he sought. It was an ancient, common mode of decoration—incise a seemingly infinite series of rings, as the pot turned beneath the cutting tool. The cutting tip revealed a differently colored dye underneath, a technique called sgraffito, the scratched.

It could never have occurred to the Islamic potters who invented sgraffito that they were, in fact, devising the first phonograph records.

Hart pressed a switch and the turntable began to spin. He watched it for a moment, squinting with concentration. Then he reached down to the side of the turntable housing and swung up the stylus manifold. It came up smoothly and Hart locked it in just above the spinning red surface of the pot.

“Not a particularly striking item, is it?” Brooks said conversationally.

“No.”

“Who made it?”

“Near as I can determine, somebody in a co-operative of villages, barely Christian. Still used lots of pagan decorations. Got them scrambled up with the cross motif a lot.”

“You’ve gotten . . . words?”

“Oh, sure. In early English, even.”

“I’m surprised crude craftsmen could do such delicate work.”

“Luck, some of it. They probably used a pointed wire, a new technique that’d been imported around that time from Saxony.”

The computer board hooted a readiness call. Hart walked over to it, thumbed in instructions, and turned to watch the stylus whir in a millimeter closer to the spinning jug. “Damn,” Hart said, glancing at the board. “Correlator’s giving hash again.”

Hart stopped the stylus and worked at the board. Brooks turned nervously and paced, unsure of what his attitude should be toward Hart. Apparently the man had discovered something, but did that excuse his surliness? Brooks glanced out the window, where the last crowds were drifting away from the Vault dedication and strolling down the Mall. There was a reception for the Board of Regents in Georgetown in an hour. Brooks would have to be there early, to see that matters were in order—

“If you’d given me enough money, I could’ve had a Hewlett-Packard. Wouldn’t have to fool with this piece of . . .” Hart’s voice trailed off.

Brooks had to keep reminding himself that this foul-tempered, scrawny man was reputed to be a genius. If Hart had not come with the highest of recommendations, Brooks would never have risked valuable Vault funding. Apparently Hart’s new method for finding correlations in a noisy signal was a genuine achievement.

The basic idea was quite old, of course. In the 1960s a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had applied a stylus to a rotating urn and played the signal through an audio pickup. Out came the wreeee sound of the original potter’s wheel where the urn was made. It had been a Roman urn, made in the era when hand-turned wheels were the best available. The Natural History “recording” was crude, but even that long ago they could pick out a moment when the potter’s hand slipped and the rhythm of the wreeee faltered.

Hart had read about that urn and seen the possibilities. He developed his new multiple-correlation analysis—a feat of programming, if nothing else—and began searching for pottery that might have acoustic detail in its surface. The sgraffito technique was the natural choice. Potters sometimes used fine wires to incise their wares. Conceivably, anything that moved the incising wire—passing footfalls, even the tiny acoustic push of sound waves—could leave its trace on the surface of the finished pot. Buried among imperfections and noise, eroded by the random bruises of history . . .

“Got it,” Hart said, fatigue creeping into his voice.

“Good. Good.”

“Yeah. Listen.”

The stylus whirred forward. It gently nudged into the jug, near the lip. Hart flipped a switch and studied the rippling, dancing yellow lines on the board oscilloscope. Electronic archaeology. “There.”

A high-pitched whining came from the speaker, punctuated by hollow, deep bass thumps.

“Hear that? He’s using a foot pump.”

“A kick wheel?”

“Right.”

“I thought they came later.”

“No, the Arabs had them.”

There came a clop clop clop, getting louder. It sounded oddly disembodied in the silence of the long room.

“What . . . ?”

“Horse. I detected this two weeks ago. Checked it with the equestrian people. They say the horse is unshod, assuming we’re listening to it walk on dirt. Farm animal, probably. Plow puller.”

“Ah.”

The hoofbeats faded. The whine of the kick wheel sang on. “Here it comes,” Hart whispered.

Brooks shuffled slightly. The ranks upon ranks of ancient pottery behind him made him nervous, as though a vast unmoving audience were in the room with them.

Thin, distant: “Alf?”

“Aye.” A gruff reply.

“It slumps, sure.”

“I be oct, man.” A rasping, impatient voice.

“T’art—”

“Busy—mark?”

“Ah ha’ wearied o’ their laws,” the thin voice persisted.

“Aye—so all. What mark it?” Restrained impatience.

“Their Christ. He werkes vengement an the alt spirits.”

“Hie yer tongue.”

“They’ll ne hear.”

“Wi’ ’er Christ ’er’re everywhere.”

A pause. Then faintly, as though a whisper: “We ha’ lodged th’ alt spirits.”

“Ah? You? Th’ rash gazer?”

“I spy stormwrack. A hue an’ grie rises by this somer se’sun.”

“Fer we?”

“Aye, unless we spake th’ Ave maris stella ’a theirs.”

“Elat. Lat fer that. Hie, I’ll do it. Me knees still buckle whon they must.”

“I kenned that. So shall I.”

“Aye. So shall we all. But wh’ of the spirits?”

“They suffer pangs, dark werkes. They are lodged.”

“Ah. Where?”

“S’tart.”

“‘Ere? In me clay?”

“In yer vessels.”

“Nay!”

“I chanted ’em in ’fore sunbreak.”

“Nay! I fain wad ye not.”

whir whir whir

The kick wheel thumps came rhythmically.

“They sigh’d thruu in-t’wixt yer clay. ’S done.”

“Fer what?”

“These pots—they bear a fineness, aye?”

“Aye.”

A rumbling, “—will hie home ’er. Live in yer pots.”

“An?”

“Whon time werkes a’thwart ’e Christers, yon spirits of leaf an’ bough will, I say, hie an’ grie to yer sons, man. To yer sons sons, man.”

“Me pots? Carry our kenne?”

“Aye. I investe’ thy clay wi’ ern’st spirit, so when’s ye causes it ta dance, our law say . . .”

whir

A hollow rattle.

“Even this ’ere, as I spin it?”

“Aye. Th’ spirits innit. Speak as ye form. The dance, t’will carry yer schop word t’ yer sons, yer sons sons sons.”

“While it’s spinnin’?”

Brooks felt his pulse thumping in his throat.

“Aye.”

“Than’t—”

“Speak inta it. To yer sons.”

“Ah . . .” Suddenly the voice came louder. “Aye, aye! There! If ye hear me, sons! I be from yer past! The ancient dayes!”

“Tell them wha’ ye must.”

“Aye. Sons! Blood a’ mine! Mark ye! Hie not ta strags in th’ house of Lutes. They carry the red pox! An’ . . . an’, beware th’ Kinseps—they bugger all they rule! An’, whilst pot-charrin’, mix th’ fair smelt wi’ greeno erst, ’ere ye’ll flux it fair speedy. Ne’er leave sheep near a lean-house, ne, ’ey’ll snuck down ’an it—”

whir whir thump whir

“What—what happened?” Brooks gasped.

“He must have brushed the incising wire a bit. The cut continues, but the fine touch was lost. Vibrations as subtle as a voice couldn’t register.”

Brooks looked around, dazed, for a place to sit. “In . . . incredible.”

“I suppose.”

Hart seemed haggard, worn.

“They were about to convert to Christianity, weren’t they?”

Hart nodded.

“They thought they could seal up the—what? wood spirits?—they worshiped. Pack them away by blessing the clay or something like that. And that the clay would carry a message—to the future!”

“So it did.”

“To their sons sons sons . . .” Brooks paused. “Why are you so depressed, Hart? This is a great success.”

Abruptly Hart laughed. “I’m not, really. Just, well, manic, I guess. We’re so funny. So absurd. Think about it, Brooks. All that hooey the potter shouted into his damned pot. What did you make of it?”

“Well . . . gossip, mostly. I can’t get over what a long shot this is—that we’d get to hear it.”

“Maybe it was a common belief back then. Maybe many tried it—and maybe now I’ll find more pots, with just ordinary conversation on them. Who knows?” He laughed again, a slow warm chuckle. “We’re all so absurd. Maybe Henry Ford was right—history is bunk.”

“I don’t see why you’re carrying on this way, Hart. Granted, the message was . . . obscure. That unintelligible information about making pottery, and—”

“Tips on keeping sheep.”

“Yes, and—”

“Useless, right?”

“Well, probably. To us, anyway. The conversation before that was much more interesting.”

“Uh huh. Here’s a man who is talking to the ages. Sending what he thinks is most important. And he prattles out a lot of garbage.”

“Well, true . . .”

“And it was important—to him.”

“Yes.”

Hart walked stiffly to the window. Earthmovers crawled like eyeless insects beneath the wan yellow lamps. Dusk had fallen. Their great awkward scoops pushed mounds of mud into the square hole where the Vault rested.

“Look at that.” Hart gestured. “The Vault. Our own monument to our age. Passing on the legacy. You, me, the others—we’ve spent years on it. Years, and a fortune.” He chuckled dryly. “What makes you think we’ve done any better?”

© 1979 by Gregory Benford.

Originally published in Universe 9, edited by Terry Carr.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory Benford is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society, his fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In 2007 he was awarded the Asimov Memorial Award for Popularizing Science.

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

Water Rights

An Owomoyela | 5,000 words

It was a beautiful explosion, and in a way Jordan was lucky to have such a good seat. She’d been watching the Earth swell up to fill and exceed her porthole, ignoring the thin strand of the space elevator and the wide modules of its ascender until one of them flashed and spilled its guts in a spray of diamonds.

The guy next to her, asleep since they crossed inside the moon’s orbit, jerked awake as the skiff fired its slowdown thrusters to stop them still a kilometer from the elevator station. He leaned over against his straps, gaping at the rainbows glittering beside the ascender. “My god, that’s beautiful. What is that?”

Jordan’s mouth was dry, her heart going tripletime.

“Water,” she said. “That’s all our water.”

• • • •

By the time the station took a damage assessment and rousted every security guard posted there, the skiff had gone into an uproar and the complimentary drinks cabinet was locked. By the time the skiff emptied onto the station the starfield was peppered with emergency vehicles and private Help & Rescue, and guards with nonlethals bristled at the passengers flooding the concourse.

The queue at the transmission station was long enough that Jordan just pushed off toward the light skiff toward Lagrange One, cornering around a couple Earthers who startled, all nerves, as she boosted off their shoulders. Poor bastards. If they’d planned on taking the ascender down, acclimating to touch-friendly micrograv was the least of their problems.

Due to the accident on the ascender, all hydrogen- and oxygen-thrust vehicles out of Hyperion Station have been suspended, announced the PA. Repeat, due to the accident on the ascender . . .

Jordan showed her identification to a cluster of guards at the terminal, went up to the kiosk, and sprang the extra expense to board into a private module with a transmitter. The module was a closet, compared to the cabins on the ascender; even the micrograv straps seemed superfluous, as there were barely ten centimeters of space left between Jordan’s elbows and the module walls.

She keyed in the transmission codes for her rig, and a few seconds later Marcus’s face popped onto the screen, dark skin flushed in the rig’s full-spectrum lights.

“Oh, thank god,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m pretty well shaken and stirred, Marc,” Jordan said. “Listen—put the rig into emergency water rationing. Stop all the new planting, and restrict personal use as far down as it’ll go.”

Seconds passed, and she watched Marcus’s expression as he waited for the transmission to reach him. “Already done, Ms. Owole,” he responded. “Soon as we heard the news. Have you heard the latest?”

“I know they’re suspending H and O ships out of Earth orbit. I’m just glad we do enough business to have photonic corridors from L1 out there.”

“Yeah, saved by big business,” Marcus said. “L1 is putting a discouragement tax on H-O thrusters. Oh, and Etienne is coming after you.”

He had the grace to look sheepish, at least. Jordan groaned.

“Between us and the refueling stations Galot and Bardroy run, that’s sixty percent of the water in the near-Earth colonies,” he said. “The next reserve is on Mars, and the next after that is Europa. They’re no help. Didn’t take long for Etienne to come to that conclusion.”

“And did Etienne’s observation come with demands?”

Marcus laughed uneasily. “You know it would’ve. Fortunately they’re still crunching numbers on how long we can stretch what we have. Heard anything from Ouranos-Hyperion on repair times?”

“You know Earthside procedure,” Jordan said. “It’ll be security promises and pointing fingers for a while. Marcus, I haven’t even got a message to Harper yet. She was going to meet me Earthside; god knows what she thinks.”

She waited a few seconds.

Then, without waiting for the response, said, “They’re calling it an accident. I know they want to keep us from rioting, but do they think we’re stupid?”

“Jordan.” Marcus pressed his fingers to the camera. “I’m sure she heard that the ascender exploded; she can put two and two together.”

A pause, as the second half of the message caught him.

“If I were them I wouldn’t know what to think,” he said. “Listen, I’ll meet you on Lagrange One, okay? Raxel’s got things in hand here, and you could use an escort in. And a stiff drink, and I’m thinking the bars will be crowded.”

Jordan quirked a dry smile. “You’re an angel, Marcus. Feel free to call me on the flight. I’ll see you there.”

Marcus gave a little wave after the lag, and the transmission cut.

Jordan closed her eyes, listened to see whether more people were boarding or whether the crew was gearing up to fire the photonic thrusters, couldn’t tell, and typed another transcode in. The screen flashed red.

TRANSMISSION TO EARTH IS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED: EARTH SECURITY DIRECTIVE 515.05.81 03:07 UTC, it read.

“Great,” Jordan muttered. “Just great.”

• • • •

Lagrange One wasn’t as large as the Ouranos-Hyperion station at the Elevator, but it was large enough to have a photonic-thrust lane there and back. And it was large enough that as soon as Jordan disembarked from the skiff, she was assaulted from all sides by the low roar of spacers arguing, the tense tones of the news broadcasts, the smell of too many frightened people. Jordan wrinkled her nose. Hygiene was going to go to shit.

The terminals along the walls displayed the same news accounts she’d been subjected to for eight hours on the skiff, though these were intercut with station-wide announcements warning everyone to stay calm.

No one was staying calm.

Barely three metres from the debarkation line someone called “Hey! You Jordan Owole?”, and she turned just in time for a man to sail into her, grab her arm, and link their momentum. A moment later they were against the wall. The man wore the charcoal security armor that denoted system-wide jurisdiction, with a tag reading LISTER on his chest. He was short and strong and looked like he’d had a lot of elective surgery, which meant that no way was he a native in micrograv. New guy in space, maybe, and not happy about it today.

“Something wrong?” Jordan asked.

“Got a flag from the skiff,” Lister said. “You were trying to contact someone Earthside?”

“Yeah—I was scheduled to go down and meet my sister,” Jordan said. “Is that all right?”

“Your sister is Harper Owole?” Lister asked, and a mass settled in Jordan’s throat.

“Is that all right,” she said again, colder this time.

“She wrote those editorials,” Lister said. “‘Earth shouldn’t be shipping its water away, it’s not renewable if we ship it up there—’”

“Yeah, I know what she thinks; we talk from time to time,” Jordan interrupted. “What—”

“Why’d you try to call her?”

“I was going down to visit her!” Jordan said. “We were going to look at roses.”

That seemed to throw him, for a moment. “Hell’s that supposed to mean? Roses?”

“Jordan!”

God bless Marcus, Jordan thought, and looked past Lister into the crowds. Marcus was boosting his way through, systemwide security be damned. She looked back to Lister as Marcus arrived.

“Am I under arrest? Sir?”

Lister let go of her arm, releasing it like it was something disgusting. “We’ve got a flag out on you,” he said, jabbing a finger at her before he shoved off.

“Putain de merde,” Marcus muttered. “What was that?”

“He’s scared,” Jordan said, watching him go. “Everyone is scared, and that’s not a good place to be. Let’s get off this floating hunk of scrap.”

Marcus turned to her and palmed over a foil packet—alcohol, probably. Judging by the size, Jordan guessed straight ethanol. “Don’t flash it,” he said, and clapped her on the shoulder. “People will think it’s water. Let’s get home.”

That was easier said.

This close to her rig, people recognized her. Before they made it to the terminal someone intercepted her, caught her arm. “Ms. Owole? Jordan Owole?”

“I didn’t do it,” Jordan said, and only realized belatedly that she’d probably pay for that joke.

“You’re selling, aren’t you?” the man asked. “It’s been on the news; it’s up to private holders now—”

Oh, no. “Stop right there. Just stop.”

“I’ll pay any price. There are fifteen families on my station. Eight of them have children.”

“It’s not—” she said, and didn’t have anything to follow that with except for the urge to roundhouse-kick this guy down the hall and escape.

“Pull the E card,” Marcus muttered.

Jordan wished for some choice French profanity of her own. “I’ve got a call waiting with Etienne.”

And, for once in her life, she thought God bless Etienne, too. The man didn’t back off, but he looked like he was weighing the benefits of pressing.

“Which we have to get to,” Marcus said, and put a hand between them. “I’d take it up with her.”

Excusing themselves felt less like a departure than a retreat.

Marcus kept himself between Jordan and the station crowd as much as he could, which would have been difficult enough in an Earthside concourse and was nigh impossible in L1. Every bumped shoulder and correction of momentum seemed to communicate tension like a sludge or a fast-acting disease, and a palpable relief hit them when they made it to the dock module for the hydroponic rig skiff. Only one guard was stationed there, and he checked their identification, unlocked the dock door, and said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

It was enough of a deviation from the pattern that Jordan couldn’t process it for a moment. “Excuse me?”

He looked at her, and held her gaze. He had a sort of spacer-mutt gangliness, and his expression, while serious, didn’t share the panic of the rest of the station. Native, maybe. Young, certainly.

“You’re Jordan Owole, right? You own the hydro rig?”

“I’m not selling,” Jordan said.

“Wouldn’t want you to,” the guard responded. “Just let me know if I can help.”

• • • •

The light-skiff ride to Owole Hydroponics was just under fifteen minutes, and the first thing Jordan saw on arriving was her workstation waiting just past the airlock. She looked around for Raxel—the only one who’d leave the hint that blatantly—but she was nowhere to be found.

“My kingdom to avoid this call,” she said, grabbing the workstation from where it had drifted into the bulkhead. Marcus gave her a sympathetic look. “Of course, my kingdom is what she’s wanting.”

“If you want me to take it—”

“She’d make you put me on, and you know it,” Jordan said. “If you don’t hear from me again, send rescue.”

She turned, got a foot against the inner rim of the door, and pushed toward an office.

Etienne wasn’t officially anything in the near-Earth colonies’ administration, but unofficially, you did well to stay on her good side. Jordan was of the opinion that Etienne played either the cattledog to the near-Earth colonies’ herd or the bent Sherriff to the colonies’ Wild West, anachronistic as those concepts should have been. Love her or hate her, you had to admit she was needed.

Now especially.

Jordan keyed in her contact information, and waited as the local stations caught, interpreted, and routed her call. After a minute the screen switched to WAITING, and not long after that, it switched to Etienne’s face.

“Jordan. So glad you called.”

“Well, I needed to,” Jordan said.

Etienne nodded almost immediately, and Jordan jumped. There wasn’t even a second’s delay—much less than the ten or so it would take to transmit to Earth orbit and back. Etienne must have come out to the L1 cluster.

“I heard you had an interesting day,” Etienne said.

Jordan grunted. “En route to Hyperion Station when the ascender blew. Watched it out of the skiff window.”

“Nasty piece of work.” Etienne clicked her tongue. “If the names of the perps go public, I know a few solar satellites which may be abruptly retargeted from their collection stations.”

Jordan felt a vertiginous sense of unease. “You’re not serious.”

“There’s always talk of retribution, Jordan. Even if we don’t have half a blip on who we’d be targeting.” Etienne waved a hand. “Relax. No one’s launching a burn attack on Earth under my watch.”

Jordan didn’t relax.

“But let’s talk business,” Etienne said.

Jordan took a breath. “Etti, our water is tied up in food production. Why is everyone looking to us? What’s the matter with the reserve?”

“Oh, you really haven’t been watching the numbers, have you?” Etienne said. “The problem is we grew too fast, hon. The reserve was only ever a stopgap and now it’s a flash in the pan. Ergo, near-Earth needs you.”

Jordan shook her head. “No water, no crops, no food.”

“Less water, fewer crops, less food. You’re one of our luxuries up here. If the other choice is going thirsty, you think people will complain when their kumquats come off the market?”

Jordan ignored the jab. “It took years to get some of these crops established. You can’t just stop and start production on a hydroponics rig.”

“Try putting a stop to drinking,” Etienne shot back. “And darling, I looked over the logs from Ouranos-Hyperion. You’ve been ordering water over your business use.”

Jordan groaned. “I won’t bother asking how you got those.” Etienne got anything she put her mind to getting. “Listen, I know, it’s a disaster, but there’s gotta be other options. I’ve got loans out, the crop cuts could take years to correct—this could ruin me.”

“We’re pulling every option we have.” Etienne drummed her fingers against the console, and the sound translated to a menacing bassbeat over the connection. “You’ll be compensated for your expenditure—”

“No insurance on Earth or in the heavens above is going to pay me for giving up water and destroying viable crops,” Jordan said. “I’ll get reimbursement on the shipment I lost in the explosion, but there’s no way I’ll get anything back from a fire sale of my stores.”

“I’ll see to it,” Etienne said. “Darling, the reserve will last us a month, at most. You want to know how many liters we’re losing every day?”

“No. I don’t.” Jordan rubbed her temples, and let her shoulders slump. “What are your numbers?”

“Against seven months for the ascender repairs, we’ve got two weeks on the reserve at normal use—a month on emergency rationing. Four more months using eighty percent of your water stores and sixty-five of the refueling stations’. That’s leaving the rest to you to grow food and to Galot and Bardroy to run food and water deliveries and handle emergencies. That should get us to a point where relief organizations can send up water in the quantities to get us through the interim.”

“That’s the gamble?” Jordan asked. “Your best-case scenario leaves us two months’ blind hope?”

“Well, its a damn sight better than six months of despair,” Etienne pointed out. “I know we can count on you, darling.”

“I got mobbed on L1!” Jordan shouted. “We haven’t even cracked the reserve yet, and people want to buy off my stores. What happens when we’re coming up on the end of our rations?”

“If you need protection, you know that’s never been a problem,” Etienne said. “Protection from Ouranos-Hyperion too, if you need it.”

It took Jordan a moment to process that. “You’re talking about my sister.”

“I’m talking about you, dear,” Etienne said. “As of that explosion, you’re the richest person in space.”

Jordan felt disbelief and anger tangling up at the bottom of her lungs. “Rich?” she demanded. “You want to call this rich? Getting strongarmed into killing off my crops, setting my own business back, jettisoning everything I’ve achieved, everything I’ve planned for—”

“Yes, and what were you planning for?” Etienne asked.

“I was planning for mind your own damn business!” Jordan said, and cut transmission.

• • • •

Raxel and Marcus were waiting when she left the office, with looks that suggested they were checking her for ripped-out hair so they’d be ready to change out the air filters. Jordan arrested her momentum as she came up to them, and jerked her chin down one of the tunnels. “Come on, let’s see our damage.”

“I say we keep the water for ourselves,” Raxel grumbled. “Between the three of us, we could probably last here longer than any of us would live.”

“Oh, definitely. If only because they’ll kill us for it,” Jordan said. “Etienne is talking people down from using the solar transfer beams as retribution against Earth. Let’s not piss her off or she might tell them to switch targets.”

“So did you work something out?” Marcus asked.

Jordan grimaced. “Well, I told her to piss off.”

“. . . uh,” Marcus said.

“I know, I know, and if we catch a laser through our bulkheads, blame me,” Jordan said. “You think we have a choice? Our crops versus everyone’s life. But I’m allowed to get mad, watching everything I’ve worked for go out with the waste brine.”

She steadied herself with a handhold and punched the bulkhead. Her workers looked at each other.

“We could dehydrate what we have,” Marcus said. “That might stretch the water reserves a little.”

“Too little. And anyone who ate the food would just get thirstier wanting the water back,” Jordan said. “For storage, though, probably our best option. People will be tightening belts once we scale down.”

Raxel glanced toward an empty bay. “Does she know about the stash?”

“She’s Etienne. She knows everything.” Jordan picked an office and pushed off for it, and Raxel and Marcus followed her. “So, we need a plan to scale down to twenty percent of our water use.”

“Twenty percent!” Raxel said. She reached the door first, and keyed it open. “By when?”

“Distribution at the end of the month, I think,” Jordan said. “Thanks.” She swung in the open door, and grabbed a hammock with her feet. “Ideas?”

“Will that even feed us?” Raxel asked, twitching to the desk and catching her feet under the lip.

“Subsistence, high-yield crops,” Marcus said.

“What, bean crops, potatoes, onions, peas?” Raxel asked. “Winter wheat, I guess, if we still have water. Could people live on that?”

“You could live on that,” Marcus muttered.

“People are going to riot if they don’t have colors available for their plates,” Jordan said. “Fruits and vegetables. Hell hath no fury like colonies who think they’re entitled to their grapes and raspberries, water crisis or none.”

“Maybe we should hire additional security,” Raxel said, and Jordan thought of the guard outside her dock at L1. “I know we don’t have the budget, but we could cut a crop and pay in fresh water until this sorts out.”

Jordan dug the knuckles of her thumbs into the corners of her eyes. “Anyone else beginning to think that maybe the anti-exporters have a point?” she asked. Despair was a strange feeling in micrograv: still felt like something settling on your chest, but it was the only thing settling. One spot of weight in weightlessness. “Maybe we have no business being in a place that can’t support us.”

Marcus and Raxel exchanged a look, and Raxel said, “Tell that to my family back in Phoenix.”

Jordan snorted and flicked her pencil at Raxel’s head.

Raxel reached out and plucked it from the air, then looked across at Marcus. “Marc, why’d you come to space?”

Marcus shrugged. “Ms. Owole was the only person who wanted to hire a thirty-year-old Haitian geek who’d spent way too long getting a Bachelors in hydroponic ag. And the relocation package was good.”

“How about you, Jordan?” Raxel asked.

“Because I was an 1860s frontiersman in a previous life,” Jordan said. “What about you, Raxel? I’m guessing you have a point to make.”

“Yeah, I have a point to make, “ Raxel said, and jabbed the pencil at Marcus. “I say we’re all up here for the same reason: because without hacking it up here, we’d never have sent the diver out to Europa. And if we can’t hack it that far, we’ll never get to another star.” She waved her hand back toward the observation modules, indicating the entire Milky Way by association. “Because either we can spread out or we can say this is as far as we’re gonna get. Because Earth is like—it’s our parents’ house, and near-Earth is our first crappy apartment, and somewhere out there is New York City, it’s New Delhi, it’s Sydney, it’s Madrid, and some people dream of going there and some people actually do. And we do. Least, we’re trying to.”

There was silence for a moment. Then, Marcus cleared his throat. “Rax, how many papers on this did you write?”

It was his turn to get a pencil flicked at his head.

“I was going to say we were little babies, and our umbilical just got cut, and we are desperately premature,” Jordan said. Raxel sent a disparaging look her way.

“Look, you can disagree, but this has always been the bargain,” Raxel said. “Back when we were still shooting things up with individual launches, those rockets were pumping out enough shit to turn the local nature preserves into acid swamps for half a day. You know what they said? ‘The dead animals are dedicated in the interests of the mission.’ You can love Earth or you can love space.”

Marcus’s hand closed around the pencil, and he looked uneasily to Jordan. “So it’s us or them? I mean, we solved the fuel problem with the elevator. You don’t think—”

“Marcus,” Jordan said. “Kids. Both of you. You want to save the world—” she looked from Marcus to Raxel, “—and you want to colonize other stars. Let’s focus on keeping in food and water and Etienne’s good graces until they fix the damn elevator, and we can all be heroes then.”

Raxel showed both hands. Marcus looked contrite, and pushed off to Jordan.

“Here’s your pencil back,” he said, and his hand closed on her shoulder. She curled her hand over it.

“Thank you,” she said, and looked back to her notes. “So. Rice, lentils, and raspberries.”

• • • •

You could hire security, you could seal your hatches, you could do just about anything in the near-Earth colonies, but you could never bar your door to Etienne.

She arrived on a light skiff at what, planetside, would be an indecent hour, but Jordan was still awake to meet her. She led her back to an inner observation module, placed alongside a long row of producing fruits, and opened a cabinet to withdraw two small packages of awamori from the secret and not entirely legal still Marcus tended in the back of the rice modules. She floated one to Etienne, who caught it and placed it in the air just to one side.

“I tell you,” Etienne said, looking down into the complex, her face softening as she took in the green. “If civilization ever collapses up here, all of us who can’t get to Europa should hope you’d let us in. You’ve got your own little ecosystem.”

“It’s an ecosystem that requires a lot of intervention,” Jordan pointed out. “We’re no Earth.”

“Still, if you downshifted to subsistence farming, rationed your water, recycled every drop . . . how long do you think you could last, here?”

Jordan sighed, rolling her head back. “With the staff I have now? Years. Indefinitely. Does it matter?” She popped the cap off the awamori, traced her finger around the lip. “It’ll never come to that.”

“Mm,” Etienne agreed.

They sat in silence for a moment, looking down at the crops transplanted from their terrestrial homes. They looked strange, to an Earth-cultured perspective: far away from nature and the richness of soil. But space had its own rules and its own rightness.

“So. Darling.” Etienne affected an old French accent, and Jordan slipped half a smile. “Time to bare all. What is it twisting up your mind?”

“You’re going to laugh,” Jordan said.

“I won’t laugh.”

“Oh, you’re going to laugh.” Jordan nudged herself back, pushing her shoulders against the curve of the bulkhead. “You said that we’re a luxury. Thing is, we were finally doing well enough to be.”

“The pomegranates were a particular triumph,” Etienne agreed.

Jordan shook her head. “I wanted a rose garden.”

Etienne watched her. After a moment she took and raised her awamori, indicating Jordan should continue.

“Of all the fussy, water-intensive things,” Jordan said. “Harper was going to take me to see a rose specialist. Grand conciliatory gesture, now that she’s finally come to terms with me moving up here—and it only took her, what, seventeen years, for that to burn off? And now the ascender’s blown, and I guess we’re both suspects, because she gets loud about water crises planetside and I’m apparently rich these days, and—”

“Breathe, darling.” Etienne waved her hand.

Jordan glared at her.

Etienne watched, as though weighing how much her protection might be worth. What came out of her mouth, though, was “Roses? Really?”

“What, I don’t seem the type?” Jordan raised an eyebrow. “This specialist, Etienne. He’s got roses traced to stock from the Gardens of Albarède, from Chandigarh, he’s got a Autumn Damask that would make your heart ache. I wanted something of my own up here. Something just beautiful.” She sighed, and drank. “Everything on the frontier is so damn practical. So, so am I.”

“Numbers and figures and madmen and dreamers,” Etienne said. There was a fondness to her tone that Jordan wasn’t used to hearing. “They got us here and they’ll get us through. So it’ll take a few extra years.”

“It’ll take a few extra years to scale crop production back to normal,” Jordan said. She shook her head. “Longer than that for roses. So much for dreamers, huh? One little explosion, and boom.” She made an exploded gesture with one hand. “Bleeding rainbows in geosynchronous orbit. We were barely bringing up enough water for me to claim a surplus in the first place; where do we go from here?”

“Where do we ever?” Etienne said.

“Raxel says living in space means bleeding Earth dry.”

Etienne massaged her drink with her fingers, then crossed her legs and her arms. “Jordan Owole, do you think people up here will pay back your water if they can?”

Jordan shrugged. “I think I do. But—”

“Then let’s tell Earth the same damn thing.” Etienne shrugged. “One day it’ll all pay out. We’ll bring them some nice comets for their troubles, or whatever they need from us. It’s big out here. Full of possibilities.”

“Have you looked at space?” Jordan asked. “It’s not full, it’s empty.”

“There’s more out here than there’ll ever be down there,” Etienne said. “It just takes a little getting to.”

“That’s the problem.”

Etienne gave an exaggerated sigh. “You know, you’re damn cynical for a spacer, Jordan. It’s a wonder you ever got your feet off the ground.” She extended her leg, pushed off in one graceful motion, and caught Jordan’s shoulder. “Darling, it’s space. We help each other or we float dead into nothing. You share your water and every spacer worth a breath of air and a bag to drink will dip in to make your dreams come true. I guarantee it.”

Jordan gave a sad, sidelong smile. “You mean you’ll henpeck them until they agree to your terms.”

Etienne put a hand to her heart. “Why, Jordan,” she said. “How well you know me.”

• • • •

Jordan was going through the seed logs when her callpad blipped with a message, and she reached over to open it without looking. She hit the button for the text-to-audio option, and it read IMAGE FILE FILENAME PROMISE.

That got her to glance over.

It was a rose. Hand-rendered, rotating on three axes. She checked the message data, traced it back to a doctor in the colony at Tsiolkovskiy. There was no message attached.

She studied it for a while. She didn’t know the doctor, though she’d heard his name around. They’d never interacted.

She might have questioned that further, but she was interrupted by another message blip. Another rose, this one in oil pastels.

Four minutes later, another.

They kept coming. One by one, diverging from art to factoids, to photos and personal recollections, memories of scent-rich Earth. She watched as the number climbed past thirty, past sixty, past a hundred.

“Oh, hell,” Jordan said, and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. She reached over and typed Marcus’ number into the callpad. “Marcus—”

A new message flashed onto her screen.

She opened it. This one was text, and the speech option read it dutifully out. Jordan read along with it.

Marcus connected on his end, his face popping up on the vid channel. “Ms. Owole?”

“Etienne can get a message to my sister on Earth,” Jordan read, tracing the words on her screen.

“That’s great!” Marcus said. “Trust Etienne. What are you going to say?”

Jordan took a long, deep breath.

“I’ll say, ‘Still love you, still miss you, and enjoy the gardens at Sangerhausen,’” she said. “And Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

She closed the images, and braced herself against the coming dry spell. “Tell Raxel we’re putting our faith in her, for this one. And start scaling down. Make ready to distribute our water.”

© 2012 by An Owomoyela.

Originally published in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

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

The Fiddler of Bayou Teche

Delia Sherman | 7,967 words

Come here, cher, and I tell you a story.

One time there is a girl lives out in the swamp. Her skin and hair are white like the feathers of a white egret and her eyes are pink like a possum’s nose. When she is a baby, the loup-garous find her floating on the bayou in an old pirogue and take her to Tante Eulalie.

Tante Eulalie does not howl and grow hair on her body when the moon is full like the loup-garous. But she hide in the swamp same as they do, and they are all friends together. She take piquons out of the loup-garous’ feet and bullets out of their hairy shoulders and dose their rheumatism and their mange. In return, the loup-garous build her a cabin out of cypress and palmetto leaves and bring her rice and indigo dye from town. On moonlit nights, she play her fiddle at the loup-garous’ ball. The loup-garous love Tante Eulalie, but the girl love her most of all.

Yes, the girl is me. Who else around here has white skin and hair and pink eyes, eh? Hush now, and listen.

Tante Eulalie, she like my own mother, her. She name me Cadence and tell me stories—all the stories I tell you, cher. When we sit spinning or weaving, she tell me about when she was a young girl, living with her pap and her good maman and her six brothers and three sisters near the little town of Pierreville. She tell me about her cousin Belda Guidry, the prettiest girl in the parish.

Now, when Belda is fifteen, there are twenty young men all crazy to marry her. She can’t make up her mind, her, so her old pap make a test for the young men, to see which will make the best son-in-law. He make them plow the swamp and sow it with dried chilies and bring them to harvest. And when they done that, they have to catch the oldest, meanest ’gator in Bayou Teche and make a gumbo out of him.

I thought Tante Eulalie was making it all up out of her head, but she swore it was true. It was Ganelon Fuselier who won Belda, and Tante Eulalie was godmother to their second child, Denise.

Ganie cheated, of course. Nobody can pass a test like that without cheating some. Seemed to me like cheating was a way of life in Pierreville. The wonder was how the folks getting cheated never learned to be less trustful. I thought if I ever went to Pierreville, and Ganie Fuselier or Old Savoie tell me the sky is blue, I’d go outside and check. And if Murderes Petitpas came knocking at my door, I’d slip out the back.

Tante Eulalie’s best stories were about Young Murderes Petitpas, who was like the grasshopper because he’d always rather fiddle than work, though ’Dres was too smart to get caught out in the cold. How smart was he? Well, I tell you the story of ’Dres and the Fiddle, and you can judge for yourself.

Once there’s this old man called Old Boudreaux. He has a fiddle, and this fiddle is the sweetest fiddle anybody ever hear. His old pap make it himself, back in eighteen-something, and when Old Boudreaux play, the dead get up and dance. Now, Young ’Dres think it’s a shame that the best fiddler in St. Mary’s parish—that is, Young ’Dres himself—shouldn’t have the best fiddle—that is, Old Boudreaux’s Pap’s fiddle. So Young ’Dres go to Old Boudreaux and he say, “Old Boudreaux, I’m afraid for your soul.”

Old Boudreaux say: “What you talking about, boy?”

Young ’Dres say: “Last night when you were playing ‘Jolie Blonde,’ I see a little red devil creep out of the f-holes and commence to dancing on your fingerboard. The faster he dance, the faster you play, and he laugh like mad and wave his forked tail so I was scared half to death.”

“Go to bed, ’Dres Petitpas,” say Old Boudreaux. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

“It’s as true as I’m standing here,” say Young ’Dres. “I got the second sight, me, so I see things other people don’t.”

“Hmpf,” say Old Boudreaux, and he start back in the house.

“Wait,” say Young ’Dres. “You bring your fiddle here, and I go prove it to you.”

Of course, Old Boudreaux say no. But Young ’Dres got a way with him, and everybody know Old Boudreaux ain’t got no more sense than a possum. So Old Boudreaux fetch his fiddle.

When Young ’Dres see it, he commence to moan and wring his bandana. “Mother Mary preserve me!” he say. “Can’t you see its red eyes twinkling in the f-holes? Can’t you smell the sulfur? You got to exercise that devil, Old Boudreaux, or you go fiddle yourself right down to hell.”

Old Boudreaux nearly drop his fiddle, he so scared. He don’t dare look in the f-holes, but he don’t have to, because as soon as Young ’Dres name that devil, there’s a terrible stink of sulfur everywhere.

“Holy Mother save me!” Old Boudreaux cry. “My fiddle is possessed! What am I going to do, ’Dres Petitpas? I don’t want to fiddle myself down to hell.”

“Well, I go tell you, Old Boudreaux, but you ain’t going to like it.”

“I’ll like it, I promise. Just tell me what to do!”

“You give the fiddle to me, and I exercise that devil for you.”

Old Boudreaux so scared, he hand his pap’s fiddle right over to Young ’Dres. What’s more, he tell him to keep it, because Old Boudreaux never go touch it again without thinking he smell sulfur. And that’s how ’Dres Petitpas get the sweetest fiddle in the parish for nothing more than the cost of the bandana he crush the rotten egg in that make Old Boudreaux believe his fiddle is haunted.

Yes, that Young ’Dres make me laugh, him. But Tante Eulalie shake her head and say, “You go ahead and laugh, ’tit chou. Just remember that people like ’Dres Petitpas are better to hear about than have dealings with, eh? You ever meet a bon rien like that—all smiling and full of big talk—you run as fast and as far as you can go.”

That was Tante Eulalie. Always looking out for me, teaching me what I need to know to live in the world. By the time I could walk, I knew to keep out of the sun and stay away from traps and logs with eyes. When I grew older, Tante Eulalie taught me to spin cotton and weave cloth and dye it blue with indigo. She taught me how to make medicine from peppergrass and elderberry bark and prickly pear leaves, and some little magic gris-gris for dirty wounds and warts and aching joints. Best of all, she taught me how to dance.

Tante Eulalie loved to play the fiddle, and she played most nights after supper was cleared away. The music she played was bouncing music, swaying music, twirl around until you fall music, and when I was very little, that’s all I did. Then Tante Eulalie took me to the loup-garous’ ball, where I learned the two-step and the waltz.

I took to it like a mallard to open water. Once I learned the steps, I danced all the time. I danced with the loup-garous and I danced by myself. I danced when I swept and I danced when I cooked. I danced to Tante Eulalie’s fiddling and I danced to the fiddling of the crickets. Tante Eulalie laughed at me—said I’d wear myself out. But I didn’t.

Then came a winter when the leaves were blasted with cold and ice skimmed the surface of the bayou. Long about Advent-time, Tante Eulalie caught a cough. I made her prickly pear leaf syrup and willow bark tea for the fever, and hung a gris-gris for strength around her neck. But it didn’t do no good. At the dark of the year, she asked me to bring her the cypress wood box from under her bed. I opened it for her, and she pulled out three pieces of lace and a gold ring and put them in my hand.

“These are all I have to leave you,” she said. “These, and my fiddle. I hope you find good use for them someday.”

Not long after that, the Bon Dieu called her. Her friends the loup-garous came and buried her under the big live oak behind the cabin and howled her funeral mass. I was sixteen years old now, more or less, and that was the end of my girlhood.

That was the end of my dancing, too, for a time. When I saw Tante Eulalie’s fiddle lying silent across her cane-bottomed chair, I fell into sadness like a deep river. Day in and day out, I lay in a nest of nutria skins next the fire and watched the flames burn low and thought how nobody would know or notice if I lived or died.

Some time passes, I don’t know how much, and then somebody knock at the door. I don’t answer, but he come in anyway. It is Ulysse, the youngest of the loup-garous. I like Ulysse. He is quiet and skinny and he bring me peanut butter and white bread in a printed paper wrapper, and when we dance at the loup-garous’ ball, everybody stop and watch us. Still, I wish he would go away.

Ulysse sniff around a little, then he dig me out of my nest and give me a shake. “You in a bad way, chère,” he say. “If Tante Eulalie see how you carry on, she pass you one big slap, for sure.”

“Good,” I say. “I like that fine. At least she be here to slap me.”

Not much Ulysse can say to that, I think, and maybe he will go away now and let me be sad by myself. But he has another idea, him. He sniff around again and start to clucking like an old hen. “This place worse than a hog pen,” he say. “Tante Eulalie see the state her cabin is in, she die all over again.” He pick her fiddle and bow up off her chair. “Where she keep these at?”

To see Ulysse holding Tante Eulalie’s fiddle give me the first real feeling I have since it seems like forever. I get mad, me, so mad I go right up to Ulysse, who is bigger than me by a head, who has wild, dark hair and long teeth and sharp nails even when the moon is dark, and I hit him in the stomach.

“Tiens, chère! What is this? Why you hit your friend Ulysse?”

“Why? Because you touch Tante Eulalie’s fiddle. Put it down, you, or I make you.”

“Put it up, then,” he say, “instead of curling up like a crawfish in winter.”

I take the fiddle like it was an egg, and hang it on its hook over Tante Eulalie’s bed. And then I start to cry, with Ulysse holding my shoulders and licking my hair like a wolf lick her cub till I am calm again.

After that, I clean the cabin and make myself a gumbo. I string Tante Eulalie’s big loom with thread she spun and dyed, and I weave a length of pale blue cloth. When the water rise to the edge of the porch and the nights get shorter, I set lines to catch fish, and make my garden with the seeds Tante Eulalie saved. The loup-garous still knock on my door, and I treat them for mange and rheumatism and broken bones, as Tante Eulalie always did. But I don’t dance at their balls. I take my pirogue out at sunset and paddle between the big cypress trees and listen to the frogs sing of love and the roaring of the ’gators as they fight for their mates.

One night, paddling far from home, I see lights that are not the pale feu follets that dance in the swamp at night. They are yellow lights, lantern lights, and they tell me I have come to a farm. I am a little afraid, for Tante Eulalie used to warn me about letting people see me.

“You know how ducks carry on when a strange bird land in their water?” she say. “The good people of Pierreville, they see that white hair and those pink eyes, and they peck at you till there’s nothing left but two-three white feathers.”

I do not want to be pecked, me, so I start to paddle away.

And then I hear the music.

I turn back with a sweep of my paddle and drift clear. I see a wharf and a cabin and an outhouse and a hog pen, and a big barn built on high ground away from the water. The barn doors are open, and they spill yellow light out over a pack of buggies and horses and even cars—only cars I’ve seen outside the magazines Ulysse sometimes bring. I don’t care about the cars, though, for I am caught by the fiddle music that spills out brighter than the lantern light, brighter than anything in the world since Tante Eulalie left it.

I paddle toward the music like a moth to a lit candle, not caring that fire burns and ducks peck and the people of Pierreville don’t like strangers. But I am not stupid like Old Boudreaux. I am careful to hide my pirogue behind a buttonbush and I don’t come out in the open. I stalk the music softly, softly, like a bobcat, and I find a place behind the barn where I think nobody will come. And I dance. I dance the two-step with my brown striped shawl, tears wet on my face because Tante Eulalie is dead, because I am dancing alone in the dark, because the fiddle is crying and I cannot help but cry, too.

The moon rise, the crickets go to bed. The fiddler play and I dance as if the dawn will never come. I guess I keep dancing when the music stop, because next thing I know, there’s a shout behind me. When I open my eyes, the sky is pale and gray and there’s a knot of men behind the barn with their mouths gaping like black holes in their faces.

One of them step forward. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and thick, and he wear a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes, glittering in its shadow like the eyes of a snake in a hole. I throw my shawl around my shoulders and turn to run.

As soon as I move, all the men gasp and step back. I think that a little fear make ducks mean, but a lot of fear make them run. I give a hoot like a swamp owl, hold my shawl out like wings, and scoot low and fast into the cypress grove.

Behind me, there is shouting and lights bobbing here and there like lightning bugs. I creep to my pirogue and paddle away quiet as a watersnake, keeping to the shadows. I am very pleased with myself, me. I think the men of Pierreville are as stupid as Old Boudreaux to be frightened by a small girl in a striped shawl. Maybe soon I will go and hear the music again.

Next night, Ulysse come knocking at my door. He sit down at the table and I give him coffee and then I go to my wheel and set it spinning.

“I hear tell of a thing,” Ulysse say over the whirr of the wheel. “It make me think.”

I smile a little. “Think?” I say. “That is a piece of news. You tell your friends? Old Placide, he be surprised.”

Ulysse shakes his head. “This is serious, Cadence. Up and down the bayou, everybody is talking about the haunt that bust up the Doucet fais-do-do.”

I look down at the pale brown thread running though my fingers, fine and even as Tante Eulalie’s. “There weren’t no haunts at the Doucet fais-do-do, Ulysse.”

“I know that. The Doucets say different. They say they see a girl turn into a swamp owl and fly away. What you say to that, hien?”

“I say they drink too much beer, them.”

He bring his heavy black eyebrows together. “Why you go forget everything Tante Eulalie tell you, Cadence, and make a nine-days’ wonder with your foolishness?”

“Don’t scold, Ulysse. The people of Pierreville for sure got more important things to talk about than me.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Ulysse say darkly. “What you doing at the Doucets’?”

“Dancing,” I say, still teasing. “Who is the fiddler, Ulysse? He play mighty fine.”

Ulysse is still not smiling. “He is a bon rien, Cadence, a bad man. Shake hands with Murderes Petitpas, you go count your fingers after.”

I almost let the wheel stop, I’m so surprised. “You go to bed, Ulysse. Tante Eulalie make ’Dres Petitpas up out of her head. “

“He’s real, all right. Everybody say he sell his soul to the devil so he can play better than any human man. Then he fiddle the devil out of hell and keep him dancing all day and night until his hoofs split in two and the devil give ’Dres his soul back so he can stop dancing. ’Dres Petitpas is the big bull on the hill, and mean, mean. You stay away from him, you.”

I maybe like Ulysse, but I don’t like him telling me what to do—Ulysse, who eats rabbits raw and howls at the moon when it’s full. I pinch the thread too tight and it breaks in two.

“Eh, Cadence,” he say, “you going to hit me again? Ain’t going to change what I say, but go ahead if it make you feel better.”

I don’t hit him, but I am maybe not very kind to him, and he leaves looking like a beaten dog. I hear howling, later, that I think is Ulysse, and I am a little sorry, but not too much.

Still, I do not go out again to dance. Not because Ulysse tell me, but because I am not a couyon like Old Boudreaux.

Two, maybe three nights after, I hear a thump against my porch and the sounds of somebody tying up a pirogue and climbing out. Not Ulysse—somebody heavier. Old Placide, maybe. I am already up and looking for my jar of fly blister for his rheumatism when there’s a knock on the door.

I open it. I do not see Old Placide. I see a big man with a belly like a barrel, a big-brimmed hat, and a heavy black mustache. I try to shut the door, but ’Dres Petitpas shoves it back easy, and walks past me like he’s at home. Then he sit down at my table with his hat pulled down to his snake-bright eyes and his hands spread on his thighs.

“Hey there, chère,” he say, and smiles real friendly. His teeth are yellow and flat.

I stand by the door, thinking whether I will run away or not. Running away is maybe safer, but then ’Dres Petitpas is alone in my cabin, and I don’t want that.

He eyes me like he knows just what I’m thinking. “I go tell you a story. You stand by the door if you want, but I think you be more comfortable sitting down.”

I hate to do anything he tell me to, but I hate worse looking foolish. I close the door and sit by the fire with my hands on my lap. I do not give him coffee.

“Well,” he say, “this is the way it is. I am a good fiddler, me, maybe the best fiddler on the bayous. Maybe the best fiddler in the world. Ain’t nobody in St. Mary’s parish dance or court or marry or christen a baby without me. But St. Mary’s parish is a small place, eh? I am too big for St. Mary’s. I have an idea to go to New Orleans, fiddle on the radio, make my fortune, buy a white house with columns on the front.”

He lift his hands, his fingers square at the tips, his nails trimmed short and black with dirt, and he laugh. It is not a good laugh.

“You maybe don’t know, little swamp owl girl, these hands are like gold. I fiddle the devil out of hell once and I fiddle him down again. I will make those cuyons in New Orleans lie down and lick my bare feets.”

He glances at me for a reaction, but I just sit there. Tante Eulalie is right. Close to, ’Dres Petitpas is not funny at all. He want what he want, and he don’t care what he has to do to get it. He can’t trick me, because I know what he is. What he go do, I wonder, when he finds that out?

As if he hear my thoughts, ’Dres Petitpas frown. He look around the cabin, and his eyes light on Tante Eulalie’s fiddle hung on the wall. He get up and take it down, and run his thumb over the strings. They twang dully. “Good thing you loosen the strings,” he say. “Keep the neck from warping, eh? Nice little fiddle. You play?”

I don’t remember getting up, but I am standing with my hands twisted in my skirts. “No,” I say as lightly as I can. “Stupid old thing. I don’t know why I don’t throw it into the bayou.”

“You won’t mind if I tune her, then.” He brings the fiddle to the table and starts to tighten the strings. I sit down again. “One day,” he say, picking up the story. “One day, my five sons Clopha and Aristile and ’Tit Paul and Louis and Télémaque come to me. Clopha is in love, him, and he ask my blessing to marry Marie Eymard.

“Now, I got nothing against marriage. My wife Octavie and me been married together twenty-two years, still in love like two doves. My sons are good boys, smart boys. Clopha can read anything you put in front of him—writing, printing, it don’t matter. And young Louis can add up numbers fast as I can play my fiddle. But they got no sense about women. So I tell Clopha I will choose a wife for him, if he want one. And when the time come, I’ll choose wives for the other boys, too. Wives are too important a matter to be left to young men.

“‘My foot!’ Clopha say. ‘I go marry Marie without your blessing, then.’

“‘You go do more than that,’ I tell him. ‘You go marry with my curse. Remember, I got the devil on a string. My curse is something to fear. And you see if Marie Eymard go marry together with you when she find out you don’t bring her so much as a stick of furniture or a woven blanket or a chicken to start life with.’

“Well, you think that be the end of it. But my sons are hardheaded boys. They argue this way and that. And then I have an idea, me, how I can shut their mouths for once and all. I offer my sons a bet.”

He stop and hold the fiddle up to his ear and pluck teach string in turn, listening intently. “Better,” he say. He set the fiddle on the table, pull a lump of rosin from his pocket, and goes to work on the bow.

“The bet,” he say, “is this. I will fiddle and my sons will dance. If I stop fiddling before they all stop dancing, I go bless their marriages and play at their weddings. If not, Clopha and Louis come to New Orleans with me to read anything that needs to be read, and Aristile, ’Tit Paul, and Télémaque go tend the shrimp boats and help Octavie with the hogs and the chickens and the cotton.”

’Dres Petitpas grin under his moustache. “It is a good bet I make, eh? I cannot lose.

“Well, my sons go off behind the hog pen and talk for a while, and when they come back, they tell me that they will take my bet—on two conditions. One, they will dance one after another, so I must fiddle out five in a row. Two, I will provide a partner for them—one partner, who must dance as long as I fiddle.

“Now I am proud of my five sons, because they are smart as well as strong. They know I can play the sun up and down the sky. They know I can play until the cows come home and long after the chickens come to roost. They know nobody human can dance as long as I can play.” He looks away from the bow and straight at me. “They don’t know you.”

I turn my head away. I don’t know how long I can dance. All night, for sure, then paddle home after and dance in the cabin while I do my chores. Maybe the next night, too. I might could do what I guess ’Dres Petitpas wants. But I won’t. I won’t show my face to the people of Pierreville, my white face and pink eyes and white, white hair. I won’t go among the ducks and risk their pecking—not for anybody and for sure not for ’Dres Petitpas.

“I see you at the Doucet fais-do-do,” he say. “I see you dance like a leaf in the wind, like no human girl I ever seen. I go to a man I know, a hairy, sharp-tooth man, and he tell me about a little swamp owl girl who dance all night long at the loup-garous’ ball. I think this girl go make a good partner for my boys. What you say, hien? You come dance with my five strong sons?”

My heart is sick inside me, but I can’t be angry at the loup-garou who betrayed me. ’Dres Petitpas is a hard man to say no to. But I do. I say, “No.”

“I don’t ask you to dance for nothing,” ’Dres Petitpas coaxes me. “I go give you land to raise cotton on and a mule to plow it with.”

“No.”

“You greedy girl, you,” he says, like it’s a compliment. “How you like to marry one of my sons, then? Any one you like. Then you be important lady, nobody dare call you swamp owl girl or little white slug.”

I jump up and go for him, so angry the blood burns like ice in my veins. I stop when I see him raise Tante Eulalie’s fiddle over his head by the neck.

“Listen, chère. You don’t help me, I take this fiddle and make kindling out of it, and I break that loom and that wheel, and then I burn this cabin to ash. What you say, chère: yes or no? Say ‘yes’ now, and we have a deal. You help me win my bet and I give you land and a mule and a husband to keep you warm. That is not so bad a bargain, hien?”

It stick in my throat, but I have no choice. “Yes,” I say.

“That’s good,” Murderes Petitpas say, and he tuck Tante Eulalie’s fiddle under his chin and draw the bow across the strings. It sounds a note, strong and sweet. “The contest is set for Saturday night—that’s three nights from now. We start after supper, end when the boys get tired. Make a real fais-do-do, eh? Put the children down to sleep?” He make the fiddle laugh, a skip of notes. “Might could take two-three days. You understand?”

I understand very well, but I can’t help trying to find a way out. “I do not know if I can dance for three days and nights.”

“I say you can, and I say you will. I got your fiddle, me.”

“I cannot dance in the sun.”

A discord sounds across the strings. “Little white slug don’t like sun, eh? No matter. We make the dance in Doucet’s barn. You know where it at already.” Tante Eulalie’s fiddle mocks me with one of the tunes he played that night. Despite myself, my feet begin to move. He grin a ’gator’s grin. “You a dancing fool, chère. I win my bet, my sons learn who’s boss, and I go be a rich man on the radio.”

He’s fiddling as he speaks and moving towards the door. I’m dancing because I can’t help it, with tears of rage stinging the back of my nose and blurring my eyes. I don’t let them fall till he’s gone, though. I have that much pride.

The rest of that night is black, black, and the next two days, too. There are knocks at my door, but I do not answer them. I am too busy thinking how I will make Murderes Petitpas sorry he mess with me. I take my piece of blue cloth off the loom and sew a dancing dress for myself, with Tante Eulalie’s lace to the neck and cuffs. Early the third morning, I make a gris-gris with Tante Eulalie’s gold ring. I sleep and wash myself and put on the dress and braid my hair in a tail down my back and hang the gris-gris around my neck. Then I get in my pirogue and paddle through the maze of the swamp to the warm lights of the Doucet’s farm

It is very strange to tie my pirogue to the wharf and walk up to the barn in the open. Under my feet, the dirt is warm and smooth, and the air smells of flowers and spices and cooking meat. The barn doors are open and the lantern light shines yellow on the long tables set up outside and the good people of Pierreville swarming around with plates and forks, scooping jambalaya and gumbo, dirty rice and fried okra, red beans and grits from the dishes and pots.

At first they don’t see me and then they do, and all the gumbo ya-ya of talk stops dead. I walk toward them through a quiet like the swamp at sunset. My heart beats so hard under my blue dress that I think everybody must see it, but I keep my chin up. The people are afraid, too. I can smell it on them, see it in their flickering eyes that will not meet mine, hear it in their whispers: Haunt. Devil. Look at her eyes—like fireballs. Unnatural.

A woman steps in front of me. She is wiry and faded, with white-streaked hair in stiff curls around her ears and a flowery dress made up of store-bought calico. “I am Octavie Petitpas,” she says, her voice tight with fear. “You come to dance with my sons?”

I see ’Dres Petitpas grinning his yellow-tooth grin over her head. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Your partner’s here, boys,” ’Dres Petitpas shouts. “Time to dance!”

He turn to five men standing in an uneven line—his five sons. I guess the first must be Clopha the reader, thin as his father is wide, with lines of worry across his forehead. Aristile and ’Tit Paul are big like their father, with trapped, angry eyes. Louis is a little older than me, with a mustache thin as winter grass. Télémaque is still a boy, all knees and elbows.

I walk up to Clopha and hold out my hand. He look at it, then takes it with a sigh. His hand is cold as deep water.

We all troop into the Doucet’s barn, Clopha and me and ’Dres and every soul from St. Mary’s Parish who can find a place to stand. ’Dres climbs up on a trestle table, swings his fiddle to his shoulder, and starts to play “Jolie Blonde.” He’s grinning under his black mustache and stamping with his foot to show he is having a good time, if nobody else is.

Clopha and I start to dance. I know right away that he will not last long. He has already lost the bet in his heart, him, already lost his Marie, who I can see watching us, her hands to her mouth and tears wetting her cheeks like a heavy rain. It is hard work dancing with Clopha. I think his father trick him so often that he is like Old Boudreaux, who doesn’t know how to win. This makes Clopha heavy and slow. I have to set the pace, change directions, twirl under his lax arm without help or signal. He plods through five, six, seven tunes, and then he stumbles and falls to his knees, shaking his head heavily until Marie Eymard come and help him up with a glare that would burn me black, if it could.

Then it is Aristile’s turn.

Aristile is strong, him, and he is on fire to beat me. My head barely reaches his heart, and he crushes me to him as if to smother me. Half the time, I’m dancing on tiptoe. The other, I’m thrown here and there by his powerful arms, my shoulders aching as he puts me through my paces like a mule. It’s wrestling, not dancing, but I dance with wolves, me, and I am stronger than I look. Six songs, seven, eight, nine, and then the tunes all run together under our flying feet. I do not even notice that Aristile has fallen until I find myself dancing alone. Then I blink at the sun pouring in through the barn door while two men carry Aristile to a long bench along the wall. I see a girl in pink kneel beside him with a cup and a cloth for his red face, and then I go up to ’Tit Paul and the music carries us away.

‘Tit Paul is even more angry than his brother, and bigger and taller. He cheats. When we spin, he loosens his grip on my waist and wrist, hoping to send me flying into the crowd. I cling to him like a crab, pinching his shirt, his cuff, his thick, sweaty wrist. The dance is a war between us, each song a battle, even the waltzes. I win them all, and also the war, when ’Tit Paul trips over his own dragging feet and falls full length in the dust, barrel chest heaving, teeth bared like a mink. I feel no pity for him. I think some day ’Tit Paul will find a way to shove his father’s curse back into his throat.

The music doesn’t stop, so I don’t either, two-stepping alone as men carry ’Tit Paul to the bench where he, too, is comforted by a dark-haired girl. Through the barn doors, I see that it is dark again outside. I have danced, as ’Dres Petitpas has fiddled, for a night and a day. I am a little tired.

I dance up to Louis and hold out my hand.

Louis, who understands numbers, dances carefully, making me do all the work of turning, twisting, threading the needles he makes with his arms. From time to time, he speeds up suddenly, stumbles in my way so I must skip to keep from falling, throws me off balance whenever he can. After a time, his father sees what he’s up to and shouts at him, and the spirit goes out of Louis like water draining out the hole in a bucket. There is a girl to give him water and soft words when he falls, too, a thin child with her hair in braids. I feel no pity for Louis, either, who is sly enough to beat his father at his own game when he’s older.

It’s light again by now, and I have danced for two nights and a day. I feel that my body is not my own but tied by the ears to Murderes Petitpas’s fiddle bow. As long as he plays, I will dance, though my feet bleed into the barn floor and my eyes sting with the dust. ’Dres launches into “La Two-Step Petitpas,” and I dance up to Télémaque who is still a child, and all I think when I hold out my hand is how glad I am Octavie gave her husband no more sons.

Télémaque, like me, is stronger than he looks. He has watched me dance with his four brothers, and he has learned that I cannot be tripped and I cannot be flung. He gives me a sad, sweet smile and limps as he dances, like he’s a poor cripple boy I’d be ashamed to beat. I think it is a trick lower than any of Louis’s, and I turn my face from him and let myself be lost in the stream of music. The bow of ’Dres Petitpas lifts my feet; his fingers guide my arms; his notes swirl me up and down and around as a paddle swirls the waters of the bayou. Around me, I feel something like a thunderstorm building, clouds piling, uneasy with lightning, the air growing thicker and thicker until I gasp for breath, dancing in the middle of the Doucets’ barn with Télémaque limp at my bleeding feet and Murderes Petitpas triumphant on his table and his neighbors around us, growling and muttering.

“The last one down!” he crows. “What you say now, Octavie?”

Octavie Petitpas steps out from the boiling cloud of people, and if she looked worn before, now she is gray as death.

“I say you are a fine fiddler, Murderes Petitpas. There ain’t a man in the whole of Louisiana, maybe even the world, could do what you done. Or would want to.”

“I am a fine fiddler,” ’Dres say. “Still, I can’t win my bet without my little owl girl, eh?” He waves his bow arm toward the five brothers sitting on the bench with their gray-faced sweethearts. “There they are, girl. Take your pick, you. Any one you want for your husband, and land and a mule, just like I promised. Murderes Petitpas, he keep his word, hien?”

I touch Tante Eulalie’s lace at my neck for luck, and the little bulge of the gris-gris hanging between my breasts and I say, “I do not want your land or your mule, ’Dres Petitpas. I do not want to marry any of your five sons. They have sweethearts of their own, them, nice Cajun girls with black eyes and rosy cheeks who will give them nice black-eyed babies.”

An astonished wind of whispers blows through the crowd.

I go on. “I make you a bet now, Murderes Petitpas. I bet I can dance longer than you can. Dance with me, and if I win, you will give your blessing on your sons’ marriages and return what you stole from me.”

His eyes narrow under his broad-brimmed hat and his fingers grip the neck of his fiddle. “No,” he say. “I make no more bets, me. I have what I want. I will not dance with you.”

“If you do not dance, Murderes Petitpas, everybody will think you are afraid of a little white-skin, pink-eye swamp girl, with her bare feets all bloody. What you afraid of, hien? You, who fiddle the devil out of hell and back down again?”

“I ain’t afraid,” say ’Dres through his flat yellow teeth. “I just ain’t interested. You don’t want to marry together with one of my sons, you go away back to the swamp. We got no further business together.”

Louis gets to his feet and limps up beside me. “I say you do, Pap. If you win, you get my word I don’t go run away first chance I see.”

“And my word I don’t go with him,” says Télémaque, joining him.

Aristile comes up on the other side of me. “And mine.”

“And mine,” says ’Tit Paul.

“And you got my word not to make your life a living hell for taking my sons from me out of pure cussedness,” says Octavie.

’Dres Petitpas look down on the pack of us. His face is red as fire and his eyes glow hot as coals. “I see you boys still got some learning to do. I take your bet, swamp owl girl. You bring up a fiddler to play for us, and I dance the sun around again.”

Everybody get real quiet, and Octavie say, “’Dres, you know there ain’t no other fiddler in St. Mary’s parish.”

“That’s it, then. I don’t dance without music. The bet’s off.”

Someone in the crowd laughs. I’d laugh myself if this was a story I was hearing, about Young ’Dres Petitpas and how he owns all the music in St. Mary’s parish.

Then another voice speaks out of the crowd. “I will play for this dance,” says my friend Ulysse.

I spin around to see him in a store-bought suit, with his wild, black hair all slicked down with oil, looking innocent as a puppy in a basket.

“I have an accordion,” he say, and gives me a sharp-toothed smile, and I know, just then, that I love him.

Another man turn up with a washboard and a spoon, and he and Ulysse jump up on the table as ’Dres Petitpas climb down. Ulysse strikes up a tune I’ve heard a thousand times: “T’es Petite et T’es Mignonne,” which is Tante Eulalie’s special tune for me. It gives my weary feet courage, and I dance up to Murderes Petitpas and take hold of his hand.

That is when the good people of Pierreville discover that Murderes Petitpas cannot dance. He has two left feet and he can’t keep time, and he may know what a Window or a Cajun Cuddle or a Windmill look like, but he for sure don’t know how to do one. We stumble and fumble this way and that around the floor while the storm breaks at last in a gale of laughter. I laugh, too, in spite of the pain in my feet, like dancing on nails or needles. I don’t care if he falls first or I do. I’ve won already, me. The good people of Pierreville have seen ’Dres Petitpas for what he is. His sons will marry whoever they want, and he will not dare say a word against it.

Scree, scraw goes the accordion; thunk-whoosh goes the washboard, with Ulysse’s hoarse voice wailing above it all, and I’m dancing like the midges above the water at dusk, with ’Dres stumbling after me. Somehow my feet don’t hurt so much now, and my legs are light, and I enjoy myself. It is still dark outside the barn when ’Dres falls to his knees and bends his head.

As the accordion wheezes into silence, Octavie runs to her husband and puts her arms around his shoulders. His sons are kissing their sweethearts, and everybody’s talking and fetching more food and slapping Ulysse and the washboard player on the back and pretending that I don’t exist.

I step up to Octavie and I say, “Miz Petitpas, I’ll take my fiddle now, my Tante Eulalie’s fiddle your husband took from me.”

She look up and say, “Eulalie? Old Eulalie Favrot, that run away to the swamp? You kin to Eulalie Favrot?”

I nod. “Tante Eulalie take me in when I’m a baby, raise me like her own.”

Octavie wave to an ancient lady in a faded homespun dress. “Tante Belda, you come here. This here’s Eulalie Favrot’s girl she raised. What you think of that?”

The ancient lady bring her face, wrinkled as wet cloth, right up to my lace collar so she can squint at it better. “That ’Lalie’s wedding lace,” she say. “I know it anywhere, me. How she keeping, girl?”

“She catch a cough this winter and die.”

“I sure am sorry to hear that,” the ancient lady say. “‘Lalie is my cousin, godmother to my girl, Denise. She marry Hercule Favrot back in the ’teens sometime. Poor Hercule. He lose his shrimp boat and his nets to ’Dres Petitpas because of some couyon bet they make. Hercule take to drink, him, beat ’Lalie half to death. One morning she find him floating in the duck pond, dead as a gutted fish. ’Lalie go away after the funeral, nobody know where. She never have no children.”

“She have me,” I say. “Can I have her fiddle back now?”

Someone brings me a plate of food while I wait, but I am too tired to eat. My legs shake and my feet burn and sting. I think maybe I should sit down, but I can’t move my legs, and how will I get home before light? I feel the tears rise in my eyes, and then there is an arm around my waist and a voice in my ear.

“Cadence, chère,” Ulysse says. “Miz Petitpas bring your fiddle. Take it, you, and I carry you home to sleep.”

The plate disappears from my hands and Tante Eulalie’s fiddle and bow appear in its place. Ulysse pick me up in his arms like I’m a little child, and I put my head against the tight weave of his store-bought suit and let him carry me out of the Doucets’ barn.

The moon’s getting low, and there’s a chill in the air says dawn isn’t far away. Ulysse sets me in my pirogue, crawls in after, casts off, and starts to paddle. I see the Doucets’ wharf get small behind us, and the people of Pierreville standing there, watching us go. The ancient lady that once was the prettiest girl in the parish waves her handkerchief to us as we slip among the cypress trees and the lights of the Doucets’ farm disappear behind Spanish moss and leaves.

We do not speak as we glide through the waterways. The music echoes in my ears, accordion and washboard and fiddle all together as they play them at the loup-garous’ ball. I hum a little, quietly. The sun rises and Ulysse throw me his jacket to put over my head. When we get to my cabin, Ulysse carries me and my fiddle inside and closes the door.

Not long after, we are married together, Ulysse and me, with Tante Eulalie’s gold ring. We still live in the swamp, but we visit Pierreville to hear the gossip and go to a fais-do-do now and then. Ulysse always brings his accordion and plays if they ask him. But I keep my dancing for the loup-garous’ ball and for my husband in our own cabin. We dance to the music of our voices singing and the fiddling of our eldest daughter, ’Tit ’Lalie.

And Murderes Petitpas?

Old ’Dres Petitpas fiddles no more, him. He say he fiddle himself dry in those two days and two nights. He won’t go out into the swamp either, but sits on his front porch and sorts eggs from Octavie’s chickens and tells his grandchildren big stories about what a fine fiddler he used to be. Aristile has got Old Boudreaux’s fiddle now, and you can hear him playing with his wife’s brother and two cousins on the radio. But Aristile Petitpas ain’t the only fiddler in St. Mary’s parish, not by a long shot. There’s plenty of fiddlers around these days, and singers and accordion players and guitar players. They play Cajun and zydeco, waltzes and two-steps and the new jitterbugs, and they play them real fine. But there’s none them can fiddle the devil out of hell, like ’Dres Petitpas did one time.

© 2007 by Delia Sherman.

Originally published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

The Invention of Separate People

Kevin Brockmeier | 2,831 words

Once, not so long ago but before our time, all people were the same person. That’s not to say that they weren’t immersed in their own lives; they were, of course, as people always have been—millions of fish in their millions of bowls. It’s just that they were equally immersed in everyone else’s.

In those days it was possible to browse the spice aisle at the supermarket while you lay in bed reading a book, harvested lemons from an orchard, went snailing past a traffic accident on the highway, and hammered a piton into a rock face, coloring the air with that marimba-like sound of steel entering granite. Every moment contained the traces of all the others, so that even the most irresistible gust of excitement or laughter was accompanied by someone else’s rage, wistfulness, drowsiness, petulance, and fear. The best experiences were inextricably wrapped up with the worst, the happiest with the most miserable, and no one received so much as an instant of life without also dying somewhere. That was just the way things were. People were accustomed to it, never having known a world in which everyone wasn’t the same person, a big little aging athletic young lazybones who was everywhere anyone was.

Though there was love back then, or something like it, there was no privacy. Dating was effortless, and frequently inadvertent. Now and then people would find themselves spending time together in the flesh rather than apart—that’s all—and how, they might wonder, would it feel if two of their ankles brushed under the table? If two of their hands touched? If two of their bodies made love? Romances were fixed into place with an orderly tock-tock-tock, like tiles a mason was situating on a floor. And if the day came for you to settle down and marry, you would simply turn your gaze inward and sort through your galaxy of other selves until you found one beside whom you could agree to spend a lifetime.

Maybe such love wasn’t love at all. That was what one part of everyone believed. He worked as a dispatcher for a small-town hospital, and on overnight shifts, when no one’s brain or heart or shotgun went off, he would sit at his desk and let his mind wander. What would it be like if people knew as little of each other as that pen standing in his cup knew of that clock hanging on his wall? What if people could be separate, truly separate, a whole planetful of genuine individuals, completely alone inside their bodies? No one but a mystic could imagine such a thing, and even then only in wisps and snatches, but this particular part of everyone could not stop trying to make sense of the idea. He was sure that the world would seem bigger, and he himself bigger inside it, if only it had a little more mystery.

Whenever a portion of himself ruptured an artery or lay jerking for breath on the pavement, he knew it at once, and frequently, if that portion was nearby, the signal on his phone would flash and he would take down the details so that he could dispatch one of the ambulances. The long minutes as he sat rushing toward himself were horrifying. He never grew used to the feeling.

He had learned over the years that to distract himself he should concentrate on being other people, stronger ones, with bodies they could ignore if not indulge. His favorite was a woman on the opposite side of the world who worked repairing floral coolers, servicing their motors, sprayers, thermostats, and condensers. All day long she drove the city streets, from the coast up to the hills and back, maintaining her company’s machines. He was fascinated by the way she could spend a full eight hours wielding pliers, valves, and wrenches and still smell like flowers at the end of it all, a perfume she hardly detected except when she saw herself as he did. They were two small parts of everyone, the pair of them, separated by multiple oceans, and he knew that his was not a life of hers she especially noticed, yet occasionally he wondered if he did not, in fact, love her.

Sometimes he found it hard to be so tiny a fragment of other people. A molecule of her—that’s all he was. No, not even a molecule—an atom. He fantasized about introducing himself to her as a total stranger, a piece of herself she had somehow never met.

“You might like me if you got to know me,” he would say.

“Take a chance,” he would tell her.

Maybe the concept was senseless, but he kept turning it over, examining it again and again in his own poor parcel of people’s minds. Love, he thought, or at least the idea of it, needed risk, impenetrability. It suffered from too much certainty. Somewhere far away he was a little girl making a chain of paper dolls with her safety scissors, snipping them free where their hands came together—and here he was in his office, in the middle of the night, wishing he could make the same series of delicate snips in real life. Everything was connected. It was just that the strings were drawn too tight.

One day, as this part of everyone drove home from work, another car went jackrabbiting through a red light and struck the edge of his front bumper. He was concentrating when it happened—concentrating hard—on the woman who worked with hand tools but smelled like flowers. She gave a short puff of compressed effort as she severed a length of copper tubing. The aroma of oil and daisies lay thick in the air, and the heavy round cutter filled her bone-slender hands, and for just a second, as his brakes cried out, she disappeared from his awareness. He was everyone except her, all the same millions of people as always, including the actuary driving the other car and the bank teller buckled into the passenger seat. But where she had been there was nothing.

His car tugged forward against its frame. Instantly she was one of him again. His limbs buzzed with adrenaline. What on Earth was that?

The crunch of glass and resin had hardly left his ears, and already he was trying to figure out what had happened. She was such an insignificant spoonful of him, the woman, yet suddenly she seemed so important. That night, after dinner, as he settled down to watch TV, he felt her trembling into a stretch. The morning sun had set her curtains aglow. She was preparing to climb out of bed, and along with the sensation of her toes crackling and her shoulders shaking came all the usual everything elses: the cough of a fraternity boy who had downed a scotch and soda, and the shared elation of a crowd cheering at a stadium, and the billows and trills a tourist heard diving for pearls in the Gulf, and the heartbrokenness of a kid unfolding a note with the no box checked, and the power-grin of the kid who had checked it, and the tightness in the knuckles of a barber who had been at his scissors since half past seven, and the otherworldly distress of childbirth—not only the stabbed agony of the mother but the baby’s first blast of amazed sensation—and the roaming sadness of innumerable old men and women—a sadness that was more like wonder—as they lay back into their minds asking themselves where the years had gone. The part of him that was the woman who lived on the other side of the world rubbed the grit from her eyes. There was something comical about the way she folded her blanket over before she slid out from underneath it, her hands so neat and formal as they completed the operation, as if she were creasing the corner of a page in a book. She was like a child playing grown-up, he thought, fussing through some ceremony she had only just invented. He wished he could greet the sight with adoration. How could he, though, when everything she did was so familiar?

Stop it, he told himself. You’re obsessing again.

It was crazy, wishing that people could be disentangled from each other, pointless, like thirsting for some other air to breathe.

All the same, he continued to pose his what-ifs.

As the days passed, he busied himself more and more as the woman who repaired the floral coolers. The moment of the car accident, when who knows what mishap or coincidence had hidden her away from him, had been thrilling, so extraordinary that he only half trusted that it had really occurred, and for hours at a time, as he stood at the grocery store testing the softness of the avocados or worked behind his desk placing calls to the vehicle bay, he was actually tap-tap-tapping at the plaster of her life, waiting to see if the experience would repeat itself.

Early the next Saturday it did. The part of everyone who was so desperate and preoccupied was collecting his car from the auto body shop when another part of everyone met him with his car keys. “We got your bumper ready. Right now we’re tightening up the chassis. Give us a few and we’ll have her all done for you.” For the second night in a row, the part of everyone who barely smelled the flowers on her skin was enjoying a late-late dinner in a neighborhood restaurant, dipping a tuna roll into her soy sauce, first one side and then the other, so that the wasabi leached deep into the rice. Just then, as she popped it into her mouth, the part of everyone who was reclining beneath the car in the garage accidentally kicked a chock loose from one of the tires. There was a long groan of springs, followed by a quick procession of pings and snaps, and the front end came down with a crash. The noise was so explosive that even the mechanic himself presumed he had been crushed. Then he came rolling out from under the rear bumper on his automotive creeper. Beneath the striplights he lay coughing and twisting his eyes shut, untouched except for the shiny gray talc on his face. It was only after his pulse had slowed that the part of everyone who was in the waiting room, his hand resting on a tall display of truck tires, realized that for the second time in as many weeks the woman had gone missing. He was toying with the bristly rubber cilia along the tire treads, and he was everywhere else, too, or at least he thought he was, and suddenly he was one place more: perched beside the bamboo counter finishing off the saké she had ordered.

Unbelievable.

Scarcely an hour went by before he sat hunched at his kitchen table scribbling on a sheet of paper. Fear + Concentration = Estrangement—that seemed to be the equation. The more unexpected the fright that overtook him, and the more intently he was studying another part of himself when it did, the likelier a rupture was to open up between his lives.

He had a theory. Now he needed to test it. He harnessed his attention to the piece of him that was the woman and waited patiently for something to shock him. For days he enclosed himself in her experience. His thoughts hardly wavered. She might be cleaning a set of condenser coils or coaxing her work van up a hill, brushing her teeth or trying to ply a knot from her collarbone. It didn’t matter—he was there, always there, as alert to her life as he was to his own. Once, walking downstairs in the dark, he misjudged a step and for a quick little whiplash of seconds she melted away. He barely had time to notice she was gone before she resurfaced. A few mornings later, it happened again. He was buttering his toast when a bird smacked into his kitchen window. Flash—she vanished—and flash—she reappeared. He was afraid of heights, so he took an elevator to the top floor of a hotel, peering over the safety rail into the abyss of the lobby. This time he was halfway home before she finally loomed back up in him. It was his most successful experiment yet. Soon he realized he could generate a good productive vertigo using any life he chose. Someone somewhere was always tarring a roof or crossing a pedestrian bridge, and with each gust of wind, as the man imagined himself plummeting to the earth, a wave of panic would pour through him and swallow the woman whole. Some of the episodes lasted only a second or two, but some considerably longer. He cultivated the sensation, teaching himself to nurse each dim flicker of terror until his feet felt like bricks and the rest of him like a hanging sculpture, a strange stack of bones drifting and swaying on their metal wires. After a while he was able to reproduce the effect at will. It wasn’t so difficult once he developed the knack for it. The periods he spent without the woman grew to fill his hours and his days. Again and again he blew her out like a candle flame. Eventually she began to seem like someone he had never been.

That all people were the same person had never troubled anyone else—he knew it beyond a doubt—but isolating yourself from one person, he discovered, made it easier to isolate yourself from another. Bit by bit he took each scrap and morsel of himself and swept them away. And presently, to his great surprise, he was alone.

That was the beginning. In the years that followed, the fashion for being a single distinct individual spread until it was no longer a fashion at all but a custom, and ultimately something more like a law. People traded their ability to be one another for this passion or that: anger, pity, kindness, pride, reverence, desire, regret. Gradually, body by body, they shed themselves of their multimillion lives, until hardly anyone was more than a person or two.

But before the rest of them, there was the man who was no one else. Beneath his skin he carried an endless wispy feeling of alarm, a nervous tension that thinned and thickened by the moment but never completely dissipated, so that in time he found it easy to suppose he had gotten used to it. But when he thought about the woman who repaired the floral coolers, whose life not so long ago had been one of his own, it was with a foreignness and an affection that went fanning out inside him insuppressibly. Maybe it was love, and maybe it wasn’t—who could say? All he knew was that some part of him seemed to yield around it like soil around the roots of a tree.

What, if anything, the feeling might signify, he had no idea, but he had already scheduled his vacation from the hospital, and when his two weeks arrived, he traveled to her city on the other side of the world. He found her, as he had hoped he would, at her favorite restaurant, sitting alone at a corner of the sushi bar. He took the first stool along the adjoining bend.

“Excuse me,” he said. He had a skill with languages and had not forgotten hers.

“Yes,” she asked, and then, “Do I know you?” and suddenly the puzzled look she had given him dropped deeper into itself. “I don’t know you.”

He tried to strike the smile from his face and could not tell if she noticed. How extraordinary. “That’s true. I can show you how it’s done, if you’d like.”

She was slow to reply, but at last she gave a decisive nod.

For her, it turned out, sadness was the key, not fear, but she was a much more skillful learner than he had been, and the day soon came when she was no one but herself and he was no one but himself, two separate people sealed tight in their own privacies. One night, to celebrate, he cooked her dinner, and she uncorked a bottle of wine, and afterward, as they stood eye to eye trading gazes, it was nothing like looking into a mirror. As their fingers met, each of them wondered what the other was thinking, how the other was feeling. They were living in an entirely new world, one not so different from yours and mine, a world where you could fall in love, promise your heart, and say I do, without ever knowing for certain if you really were, or if you sincerely could, or if you truly did.

© 2014 by Kevin Brockmeier.

Originally published in Unstuck 3.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and, most recently, a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. He has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South, and in 2007 he was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

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

Tragic Business

Emil Ostrovski | 2,780 words

Once, an apple named Evan fell in love with a hummingbird, as moldy apples lying in irradiated playgrounds are sometimes wont to do.

“I like your wings,” Evan said.

The hummingbird briefly landed on him. “You are very warm,” the hummingbird observed, because hummingbirds are, generally, imbeciles. Too much energy spent flapping those pretty wings, too little spent on the brain, or on developing powers of observation that might better enable them to avoid eagles.

Evan positively blushed. “So thoughtful of you to notice.”

“You are very warm,” the hummingbird said.

Shortly after this exchange, the hummingbird was eaten by an eagle, who attacked, not out of any genuine sense of hunger, but rather, out of habit, as eagles are wont to do, because eagles are assholes with wings.

When night fell, Evan sought to appeal the injustice of love thwarted to the stars and planets that visited the night sky.

“Thank you for calling the cosmic support center,” Venus said, speaking up for the entire cosmic delegation. “Your conversation may be monitored for quality assurance. How can we be of service tonight?”

“I fell in love with a hummingbird, and then an eagle crushed her skull in his talons until her eyes popped out of her head,” Evan explained.

The planets and the stars huddled together; a lengthy deliberation followed. Finally, Venus spoke up again, voicing a thought that was on many a cosmic body’s mind: “Did you at least get to second base?”

“Second base?”

“Second base.”

Evan contemplated for a long moment, knowing that much depended on his response. “She sat on me,” he finally offered.

This scandalous answer sent the stars and planets into a tizzy.

“Why, that’s not even one of the bases—” a particularly gossipy star remarked.

“Settle down, settle down,” Venus implored. Turning back to the Evan, she said, “We can tell the two of you had a very—kinky—relationship—”

“She sat on me for at least five seconds,” Evan lied.

“Yes, yes,” Venus said, growing weary of the exchange. “We will reunite the two of you in your next life, and you will have another chance at love. We’ll also give you a five dollars off coupon to Starbucks. Is this acceptable?”

“I really liked her wings,” Evan mumbled absentmindedly. He didn’t know what a Starbucks was, but suspected it was some sort of cosmic currency.

“Yes, yes. Wonderful,” Venus said. “Now, before your next life can commence, we will have to end your current one. Thank you for calling the cosmic support center. Enjoy your last moments on Earth.”

A few seconds later, a mutant raccoon stumbled out of the nearby brush and ate Evan. The raccoon had diarrhea for the next three days, and that was that.

• • • •

Before his soul was to be (re)born into the world, there was of course the perfunctory business of tea and crumpets with The Great Voice.

“Do you get it yet, old boy?” The Great Voice asked wearily, for no one had gotten it in a very long while, so long, in fact, that The Great Voice sometimes forgot what it was they were supposed to get in the first place.

“Of course,” Evan the Apple said hurriedly, taking a sip of tea. “Suffering is caused by attachment to the illusory world of birth and rebirth and death; the only way to escape suffering is by ceasing at once our need for permanence in an impermanent world. May I have my Starbucks please?”

A coupon materialized on the table. “I’m terribly sorry to say we’re all out of the five dollar offs,” The Great Voice said, clearing its non-existent throat. “Ran right out of the bunch. But you can get a free Frappachino instead, and that’s just as well, isn’t it?”

• • • •

Evan, now a nineteen-year-old boy, struggled to keep his eyes open. No more online dating. No more dating period, online or otherwise. He would become a monk. A warrior monk, like in those crouching-tiger-hidden-dragon martial arts flicks. He’d sit under a tree for forty days until enlightenment hit him on the head like a falling apple. He’d only break his meditation long enough for an occasional masturbation break. Because you’re never more at peace with the universe than after you’ve wacked one off.

“Am I boring you? Because you look like I’m boring you.”

Evan took a sip of his free Frappuccino, the best part of the date by far, and glanced across the table at Samuel, whose ADAM4ADAM profile name was h@rdman12. “No. Sorry. You were saying—about Pomeranians?”

Samuel’s eyes narrowed. He took a miniscule bite of his blueberry muffin and chewed on it for a while before deigning to respond. “Pommeroy,” he finally said. “I was saying, I was talking about Pommeroy.”

Evan flashed him his best apologetic smile. “I was close though, right?”

“I was saying Pommeroy, he and Warhol collaborated on this book of poems, A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu.”

Evan tried to translate the title into English in his head, realized very quickly this venture was doomed before it ever began, thanks to the mediocrity of his public school education, and settled for: “So I was close though, right?”

Just then a man wearing a black ski mask entered the Starbucks carrying something in his arms—Evan squinted, disbelievingly—but before he could quite reconcile himself to the fact that such things did not only happen on TV, the man opened fire.

Evan took a bullet to the throat, and as he toppled out of his chair, onto the hardwood floor, the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the ski-masked man dashing in the face of a rather beautiful Starbucks employee with hair like a bird’s nest. The blood-spattered name tag pinned to the boy’s chest introduced him to the coffee-drinking world they were both about to leave as Aidan.

• • • •

Upon death, memory of his most recent couple past lives flooded back.

“That didn’t even make sense!” Nineteen-year-old Evan stuffed the crumpets into his mouth angrily, until he could barely chew. “AYE CUDN EVE CAHL RUH COZM SUPPOR LAYN,” he said, through his full mouth.

“Now, now, Evan, you know better than this.” The Great Voice said. “Kindly refrain from using your outside voice.”

Evan swallowed, then washed the crumpets down with tea. “I couldn’t even call the cosmic support line that time,” he repeated. “I didn’t even know about it—”

“Well of course you didn’t know about it, old boy,” The Great Voice said haughtily, “The cosmic support line is only for apples. You weren’t very well cheery as an apple, if you remember.”

Evan remembered all too well, which made him even angrier. “And you sent me back in time!” he said. Which was true. Earth had been completely evacuated by humans for at least three hours by the time Evan the Apple met the hummingbird of his life.

If The Great Voice had had eyes, it would have rolled them. “The coupon wouldn’t have worked otherwise.” It mumbled something about how ungrateful, how petty all its tea guests were.

“And where the hell was the hummingbird?” Evan cried, gesticulating wildly.

“Ah, I believe he was that boy that gave you a brief erection before you bled out, wasn’t he?”

“The one with—who got his face bashed in?”

“Quite a pity,” The Great Voice agreed.

“Why wasn’t I on a date with him, at least?”

If The Great Voice had had shoulders, it would have shrugged them. “It’s possible he never responded to your ADAM4ADAM message. It’s possible he was an OkCupider. We may never know.”

A thought struck Evan. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he said, “Could I—maybe—stick around? He’s bound to be coming through here—”

“Absolutely not!” The Great Voice thundered so loud it set off an earthquake in Alaska in the year 1964.

“But—”

“Protocols must be followed, I’m afraid.”

“Then at least could I have one more shot?”

The Great Voice let out a pretty great sigh.

“You’ve had six hundred forty-seven shots. In four of them, you’ve even got as far as conversing with each other. In one, if you remember, he sat on you.”

“I do,” Evan said dreamily.

“Not exactly earth-shattering conversations either, I’m afraid.”

Evan’s eyes went suddenly wide. “But wait. Six hundred forty—”

“Seven, yes,” The Great Voice finished for him. “But I suppose another go at it wouldn’t kill you.”

• • • •

As it happens, it did.

Evan the Goldfish swam in circles inside his plastic baggie, on a table at the Ulster County Fair, surrounded by baggies filled with other goldfish who would, soon enough, be sold to the parents of small children for a few dollars and have their already brief lives made even briefer thanks to the alternating cycles of overfeeding and outright starvation that would ensue.

On the bright side, it was a sunny day.

Oh, and Evan had tumbled wen over fins for Ada.

He pressed himself against the transparent wall separating him from her, and stared longingly at the glint of her scales in the light.

She, for her part, exercised the good judgment to completely ignore him, which only endeared her to him all the more. He wanted to have nothing to do with fish that wanted to have something to do with him. They had obviously had one too many barnacles. But Ada. Now there was a goldfish who had her wen on straight! And look at how gracefully she swam—it was almost like she was flying!

“Look how fat that one is!” A gigantic face said, pointing its finger at Evan. “Fatty, fatty, like a chicken patty!”

Evan hated that face.

“Mom!” the boy said, tugging on his mother’s sleeve. “Mom! Look! Look how fatty—”

“Yes, mommy heard,” a Mommy said in a weary, this-is-how-I-spend-my-weekends-now voice.

“I don’t want the fat one,” the boy declared.

“There’s nothing wrong with being—with having a little weight to carry around, honey. Remember how we talked about being more—remember? Sensitive?”

The boy considered this radical idea, then conceded, “I guess fat ones are good for sushi.”

The mother started to protest, but stopped herself. Better to take what victories she could get.

Of all the fish the boy could have chosen, he, of course, chose Ada. He held her in his greedy arms while the mother paid, raising the plastic bag up to eye level to get a better look, upon which he suddenly bellowed, “Ewwww, I think it has a tumor!” and let the bag drop. It popped as soon as it hit ground, spilling Ada out onto the grass, where she lay sputtering for breath, until a passing high heel finally put an end to the whole overwhelmingly tragic business.

• • • •

“Look, we really are going to have to talk eventually,” said The Great Voice.

But Evan the Goldfish wasn’t in a very talkative mood. He hadn’t so much as touched the crumpets or the tea.

“Look, I’m not suggesting that the high heel wasn’t demonstrating a fundamental point— quite fundamental really, old boy, if you think about it—regarding the nature of suffering in the ephemeral world, and I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest it may have been somewhat overkill, exactly, but, if one were to express that opinion in my presence, I wouldn’t necessarily be completely unsympathetic to it, now would I?”

Evan remained silent.

“And if you would care to file a complaint, it would of course be my happy obligation to provide you with the requisite forms.”

“I’d like to file a complaint,” Evan said stiffly.

A form appeared on the table in front of him. Evan crumpled it up into a paper ball (quite a feat, for a goldfish), and threw it in The Great Voice’s general direction.

“Complaint filed,” Evan said.

“Well I never,” The Great Voice said. Although The Great Voice had no corporeal body, it was wounded very deeply on principle. Here it was, pushing unruly souls to transcend their attachment to the illusory, impermanent world of life, death, and rebirth, pushing souls to accept their Buddha nature, their oneness with all things, and did anyone ever think to thank it? Did anyone ever so much as send a holiday card its way? Nowadays the process was virtually all automated, you just log onto Hallmark.com six months in advance, for goodness sake—

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Evan said.

“I wouldn’t exactly say—it would really be rather more accurate to say with a purpose, now wouldn’t it?” A look of contempt flashed across Evan’s face, so The Great Voice added, “So, let’s assume you get together, have a little rump-a-dump, swim about in the same plastic bowl or whatever-you-do. Why, if it’s not a high heel or an eagle, old boy, it’ll be an apocalyptic meteor or dropsy or just the simple fact that you grow into different people who no longer have any desire to be within a 200-mile radius of one another. The desire for permanence in an impermanent world will always lead to the same place, now doesn’t it?”

“Tea and crumpets, you mean,” Evan said.

“Don’t be daft,” The Great Voice said, irritated. “You’re a goldfish, not an imbecile.”

“I don’t want to be saved. I want to nibble on her wen.”

“Yes, well—”

“And make caviar with her.”

“I’m afraid only sturgeons produce caviar.”

“I don’t care.”

“Why, there’s no talking to you when you get like this,” The Great Voice said, with a sigh. “Have it your way, why don’t you?”

• • • •

It’s unclear why exactly humanity decided to abandon Earth, but some sources point to a three-year-old child prodigy in the hit summer blockbuster BABY GENIUSES 7 who declared to audiences worldwide that “the view is better from the other side of the cosmos,” just before snapping a terrorist’s neck. Regardless, humanity packed its bags, boarded its ARK-class Generation Ships, nuked the eagles, and bid the solar system toodle-loo, while on Earth, mutant raccoons went about their business of eating moldy apples.

Halfway through the millennium-long voyage to the Tau Ceti system, onboard the Generation Ship ICARUS, Nurse Evan O’Connor was giving his robotic nurse’s assistant, ADM-10891 the seventh most thorough physical since the universe banged itself into being.

“I would like you to disclose your previous sexual associations,” ADM-10891 said afterwards, as they sat together on the examination table.

“Well,” Evan said, hesitating.

“Yes?”

“There was the coffee machine. A Y-series.”

“They’re exceedingly energy efficient,” Adam said, with a hint of jealousy.

“But it always felt—I never felt fulfilled. Not like this.”

“They will castrate you, decommission me, and jettison the both of us out of the airlock,” ADM-10891 said, in reference to the practically medieval regulations regarding appropriate human-machine relations. And he was right, more or less. ADM-10891—being only slightly more advanced than the Y-series of coffee makers, and considerably less energy efficient—could not act in contradiction to his programming for long; thus he was compelled to march into the Fleet Security Corps and confess: “I gave Nurse Evan O’Connor a rectal exam the other day. He screamed my unit identification number and licked my visual sensory interface. I’ve never felt more complete.”

When prompted, ADM-10891 submitted as evidence all the recordings he’d made of his sessions of intimacy with Nurse Evan, which a handful of digital lab techs promptly leaked to a file-sharing node.

At the last moment before Evan and ADM-10891were to be thrown out of the airlock, holding hands as their sentence was read to them, a flushed lieutenant delivered a pardon—the Admiralty Board bowing to the mounting uproar of Evan and ADM-10891 fans (estimated at thirty-seven percent of the population of the ship), who had been clamoring for a full pardon for the couple, and, in general, a liberalization of robot-human relations. The Admirals, it must be confessed, were not entirely unsympathetic to Nurse Evan’s proclivities—Admiral Studebaker in particular had been carrying on a none-too-clandestine affair with his VIBROZONE electric toothbrush for over three months now (VIBROZONE: Making mouths feel things they’ve never felt before since 2021). By the time Evan stepped onto the surface of Tau Ceti F, liberalization had resulted in full-integration. Evan had downloaded his consciousness into a robot body—if the body ever got destroyed, his consciousness would simply be uploaded into a new one; he had managed to transcend the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Oh, and ADM-10891 had broken up with him three weeks ago, and was now seeing a microwave oven.

Not tragic, necessarily, but certainly a goddamn shame.

© 2015 by Emil Ostrovski.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emil Ostrovski is the twenty-five-year-old author of a young adult novel, The Paradox of Vertical Flight, which has been published in the US, Spain, and Germany, and nominated for The German Youth Literature Award. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Lightspeed, The New Orleans Review, Atticus Review, Word Riot, and YARN. He may be reached at emilostrovski@gmail.com.

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

The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club

Nike Sulway | 6,740 words

Two bright bangles on an arm clang,
a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

—Khargaviṣana-sutra [the Rhinoceros Sutra] c.29 BCE

Ten years ago, Clara had attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop, Karen Joy also kept saying, I am going to talk about endings, but not yet. But Karen Joy never did get around to talking about endings, and Clara left the workshop still feeling as if she was suspended within it, waiting for the second shoe to drop.

Eventually, Clara had attempted a cold equations story, and though Karen Joy never read it, Clara thought she might have liked it if she’d had the chance. In Clara’s story, “False Equations,” the Emergency Despatch Ship (EDS) was packed full of animals, rather than people, and the stowaway was the child of a White-backed vulture pair. An egg when she was smuggled aboard, the stowaway hatched during the journey to Walden (rather than Woden).

Clara had made several copies of the story and sent them out to the other members of her book club. Fern wrote back to say that the story was too complex and far-fetched. Bea wrote that she hadn’t time to read anything just then except the book that they were supposed to be reading for their next meeting. And Belle said simply that there were far too many “Cold Equations” reworkings and inter-textual responses out there, and she didn’t see why Clara had bothered attempting another if she had so little to say about the matter.

Clara, like Fern and all of the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club, had never managed to finish reading the set book before their scheduled get-together. But then, none of their planned book discussions had yet taken place. There was always some complication, some hindrance that they were incapable of overcoming.

The workshop had not been a total loss, however, since Clara had met Belle there, and they had ended up good friends. They lived near each other—their farms were only a short walk apart—and a few years ago they had opened up a café in town where they served good, simple food and provided their customers with a shaded garden in which to sit and chat.

These days, when Clara can, she takes time off from the café to go and visit her daughter. Alice lives near the great lakes. She has a large house; tall and stone-walled, with large windows to catch the afternoon breezes. As Clara comes down the shared driveway to Alice’s house, she always experiences a moment of something like regret, or fear. What if, once she enters her daughter’s house, she isn’t able to leave again? What if, once she sees all the children her daughter cares for, she can’t stop herself from saying something cruel? Telling her daughter what she believes: that Alice’s house full of other people’s children is just a way for her daughter to endlessly delay her own grieving, her own letting go of things. Or what if the opposite occurs: What if she enters that house full of children, sees all the work that needs to be done caring for them, and is caught up in her daughter’s Sisyphean task of feeding, bathing, and holding other creatures’ young? Like Sisyphus forever pushing his stone up the same mountain, only to watch it roll down again.

Clara isn’t sure she is a welcome visitor any more, or whether she wants to go there. She doesn’t think about these things directly, but as she comes up the walk she tries to imagine herself greeting and being greeted by her daughter and struggles to construct an image that contains ease or warmth.

As it happens, she finds Alice in the garden with her new lover. They are walking from tree to tree, looking up into the canopy of each one and then moving on.

This is not Alice’s first lover, Jeff, who is dead now, and Clara has difficulty remembering this one’s name. Blue? Balloon?

They go to wallow in the mud-hole that spreads out from beneath the African tulip tree. The one Jeff had liked to wallow in with guests. They had been cooling off there together—Alice and Jeff—when they had told Clara there would be no grandchildren. “It’s my fault, I’m afraid,” he’d said, as if he’d forgotten to pick up ice on the way home, but blushingly. “They’re no good, my swimmers. My—”

“She knows what you mean,” Alice had said. “There’s no need to go on and on.”

Clara had remembered, then, the termination Alice had when she was in high school. The waiting room full of pictures of empty landscapes at sunset, the interview with the cheerful nurse, the other young females in the waiting room—all of them avoiding each other’s eyes. And afterwards, her daughter wanting ice cream and to sit by the river and watch the waterbirds dancing in the shallow water. Alice had rested her head on Clara’s shoulder, curled her feet up under her bottom like a child. Her breath had smelled of milk and sweet biscuits, and her hair of antiseptic. It is the last time Clara can remember her daughter wanting to be held.

The garden has changed more than Clara’s daughter has, since Jeff’s passing. The paths that were once just worn earth have been widened and cleared of weeds. The beds of unnamed flowers that Alice and her husband used to grow have been replaced with vegetable patches and rows of imported exotics. Mulched and weeded and trimmed and fertilised to within an inch of their lives.

“You should keep going,” Alice says to her lover.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh yes, of course! Women’s talk.” He winks at Clara as he moves away. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

When he has gone, Alice sighs and settles into a more comfortable position. “The sad thing is, he means it,” she says. “He won’t tolerate me doing anything without consulting him. He calls it communication, when what he really means is him telling me what to do.” She flicks her ears a little to clear away the flies. “It almost makes me glad we’re too different to breed. Imagine us: the parents of the last generation!”

Clara squints into the sun and watches her daughter’s lover still moving from tree to tree, looking up, thinking, then moving on. She is tired of being a visitor already, but Alice asks her all the questions a daughter asks anyway. No, Clara hasn’t heard from her husband of late. Yes, the café is going well. They’ve started a new tradition of monthly dinners. Seasonal dishes, all made with local produce. No, nobody special.

Alice looks across the mud-hole to the forest. “I’ve lost track of Dad,” she says. “Wasn’t he out west somewhere, living on a wildlife refuge of some kind?”

“I’d heard that,” Clara said. “Him and that female were working the summers and mostly left alone in the winters. Wandering the hills.”

“Janet,” says her daughter.

“What?”

“Dad’s new partner, her name is Janet.”

She ought not to have come, Clara thinks. Everything her daughter says or asks of her feels like a reproach. Even the gardens are reproachful, the liquidambars arching over the green lawn. The perfect garden beds, the even paths, the vistas like postcards. It was just what she’d dreaded, coming down the driveway, just what she’d been preparing herself for.

Alice wants to show her around the bottom end of the garden, which she says is where Jeff spent most of his time during the last few months of his life. Sometimes, he would fall asleep on the lawn, stretched out like a child and snoring so loudly that the small birds—the fairy wrens and tits—would scatter with fear.

“When I woke him up he would always say he hadn’t been sleeping at all,” Alice says. “He’d say he’d been writing. He’d tell me all about whatever it was he had been working on. By the end, the things he told me were just a jumble. A nonsense. But at first I believed him. Or . . . or I wanted to. He was working on a cold equations story, he said. But it was set here on Earth, and instead of people, the two characters were rhinos, like us. The last two rhinos on Earth. And as soon as one died, the other would become functionally extinct.”

Alice was smiling, as though even now she could hear Jeff working out the shape of his story in her head. “That must be how he thought of us,” she said. “After all those years of being together, of sharing our lives and building this house and this garden. That there was no point to us being together, or having children. That we were just the leftover scraps of something that had once been whole.”

• • • •

Jeff had died five years ago, just before the end of the summer, but Clara had not heard about it until six months after that. She got the news in a letter from Janet, her former husband’s new partner, one of the founding members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. They had once met, purely by accident, near a temporary market in Pullington. Janet had been walking away from a dungpile that Clara was going towards and somehow they had gotten to talking. It wasn’t till much later that they had realised they shared a man. In a manner of speaking.

Of course, I know that you knew Jeff far more intimately than I ever did, Janet wrote. But I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve thought about him. His passing makes me think about all of us, how we were, fifty years or so ago, when we didn’t know that it was all going to come to such an ending. We were full of ideas for growing the future—remember that plan Hildy had for forming a partnership with the San Diego Zoo?—and the males were all so ready to charge out into the world and lay down babies wherever they could.

Of course, Jeff wasn’t like that. Not even slightly. He never wanted anyone but his one dear wife; he wasn’t like his father, or any of that generation that were ours to love. Jeff seemed the most vulnerable of us all, even when he was young. I remember I could hardly bear to look at the dark spaces between his skin folds.

Did Janet really think that’s how it had been, for all of them? That, like her, they’d spent their youth getting babies on and from whoever they could? Clara’s memory of those days was that she and her husband had expected to stay together for their whole lives, babies or no babies. Until one of them died and was left to rot in some godforsaken grove of spindle-trees. Without a future generation to be mindful of, there was no reason for him to move on after twenty days. He could stay; they could form a pair-bond that would last through as many breeding seasons as they survived.

Clara and Janet had never been close—they had their reasons not to be—but Janet had known where to reach her when Jeff died, and she had kept in touch with Jeff, or with Clara’s daughter. She had known about Jeff’s death, and written to Clara with those strange, true words. Without Janet, Clara might never have known that her daughter’s husband had died. She might still have been keeping her distance, thinking that one day soon she would hear from him, and from her daughter.

• • • •

The first time she went to Belle’s place it had been to drop off some salad greens she had picked up from a roadside stall on the way home. Belle’s crash was more or less what Clara had expected. Abundant and shabby, her teenage daughters sprawled across the savannah, leaving a trail of unconsciously messy beauty in their wake. Belle didn’t come to greet her, just hallooed her in, and when Clara came through she found the kitchen, unlike the one in the café, a lively and fragrant jungle of ingredients. Belle herself was the least colourful thing. She had taken off the two clanging bangles she wore around her ankles at work and stood in the kitchen barefoot, her skin rough and grey.

Belle’s husband, Robert, poured drinks for all of them. Clara put the greens in a clear space and somehow was invited to stay for dinner. The food Belle served was not as fancy as that she served in the café, and the dinner service was a mismatched collection of hand-thrown pottery pieces. The kind you pick up cheap at garage sales and second-hand stores. Robert kept their glasses full and talked about the fields of grapes he had seen growing on a property out the other side of the reserve. He also told stories about the Scandinavian furniture he had bought cheaply on eBay, especially about a queer couple of Silverbacks from whom he had wrangled a pair of original Thonet chairs. The way he talked about the exchange made it seem scandalous, as though they had propositioned him in some way. Later, when he made coffee, he talked about a workshop he had gone to on “cupping” and tried to teach Clara and Belle how to smell the grounds, insisting that they all drink their coffee sugarless and milk-free in order to better appreciate the flavours of the coffee.

During a pause in the conversation, Clara asked Belle if she had thought any more about whether she wanted to join the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. Robert leant back away from the conversation, raising an eyebrow at his daughters as if he had been interrupted mid-anecdote, and then listened to his wife talk about the book they were planning to read with studied, careful attention.

After dinner, the pale-skinned daughters dragged their father off to help them with something and Belle and Clara were left alone in the mud-hole. The solar fairy lights were starting to dim, but the citronella candles threw off more than enough light. Belle stretched herself out, her feet in the cool spot where Robert had been sitting.

“I should go,” Clara said, and Belle turned and reached out as if to stop her.

“Don’t go,” Belle said. “Nobody else gets a word in once Rob gets going.”

Clara saw how it was. How Belle was in no hurry to be left alone with Robert after their evening of high talk and laughter. How he was the kind of male who was roused by such things into something like rage. Belle was weary, and filled with the kind of dread that comes when a party is over and you see, all at once, all the damage you must now repair.

• • • •

Clara and Belle were both of that generation who were unlikely to have grandchildren, though they had both had husbands and children of their own. They were the mothers of daughters they did not understand, and whose troubles they could barely recognise. They went in and out of each other’s houses on a daily basis. They would graze in the savannah, or stand side by side in the kitchen making bread and listening to Belle’s daughters talk about their lives. The jokes about being the last of their kind. The bullying and despair. The gossip and conspiracies. A female in another herd had had a child, but it had died after one year. Another had given birth to three at once, stillborn and pale as cake. Clara and Belle looked at each other and twitched their ears in silent amazement. Who were these females? What lives were they living?

“Where did you hear that?” Belle said. “Facebook? It sounds like a hoax. Fear-mongering.”

The girls said it didn’t matter if one particular story was true or not, the point was not that one female had bred or not, but that they would never have children of their own. And if they did, they would be outcasts.

“We’d stay friends, if one of us had a child,” said one of Belle’s daughters.

“Sure,” said the other. “We’d set up a home and raise it together. Share it.”

“What about the bull?” said the younger daughter. “Would he have to live with us, too?”

Belle and Clara shared another of their looks, folded and pounded the dough they were working.

Belle’s older daughter shrugged. “You know what the males are like,” she said. “The ones who can breed are like . . . ugh.”

When they had talked enough about the future, the daughters talked about movies and music and the parties they were going to. Belle’s daughters were into bushwalking, and were always trying to drag their mother and Clara along on their week-long walks across the reserve. They talked about the places they would walk to next, and the things they planned to do when they got there.

Clara and Belle also worked together in the kitchen at the café. Or they went to other cafés to eat cake and drink coffee. They liked to sample the menus in the other cafés and consider the clientele. Sometimes, they would buy flat, sweet Dutch donuts from the baker, and get take-away coffee from the place next door to that, and then they’d go for a long walk along the beach together.

They talked, at first in a sidelong fashion, and later with increasing heatedness, about the males with whom they had paired, their children, the lives they still felt they might live.

Clara said that her husband had been the kind that, whenever they invited people for dinner, would insist that she spend the two days prior to their arrival cleaning the whole of their home from top to bottom. She would pull out the weeds along the pathways and pull out the saplings that were too hard or bitter to eat. Trample the path till it was good and wide, and gather extra food for everyone. “It got to the point it was just easier not to have guests,” she said. “By the time they arrived, I was too exhausted to enjoy their company.”

Belle said that she had found out Robert still wrote letters to his childhood sweetheart. One a week. And that the woman wrote back just as often.

“What do the letters say?” Clara asked.

Belle shrugged and looked away, squinting out to sea. “I don’t know. He keeps them in a toolbox in his solitary territory. I’ve never had the courage to read them. I can’t decide whether I want them to be in love still, or not.”

They looked at each other, and then they both laughed. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? The way the ones that were meant to be the centres of their lives were so peripheral. It was their friendship with each other that was the true and central thing.

“I shouldn’t talk about him like this,” said Belle. “He’s a good enough husband.”

Clara nodded. “Mine was, too. He was all right, as far as husbands go.”

“Just not—I don’t know. It’s as though he’s given up. As though now that we know we’ll go extinct—there’s no point in paying attention to the lives we do have. The lives we’re living.”

“As if we’re already ghosts,” said Clara. “Already dead.”

“I’m going to leave him,” Belle said. “I can’t go on like this for much longer; living in the afterlife.”

• • • •

After they separated, Belle and her husband were friendly enough. He stayed in touch with the girls and was still often at their place, dropping them off or picking them up, mending this and that.

Belle spent most of her time at the café. She put in a herb garden, and then a vegetable patch. There was a vacant lot next door and it was soon overrun with pumpkins and nasturtiums, zucchini and tomato plants. She stopped wearing her bangles to work, and was often working in the garden, showing off her bare, strong shoulders and sturdy legs. She seemed younger every week, rather than older. Cleverer, too, and full of easy opinions about things. The customers who came into the café liked to talk to her about their own gardens, and their own efforts at baking this or that. They liked to walk beside her as she moved through the garden, pulling weeds or turning soil. In the middle of the day, if it was too hot and there were no customers to speak of, she would find a shady spot in the garden, spread out a picnic blanket and sit outside reading.

Sometimes, one of the customers would go out into the garden to see her; they would bring her an armful of rosemary, or a bucket of beets they had grown. These were always single females. They weren’t lonely, exactly, but they seemed to like to come and take up a corner of Belle’s blanket and talk.

Finally, one night after closing up late, Clara invited Belle to come to her house for a drink. Usually, Belle was busy in the evenings. She had the girls at home most nights, after all. But this time she said yes, and followed Clara up the long dirt road to her house.

Clara’s house was small but she had an earnest, quiet affection for it. It had a long, narrow room running all along one side—a closed-in verandah—which was her very own library. There were windows at both ends, but it was a cool, dark, narrow room. She had her desk in there, but it was mostly just bookcases. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. In the early evening, it was flooded with a faint, stippled light that came in through the bush surrounding the house. The room, like the rest of the house, was very plain and tidy. Clara found this plainness comforting amid the flourishing chaos of the bush in which the house sat. The winding, shaded paths through the rainforest. The weedy, vine-strangled creek. Here, the books spoke their own quiet language.

One of the deep, unspoken pleasures of Clara’s life was to spend a whole day putting the books in order. She would catalogue everything like a real library, using the Dewey Decimal System, or ordering the books by colour and size. She would often lie on the cool concrete floor, with the reading lamp lit and her notebook at hand. Not reading, just waiting. It didn’t matter what book it was she was meant to be reading. None of what was in the books mattered, in a sense. The fact of their existence was enough.

She heard Belle come down the path to the house. Heard her exuberant halloooo as she descended. Clara felt a fish hook catch in her ribs, and pull. She went out into the hall and saw Belle coming in at the door, leaving it open in her wake.

They went through the house. Clara had not turned on any of the lights. There was only the reading light in the library.

They sat on the floor in the library. Clara showed Belle her collection of fairy tales. Pictures of geese and princesses, ravens and hedgehogs, foxes and underground castles whose kitchens were acres and acres wide.

Belle stretched out across the floor and closed her eyes. Clara read to her, and she fell asleep. They both did. Then Belle left while Clara was sleeping, without saying goodbye.

But Belle visited again the next night, and told her a story she had heard when she was a child. They were sitting on the floor in the library again. Their backs against the bookcase, and their legs stretched out in front of them. When the story was finished, Belle said, very quietly, “You know, you’re very important to me.” They sat in the almost-dark room. It was hot, but a storm was about to break outside. You could feel its wet promise in the air. Belle tilted her head till it rested on Clara’s shoulder. And then she got up and went away again.

She stayed away for three nights, then came without warning. Knocked and stood in the doorway, asking Clara if she would come to the river with her, right then and there, and walk along it in the dark.

They sat for a while on the enormous stones that lined one section of the riverbank. There were a few boats moored in the water, and the she-oaks that lined the shore on the other side made a soft, comforting sound. Like mothers hushing their children. They made love in a sandy gap between two large, flat stones. They walked along the river’s edge afterwards, not touching, not talking. Clara felt herself a strong and independent female, unhampered by marriage or children or housework.

At home, she walked through the house spreading sand over the freshly swept and polished floors. She bathed, but there was sand in her creases that found its way into her bed. She woke with the smell of river-water and night air still on her skin, would not have been surprised to find a small fish swimming in the sheets.

• • • •

Clara became consumed by this other version of herself. A night-time version that bore only an uncertain relation to her ordinary daytime self. The map of the reserve that she had held in her mind changed subtly. A secret map was sketched across the day-lit one, with its markets and mud-holes and roads. The second map drew attention to the edges of places, and the gaps between them. To shorelines and unmarked paths. Places, like her library, that she thought of as corridors, light coming in at both ends and herself flying through them, like the sparrow in the old story by the venerable Bede.

Clara felt herself to be full of increasingly numerous pockets of strangeness. Walking to work, or cleaning the house, grazing on the savannah or kneading bread in the café, she contained fragments of another female, one who had during the night made love with Belle on the weedy grass at the edge of the forest, or on the savannah, or, during one particularly wild rainstorm, in an empty carpark. That other Clara whose body seemed to be always already naked and beautiful.

How many females, she wondered, had felt this looseness, this glorious severance from the future? Had she been moving towards this feeling her whole life? Since her husband had left her? Since her daughter had stopped speaking to her? Since the scientists had said, finally, and with a sense more of exhaustion than of sadness, that there was no hope for their species?

The trouble began when Belle said that she loved her. They were in the kitchen at the café, standing side by side chopping pumpkins for the soup.

“I didn’t know this was going to happen,” Belle said. She was blushing, but seemed determined not to acknowledge that this was so.

“I know,” Clara said.

That night, they walked through the darkness and met each other on the road between their houses. They hadn’t planned it that way. Both of them had simply decided to walk towards the other. They moved off the road, into the forest, and found a place to lie down. Not a word was uttered, but Clara felt the things that Belle had said earlier that day like a widening of the channel in which they lay. She worried that the space would narrow, or disappear altogether. But it broadened out, from a narrow corridor into the high, bright nave of a cathedral. They could not look at each other, though their eyes were open. Their skin was cool and smooth to the touch. Clara felt that they were like fallen statues of themselves, organless and simple both inside and out.

• • • •

“That story you wrote,” Belle said, “the one about us going extinct.”

“I never wrote a story about extinction,” said Clara.

“False something, it was called.”

Belle had started the conversation in that quiet moment when they were lying in the library, after making love, when last time they had not spoken at all, but allowed the stillness between them to express everything.

“Did you ever think of having the two females just go on together? The mother and the daughter: Alice. They could jettison the male and have enough resources to make it to Walden.”

The male White-backed vulture in the story had been perhaps the most troubled by their predicament. The nest he and his partner had built, in the nearest thing they could find to a tree in the EDS, was lined not with green leaves and grass, but with the hair of other animals, with electrical wires and strips of soft plastic. He had tried to get some of the other animals—in particular the other birds—to become part of a breeding colony, but nobody would join him. Nobody wanted to become the mother or father of a child who would have to be jettisoned into space.

“It’s not that simple. You’re making the same mistake as the others,” Clara said.

“What did the others say, about the story?”

Belle tried to nuzzle Clara, to draw her back into an embrace, but Clara moved away slightly. There was a tightness in her gut that wouldn’t allow her to look at her lover. “I didn’t mean them,” Clara said. “I meant the other writers. Godwin. All those men. It’s a false equation.”

“But you sent it to the others, didn’t you? To the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club? What did they say?”

Clara shook her head, appalled.

“You didn’t send it to them,” Belle said. “Just to me? Or . . . perhaps they don’t exist, those others,” she said softly, squeezing the flesh of Clara’s thigh. “Perhaps there’s only me. Perhaps I’m the stowaway in your spaceship to Walden.”

“Stop it,” Clara said, pushing Belle away. Her rough, insistent touch. “Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” Belle said, sliding closer, curling her tail, pushing herself against Clara in a mocking, vulgar way. “I just want to get inside you. Inside your pretty head where all the other women meet.” She began to herd Clara against the wall, to wipe her horn on the floor with a terrible scraping noise.

Clara told her to leave. She said that if Belle didn’t leave now, then she would go herself. She moved away, stiffened herself. Belle pressed her horn into the ridge between Clara’s shoulder and her neck, pushed the point in with a soft, ugly curse. The same word she sometimes cried out when they were lying together. Then she pulled away, gave Clara a sour and pitying look, and left.

Clara stayed in the library for some time, wondering what had happened, exactly. What had gone wrong. When she thought about it afterwards—when she had become a solitary wanderer—she decided that Belle had been frightened of what it meant for the love they made to be incapable of producing a future. That was the whole point of love, for Belle, for it to create the possibility of lineage. To gesture towards Walden, when in reality whether they remained in the ship or arrived at some fantastical destination made no difference. What did it mean, to save Alice, when there was no future into which she might travel? Or perhaps Belle had just wanted to humiliate Clara because she was frightened. Or was it all just a part of loving a woman, after all, some ordinary consequence of lying down together?

• • • •

A week later, there was a knock at the door, and Clara was sure it would be Belle. She had been thinking all week that Belle would call to explain herself, to ask for forgiveness, to say that she had been frightened, or even uncertain, and that the uncertainty had made her cruel. Clara had rehearsed their conversation in her head. She would listen, she had decided, patiently and kindly, though she would not forgive her lover too quickly.

But when she opened the door it was only her daughter, Alice.

“Belle sent me a message,” Alice said. “Your Belle. How did she even know my name?”

“I don’t know,” said Clara.

She had told Belle about Alice, of course. She had offered up the story of her lost, wild daughter as a kind of intimacy. Or in order to make herself seem more interesting, more strange and unfamiliar than she otherwise might have seemed.

“She wants to come and talk to me,” Alice said. “What’s the matter with her? What does she want?”

“We had a fight,” Clara said, wondering if that was true, after all.

“Does she want to punish you, by talking to me? Or have me convince you to forgive her?”

Clara shook her head. “She’s not like that,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if it was true.

“I’m going to meet her at the café,” Alice said. “It’s closed, but Belle says we can sit in the garden and talk. I’ll send you a message afterwards and tell you what happens.”

Clara tried not to pay too much attention to the time. Several hours passed. The day ended. She sat in the library, not reading the book they were planning to discuss at book club. She turned the pages one at a time, then in batches, going backwards, going forwards. It didn’t seem to matter.

It was almost morning by the time she decided to walk to Alice’s house. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but at least the walking would give her something to do.

As she walked, she tried to remember, and silently recite, the lines of the rhinoceros sutra. Only fragments of the already fragmented text would come to her. She remembered that there was something about a kovilara tree that has shed its leaves. She could remember that one of the sutras was: Seeing the danger that comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros. And another: Give up your children, and your wives, and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

She walked down the long drive towards Alice’s house, which was lined on both sides with overgrown black bamboo. There were no lights on in the house. She could see that all the windows were open to let in any cool breeze.

Clara looked in at the windows and saw that Alice had left the children she cared for alone, and the doors unlocked. None of them woke and saw her looking in at them. Some of the creatures were unfamiliar to her; had they come from other reserves? Other continents? Were they all, like Alice, the last of their kind?

Clara found an open door at the back of the house and went in, closing it behind her. She lay on the cool stone floor of the living area. She lay still, listening to the snuffling and breathing of the children, until she heard the birds outside the house waking. She was stiff and tired. She got up and opened the front door, looking up the driveway for a sign of her daughter. Nothing.

She could not quite identify what she was feeling. She was restless, but wanted to be still. She was impatient, but did not want to hear what Belle and Alice had had to say to each other. She longed for the feeling she was already having trouble recalling, of being in the long, cool channel of the library. With light behind her, and light ahead, and this moment, this now, always just a thing she was passing through.

She went from room to room looking in at the children. How carelessly they slept, with the windows open and the doors unlocked. They lay tangled together, sleeping. So fearless. When had she last slept that way?

Alice appeared at the door behind her, looking in at the sleeping babies. “I told you they were beautiful,” she said.

Clara did not answer. She could barely remember the conversations they had had, so many years ago, about Alice’s decision not even to try to have children of her own. She tried to pretend that Alice had not come home yet, and that as the children woke—they were starting to turn and itch in their sleep—they would come to Clara, climbing up and over her. She would prepare breakfast for them, and watch them play on the wide back lawn.

“She didn’t say anything, really,” Alice said. “We had a bottle of wine and Belle said that she wasn’t sure what had happened between you, but that she hoped it would be all right again soon. She said she thought it was too late now, for any of us, to hold grudges or fall in love.”

She said. “Mum, listen. It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. One day, you’ll forget her name. We’ll have to call her That Woman From The Café. We’ll laugh about it.”

Then, “Mum, what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do. It’s done.”

One of the children came sleepily out of their room and leant against Alice, then clambered up onto her back. Clara smiled at the way Alice moved to accommodate the child; at how natural and easy it seemed for her to do so.

“I have to go,” Clara said. She felt disconnected from all of it, now that she had seen the house with Alice in it, and all the children sleeping so quietly together. All these years there had been a kind of wire connecting her to Alice. A twinging in her ribs whenever she thought of her, and what her future might contain, and now it was gone. Things were exactly as they were, exactly as they were supposed to be.

Clara never saw Belle, or Alice, again. She left Alice’s house and went home, walked through the rooms in which she had spent her life and did not recognise a thing. Even the library, with its walls of unread books, seemed unfamiliar.

So she left the house and started wandering, alone, like a rhinoceros.

The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club were due to meet in a few months’ time, and if she reached them, that was fine. And if not, that would be fine as well. She got a powerful sense of pleasure out of walking away. She was pleased with herself, with the controlled and deliberate way in which she managed it. She scraped Belle out of herself, all those tangled and uncertain emotions, and found that the hollow that was left behind was a good and simple thing.

She saw that she had been living in a false equation: She had believed, like Belle and all the others, like Janet and her husband, that love and futurity were connected. That without a future, love was no longer possible; without Walden as their destination, there was no reason to jettison the hatchling, and no reason not to.

But love does not require a future in order to exist. And the future exists, whether you furnish it with love or not. The second rhinoceros sutra, after all, was clear: Renouncing violence for all living beings, harming not even a one, you would not wish for offspring, so how a companion? Wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Clara turns onto an unfamiliar path. She has passed, finally, beyond the reserve. She does not think about the future, or love, as she walks through the waist-high grass, with its smell of summer and heat. Past the kovilara trees, past the view of the mountain washed in late afternoon light. She doesn’t think about Belle, or Alice, or her husband. The path is shaded, but warm. She can see where it disappears ahead of her.

As she wanders, she thinks about being in the library late in the day. The light from the forest lying complicated, shifting patterns on the floor. And herself, passing through, from one end of the story to the other.

© 2015 by Nike Sulway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nike Sulway is an Australian writer. She is the author of several novels, including Rupetta, which—in 2014—was the first work by an Australian writer to win the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her next novel, Dying in the First Person, will be published through Transit Lounge in 2016.

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

Slow Music

James Tiptree, Jr. | 17,380 words

Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream. . . .
We come between man and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.

—W.B. Yeats

Lights came on as Jakko walked down the lawn past the house; elegantly concealed spots and floods which made the night into a great intimate room. Overhead the big conifers formed a furry nave drooping toward the black lake below the bluff ahead. This had been a beloved home, he saw; every luxurious device was subdued to preserve the beauty of the forested shore. He walked on a carpet of violets and mosses, in his hand the map that had guided him here from the city.

It was the stillness before dawn. A long-winged night bird swirled in to catch a last moth in the dome of light. Before him shone a bright spearpoint. Jakko saw it was the phosphorescent tip of a mast against the stars. He went down velvety steps to find a small sailboat floating at the dock like a silver leaf reflected on a dark mirror.

In silence he stepped on board, touched the mast.

A gossamer sail spread its fan, the mooring parted soundlessly. The dawn breeze barely filled the sail, but the craft moved smoothly out, leaving a glassy line of wake. Jakko half-poised to jump. He knew nothing of such playtoys, he should go back and find another boat. As he did so, the shore lights went out, leaving him in darkness. He turned and saw Regulus rising ahead where the channel must be. Still, this was not the craft for him. He tugged at the tiller and sail, meaning to turn it back.

But the little boat ran smoothly on, and then he noticed the lights of a small computer glowing by the mast. He relaxed; this was no toy, the boat was fully programmed and he could guess what the course must be. He stood examining the sky, a statue-man gliding across reflected night.

The eastern horizon changed, veiled its stars as he neared it. He could see the channel now, a silvery cut straight ahead between dark banks. The boat ran over glittering shallows where something splashed hugely, and headed into the shining lane. As it did so, all silver changed to lead and the stars were gone. Day was coming. A great pearl-colored blush spread upward before him, developed bands of lavender and rays of coral-gold fire melting to green iridescence overhead. The boat was now gliding on a ribbon of fiery light between black-silhouetted banks. Jakko looked back and saw dazzling cloud-cities heaped behind him in the west. The vast imminence of sunrise. He sighed aloud.

He understood that all this demonstration of glory was nothing but the effects of dust and vapor in the thin skin of air around a small planet, whereon he crawled wingless. No vastness brooded; the planet was merely turning with him into the rays of its mediocre primary. His family, everyone, knew that on the River he would encounter the Galaxy itself in glory. Suns beyond count, magnificence to which this was nothing. And yet—and yet to him this was not nothing. It was intimately his, man-sized. He made an ambiguous sound in his throat. He resented the trivialization of this beauty, and he resented being moved by it. So he passed along, idly holding the sail rope like a man leashing the living wind, his face troubled and very young.

The little craft ran on unerringly, threading the winding sheen of the canal. As the sun rose, Jakko began to hear a faint drone ahead. The sea surf. He thought of the persons who must have made this voyage before him: the ship’s family, savoring their final days of mortality. A happy voyage, a picnic. The thought reminded him that he was hungry; the last groundcar’s synthesizer had been faulty.

He tied the rope and searched. The boat had replenished its water, but there was only one foodbar. Jakko lay down in the cushioned well and ate and drank comfortably, while the sky turned turquoise and then cobalt. Presently they emerged into an enormous lagoon and began to run south between low islands. Jakko trailed his hand and tasted brackish salt. When the boat turned east again and made for a seaward opening, he became doubly certain. The craft was programmed for the River, like almost everything else on the world he knew.

Sure enough, the tiny bark ran through an inlet and straight out into the chop beyond a long beach, extruded outriggers, and passed like a cork over the reef foam on to the deep green swells beyond. Here it pitched once and steadied; Jakko guessed it had thrust down a keel. Then it turned south and began to run along outside the reef, steady as a knife cut with the wind on its quarter. Going Riverward for sure. The nearest River place was here called Vidalita or Beata, or sometimes Falaz, meaning “illusion.” It was far south and inland. Jakko guessed they were making for a landing where a moveway met the sea. He had still time to think, to struggle with the trouble under his mind.

But as the sun turned the boat into a trim white-gold bird flying over green transparency, Jakko’s eyes closed and he slept, protected by invisible deflectors from the bow-spray. Once he opened his eyes and saw a painted fish tearing along magically in the standing wave below his head. He smiled and slept again, dreaming of a great wave dying, a wave that was a many-headed beast. His face became sad and his lips moved soundlessly, as if repeating, “No . . . no . . .”

When he woke they were sailing quite close by a long bluff on his right. In the cliff ahead was a big white building or tower, only a little ruined. Suddenly he caught sight of a figure moving on the beach before it. A living human? He jumped up to look. He had not seen a strange human person in many years.

Yes—it was a live person, strangely colored gold and black. He waved wildly.

The person on the beach slowly raised an arm.

Alight with excitement, Jakko switched off the computer and grabbed the rudder and sail. The line of reef surf seemed open here. He turned the boat shoreward, riding on a big swell. But the wave left him. He veered erratically, and the surf behind broached into the boat, overturning it and throwing him out. He knew how to swim; he surfaced and struck out strongly for the shore, spluttering brine. Presently he was wading out onto the white beach, a short, strongly built, reddened young male person with pale hair and water-blue eyes.

The stranger was walking hesitantly toward him. Jakko saw it was a thin dark-skinned girl wearing a curious netted hat. Her body was wrapped in orange silk, and she carried heavy gloves in one hand. Three nervous moondogs followed her. He began turning water out of his shorts pockets as she came up.

“Your . . . boat,” she said in the language of that time. Her voice was low and uncertain.

They both turned to look at the confused place by the reef where the sailboat floated half-submerged.

“I turned it off. The computer.” His words came jerkily too, they were both unused to speech.

“It will come ashore down there.” She pointed, still studying him in a wary, preoccupied way. She was much smaller than he. “Why did you turn? Aren’t you going to the River?”

“No.” He coughed. “Well, yes, in a way. My father wants me to say good-bye. They left while I was traveling.”

“You’re not . . . ready?”

“No. I don’t—” He broke off. “Are you staying alone here?”

“Yes. I’m not going, either.”

They stood awkwardly in the sea wind. Jakko noticed that the three moondogs were lined up single file, tiptoeing upwind toward him with their eyes closed, sniffing. They were not, of course, from the moon, but they looked it, being white and oddly shaped.

“It’s a treat for them,” the girl said. “Something different.” Her voice was stronger now. After a pause she added, “You can stay here for a while if you want. I’ll show you, but I have to finish my work first.”

“Thank you,” he remembered to say.

As they climbed steps cut in the bluff Jakko asked, “What are you working at?”

“Oh, everything. Right now it’s bees.”

“Bees!” he marveled. “They made what—honey? I thought they were all gone.”

“I have a lot of old things.” She kept glancing at him intently as they climbed. “Are you quite healthy?”

“Oh, yes. Why not? I’m all alpha so far as I know. Everybody is.”

“Was,” she corrected. “Here are my bee skeps.”

They came around a low wall and stopped by five small wicker huts. A buzzing insect whizzed by Jakko’s face, coming from some feathery shrubs. He saw that the bloom-tipped foliage was alive with the golden humming things. Recalling that they could sting, he stepped back.

“You better go around the other way.” She pointed. “They might hurt a stranger.” She pulled her veil down, hiding her face. Just as he turned away, she added, “I thought you might impregnate me.”

He wheeled back, not really able to react because of the distracting bees. “But isn’t that terribly complicated?”

“I don’t think so. I have the pills.” She pulled on her gloves.

“Yes, the pills. I know.” He frowned. “But you’d have to stay, I mean one just can’t—”

“I know that. I have to do my bees now. We can talk later.”

“Of course.” He started away and suddenly turned back.

“Look!” He didn’t know her name. “You, look!”

“What?” She was a strange little figure, black and orange with huge hands and a big veil-muffled head. “What?”

“I felt it, just then, desire. Can’t you see?”

They both gazed at his wet shorts.

“I guess not,” he said finally. “But I felt it, I swear. Sexual desire.”

She pushed back her veil, frowning. “It will stay, won’t it? Or come back? This isn’t a very good place. I mean, the bees. And it’s no use without the pills.”

“That’s so.”

He went away then, walking carefully because of the tension around his pubic bone. Like a keel, snug and tight. His whole body felt reorganized. It had been years since he’d felt flashes like that, not since he was fifteen at least. Most people never did. That was variously thought to be because of the River, or from their parents’ surviving the Poison Centuries, or because the general alpha strain was so forebrain-dominant. It gave him an archaic, secret pride. Maybe he was a throwback.

He passed under cool archways, and found himself in a green protected place behind the seaward wall. A garden, he saw, looking round surprised at clumps of large tied-up fruiting plants, peculiar trees with green balls at their tops, disorderly rows of rather unaesthetic greenery. Tentatively he identified tomatoes, peppers, a feathery leaf which he thought had an edible root. A utilitarian planting. His uncle had once amused the family by doing something of the sort, but not on this scale. Jakko shook his head.

In the center of the garden stood a round stone coping with a primitive apparatus on top. He walked over and looked down. Water, a bucket on a rope. Then he saw that there was also an ordinary tap. He opened it and drank, looking at the odd implements leaning on the coping. Earth tools. He did not really want to think about what the strange woman had said.

A shadow moved by his foot. The largest moondog had come quite close, inhaling dreamily. “Hello,” he said to it. Some of these dogs could talk a little. This one opened its eyes wide but said nothing.

He stared about, wiping his mouth, feeling his clothes almost dry now in the hot sun. On three sides the garden was surrounded by arcades; above him on the ruined side was a square cracked masonry tower with no roof. A large place, whatever it was. He walked into the shade of the nearest arcade, which turned out to be littered with myriad disassembled or partly assembled objects: tools, containers, who knew what. Her “work”? The place felt strange, vibrant and busy. He realized he had entered only empty houses on his yearlong journey. This one was alive, lived-in. Messy. It hummed like the bee skeps. He turned down a cool corridor, looking into rooms piled with more stuff. In one, three white animals he couldn’t identify were asleep in a heap of cloth on a bed. They moved their ears at him like big pale shells but did not awaken.

He heard staccato noises and came out into another courtyard where plump white birds walked with jerking heads. “Chickens!” he decided, delighted by the irrational variety of this place. He went from there into a large room with windows on the sea, and heard a door close.

It was the woman, or girl, coming to him, holding her hat and gloves. Her hair was a dark curly cap, her head elegantly small; an effect he had always admired. He remembered something to say.

“I’m called Jakko. What’s your name?”

“Jakko.” She tasted the sound. “Hello, Jakko. I’m Peachthief.” She smiled very briefly, entirely changing her face.

“Peachthief.” On impulse he moved toward her, holding out his hands. She tucked her bundle under her arm and took both of his. They stood like that a moment, not quite looking at each other. Jakko felt excited. Not sexually, but more as if the air was electrically charged.

“Well.” She took her hands away and began unwrapping a leafy wad. “I brought a honeycomb even if it isn’t quite ready.” She showed him a sticky-looking frame with two dead bees on it. “Come on.”

She walked rapidly out into another corridor and entered a shiny room he thought might be a laboratory.

“My food room,” she told him. Again Jakko was amazed. There stood a synthesizer, to be sure, but beside it were shelves full of pots and bags and jars and containers of all descriptions. Unknown implements lay about, and there was a fireplace which had been partly sealed up. Bunches of plant parts hung from racks overhead. He identified some brownish ovoids in a bowl as eggs. From the chickens?

Peachthief was cleaning the honeycomb with a manually operated knife. “I use the wax for my loom, and for candles. Light.”

“What’s wrong with the lights?”

“Nothing.” She turned around, gesturing emphatically with the knife. “Don’t you understand? All these machines, they’ll go. They won’t run forever. They’ll break or wear out or run down. There won’t be any, anymore. Then we’ll have to use natural things.”

“But that won’t be for centuries!” he protested. “Decades, anyhow. They’re all still going, they’ll last for us.”

“For you,” she said scornfully. “Not for me. I intend to stay. With my children.” She turned her back on him and added in a friendlier voice, “Besides, the old things are aesthetic. I’ll show you, when it gets dark.”

“But you haven’t any children! Have you?” He was purely astonished.

“Not yet.” Her back was still turned.

“I’m hungry,” he said, and went to work the synthesizer. He made it give him a bar with a hard filler; for some reason he wanted to crunch it in his teeth.

She finished with the honey and turned around. “Have you ever had a natural meal?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, chewing. “One of my uncles tried that. It was very nice,” he added politely.

She looked at him sharply and smiled again, on—off. They went out of the food room. The afternoon was fading into great gold-and-orange streamers above the courtyard, colored like Peachthief’s garment.

“You can sleep here.” She opened a slatted door. The room was small and bare, with a window on the sea.

“There isn’t any bed,” he objected.

She opened a chest and took out a big wad of string. “Hang this end on that hook over there.”

When she hung up the other end he saw it was a large mesh hammock.

“That’s what I sleep in. They’re comfortable. Try it.”

He climbed in awkwardly. The thing came up around him like a bag. She gave a short sweet laugh as brief as her smile.

“No, you lie on the diagonal. Like this.” She tugged his legs, sending a peculiar shudder through him. “That straightens it, see?”

It would probably be all right, he decided, struggling out. Peachthief was pointing to a covered pail.

“That’s for your wastes. It goes on the garden, in the end.”

He was appalled, but said nothing, letting her lead him out through a room with glass tanks in the walls to a big screened-in porch fronting the ocean. It was badly in need of cleaners. The sky was glorious with opalescent domes and spires, reflections of the sunset behind them, painting amazing colors on the sea.

“This is where I eat.”

“What is this place?”

“It was a sea station last, I think. Station Juliet. They monitored the fish and the ocean traffic, and rescued people and so on.”

He was distracted by noticing long convergent dove-blue rays like mysterious paths into the horizon; cloud shadows cast across the world. Beauty of the dust. Why must it move him so?

“—even a medical section,” she was saying. “I really could have babies, I mean in case of trouble.”

“You don’t mean it.” He felt only irritation now. “I don’t feel any more desire,” he told her.

She shrugged. “I don’t either. We’ll talk about it later on.”

“Have you always lived here?”

“Oh, no.” She began taking pots and dishes out of an insulated case. The three moondogs had joined them silently; she set bowls before them. They lapped, stealing glances at Jakko. They were, he knew, very strong despite their sticklike appearance.

“Let’s sit here.” She plumped down on one end of the lounge and began biting forcefully into a crusty thing like a slab of drybar. He noticed she had magnificent teeth. Her dark skin set them off beautifully, as it enhanced her eyes. He had never met anyone so different in every way from himself and his family. He vacillated between interest and a vague alarm.

“Try some of the honey.” She handed him a container and spoon. It looked quite clean. He tasted it eagerly; honey was much spoken of in antique writings. At first he sensed nothing but a waxy sliding, but then an overpowering sweetness enveloped his tongue, quite unlike the sweets he was used to. It did not die away but seemed to run up his nose and almost into his ears, in a peculiar physical way. An animal food. He took some more, gingerly.

“I didn’t offer you my bread. It needs some chemical, I don’t know what. To make it lighter.”

“Don’t you have an access terminal?”

“Something’s wrong with part of it,” she said with her mouth full. “Maybe I don’t work it right. We never had a big one like this, my tribe were travelers. They believed in sensory experiences.” She nodded, licking her fingers. “They went to the River when I was fourteen.”

“That’s very young to be alone. My people waited till this year, my eighteenth birthday.”

“I wasn’t alone. I had two older cousins. But they wanted to take an aircar up north, to the part of the River called Rideout. I stayed here. I mean, we never stopped traveling, we never lived anywhere. I wanted to do like the plants, make roots.”

“I could look at your program,” he offered. “I’ve seen a lot of different models, I spent nearly a year in cities.”

“What I need is a cow. Or a goat.”

“Why?”

“For the milk. I need a pair, I guess.”

Another animal thing; he winced a little. But it was pleasant, sitting here in the deep blue light beside her, hearing the surf plash quietly below.

“I saw quite a number of horses,” he told her. “Don’t they use milk?”

“I don’t think horses are much good for milk.” She sighed in an alert, busy way. He had the impression that her head was tremendously energic, humming with plans and intentions. Suddenly she looked up and began making a high squeaky noise between her front teeth, “Sssswwt! Sssswwwt!”

Startled, he saw a white flying thing swooping above them, and then two more. They whirled so wildly he ducked.

“That’s right,” she said to them. “Get busy.”

“What are they?”

“My bats. They eat mosquitoes and insects.” She squeaked again, and the biggest bat was suddenly clinging to her hand, licking honey. It had a small, fiercely complicated face.

Jakko relaxed again. This place and its strange inhabitant were giving him remarkable memories for the River, anyway. He noticed a faint glow moving where the dark sky joined the darker sea.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, the seatrain. It goes to the River landing.”

“Are there people on it?”

“Not anymore. Look, I’ll show you.” She jumped up and was opening a console in the corner, when a sweet computer voice spoke into the air.

“Seatrain Foxtrot Niner calling Station Juliet! Come in, Station Juliet!”

“It hasn’t done that for years,” Peachthief said. She tripped tumblers. “Seatrain, this is Station Juliet, I hear you. Do you have a problem?”

“Affirmative. Passenger is engaging in nonstandard activities. He-slash-she does not conform to parameters. Request instructions.”

Peachthief thought a minute. Then she grinned. “Is your passenger moving on four legs?”

“Affirmative! Affirmative!” Seatrain Foxtrot sounded relieved.

“Supply it with bowls of meat food and water on the floor and do not interfere with it. Juliet out.”

She clicked off, and they watched the far web of lights go by on the horizon, carrying an animal.

“Probably a dog following the smell of people,” Peachthief said. “I hope it gets off all right. . . . We’re quite a wide genetic spread,” she went on in a different voice. “I mean, you’re so light, in body type and all.”

“I noticed that.”

“It would give good heterosis. Vigor.”

She was talking about being impregnated, about the fantasy child. He felt angry.

“Look, you don’t know what you’re saying. Don’t you realize you’d have to stay and raise it for years? You’d be ethically and morally bound. And the River places are shrinking fast, you must know that. Maybe you’d be too late.”

“Yes,” she said somberly. “Now it’s sucked everybody out, it’s going. But I still mean to stay.”

“But you’d hate it, even if there’s still time. My mother hated it, toward the end. She felt she had begun to deteriorate energically, that her life would be lessened. And me—what about me? I mean, I should stay, too.”

“You’d only have to stay a month. For my ovulation. The male parent isn’t ethically bound.”

“Yes, but I think that’s wrong. My father stayed. He never said he minded it, but he must have.”

“You only have to do a month,” she said sullenly. “I thought you weren’t going on the River right now.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to feel bound, I want to travel. To see more of the world, first. After I say good-bye.”

She made an angry sound. “You have no insight. You’re going, all right. You just don’t want to admit it. You’re going just like Mungo and Ferrocil.”

“Who are they?”

“People who came by. Males, like you. Mungo was last year, I guess. He had an aircar. He said he was going to stay, he talked and talked. But two days later he went right on again. To the River. Ferrocil was earlier, he was walking through. Until he stole my bicycle.”

A sudden note of fury in her voice startled him; she seemed to have some peculiar primitive relation to her bicycle, to her things.

“Did you want them to impregnate you, too?” Jakko noticed an odd intensity in his own voice as well.

“Oh, I was thinking about it, with Mungo.” Suddenly she turned on him, her eyes wide open in the dimness like white-ringed jewels. “Look! Once and for all, I’m not going! I’m alive, I’m a human woman. I am going to stay on this Earth and do human things. I’m going to make young ones to carry on the race, even if I have to die here. You can go on out, you—you pitiful shadows!”

Her voice rang in the dark room, jarring him down to his sleeping marrow. He sat silent as though some deep buried bell had tolled.

She was breathing hard. Then she moved, and to his surprise a small live flame sprang up between her cupped hands, making the room a cave.

“That’s a candle. That’s me. Now go ahead, make fun like Mungo did.”

“I’m not making fun,” he said, shocked. “It’s just that I don’t know what to think. Maybe you’re right. I really . . . I really don’t want to go, in one way,” he said haltingly. “I love this Earth, too. But it’s all so fast. Let me . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“Tell me about your family,” she said, quietly now.

“Oh, they studied. They tried every access you can imagine. Ancient languages, history, lore. My aunt made poems in English. . . . The layers of the Earth, the names of body cells and tissues, jewels, everything. Especially stars. They made us memorize star maps. So we’ll know where we are, you know, for a while. At least the Earth-names. My father kept saying, when you go on the River you can’t come back and look anything up. All you have is what you remember. Of course you could ask others, but there’ll be so much more, so much new. . . .”

He fell silent, wondering for the millionth time: Is it possible that I shall go out forever between the stars, in the great streaming company of strange sentiences?

“How many children were in your tribe?” Peachthief was asking.

“Six. I was the youngest.”

“The others all went on the River?”

“I don’t know. When I came back from the cities the whole family had gone on, but maybe they’ll wait awhile, too. My father left a letter asking me to come and say good-bye, and to bring him anything new I learned. They say you go slowly, you know. If I hurry there’ll still be enough of his mind left there to tell him what I saw.”

“What did you see? We were at a city once,” Peachthief said dreamily. “But I was too young, I don’t remember anything but people.”

“The people are all gone now. Empty, every one. But everything works, the lights change, the moveways run. I didn’t believe everybody was gone until I checked the central control offices. Oh, there were so many wonderful devices.” He sighed. “The beauty, the complexity. Fantastic what people made.” He sighed again, thinking of the wonderful technology, the creations abandoned, running down. “One strange thing. In the biggest city I saw, old Chio, almost every entertainment screen had the same tape running.”

“What was it?”

“A girl, a young girl with long hair. Almost to her feet, I’ve never seen such hair. She was laying it out on a sort of table, with her head down. But no sound, I think the audio was broken. Then she poured a liquid all over very slowly. And then she lit it, she set fire to herself. It flamed and exploded and burned her all up. I think it was real.” He shuddered. “I could see inside her mouth, her tongue going all black and twisted. It was horrible. Running over and over, everywhere. Stuck.”

She made a revolted sound. “So you want to tell that to your father, to his ghost or whatever?”

“Yes. It’s all new data, it could be important.”

“Oh, yes,” she said scornfully. Then she grinned at him. “What about me? Am I new data, too? A woman who isn’t going to the River? A woman who is going to stay here and make babies? Maybe I’m the last.”

“That’s very important,” he said slowly, feeling a deep confusion in his gut. “But I can’t believe, I mean, you—”

“I mean it.” She spoke with infinite conviction. “I’m going to live here and have babies by you or some other man if you won’t stay, and teach them to live on the Earth naturally.”

Suddenly he believed her. A totally new emotion was rising up in him, carrying with it sunrises and nameless bonds with Earth that hurt in a painless way; as though a rusted door was opening within him. Maybe this was what he had been groping for.

“I think—I think maybe I’ll help you. Maybe I’ll stay with you, for a while at least. Our—our children.”

“You’ll stay a month?” she asked wonderingly. “Really?”

“No, I mean I could stay longer. To make more and see them and help raise them, like Father did. After I come back from saying good-bye I’ll really stay.”

Her face changed. She bent to him and took his face between her slim dark hands.

“Jakko, listen. If you go to the River you’ll never come back. No one ever does. I’ll never see you again. We have to do it now, before you go.”

“But a month is too long!” he protested. “My father’s mind won’t be there, I’m already terribly late.”

She glared into his eyes a minute and then released him, stepping back with her brief sweet laugh. “Yes, and it’s already late for bed. Come on.”

She led him back to the room, carrying the candles, and he marveled anew at the clutter of strange activities she had assembled. “What’s that?”

“My weaving room.” Yawning, she reached in and held up a small, rough-looking cloth. “I made this.”

It was ugly, he thought; ugly and pathetic. Why make such useless things? But he was too tired to argue.

She left him to cleanse himself perfunctorily by the well in the moonlit courtyard, after showing him another waste-place right in the garden. Other people’s wastes smelled bad, he noticed sleepily. Maybe that was the cause of all the ancient wars.

In his room he tumbled into his hammock and fell asleep instantly. His dreams that night were chaotic; crowds, storms, jostling, and echoing through strange dimensions. His last image was of a great whirlwind that bore in its forehead a jewel that was a sleeping woman, curled like an embryo.

He waked in the pink light of dawn to find her brown face bending over him, smiling impishly. He had the impression she had been watching him, and jumped quickly out of the hammock.

“Lazy,” she said. “I’ve found the sailboat. Hurry up and eat.”

She handed him a wooden plate of bright natural fruits and led him out into the sunrise garden.

When they got down to the beach she led him south, and there was the little craft sliding to and fro, overturned in the shallows amid its tangle of sail. The keel was still protruding. They furled the sail in clumsily, and towed it out to deeper water to right it.

“I want this for the children,” Peachthief kept repeating excitedly. “They can get fish, too. Oh, how they’ll love it!”

“Stand your weight on the keel and grab the side rail,” Jakko told her, doing the same. He noticed that her silks had come loose from her breasts, which were high and wide-pointed, quite unlike those of his tribe. The sight distracted him, his thighs felt unwieldy, and he missed his handhold as the craft righted itself and ducked him. When he came up he saw Peachthief scrambling aboard like a cat, clinging tight to the mast.

“The sail! Pull the sail up,” he shouted, and got another faceful of water. But she had heard him, the sail was trembling open like a great wing, silhouetting her shining dark body. For the first time Jakko noticed the boat’s name, on the stern: Gojack. He smiled. An omen.

Gojack was starting to move smoothly away, toward the reef.

“The rudder!” he bellowed. “Turn the rudder and come back.”

Peachthief moved to the tiller and pulled at it; he could see her strain. But Gojack continued to move away from him into the wind, faster and faster toward the surf. He remembered she had been handling the mast where the computer was.

“Stop the computer! Turn it off, turn it off!”

She couldn’t possibly hear him. Jakko saw her in frantic activity, wrenching at the tiller, grabbing ropes, trying physically to push down the sail. Then she seemed to notice the computer, but evidently could not decipher it. Meanwhile Gojack fled steadily on and out, resuming its interrupted journey to the River. Jakko realized with horror that she would soon be in dangerous water; the surf was thundering on coral heads.

“Jump! Come back, jump off!” He was swimming after them as fast as he could, his progress agonizingly slow. He glimpsed her still wrestling with the boat, screaming something he couldn’t hear.

“JUMP!”

And finally she did, but only to try jerking Gojack around by its mooring lines. The boat faltered and jibbed, but then went strongly on, towing the threshing girl.

“Let go! Let go!” A wave broke over his head.

When he could see again he found she had at last let go and was swimming aimlessly, watching Gojack crest the surf and wing away. At last she turned back toward shore, and Jakko swam to intercept her. He was gripped by an unknown emotion so strong it discoordinated him. As his feet touched bottom he realized it was rage.

She waded to him, her face contorted by weeping. “The children’s boat,” she wailed. “I lost the children’s boat—”

“You’re crazy,” he shouted. “There aren’t any children.”

“I lost it—” She flung herself on his chest, crying. He thumped her back, her sides, repeating furiously, “Crazy! You’re insane!”

She wailed louder, squirming against him, small and naked and frail. Suddenly he found himself flinging her down onto the wet sand, falling on top of her with his swollen sex crushed between their bellies. For a moment all was confusion, and then the shock of it sobered him. He raised to look under himself, and Peachthief stared too, round-eyed.

“Do you w-want to, now?”

In that instant he wanted nothing more than to thrust himself into her, but a sandy wavelet splashed over them and he was suddenly aware of chafing wet cloth and Peachthief gagging brine. The magic waned. He got awkwardly to his knees.

“I thought you were going to be drowned,” he told her, angry again.

“I wanted it so, for—for them. . . .” She was still crying softly, looking up desolately at him. He understood she wasn’t really meaning just the sailboat. A feeling of inexorable involvement spread through him. This mad little being had created some kind of energy vortex around her, into which he was being sucked along with animals, vegetables, chickens, crowds of unknown things; only Gojack had escaped her.

“I’ll find it,” she was muttering, wringing out her silks, staring beyond the reef at the tiny dwindling gleam. He looked down at her, so fanatic and so vulnerable, and his inner landscape tilted frighteningly, revealing some ancient-new dimension.

“I’ll stay with you,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat, hearing his voice shake. “I mean I’ll really stay, I won’t go to the River at all. We’ll make them, our babies now.”

She stared up at him openmouthed. “But your father! You promised!”

“My father stayed,” he said painfully. “It’s—it’s right, I think.”

She came close and grabbed his arms in her small hands. “Oh, Jakko! But no, listen—I’ll go with you. We can start a baby as we go, I’m sure of that. Then you can talk to your father and keep your promise and I’ll be there to make sure you come back!”

“But you’d be—you’d be pregnant!” he cried in alarm. “You’d be in danger of taking an embryo on the River!”

She laughed proudly. “Can’t you get it through your head that I will not go on the River? I’ll just watch you and pull you out. I’ll see you get back here. For a while, anyway,” she added soberly. Then she brightened. “Hey, we’ll see all kinds of things. Maybe I can find a cow or some goats on the way! Yes, yes! It’s a perfect idea.”

She faced him, glowing. Tentatively she brought her lips up to his, and they kissed inexpertly, tasting salt. He felt no desire, but only some deep resonance, like a confirmation in the earth. The three moondogs were watching mournfully.

“Now let’s eat!” She began towing him toward the cliff steps. “We can start the pills right now. Oh, I have so much to do! But I’ll fix everything, we’ll leave tomorrow.”

She was like a whirlwind. In the food room she pounced on a small gold-colored pillbox and opened it to show a mound of glowing green-and-red capsules.

“The red ones with the male symbol are for you.”

She took a green one, and they swallowed solemnly, sharing a water mug. He noticed that the seal on the box had been broken, and thought of that stranger, Mungo, she had mentioned. How far had her plans gone with him? An unpleasant emotion he had never felt before rose in Jakko’s stomach. He sensed that he was heading into more dubious realms of experience than he had quite contemplated. He took his foodbar and walked away through the arcades to cool down.

When he came upon her again she seemed to be incredibly busy, folding and filling and wrapping things, closing windows and tying doors open. Her intense relations with things again . . . He felt obscurely irritated and was pleased to have had a superior idea.

“We need a map,” he told her. “Mine was in the boat.”

“Oh, great idea. Look in the old control room, it’s down those stairs. It’s kind of scary.” She began putting oil on her loom.

He went down a white ramp that became a tunnel stairway, and came finally through a heavily armored portal to a circular room deep inside the rock, dimly illumined by portholes sunk in long shafts. From here he could hear the hum of the station energy source. As his eyes adjusted he made out a bank of sensor screens and one big console standing alone. It seemed to have been smashed open; some kind of sealant had been poured over the works.

He had seen a place like this before; he understood at once that from here had been controlled terrible ancient weapons that flew. Probably they still stood waiting in their hidden holes behind the station. But the master control was long dead. As he approached the console he saw that someone had scratched in the cooling sealant. He could make out only the words:—WAR NO MORE. Undoubtedly this was a shrine of the very old days.

He found a light switch that filled the place with cool glare, and began exploring side alleys. Antique gear, suits, cupboards full of masks and crumbling packets he couldn’t identify. Among them was something useful—two cloth containers to carry stuff on one’s back, only a little mildewed. But where were the maps?

Finally he found one on the control-room wall, right where he had come in. Someone had updated it with scrawled notations. With a tremor he realized how very old this must be; it dated from before the Rivers had touched Earth. He could hardly grasp it.

Studying it, he saw that there was indeed a big landing dock not far south, and from there a moveway ran inland about a hundred kilometers to an airpark. If Peachthief could walk twenty-five kilometers they could make the landing by evening, and if the cars were still running the rest would be quick. All the moveways he’d seen had live cars on them. From the airpark a dotted line ran southwest across mountains to a big red circle with a cross in it, marked VIDA! That would be the River. They would just have to hope something on the airpark would fly, otherwise it would be a long climb.

His compass was still on his belt. He memorized the directions and went back upstairs. The courtyard was already saffron under great sunset flags.

Peachthief was squatting by the well, apparently having a conference with her animals. Jakko noticed some more white creatures he hadn’t seen before, who seemed to live in an open hutch. They had long pinkish ears and mobile noses. Rabbits, or hares perhaps?

Two of the strange white animals he had seen sleeping were now under a bench, chirruping irritably at Peachthief.

“My raccoons,” she told Jakko. “They’re mad because I woke them up too soon.” She said something in a high voice Jakko couldn’t understand, and the biggest raccoon shook his head up and down in a supercilious way.

“The chickens will be all right,” Peachthief said. “Lotor knows how to feed them, to get the eggs. And they can all work the water lever.” The other raccoon nodded crossly, too.

“The rabbits are a terrible problem.” Peachthief frowned. “You just haven’t much sense, Eusebia,” she said fondly, stroking the doe. “I’ll have to fix something.”

The big raccoon was warbling at her; Jakko thought he caught the word “dog-g-g.”

“He wants to know who will settle their disputes with the dogs,” Peachthief reported. At this, one of the moondogs came forward and said thickly, “We go-o.” It was the first word Jakko had heard him speak.

“Oh, good!” Peachthief cried. “Well, that’s that!” She bounced up and began pouring something from a bucket on a line of plants. The white raccoons ran off silently with a humping gait.

“I’m so glad you’re coming, Tycho,” she told the dog. “Especially if I have to come back alone with a baby inside. But they say you’re very vigorous—at first, anyway.”

“You aren’t coming back alone,” Jakko told her. She smiled a brilliant noncommittal flash. He noticed she was dressed differently; her body didn’t show so much, and she kept her gaze away from him in an almost timid way. But she became very excited when he showed her the backpacks.

“Oh, good. Now we won’t have to roll the blankets around our waists. It gets cool at night, you know.”

“Does it ever rain?”

“Not this time of year. What we mainly need is lighters and food and water. And a good knife each. Did you find the map?”

He showed it. “Can you walk, I mean really hike if we have to? Do you have shoes?”

“Oh, yes. I walk a lot. Especially since Ferrocil stole my bike.”

The venom in her tone amused him. The ferocity with which she provisioned her small habitat!

“Men build monuments, women build nests,” he quoted from somewhere.

“I don’t know what kind of monument Ferrocil built with my bicycle,” she said tartly.

“You’re a savage,” he said, feeling a peculiar ache that came out as a chuckle.

“The race can use some savages. We better eat now and go to sleep so we can start early.”

At supper in the sunset-filled porch they scarcely talked. Dreamily Jakko watched the white bats embroidering flight on the air. When he looked down at Peachthief he caught her gazing at him before she quickly lowered her eyes. It came to him that they might eat hundreds, thousands of meals here; maybe all his life. And there could be a child—children—running about. He had never seen small humans younger than himself. It was all too much to take in, unreal. He went back to watching the bats.

That night she accompanied him to his hammock and stood by, shy but stubborn, while he got settled. Then he suddenly felt her hands sliding on his body, toward his groin. At first he thought it was something clinical, but then he realized she meant sex. His blood began to pound.

“May I come in beside you? The hammock is quite strong.”

“Yes,” he said thickly, reaching for her arm.

But as her weight came in by him she said in a practical voice, “I have to start knotting a small hammock, first thing. Child-size.”

It broke his mood.

“Look. I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. You go on back to yours, we should get sleep now.”

“All right.” The weight lifted away.

With a peculiar mix of sadness and satisfaction he heard her light footsteps leaving him alone. That night he dreamed strange sensory crescendos, a tumescent earth and air; a woman who lay with her smiling lips in pale-green water, awaiting him, while thin black birds of sunrise stalked to the edge of the sea.

• • • •

Next morning they ate by candles, and set out as the eastern sky was just turning rose-gray. The ancient white coral roadway was good walking. Peachthief swung right along beside him, her backpack riding smooth. The moondogs pattered soberly behind.

Jakko found himself absorbed in gazing at the brightening landscape. Jungle-covered hills rose away on their right, the sea lay below on their left, sheened and glittering with the coming sunrise. When a diamond chip of sun broke out of the horizon he almost shouted aloud for the brilliance of it; the palm trees beyond the road lit up like golden torches, the edges of every frond and stone were startlingly clear and jewel-like. For a moment he wondered if he could have taken some hallucinogen.

They paced on steadily in a dream of growing light and heat. The day wind came up, and torn white clouds began to blow over them, bringing momentary coolnesses. Their walking fell into the rhythm Jakko loved, broken only occasionally by crumbled places in the road. At such spots they would often be surprised to find the moondogs sitting waiting for them, having quietly left the road and circled ahead through the scrub on business of their own. Peachthief kept up sturdily, only once stopping to look back at the far white spark of Station Juliet, almost melted in the shimmering horizon.

“This is as far as I’ve gone south,” she told him.

He drank some water and made her drink too, and they went on. The road began to wind, rising and falling gently. When he next glanced back the station was gone. The extraordinary luminous clarity of the world was still delighting him.

When noon came he judged they were well over halfway to the landing. They sat down on some rubble under the palms to eat and drink, and Peachthief fed the moondogs. Then she took out the fertility-pill box. They each took theirs in silence, oddly solemn. Then she grinned.

“I’ll give you something for dessert.”

She unhitched a crooked knife from her belt and went searching around in the rocks, to come back with a big yellow-brown palm nut. Jakko watched her attack it with rather alarming vigor; she husked it and then used a rock to drive the point home.

“Here.” She handed it to him. “Drink out of that hole.” He felt a sloshing inside; when he lifted it and drank, it tasted hairy and gritty and nothing in particular. But sharp too, like the day. Peachthief was methodically striking the thing around and around its middle. Suddenly it fell apart, revealing vividly white meat. She pried out a piece.

“Eat this. It’s full of protein.”

The nutmeat was sweet and sharply organic.

“This is a coconut!” he suddenly remembered.

“Yes. I won’t starve, coming back.”

He refused to argue, but only got up to go on. Peachthief holstered her knife and followed, munching on a coconut piece. They went on so in silence a long time, letting the rhythm carry them. Once when a lizard waddled across the road Peachthief said to the moondog at her heels, “Tycho, you’ll have to learn to catch and eat those one day soon.” The moondogs all looked dubiously at the lizard but said nothing. Jakko felt shocked and pushed the thought away.

They were now walking with the sun westering slowly to their right. A flight of big orange birds with blue beaks flapped squawking out of a roadside tree, where they were apparently building some structure. Cloud shadows fled across the world, making blue-and-bronze reflections in the sea. Jakko still felt his sensory impressions almost painfully keen; a sunray made the surf line into a chain of diamonds, and the translucent green of the near shallows below them seemed to enchant his eyes. Every vista ached with light, as if to utter some silent meaning.

He was walking in a trance, only aware that the road had been sound and level for some time, when Peachthief uttered a sharp cry.

“My bicycle! There’s my bicycle!” She began to run; Jakko saw shiny metal sticking out of a narrow gulch in the roadway. When he came up to her she was pulling a machine out from beside the roadwall.

“The front wheel—Oh, he bent it! He must have been going too fast and wrecked it here. That Ferrocil! But I’ll fix it, I’m sure I can fix it at the station. I’ll push it back with me on the way home.”

While she was mourning her machine Jakko looked around and over the low coping of the roadwall. Sheer cliff down there, with the sun just touching a rocky beach below. Something was stuck among the rocks—a tangle of whitish sticks, cloth, a round thing. Feeling his stomach knot, Jakko stared down at it, unwillingly discovering that the round thing had eyeholes, a U-shaped open mouth, blowing strands of hair. He had never seen a dead body before (nobody had), but he had seen pictures of human bones. Shakenly he realized what this had to be: Ferrocil. He must have been thrown over the coping when he hit that crack. Now he was dead, long dead. He would never go on the River. All that had been in that head was perished, gone forever.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Jakko grabbed Peachthief by the shoulders, saying roughly, “Come on! Come on!” When she resisted confusedly, he took her by the arm and began forcibly pulling her away from where she might look down. Her flesh felt burning hot and vibrant, the whole world was blasting colors and sounds and smells at him. Images of dead Ferrocil mingled with the piercing scent of some flowers on the roadway. Suddenly an idea struck him; he stopped.

“Listen. Are you sure those pills aren’t hallucinaids? I’ve only had two and everything feels crazy.”

“Three,” Peachthief said abstractedly. She took his hand and pressed it on her back. “Do that again, run your hand down my back

Bewildered, he obeyed. As his hand passed her silk shirt onto her thin shorts he felt her body move under it in a way that made him jerk away.

“Feel? Did you feel it? The lordotic reflex,” she said proudly. “Female sexuality. It’s starting.”

“What do you mean, three?”

“You had three pills. I gave you one the first night, in the honey.”

“What? But—but—” He struggled to voice the enormity of her violation, pure fury welling up in him. Choking, he lifted his hand and struck her buttocks the hardest blow he could, sending her staggering. It was the first time he had ever struck a person. A moondog growled, but he didn’t care.

“Don’t you ever—never—play a trick like—” He yanked at her shoulders, meaning to slap her face. His hand clutched a breast instead; he saw her hair blowing like dead Ferrocil’s. A frightening sense of mortality combined with pride surged through him, lighting a fire in his loins. The deadness of Ferrocil suddenly seemed violently exciting. He, Jakko, was alive! Ignoring all sanity he flung himself on Peachthief, bearing her down on the road among the flowers. As he struggled to tear open their shorts he was dimly aware that she was helping him. His engorged penis was all reality; he fought past obstructions and then was suddenly, crookedly, in her, fierce pleasure building. It exploded through him and then had burst out into her vitals, leaving him spent.

Blinking, fighting for clarity, he raised himself up and off her body. She lay wide-legged and disheveled, sobbing or gasping in a strange way, but smiling, too. Revulsion sent a sick taste in his throat.

“There’s your baby,” he said roughly. He found his canteen and drank. The three moondogs had retreated and were sitting in a row, staring solemnly.

“May I have some, please?” Her voice was very low; she sat up, began fixing her clothes. He passed her the water and they got up.

“It’s sundown,” she said. “Should we camp here?”

“No!” Savagely he started on, not caring that she had to run to catch up. Was this the way the ancients lived? Whirled by violent passions, indecent, uncaring? His doing sex so close to the poor dead person seemed unbelievable. And the world was still assaulting all his senses; when she stumbled against him he could feel again the thrilling pull of her flesh, and shuddered. They walked in silence awhile; he sensed that she was more tired than he, but he wanted only to get as far away as possible.

“I’m not taking any more of those pills,” he broke silence at last.

“But you have to! It takes a month to be sure.”

“I don’t care.”

“But, ohhh—”

He said nothing more. They were walking across a twilit headland now. Suddenly the road turned, and they came out above a great bay.

The waters below were crowded with boats of all kinds, bobbing emptily where they had been abandoned. Some still had lights that made faint jewels in the opalescent air. Somewhere among them must be Gojack. The last light from the west gleamed on the rails of a moveway running down to the landing.

“Look, there’s the seatrain.” Peachthief pointed. “I hope the dog or whatever got ashore. . . . I can find a sailboat down there, there’s lots.”

Jakko shrugged. Then he noticed movement among the shadows of the landing station and forgot his anger long enough to say, “See there! Is that a live man?”

They peered hard. Presently the figure crossed a light place, and they could see it was a person going slowly among the stalled waycars. He would stop with one awhile and then waver on.

“There’s something wrong with him,” Peachthief, said.

Presently the stranger’s shadow merged with a car, and they saw it begin to move. It went slowly at first, and then accelerated out to the center lanes, slid up the gleaming rails and passed beyond them to disappear into the western hills.

“The way’s working!” Jakko exclaimed. “We’ll camp up here and go over to the way station in the morning, it’s closer.”

He was feeling so pleased with the moveway that he talked easily with Peachthief over their foodbar dinner, telling her about the cities and asking her what places her tribe had seen. But when she wanted to put their blankets down together he said no, and took his away to a ledge farther up. The three moondogs lay down by her with their noses on their paws, facing him.

His mood turned to self-disgust again; remorse mingled with queasy surges of half-enjoyable animality. He put his arm over his head to shut out the brilliant moonlight and longed to forget everything, wishing the sky held only cold quiet stars. When he finally slept he didn’t dream at all, but woke with ominous tollings in his inner ear. The Horse is hungry, deep voices chanted. The Woman is bad!

• • • •

He roused Peachthief before sunrise. They ate and set off overland to the hill station; it was rough going until they stumbled onto an old limerock path. The moondogs ranged wide around them, appearing pleased. When they came out at the station shunt they found it crowded with cars.

The power pack of the first one was dead. So was the next, and the next. Jakko understood what the stranger at the landing had been doing; looking for a live car. The dead cars here stretched away out of sight up the siding; a miserable sight.

“We should go back to the landing,” Peachthief said. “He found a good one there.”

Jakko privately agreed, but irrationality smoldered in him. He squinted into the hazy distance.

“I’m going up to the switch end.”

“But it’s so far, we’ll have to come all the way back—”

He only strode off; she followed. It was a long way, round a curve and over a rise, dead cars beside them all the way. They were almost at the main tracks when Jakko saw what he had been hoping for: a slight jolting motion in the line. New cars were still coming in ahead, butting the dead ones.

“Oh, fine!”

They went on down to the newest-arrived car and all climbed in, the moondogs taking up position on the opposite seat. When Jakko began to work the controls that would take them out to the main line, the car bleated an automatic alarm. A voder voice threatened to report him to Central. Despite its protests, Jakko swerved the car across the switches, where it fell silent and began to accelerate smoothly onto the outbound express lane.

“You really do know how to work these things,” Peachthief said admiringly.

“You should learn.”

“Why? They’ll all be dead soon. I know how to bicycle.”

He clamped his lips, thinking of Ferrocil’s white bones. They fled on silently into the hills, passing a few more station jams. Jakko’s perceptions still seemed too sharp, the sensory world too meaning-filled.

Presently they felt hungry, and found that the car’s automatics were all working well. They had a protein drink and a pleasantly fruity bar, and Peachthief found bars for the dogs. The track was rising into mountains now; the car whirled smoothly through tunnels and came out in passes, offering wonderful views. Now and then they had glimpses of a great plain far ahead. The familiar knot of sadness gathered inside Jakko, stronger than usual. To think that all this wonderful system would run down and die in a jumble of rust . . . He had a fantasy of himself somehow maintaining it, but the memory of Peachthief’s pathetic woven cloth mocked at him. Everything was a mistake, a terrible mistake. He wanted only to leave, to escape to rationality and peace. If she had drugged him he wasn’t responsible for what he’d promised. He wasn’t bound. Yet the sadness redoubled, wouldn’t let him go.

When she got out the pillbox and offered it he shook his head violently. “No!”

“But you promised—”

“No. I hate what it does.”

She stared at him in silence, swallowing hers defiantly. “Maybe there’ll be some other men by the River,” she said after a while. “We saw one.”

He shrugged and pretended to fall asleep.

Just as he was really drowsing, the car’s warning alarm trilled and they braked smoothly to a halt.

“Oh, look ahead—the way’s gone! What is it?”

“A rockslide. An avalanche from the mountains, I think.”

They got out among other empty cars that were waiting their prescribed pause before returning. Beyond the last one the way ended in an endless tumble of rocks and shale. Jakko made out a faint footpath leading on.

“Well, we walk. Let’s get the packs, and some food and water.”

While they were back in the car working the synthesizer, Peachthief looked out the window and frowned. After Jakko finished she punched a different code and some brownish lumps rolled into her hand.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see.” She winked at him.

As they started on the trail a small herd of horses appeared, coming toward them. The two humans politely scrambled up out of their way. The lead horse was a large yellow male. When he came to Peachthief he stopped and thrust his big head up at her.

“Zhu-gar, zhu-gar,” he said sloppily. At this all the other horses crowded up and began saying “zhu-ga, zu-cah,” in varying degrees of clarity.

“This I know,” said Peachthief to Jakko. She turned to the yellow stallion. “Take us on your backs around these rocks. Then we’ll give you sugar.”

“Zhu-gar,” insisted the horse, looking mean.

“Yes, sugar. After you take us around the rocks to the rails.” The horse rolled his eyes unpleasantly, but he turned back down. There was some commotion, and two mares were pushed forward.

“Riding horseback is done by means of a saddle and bridle,” protested Jakko.

“Also this way. Come on.” Peachthief vaulted nimbly onto the back of the smaller mare.

Jakko reluctantly struggled onto the fat round back of the other mare. To his horror, as he got himself astride she put up her head and screamed shrilly.

“You’ll get sugar, too,” Peachthief told her. The animal subsided, and they started off along the rocky trail, single file. Jakko had to admit it was much faster than afoot, but he kept sliding backward.

“Hang on to her mane, that hairy place there,” Peachthief called back to him, laughing. “I know how to run a few things too, see?”

When the path widened the yellow stallion trotted up alongside Peachthief.

“I thinking,” he said importantly.

“Yes, what?”

“I push you down and eat zhugar now.”

“All horses think that,” Peachthief told him. “No good. It doesn’t work.”

The yellow horse dropped back, and Jakko heard him making horse-talk with an old gray-roan animal at the rear. Then he shouldered by to Peachthief again and said, “Why no good I push you down?”

“Two reasons,” said Peachthief. “First, if you knock me down you’ll never get any more sugar. All the humans will know you’re bad and they won’t ride on you anymore. So no more sugar, never again.”

“No more hoomans,” the big yellow horse said scornfully. “Hoomans finish.”

“You’re wrong there, too. There’ll be a lot more humans. I am making them, see?” She patted her stomach.

The trail narrowed again, and the yellow horse dropped back. When he could come alongside he sidled by Jakko’s mare.

“I think I push you down now.”

Peachthief turned around.

“You didn’t hear my other reason,” she called to him.

The horse grunted evilly.

“The other reason is that my three friends there will bite your stomach open if you try.” She pointed up to where the three moondogs had appeared on a rock as if by magic, grinning toothily.

Jakko’s mare screamed again even louder, and the gray roan in back made a haw-haw sound. The yellow horse lifted his tail and trotted forward to the head of the line, extruding manure as he passed Peachthief.

They went on around the great rockslide without further talk. Jakko was becoming increasingly uncomfortable; he would gladly have got off and gone slower on his own two legs. Now and then they broke into a jog-trot, which was so painful he longed to yell to Peachthief to make them stop. But he kept silent. As they rounded some huge boulders he was rewarded by a distant view of the unmistakable towers of an airpark, to their left on the plain below.

At long last the rockslide ended, quite near a station. They stopped among a line of stalled cars. Jakko slid off gratefully, remembering to say “Thank you” to the mare. Walking proved to be uncomfortable, too.

“See if there’s a good car before I get off!” Peachthief yelled.

The second one he came to was live. He shouted at her.

Next moment he saw trouble among the horses. The big yellow beast charged in, neighing and kicking. Peachthief came darting out of the melée with the moondogs, and fell into the car beside him, laughing.

“I gave our mares all the sugar,” she chuckled. Then she sobered. “I think mares are good for milk. I told them to come to the station with me when I come back. If that big bully will let them.”

“How will they get in a car?” he asked stupidly.

“Why, I’ll be walking, I can’t run these things.”

“But I’ll be with you.” He didn’t feel convinced.

“What for, if you don’t want to make babies? You won’t be here.”

“Well then, why are you coming with me?”

“I’m looking for a cow,” she said scornfully. “Or a goat. Or a man.”

They said no more until the car turned into the airpark station. Jakko counted over twenty apparently live ships floating at their towers. Many more hung sagging, and some towers had toppled. The field moveways were obviously dead.

“I think we have to find hats,” he told Peachthief.

“Why?”

“So the service alarms won’t go off when we walk around. Most places are like that.”

“Oh.”

In the office by the gates they found a pile of crew hats laid out, a thoughtful action by the last of the airpark people. A big hand-lettered sign said, ALL SHIPS ON STANDBY, MANUAL OVERRIDE. READ DIRECTIONS. Under it was a stack of dusty leaflets. They took one, put on their hats, and began to walk toward a pylon base with several ships floating at its tower. They had to duck under and around the web of dead moveways, and when they reached the station base there seemed to be no way in from the ground.

“We’ll have to climb onto that moveway.”

They found a narrow ladder and went up, helping the moondogs. The moveway portal was open, and they were soon in the normal passenger lounge. It was still lighted.

“Now if the lift only works.”

Just as they were making for the lift shaft they were startled by a voice ringing out.

“Ho! Ho, Roland!”

“That’s no voder,” Peachthief whispered. “There’s a live human here.”

They turned back and saw that a strange person was lying half on and half off one of the lounges. As they came close their eyes opened wide: He looked frightful. His thin dirty white hair hung around a horribly creased caved-in face, and what they could see of his neck and arms was all mottled and decayed-looking. His jerkin and pants were frayed and stained and sagged in where flesh should be. Jakko thought of the cloth shreds around dead Ferrocil and shuddered.

The stranger was staring haggardly at them. In a faint voice he said, “When the chevalier Roland died he predicted that his body would be found a spear’s throw ahead of all others and facing the enemy. . . . If you happen to be real, could you perhaps give me some water?”

“Of course.” Jakko unhooked his canteen and tried to hand it over, but the man’s hands shook and fumbled so that Jakko had to hold it to his mouth, noticing a foul odor. The stranger sucked thirstily, spilling some. Beyond him the moondogs inched closer, sniffing gingerly.

“What’s wrong with him?” Peachthief whispered as Jakko stood back.

Jakko had been remembering his lessons. “He’s just very, very old, I think.”

“That’s right.” The stranger’s voice was stronger. He stared at them with curious avidity. “I waited too long. Fibrillation.” He put one feeble hand to his chest. “Fibrillating . . . rather a beautiful word, don’t you think? My medicine ran out or I lost it. . . . A small hot animal desynchronizing in my ribs.”

“We’ll help you get to the River right away!” Peachthief told him.

“Too late, my lords, too late. Besides, I can’t walk and you can’t possibly carry me.”

“You can sit up, can’t you?” Jakko asked. “There have to be some roll chairs around here, they had them for injured people.” He went off to search the lounge office and found one almost at once.

When he brought it back the stranger was staring up at Peachthief, mumbling to himself in an archaic tongue of which Jakko only understood: “. . . The breast of a grave girl makes a hill against sunrise.” He tried to heave himself up to the chair but fell back, gasping. They had to lift and drag him in, Peachthief wrinkling her nose.

“Now if the lift only works.”

It did. They were soon on the high departure deck, and the fourth portal-berth held a waiting ship. It was a small local ferry. They went through into the windowed main cabin, wheeling the old man, who had collapsed upon himself and was breathing very badly. The moondogs trooped from window to window, looking down. Jakko seated himself in the pilot chair.

“Read me out the instructions,” he told Peachthief.

“One, place ship on internal guidance,” she read. “Whatever that means. Oh, look, here’s a diagram.”

“Good.”

It proved simple. They went together down the list, sealing the port, disengaging umbilicals, checking vane function, reading off the standby pressures in the gasbags above them, setting the reactor to warm up the drive motor and provide hot air for operational buoyancy.

While they were waiting, Peachthief asked the old man if he would like to be moved onto a window couch. He nodded urgently. When they got him to it he whispered, “See out!” They propped him up with chair pillows.

The ready-light was flashing. Jakko moved the controls, and the ship glided smoothly out and up. The computer was showing him wind speed, altitude, climb, and someone had marked all the verniers with the words COURSE SET—RIVER. Jakko lined everything up.

“Now it says, put it on automatic,” Peachthief read. He did so.

The takeoff had excited the old man. He was straining to look down, muttering incomprehensibly. Jakko caught, “The cool green hills of Earth . . . Crap!” Suddenly he sang out loudly, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door—let’s go!” And fell back exhausted.

Peachthief stood over him worriedly. “I wish I could at least clean him up, but he’s so weak.”

The old man’s eyes opened.

“Nothing shall be whole and sound that has not been rent; for love hath built his mansion in the place of excrement.” He began to sing crackedly, “Take me to the River, the bee-yew-tiful River, and wash all my sins a-away! . . . You think I’m crazy, girl, don’t you?” he went on conversationally. “Never heard of William Yeats. Very high bit-rate, Yeats.”

“I think I understand a little,” Jakko told him. “One of my aunts did English literature.”

“Did literature, eh?” The stranger wheezed, snorted. “And you two—going on the River to spend eternity together as energy matrices or something equally impressive and sexless. . . . Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.” He grunted. “Always mistrusted Keats. No balls. He’d be right at home.”

“We’re not going on the River,” Peachthief said. “At least, I’m not. I’m going to stay and make children.”

The old man’s ruined mouth fell open; he gazed up at her wildly.

“No!” he breathed. “Is it true? Have I stumbled on the lover and mother of man, the last?”

Peachthief nodded solemnly.

“What is your name, O Queen?”

“Peachthief.”

“My god. Somebody still knows of Blake.” He smiled tremulously, and his eyelids suddenly slid downward; he was asleep.

“He’s breathing better. Let’s explore.”

The small ship held little but cargo space at the rear. When they came to the food-synthesizer cubby Jakko saw Peachthief pocket something.

“What’s that?”

“A little spoon. It’ll be just right for a child.” She didn’t look at him.

Back in the main cabin the sunset was flooding the Earth below with level roseate light. They were crossing huge, oddly pockmarked meadows, the airship whispering along in silence except when a jet whistled briefly now and then for a course correction.

“Look—cows! Those must be cows,” Peachthief exclaimed. “See the shadows.”

Jakko made out small tan specks that were animals, with grotesque horned shadows stretching away.

“I’ll have to find them when I come back. What is this place?”

“A big deathyard, I think. Where they put dead bodies. I never saw one this size. In some cities they had buildings just for dead people. Won’t all that poison the cows?”

“Oh, no, it makes good grass, I believe. The dogs will help me find them. Won’t you, Tycho?” she asked the biggest moondog, who was looking down beside them.

On the eastern side of the cabin the full moon was rising into view. The old man’s eyes opened, looking at it.

“More water, if you please,” he croaked.

Peachthief gave him some, and then got him to swallow broth from the synthesizer. He seemed stronger, smiling at her with his mouthful of rotted teeth.

“Tell me, girl. If you’re going to stay and make children, why are you going to the River?”

“He’s going because he promised to talk to his father, and I’m going along to see he comes back. And make the baby. Only now he won’t take any more pills, I have to try to find another man.”

“Ah yes, the pills. We used to call them Wake-ups. . . . They were necessary, after the population chemicals got around. Maybe they still are, for women. But I think it’s mostly in the head. Why won’t you take any more, boy? What’s wrong with the old Adam?”

Peachthief started to answer, but Jakko cut her off. “I can speak for myself. They upset me. They made me do bad, uncontrolled things, and feel, agh—” He broke off with a grimace.

“You seem curiously feisty, for one who values his calm above the continuance of the race.”

“It’s the pills, I tell you. They’re—they’re dehumanizing.”

“Dee-humanizing,” the old man mocked. “And what do you know of humanity, young one? . . . That’s what I went to find, that’s why I stayed so long among the old, old things from before the River came. I wanted to bring the knowledge of what humanity really was . . . I wanted to bring it all. It’s simple, boy. They died.” He drew a rasping breath. “Every one of them died. They lived knowing that nothing but loss and suffering and extinction lay ahead. And they cared, terribly. . . . Oh, they made myths, but not many really believed them. Death was behind everything, waiting everywhere. Aging and death. No escape . . . Some of them went crazy, they fought and killed and enslaved each other by the millions, as if they could gain more life. Some of them gave up their precious lives for each other. They loved—and had to watch the ones they loved age and die. And in their pain and despair they built, they struggled, some of them sang. But above all, boy, they copulated! Fornicated, fucked, made love!”

He fell back, coughing, glaring at Jakko. Then, seeing that they scarcely understood his antique words, he went on more clearly. “Did sex, do you understand? Made children. It was their only weapon, you see. To send something of themselves into the future beyond their own deaths. Death was the engine of their lives, death fueled their sexuality. Death drove them at each other’s throats and into each other’s arms. Dying, they triumphed. . . . That was human life. And now that mighty engine is long stilled, and you call this polite parade of immortal lemmings humanity? . . . Even the faintest warmth of that immemorial holocaust makes you flinch away?”

He collapsed, gasping horribly; spittle ran down his chin. One slit of eye still raked them.

Jakko stood silent, shaken by resonances from the old man’s words, remembering dead Ferrocil, feeling some deep conduit of reality reaching for him out of the long-gone past. Peachthief’s hand fell on his shoulder, sending a shudder through him. Slowly his own hand seemed to lift by itself and cover hers, holding her to him. They watched the old man so for a long moment. His face slowly composed, he spoke in a soft dry tone.

“I don’t trust that River, you know. . . . You think you’re going to remain yourselves, don’t you? Communicate with each other and with the essences of beings from other stars? . . . The latest news from Betelgeuse.” He chuckled raspingly.

“That’s the last thing people say when they’re going,” Jakko replied. “Everyone learns that. You float out, able to talk with real other beings. Free to move.”

“What could better match our dreams?” He chuckled again. “I wonder . . . could that be the lure, just the input end of some cosmic sausage machine . . . ?”

“What’s that?” asked Peachthief.

“An old machine that ground different meats together until they came out as one substance. . . . Maybe you’ll find yourselves gradually mixed and minced and blended into some-some energic plasma . . . and then maybe squirted out again to impose the terrible gift of consciousness on some innocent race of crocodiles, or poached eggs. . . . And so it begins all over again. Another random engine of the universe, giving and taking obliviously. . . .” He coughed, no longer looking at them, and began to murmur in the archaic tongue, “Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken, confusion of the deathbed over, is it sent . . . out naked on the roads as the books say, and stricken with the injustice of the stars for punishment? The injustice of the stars . . .” He fell silent, and then whispered faintly, “Yet I too long to go.”

“You will,” Peachthief told him strongly.

“How . . . much longer?”

“We’ll be there by dawn,” Jakko said. “We’ll carry you. I swear.”

“A great gift,” he said weakly. “But I fear . . . I shall give you a better.” He mumbled on, a word Jakko didn’t know; it sounded like “afrodisiack.”

He seemed to lapse into sleep then. Peachthief went and got a damp, fragrant cloth from the cleanup and wiped his face gently. He opened one eye and grinned up at her.

“Madame Tasselass,” he rasped. “Madame Tasselass, are you really going to save us?”

She smiled down, nodding her head determinedly, yes. He closed his eyes, looking more peaceful.

The ship was now fleeing through full moonlight, the cabin was so lit with azure and silver that they didn’t think to turn on lights. Now and again the luminous mists of a low cloud veiled the windows and vanished again. Just as Jakko was about to propose eating, the old man took several gulping breaths and opened his eyes. His intestines made a bubbling sound.

Peachthief looked at him sharply and picked up one of his wrists. Then she frowned and bent over him, opening his filthy jerkin. She laid her ear to his chest, staring up at Jakko.

“He’s not breathing, there’s no heartbeat!” She groped inside his jerkin as if she could locate life, two tears rolling down her cheeks.

“He’s dead—ohhh!” She groped deeper, then suddenly straightened up and gingerly clutched the cloth at the old man’s crotch.

“What?”

“He’s a woman!” She gave a sob and wheeled around to clutch Jakko, putting her forehead in his neck. “We n-never even knew her name. . . .”

Jakko held her, looking at the dead man-woman, thinking, She never knew mine, either. At that moment the airship jolted, and gave a noise like a cable grinding or slipping before it flew smoothly on again.

Jakko had never in his life distrusted machinery, but now a sudden terror contracted his guts. This thing could fall! They could be made dead like Ferrocil, like this stranger, like the myriads in the deathyards below. Echoes of the old voice ranting about death boomed in his head, he had a sudden vision of Peachthief grown old and dying like that. After the Rivers went, dying alone. His eyes filled, and a deep turmoil erupted under his mind. He hugged Peachthief tighter. Suddenly he knew in a dreamlike way exactly what was about to happen. Only this time there was no frenzy; his body felt like warm living rock.

He stroked Peachthief to quiet her sobs, and led her over to the moonlit couch on the far side of the cabin. She was still sniffling, hugging him hard. He ran his hands firmly down her back, caressing her buttocks, feeling her body respond.

“Give me that pill,” he said to her. “Now.”

Looking at him huge-eyed in the blue moonlight, she pulled out the little box. He took out his and swallowed it deliberately, willing her to understand.

“Take off your clothes.” He began stripping off his jerkin, proud of the hot, steady power in his sex. When she stripped and he saw again the glistening black bush at the base of her slim belly, and the silver-edged curves of her body, urgency took him, but still in a magical calm.

“Lie down.”

“Wait a minute—” She was out of his hands like a fish, running across the cabin to where the dead body lay in darkness. Jakko saw she was trying to close the dead eyes that still gleamed from the shadows. He could wait; he had never imagined his body could feel like this. She laid the cloth over the stranger’s face and came back to him, half shyly holding out her arms, sinking down spread-legged on the shining couch before him. The moonlight was so brilliant he could see the pink color of her sexual parts.

He came onto her gently, controlledly, breathing in an exciting animal odor from her flesh. This time his penis entered easily, an intense feeling of all-rightness.

But a moment later the fires of terror, pity, and defiance deep within him burst up into a flame of passionate brilliance in his coupled groin. The small body under his seemed no longer vulnerable but appetitive. He clutched, mouthed, drove deep into her, exulting. Death didn’t die alone, he thought obscurely as the ancient patterns lurking in his vitals awoke. Death flew with them and flowed by beneath, but he asserted life upon the body of the woman, caught up in a great crescendo of unknown sensation, until a culminant spasm of almost painful pleasure rolled through him into her, relieving him from head to feet.

When he could talk, he thought to ask her, “Did you—” he didn’t know the word. “Did it sort of explode you, like me?”

“Well, no.” Her lips were by his ear. “Female sexuality is a little different. Maybe I’ll show you, later. . . . But I think it was good, for the baby.”

He felt only a tiny irritation at her words, and let himself drift into sleep with his face in her warm-smelling hair. Dimly the understanding came to him that the great beast of his dreams, the race itself maybe, had roused and used them. So be it.

A cold thing pushing into his ear awakened him, and a hoarse voice said, “Ffoo-ood!” It was the moondogs.

“Oh, my, I forgot to feed them!” Peachthief struggled nimbly out from under him.

Jakko found he was ravenous, too. The cabin was dark now, as the moon rose overhead. Peachthief located the switches, and made a soft light on their side of the cabin. They ate and drank heartily, looking down at the moonlit world. The deathyards were gone from below them now, they were flying over dark wooded foothills. When they lay down to sleep again they could feel the cabin angle upward slightly as the ship rose higher.

He was roused in the night by her body moving against him. She seemed to be rubbing her crotch.

“Give me your hand,” she whispered in a panting voice. She began to make his hands do things to her, sometimes touching him too, her body arching and writhing, sleek with sweat. He found himself abruptly tumescent again, excited again, excited and pleased in a confused way. “Now, now!” she commanded, and he entered her, finding her interior violently alive. She seemed to be half-fighting him, half-devouring him. Pleasure built all through him, this time without the terror. He pressed in against her shuddering convulsions. “Yes—oh, yes!” she gasped, and a series of paroxysms swept through her, carrying him with her to explosive peace.

He held himself on and in her until her body and breathing calmed to relaxation, and they slipped naturally apart. It came to him that this sex activity seemed to have more possibilities, as a thing to do, than he had realized. His family had imparted to him nothing of all this. Perhaps they didn’t know it. Or perhaps it was too alien to their calm philosophy.

“How do you know about all this?” he asked Peachthief sleepily.

“One of my aunts did literature, too.” She chuckled in the darkness. “Different literature, I guess.”

They slept almost as movelessly as the body flying with them on the other couch a world away.

• • • •

A series of noisy bumpings wakened them. The windows were filled with pink mist flying by. The airship seemed to be sliding into a berth. Jakko looked down and saw shrubs and grass close below; it was a ground-berth on a hillside.

The computer panel lit up: RESET PROGRAM FOR BASE.

“No,” said Jakko. “We’ll need it going back.” Peachthief looked at him in a new, companionable way; he sensed that she believed him now. He turned all the drive controls to standby while she worked the food synthesizer. Presently he heard the hiss of the deflating lift bags, and went to where she was standing by the dead stranger.

“We’ll take her, her body, out before we go back,” Peachthief said. “Maybe the River will touch her somehow.”

Jakko doubted it, but ate and drank his breakfast protein in silence.

When they went to use the wash-and-waste cubby he found he didn’t want to clean all the residues of their contact off himself. Peachthief seemed to feel the same way; she washed only her face and hands. He looked at her slender silk-clad belly. Was a child, his child, starting there? Desire flicked him again, but he remembered he had work to do. His promise to his father; get on with it. Sooner done, sooner back here.

“I love you,” he said experimentally, and found the strange words had a startling trueness.

She smiled brilliantly at him, not just off-on. “I love you too, I think.”

The floor-portal light was on. They pulled it up and uncovered a stepway leading to the ground. The moondogs poured down. They followed, coming out into a blowing world of rosy mists. Clouds were streaming around them, the air was all in motion up the hillside toward the crest some distance ahead of the ship berth. The ground here was uneven and covered with short soft grass, as though animals had cropped it.

“All winds blow to the River,” Jakko quoted.

They set off up the hill, followed by the moondogs, who stalked uneasily with pricked ears. Probably they didn’t like not being able to smell what was ahead, Jakko thought. Peachthief was holding his hand very firmly as they went, as if determined to keep him out of any danger.

As they walked up onto the flat crest of the hilltop the mists suddenly cleared, and they found themselves looking down into a great shallow glittering sunlit valley. They both halted to stare.

Before them lay a huge midden heap, kilometers of things upon things upon things, almost filling the valley floor. Objects of every description lay heaped there; Jakko could make out clothing, books, toys, jewelry, myriad artifacts and implements abandoned. These must be, he realized, the last things people had taken with them when they went on the River. In an outer ring not too far below them were tents, ground- and aircars, even wagons. Everything shone clean and gleaming as if the influence of the River had kept off decay.

He noticed that the nearest ring of encampments intersected other, apparently older and larger, rings. There seemed to be no center to the pile.

“The River has moved, or shrunk,” he said.

“Both, I think.” Peachthief pointed to the right. “Look, there’s an old war-place.”

A big grass-covered mound dominated the hillcrest beside them. Jakko saw it had metal-rimmed slits in its sides. He remembered history: how there were still rulers of people when the River’s tendrils first touched Earth. Some of the rulers had tried to keep their subjects from the going-out places, posting guards around them and even putting killing devices in the ground. But the guards had gone themselves out on the River, or the River had swelled and taken them. And the people had driven beasts across the mined ground and surged after them into the stream of immortal life. In the end the rulers had gone too, or died out. Looking more carefully, Jakko could see that the green hillslopes were torn and pocked, as though ancient explosions had made craters everywhere.

Suddenly he remembered that he had to find his father in all this vast confusion.

“Where’s the River now? My father’s mind should reach there still, if I’m not too late.”

“See that glittery slick look in the air down there? I’m sure that’s a danger-place.”

Down to their right, fairly close to the rim, was a strangely bright place. As he stared it became clearer: a great column of slightly golden or shining air. He scanned about, but saw nothing else like it all across the valley.

“If that’s the only focus left, it’s going away fast.”

She nodded and then swallowed, her small face suddenly grim. She meant to live on here and die without the River, Jakko could see that. But he would be with her; he resolved it with all his heart. He squeezed her hand hard.

“If you have to talk to your father, we better walk around up here on the rim where it’s safe,” Peachthief said.

“No-oo,” spoke up a moondog from behind them. The two humans turned and saw the three sitting in a row on the crest, staring slit-eyed at the valley.

“All right,” Peachthief said. “You wait here. We’ll be back soon.”

She gripped Jakko’s hand even tighter, and they started walking past the old war-mound, past the remains of ancient vehicles, past an antique pylon that leaned crazily. There were faint little trails in the short grass. Another war-mound loomed ahead; when they passed around it they found themselves suddenly among a small herd of white animals with long necks and no horns. The animals went on grazing quietly as the humans walked by. Jakko thought they might be mutated deer.

“Oh, look!” Peachthief let go his hand. “That’s milk—see, her baby is sucking!”

Jakko saw that one of the animals had a knobby bag between its hind legs. A small one half-knelt down beside it, with its head up nuzzling the bag. A mother and her young.

Peachthief was walking cautiously toward them, making gentle greeting sounds. The mother animal looked at her calmly, evidently tame. The baby went on sucking, rolling its eyes. Peachthief reached them, petted the mother, and then bent down under to feel the bag. The animal sidestepped a pace, but stayed still. When Peachthief straightened up she was licking her hand.

“That’s good milk! And they’re just the right size, we can take them on the airship! On the waycars, even.” She was beaming, glowing. Jakko felt an odd warm constriction in his chest. The intensity with which she furnished her little world, her future nest! Their nest . . .

“Come with us, come on,” Peachthief was urging. She had her belt around the creature’s neck to lead it. It came equably, the young one following in awkward galloping lunges.

“That baby is a male. Oh, this is perfect,” Peachthief exclaimed. “Here, hold her a minute while I look at that one.”

She handed Jakko the end of the belt and ran off. The beast eyed him levelly. Suddenly it drew its upper lip back and shot spittle at his face. He ducked, yelling for Peachthief to come back.

“I have to find my father first!”

“All right,” she said, returning. “Oh, look at that!”

Downslope from them was an apparition—one of the white animals, but partly transparent, ghostly thin. It drifted vaguely, putting its head down now and then, but did not eat.

“It must have got partly caught in the River, it’s half gone. Oh, Jakko, you can see how dangerous it is! I’m afraid, I’m afraid it’ll catch you.”

“It won’t. I’ll be very careful.”

“I’m afraid so.” But she let him lead her on, towing the animal alongside. As they passed the ghost-creature Peachthief called to it, “You can’t live like that. You better go on out. Shoo, shoo!”

It turned and moved slowly out across the piles of litter, toward the shining place in the air.

They were coming closer to it now, stepping over more and more abandoned things. Peachthief looked sharply at everything; once she stooped to pick up a beautiful fleecy white square and stuff it in her pack. The hillcrest was merging with a long grassy slope, comparatively free of debris, that ran out toward the airy glittering column. They turned down it.

The River-focus became more and more awesome as they approached. They could trace it towering up and up now, twisting gently as it passed beyond the sky. A tendril of the immaterial stream of sidereal sentience that had embraced Earth, a pathway to immortal life. The air inside looked no longer golden, but pale silver-gilt, like a great shaft of moonlight coming down through the morning sun. Objects at its base appeared very dear but shimmering, as if seen through crystal water.

Off to one side were tents. Jakko suddenly recognized one, and quickened his steps. Peachthief pulled back on his arm.

“Jakko, be careful!”

They slowed to a stop a hundred yards from the tenuous fringes of the River’s effect. It was very still. Jakko peered intently. In the verges of the shimmer a staff was standing upright. From it hung a scarf of green-and-yellow silk.

“Look—that’s my father’s sign!”

“Oh, Jakko, you can’t go in there.”

At the familiar-colored sign all the memories of his life with his family had come flooding back on Jakko. The gentle rationality, the solemn sense of preparation for going out from Earth forever. Two different realities strove briefly within him. They had loved him, he realized that now. Especially his father . . . But not as he loved Peachthief, his awakened spirit shouted silently. I am of Earth! Let the stars take care of their own. His resolve took deeper hold and won.

Gently he released himself from her grip.

“You wait here. Don’t worry, it takes a long while for the change, you know that. Hours, days. I’ll only be a minute, I’ll come right back.”

“Ohhh, it’s crazy.”

But she let him go and stood holding to the milk-animal while he went down the ridge and picked his way out across the midden heap toward the staff. As he neared it he could feel the air change around him, becoming alive and yet more still.

“Father! Paul! It’s Jakko, your son. Can you still hear me?”

Nothing answered him. He took a step or two past the staff, repeating his call.

A resonant susurrus came in his head, as if unearthly reaches had opened to him. From infinity he heard without hearing his father’s quiet voice.

You came.

A sense of calm welcome.

“The cities are all empty, Father. All the people have gone, everywhere.”

Come.

“No!” He swallowed, fending off memory, fending off the lure of strangeness. “I think it’s sad. It’s wrong. I’ve found a woman. We’re going to stay and make children.”

The River is leaving, Jakko my son.

It was as if a star had called his name, but he said stubbornly, “I don’t care. I’m staying with her. Good-bye, Father. Goodbye.”

Grave regret touched him, and from beyond a host of silent voices murmured down the sky: Come! Come away.

“No!” he shouted, or tried to shout, but he could not still the rapt voices. And suddenly, gazing up, he felt the reality of the River, the overwhelming opening of the door to life everlasting among the stars. All his mortal fears, all his most secret dread of the waiting maw of death, all slid out of him and fell away, leaving him almost unbearably light and calmly joyful. He knew that he was being touched, that he could float out upon that immortal stream forever. But even as the longing took him, his human mind remembered that this was the start of the first stage, for which the River was called Beata. He thought of the ghost animal that had lingered too long. He must leave now, and quickly. With enormous effort he took one step backward, but could not turn.

“Jakko! Jakko! Come back!”

Someone was calling, screaming his name. He did turn then, and saw her on the little ridge. Nearby, yet so far. The ordinary sun of Earth was brilliant on her and the two white beasts.

“Jakko! Jakko!” Her arms were outstretched, she was running toward him.

It was as if the whole beautiful Earth was crying to him, calling to him to come back and take up the burden of life and death. He did not want it. But she must not come here, he knew that without remembering why. He began uncertainly to stumble toward her, seeing her now as his beloved woman, again as an unknown creature uttering strange cries.

“Lady Death,” he muttered, not realizing he had ceased to move. She ran faster, tripped, almost fell in the heaps of stuff. The wrongness of her coming here roused him again; he took a few more steps, feeling his head clear a little.

“Jakko!” She reached him, clutched him, dragging him bodily forward from the verge.

At her touch the reality of his human life came back to him, his heart pounded human blood, all stars fled away. He started to run clumsily, half-carrying her with him up to the safety of the ridge. Finally they sank down gasping beside the animals, holding and kissing each other, their eyes wet.

“I thought you were lost, I thought I’d lost you,” Peachthief sobbed.

“You saved me.”

“H-here,” she said. “We b-better have some food.” She rummaged in her pack, nodding firmly as if the simple human act could defend against unearthly powers. Jakko discovered that he was quite hungry.

They ate and drank peacefully in the soft flower-studded grass, while the white animals grazed around them. Peachthief studied the huge strewn valley floor, frowning as she munched.

“So many good useful things here. I’ll come back someday, when the River’s gone, and look around.”

“I thought you only wanted natural things,” he teased her.

“Some of these things will last. Look.” She picked up a small implement. “It’s an awl, for punching and sewing leather. You could make children’s sandals.”

Many of the people who came here must have lived quite simply, Jakko thought. It was true that there could be useful tools. And metal. Books, too. Directions for making things. He lay back dreamily, seeing a vision of himself in the far future, an accomplished artisan, teaching his children skills. It seemed deeply good.

“Oh, my milk-beast!” Peachthief broke in on his reverie. “Oh, no! You mustn’t!” She jumped up.

Jakko sat up and saw that the white mother animal had strayed quite far down the grassy ridge. Peachthief trotted down after her, calling, “Come here! Stop!”

Perversely, the animal moved away, snatching mouthfuls of grass. Peachthief ran faster. The animal threw up its head and paced down off the ridge, among the litter piles.

“No! Oh, my milk! Come back here, come.”

She went down after it, trying to move quietly and call more calmly.

Jakko had gotten up, alarmed.

“Come back! Don’t go down there!”

“The babies’ milk,” she wailed at him, and made a dash at the beast. But she missed and it drifted away just out of reach before her.

To his horror Jakko saw that the glittering column of the River had changed shape slightly, eddying out a veil of shimmering light close ahead of the beast.

“Turn back! Let it go!” he shouted, and began to run with all his might. “Peachthief—come back!”

But she would not turn, and his pounding legs could not catch up. The white beast was in the shimmer now; he saw it bound up onto a great sun- and moonlit heap of stuff. Peachthief’s dark form went flying after it, uncaring, and the creature leaped away again. He saw her follow, and bitter fear grabbed at his heart. The very strength of her human life is betraying her to death, he thought; I have to get her physically, I will pull her out. He forced his legs faster, faster yet, not noticing that the air had changed around him, too.

She disappeared momentarily in a veil of glittering air, and then reappeared, still following the beast. Thankfully he saw her pause and stoop to pick something up. She was only walking now, he could catch her. But his own body was moving sluggishly, it took all his will to keep his legs thrusting him ahead.

“Peachthief! Love, come back!”

His voice seemed muffled in the silvery air. Dismayed, he realized that he too had slowed to a walk, and she was veiled again from his sight.

When he struggled through the radiance he saw her, moving very slowly after the wandering white beast. Her face was turned up, unearthly light was on her beauty. He knew she was feeling the rapture, the call of immortal life was on her. On him, too; he found he was barely stumbling forward, a terrible serenity flooding his heart. They must be passing into the very focus of the River, where it ran strongest.

“Love—” Mortal grief fought the invading transcendence. Ahead of him the girl faded slowly into the glimmering veils, still following her last earthly desire. He saw that humanity, all that he had loved of the glorious Earth, was disappearing forever from reality. Why had it awakened, only to be lost? Spectral voices were near him, but he did not want specters. An agonizing lament for human life welled up in him, a last pang that he would carry with him through eternity. But its urgency fell away. Life incorporeal, immortal, was on him now; it had him as it had her. His flesh, his body, was beginning to attenuate, to dematerialize out into the great current of sentience that flowed on its mysterious purposes among the stars.

Still the essence of his earthly self moved slowly after hers into the closing mists of infinity, carrying upon the River a configuration that had been a man striving forever after a loved dark girl, who followed a ghostly white milch deer.

© 1980 by James Tiptree, Jr.

Originally published in Interfaces, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon (1915-1987), who before turning to writing had been an artist, a newspaper art critic, a World War II photo-intelligence officer, a chicken farmer, a CIA agent, and a research psychologist. After earning her PhD in psychology in 1967, she started writing science fiction short stories—using a pseudonym to protect her new academic career, and a male name to fit in better at the magazines. As Tiptree, she published two novels and eight collections of short stories. She won two Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards (one as Raccoona Sheldon, an occasional second nom de plume), and one World Fantasy Award. An award for gender-based science fiction was named after Tiptree in 1991, and a biography by Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, was published in 2006.

NOVEL EXCERPT: Silver on the Road (Saga Press)

Laura Anne Gilman | 10,170 words

PART ONE
FLOOD

Izzy leaned against the railing and watched the sun rise over the far end of town. Flood wasn’t much to look at, she’d admit. Sun-greyed planks and local stone: there wasn’t much point in prettifying with paint when the wind and sun would only beat you back down to plain again.

The way the story’d been told her when she was younger, a gospel sharp had ridden into town before there was much of a town at all, just the saloon and a couple-three homesteads, looked around, and pronounced that they’d be the first washed away, come the Flood. The name’d stuck. But the sharp had been wrong about the important thing: Flood had dug its roots in deep and stuck, too. In addition to the saloon, there were a dozen storefronts now, and a bank, and thirty families living within town limits. “Thirty pieces of silver,” the boss called them, and would shake his head and laugh, and say they’d gotten that story all wrong, too.

The boss had a sense of humor, Izzy thought. Not a man could say he didn’t.

The sun was stretching higher over the rooftops now, and the town was beginning to stir; she could hear Missus Wallace calling to her chickens, and then the blacksmith’s hammer rang out, a pause followed by a series of steady blows. Hiram was always the first to work each morning, and his forge never cooled entirely, the scent of brimstone and hot metal always in the air. Izzy breathed in, letting the familiar stink settle in her chest. Her bare toes curled and relaxed against the dry wood of the verandah, the morning sun touching her upturned face.

Winters were bad, dry and cold, and in summer, the sun got hot and the ground got hotter and mostly folk stayed under shade if they could. Just now, though, Flood was nearly perfect.

At that thought, a shiver ran through her, and she wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders against an imagined chill. Today, she thought. I have to decide today.

As though her thought had called him, a voice came from the doorway. “Izzy. What are you doing awake so early?”

She didn’t turn around but smiled, a gentle curve of her lips the way she’d seen the older women do, that she’d practiced late at night, looking in the mirror over her washstand until she got it right. “It’s my birthday.”

“All the more reason to sleep in.” The boss’s voice was deep and smooth, and always gentle, even when he was angry. In all her years, Izzy realized, she’d never heard him yell. Angry, yes; his temper was legendary. But he never yelled. He never had to; nobody ever dared cross him. Flood was his town, not the buildings or the land, but the people who lived here. They were all of them his, one way or the other.

“I’m sixteen today,” she said, as though testing the words.

“Yes. You are.”

He had been the one to draft her indenture papers fourteen years before; he knew what that meant.

She turned, keeping the smile on her lips with an effort. He was standing in the doorway of the saloon, the morning light silvering his dark hair, two tin mugs in his hands. The mugs were battered and dented, and tendrils of steam swirled over the tops as though an unseen finger stirred them. She could smell it from where she stood: chicory and coffee, and a chunk of sugarcane boiled with it.

She stepped forward and took one of the mugs, the thick dark brew sloshing slightly against the rim. “Thanks.” He was the boss; he shouldn’t be bringing her coffee.

“Not every day a girl turns a woman,” he said, as though knowing what she’d been thinking. “And today’s twice special. No doubt you’ve been thinking on it for a while.”

She sipped the bittersweet brew, wincing as it burned the inside of her mouth, and nodded. For months now, tangled thoughts that each time she thought them neatly sorted would tangle again while she slept. He knew. He always knew, even when he didn’t say. That was the boss through and through, though; you had to come to him.

His smile turned faintly mocking. “Well, if you’re determined to be awake, put yourself to use. Marie tells me Catie’s got the headache, so Ree could use help in the kitchen.”

It might be her birthday, but there was always work to be done, and idle hands were the devil’s tools. She nodded again.

“And Izzy?” he said before going back inside.

She looked up.

“Happy birthday, dearling.”

She smiled then for real, cupped her mug in her hands, and turned back in time to see the sun come full above the horizon, turning the sky from dark to pale blue.

Sixteen. Fourteen years since she’d first come to Flood. This was the only home she’d ever known: the two-story building of the saloon and the wide, rutted street in front of her, and the flickerthwack of cards laid on faded green felt, the clink of glasses, the scrape of bootheels on wooden planks, and the stink of sweat and hope and desperation on human skin.

Flood was home, the only one she could imagine. But she was sixteen now. A woman grown in the eyes of the law, and her indenture ended.

Everything changed. If she wanted it to.

• • • •

Ree was already arms-deep in work when Izzy slipped through the kitchen doorway. The morning air might be cool, but the kitchen was steamy-warm already, the smell of bread baking mixing with the tang of fresh meat, and the sharp, warm spice that tasted like licorice. Her mouth watered, anticipating. “Good morning, Ree. Boss said you could use some help?”

“Knead dough,” the cook said shortly, not looking up from the haunch he was cutting up. Ree was stern and mostly silent, but he was that way with everyone, even the boss. He might’ve known it was her birthday or might not, and most probably didn’t care.

She made a face—breadmaking wasn’t her favorite chore—but tied a kerchief over her brow to keep the sweat from her face and reached for an apron hung on a hook to cover her clothing. She’d worn her best dress today, a brown gingham that had been made for her, not handed down and mended. She’d tried to add a new bit of ribbon to her bodice when she dressed, but her hands had been shaking so badly, she finally left off.

Izzy prided herself on steady hands and ordered thinking. Lapses in both irked her. The boss had put his finger on it and tangled all her thoughts again. He did that: she’d be going along with her day, and he’d say something out of nowhere, and she’d start thinking again.

Mostly, she liked that. Working through a problem, looking at all the details. But this wasn’t something she could think on forever. Today was her birthday. Today, she had to choose.

Izzy pulled the dough out from under its cloth cover and turned it into a bowl, digging her fingers into the spongy mass. Soon enough, her arms ached with the effort of turning it into something useful, but the quiet warmth of the kitchen and the repeating actions of her hands and arms let her thoughts go where they would.

Unfortunately, they seemed to go around and around, without cease. Her whole life, there were things other folk decided. Where she slept, what chores she did, and what lessons she was put to, even after she left school last year. Marie, who ran the saloon for the boss, had no use for what she called chickenskull girls. They could all read and figure as well as pour drinks and shuffle cards, know how to charm a stranger and listen to confidences. And most of the girls seemed content with that, night in and night out, the same routine safe and soothing as running water. Izzy, though, she kept thinking.

“Now leave alone.”

Izzy started, then realized that Ree was talking about the dough. She’d been kneading longer than she realized, and her hands were beginning to cramp. She shook her arms out, wiping them with the warm cloth he offered, and rolled her sleeves back down. Sweat had formed under the kerchief, and she lifted her braid to wipe the back of her neck as well.

Ree had already gone back to work, and she looked across the kitchen at him, frowning. He was a big man; sallow-skinned, round-shouldered, and bald. His arms were covered with lines of dark ink, and he never covered them, not even when the wind turned bitter cold and the horses grew their coats out thick. He was a good cook, good with the horses the boss kept, good with his hands when something needed fixing. He could have done anything, anywhere, pretty much.

“Why did you come here? To Flood, I mean.” To the saloon, she meant. To work for the boss, out of all his choices.

She’d never asked before. Never dared to. You didn’t poke into someone’s privacy unless they offered first.

Ree didn’t say anything for the longest time, and Izzy thought maybe he wouldn’t, until he did. “Nothing where I started for me. Nothing out there for me. People scattered, land shuffled like cards to whoever won. So, I went west, came here.”

She chewed on that a little while she turned the dough into its bowl, covered it, and set it on the shelf at the far end of the kitchen, where it could rest. Everyone who came to Flood wanted something: an answer, a Bargain, a way to get out of a mess you’d made. That was why you came to Flood. But most of them took what they got and moved on. If you stayed, Izzy thought, it was because the devil had need of you.

If you stayed, it was because you’d made a Bargain. But if you never asked what someone came for, you never asked what they paid.

“Was it worth it?” The question slipped out anyway, like she was still a little girl who didn’t know better.

Ree chopped a handful of carrots, shoving them off the board into the stewpot, every motion focused on what he was doing. If she had been rude, he didn’t seem to care. “For me, yes.” He reached for another bunch of carrots and the knife cut into them, a quicker, lighter thunk than the blacksmith’s hammer, but with the same steady rhythm. “This I know: when you deal with the devil, first know what you want, and what you can pay.”

Izzy opened her mouth to ask another question, but no sound came out. How did you know? she wondered. How could you know what you were able to pay, and what did you offer when you had nothing of value except what he already owned?

Flood was the boss’s town. He owned everything—and everyone in it. Including her.

For one more day.

Her hands clean and dried, Izzy wandered to the single window, waiting for Ree to give her another chore. She rubbed a finger against the pane. The glass was flawed, thick and wavy, but it let in light from the alley that ran between the saloon’s backside and the Judge’s office. A clowder of cats prowled there; Ree tossed scraps out for them every evening, but she’d seen the remains of rats and birds there, too. Like everything else in Flood, the cats served a purpose.

One more day, she thought, letting her fingers rest on the sill. “What’s out there?”

Ree knew she didn’t mean the alley. “Beyond Flood? Open space. Plains, mountains, deserts. Indígena, los nativos do país. Some homesteads, some towns. Go too much west, Espanhóis. Go east, cross the Mudwater into the States, there are cities. Lots more people.”

“How many more?”

Ree looked at her, his eyes dark and unblinking, until Izzy started to feel nervous. She had known him all her life, it seemed, but just then, he was nearly a stranger, thinking of things she’d never seen.

“More people than you have ever met. More people than in all of the Territory, north to south. Too many people.”

She had no basis for “too many people”; the words were only words. “Have you seen a city?”

He shuddered. “No. No desire to.”

She ran her fingers along the frame of the window and looked through it as though she might see something new. Nueva España didn’t like folk crossing the border; she knew that much. They considered the Territory unclean, dangerous, and everyone who lived there lost souls, to be saved or burned. But the stories about the States said people there didn’t care, so long as you could earn your way. If she wanted to, she could go to the States. Head across the River to Fort Cahokia, or all the way east to one of the cities, Boston or even New York.

And do what, once there? No one knew her, there. No one would even notice her. She thought about being somewhere nobody knew her name, tried to imagine living somewhere like that, and found the one thing that scared her.

• • • •

The kitchen only got warmer as the morning went on, and Izzy sighed with relief when Catie, Ree’s usual helper, came in to take over.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said to Ree. “Megrim this morning wouldn’t let go.” Then she saw Izzy. “Lord, child, don’t try to carry all that at once. Give that to me, here.” Catie was slender, red-cheeked, and blunt-spoken, and rumor had it she’d been born across the River, in the States, though she never spoke of it, or anything before coming to Flood two years before.

“Sit, eat something,” Catie said. “You’re still a growing girl, and if I know Sundays by now, odds are you won’t have a chance to sit again until supper.”

Izzy willingly sat at the long worktable and tucked into the corn dodgers and cold pork Catie handed her, then wiped the grease carefully off her fingers before rinsing her plate and cup. She waited a moment, but the two of them seemed to be knowing exactly where to be and what to do, with no more need of her. Izzy returned her apron to its hook and left them to their work.

It was still early by the saloon’s usual hours, and the main room was quieter than she was used to. Izzy knew that she should take advantage of the time, get to her usual chores before the day got busy. The saloon officially opened midmorning, but sometimes someone wandered in earlier off the road, and Iktan never turned anyone away, serving up coffee and whiskey to the men—and some women—who came in.

Instead, she sat on the wide wooden stairs leading to the second level where the living quarters were, tucked her skirts up under her legs, and watched the others.

Iktan was nowhere to be seen, although his apron and rag lay across the gleaming wooden bar that filled much of the left-hand wall. Young Sarah was helping Feeny set up the tables, the girl as usual more trouble than help. Alice, at ten the youngest and newest saloon girl, was sweeping the floor, while her brother, Aaron, wound the mechanism of the striking clock. They’d come to Flood over the winter, half-starved and terrified, dropped off by a stern-faced man with a road marshal’s badge. Their parents had been outlaws, and nobody else would take them, certain the twins would be trouble, too.

The boss had promised to beat it out of them, if so.

The boss had beaten her once. She had been their age and spoken rudely to a customer who’d insulted her. The boss had taken her side in public, but that morning, after the saloon closed, she had been summoned to his office. Marie had assigned her chores to keep her standing up the next day, for mercy.

The boss had a temper, yes, and a strong hand, but never undeserved. Every now and again, a gospel sharp would come to Flood. He’d set up outside the saloon—never coming in, despite the boss’s own invitation—and would preach for hours in his coat and collar, sunrise to sundown, about how the devil was evil, the devil was wrong, the devil was a risk to their immortal souls and ruining these lands, beside; that without him, the high plains would be fertile, the rivers lush even in summer, and no one would ever die of hunger or thirst or native attack.

Izzy had never been sick, never gone hungry, never been threatened by real danger—at most, a customer might tug at her braid or pat her backside until one of the women distracted him, took his attention back where it belonged. She was safe here.

She thought about that, and again about what she knew of the States, still in turmoil after their rebellion, and Spain’s holdings south and far west of them, where everyone bowed to the Church.

People didn’t bow in the Territory. Preachermen and gospel sharps here would call to you, cajole and harangue you, but nobody had to listen to them who didn’t have a mind to. You just went somewhere else until they were gone.

But no matter how much she thought on her options, of Nueva España or the States, or the wild lands far to the north, they slipped through her thoughts like trying to catch minnows, too slick to hold. She couldn’t imagine herself there . . . but she couldn’t imagine this, either, doing the same thing tomorrow she’d done every night before.

But she would be an adult, come sundown. She would be free.

Izzy had said the word “free” so many times in her head, she didn’t know what it meant anymore. Ree’s words came back to her: “First know what you want.” How could she know what she wanted when she’d never wanted for anything her whole life?

With the front doors open to the street, the sounds of the town filtered in: voices raised in greeting, the occasional clop of hooves or rattle of wagons, a horse’s neigh or dog’s bark. She heard the laundryman’s voice: fresh linens were being delivered. Inside the saloon, though, it was hushed, the occasional scrape of a chair or clink of a glass, Alice’s broom on the floor, and the sound of cards in the boss’s hands.

He’d come in while she was thinking, sitting down at his favorite table while everyone worked around him. His hair gleamed dark red now in the dusty light, slicked back and curled down to the turn of his collar, a neat goatee turning silver trimmed close against his bronzed jaw. Only his eyes never changed, golden brown and deep as the moon.

He knew she was watching him.

“What should I do?” she asked, not raising her voice a bit.

“Your cards, your call,” he said, slicing open a new deck and spreading it out underneath his hand. “All I can do is wait and see how they’re played.”

An entirely unsatisfactory answer. Izzy rested her chin on her hands, her elbows on her knees, and watched him deal out the cards to invisible players. Supple hands, strong wrists, his shirtsleeves pulled back to show the sinews moving under his skin. The working girls said he was a particular lover; only a few ever felt his touch, despite what the preachermen said. He liked women; he liked men. But he liked them willing. That was more than she could say about some of the men who’d come into the saloon. You knew them, the way they looked, the way they moved. You learned to tell, and evade, and not give them the chance to make trouble.

If they did, the boss gave them what they came for, twice over, and they never came back again.

“Tell me about my parents,” she said.

“They were young. And stupid.” He said it without condemnation; stupidity was a natural state. “In over their heads and looking for a way out.”

“But there wasn’t one.” She knew the story by heart but liked hearing him tell it, anyway.

“No. There wasn’t. They’d planted themselves in Oiwunta territory without asking permission, built themselves a house and had themselves a child, and never once thought there might be a price to pay.”

Everything had a price. Every resident of Flood knew that. Everyone who survived a year in the Territory knew that. “And then the Oiwunta came.”

“They came back from the summer hunting grounds and found a cabin in their lands, where the creek turned and watered the soil, and the deer had roamed freely.” He set aside the deck of cards and slit open another pack, fanning the pasteboards easily, frowning as he did so.

The backs of the boards were dark blue, pipped with silver. The last pack had been pipped in gold. They got a new shipment in from the East every month, and the old ones were burned so nobody could say the cards were worn or marked.

“That was offense given, thrice over. The Oiwunta would have been within their rights to kill everyone, burn the cabin down, and steal all that was within.” He paused, fingers splayed over the cards. “Although it’s easier to steal, then burn. They’re a tricky folk to predict, though.” He smiled, closed-mouthed, as though that pleased him.

The natives didn’t come to Flood, mostly; the boss said they had their own ways of getting into trouble, didn’t need him for it.

“But they didn’t,” she said, bringing the story back to her parents.

“They didn’t. They’d been watching, the Oiwunta had, watching what happened elsewhere when settler folk moved in, and they were smart—smarter than your parents, not that it took much doing. The strangers could stay, but they had to pay. Just once, but something that would tie them to the land, tie them to the welfare of the tribe. Their child.”

“Me.”

“You.” The boss shrugged, shuffled the cards, and laid down a new hand on the felt, all his attention on the pasteboard. “They could have had other children; if they wanted to make a go of it out there, they’d have to have other children, take in orphans, or hire help from somewhere else. But they were stupid, like I said. They refused. And the Oiwunta burned ’em out. Stole everything they had but left ’em alive.”

“And then they came here,” Marie added as she passed by, unable to resist adding her piece. Marie had been here then. Marie, Izzy thought, had always been here, much like the devil himself. She had the smooth skin and straight back of a young woman, but she had always been here, for as long as Izzy could recall.

“To the saloon?” she asked.

“To Flood,” the boss said. “And, eventually, here.”

Everyone who came to Flood came to the saloon, eventually. To see, to deal, to press their luck, or to pay homage. The newspapers back East called everything this side of the Mudwater the Devil’s West, but Flood especially was the devil’s town. He came and he went, but you could always find him there if you came calling. And people did, even if they didn’t always know they was looking for him.

“Nothing but the clothes on their backs and a single horse—and you, little mite, all wide-eyed and closed mouth, barely walking. Didn’t say a word, even when your daddy handed you over.” The boss chuckled, looking up at her then. “Thought I was getting a quiet one. Proof even I can be wrong.”

She remembered that, maybe. Her father was a hard-handed blur in her memory, and her mother only a soft voice and tears, but she remembered being handed over, the boss’s face peering down into hers, and him promising that she’d never be sick, never be hungry, never be lonely, so long as she worked for him.

The boss kept his promises.

“What happened to them after that?”

“They took the money from your indenture and they left town.”

“Where did they go?” She had never asked that question before, either, in all the times he’d told the story.

“Back south across the Knife? Or headed north, maybe. No idea.”

They weren’t his; he didn’t worry about them.

Izzy thought about that for a minute, then got up from the steps and headed for the storeroom. If the laundryman had been here, there were linens to fold and put away. Her birthday didn’t mean there weren’t still chores to be done.

• • • •

“You thinking of following them?” Sarah was nine and not a saloon girl; her mother was one of the faro dealers, so she helped out and generally got petted and spoiled by everyone. She perched on the edge of the worktable now, watching while Izzy worked.

“Of course not,” Izzy said, sorting the linens into piles, a familiar, mindless routine. “Why would I?”

“They’re your parents.” Sarah’s eyes went wide when Izzy shrugged. She liked hearing the stories, liked imagining the house she’d been born in, on the banks of a creek with fierce natives lined up outside on their painted ponies, strong and true. But the people who had birthed her had less relevance than the farmers and gamblers who came through Flood, and left even less of a mark on her life.

“You gonna stay?” Sarah’s voice was hopeful.

“I don’t know.”

Until now, it had been a story, like the story of how she came to Flood, only she could change this story, play out all the endings she could imagine. But at the end of the day, she would be sixteen for real. The term her parents had sold her into would end, and in the eyes of the law, she would be a legal adult. She could choose to sign an employment contract, name her own terms . . . or she could leave.

The possibilities taunted her, ticking down the hours until she had to give the boss an answer. Stay, and her future was decided. She would never be ill, or lonely, never be without food or shelter. It seemed foolish to consider any other choice, and yet, and yet. Izzy pressed her hands into the pile of linen and closed her eyes. And yet, the thought of remaining as she was filled her with upset, like a bird trapped inside a too-small cage. She was ungrateful; she was a fool for wanting more.

Especially since she could not say what that more might be.

“Izzy?”

“Take these to the storeroom,” she said, pushing the folded linens into Sarah’s arms. “I’ve other things to do.”

• • • •

By midafternoon, the upstairs rooms were filled with noise and voices as the women woke up, and the arrival of the Lees’ new baby too early meant that Rosa was called out for her healing skills, meaning Izzy added hairdresser and bodice-lacer to her usual chores. No matter how busy her hands, though, Izzy’s thoughts kept wandering, picking one possibility up to consider it, then setting it aside for another, the need to make a decision weighting her shoulders. Nueva España. The States. Heading north to the Wilds to make her living as a trapper. Settling down in one of the Territory towns, maybe become a storekeeper or marry a farmer. Stay in Flood. Leave Flood forever. Each time she thought she’d come to a decision, then a new thought would wind its way in and tangle the threads again, only now her chest got tight every time she thought of something new, the need to make a decision pressing against her and making it hard to breathe.

“You have wrinkles in your forehead, Izzy.” A tall brunette paused as she walked past the window seat where Izzy had taken refuge for a moment, and reached out to rub at Izzy’s forehead. “Men don’t like girls with worry-lines.”

“Men don’t look that high up,” Izzy retorted, batting at the helping hand. She was trying to fix her hair; a braid was fine for daytime, but she was due on shift soon, and the thick black mass needed to be pinned up neatly.

“Oh, here, let me do that. How someone so nimble with her hands can so muddle a coil, I’ll never understand.” Peggy settled in behind her, making swift work of rolling the braid up into a neat knot. “There you are.”

Izzy didn’t bother to reach up with a hand to check it; Peggy wouldn’t say it was ready if it wasn’t.

She tilted her head to look up at the older woman. Peggy had come to Flood seven years before, after her husband died. She had to be nearly forty, but despite her sorrow, her face was unlined now and she still laughed easily. Even the hardest customers relaxed when she rested her hand on their shoulder. “Have you ever been East, to the States?” Izzy asked, trying to keep her face equally calm.

“Not me, no.” Peggy didn’t sound surprised by the question, but then, Peggy rarely was surprised by anything. “My brother was born there, but we came out when he was only five.”

Her brother was a road marshal, one of those who settled disputes and kept the daily peace. A hard job, the boss always said, but some folk were born to it, and Tom was one of those. He’d ridden through town last year and visited with them for a while. He didn’t laugh the way his sister did, and kept the six-pointed star pinned inside his vest, but he’d smiled at her and given the young ’uns store-bought candy.

“And west, out to the Spanish lands?”

“Now, why on earth would I want to do that?” Peggy’s hands rested briefly on Izzy’s shoulders, her fingers warm and hard through the cotton of her shawl and dress. “Izzy, dearling, whatever is in that head of yours, with all these questions?”

Izzy looked down at her hands, rubbing fingertips together and feeling the soft calluses there. People came to Flood for a reason. But she hadn’t come here; she’d been brought. What reason did she have to stay? “Just thinking, is all.”

“Well, you think too much and you’ll be late for your shift. Go on; shoo, now.”

Izzy ducked back into her room to catch up a shawl to drape over her shoulders against the evening chill, and came back out just as the clock called four chimes. She went to the stairs and looked down; it was a quiet start to the night, with only half of the six gaming tables in use, but that would change soon enough. Catie was right; Sundays were always busy. She looked back up at the balcony, where Peggy was leaning against the railing. The woman smiled and winked, then went back into her room to finish her own preparations.

Peggy was content here. So was Rosa. So was mostly everyone. Why couldn’t she be the same?

Izzy was the only girl working that afternoon; Lisabeth had a bad head cold, and Alice was too young to work with customers yet. Sarah’s mother was working the far left table, dark brown hair piled elegantly on her head, a periwinkle-blue gown half-covered by her lace shawl, her pale, slender fingers distributing cards. Jack’s table was the other side of the room from hers, only two men at it just then, talking among themselves while they waited for a third. Jack had shed his jacket, his shirtsleeves gleaming white like the store-bought finery they were, emphasizing the odd coppery redness of his hair.

This was her home. She knew every pulse, every shift, the way she knew her own heartbeat.

Suddenly aware that she’d been moon-gazing, Izzy picked up a tray from behind the bar and began circulating around the tables, collecting empty glasses and filled ashtrays. As she worked, she looked over the crowd, habit and curiosity sorting them out. There were a few locals passing time and gossiping, a handful of strangers with the look of professional gamblers come to test their luck against the devil, and two men who sat shoulder-slumped at the bar, drinking too slow to forget but too fast to be calm. Only one woman among them all, watching the tables, wearing widow black trimmed with purple. That meant she was nearly out of mourning, or was out but decided black made her look exotic. Her dust-veil was tucked back, showing wisps of pitch-black hair and a pale, square face that had never seen the noon sun, not without a parasol, anyway.

Men came to Flood for a hundred different reasons, the boss always said. Women only came for one reason: revenge. Izzy thought that he would deal with this woman last, after the easier tasks were done.

Izzy waited patiently for Iktan to finish filling the new orders, then carried them to the main table, where the boss held sway, his hands sorting and delivering cards with nonchalance, as though gold and souls were not on the table.

Three men were playing him, two sweating, one too cool. He was the one with the worst hand, she thought in passing.

She delivered her drinks, then paused by the boss in case he had direction for her.

“What do you think, birthday girl? What do you see?” The boss’s voice was scented with the cigars he carried but never smoked, and the lighter taste of the gold-colored whiskey he drank a sip at a time.

Izzy knew what he was asking. They played this game often. “The woman.” She was the most interesting, of all the people here tonight. “She’s glad he’s dead. There’s something else she wants.”

“A lover? Scorned, or unresponsive?”

“Another woman.” Izzy didn’t know how she knew that; something about the way the woman’s head turned, the way she listened or simply how she wore her hat. “She hates another woman.”

“Ah.” He had already known, of course. But she felt a flush of satisfaction hearing his voice confirm her suspicion. People were so easy to read, sometimes. She finished delivering their drinks and turned to go.

“And that gentleman, last seat at Jack’s table?”

And sometimes, they weren’t so easy to read. Izzy studied the stranger from under her lashes, careful not to draw his attention. Despite that, he turned and looked directly at her. His smile was sly and sweet, and promised things she knew that she’d like. Izzy composed herself, looking her fill, until she had his measure.

“A charmer, that one. He’s winning and doesn’t care.” Most men cared very much. Whatever they brought to the table, they clung to—until they gambled it away in a moment of passion or hunger, and then the devil had them.

“Yes.” The boss agreed with her assessment. “Why is that?”

It was a question, and an order.

• • • •

When she’d been younger, Izzy could get away with walking up to someone and asking a question. Even if someone had been offended, they’d laughed rather than take it out on a child. Now she had to be more careful. She ghosted to the man’s elbow, her tray balanced on her palm, a saucy pitch she’d stolen from Peggy in her voice. “You like a freshening?”

“That’s all right, darlin’.” He had a soft voice, faded around the Rs and Ds, and he didn’t look up from his cards when she paused at his elbow.

“I can get you something else, if you like?”

He looked up then, and his gaze took her in, crown to toe. Close up, she noted that he’d dark blue eyes under thick brown lashes, and his crooked, sly smile was all the more powerful when he wasn’t trying for sweet. Izzy felt herself blush; there was no way not to, under such a look, but she made herself stand and take it.

She could tell that he wasn’t one of those men who came here for the women and not the cards, but he looked his fill anyway and didn’t seem to mind what he saw. “Your boss send you over to distract me?”

“If he wanted to do that, he’d send Molly or Sue.”

“Get me drunk, then, drinking his surprisingly fine whiskey?”

There was good whiskey and rotgut behind the bar; Iktan decided what you got, no matter what you paid. She let his wink go and tilted her head at him, curious. “Why would the boss do that?”

“Why, indeed? Because I’ve got a tidy pile of his house’s money under my palm?”

Izzy almost laughed. “He doesn’t mind that. The boss admires a man who takes chances and plays them well.”

“And to entice us in, he offers the only honest faro game in all the Devil’s West.” His smile was cheeky, his dimples showing, and there was laughter in his eyes, too, the way they crinkled around the edges and made him look older than he probably was.

“The devil’s table is an honest one,” Izzy said, not quite scolding him.

The crinkles around his eyes eased a little; he wasn’t laughing now. “So I’ve heard.”

She had his measure now: likely a professional gambling man, or maybe a law’s advocate, someone who held things close. A sharp man, either way. The charm was on the surface; she couldn’t tell yet what was underneath.

“You’re one of his girls. Young for it, aren’t you?”

“Sixteen.” She put her hand on one hip, shifting her weight the way she’d seen Molly do when she sassed a man.

“Still young for this world, barely a woman grown,” he said. “But good bones, bright eyes, smart mind, and a mouth that doesn’t say half of what that smart mind’s thinking. You’ll be a handsome woman soon enough.”

“Handsome?” Her pride was stung. “Not pretty?”

“Handsome’s better than beauty,” he said, leaning back in his chair, the cards under his fingers not forgotten but put aside, for now. “Lasts longer. Does better. A handsome horse, a handsome woman, they’ll never give you grief. Pretty is heartbreak waiting to happen.”

“That’s a man’s take on it. Beauty is power.”

He laughed and moved on his cards, proving he was watching what happened at his table, too. “Power is power. A good hand of cards, a bank filled with gold, a loaded gun, a pair of fine eyes and a bewitching smile . . . The trick isn’t what you’ve been given but how you use it.”

He studied his cards, then studied her again with the same look. “A young girl with wits and looks could do well beyond Flood.”

Izzy cocked her head, looking at him differently now, studying the new turn he’d taken. “Is that an invite, mister . . .”

“Kasun. Gabriel Kasun. You’re a bit young yet for me to be offering any invites to, missy, sixteen or no. But if you happened to be out front when I ride out, I would not be unwelcoming of the company. I’ve mentored before; not against doin’ it again for the right rider.”

She stared at him, her hand still on her hip, all sass forgotten. An offer like that to come along on this of all days, only a fool’d ignore it. A mentor, someone who knew the Territory, could teach her what she needed to know, how to get by on more than her wits. . . .

“You mean that?”

He was paying full attention to his cards, not her. “I don’t offer what I don’t mean, girl.”

“Iz-sobel. My name is Isobel.” Her full name felt odd-shaped in her mouth, but she didn’t want to use her nickname, not with this man. Not when he talked to her like that.

“Isobel, then.”

The weight of the tray in her hand reminded her she had other drinks to deliver. He might have watched her as she walked off: Izzy didn’t look back to find out. She made her rounds as though nothing had changed, watching the way cards were held, the shift and lean of bodies, keeping a tally of whose glass was nearly empty and who had waved off a refill already. She couldn’t afford to think on it, not while she was working, not when she was meant to be looking and seeing, not thinking.

Eventually, she made her way back to the main table and stood behind the boss while he finished a game, waiting while the players took their winnings or left their losings. In the brief space before new players came, she gave her report. “House is clean. Nobody cheating too obvious; nobody looking to cause trouble.”

“And the young man over there?”

“He’s a sharp, passing through. Likely wanted to see how the devil’s house laid down the cards.”

“And he is satisfied?”

“Said you run the only honest game in the West.”

“Hah.” The boss seemed pleased. “And so I do.”

“He said I was handsome.”

The boss skimmed her with his gaze and smiled. “And so you are.”

“And he thinks I could do well, outside of Flood.”

The boss put his cards down and swung around in his chair. Izzy quailed inside but stood her ground. He wasn’t angry, just paying attention, hearing what she was—and wasn’t—saying.

“You could. But not because you’re handsome.”

“Because you trained me well.”

“Exactly.” He turned back to the table, new players taking their seats, and she was dismissed.

• • • •

The rest of the evening kept them all busy, although true to her read, there wasn’t any trouble worth mentioning, not even an overenthusiastic drunk. She took advantage of a moment’s breather when she could, leaning a little to take the weight off her feet while she waited for Iktan to fill her orders.

“You all right, Izzy?” he asked, even as he poured out the whiskey and rye.

“I’m fine.”

Iktan didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t push, just slid the drinks onto her tray and let her be. He had to be nearly a hundred, his bronzed skin wrinkled like a dried apple, but there wasn’t a man in town who’d want to take him in a fight; the boss said he hadn’t been born so much as forged out of iron and stone, and there were some who claimed that wasn’t a joke.

But when she looked down at the tray, a stick of sugar candy was tucked between the glassware, tied with a scrap of pink ribbon. Birthdays weren’t generally fussed over, but that Iktan had remembered this one, specifically, made Izzy’s eyes itch. She blinked back the tears, and slipped the candy into her pocket for later.

Time slipped by, drinks to be served, reports to pass along to the boss. The gaming tables were all full and the noise level had risen considerably when Peggy, Molly, and William finally came down, dressed in their working best, to join the others already on the floor.

“Eat something,” Will said as he passed her then, his stern tone at odds with his boyish face and the welcoming smile he cast at a customer. “You look like half a shadow.”

Part of her rebelled at being scolded like a child, but that thought triggered the realization that their arrival meant it was past eight o’clock. Her breath caught; how could she have missed that?

Izzy looked around the room, catching a nod from the boss. Released, she ignored the supper waiting for her and fled up the stairs to her room, closing the door carefully behind her.

She had lived in this room for nearly four years, since she earned a space of her own rather than a cot in the room the younger girls shared. It was small, but there was a window that looked out over the front porch, directly into the top floor of the mercantile across the street, a narrow bed that squeaked when she turned at night, a chestnut dresser and a washbasin that had come all the way from the East, its bowl painted with green vines and tiny yellow flowers, and a wood-framed mirror set against the wall. She lit the oil lamp by her bed and stood in front of the mirror now. The last tracings of sunlight were gone, the oil lamp casting more shadows than light.

Sundown had come. She was free.

Izzy took a deep breath, watching the dim shape in the mirror do the same. She looked the same as she ever had: dark hair and eyes, the ruddy tones of her skin washed pale by shadows. Her teeth were good, and Molly had said once that her eyes were her best feature, round and wide-set. But she was nothing remarkable.

Yet the stranger had seen something in her. Handsome. Strong.

“A young girl with wits and looks could do well beyond Flood.”

Izzy made a face at her reflection. The cardsharp man—no, Gabriel his name had been, Gabriel Kasun—had thought she was unhappy here, that she wanted something more. She wasn’t . . . and she did. All the thinking she’d been doing, all the sorting and watching, and the threads of her thoughts had finally come clean and smooth, without her even noticing.

You trained me well.

The boss had taken her in, barely walking, and indentured her, the work of her hands and back at his command. Clothed her, fed her, trained her, to be . . . what? What did she want?

“Your cards, your call. All I can do is wait and see how they’re played.”

One thing she knew like her own breath: it was the devil’s game, life in the Territory, but he ran it honest. Mister Kasun had the right of that. The boss would wait to see what she chose; for the first time in her life, the decision was solely her own. She could do whatever she wanted.

Mister Kasun would ride out tomorrow morning. She could be there. And maybe, in the greater Territory or beyond, she would find what suited her.

Or she could stay. And be what?

Not a saloon girl, nor a shopgirl. She had considered both, off and again, and rejected them. She didn’t like the kitchen; she wasn’t much for the stables, nor being a shopkeep girl. She wanted more.

Riding with a mentor gave her options she hadn’t considered, hadn’t even thought to consider. Riders—”road vagrants,” Marie called them, not always kindly—had freedom, could go wherever they wished, do whatever they wanted, pick up whatever skill they thought handy . . . but they were loners, too. They could go anywhere, but they didn’t have anywhere to come back to, not really.

Izzy couldn’t imagine being alone. But crossing the River into the States, with all those people, their noise and bustle . . . she couldn’t imagine that, either. And Nueva España feared those who came over the Knife, the taint of the Territory; without something to offer, some skill or wealth, they would not welcome her. North held some appeal, but she lacked the skills to become a trapper or trader; Izzy knew she’d come to grief during their cold, hard winters if she went north. And it was a lonely thing there, too, she’d been told.

All these choices, but the truth was, this was her home.

The knowing of what she wanted rose up the way waters did from streams underground, so quietly you didn’t notice until you slipped on the slicked-down stone. All those choices, like the spread of cards facedown on the table, but she’d spent her entire life learning the devil’s game . . . and she was good at it. Good at seeing underneath the bluff to what people held, what they wanted.

She looked at the girl in the mirror, and the girl smiled back at her, quiet and sly.

Bargaining with the devil was tricky, but he didn’t cheat. He never had to. Ree had been right: the devil took nothing you weren’t willing to give. Her parents had taken money and handed her over to the devil they knew rather than the copper-skinned one they didn’t. They’d abandoned her, maybe with tears and maybe not, and it didn’t matter, because she hadn’t been their daughter, the only child of Alfonso Távora and Felipa Lacoyo; from that moment on, she’d been Izzy, indentured to the Devil’s House.

And she wasn’t that Izzy any longer. Sixteen and free.

Without thinking, Izzy rose, opened the door, went to stand by the railing, looking down.

The night was in full swing. Molly was sitting in someone’s lap; William was deep in discussion with the woman in black and a freedman, the three of them leaning against the bar while the others circulated, refilling drinks and flirting, making everyone feel at home, whether they were there to gamble, gossip, or just drink their troubles away. Most of the tables were still full, and the dealers were flipping cards smooth as butter.

Marie passed behind the boss’s table, her hand touching his shoulder as she went. To Izzy’s eye, he took no notice any more than he looked up to see her standing there, but she knew he knew where they all were, every moment of every day. They were his, for as long as their contracts ran, and the devil never lost anything he cared to hold.

And he knew the things you don’t even tell yourself. He just waited until you figured it out.

• • • •

Panic gripped Izzy when she woke to the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer already ringing out. The light coming through the window told her she had slept well past dawn, and she sat upright, her heart racing, before remembering that she had no duties to perform that morning.

Free.

She slipped from bed and washed up quickly at the basin, then brushed out and rebraided her hair, feeling the weight of it swinging between her shoulder blades. That done, she paused, staring blankly at the wooden brush still in her hand. With the end of her indenture, she had no responsibilities today, no chores that needed doing, no obligations or . . . anything. The lack felt like an itch under her skin, uncomfortable and awkward.

“And what do you do when there’s nothing to be done, Izzy?” she asked her reflection in the mirror. The words she’d heard nearly every day of her life came back to her, shaped by her own mouth but sounding suspiciously like Marie: “Find something that does need to be done.”

She didn’t have far to look, although the thought of it unnerved her enough that she thought for a moment to crawl back into her bed, pull the covers over, and pretend.

She placed the hairbrush on her dresser, smoothed the fabric of her skirt, and left the room.

All the bedroom doors were closed, and no one else seemed to be about, although there was the usual muted clatter coming from the kitchen when she came down the stairs. The tables were covered with their usual sheets to keep dust and dirt off the felt, the chairs tipped forward or stacked against the far wall. Somehow, she had thought that everything would change today. Instead, it felt exactly the same.

A door opened and shut above her, the wood creaking the way it always did, and someone shuffled into another room. When the saloon was open, everyone wore hard-soled shoes that tap-tapped merrily on the wood. After hours, though, the women wore sheepskin slippers, upswept hair came down over shoulders, and tired faces smiled only when they wanted to, the saloon a refuge rather than a place of business. Izzy felt guilty for wearing her shoes this early, as though she were making too much noise, but the thought of facing this in slippers . . . Izzy blanched. No, for this, she would be dressed and ready.

The boss was in his office, coffee by his elbow, the steam rising lazily into the air while he entered figures into the ledger book.

“You’re up early again, dearling.” He didn’t look up when she paused in the doorway. The boss’s office wasn’t exactly forbidden; she’d been in there often enough, usually when being scolded. But she waited anyway, and finally he sighed, closed the ledger book, and looked up at her.

The boss hadn’t aged in all the time she’d known him, but he looked . . . tired this morning. There were no windows in his office, but she thought sunlight might pick out a few more silver strands in his dark blond hair. He was clean-shaven today, his shirt open at the neck, vest undone and no cravat around his neck, so she could see his Adam’s apple move when he spoke.

“I didn’t sleep well,” she admitted.

“Not well or not at all?” He pointed at the chair opposite his desk, and she sat in it obediently. Unlike yesterday, she wasn’t wearing her best, just a simple brown wool dress that she thought made her look older, more serious. She crossed her feet at the ankle to keep from tapping her toes nervously on the floor. What had seemed so obvious, so plain, before she fell asleep last night now fluttered like a butterfly, too flighty to consider.

“Not well—barely at all,” she admitted. Her fingers twisted together in her lap, and she sighed, giving up on any pretense of maturity, solemnity, or dignity. “My indenture ended last night.”

“So it did.” He was giving her his full attention now, his eyes still arrowhead-sharp, the brown tinged with gold, his skin sun-weathered and creased. She’d always liked this look best on him. “A grown woman with her life spread out in front of her.”

His tone was teasing, but his expression was serious. She nodded, and suddenly the words, rather than being locked up in her throat, flowed easily.

“I’ve been thinking. Like you said yesterday. I’ve considered my options, and I want to stay. I want to work for you. Not the saloon, not . . . I don’t want to work the back rooms or the bar. I want to work for you.”

It had sounded better, clearer, when she’d rehearsed it in her head, lying in her bed last night. Izzy felt her skin flush, and she looked down at her fingers again, embarrassed.

He wasn’t going to make this any easier, reverting to the formal posture and voice he used when someone came calling for a Bargain. “What is it that you want, Isobel Lacoyo Távora?”

The sound of her family name, her birth name, brought a flash of memory, voices and warmth, but she pushed it away. The past was past. Her future was what mattered now.

“Respect.” There was no thought of lying to him or shading the desire. There was no point: if she were to bargain with the devil, she needed to be honest. This was what she wanted, what she had been bought and trained for. “Power, maybe.” You could not have the first without the second; she knew that. “To be part of what you do. To help . . .” Her mouth was so dry, but she managed to get the words out. “To be part of all this.”

“And you think to find that here, in this House? To be my faithful right hand in all doings?” He smiled, and it was both sweet and cold. “You want Marie’s job?”

“I . . . Maybe? Someday, yes.” Izzy licked her lips nervously. This wasn’t going the way she’d thought it would. In her imagining, the boss had laughed and told her he’d been waiting for her to say that, and Marie welcomed her, saying her help would be priceless, and . . .

In daylight, she saw how foolish that had been. The devil was honest, but he gave nothing away, and Marie had no reason to share, no need of help.

“Or something else,” she said. “Some way I can help . . .”

“Help what?” He was still watching her, still with that smile. It should have made her angry or uneasy, but instead, her nerves steadied. She was a free woman come to make a Bargain. She knew that look, knew him, as much as any soul might. Izzy waited, and watched him in return, the way she had watched the woman in black the last night, the way she’d watched so many other people come and go over the years. She had lived her entire life in the devil’s house, and she had no fear of him. He had taught her that, as well.

“Help you do what you’ve been training me to do all these years,” she said finally. “To see what people are, what they want. What they need. And how to give it to them.”

She was right; she knew she was. She had to be right.

He leaned back, his left index finger tapping thoughtfully at his lips, his gaze unblinking as ever as they regarded her, looking bone-deep in that way he had.

“Marie runs this house,” he said. “She is my steady right hand and will continue to be so for many more years.”

Izzy refused to let her shoulders slump, but inwardly, all of her hopes and courage crumbled. If he had no need of her, then what?

The boss sighed, then brought both of his hands up in front of him and held them up, turning them back and forth as though to show he held nothing in his palm, nothing up his sleeve. He had strong hands, long-fingered and supple, and his right hand was unadorned, while his left bore a silver-and-black signet ring on his index finger. She had never seen that ring before—but a similar one, with a clear stone, encircled Marie’s right thumb.

“We each have two hands, of equal strength and dexterity. Each with things it does well, better than the other. All this time, you’ve seen the day-to-day business, the gathering-in and the granting, the bargaining and the dealing, the work of my right hand.” His voice changed again, slipping to a soft growl she had never heard before. “Did you never think beyond that, Isobel? Did you never wonder what the other hand held?”

“I . . . No.” She never had.

“Most don’t. I prefer it that way.” He let his hands fall, resting them palm-down on the desk, graceful even in stillness. The growl was gone, but his voice remained sharp. “The States see us as some empty wilderness to be claimed and tamed, while Spain and their holdings call us evil, a cluster of heathens and sinners in need of cleansing—by sword and fire, if they had their way. Both sides press on us, coveting us. Those who leave their homes and come here, who cross into our borders in search of something, even if they never make their way to Flood, they see more clearly what the Territory means, but even so, they see only the one side . . . until they need the other. Then they grab onto it, with desperate strength.

“The right hand gathers and gives, visible to all. But the left hand, Isobel, the manu sinistra? It moves in shadows, unseen, unheard . . . until I deem it time for it to be seen and heard. And when it moves, its work cannot be undone. It is the strength of the Territory, the quick knife in the darkness, the cold eye and the final word.”

She looked up, away from his hands, and was caught by a gaze the burnt gold of the morning sun.

“I have been lacking a left hand for too long. Are you strong enough for that, Isobel née Lacoyo Távora? Is the iron in your spine, the fire in your blood, ready for my forging?”

Née? Marie was née too when she introduced herself. Marie née Aubertin. Izzy didn’t let herself hesitate, didn’t let herself feel fear. “Yes.”

“And what do you have to offer in return?”

She had nothing. Everything she owned, everything she carried, belonged to him. “Myself,” she said. “All I have is myself.”

“I accept your terms,” he said abruptly. “Marie will write up your new papers.”

Then his eyes faded to the more soothing, familiar brownish-gold, and the smile in them was familiar, and fond. “They won’t be ready for several hours. You have this day of freedom, dearling. Go, enjoy it.”

© 2015 by Laura Anne Gilman.

Excerpted from Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman.

Published by permission of the author and Saga Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Anne is the author of the popular Cosa Nostradamus novels and novellas, and the Nebula award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy. Her latest project is Silver on the Road, the first in the Devil’s West series from Saga/Simon & Schuster, beginning in October 2015. She has also dipped her pen into the mystery field as well, writing as L.A. Kornetsky (Collared, Fixed, Doghouse, and the forthcoming Clawed). A member of the writers’ digital co-op Book View Café, she continues to write and sell short fiction in a variety of genres, selling most recently to the anthologies Genius Loci and Temporally Out of Order (2015).

NOVEL EXCERPT: A Borrowed Man (Tor Books)

Gene Wolfe | 5,100 words

1
From the Spice Grove Public Library

Murder is not always such a terrible thing. It is bad, sure, sometimes awfully, awfully bad. But only sometimes. I have been lying here on my shelf trying to figure out why I wrote all this, and I think maybe that is it. The law is not perfect.

You kept reading! All right, here we go.

I am really a young guy behind an older guy’s face; you must understand that or you will not understand half the stuff I am going to tell. I was a mystery writer, a good one. You must know about the truckloads of his memories I am carrying from all his brain scans; so please keep them in mind all the time, just like I have to.

I live here, on a Level Three shelf in the Spice Grove Public Library. Our shelves are sort of like furnished rooms, if you have ever lived in one of those. About like furnished rooms, only three walls instead of four. There is a roll-up bed and some chairs, and the little table I have got this screen I borrowed on. I am not supposed to have the screen, but when the library is closed we can do just about whatever we want. There are the ’bots, sure; but sometimes they cannot seem to tell us from you fully humans. Sometimes I wish I could peek inside one and see how it thinks. Not that I believe that would really work. I know it would not.

Have I said there is a curtained-off part with a toilet and a washbowl? No, not yet. Well, there is; only when I want to take a shower I have to go to the shower room, and I am not supposed to until after six.

Unless we are checked out, or at least taken to a table for consultation, we cannot leave our shelves until the library closes. We sleep here, shit here, and wash here. You have caught on to that already, I guess. At first it is not as bad as you might think. One time I saw a girl whose tits read: everything for a peaceful life. All right, I have got a peaceful life. Also I will get a peaceful death, when they burn me and death comes again. Only after a while you want more, and death comes again way, way too quick for anybody who never gets borrowed. Just the same . . . Well, you know. Naturally having you, my reader, in the back of my mind so much worries me.

I have been borrowed twice, thanks to all this about Colette, the locked doors, and my old book. Colette will come back next year and borrow me again. I have seen to it. I am called E. A. Smithe, just like I was—I mean, the first me—and I am really just like you. I ought to say that before we get in too deep. We reclones are people, even if we do not count as human beings with you fully human ones. She knew that.

My watch had struck two when she stopped to stare up at me; I sat there trying not to grin and liked looking at her. She was at least as tall as I am, with coal black hair, dream-deep blue eyes, and that paper white skin that burns in five or ten minutes if it is not protected from the sun. When a whole lot of fun and daydreams had passed, she whispered, “You might be the card that opens the book for me.”

I nodded. “There’s only one way to find out, madam.” It is not just that I look like him, I talk like him, too. Boy, do I ever! Really though, I talk the way he wrote exposition. I have to. Only I could not write like that if I wanted to, or nowhere except here when they do not know. They will not let me, just to begin with. Someday I would love to kick the guy who worked out all this business of bringing back writers but not letting them write.

Colette took my hand and I jumped down off my shelf. Then she took me to a table. You can guess how happy that made me. Being consulted is not nearly as good as being checked out, but it is good, too; and in three years I had not gotten consulted more than three or four times. It was July, and so far that year it had only been once, for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. In my dreams I could see the flames and feel the heat.

“Do you know about books?” Colette asked. She sat down, which let me sit, too.

So play it cool. I shook my head. “I don’t. I fear you’ve got the wrong man.”

“Yes, you do!”

“No. I know something about men. I know more about women than most men do, which really isn’t saying a great deal. I know a little about children, rather more about dogs, and much less about cats. I’m afraid that’s as far as my knowledge goes. Nothing worth mentioning about books or music or cooking or ten thousand other things.”

“I’ve researched you, Mr. Smithe. You wrote The Lantern in the Library, so clearly you know a lot about books.”

Hoping I was teasing her along, I shook my head.

“There’s a book that holds an enormous secret.”

I said, “There are thousands upon thousands of books that hold millions upon millions of secrets, madam. A few hundred of those secrets may be enormous. I won’t argue the point.”

“Not like this.”

“I see.” I waited; and when she did not speak, I asked, “What is this secret you seek?”

“I don’t know,” Colette said; she should have looked put out at the question, but she did not. She just smiled at me, and I felt she sure as hell knew.

So try something else. “What’s the title of this mysterious book?”

Still smiling she said, “I’m afraid I don’t know that, either.”

“You’re being very close-mouthed; I can only hope you have a good reason. With no more information than you’ve given, do you expect me to tell you the title?”

“No, I don’t; but I expect you to help me ferret out the secret.”

“I will—if I can. I am a library resource, after all.” I was still not sure I would be able to wrangle a checkout from her. “Knowing no more than you’ve told me, how can I be of help?”

“A man wants to change one page of a certain book to incorporate information he needs to conceal. Am I making myself clear?”

So spy novel stuff; I tried to keep a straight face as I nodded. “Perfectly.”

“Very well. How can he do it?”

“In any of a dozen ways, or so I would think. To begin with, paper books are now printed exclusively on demand. You can buy a download from a company that is selling the book you want and have one printed for you. You must know about that.”

“Tell me about it.” Colette was concentrating, so she had stopped smiling.

“There are machines. One can be bought or rented. You download the text. You may design the cover. If you do not, the machine will design its own. Those are very plain, for the most part, and you can save a bit of money by specifying two colors instead of four.”

She nodded, impressed; and silently I blessed a couple of librarians whose conversation I had overheard eight or ten weeks ago. “Say that I want to conceal my information in a standard reference such as Common Deciduous Trees of Our New America. I’d download a copy from the publisher, carefully scan the text and illustrations, then insert my information at an appropriate point. That done, I would rent time on a demand printer and binder.” I shut up and waited for a question or a comment, but she did not say a word.

“I would not have to go where the machine was, you understand, just rent the time. I would download the text I had prepared and specify one copy. The machine would print and bind the book in something less than a minute. The exact time would vary, depending upon the length of the text and the number and difficulty of the illustrations. The company that owned the machine would send me the book, with a bill for machine time and postage.” I waited for a question before I added, “In most cases, it would offer to print me additional copies at a reduced price, if I were satisfied and wanted more.”

“You said there were a dozen ways, I believe.”

“There are. Here’s a simpler one. Books—books other than textbooks particularly—often contain errors. When they do, the publisher may include an errata sheet correcting the error. ‘On page two twenty-one store age should read storage.’ This library tips those sheets into the back of its books.”

Colette nodded.

“If the information someone wanted to hide were brief, he could easily print up his own errata sheet. ‘On page two twenty-one, the formula such-and-so has been omitted.’ Do you like that one?”

She smiled. “You really are the person I need. I don’t know how I knew it.”

That was flat-out encouraging. It sounded like she might actually borrow me; so I smiled, too, hoping to hit the next question out of the park.

“Give me another. You said a dozen.”

“I feel sure you’ve thought of the simplest. He could write something on a flyleaf, or in the margin of a certain page.”

“I don’t think it’s as obvious as that.”

“There are chemical formulations that will disappear into the paper when they dry, only to reappear if the paper is warmed. When it cools, the writing vanishes again. Say that he writes his secret on a flyleaf. Conceivably it might be warmed by accident and some reader might notice it. But that would be extremely unlikely.”

“I didn’t know about the chemicals.”

“A great deal will depend on the nature of the information. The longer it is, the harder it will be to hide. If it can be expressed in text, that’s one thing. If it requires diagrams . . .” I pushed my shoulders up and let them drop.

“Suppose it’s solid. A physical object.”

I was not ready for that one, which was limiting and pretty crude. I said, “Ouch!”

“Yes, exactly. But suppose it is.”

Thinking hard, I said, “It would have to be quite small.”

“And flat, right?”

“Wrong. A pin might be pushed into the binding of a clothbound book and go unnoticed. A leatherbound book would be worse still.”

“Most books have plastic bindings, like this one.” She got a book out of her shaping bag and held it up.

“Of course, but almost anything is still possible. Is it information? Basically?”

“I think so.”

“Then it might be encoded in a microchip, which is a tiny physical object that can hold, well, a lot. A chip like that can be inserted in a mouse’s ear and used to locate and identify the mouse. If you really want me to help you, you’re going to have to tell me a great deal more than you have so far.”

“Not here,” she said.

“Where, in that case?” Here I was afraid she was going to suggest someplace in the library; I would have to counter that somehow.

She shook her head. “I doubt that we’re being bugged here, but it’s possible. If we are—let’s just say that anything we say may put us in danger.”

That sounded paranoid; I decided to play up to it for the time being. “They would bug the place you named before we got there.”

“Something like that. Yes. Come with me.” She had decided, and she jumped up fast. “I’m going to check you out.”

That was exactly what I had been hoping for, but I managed to hide my grin before we got to the front desk. Colette showed her library card to the ’bot we called Electric Bill, and it got us a fully human librarian who told her, “I’m afraid your card hasn’t been approved for reclones.”

Colette nodded. “I want to get it approved so I can check out this one.”

“We need a deposit. It’s quite substantial.” The librarian’s tone said Colette could not possibly have enough money.

Colette nodded again. “I suppose it must be. I’ll return him.”

“It will be refunded when you bring him back, assuming he’s not damaged. How long?”

Colette pursed her lips. “Let’s say I’ll keep him for ten days.”

The librarian looked skeptical. “For a period in excess of a week, I may be able to get you a special rate; but it will still be a great deal of money.”

Electric Bill asked, “Will we give her the long-term discount, ma’am?”

“With undemand.”

Electric Bill hummed. “My figure is forty-seven hundred for ten days, ma’am.”

Colette took it calmly enough, but to me it came as a pretty stiff shock; I had hoped the library valued me more highly. The librarian merely pulled out another card and waved it at Bill, who promptly coughed up a couple more. The librarian took them and passed one to me, saying, “July thirtieth.”

I said, “I’ll remember.”

“Not that we wouldn’t like to hang on to your money, Ms. Coldbrook.” Smiling, the librarian handed Colette the other card.

Maybe I should stop right here and explain that up until then I had not known Colette’s name. As we were going out of the library I said, “It will be quite a treat to be in your company for so long, Ms. Coldbrook,” and she told me to say Colette.

A hovercab came at her signal. I had seen hovercabs before, but I had never ridden in one. There is nothing scary about them—or anyway I was not scared when it seemed pretty clear that Colette had ridden in them a lot. The whole thing should have been a lot scarier than it was; of course Colette’s not being scared helped. “Taos Towers, please,” she told the sim who’d showed up in the hovercab’s screen.

It touched its cap, and the hovercab, which had been floating up like a bubble in still water, picked up speed enough to push us back in our seats.

“It’s quite a run,” the sim remarked. “Takes a load of energy, ma’am.”

“Which will be covered by your charge.”

It nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll have to deadhead back, though.”

“Unless you pick up another fare there. Which you probably will.”

“These exclusive places . . .”

I believe she ignored him. I was looking down at New America, something I had seen before only on maps. We flew from twilight into day while I watched. The mountains were much nearer now.

Colette leaned forward, whispering to the hovercab, and I felt it make a change of course. “Another thirty-four thou and I can buy out,” the sim told us.

Colette did not speak; so I said, “I suppose you’ll go humanoid?”

“ ’Course I will. That what you are, sir?”

Colette laughed.

I shook my head. “I’m flesh and blood. Almost the real thing.”

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

I was looking up, mostly. Also down and around.

“You have a wonderful face,” Colette told me.

My eyes left the sky; when I looked at her, I had to catch my breath. As soon as I could, I said, “No one else has ever thought so.”

“Of course they have! You mean they haven’t said so. You can’t possibly know their thoughts.”

“There must be machines for that.”

“There are. When I was still a student they took us to Long Lawn. They have one there to help them treat the patients. One of the other students volunteered, and they let us look into his thoughts. Imagine an anthill, but instead of just seven kinds every ant is different. Then they let us listen to them. It was like listening to the whole city talking, everybody talking at once.”

“You have an enchanting face,” I said to her. “Any number of men must have told you that. Please don’t be insulted.”

She laughed. “Half a dozen men and three or four women. The women were trying to sell me clothes and the men were trying to get me to take them off.”

“I’m not. Believe me, I know what I am.”

“A less-than human who contemplates the sky.” Said with that tender smile, it did not sting.

“How can anyone not? This is a lovely world, and until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how lovely it is. People are wonderfully fortunate to be born now. I remember a world whose sky was gray with smoke or black with dust.”

“That’s right, you have his memories. I’d forgotten that.”

I nodded. “Wonderful memories. Back in the library, on my shelf, that was what I did most of the time. For day after day I read and remembered.”

“We’re down to about one billion now. I’d halve that, if I could.” Colette paused, thinking. “It must have been lonely there in the library. Did you tell yourself your own stories?”

“Sometimes. Stories help, sometimes. When I tire of stories, I daydream about Arabella—Arabella Lee. Perhaps you know her work?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“She was a poet, and a fine one. Her poetry was lovely, although not half so lovely as she. We were married. . . .”

“Yes?” Colette pronounced the word in a way that made it seem she might really be interested.

“Only for two years; then she divorced me. I mean the original me, back in my own time. The me who wrote all my books.”

“How old are you? Not him, but the living, breathing reclone sitting beside me.”

When I did not answer, she changed it to, “How long has it been since you were published?”

I shrugged. “They told me, but I’ve forgotten.”

“You’re lying!”

“Yes. Am I that transparent?”

“Certainly. All men are. Women lie and lie—do you know that?”

I said, “I suppose I do now.”

“It’s one of the things men tell each other, and it’s true. We women lie and lie, because we’re good at it. Men generally tell the truth because they’re not.”

“I have nearly half a century of memories. Doesn’t that make me old?”

“Certainly not. I’m a good judge of age. Shall I tell you how old you are?”

I nodded and tried to smile, although no smile came. “I wish you would.”

“You’re twenty-one or twenty-two, but you could easily pass for thirty or more. Most people wouldn’t believe that you’re only twenty-two.”

Although Colette would and did. And it was not quite true, I decided, that I had an old man’s memories and a young man’s mind. That was what they had taught me to believe, but it was not really that simple. How old was my judgment? I think your judgment depends on both those things, but it depends more on something else, something I cannot put my finger on. On insight and this other thing. Only I am a lot younger than Colette thought.

I could study the mountains in the middle distance when we landed in what looked like the ruined garden of some abandoned estate. There were trees like towers of bells, and patches of golden-green sunlight. A waterfall roared about a hundred paces away. “This grass is fresh and very soft,” I said when our hovercab had lifted off, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to sit on the ground in that skirt.”

Colette nodded and waved her hand, leading me to a couple of stones about a hundred steps away. I dusted off both with my handkerchief, which got me a really great smile, and I sat on mine after she had sat down.

Opening her shaping bag, she took out the plastic-bound book she had shown me before. “Books like this are almost obsolete now. Did you know it?”

“The librarians have told me so. I would hate to believe it.”

“You must, because it’s true.”

I wanted to walk. That was a new feeling for me, or maybe only an old buried one coming back, one so old I had forgotten it. I got up and walked up and down, not fast but not slow. Books—real books printed on paper—were the heart and soul of a whole culture that had been mine. Cultures are like people, it seems. Sure, they get old and die; but sometimes they die even when they are not very old at all.

“I can see you’re trying to keep this age straight.” Colette herself was trying hard not to laugh.

Still dizzy with thought, I nodded.

“That’s good. Do it. I’ll stop talking until you sit again.”

Without paying much attention to what I did, I had gone to the edge of the waterfall. I guess it was pretty small, no higher than some of the belltower trees, but really pretty. I must have watched it for ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe more.

At last I went back to her. “You told me that books are almost obsolete, yet you carry that one in your shaping bag. That must mean that this secret you’re looking for is in there, or you think it is. You were afraid of our being overheard—afraid there were hidden listening devices in the library.”

She nodded, looking grim.

“Why would the police be snooping our conversation?”

“They wouldn’t be interested—not as far as I know, or at least not seriously.” She shut up for a long look at the book. “You may be right. I . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’ll certainly consider it. Probably for quite a while.”

I sat down again. “Are you yourself a scientist?”

She laughed and shook her head. “What makes you think I might be?”

“Our earlier conversation. I didn’t ask about a map that might give the location of buried treasure. I talked about formulas and diagrams, none of which you challenged. So it’s a scientific secret, or at least you think that it might be.”

“Yes, it might.”

“But you yourself are no sort of scientist. What are you, then?”

“What do I look like?”

I shrugged. “A wealthy, well-educated young lady.”

“Close enough! Let’s leave it at that.” She had been reading the book. “You mustn’t ask me how I know the secret’s in here.”

“In that case, you’d certainly lie if I did.” I smiled, remembering something she had said.

She nodded.

“So I won’t. Tell me this, please, and don’t lie. Is it in all copies of that book, or only in that one?”

“You . . .” She hesitated. “I don’t really know. What difference does it make?”

“A great deal, or so I think. If it is in this one alone, we need only look for a difference between this copy and the rest; but if it’s in all the copies, that approach would be quite useless.”

“If it’s in all the copies, it must be in the text.”

“Correct,” I said.

“While if it’s only in this one, there could be some difference in text. Or else something physical, like the chemical ink you talked about, or the errata sheet.”

“Exactly. Are you good with modern screens? I knew next to nothing about the wonderful computers of my own time, and I know less than nothing about the screens you use now.”

“No, not at all.” She paused. “Some people are fascinated by them.”

“You aren’t, I take it.”

“No.” She opened the book and closed it again. “I’m not. Those people are mostly boys, and they get into the mathematics—all sorts of things that machines can handle much better than we can.”

“We may have to enlist one of those boys in that case. Millions of books are available in digital form, or so I’ve heard.”

“Several digital forms, really.” She smiled. “I see I’ve let the helium out. I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

“Not necessarily. Why several forms?”

“Sometimes people want to see the author’s original text, prior to editing. In other cases there are several forms. Suppose a Chinese book has been translated into English. There could be three or four translations, and arguments about which translation is best.”

“Is that a translation?”

She shook her head. “I’ve researched it, and it was written in late English—in the language we’re speaking, in other words.”

“Is that the only language in use now?”

She shook her head again. “There are dozens of others.”

“In time—”

She nodded again. “Yes. I know what you’re going to say, and I agree: there may be a planetary language. But it hasn’t happened yet and perhaps it never will.”

“Since we don’t have to worry about translations, what do we have to worry about? The author’s original text?”

She smiled. “You should know.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You wrote it.” She handed me the book.

I glanced at the title page and shook my head. “I see I did, but this one must have been written after my death. I don’t remember it at all.”

“Oh, come now!”

“I meant almost. After my last scan, in other words, and nobody thought it was worthwhile to make another. I suppose I wasn’t selling all that well. As to the author’s—as to my original text . . .”

“Yes? Tell me!”

“I don’t think we have to worry. I wasn’t generally edited a lot. You couldn’t hide an enormous secret in minor corrections of punctuation and the like, or I don’t see how you could.”

“And it would have to be something you, the author, could see.”

“Which is why you thought I might be the one to help you?”

“Exactly. I’ve talked to experts on codes and ciphers. Nothing they told me seemed to lead anywhere; then I thought of you. Are you sure you don’t know what you put in this book?”

“I am.” I opened the book and read a few paragraphs. “It seems to be in my style, or something very near it, so I doubt the title page is lying. I don’t recall writing it, but the copyright date must—”

“What’s the matter?”

“I just thought of something, that’s all. You knew where these stones were.”

She nodded.

“So you’ve been here before. Isn’t it possible that the hearers you fear are listening to us? That they’ve bugged it?”

“I doubt it. It’s been almost three years since I was here last.”

“You sat on these stones.”

She nodded.

“And he sat on this one I’m sitting on.”

“Oh, stars! Now you’ll want to know who he was, and whether I still care about him, and how much I cared about him when I did, and whether we slept together a lot, and if he and I—”

I had raised my hand. “No!”

“You don’t have to shout at me.”

“I wasn’t shouting, but if it seemed like that to you, I apologize most humbly. All I’m saying is that this site could be bugged. Perhaps it’s unlikely, but it’s certainly possible.”

“How about over there?” She pointed across the stream.

I agreed.

The stream was narrow and deep, with a fast current. The land on the other side was rough with broken building stones. We walked slowly, I wearing the one pair of low shoes that was all I had, and Colette in screw-heeled fashion boots. I wondered how soon she would want to stop. Now I think she was probably thinking something like that about me.

After a while she said, “Not all the animals here are harmless, you know.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t.”

“Some of the dangerous ones have been killed off; but they keep coming back, bears and wolves, and panthers that look like big Siamese cats.”

“Were they less dangerous near the waterfall?” We were still walking.

“Yes, because there was no scent trail for the animal to pick up. We’re leaving one now.”

I nodded. “Then let’s stop and talk here.”

“There’s no place for the hovercab to land.”

“We can go back.”

“If anything’s tracking us, we’ll meet it. You realize that, I hope.”

“In that case, the sooner we start back, the safer we’ll be.”

“Not if they’re listening.” She paused. “I know you’re right—they might have found out about that spot.”

“Who are they? Do you know?”

“First I want to sit down. Isn’t that terrible?”

I shook my head. “We’ve walked quite a distance, and you’re wearing screw heels. I didn’t think we’d come this far.”

We went back to the stream. The water was well below ground level there, and we sat on the bank. We hadn’t been there long before she pulled off her boots and splashed the water with her feet. I pulled off my shoes and stockings, and did it, too.

© 2015 by Gene Wolfe.

Excerpted from A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe.

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

Gene Wolfe is one of the most admired and respected living writers of SF and fantasy. He is the author of The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the bestselling The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, as well as among many others including Soldier of the Mist, The Sorcerer’s House, Home Fires, The Knight, The Wizard, Peace, and The Book of the Long Sun. He is also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which is collected in many volumes over the last four decades, most recently in The Best of Gene Wolfe. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, and multiple Nebula and Locus awards, among other honors. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In 2012, he was awarded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.

Interview: Marc Goodman

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7,300 words

Security expert and futurist Marc Goodman has over twenty years in law enforcement working with organizations such as Interpol, the UN, NATO, the LAPD, and the US government. He’s also the founder of the Future Crimes Institute, and an advisor for Singularity University. His new book is called Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It.

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.

Your new book is called Future Crimes; tell us how this book came about.

I’ve worked in high-tech crime investigation for many years, and I’ve watched the flow of technology and the pace of Moore’s Law, and I’ve been fascinated by how criminals are focused on all these next-generation technologies. I wanted to write a book explaining what’s going on in the digital underground to folks so they could learn more about what’s happening and how to protect themselves, their families, businesses, and the country.

A lot of the stuff you talk about in the book is actually happening already.

Yes. You know, it depends on the audience; some will be very well versed in the idea of hacking drones, and perhaps that’s the Wired audience. But the general public may have no idea that people are hacking robots, using AI to script denial-of-service attacks, and messing around with synthetic biology for bio-attacks.

I like to think that I’m pretty up on this stuff, but I was frankly shocked by a lot of the things I discovered. Anyone listening to this is going to learn some things they definitely didn’t know before.

There is a tremendous amount going on out there that is truly at the cutting edge of science, and the fact that some of the Colombian narco-cartels have five-million-dollar R&D budgets for robotics is just one example; that narcos in Mexico are going to colleges of aeronautical engineering to hire drone engineers would be a surprise. AI, synthetic biology, robotics, big data, internet-of-things—crooks, terrorists, rogue governments, and corporations are trying to exploit this technology to the detriment of the general public.

Another thing that surprised me is that this is a book about criminals, but you start out talking about companies like Facebook and Google. Why start talking about these presumably legal companies?

I, because of my own background in law enforcement, was very much intent on writing a book about crimes, criminals, terrorists, and the like, and as I got more into the research I needed to look at where a lot of this data was originating and who else was using it. That very clearly pointed me in the direction of some companies, particularly some social media firms. The long and short of it is that all this data we are producing eventually leaks. Most of your listeners will be familiar with Moore’s Law, and in the book I created my own law, which I jokingly call “Goodman’s Law.” Goodman’s Law states that the more data you’re willing to produce, the more organized crime is willing to consume. For most people, a lot of that data is produced via their social media streams or GPS locations. Many people don’t understand the dynamics of why Facebook and some of the other social media tools are “free”; it’s the business models of those companies to take the data that you provide them willingly—and the other data that they’re able to deduce or gather through your camera, the microphone on your telephone, your GPS, your accelerometer—and divide into small groups they can sell at the highest rate to advertisers. That’s one side of it. The other side is how much of your social media data leaks to criminals; I point out in the book that Facebook, according to its own statistics, has 600,000 accounts compromised on a daily basis. For a lot of these cyber threats, I had to go back to the data and see how this data ends up in the hands of organized crime and others, and much of it leaks from third party aggregators.

To take one example that I found incredibly sleazy, you talk about how the dating site OkCupid, when you fill out this very personal data like “Do you want to have kids?” or, “How often do you drink?”—they’re actually taking that and selling it to companies that are going to pass it on to potential employers and the government. That’s their business model.

Let’s start with two of the big problems with this whole data-sphere, and that has to do with “free” and “Terms of Service.” Everybody thinks the internet is free; Facebook, Words With Friends, Angry Birds, Gmail—none of it is free. You’re paying with your data, your privacy, and at the end of the day Facebook makes, on average, between six and fourteen dollars a year on the average American. That’s how much they’re able to monetize them for, for selling off their data. I’d rather give Facebook ten bucks and say, “I’d like to keep my privacy.” They get away with this through their Terms of Service, which are ever-growing; I call them “Terms of Abuse” in the book.

OkCupid was asking people to fill out dating profiles, but then they got into much more personal stuff—sex, sexual orientation, and drug use. And people might think, “I use meth on the weekend, so I want to find somebody else who enjoys meth,” but what they don’t realize is that the minute they say they use cocaine—or meth, or ecstasy—OkCupid was dropping a cookie on their hard drive and taking that data and selling it to third parties.

We found out about this through a researcher who’s now at the Federal Trade Commission. Those third party companies are hired by employers to do background checks; you may apply for a job, not get the job, and never know it’s because OkCupid passed along that data point to an entirely unregulated data-broker industry. A multi-billion-dollar industry. And they can sell that data to the government and, if you happen to get into a DUI or car accident, don’t be surprised if somebody subpoenas your admitted cocaine use down the line. And people think, “Well, I don’t use my real name on OkCupid,” but there are dozens of companies that do data de-anonymization and are very clear that, even though your screen-name may be “Charlie1234” in San Francisco, everybody can work backwards from there and figure out exactly who you are based upon your IP address, MAC address, and other data that these folks gather.

You mention the Terms of Service, and I want to touch on that because I’m a writer, a lot of our listeners our writers, and according to the Google Terms of Service, you say that if JK Rowling had composed the Harry Potter books in Google Docs that Google would own all the rights to those books.

That’s what Google asserts and that’s what you agree to when you sign up. “I have read and agree to the Terms of Service” is the biggest lie on the internet. Facebook’s Terms of Service, when they started out, was a thousand words; they’re now at nine thousand. The US Constitution, by comparison, is only 4,400 words. The largest Terms of Service in the industry are PayPal’s: 36,000 words. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was only 32,000. If you added up all the Terms of Service the average American came up against on an annual basis, it would take seventy-eight days of reading around the clock to read through all of them. And they tell you all the different ways the companies can take advantage of you, for both free and paid services. The hundred dollars you pay AT&T for your cell phone service isn’t enough; they take all your cell phone traffic—who you’re dialing, what you’re surfing for on your cell phone—and they’re selling that to third parties.

Back to JK Rowling: When you sign up for Google, for any of their services, whether it be Google Voice or Gmail, you have to sign a waiver that says, “I hereby grant Google authority to read all my emails; to reproduce, copy, translate, perform, dramatize in this medium or any medium to ever be discovered . . .” When you use Google Docs to write your story or play, to draw your art, Google has claimed, and you have agreed to grant them, an unlimited license to use that data. So yeah, had JK Rowling written her books in Google Docs as opposed to Microsoft Word, in theory she would’ve granted Google the global license for her fifteen-billion-dollar empire.

I studied law as an undergrad, and there was this idea of conscionability in adhesion contracts, which is what these Terms of Service are: Would a court actually enforce something that’s so plainly unfair?

It’s a great question, and it’s one that people don’t ask enough. What I found is that the law is all over the place; in some cases they are found to be contracts of adhesion and non-enforceable, but on many other occasions they have been found completely legal. This goes back to the old software shrink-wrap; by opening up the package that the CD or DVD came in, you agreed to all of this stuff. And while Google has not specifically asserted those rights—and I don’t know how that would play out in court—there are many companies with similar Terms of Service that have had them upheld.

Just to show how ridiculous these Terms of Service are, I mention in the book an experiment done by a British gaming company called GameStop; for Halloween, they updated their Terms of Service to see if anybody read them, and they put in some language in the middle that said, “By clicking here, I agree to grant GameStop possession, eternally, of my immortal soul now and forever.” Seventeen hundred people that bought stuff on the website agreed to it.

If you go to McDonald’s, they can’t just put a sticker on the door that says, “By opening this door, you agree that if a member of your family dies of salmonella from improperly handled food, we’re not responsible for it.” Why is a software company allowed to do that?

I agree. That’s one of the basic questions I ask in Future Crimes. If you went ahead and bought a Ford and every three feet it stalled or crashed, the courts would not allow Ford to get away with that, but these companies do. There was a great example at a company called Nordstrom’s, an upper-scale department store; they started monitoring their customers inside their store. Most folks today have smart phones and most smart phones have got Wi-Fi and most people leave their Wi-Fi port open and running all the time, which leaks the MAC address, a unique identifier. Nordstrom’s wanted to more precisely track their customers inside the store so they could know how much time they spent in shoes or dresses or ladies’ underwear, and they were doing micro-geolocation of the customers. They told their customers they were doing this by placing a six-inch sign at the mall entrance in a way that nobody would notice it that said, “In an effort to serve Nordstrom’s customers better”—which is always the clue—“we will now begin tracking your location in our stores via your mobile phone and your Wi-Fi. If you do not wish to participate in this project, either turn off your phone before coming in the store, or don’t come in.” And so, merely by walking into Nordstrom’s, you have agreed to Nordstrom’s new Terms of Service. People refer to this as the “Cookie-ing of the Street” where all of the cookies we’ve had to deal with in virtual space are increasingly coming into physical space.

Speaking of geotagging and tracking your location, you mention some really horrifying ways in which criminals can take advantage of that information: You might take a picture of your kids, and you don’t know that it has the location of where it was taken embedded in the file and a pedophile could analyze that photo and identify where you live. Another example you give is that domestic violence shelters now tell women to remove the batteries from their phones because their abusive spouse could track them down, and have in the past.

There have been lots of examples of that sort of locational threat data leaking, certainly in the case of domestic violence. Not only did they tell folks to take the battery out, but they actually confiscate the phones when they go into women’s shelters; many of these shelters are in private locations to prevent those that are committing domestic abuse from finding their victims, and now they take those phones away and don’t even permit them. Even burglars are using it, too; people have posted pictures of high-end stereos on Craigslist and the geotagging data will be hidden in those photos, and burglars are showing up and ripping people off. I tell the story of a Taliban attack where they were able to blow up a bunch of Apache helicopters that were just delivered because the GPS coordinates of the photographs posted by the soldiers on the base leaked the location of the secret base.

I had some vague sense that it was possible to hack into your computer and look out through your camera, but that this was difficult and no one would be particularly interested in watching me. But it sounds like it’s incredibly easy; you should just assume that every camera or microphone you own is recording you. And I guess there are websites where there are dozens of people being recorded twenty-four/seven that you can just watch.

Yeah; voyeur cams, stalker cams, and if you tune into these websites you can see people changing, gymnasiums, people in lawyers’ offices, detention cells in jails, dry cleaners, doctor’s offices. I forget the exact numbers, but all the cameras today are pretty much connected to the internet; forty percent of those camera systems don’t have any password on them, and another thirty percent use the default password that’s in the manual that you can google. It’s incredibly easy to get access.

The big difference is that now those cameras can be hacked with packaged malware. So you don’t need a master hacker that goes in every time and uniquely creates an account or a software tool that will break into someone’s camera; you can buy malware, or crimeware, as I call it, software that will automatically hijack somebody’s camera. That could be a baby camera, a camera in somebody’s home or on their laptop and mobile phone. We saw this happen with Miss Teen America, a young woman sixteen years old by the name of Cassidy Wolf; one day she got an email that contained over a hundred pictures of her naked in her own bedroom. And attached to the email was a threat; it said, “Hey, you have to have sex with me on online, on video chat, otherwise I’m going to post these naked pictures of you on social media and send it out to your Facebook friends.” Of course she was horrified; fortunately, she told her parents, who called in the FBI. They did an investigation into it and found that the hack was carried out by one of her classmates, a seventeen-year-old kid. And this kid was not a master hacker; he just bought some cheap software online, sent her an email, she clicked on the wrong thing and installed keystroke loggers onto her computer, and he took over her camera. What most people don’t realize about these camera hacks is that the little red or green light that you expect to see go on when you’re video recording can be disabled, so your cameras can be recording you in the background all the time.

You’re actually recommending people cover up their cameras with tape or something, right?

A sticky, a Band-Aid, a piece of electrical tape—of course, that doesn’t prevent the microphone from recording. In the case of Cassidy Wolf, she was not somebody who was always naked in her bedroom; the camera caught her coming from her bathroom, coming out of the shower, and changing in her bedroom.

I think it’s bad enough that people can get access to their data, but . . . I guess you watch movies like Die Hard or Mission Impossible and they can hack into traffic lights and prison cells and air traffic control; you tend to think all that’s Hollywood, you can’t really do that. But apparently, you can.

Art imitating life imitating art; there are lots of examples of hacking critical information and infrastructures in the book. I started talking about today’s crimes so that folks that weren’t so technologically savvy could relate. We started talking about Facebook and Google, but as you fast-forward to more advanced technologies, it is computers that run all of our critical infrastructures, whether it be the electrical grid, financial networks, ATMs, 911 dispatch systems, streetlights, hospitals’ electronic health records. And here’s the startling fact: There has never been a computer system that couldn’t be hacked. Most folks, when they think of cyber threats, think, “I was a victim of identity theft,” or, “I got a new credit card.” While those can mess with somebody’s life, that’s kind of the low-hanging fruit out there. The bigger threats are against these advancing technologies and our critical infrastructures, so in Future Crimes I tell the stories of hacking automobiles and hacking pacemakers and streetcars and air traffic control, and I give real-world examples where criminals or terrorists or hackers have done all of those things.

Most folks don’t realize the extent to which the whole world is becoming a computer; we used to have paper maps, now we have GPS; we used to have movies that were on film, now we’ve got Netflix; we had music CDs, now we’ve got Spotify and Pandora. We’re going to see the same thing that happened to music and movies and apps coming to physical objects; if you look at a 1965 Chevy or Mustang, those were mechanical cars, but the cars today . . . Any car that’s rolled off the assembly line in the past few years has well over two hundred microchips in it that control the radio, the GPS, the airbags, the cruise control, the speedometer.

Recently on 60 Minutes—they finally did a story on it even though I’ve been talking about it for years—Leslie Stall’s car was hacked; somebody was able to slam on the acceleration, slam on the breaks. A modern car is a computer that we ride in; an elevator is a computer that we ride in; an airplane is a Solaris box that we fly in. All of these devices are hackable, and as we rush towards the “Internet of Things” and the 200 billion new devices by the year 2020—according to the Intel Computer Corp—all of those new devices are going to be hackable as well.

Is there any role here for just going back to analog systems for certain things? Does the door of a prison cell really need to be connected to the internet?

I talked about a high security prison in Miami being hacked and the hackers were able to open up the cell doors and the prisoners got out and gang riots ensued. Right now, before we go ahead and connect those 200 billion new devices—whether they be pets, prisoners, plates, cars, pacemakers—we should stop and think about it. We can’t even secure the stuff that we have online today—iPads, iPhones, Android phones, Game Boys, Xboxes. All of that stuff is hackable and has more security than your smart refrigerator will. I think it’s worth asking the question, what should and should not be online. There is a movement among some companies to take certain things out of the electronic realm; KFC and McDonald’s have secret recipes for Coke and fried chicken. Those are not stored in any electronic systems; those are written down on paper and kept in a safe. After the Snowden revelations, the Kremlin—for their secret communications in Moscow—went back to manual typewriters.

The question is not “how do we stop this technological progress?” I, like most readers of Wired, am very pro-technology; I’m a technophile. All I’m saying is that we need to give much more attention to how we’re going to deal with the privacy issues that are emerging, as well as the security issues.

You also talk a lot about biometrics, which is a fixture of science fiction: retinal scanners and fingerprint scanners. I never thought about this before, but you make the point that a fingerprint scanner has a really big drawback: If somebody hacks it, if they get a copy of your fingerprint, you can’t just change your fingerprint like you change your password.

Exactly. Somebody hacks your credit card, you get a new credit card; somebody hacks your finger, you don’t get a new finger. What people forget about these fingerprint scanners is that they’re not storing your fingers; what they’re doing is taking your fingerprint and running it past an algorithm and creating a mathematical representation of your finger in a computer. It’s just data and, like all other data in a computer, it can be manipulated; it can be hacked, deleted, changed, mixed up with somebody else’s . . . I can take your fingerprints that show you’re innocent and then the police department computer can add a felony warrant to that.

And the data is leaking in interesting ways; in Israel, they had a national biometric database on their nine million citizens and a disgruntled insider went ahead and stole the entire database and posted it online. And there are other ways people are hacking biometrics, particularly with photography: Recently, a photograph was taken of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and they were able to—just by the resolution of the photograph—have a perfect copy of her fingerprint.

A few years ago, the German Minister of Justice, a minister of the interior over there—kind of like the Attorney General here in the United States—was pushing very hard for Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards and he wanted all Germans to be fingerprinted, and the German people pushed back, particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club. And so what they did was, when the German Minister of Justice was out at a restaurant, they got the glass that he had left behind and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of the glass and took a photograph, imported it into Photoshop, cleaned it up, and were able to replicate it on 3D printers in latex and included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club magazine that went out to 5,000 people. And they encouraged their readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprint at crime scenes all over Germany, which they did.

There’s a lot of stuff in the book about 3D printing narcotics, explosives, rocket launchers, and even uranium centrifuges. It just sounds like all this stuff is going to be completely out of control.

Digital manufacturing is awesome for a lot of reasons: They sell 3D printers at Staples, and while most people don’t have them, the same way most people didn’t have laser printers or inkjet printers a few years ago, eventually they’ll be in our offices, our homes, and many people will be using them for lots of amazing tools. But they can be misused as well, and probably the most controversial has been the 3D printing of weapons through the DEFCAD Project and others. These guys have been able to print everything from the lower receiver of an AR-15 to magazines, and now you can even 3D print bullets successfully. As you mentioned with rocket launchers, as 3D printers get bigger, you can just print bigger and bigger things. We’ve had criminals 3D printing handcuff keys, police badges, and all of the intellectual property theft that people had to worry about in the digital space with the stealing of music and videos is going to come to physical objects. So whether it’s a Gucci purse or a Rolex watch, just scan it with your Kinect and import it and start printing the parts and put together a perfect replica. In the not-too-distant future, maybe a decade out, there’ll be printers that can print medicine. They already exist; they’ll just become more commonplace. Then, of course, if you can print medicine with a chem-printer, you can print illicit narcotics.

Does law enforcement—do we—have any strategy in mind to deal with people printing contraband out in the privacy of their homes?

Some contraband many people might not care about. We see this huge debate right now in the United States about marijuana; some states are making it one hundred percent legal for any purpose, others are making it legal for medicinal purposes. In terms of some of the other threats that are emerging in cyberspace, law enforcement, I’m afraid to say, is left behind, and this is coming from somebody who’s spent a career in law enforcement.

Policing and crime used to be almost exclusively a local affair, so if somebody robbed a Bank of America in mid-town Manhattan, the cops would know the victim was in mid-town Manhattan, they would know that the cops were located in mid-town Manhattan, they would know that the criminal was located in mid-town Manhattan, and so you had the co-location of criminal, victim, and cops. Now, the criminal can be in Kiev or El Salvador or Chicago, and they can hack somebody in Moscow or New York. So it’s not just whether the cops are keeping up, it’s that the internet fundamentally broke law enforcement, because law enforcement does not work internationally by design; you wouldn’t want a bunch of Russian cops kicking down your door in San Francisco with a search warrant and taking away an American citizen.

One of the things I mention in Future Crimes is that we actually may have the wrong paradigm for dealing with cyberthreats. When we talk about cyberthreats, we use the language of medicine; we use the language of infections—computer viruses—to describe the problem, but we don’t use the tools of medicine to address the problem, and I think there’s a huge opportunity there: What could we learn from the world of epidemiology, for example, or public health, when it comes to these threats and apply better threat models in our response?

My goal should not be to arrest every hacker in the world. My goal should be to create a self-healing immune system for the internet; even if a disease or virus gets created, that it won’t be passed to me. We need new institutions like the World Health Organization for cyber that can help drive this. If you think about how we get trained as little kids—if you sneeze, you cover your mouth, and if you cover your mouth after you sneeze, you don’t shake somebody’s hand—that’s hygiene. Nobody knows what that looks like in cyberspace, so we take USB thumb drives that we get at conferences and we plug them into our computers, and your computer, and we spread viruses; we open up attachments and downloads and forward them onto our friends and post them on social media; our own computers get ensnared in bot-nets. People don’t know how to protect against it, so I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for both public health and education to help reduce these threats.

Do you think there’s any sort of role for AI in this? Shouldn’t your computer be smart enough to know that, by opening up this attachment, you don’t want this gigantic program running and erasing all your data? Shouldn’t a water treatment plant know that it shouldn’t be taking directions from someone in China even if they do have the password?

I agree. There’s a ton of work going on in the field of applying AI to some of these cyber threats, but the challenge is that right now software is built to run; you want the default answer to be “yes”—you want the car to go, if you will. It’s incredibly difficult to foresee all of these threats. In the future, with AI and machine learning, we can do tremendous advances in this field, and there are lots of researchers, including DARPA, that are looking at this. But we’re nowhere near that now, and what we see is actually the opposite: The bad guys are using AI and machine learning to script their attacks faster and at scale.

Speaking of AI, there’s this fascinating thing in the book where this guy murdered his roommate, and when they caught him they checked his phone and he had asked Siri, “I need to hide my roommate.” And Siri had replied, “Swamps, reservoirs, metal foundries, and dumps.”

That’s the point I was making in that section of Future Crimes, because I was talking about AI and next generation threats. “The Future is already here,” to quote William Gibson from Neuromancer, “it’s just unevenly distributed.” We’ve had people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking talk about their severe concerns about artificial general intelligence, and I also share some of those concerns, but even before we get to the time of AGI, we have some serious risks emerging from narrow AI; the type of AI that recommends how you drive from point A to point B, that is doing the majority of trading on Wall Street. That’s not carried out by human beings, but by algorithms and bots. Even low level criminals, like an eighteen-year-old kid at the University of Florida: When he needed to figure out where to hide a dead body, when he was looking for a co-conspirator, he turned to Siri. And Siri, because she does not have an ethics engine, just provided the answer.

And these AI things, you can copy them endless times; you can, essentially, have billions of grifters out on the internet, all scamming people at once.

That’s already going on, and that’s a huge problem. One of the big takeaways from Future Crimes is that it’s not people committing crime anymore—crime has become software; it’s crimeware. You used to need to be a master hacker, be very familiar in programming languages and know your way around internet protocol, to break into all of these systems. Now you don’t; master hackers have created software that they are selling to lower-level criminals that can do all of this in the background. The reason why we’ve gone from one person robbing another, one-on-one in street robberies, to someone in the Target hack, robbing over a hundred million people, is because crime scales exponentially. A DDoS attack is just scripted; it’s the computer that’s carrying it out, and we’re seeing more and more sophisticated crimes being scripted and carried out. There’s a concept in malware known as “ransomware,” and these are bits of malware that get on your computer and encrypt your hard drive with a private key and then hold your computer for ransom, and you’re given forty-eight hours to pay in bitcoin, and if you don’t, you lose all the data in your computer. So even sophisticated crimes like ransoming are now being scripted; blackmail has been scripted, so all of it is becoming an algorithm, and the bad guys have built the crime-bots.

As you pointed out earlier, we haven’t built the cop-bots, and even though it looks great on TV with Minority Report, the reality is that law enforcement and government are far behind in defending against these threats, as are many companies and individuals.

And the bots you’re talking about are computer virus-type bots, but there’s no reason these couldn’t be physical bots; you talk about drones armed with guns or self-driving trucks armed with bombs.

I say it in the book: Cybercrime is going 3D. Right now, we’ve only had to worry about hacks that were behind two-dimensional screens; somebody moves some bits and you lose money from your bank account; they take over your identity, they take over your credit card. This is the thing that the general public misses about the cyberthreat: We look around us and we see Xboxes and GPS devices and smart TVs and we think we’re at the pinnacle of technology. But with Moore’s Law and the Internet of Things, we’re just about to hit the knee of the curve; this internet is going to grow in size from a metaphorical golf ball to the size of the sun with Internet Protocol version 6.

One of the things that will come out of this are computers that are going to walk, crawl, fly, swim, and roll. And we already have robots that are used extensively in the manufacturing process in automobile manufacturing; we have tons of robots that are used on the battlefield. But we’re starting to see them come into the home, whether it be Roomba vacuums, home health care bots—robots are going to be everywhere. But like all other computers, they are hackable, and we’ve seen robots hacked on many occasions before; we’ve had drones flying over Afghanistan that the Taliban hacked the video feeds on; a DHS drone on the southern border of the United States flying between Texas and Mexico that a bunch of students from UT-Austin were able to commandeer. The difference between hacking a two-dimensional computer and a three-dimensional computer is a three-dimensional computer can kick and punch and drag and lift and have super-human strength, and we’re completely unprepared for that.

You say we have this problem of a digital monoculture, where all the devices are running the same software, so once somebody writes a virus for that software, it affects millions of devices. Should there be a hundred different operating systems for people to choose from so that it limits the damage whenever a security flaw in one of them is discovered?

The concept of monoculture is really important, and it goes back to what I was saying earlier about epidemiology and public health; if there’s just one type of computing system, let’s say Windows 7, it would behoove hackers and virus writer to write their viruses for Windows 7. And we saw, in the early days of Windows, almost all of the threats were against those Windows devices because they were the predominant ones. This is where the misconception that Macs are not hackable came from; it wasn’t that Macs aren’t hackable, it’s that why would I, as a master hacker, spend my time on .01% of the market? But as Mac OS has increased, significantly, in market share—particularly on the iOS mobile front—we’re seeing that, increasingly, hackers are developing malware against those tools.

Since we were just talking about robotics, one of the things that has protected the global information grid, our critical infrastructures, and even robotics, from being hacked is that most of those times those operating systems were completely unique: The software that Con Ed used to protect and run the electricity grid in the city of New York was different from what PG&E used to protect the electrical grid in San Francisco. And up until this point, there really hasn’t been a standard robotic operating system; now one is emerging called ROS, the Robotic Operating System. So now you can create an attack that could impact a whole bunch of robots.

Is there any sort of effort towards diversifying the operating systems?

Not that I’m aware of, on a mass scale; I know people that use Linux for this exact reason.

Another ray of hope you offer in this book is the idea of crowdsourcing crime fighting: Rather than relying on the police exclusively, you would draw on the power of these millions of citizens who want to do the right thing and would help fight crime.

In Future Crimes, I tell story after story of how criminals, and even terrorists, are crowdsourcing their attacks. Criminals were able to break into the prepaid debit card network and remove the fifty- or hundred-dollar limit, and were able to send these debit cards to organized crime groups in twenty-seven different countries. They spread them among these low-level thieves that, all at once, hit up as many ATMs as they could in a ten-hour period, carried out 36,000 transactions and walked away with forty-five million dollars. The bad guys definitely understand how to leverage crowdsourcing, and they’re even using crowdfunding techniques.

The challenge is that we haven’t done a particularly great job of leveraging crowdsourcing for the public good. If you think about it, crowdsourcing has kind of been an element of law enforcement since the beginning; if you go back to the 1850s, there were “Wanted” posters in the post office, offering a reward, and we’ve had Neighborhood Watch programs. The internet creates the opportunity, as we saw with the Serial podcast; you can get tens of thousands of people investigating cases; you can get tens of thousands of people involved in the identification of malware.

One thing I call for in Future Crimes is the involvement of the gamer community in helping us protect our security; what if, as people were going through the games, they were actually shooting malware or destroying phishing attacks or identifying spear-phishing attacks? We have reserve Army, Marine Corps, police officers, even FEMA that deals with natural disasters, but we don’t have any entity that is a crowdsourced approach to cybersecurity. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to take people of technological skill—whether it be a ten-year-old in India, or a eighty-year-old woman in Seattle—and get these people involved in this fight. I think it’s the only way we’re going to move forward and win this battle.

I like the example of the Serial podcast; that we need to leverage the massive power of podcasting for good.

I think a podcaster might like that.

This book scared the hell out of me, and I imagine it’s scaring the hell out of a lot of people who are reading it. Do you get the sense that people are taking this book seriously and are formulating a response to it?

Future Crimes just hit number three on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. I’m deeply grateful to all the folks who bought the book and are reading it, and I think it’s getting someplace in the press as well as government; I’ve been contacted by a number of government leaders who are looking at it. I’m trying to point out the cutting edge of criminal innovation, and how everybody from organized crime to terrorists, governments, and corporations are using technology against the general public in ways they don’t understand. My goal is not to scare, it’s to educate, so people can get a feel for what’s going on and then they can empower themselves, It’s better to understand the risks and threats so people can protect themselves. In the last few chapters of Future Crimes, I put out a whole bunch of technology, public policy, legal, and regulatory recommendations; I call for a Manhattan Project for cyber, an XPRIZE for cyber security—all these kinds of big-think issues that we can take on to make a really dramatic difference. I also include practical tips for individuals and businesses. It’s an interesting ride; it sounds like science fiction, but it’s science fact.

You mention science fiction and I’m curious: Are you a big science fiction fan? Did science fiction inform your thinking on these issues in any way?

I like science fiction very much, whether it be Minority Report, The Terminator, or even some of the classics: Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. And I got introduced to this whole world of hacking through film, War Games and Sneakers and a lot of other pictures that came out that talk about some of these threats. Science fiction has been very prescient about these risks; a lot of stuff that’s been shown in those films and works has come true today.

In the acknowledgments you mention two science fiction authors, Daniel Suarez and Ramez Naam; what did they contribute?

First, they’re just generally awesome people, and I’m deeply lucky to call both of them friends. I read Daniel’s Daemon and really loved it. Ramez teaches with me at Singularity University and we also have Daniel come by and teach. Both of them are experienced authors; when I was researching and working on my book, they both were extremely generous and met with me and talked through these themes and they just gave me a lot of good advice for a first-time author. I’m very appreciative.

Do you want to say more about Singularity University? You’re also involved with something called The Future Crimes Institute; do you want to let people know about those and where they can find information?

You can get more info on Singularity University at SingularityU.org; it was created back in 2010, co-founded by NASA, Google, Autodesk, the Kauffman Foundation, Nokia, and a bunch of other companies. It’s housed on the campus of the NASA research center in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, and the school has but one mission: To teach students about exponential technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotech, big data, Internet of Things, and AI, amongst others, and make sure our students take those tools with the mission of positively affecting the lives of a billion people over the next ten years. We want our students to take drones and not just use them as weapons, but use them to deliver food to Africa, medicine to isolated villages that don’t have access to a doctor or advanced medical techniques. Amazing faculty; we have astronauts and roboticists and big data scientists and physicians on staff, and there’s a bunch of free videos online, and we also run executive programs, too.

The Future Crimes Institute was something I founded back in 2010, and the goal of that was to unite technologists and those working in criminal justice to discuss these emerging threats. It’s a virtual institute online, we have about 3,500 members; chief security officers from companies your listenership would be familiar with, as well as senior leadership from the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We conduct individual research on everything from the security threats of virtual reality and augmented reality to hacking, 3D printers, and the like.

Are there any projects, websites, or anything else you want to mention?

If folks want to learn more about the book, they can stop by FutureCrimes.com; if you sign up I can send you an info-graphic that I’ve created that specifically lists six steps that everybody can take to reduce their cyber security risk by eighty-five percent. Future Crimes is on sale; you can pick it up at stores or anyplace online. I look forward to continuing the conversation; Wired is a great magazine and I love it; I’ve written for RGK before, and it’s just a great audience. I’m glad I got the opportunity to discuss these topics with you today. Thank you for your time.

Future Crimes is a really good book everyone has to read; there’s tons of stuff we didn’t get a chance to talk about that you really need to know. Marc, thanks for joining us.

The pleasure is mine.

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: October 2015

Andrew Liptak | 1,350 words

This month for my book review column, I found myself drawn to three books written from around the planet: Gene Mapper, by Taiyo Fujii (Japan), Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Canada/Mexico), and A Planet To Rent, by Yoss (Cuba). Something that has personally interested me is how the internet has begun to unite the world’s science fiction community, and how we’re seeing a huge number of works reaching US audiences (and other international markets) that bring an entirely new perspective to genre circles.

Gene Mapper
Taiyo Fujii
(translated by Jim Hubbert)
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN 978-1421580272
Haikasoru, June 2015
304 Pages

While reading Gene Mapper, I got the sense that reading this book was like reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time: it was like an electric shock to my brain. This novel is full of vivid ideas for how the future will look, from augmented reality to genetic engineering. In it, a freelance gene mapper, Hayashida, is informed that there’s a problem with a crop that he worked on: SRO6 is doing something odd. The colors aren’t right, and it seems like this grand experiment that he’s been a part of is on the verge of failure. The crop is a genetically modified—a distilled plant—type of rice that will help to feed billions of people across the world. It’s a PR coup for L&B, his benefactor company, provided that it works. As he heads out to the field, he works with field technicians and hackers to uncover the malicious reason behind the gene collapse, and discovers something more sinister and strange than he could have imagined.

Fujii throws you into the deep end of this world, and you’re along for the rush as Hayashida gets pulled into a much larger conspiracy. He’s brilliantly imagined the world and the future history that it took to get to the story; for a book so short, he’s packed a lot of information in, and I hope that we’ll see him continued to expand upon it. (As an aside, Lightspeed recently published a short story from Fujii, which you can read here: lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/violation-of-the-truenet-security-act.)

There are some obvious comparisons to other climate change/biological science fiction novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, but where Bacigalupi’s novel trends pessimistic, Fujii’s novel brims with technological optimism. Fujii seems to revel in the possibilities of what technology can do, and it’s an interesting book to read in a climate where entire countries are banning GMO crops and states within the United States are mandating that GMO products be labeled. Fujii’s characters are clear where they stand: what they’re working on will feed billions of people, even as they acknowledge that in the past, there were some problems along the way.

I really enjoyed this book, and it’s one I think that I’ll return to at some point, if anything just to take in the world and to see what I might have missed as I read along. People decry science fiction for being too dystopic or depressing: Gene Mapper is the perfect antidote for that. It’s dark, but Fujii’s outlook is bright and optimistic.

Signal To Noise
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN 978-1781082997
Solaris Books, February 2015
272 Pages

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel Signal To Noise is a brilliantly imagined realistic fantasy set between 1989 and 2009 in Mexico City. The story begins when Meche returns home after being away from home for nearly two decades. Her estranged father has died, and upon her return, she reunites with a pair of school friends, bringing back a number of painful memories that led up to her leaving the country. As high school students, Meche and her two friends, Sebastian and Daniela, learned how to use magic, and they set about trying to fulfill some of their base desires—they want more money to go out to the movies and shop—to some more serious desires, like falling in love, healing a sick relative, or revenge.

Signal To Noise does a fantastic job with its characters: Merche is abrasive, Sebastian is alone, and Daniela is timid, each with their own issues as they come together. Moreno-Garcia deftly weaves these characters back and forth in time, slowly uncovering a larger narrative in which Meche’s estrangement from her friends and her family become clear. The literary device here is excellent, and as the book hammers on, there’s a sick sense of dread for what’s to come, and the plot falls neatly together as the final pages come to a close.

What I appreciated here was that Meche and friends aren’t here as part of an overarching narrative about magic, complete with consequences that will shake the world to its foundations: this is an intimate character story which each character, through their own flaws and problems, creates for themselves.

A Planet For Rent
Yoss
(translated by David Frye)
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1632060365
Restless Books, June 2015
272 Pages

The third book for this month is one of the first translated books to come out of Cuba, right as relations between the Latin American and the United States are beginning to thaw. A Planet For Rent, by Yoss (the working name for José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) comes at a time when it seems as though anything connected to Cuba is politically charged—it’s hard to separate out the political context for the worlds that he depicts, and that’s a bit of a shame, because this is probably one of the more entertaining science fiction novels that I’ve picked up in recent years.

Politically, there is some allegory here, which Yoss covers at a high level when he outlines what happened to Earth: a collection of alien civilizations has watched humanity for centuries, making contact when we were deemed “mature” enough to withstand the shock. It didn’t go so well: humans fought back and started a nuclear war, nuking Paris before the collective cracked down. They made Africa vanish completely, as a lesson to the rest of humanity, and subjugated the rest. Earth reverted back to its natural state as a sort of tourist destination for the larger galactic civilization. In the aftermath, humans are only permitted to leave Earth on occasion, and only then, they’re forced into servitude or outright slavery. The remaining humans back on Earth make their way by selling themselves in various ways: as artists, as prostitutes or as “horses”—empty bodies for aliens to walk around in. Some try to escape through rickety, homemade spaceships. This isn’t a subtle book, and it’s brimming with a level of cool anger.

Ignoring the political elements that inform this book, this is amazing science fiction. Yoss has created alien worlds and races that have few equals in science fiction, and he paints a vivid picture of Earth through a connected series of shorter stories. His humans— a prostitute, an artist, a soldier, an athlete, and others—are angry at their situation, trapped in an oppressive system that very few can escape from. It’s hard not to read into the story here as an allegorical Cuba, a small, defiant island fighting against the world at large. A Planet For Rent is a fantastic work of fiction, equal parts entertaining, shocking and horrifying. One can only hope that with the easing of restrictions between the US and Cuba, we’ll see more from some of our neighbors in the Caribbean.

After reading through these three brilliant short novels, I’ve found myself thinking more about how much bigger speculative fiction is than I ever would have realized. Science Fiction emerges from the imaginations of dreamers across the planet, bound not by literary heritage, but by the ability to see the world in a different fashion. From Japan to Cuba to Mexico, each of these novels looked at the world in ways that never would have occurred to me sitting here in Vermont, whether it’s an future run by optimistic gene hackers, a trio of teenagers in Mexico City, or of desperate refugees from Earth. Reading this group of stories has widened my horizons just that much more, and for that, I’m thankful.

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, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London in 2015.

Artist Gallery: Blaithiel

Blaithiel, also known by her real name Anna Bastrzyk, was born in Poland. Blaithiel is a self-taught digital artist who creates art for book covers, CD covers, and t-shirt designs. Her website is blaithiel.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Blaithiel

Henry Lien | 536 words

Your artwork has a very consistent mix of elements: ghostly female figures, often in a state of anguish, birds or other flying creatures, fluttering cloth or hair, a very stark and muted color palette, and a mournful, Gothic atmosphere. Did you set out to create a cohesive body of work or is this simply a reflection of your own tastes and viewpoint?

To me, each work is very different from the other works. Each one tells its own story. When I start creating a new work, I don’t explore only in one genre. I don’t steer the work in a direction to achieve only one specific effect. I just go with the flow. I just follow the images rising in my head. When I start creating a new artwork, I never know how it will end or what the final result will be and this is really cool. Like many other artists, I’m looking for beauty in all that meaning.

Joseph Campbell once described Carl Jung’s writings about dreams as examining “x-rays of the soul.” Do you ever get inspiration for your images from your own dreams or nightmares? If so, which images are taken directly from your dreams/nightmares?

To be honest, I never remember what I dream. I think everyone has their own “dark side of the moon.” I’m quite a cheerful person. Nonetheless, in many of my works, you can discern loneliness, alienation. That’s a bit of myself as well.

For the images that are not taken from your own dream life, do you ever end up dreaming about being in those spaces or seeing those figures after you first created them as art work?

Very interesting question. A couple times, I created particular works and I wanted to belong in the worlds depicted in them. However, I’ve never encountered any characters from my works in my dreams and I am not sure I want to. They are pretty scary.

How much of your work is taken from photographic sources and how much of it is originally created digitally? It looks like there are elements of both but they are seamlessly integrated into each other.

My technique is mixed media, combining photomontage and digital painting. The amount of each element depends on the particular work. Some of my works are just simple photo manipulations without any actual digital painting in them. I always start from a photo. I then try to create a whole story for it, painting digitally or using other mediums.

What are some of your artistic inspirations, from fine artists to illustrators to films, etc.?

Many things inspire me: other artists’ artworks, music, books, movies sometimes, my own feelings. I have always been drawn to dark fantasy concepts. I think everything relating to darkness, fantasy, warriors, and strong characters all give me inspiration.

What project would you most like to work on, in the future?

I will not be original and humble. Like most artists, I would love to work on some big film industry project.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, Asia, Europe, and South America. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions and the Art Director at Lightspeed Magazine. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate. He has sold stories to publications including Asimov’s, Analog, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

Jude Griffin | 1,529 words

What was the spark for “Solder and Seam”?

I wrote this as a birthday present for China Miéville, and as it was a gift, I put bunch of his favorite things into the story—revolution, cephalopods, etc. If we’re talking sparks, this story is kind of in conversation with China’s brain. His brain lights mine up daily. Some of the best things I’ve ever written have come from discussions we’ve had. He challenges me to work in forms I hadn’t thought of working in, and to use things I’d thought were too difficult to use. It’s a huge gift to have a collaborator like him. It’s so easy to relax into writing only about things you already know, rather than going foraging for new scraps of material, experimental styles and new takes. Aside from that, I’ve noticed that I’m revising American mythology in everything I write lately, and this is no exception. This is an American apocalypse story, but one with a big switch at the center, in terms of whose apocalypse we’re talking about. The story about building a boat in a field is something that recurs, not just in America, of course, but the idea of a corn or wheat field with a wooden whale in the middle of it pleased me. Though I’m not religious, I consider the Bible to be part of the wealth of stories in the world, and I grabbed from some things, in the way I grab from all folklore and myth. Our protagonist isn’t Noah, but he’s a version on that theme. Everything from the Bible to Cormac McCarthy to the Russian Revolution to—obviously—extraterrestrials slunk its way into this. Not unusual for that to be the case in my writing, but this one really felt like a braiding of several kinds of narrative into one. It ended up being a kind of Biblical folktale about toxic colonization and gluttonous hierarchy.

Oh! And I read an article a couple years ago about an FBI most wanted mob criminal from Boston who fled to Idaho and pretended to be a farmer for twenty years. He happened to have hidden in the tiny, tiny town I came from, so I was definitely thinking about that guy too. Everyone quoted in the article who was from Marsing was like, “Well, he wasn’t a good farmer, but he did have a really interesting collection of guns.” They’d just taken him at his word. Why not an alien fleeing a failed revolution on his home planet and posing as human in farm country? Seems plausible to me.

You said it was written in a fever state—did you see a difference in the final story, whether in voice, theme, or other aspect? Were you more reluctant to edit it, since I am guessing you couldn’t recreate that state at will?

The final story is, by and large, what I wrote that first night. It had clarifications and a few structural shifts, but the fever state served me well. Once that’s on the page, I can go back in and get the voice back pretty easily, actually, so this wasn’t a problem edit-wise. I actually loved going back into the story to edit, because it was fun to revisit the voice, which in this case is quite stylistically plainspoken in the Earth segments, more rococo in the off-Earth sections. It’s a pleasure for me, generally, to go back to something I wrote in a swift flow and see if I can then make it make sense without busting its rhythm. It’s almost like singing a song you haven’t sung in a while. You still have the melody.

You refer to the protagonist as a man at the start of the story, but in the end, he is revealed as alien. The ending had me going back to the beginning of the story to understand why I had considered him human from the start. What are your thoughts on this approach? Was it misdirection? Was it an unreliable narrator? Third person not-omniscient? Because he was in disguise as human?

Well, it was very much on purpose, and I did some things to make a reader feel that way, so I guess my thoughts are that I like stories in which we don’t understand everything about someone just because of the category we might put that someone in. I figure aliens don’t refer to themselves as aliens. The context of that word is all about the human POV. In the context of this man’s life, he’s a man, on Earth, with a history that is neither thing. Obviously, yeah, I wanted the reader to see him as human until we learn he’s not. It’s part of the structure of the story, the surprise that the POV we’re in, which we understand to be a probably white middle-aged human man building a boat, is actually a much more experienced and diverse narrator speaking of himself honestly but measuredly. I’m interested always in perceptions of who the aliens and monsters actually are. I write literal aliens and literal monsters, but in this story, the aliens are the humans.

You have such a fascinating background, and as I reread this story, I found myself thinking, “Oh, that came from her maritime experience; that’s from her theater work.” But what of growing up on a survivalist dog-sled ranch in Idaho? Where has that played into your work?

Ha! I forget that people know things about my history from all these other interviews! I guess it looks a little wild and wooly, from outside my skull. To me, my personal history is this great heap of possible scraps to draw on, and I happen to have a personal history that’s been a bit all over the map. My experience is all over everything I write. Anytime I write about being in the country, it’s directly from my childhood. Anytime I write about animals, dogs, cats, also directly from my childhood. Tigers, even—big ferocious farm cats! Cornfields and wheat fields, silos, big expanse of country around—all that’s directly from Idaho. I haven’t written much about the sled dog thing, but this is also a bit about survivalists, because the people left on Earth in this story? That’s what they are. They’re waiting for the end, in whatever fashion, and much of the population has fled to the skies. That said, I’m working on something right now, a fantastical memoir piece, kind of, which has a lot about my childhood in it. It’s fantastical because it felt that way, growing up in it. There was no clear version of what was magic and what was nature. It was all one for me growing up. Maybe it still is.

Did you ever consider a different ending?

Nope, the ending of the story was always there. This is, at its heart, a story about starting over, and I needed there to be a remaining world in which that could happen. Also, I totally like submarines. I like the notion of diving into the future, in the same way, elsewhere in the story, spaceships go up to create a future elsewhere. This is also a political story about the badness of colonization. So . . . who knows what’s underneath? The squid and the whale dive, but are they going to an uninhabited place? We don’t know. Is it a happy ending? Again, we don’t know. But the two people from elsewhere are traveling together into another foreign place.

Whose writing has really moved you in the past year?

I’m currently madly in love with the Scottish writer Ali Smith. I started with Artful, went to How to be Both and The Accidental, and now I’m reading Hotel World. She has a blistering capacity with multiple POVs, and a tremendously encompassing perspective—you’re as likely to find the inner considerations of a bird flying by and a piece of trash blowing in the wind as you are one of the characters—who may in fact at that moment be either of those things. Her books are full of roaming ghosts (literal ghosts), and manage to also aggressively take on all kinds of theory, while never feeling as though they’ve tilted into non-story. There’s a section in The Accidental, for example, from the POV of a character who is a lit professor. His inner monologue becomes increasingly labored sonnets. I fucking love it when a prose writer suddenly shifts forms. I like dialogue rendered in play format, song lyrics filled with the character’s considerations, anything like that. It’s a pleasure to see stylistic virtuosity when it comes to form. That’s the writing that really fills me up. Non-naturalistic writers generally make me happy—I think the only way to successfully depict nature is to dip into the surreal. Every brain is full of scatter. I love it when I see it on the page. We are not reliable narrators, as humans. I’m interested in the concept of a trustworthy narrative, because I don’t think that’s a real thing, so I quite like it when a plainspoken, seemingly trustworthy character is revealed to be telling a story that is untrue. It’s good reading.

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: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Liz Argall | 1,139 words

How did this story come about?

“Children of Dagon” was written in response to a call that had gone out for a cli-fi anthology, and it very much deals with the sort of SFnal issues I’ve recently been playing around with in my novel Children of Time—the clash between a failing humanity and the monsters it has made.

In “Children of Dagon,” I love how we slide from fantasy expectations into a grittier oceans-rising dystopian future. What was your process writing this story? Were you surprised when the Children of Dagon turned out to be genetically engineered? Or was that what you always had in mind?

When I have my SF hat on, I try to rein in the more fantastic elements so I can at least pretend to a veneer of scientific respectability. The idea that one response to a more sea-bound world would be to engineer a human subspecies that could make use of all that coastal land we’re likely to lose seemed just on this side of plausible (especially if the attempt, as per the story, is not exactly government-sanctioned).

From that germ idea, the rest followed relatively logically, if veering somewhat towards a worst-case scenario. The details of the societal collapse landbound humans have suffered are not gone into, although I can imagine a variety of scenarios that might bring such a state of affairs about. The collapse itself gives me the opportunity to showcase the titular Children in the ascendant. Although it might not seem it, this is me doing “optimistic” SF. Even if people fumble the baton, something is around to take it up and run (or, in this case, swim).

How do you balance the collaborative creativity of RPGs with the more solitary creativity of writing stories? Was it scary to go from what (at least to me) feels like the safer creative space of RPGs into more solitary fiction writing? What were the greatest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Well, I tend to GM more than play, so I’m used to shouldering the lion’s share of the creative burden. I’ve always had a story-telling, revelatory style when running games, and in the same way that I allow the players’ responses to dictate the future course of the plot, in long fiction I let the ongoing story arise from the logical ramifications of past events (ramifications generally not in my mind when I’m writing those events). I have a very organic plotting process, and I suspect that is drawn very much from running games.

The rising ocean geography seems very precise; did you spend a lot of time poring over cartographic maps? And if so, which was the coolest thing you discovered that you couldn’t fit into the story?

I had an indecent amount of fun looking at online maps of flooded London—because it’s such a hot global topic, there is plenty of reference material to be found. What’s fascinating is really how piecemeal it all gets. You won’t ever get Costner’s Waterworld out of global warming—there simply isn’t enough water, and even a city like London, that you might think would be conveniently flat, has lots of topography that turn your new flooded coast into a maze of little islands and lagoons. I think my favourite element was the underground system, which is a real symbol of modern London, but becomes the domain of the Children once the waters rise.

Why do you think Dr. Deacon got rid of functioning legs? I love the visceral nature of these creatures humping along on ground, but split legs seem so useful in a hybrid environment! Is that very bipedal-centred of me?

Precisely what Dr. Deacon was intending is up for debate—he may not have had in mind the manifest destiny that his creations assume. Possibly he was aiming at something that was primarily pelagic—so rather less in competition with baseline humans—and animals that adapt to the sea tend to get rid of their legs—it’s a repeated theme, evolutionarily. Michael Phelps aside, human legs are not very efficient for swimming, and from a practical perspective I didn’t think keeping the legs (even reduced legs) but growing a separate swimming tail was an avenue that engineering would easily go down. I also wanted to visually avoid a sort of Creature from the Black Lagoon/man in a rubber suit look for the Children.

It was tragic to reflect that the mermaids (if sailors used to mistake seals for mermaids, we can call these entities mermaids, can’t we?) were possibly created to help humanity, but violence drove them onto a different path. Do you see mermaid culture and relationships evolving differently in different geographies and conflict zones or will ocean acoustics facilitate some unifying culture? What do you think it will take to end this cycle of violence?

It would be nice to think that there are parts of that world where the Children and their parents have found an equilibrium. I tend to be cynical about the ability of people to accept and live alongside difference, but it’s possible. To live alongside changed humans, humans would have to change themselves, and let go of a lot of bad habits.

In your fantasy series Shadows of the Apt we have peoples shaped by insects, and in “Children of Dagon” we have a new ocean mammal species—do you have other animals you’d like to stick into humans?

I have a new series in the works where all the different cultures are shapechangers—tigers, wolves, bears (oh my!), which gives them a very complex relationship with the natural world. People are shaped by but also chafe against their animal natures, and all of their beliefs and customs, their entire worldview, is very different to ours because of it. One of the main elements that always seems to arise, in this and “Children of Dagon,” and with the non-human characters in Children of Time and Spiderlight, is the way different senses impact on characters—having a wolf’s sense of smell to call on, for example, or a spider’s ability to sense vibrations or taste chemicals.

What are you working on now?

Well, with Children of Time out now, I’m working on the second book of the shapechangers series—the first is The Tiger and the Wolf, and the current one is The Bear and the Serpent. That series should run to four books, but I’m also kicking around some other ideas that I’ll probably explore before returning to write book three, mostly fantasy for now. I would like to go back to SF in the future, though—I’m not short of ideas. I will also be getting some Shadows of the Apt short fiction in print in the near future, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Argall’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Gregory Benford

Sandra Odell | 864 words

Strong openings are vital, particularly in short stories where you have so much less word count to dedicate to the story as a whole. In the barest opening paragraphs of “Time Shards,” you manage to capture character, location, and the tone of the story in a few deft strokes. How do you approach the creation of a solid opening when writing short fiction? Do you find the process differs significantly from writing the opening of a novel?

I start with a situation and decide what character can best carry the reader through the action. In this case, Terry Carr called me up and said he had a hole to fill in his anthology, Universe. The hole was about 3,000 words, he needed a story with some science in it, and within a week. I was teaching two physics courses, one with 400 students, the other upper division plasma theory. Plus I had an experiment running seven days a week in my lab. So I thought about it during the weekdays, and saved Sunday to write the story. I let my unconscious do most of the work.

Where did you find the inspiration for “Time Shards”?

From a letter published in the Proceedings of the IEEE (August 1969, pp. 1465-6), which I often consulted. I had come upon it and filed the idea away. It sprang to mind when I got Terry’s call, so I read up some pottery lore, and dimly recalled doing some pottery on a turntable as a boy. Then I wondered about what the meaning of such an accidental message might be. Choice of point of view character is essential, once you have the basic idea. I liked seeing this from a bureaucrat distance, to show from outside the real pivot person, the scientist who’s frustrated by his finding.

I sat down and wrote the story in one afternoon. Letting it flow was fun, on a manual typewriter, with hand corrections to produce a final draft. (I hated retyping.) Then Xeroxed it and sent to Terry. I’d never reread it until today, thirty-seven years later. Quite compact, makes a point I explored in my nonfiction Deep Time in 1999, a study of how humanity communicates across millennia.

An X-Files episode swiped this idea. Some old pot “caught” Jesus saying a word that brought Lazarus back to life, while the pot was being formed. So the idea was that if you could play back Jesus, you could resurrect anyone within the sound of the pot. Star Trek-y science.

“Time Shards” is a time travel story where the time machine is history itself, thereby subverting the time machine trope all together. Many writers can’t see beyond the edges of their own boxes to then explore such new ideas. When you first started writing, were there any particular tropes or sacred cows that tempted your imaginary tipping lance?

Deep Time and Timescape reflect my concerns as a physicist with the still mysterious connection of space-time, and what it implies for possible future models of our universe. I always looked askance at the Wellsian time travel idea, projecting someone into another era. I thought any physics that made connections between different ages possible would first be used to send a message—far easier than a person. So I wrote Timescape as a novel about how physicists think on such subjects, doing experiments, sending messages backward in time for a real, vital reason, not just research. I was sure it would be an obscure, eccentric work of concern to few, and was quite wrong.

If you were given the opportunity to place something in a time capsule, what would you choose and why?

Consider the end of my story: “Look at that.” Hart gestured. “The Vault. Our own monument to our age. Passing on the legacy. You, me, the others—we’ve spent years on it. Years, and a fortune.” He chuckled dryly. “What makes you think we’ve done any better?” So I’d enclose items typical of our time, from my vantage. Plus a map of where all the thousands (yes!) of time capsules are buried. Most have already been forgotten, as I describe in Deep Time.

You are known for your award-winning science fiction, your work as a physicist, and your support of NASA and the Mars Society. Do you feel science fiction has a place in supporting the continued awareness of the importance of scientific study to humanity’s future?

Of course—we’re imagination constrained by experiment and evidence, so are like a road map of possible voyages humanity can take. We’re also the apes who got out of Africa, so our quest will continue using tools we devise. The most cherished idea we can put forward is the expansion of human horizons, in all meanings of those words.

What’s next for Gregory Benford? What can fans expect from you in the coming months?

I have stories coming out in F&SF, Analog, and a new Jonathan Strahan anthology, his Infinity series. Within the next two years I’ll have a novel, Rewrite (about time again) and an untitled alternate history of the Manhattan Project (another scientists-at-work novel). Then a novel about a SETI librarian . . .

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: An Owomoyela

Sandra Odell | 1,975 words

“Water Rights” begins with an immediate, visceral image that marks the story as terrifyingly near future science fiction. What was the inspiration behind this tale?

Back in 2011, Jonathan Strahan invited me to contribute to an anthology of “science fiction set in a settled, industrialized, pre-starflight solar system,” and my immediate response was more or less, “I want to go to there!” I never really thought of myself as someone who wrote hard SF (and the invitation specified “original hard SF/action adventure”), but I always kinda wanted to be, so this was a great excuse to stretch those wings.

I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking about in mid-late 2011, but it was probably some combination of hydroponics as a high-efficiency food source (This is awesome: bit.ly/organichydro!), water management (complicated, and often a hilariously tragic comedy of reckless hubris even here on Earth today), and space being vast and impartial (aaaaaa).

I thought that starting off with a bang would help meet the “action adventure” quota of the prompt, with the added bonus of being able to play with depicting explosions in a place where characters wouldn’t be able to hear the sound or feel the blast. Of course, the characters promptly decided that this was enough action and adventure for the time being and spent the rest of the story talking about things, but I got to write cool space explosions, so I regret nothing.

Your work often explores the division of culture and identity. Here we see conflicted cultures, economic states, and political views, all bound together by the very real struggle for a necessary element of life. Do you find it challenging to weave such intricate conflicts in the same story?

I think it definitely contributes to my inability to write short things, heh.

As for challenge . . . I don’t know that it’s any more of a challenge than figuring out how to structure a satisfying plot. Actually, scratch that: Getting a plot and arc together causes me a lot more headaches, wailing, lamentation, gnashing of teeth, etc. Plots are hard.

I always want to have complexity in people and their particular situations and viewpoints, and I always want to write more into a story and do it better, because I think that’s the natural state of a lot of people around me. We’re all moving through a life with strange bedfellows and all manner of different cultural and individual assumptions and finding out how we fit or if we fit with other people. And that’s not even touching on how we figure out where we fit in the world.

Thinking out complex identities and idiosyncratic conflicts often comes up in the first stages of working out what X or Y plot element is going to mean within the fic—what it might mean to different people here and now. And then, by writing it into the story, I can inflict my existential unease on all of you in the name of dramatic tension. Ha-hah.

You make excellent use of both representation of realistic scientific detail and skilled female characters in the story. What are your thoughts on the representation of women in the sciences in science fiction? As a genre, do you feel science fiction has reached the pinnacle of representation, or do we still have far to go?

I’m going to answer the second question first. And I’m going to answer the question by saying that I don’t think the pinnacle of representation actually exists.

When we tell stories, we’ve got the diverse life experiences of seven-plus billion living people to contend with, as well as the life experiences of every person who’s ever walked the Earth, and every person who ever will—not to mention those people whose existences are not (or were not) impossible, but who don’t end up in existence through whatever vagaries of fate/chance/determinism. Into that, any author is shining a very narrow beam of insight, bounded on all sides by the things we haven’t learned about and can’t extrapolate, and by things we’ve learned to discount as simply not a possibility.

No matter what we do, we’re never going to match the diversity of actual human existence. A “pinnacle of representation” is a construct like an infinity or an asymptote. We’re not going to get there. But it provides us a direction in which we can head, if we think it’s worthwhile.

Personally, I do think it’s worthwhile. I think that finding ourselves and our aspirations reflected back to us in a wide variety of media is important and empowering—to steal a phrase from Mary Oliver (phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.htm), it’s “over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” And for those of us who aren’t necessarily reflected in those images, seeing them helps to broaden that beam of insight through which we view the world around us. We learn to regard possible things as possible.

(I think that’s one of the reasons that network reality TV shows and YouTube science channels both enjoy immense popularity: Regardless of rigor, they let us enter into places and experiences that are outside of what we can experience on our own. I may not know what it’s like to be a farmer on a cranberry bog, or even that cranberries grow in bogs, but Dirty Jobs can show me; I may not have the faintest idea what goes on in a professional kitchen, but Top Chef will show me; I may not ever get to go—or ever want to go—to the basement of the Pripyat hospital or the Fukushima exclusion zone, but Veritasium will take me there. Judging from viewing figures, people are hungry for those experiences.)

. . . It’s worth noting that the female scientists in Water Rights aren’t particularly groundbreaking, when it comes to diversity. Which doesn’t mean there can’t always be more female scientists in fiction! Instead of looking at how many times something has been done, I think it’s more useful to look at the larger stories we’re telling, not as individuals, but as participants in a much vaster body of stories in the culture around us. When you’ve got a large body of stories that seems to say, “X is always the case” or “Y is never the case,” then we’ve written ourselves into a place of ignorance. That isn’t a moral judgment; ignorance is a natural state, and one we’re born into, because when we’re born, we just don’t know anything. But ignorance isn’t useful. And when enough people are living in and acting from a place of ignorance, that can work in opposition to attempts to make an interconnected and socially resilient society. So shining those beams of insight into places of ignorance is generally a good idea.

In fiction—through ignorance, accident, or political bias—we may start seeing patterns like “no women are scientists” or “all heroic people are beautiful” or “all interesting stories are told about people before their old age” or “no future for humanity is hopeful.” And when we see those patterns, well, maybe it’s time to start injecting counter-narratives. It doesn’t mean to excise those themes from our stories entirely, but it does mean some attempt to build up a canon of works with other takes on the issue.

So that’s what I wanted to do in “Water Rights.”

I know I still have far to go. And the genre also still has far to go, and the genre will continue to have far to go as our range of insight widens and we become more aware of our areas of ignorance. But so long as that beam of insight is widening, I’m okay with not making it to a pinnacle anytime soon.

If you had the chance to live in near-Earth orbit, what would you like to do to earn a living?

Oh, wow.

You know, I think I’d rather visit near-Earth orbit than live there. I like Earth things, like long walks, cats, bone density, and an atmosphere which shields me from solar radiation. If someone wants to create a near-Earth orbit resort and organize an affordable writer’s retreat up there, I will leap at the chance, but I think my permanent residence should probably remain planetside.

If I was living up there, I hope I’d be doing something cool, though. Science education, maybe; I could go around and interview all the scientists and blog or vlog about it for audiences back on Earth. Not only would I be helping expand the public perception of the possible, but I’d also get to learn all about the science going on, first-hand! Plus, I wouldn’t have to deal with all the parts that weren’t exciting (see xkcd.com/683). I could just give the top-level overview and all the enticing bits.

Alternately, I’d like to do something with computers and programming. Or maybe I could be the short story laureate. That’s a job, right?

What does science fiction mean to An Owomoyela?

My very favorite definition is and remains a section from the Asimov’s Science Fiction manuscript guidelines: “A good overview would be to consider that all fiction is written to examine or illuminate some aspect of human existence, but that in science fiction the backdrop you work against is the size of the Universe.”

Science fiction is fiction whose world or events are freed from the constraints of what we currently believe to be possible or real; it’s also fiction which, when it needs to justify those breaks from our understood reality, points to some natural process or process of reason instead of something numinous or fundamentally unknowable. Science fiction fits itself into (or plays with, or pays lip service to) the frameworks of science in the fabric of the story itself.

Freeing ourselves from the constraints of what we assume to be possible or real is why science fiction and fantasy have always been fun, to me. What if is more fun than what is.

You work spans a number of genres and styles. How do you continue to challenge yourself? How do you push your own envelope as a writer?

I indulge my magpie-mind. I have real trouble throwing any ideas away, even the ones that are manifestly unworkable, which means I always have a lot of material I can use to examine how things work and how I can make them work. I also like proving to myself that I can do things which I have no idea how to do—for example, I’ve tried a couple times to write some kind of bizarro story (as I have a couple friends who work in that genre), and while I can’t say I’ve succeeded, I have learned a lot from the process of failing.

I also look for ways to keep things fun. I’ll host prompt calls once in a while, where people can throw ideas at me and I’ll get to see how I’d turn them into stories or scenes. Or I’ll play around with various forms: At one point I took a list of dramatic terms (bit.ly/dramatic_terms), selected and ordered twenty-five at random, and paired each of those with a wordcount—a multiple of fifty, from fifty to 500, each of those also randomly chosen. Then I tried to write a cohesive story where each scene played with its assigned term in exactly the wordcount allotted. (Structurally, it’s hilarious. The denouement is the fourth scene in, and I was given fifty words for it. The rising action, on the other hand, is the seventh scene from the end. I got 400 words for onomatopoeia, and 300 for gesture, but the final scene has to be a fifty-word monologue after a 100-word allegory. No idea how I’m going to pull that one off, but I’m looking forward to it.) I stalled out on the 100-word scene for assonance, but I’m hoping I’ll finish it some day.

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: Delia Sherman

Sandra Odell | 1,122 words

Your work is often a symphony for the senses, and “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” is no exception. From “skin and hair are white like the feathers of a white egret” to pink eyes, from the stink of sulfur to the songs of frogs and gators, the story is filled with the wonders and magic of the swampland. What do you feel is the appeal of such sensory impressions that enhance the reading experience?

I’m a great believer in Real Fantasy. If I’m expecting a reader to follow me into the dark woods of folklore, dream, and metaphor, I figure I’d better leave them a trail of good, hard, palpable pebbles to follow, and maybe some interesting smells, a beckoning sound or two, and some nice gingerbread to eat on the way (with details adjusted for regional variation). In other words, I think if the world of the story is real enough, readers are much more likely to accept egret girls and loups-garoux and haunted fiddles as real, too.

What struck me most about this story is your use of dialect both as a narrative tool and as a means of expressing character. Writers often tread a fine line between cultural appropriation/insult and respect of cultural identity when dipping their toes into the waters of various dialects. How do you address the use of language as a major component in a story?

I’d argue that language is always a major component in a story, but then, I’m a language geek. I write mostly historical fantasy, set in cultures I don’t live in, and I have always chosen to reflect those cultures in the language I use to write about them. For me, adopting a new voice is a way of projecting my imagination beyond my own experience. That said, I know that no matter how much research I do, I can never know what it is like to be Cajun or French or Victorian or male. I can certainly never speak to the experience of a whole culture. What I can do is imagine what it is like to be a foundling surrounded by music and dancing and everyday magic, who draws her images from the world around her and her speech patterns from French. It’s part of her world, and so, for a time, it becomes part of mine—and, I hope, part of my reader’s, too.

“The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” takes components of “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” and “The Barrow Man” and brings them together in a rich story all their own. What would you say to younger writers if you could speak with them on the importance of blending stories and genres to create something new?

So “Beauty and the Beast” is the only text there I recognize, and I wasn’t thinking of it when I wrote this. I was thinking of (well, stealing, actually), a traditional ballad called “The Bonny Lass of Anglesey,” which I learned off Martin Carthy’s Crown of Thorn album, about a king who gets a girl to engage in a dance competition with fifteen lords who want to take his gold and his land away. (youtube.com/watch?v=4VWkxJXGe5s, if you’re interested). But that’s just the plot. The rest of the story comes from having spent a lot of time in Louisiana, from listening to a lot of Cajun bands and learning to dance the Cajun jitterbug, from having read a lot of fairy tales and read a lot of folklore. In other words, stories come from everything you do and see and read and know and live. So do a lot of all of that. And don’t be afraid to write stuff that’s different from the norm. Oh, okay, be afraid—fear is part of the process: I’m scared stiff half the time that nobody will get what I’m trying to do. Then write it anyway.

Many of your stories explore the obligations of one generation to another, the passing and passage of oral tradition. Some scholars continue to see the written word as both the savior and executioner of the oral tradition. As speculative writers, writers of any genre, really, what can we do to support the continued oral traditions of various cultures so that their stories continue into the future?

We can listen. We can listen to old (and even not so old) people with stories to tell. Doesn’t have to be ancient folklore—urban legends are part of the oral tradition, too. So are things “everybody knows.” Listen to the way people talk, the words they use and the images and metaphors they don’t even know are metaphors, because they’ve always said it that way. If we can’t listen because our stories are set in the past or somewhere we can’t visit, then we can read (thank heaven for the written word, eh?) oral histories and original texts. Memoirs are good. So are novels and letters and songs from the place or period we’re interested in. We can be as honest as we can in passing on what we read, showing the good in the bad parts and the bad in the good parts. We can engage in the richness of culture, not just consume it.

Are there any particular writers who tickle your fancy when it comes to getting your regional fantasy on? Anyone who delights your sensibilities when you want to explore new cultures and ideas?

Oh, lordy. Lots. Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter (although a secondary-world fantasy) is imbued with the folklore (both indigenous and colonial) of New Zealand. Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire combines every element I love, and her prose is music. Andy Duncan can’t put a foot wrong in any of his short stories set in the south—read any you can find. Barbara Hambley’s Benjamin January mysteries, set in Louisiana, are wonderfully evocative. Both Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler have written beautifully about California, as has Elizabeth Bear in Karen Memory. Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper is all about oral history and ghosts in Brooklyn, but not the one you usually see in movies. There are more, but this is enough to be going on with.

What’s next for Delia Sherman? What can readers expect in the coming months?

I’m just about to hand in my next book, a middle-grade novel called The Evil Wizard Smallbone. It should be coming out from Candlewick in Fall 2016. Then I’m plunging into a currently Sekrit Project that I will talk about as soon as I can, I promise. It involves more historical ventriloquism, I can say that. I’m also working on a Victorian clockwork-punk mystery. And there should be a story set in that world coming out from Tor.com in the not-too-distant future.

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: Kevin Brockmeier

Laurel Amberdine | 676 words

Most people think that what prevents greater love is a lack of truly understanding each other’s experiences. By going to the opposite extreme in “The Invention of Separate People,” you demonstrate that isn’t entirely the case. What prompted this idea?

I was probably experimenting toward this idea rather than demonstrating it. The experiment arose from my instinct that what’s most exciting about other people, what’s most likely to inspire our passion and our empathy, is their mystery; when we cease to acknowledge that mystery and convince ourselves that we truly know them, rejecting the possibility that they might not be quite the people we imagine, is when we stop perceiving them as enigmatic other human beings and only as a type of themselves—an easy maneuver to make once you grow familiar with someone, and comfortable with his or her habits, but it spells death, I think, for honest love. Here’s a fitting quote from Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, which I happened to be reading today: “In another dream an old woman told me that at my age, she wished she’d known that the soul never stops appearing.”

I never much considered that a career exists repairing floral coolers, but of course it does! What made you think of this choice for the woman, and does it have any deeper meaning?

Part of me still has the same primary-colored notion of the work grown-ups do that I had when I was six or seven. Everyone is a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, an actor, a janitor, a pilot, a chef, a police officer: the kinds of jobs it was easy for me to conceptualize when I was little. It’s not that I can’t apply a layer of symbolism to the work I assigned the woman in “The Invention of Separate People,” or that she herself couldn’t, but the truth is that, first and foremost, I was just trying to remind myself that the world is bigger and more anomalistic than my reflexes often suggest it is.

What was the hardest part of writing this story?

The hardest problems for me are always the problems of language: In this case, trying to intuit my way, sentence by sentence, toward a prose style that was simple enough to strike the classic tale-telling tone I wanted the story to possess yet would accommodate the complications of numberless different minds, and also—a closely related difficulty—to find the forms of phrasing that might belong simultaneously to both one person and to many, that could be both individual and shared, so that I could write unconfusingly about a world in which, as the story posits, “all people were the same person.”

I know you have taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and many of our readers are aspiring writers. Is there any quick piece of advice you’d like to give?

When you’re trying to decide which stories to write, choose the ones that matter deeply to you—or, if you’re beginning from a different set of bearings, apply the things that already matter deeply to you to the stories you choose to write. Then make sure that every sentence is tuned as perfectly as possible to its own purposes. There are many other pieces of advice I could offer depending on what your intentions are, but those two, I think, are universal.

What are you working on lately?

I had hoped to make “The Invention of Separate People” part of a story suite—twenty or thirty short tales about beginnings rather than endings, and joy rather than unhappiness; stories with something of the Book of Genesis about them rather than the Book of Revelation, of Cosmicomics rather than Blindness. I had hoped, in other words, to counteract my natural tendencies toward isolation, dejection, and finality. I did write another of these stories, but the project turned out to be more exciting to me in the conception than it was in the execution, and for now, at least, I’ve set it aside to work on something else.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

Author Spotlight: Emil Ostrovski

Lee Hallison | 488 words

What inspired you to write this story?

Unrequited love, the persistence of human suffering, annoyance at myself for making statements like “the persistence of human suffering,” my resolve to continue making such statements anyway, an appreciation for the elegance of Buddhism’s solution to the problem of human suffering (there it is!), a high degree of skepticism about Buddhism’s solution to the problem of human suffering (and again! He just doesn’t know when to quit, does he?), the belief that we will figure out how to avoid death long before we figure out how to be happy, and my impressively hazy understanding of a Chinese classic called The Dream of the Red Chamber.

The voice is extremely fun. When you write humor, how much do you have to work or rework the voice?

At first, the voice was a tad more disparaging of the fates of the mortals (and immortals) whose lives (and afterlives) it was narrating. But my MFA comrades protested this arch quality. And they had a point. There is a difference between humor and outright farce. I like to think I (primarily) write humor, which, to my mind, is a little more human, a little more sympathetic. The voice needed to reflect that more human quality, while also retaining an element of play.

Coffee threads its way through the story. Are you also a fan of Frappuccino, or is there something else you like to drink?

I have it on good authority that the invention of the Frappuccino is, in fact, the teleological purpose of the universe. The real question is: How do we live our lives now that this purpose has been fulfilled? Have we been set adrift, cosmically speaking? Should nihilism prevail? Is everything nothing? Why does my nose itch? Should I stop asking these questions because whatever philosophical point I wanted to make regarding the epistemological impossibility of reaching the truth about such mysteries as why my nose itches has long been eclipsed by readerly annoyance, for there is nothing a reader hates more than when an author breaks the fourth wall and says, directly to them:

“’Sup, bro?”

Curious minds want to know—now that people will be able to transcend the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, what do you predict for The Great Voice’s next job?

Retirement. The Great Voice has just moved into a senior living community in Boca Raton, where It intends to play bingo and generally not give a damn, for, approximately, forever.

What are you working on next?

My second novel, Away We Go, will be released in February 2016. It’s a young adult dystopian, which is a misleading characterization—the book is more A Separate Peace than The Hunger Games, and not nearly as good as either. If that piques your interest, please check it out. I also have new short stories in the fall 2015 issues of The New Orleans Review and PRISM International.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

Author Spotlight: Nike Sulway

Lee Hallison | 833 words

What a heart-wrenching, beautiful, and deep story! There are so many levels and layers to ponder and pull in “The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club.” When you write, do you discover these layers as you work, or do you have a strong sense of where and why the story will flow the way it does?

Thank you! That’s a very flattering and generous response; I’m so enormously pleased to think that the story moved you. It’s so gratifying for any writer, I think, to hear that their work has touched a reader in some way.

When I write short stories, in particular, I often begin with a sense of certainty around what the story will be about, what its key images and themes will be, but every time the process of writing changes my preconceptions and once I’m deep in the middle of the writing of a story I let go of my preconceptions about what it should be, or was supposed to be, and give myself over to what the story is becoming. I think it was Karen Joy Fowler who said, in a workshop I attended with her at the Brisbane Writers Festival, that every story arises from the ashes of the story you think you are writing. That rings very true for me.

At the same time, that discovery draft is something I see as raw material. Once I’ve travelled into the story, I have to travel back out of it into the editing process, and become more conscious of the shape of the thing. I think it’s a little like my favourite experiences of walking in the bush. There are paths you think you will walk: These have a shape and a destination you think you know, but then once I enter a forest, I’m quite inclined to follow the song of a bird or the glimpse of an unusual bloom into going off the path. That’s when you have the most rewarding and strangest experiences. And I think, metaphorically speaking, that’s possibly when my best writing happens.

The story is quite playful and teases the reader with the animal v. human question—animals that chop pumpkins for soup and buy furniture on eBay—what inspired you to keep the reader off balance this way?

I don’t know, to be honest. I’d had a conversation with a friend about the horrors and pleasures of anthropomorphised animal tales—from Tarka the Otter, or The Wind In The Willows, to Babar the Elephant—anyway, I came home and stood in front of the bookshelf wondering why those stories are so often for children, and what a similar tale would look like if it were written for adults. I also have a deep fondness for the story of Clara the Rhinoceros, a female Indian rhinoceros who toured Europe during the mid-1700s. She was one of the first rhinoceroses in Europe, and was exhibited regularly, had her portrait drawn by many famous artists, and was generally rather famous. So these and a few other ideas started to come together. I also wanted to challenge myself to be a little less serious and earnest as a writer. I’d received a review of another piece in which the reviewer said I was a humourless writer, and I wondered if I could write something a little more playful than usual. I’m not sure it is that much more playful: Even among eBay-shopping rhinoceri, it seems, I can find a way to write about queerness and the challenges of mother-child relationships.

Despite the extinction scenario, somehow the ending feels optimistic. What parallels do you see in Clara’s epiphany to our lives?

I do think Clara becomes optimistic: that she’s in a period of transition from being defined by her romantic and familial relationships to seeing herself as part of a wider and more diverse and strange world. If there’s any parallel between her epiphany and our lives, I think for me it might be something about the difficulty, and the possible necessity, of re-orienting ourselves in terms of our relationship with others, and with the world, if we’re to get past feeling doomed and trapped and become more hopeful. If we’re to find solutions to the environmental and ecological challenges we are facing, I think we need to actively and hopefully seek them. Clara and the other characters in the story are caught up in contemplating their extinction. They’re convinced of its inevitability, and therefore have given up on the future. I hope humanity doesn’t spend so much time mourning ourselves that we forget to believe in the future.

What are you working on now?

I’ve got a new novel coming out next year called Dying In The First Person (hopefully), which is a work of contemporary realism (sort of), and then another couple of projects including a novel called Tern, which is a contemporary fairy tale set in rural Australia. Oh, and a series of magical alternative history novels about the orphaned children of Henry VIII!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Rahul Kanakia (“Here is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All”) and Caroline M. Yoachim (“Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death”), along with SF reprints by Brian Stableford (“The Pipes of Pan”) and Kameron Hurley (“The Light Brigade”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Helena Bell (“When We Were Giants”) and Kenneth Schneyer (“The Plausibility of Dragons”), and fantasy reprints by Toh EnJoe (“Printable”) and Karen Joy Fowler (“The Black Fairy’s Curse”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ll have even more great stories headed your way. Also, in December, our sister magazine Fantasy will be releasing a special issue celebrating the work of QUILTBAG creators, Queers Destroy Fantasy!, and you won’t want to miss it.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all the great reading in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Upcoming Events

The Editors

Want to meet our editor John Joseph Adams and/or contributors to the magazine? Here’s a list of upcoming events at which you can find us:

Borderlands Books | San Francisco, CA | Oct. 4 (3pm)

Queers Destroy Science Fiction! event | Readings, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: Chaz Brenchley, Jessica Yang, Rachel Swirsky, and Tim Susman.

Barnes & Noble | Ventura, CA | Oct. 10 (5pm)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 event | Readings, Discussion, Q&A, Signing | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Sofia Samatar, and Kelly Sandoval.

Reddit AMA | reddit.com | Oct. 13 (Time TBD)

Queers Destroy! event | Ask Me Anything interview | Featuring: TBD.

Pandemonium Books | Cambridge, MA | Oct. 29 (7pm)

Queers Destroy! event | Readings, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: Felicia Davin, Susan Jane Bigelow, Amal El-Mohtar, Anthony Cardno, Cecilia Tan, and John Chu.

World Fantasy Convention | Saratoga Springs, NY | Nov. 5-8

Convention | Panel Discussions, Signing | Featuring: John Joseph Adams.

Forbidden Planet | New York, NY | Nov. 9 (7pm)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 event | Panel Discussion, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Joe Hill, and Seanan McGuire (additional contributors TBD). Moderated by David Barr Kirtley of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

NYRSF Reading Series | New York, NY | Nov. 10 (7pm)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 event | Readings | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Seanan McGuire, and Carmen Maria Machado.

WORD Bookstore | Jersey City, NJ | Nov. 11 (7:30pm)

Press Start to Play event | Readings, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Robin Wasserman, Seanan McGuire, and David Barr Kirtley.

Columbia University Science Fiction Society | Columbia University, New York, NY | Nov. 17 (6pm)

Talk and Q&A (Open to the Public) | Featuring: John Joseph Adams and Christie Yant (editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue).

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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 two-time 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 is the author of Skinwalkers, a Pathfinder Tales novel inspired by Viking lore. She’s published more than thirty short stories in anthologies like Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Armored, and The Way of the Wizard, and magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Farrago’s Wainscot. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor for Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Horror! special issue. She lives in 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

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Kevin McNeil

Illustrators

Galen Dara

Elizabeth Leggett

Reiko Murakami

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