MYTHIC

A SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE

ISSUE #16 | SPRING 2021

Editor’s Note

Shaun Kilgore

HELLO AGAIN, EVERYONE. Since Issue #16, there have been some changes to what was to be the new format for the magazine. Instead of the planned bi-monthly version, I’ve scaled back to bi-annual issues. There will be a spring and fall issue of MYTHIC every year and each on will include between fifteen and twenty short stories as well as essays, articles, reviews, and other content. This change comes in responses to changes in the rest of my life and other responsibilities so I’ve had to adjust the balance accordingly. I think by concentrating the content into two thicker issues will be a nice bonus for those who love short fiction.

The other piece of news is that thanks to all of the support the Kickstarter/subscription drive received, MYTHIC will now be able to pay authors 4 CENTS A WORD for original, unpublished fiction. This is a great move in the right direction. Honestly, I places MYTHIC halfway to professional market status according to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, which is 8 CENTS A WORD.

As always, my deep, heartfelt thanks go out to the many people who have support MYTHIC over the last four years and I hope I can count on you in the coming years as we regain our footing and prosper. I believe we can forge a new path and eventually achieve the goal of becoming a professional short fiction market.

Killing Ground

Jean Graham

MAMA HAD DEMONS.

This house is where they’d first whispered in her ear, and where they’d first told her to do The Terrible Thing.

You’d never know, to look at it today. Middle class suburban tract house on a corner lot. Two car garage, rose bushes, philodendrons. And a wrap-around lawn, more brown than green right now, thanks to the perpetual California drought.

For an hour, I’d been staring at that lawn from my car, which I’d parked across the street in front of what used to be Pastor Hale’s church. The church had a new name and a new minister these days. It was a good bet that the neighbors were all new, too. The Terrible Thing, after all, had happened forty years ago, and no one wanted to remember it.

No one except me.

The “For Sale” sign looked dirty and shopworn, as though it had been there for years. Probably had.

Gee, tough house to sell, you think? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe somebody else did remember.

I got out of the car, and took my time crossing the street to the lawn’s edge. I didn’t walk on it, though. Not yet. I needed to remember just where the spot, the killing ground, had been. There, or... No, it was there, about where the real estate post stood, leaning slightly, its sign creaking every time the breeze stirred.

I stepped onto the lawn. Parched grass crunched under my feet. Four paces in, and I knew I’d been right. It was here.

Here, on a sweltering June day filled with water sprinklers, ice cream trucks, and kids playing on bikes and skates, Mama’s demons had made her do it.

I sat down on the lawn, my back against the sign post. Didn’t give a damn what any passers-by might think of the weird woman with a large red shoulder bag sitting there on the ground.

I had reason.

I spread my fingers and put my right hand on the grass. On the spot.

And heard the screams.

Peter and I hid under my bed when it started. Mama yelling that she meant to kill us all was how it always started. She’d do it this time, though. We’d watched her get the big butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer. Before she turned around again, we ran into the bedroom, twisted the lock and scrambled under the bed’s dust-ruffled box spring.

Mama hadn’t been far behind us. We heard her body-slam the door, shrieking our names.

“Peter! Trisha!” Another slam against the door, then a string of profanities, and, “You get out here, damn you! Get out here right now!”

Shaking, we just hugged each other and stayed put while Mama’s assault on the door went on and on, until...

More screams—coming through the thin wall from the bedroom next to mine. Coming from the babies.

My door rattled one more time. Then, footsteps. The sound of the next room’s door being opened. And the babies, crying even louder.

I hugged Peter tighter and started to cry, a tear-choked mantra. “No, Mama, no, Mama, no, Mama, noooooooo!”

Babies screaming. Mama screaming. Thumps, thuds, more footsteps, and the click-bump of the front door being opened.

A few moments after that, the screaming stopped.

A rapid knocking on our door, now, and a man’s voice, frantic. “Trisha! Peter! It’s Richard Hale! Open the door!”

Pastor Hale! I crawled out, dragging a still-sobbing Peter with me, to unlock the door. The instant it came open, the pastor wrapped strong arms around us and rushed us down the hall, through the front door. Into hell.

He tried to shield our eyes with his hands. “Don’t look,” he said, and guided us down the porch steps to the right, toward the church. “Don’t look.”

But I had to look.

At the neighbors gathered in clumps on the street, murmuring, gaping, some of them crying.

And at Mama, standing frozen on the lawn, the butcher knife still in her hand. And on the ground...

I screamed.

The pastor swept us away then, escaping the carnage just as the first of a squadron of police cruisers wailed around the corner.

Blood. Oh, God, there had been so much blood.

My hand rested now on the exact place where the blood had soaked into the thirsty grass. Didn’t have to guess anymore. I knew precisely, because... well, because ever since that day, Mama’s demons had been whispering in my ear, too.

“Slumming, Trisha?”

I jumped, and the bag slipped off my shoulder to land in the grass beside the thing that had spoken. A very small, spiky thing. A horned toad.

“Yeah, slumming,” I said, glaring at it. Then I had to ask. “Which one are you?”

“Stitch.” His needle teeth formed a grotesque rictus. Lizard’s smile. “We knew you’d come.”

“That’s a comfort.” I pulled the fallen bag into my lap, looping the strap back over my shoulder. “Doesn’t tell me what you’re doing here, though.”

Stitch’s spiked head tilted to one side. “We knew you’d come,” he repeated. “And we knew why. You came because forty years of therapy hasn’t done a damned thing. You came to use that paring knife in your purse to open your veins. You came to feed the killing ground.”

Little bastards had been reading my mind again. “Go to hell,” I said stupidly, and you just haven’t lived until you’ve heard a lizard laugh. He laughed so hard that his clawed feet danced him in a little circle, and the scaly flap of skin under his chin danced, too.

“Any time now,” he snorted. Then the laughter finally stopped and he became, literally, dead serious. “But you’ll be coming with me.”

Annoyed but acquiescent, I reached into the bag and pulled the paring knife free, running my thumb lightly over its razor sharp edge. “That was my plan,” I said.

“Still is.” Yellow-rimmed eyes greedy with blood lust, Stitch did miniature push-ups in the grass, repeating himself with each lift of his scrawny legs. “Still is. Still is.” He darted abruptly away then, running a short distance across the lawn in pursuit of... what? I saw the fly just as his tongue lashed out and snatched it from the air. As he downed it with a satisfied gulp, then turned to amble back toward me, I wondered how he could possibly know that the fly hadn’t been one of his own kind. Probably didn’t matter. You couldn’t kill them, whatever form they took, and if you tried, they only returned later on as something else—rat, spider, dung beetle. They weren’t particular.

When Stitch came back from his snack, he kept on coming, crawling onto my jeans at the knee and up my thigh to the spot where my left hand rested, holding the knife.

“Nice blade,” he opined. “Shall we get on with it?”

I didn’t.

“You couldn’t get the babies, though, could you?” I looked down at my right hand, still on the spot where all the blood had been. “Pastor Hale always said that babies were innocents. Hadn’t reached what he called ‘the age of accountability.’ So they go to Heaven, no matter what.”

“One quick slash on each wrist,” he advised, completely ignoring everything I’d said. “That’s all it takes.”

“Funny thing is, I’d completely forgotten the other thing he told me, until just now,” I said, ignoring him back. “He told me you wouldn’t get Mama either, when her time came. Bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic. Not her fault. Like the babies, not accountable. So after all the terrible things you made her do...”

“One wrist will be enough. Slash just one, then.”

With the fingers of my left hand, I turned the paring knife over, then over again. Such a tiny thing. So unlike the huge butcher knife Mama took from the kitchen drawer that day.

“Maybe,” I said, “I should have paid more attention back then to all the other things the good reverend had to say.”

I’d never known that horned toads could hiss. “It’s totally painless,” he lied. “Simple. You cut, I drink, and then...”

“You take my soul,” I finished. “The same way your kind took Peter’s soul three years ago, when he couldn’t kick the cocaine habit and shot himself. Seems therapy never did him any damned good, either.”

“Want to see him again?” Stitch’s claws flexed, pricking through my jeans and into my thigh. “Just do what you came here to do.”

“And what if I say no? What if I decide I’d rather go where the babies went, and in my own good time?”

He hissed again, the claws digging into me deeper. “Bitch! I don’t need your consent, you know!” And those sharp teeth sank into the flesh of my thumb, instantly drawing blood.

“Get off!” I swatted him, hard, sent him tumbling head over horn-tailed ass across the lawn. “Get away from me!” I shouted at him. “And stay away. All of you!”

But he came scuttling right back, tail lashing side to side and blood—my blood—staining that mouth full of razor teeth. He launched himself at my sandals, aiming for the new blood supply of my bare toes.

He didn’t make it.

I snatched him up in mid-leap, and well... did what I had to do. I couldn’t kill him. But I could sure as hell screw up his lizardly incarnation, at least for a little while.

Before I drove away, I slowed just long enough to bid them all good riddance: house, killing ground, Terrible Thing... and pinned with a small paring knife to the post of a faded For Sale sign, the husk of a “dead” horned toad.

About the Author

Jean Graham’s fiction has appeared in the anthologies Alternative Apocalypse, Memento Mori, Misunderstood, Time of the Vampires, and Dying to Live, as well as in Weirdbook and Mythic Magazine. A member of both SFWA and HWA, she resides in San Diego, CA along with 5000 books, five cats, and one husband.

A True Believer in Skepticism

JR Gershen-Siegel

DENISE NEVER REALLY saw the fair assembled. One day it wasn’t there, and then the next, it was. It was held in a vacant lot near her office. Nobody knew who owned the lot, so there was no one to object.

It was a great deal like an old-fashioned circus, minus the animals. There were jugglers and trapeze artists, foods of all kinds, and games of skill and chance.

Denise took in none of that, hurrying to either go to work or come home. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened in her humdrum life, and she liked it that way.

The fair had been going on for months before she ventured inside. The main tent was crowded with fairgoers and vendors and it felt too close and claustrophobic for her all too sensible tastes. She retreated to a wall.

There was a booth which she had not noticed amidst the crowds. A fellow was seated on a stool, wearing a turban. There was a banner at the front top of the booth which said, ‘The Great Reynaldo Will Tell Your Fortune.’

Denise laughed a little. Fortune tellers were just so much hokum, the product of willing believers who were so chatty they would give their secrets away willingly. A scam artist merely needed to be good at reading body language, asking leading questions, following up on the answers, and convincingly recover from unexpected or out and out wrong answers.

“You are skeptical,” the Great Reynaldo commented, “Miss Czechowski.”

Denise was careful not to react, instead confining the double take to her thoughts. How did he know my name? “What did you just call me?”

“I called you by your name. Or would you prefer Denise? I’m only trying to be respectful.”

“You saw my driver’s license when I paid for my, my ticket.” Involuntarily, she fidgeted a little.

“I have been back here the whole time. And we both know you didn’t need a ticket to get in here. Even the main tent has free admission.”

“You saw one of my credit cards when you sold me a soda.”

“I haven’t sold you anything.”

“I mean you, the fair, collectively. You’ve got accomplices everywhere, advance scouts. I’ve seen how fake faith healers work. I know all about your little tricks and scams.”

“So you believe I have confederates?”

“I don’t just believe it. I know you do.”

“I see. And so, Denise, you’re here because you’re finally admitting your life is boring.”

“What?”

“It is. Your life is utterly dull. It’s a parade of endless gray or tan or brown pantsuits, accented with prim, high-collared blouses, and sensible flats which would be orthopedic if they were any duller.”

“How rude!”

“I’m not finished, Denise. You punctually arrive at your office and spend your time answering and filing meaningless correspondence for others. You eat your brown-bagged lunch of shaved ham on white bread, with a small apple on the side, always between 11:30 AM and noon sharp. Then you send out even more meaningless correspondence, tidy your already tidy desk, and depart, punctually, at five on the dot.”

“I—”

“You walk straight home, always taking precisely ten minutes to go a block down Taylor Street and then a sharp left onto Hoover Street and number 29.”

“You’ve been spying on me!”

“We only got to this town a few months ago. I’ve been here the whole time, either in the main tent or on the fairgrounds. We never go into the towns we visit.”

While Denise realized she had never seen a stranger at the market or the office or on the street, the whole thing still felt strange and wrong. “You’re still a stalker.”

“First I was a spy, and now I’m a stalker? Seriously, Denise—and with all due respect—but you’ve got nothing, and you do nothing, that anyone would ever want to stalk.”

If the whole encounter had been a movie, she would have slapped him then and there. Instead, she announced, “I’m leaving. I don’t need to be insulted.”

“Look, I apologize, all right? Your life may have a great deal of sameness, but it’s still your life. I shouldn’t have judged it so harshly.”

“Apology accepted.”

As Denise turned to brave the crowds again and leave, the Great Reynaldo called out, “Wait! I can make it up to you.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you your fortune.”

“I’ll pass; those are always fakes.”

“No, no, Denise! This time, it’ll all be true. So what do you say?”

She hesitated before answering. It was already getting dark, and her daily supper of baked cod with steamed cauliflower was going to be late. “I refuse to pay for whatever it is you think you’re going to predict.”

“No charge, Denise.”

“Then why do this?”

“Like I said; it’ll be to atone for my sins. Here, why don’t you sit down?” the Great Reynaldo hopped off the stool and, standing, his body did not seem to be correctly proportioned.

Denise stared for a moment and then remembered that it was rude to do so. “Well?” she asked.

“I’ll start with tonight. You’ll go home, taking the usual route, but this time there’ll be a mugger. Your sensible flats will come in handy. You’ll be able to outrun him.”

“So you’ll get an accomplice to pretend to try to mug me tonight. Right.”

“Like I said, we stay in the tents or on the fairgrounds.”

“Wait—how do you get groceries?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of delivery, Denise? Now, in a week, you’ll reflect back on our chat and the near-mugging. The incident will convince you to get into better shape. You’ll take up jogging and even sign up for a self-defense class, but you’ll only go to it twice.”

“Right, right.”

“You’ll competitively race a few times. It won’t be anything big, but you’ll enjoy it. You’ll change your diet in order to get better at your new hobby. Ham on white bread and plain baked cod with steamed cauliflower just isn’t going to be enough protein or carbs. You’ll cook whole chickens for the first time in years, and will brave a touch of ethnic cooking. You’ll be better at Mexican-style cuisine than Asian.”

“Sure.” As if that would ever happen. Ethnic food was always far too spicy, and it always upset Denise’s digestive system. Staying away from it had been a sensible precaution for years.

“In a little less than four years, you’ll meet a couple during one of your jobs. You’ll be friends for a few years, going to movies together, that sort of thing.”

“I despise the cinema.”

“You’ll go anyway. And it’ll all go swimmingly until the affair. You’ll break up their marriage.”

“Now I know you’re crazy. I would never take up with a married man.”

“Who said anything about your affair partner being male?” the Great Reynaldo asked.

“Keep spinning your yarn.” She waved at him dismissively.

“The relationship is a tempestuous one. You leave after a few years. You also leave your job and go to work for your employer’s biggest competitor, Sutton Delta Industries.”

How had he known that particular detail? It was exceptionally obscure. “So I see you’ve gotten someone to visit my office, too.”

“Like I said, we don’t leave the fairgrounds. You become ill about a year after going to work for Sutton. They deny enough of your medical benefits that you bring suit. But sadly, you don’t live long enough to collect on the verdict—which goes in your favor.”

“Wait, what?” She swallowed. This part felt wrong.

“You die about twelve years from now, at Memorial Hospital.”

Denise got up slowly from the stool. “This isn’t amusing anymore. I’m leaving.”

“No one likes hearing that part.”

On an all too rare whim, she asked, “Can you tell everyone’s fortune?”

“Of course I can. That gal in the blue blazer? She commits suicide in about a year and a half. The fellow next to her moves to the suburbs and ends up on the sex offender list. Those twin toddlers both go to Cornell and then the one on the right goes to vet school, while the one on the left gets a PhD in microbiology at Tufts. The—”

“Stop it! No more!”

“I’m sorry,” the Great Reynaldo said. “It’s not often that anyone asks about anyone other than themselves or their family. Then again, Denise, you have no family. And an existence as predictable as your own has got to bore even you sometimes, I would imagine.”

“You think you’re so clever. I didn’t come here to be insulted,” she repeated.

“Oh, then what did you come here for?”

“You’re the fortuneteller. You tell me.”

“You were curious for the first time in your life. This is a turning point for you. In fact, it’s a turning point for every single person here in the main tent. Everyone’s life will change tonight, bar none.”

“Of course you can say anything you please. It’s not like I would ever be able to verify any of it. Tell me, has everyone come over here to your booth and had their fortune told?”

“No, Denise. Only you.”

She stared, nonplussed for the moment. There was something otherworldly and almost sinister about the statement. “I’ll be leaving now.”

“Don’t forget—as if the course of your life could ever be changed—someone’s going to try to mug you tonight.”

“Right. Er, thank you.” She turned and left, making her way through the crowds again.

The night was a little cloudy but then the moon came out and the air got crisp.

People poured out of the main tent. It was as if the fair was turning off its lights just because she was leaving. That makes no sense, Denise reasoned. She was nowhere near as important as all that. She wasn’t important at all.

She was nearly at Taylor Street when she turned around. What she saw also made no sense.  It was as if the main tent had closed, like a huge umbrella, and the way it appeared was a lot like a rocket. Then someone ignited that candle and it really was a rocket, for it flew straight up, its lights illuminating the air below as it climbed.

Denise stood there, gawking, until she heard a rustling. A man appeared and he asked, “Can you give me a dollar so I can buy a soda?”

“No.”

“C’mon,” he whined.

She began to walk away. It was just a block down Taylor, and then a sharp left onto Hoover and her home, number 29.

Footsteps echoed on the sidewalk. She was being followed. She turned back to the sound of the footsteps, and there was a flash, illuminated by the main tent’s lights as it climbed into the sky. The stranger had a knife. “Gimme your wallet.”

She ran past Hoover, to Jefferson Street, and then crossed Monroe and Fillmore, where there were crowds and open shops and restaurants. She ducked into a Mexican restaurant. She had never been in it before. But then again, she hadn’t been to any of the town’s restaurants.

Shaking, she stood near the hostess’s station. The Great Reynaldo had been right. She had almost been mugged, yet she had outrun her would-be assailant. But she was winded and would need to get into better shape.

“May I help you?” asked the hostess.

“Uh, table for one.”

As the hostess brought her to her table, Denise pondered what it all meant, whether the running and the new diet and the races and the affair and all the rest of it would so much as happen. After all, she had changed things— maybe—by agreeing to a Mexican meal. The Great Reynaldo, or whatever his name really was, or even if he was a ‘he’ at all, or even human, hadn’t mentioned a Mexican supper.

The enormous menu was full of unfamiliar foods, such as chiles rellenos and enchiladas suizas. She would have to more or less close her eyes and point.

If she had changed things in the prediction, then what else could she change? The possibilities were as seemingly endless as her choices for a meal.

Mistress of her own destiny, Denise considered the open book that was her future, and placed her order.

About the Author

JR Gershen-Siegel is a Lambda Literary Award nominee (2014, Untrustworthy, under SF/F/Horror https://www.lambdaliterary.org/current-submissions/). She has been published by Riverdale Avenue Books, Jay Henge Publishing, Hydra Productions, and Writers Colony Press. Her work has appeared in Mythic Magazine (thank you), Theme of Absence, Empyreome, and Asymmetry Fiction. Her current project is a trilogy of works about Victorian Boston, called The Real Hub of the Universe. She lives in Boston with her husband and twice as many computers as they need.

Grey-Blooming Nightmare

Bo Balder

KIRSIMARJA FOUND THE bone shard when she was weeding the nightmare field. A bolt of pain struck right through her thick gloves when she touched it. She didn’t know what it meant, but she couldn’t do anything in the middle of the nightmare field. The grey-furred sepal leaves still hid the blooms with their terrible faces, but it was never wise to get the attention of a nightmare. A drop of fresh nightmare sap ingested would give you horrible nightmares, an distillation, screaming death after the slightest touch.

She shoved the bone into her pocket. With her mind shuttered as tightly as she could, she gathered her knee leathers, cutters and short hoe, and hastened out of the field. Once safely behind the screen of cypress trees, she whipped off veil and headdress, leather apron and gloves, all the necessary precautions for dealing with nightmares.

With her bare hand she took the bone out of her pocket. It was a finger bone, with a jagged, healed break. The bone Ola, her fiancé, had broken one day while they were playing. The bone sent her an image of Ola all dressed up for travel, ready to go to war and glory. He greeted someone coming up to him with a smile, turned away to fasten his saddlebag and got a blow to the head. He dropped down, dead.

Kirsimarja had been worrying about Ola for three years now, ever since he went to the front. No messages had come, but that was normal. The war ate up all one’s attention, her father and grandfather had said. She wasn’t to fret. But of course she had worried. And now it turned out she was right. Ola was dead.

She touched the bone to her forehead. Ola had been dead for years. He’d never even left but had been murdered right here at home. All those moonless nights she’d climbed the hill above the ruined town, and persuaded herself she saw the front’s fires and lightning on the western horizon, all for nothing.

Tears burned behind her eyes, but she refused to let them run free. She wasn’t ready to grieve yet.

The valley’s farmsteads hunkered in the fields around the crumbling town walls. Five houses, five families. Her family grew poisonous herbs, Ola’s. vine fuel. They and the children of the other families had all played together, slept in heaps like puppies before the great hearths, had loved and fought and defined each other.

Somebody in one of the families had killed Ola.

She had to lay her mind at rest before she could return to weeding among the nightmares. The blooms would sense her grief and grow nightmares especially for her. She shuddered. Although she’d sold them on the market without qualms, she didn’t like to think of their horrible effect on people’s sleep.

She had to find out who’d killed Ola. And after that she’d decide to do with that person. Give them what they deserved.

As she passed by the winter oats on the Vittlers’ lands the finger bone tingled against her palm. She had to stop and ride out a spasm of sobbing. How could someone have killed sweet Ola? So happy, so full of laughter, so generous and kind? The finger bone tingled harder. She closed her eyes and waded into the green, succulent oats, holding the bone in front of her. There, a large patch of rust stained the ground. She grabbed her hoe and dug around without regards for the oats. She didn’t find much, mostly rust clumped in the form of mail eyelets, spread out in man shape on one side, bunched on the other. Why had they bothered to hide his mail shirt? And why not sell it instead of tossing it away? It had been an heirloom, keeping safe generations of male Pulveras as they marched to the eternal front.

It was proof of something, but of what?

“What are you doing in my oats?” a voice said.

Kirsimarja shrieked. Quick as a flash she covered the bare path of ground with her apron and stood up to block the view.

But it was only Arto Vittler. He leaned on his own hoe, backlit against the sun so she couldn’t see his face.

“I was going home for lunch when I spotted this big weed in your field,” she said. “I thought I might as well take it out.”

The disturbed earth around her neither confirmed nor denied her words.

“Thanks, I guess. But since I can’t repay the favor with your nightmares, let me take care of my own furrows.” His voice sounded dry.

Kirsimarja stepped back on the path. “I’m going home to eat. See you later.”

Her heart thumped in her ears. Silly to get so startled. People would wonder what she was hiding.

With the finger bone as dowsing rod, she traversed the fields. She met only fieldhands who knew better than to question a member of the families. Ola’s sword was hidden in the artichoke field, stuck deep into the earth with only the hilt visible, overgrown with pisspot flowers. Someone wasn’t taking as good care of the artichokes as he should –it was Arto Vittler’s task. Should she then suspect Arto? But he had no reason to kill anyone, let alone Ola.

She left the sword penetrating the furrow. She didn’t have the strength to pull it out, and anyway, she didn’t want to be seen with the evidence of murder, not yet. Not until she knew, until she was ready.

The finger bone found Ola’s skull in the crook of an olive tree on the Cannoneras’ land. His teeth grinned death at her, all save the missing front tooth. She’d knocked that out, when they were both eight. Now it identified him.

She figured she knew enough, but her feet insisted on following the finger bone on a zigzag trek all over the valley. Thighbones hidden in a fence, in plain sight if you knew. Both his feet among the dried stalks of last year’s arrowroot, surrounded by the new bright green shoots.

Maybe someone deliberately strewed his remains all over the fields, to spread the evidence among the families. Or wild animals could have scattered the body parts as they dragged them away to eat. She might never know.

Whoever had done it had been so clever. To wait until Ola went to war. To hide the body parts all this time. She’d have to cast her mind back to the spring of three years ago. What girls had been sad to see Ola go, or jealous of Kirsimarja because he’d asked her hand in marriage? What boys had been envious of Ola, because all the girls loved him? Or because he was going to war to gain glory and spoils?

She’d never looked deeper than the surface, where they were all friends and everybody lived in harmony. That was a story they told each other to make life in the valley more bearable. The work was hard, the soil broke their backs, except for the Venineras who worked the sodden lower fields and got foot rot. Ola’s family had the hardest task, working the fields right below the razed town walls, where the ground was stoniest and the sun angle the steepest. Yet if the weather was good, stood to make the most from their wine fuel.

A flash of movement among the trees made her turn her head. Who was that? She waited, her eye trained on the line of trees, but nothing stirred. She must have imagined it.

Kirsimarja set her feet on the path to the Cannoneras’ farm, hollowed out by generations of valley folk. Fairy Lace lined the path and perfumed the air. Every year she wished she could bottle the scent and she’d never yet done anything about it. She would, she promised herself. After she’d taken revenge for Ola’s death. After.

She lifted her hand to Mother Cannonera and her women, bending their backs among the bean vines. It wasn’t her she wanted to talk to, it was Eriita, the middle daughter. Emiye had married out of the valley, to a wine merchant, and Pirkitta the youngest had only been fifteen when Ola had left.

She bumped into Pirkitta as she entered the kitchen. The girl stood a head taller than Kirsimarja, and her wide shoulders and big hands were almost male in their width and strength. Pirkitta had already been big and strong, and quick to anger when she was fifteen. It wouldn’t have been impossible for her to kill Ola. The question was more, was it likely?

“Afternoon, Kirsimarja,” Pirkitta said, not unfriendly but not warmly either.

“Pirkitta, don’t let me keep you from your work, but I want to ask you some questions.”

Pirkitta shrugged and wiped away the sweat running down her cheeks. “What about?”

“Do you remember the day Ola left?”

Pirkitta turned, the pot scrubber in her hand. “I guess, but why do you want to talk about that? It’s ages ago.”

“We were having dinner at his family’s. All of us, even the small kids.”

Pirkitta snorted and turned away again. “Even. Yeah. For once we were invited.”

Kirsimarja bit her lip. “You were so much younger. We wanted to be free, not look after little kids.”

“I understand. It just wasn’t fun, you know.”

“After the dessert and the speeches, the boys went to the armor room and Ola’s dad gave him his armor and sword. Then the boys dressed up Ola as if they were his squires and then they took a wineskin to get drunk in the orchard. Do you know where they went after that?”

Pirkitta shrugged. “ I just know you all went out and didn’t come back. It was all boring grown-up talk after that so I fell asleep.”

“The girls didn’t go away,” Kirsimarja said, puzzled.

“Yes you did. You, Erine, Fot, you all went off and left me, as usual.”

Kirsimarja was sure she and the other girls her age hadn’t left together. It was true they hadn’t paid attention to Pirkitta. She’d just never realized how much the girl had resented it. Ola’s murder made Kirsimarja a weeping wound, feeling every feeling floating her way.

Maybe she should apologize to Pirkitta, but she didn’t think that would make anything better after all this time. “Do you remember anything else? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Pirkitta bent over her pot and scrubbed harder. “I never could understand why everybody was celebrating. Going off to war is cause for sadness, wouldn’t you say? Young men dying or returning mutilated and changed?”

Kirsimarja’s throat was too tight to answer. When she found her voice, it sounded burred. “It’s an honor to defend the motherland, surely?”

Pirkitta sniffed. “It doesn’t seem to change much, does it? My granda and my da tell the exact same stories, as if they went to the same place and did the same things. I don’t get why we should revere the soldiers when there are never any victories, or defeats for that matter.”

The clean pot banged against the others as she hung it over the stove. “Stupid Ola and my stupid brother and those other jerks always snuck off everywhere together. I bet they were secretly drinking somewhere.”

Kirsimarja mumbled something and stumbled outside. Maybe Pirkitta was right, maybe Kirsimarja had forgotten details of that last evening. Or Pirkitta was wrong, but that didn’t even matter. She at least managed to think different thoughts about life here than Kirsimarja ever had.

She’d never noticed that Ola and Leka were especially close. Just boys hanging out togehter. And she’d never noticed Pirkitta’s resentment. What else had she missed? Was she especially blind, or stupid, or was it just that she’d swallowed the stories people told about themselves without ever checking if they were true, or if she had a different opinion?

She bumped up against a large, warm, wine-smelling person. Callused hands gripped her shoulders a little too tightly and she was pressed against a chuckling belly.

“Dear girl! What are you doing here, muttering to yourself? Your hair is all awry!”

Master Pulvera made as if to tuck in her stray locks all by himself, but Kirsimarja managed to sidestep him.

And then he hemmed her in again with his bulk. Why had she never noticed before that Ola’s father stood too close and looked too long at some parts of her body?

“Perhaps you’d like to come by for dinner tonight? We don’t see you as often as we like,” he purred in her ear.

It was as if Kirsimarja had borrowed Pirkitta’s eyes. What a lecherous smile Pulvera had, how close he pushed his bulging belly. She didn’t like him. She never had. Why on earth had she kept coming by like a dutiful lawdaughter and borne his sly jokes and oh so casual, accidental touches? What must her lawmother have thought?

She really needed to talk to Mistress Pulvera. “Of course, lawfather, I’m sure mother can spare me tonight, but let me just nip over and ask her. Where are you bound?”

“I have business at the Cannoneras.”

Kirsimarja wavered for a moment, thinking of poor Pirkitta who would have to fend off Master Pulvera, but then she figured the girl could take care of herself. No veils between that sharp gaze and the world.

As she took the turn back onto the path up the hill, she bumped into Arto. For a moment whe wished he’d been there to shield her from Master Pulvera’s excesses, but then again, she’d done just fine.

“If he’s bothering you, you can tell me,” Arto said.

He stood too close, like Master Pulvera. Didn’t men get that? Or did they do it on purpose? She refused to meet Arto’s eyes and sidestepped him. “I’m fine, thanks.”

She trudged up to the Pulveras’ farmhouse, hoping to find mistress Pulvera there alone. It was hot, her feet were sore from all the walking she was doing, and she hadn’t gone home for lunch. The stiff weeding apron chafed her shoulders.

The steep, rocky path wound between the apricot groves on the left and the artichoke fields on the right. At last she reached the vineyards, but that also meant leaving the shade of the apricot trees. Field workers were snipping off the excess grape clusters and checking for blights. They greeted her respectfully and she nodded back.

What did the hands think of her? Servants were omnipresent. Maybe they knew what had happened at the farewell party, or what went on in the Pulvera house. But they would never tell a member of the families.

Her feet sighed in relief as she reached the cypress-ringed Pulvera farm, the oldest in the valley. She went through the gate into the square courtyard. A small girl was turning last year’s apples. That must be Fot’s eldest, Ola’s deceased sister’s child.

“Where’s the mistress?” Kirsimarja asked.

The girl jerked her head to one of the shaded workspaces around the courtyard. “She’s checking the vats.”

Kirsimarja went into the cool darkness. While her eyes adjusted to the dimness, white ghost hams dangling from the ceiling were the only visible thing. “Mistress Pulvera?”

“Is that you, Kirsimarja?”

She curtsied briefly. “Mistress. I would like to talk to you.” The finger bone bumped against her hand, hidden in her apron pocket. Should she tell? Or did Mistress Pulvera suspect already?

Mistress Pulvera gestured to the rough trestle table where her accounts books lay opened and ready for the tally. “Let me just check off what I’ve done so far.” She dipped her goose quill into the ink and made some marks.

Kirsimarja wished she could read better. Why hadn’t she been studying harder? Until this morning, she’d always expected to be Mistress Pulvera one day, after she and Ola had been married.

“Well, my dear?”

“I’ve been wondering—we haven’t heard from Ola in three years. Was it like that for you as well? Or should I start wearing mourning?”

Mistress Pulvera finally looked up. The look from her large black eyes made Kirsimarja tremble inside. “My husband returned after two years. My lawfather after four. So I can’t answer that.”

She trapped Kirsimarja’s hand with her large cold one. “Why are you asking these questions? You realize your father has made promises about your dowry.”

Kirsimarja swallowed. She wanted to jerk her hand away but made it lay still. “Promises are a two-way deal. So far Pulvera hasn’t given me a husband. How can I know you ever will? Isn’t it my right to look elsewhere?”

Mistress Pulvera squeezed harder, frowning over her majestic nose. “Don’t be so hasty to be released from your vows. Together you and I could manage…”

Manage Pulvera, Kirsimarja understood that much. Why had she not known women could convey so much while saying so little? Had she become an adult only this morning, when she’d found the finger bone and understood her future would be forever changed?

“Maybe,” Kirsimarja said and cast down her eyes. Let Mistress Pulvera think she was in love with someone else. Not that she had much choice. Ola had had no brothers. It would either be Arto Vittler, Leka Cannonnera, a year her junior, or thirty-two year old Perti Arcinge. She’d always felt most comfortable with Arto.

“Arto…” she started.

“Is of course out of the question.” Mistress Pulvera shrugged, as if letting Arto slide off her shoulders. “Why are you dismissing Arto?” Kirsimarja said.

“Really, my dear girl, what a question. As if he compares to my Ola. Now, Perti is gruff, but a good provider. Leka could be molded into a good husband, once he’s out of his mother’s clutches. But you’d find Ola quite an understanding husband, I think. Not to mention the wealth of Pulvera.”

Kirsimarja’s head reeled. Could Mistress Pulvera read her mind? No, these were simply her only choices if she stayed in the valley. Mistress Pulvera must have tossed similar dice in her youth. She looked at the strong, lined face with the startling brows and deep dark eyes, so much like Ola’s. Had she married for love or had she made a calculated choice like she’d just outlined?

For a moment she wished Mistress Pulvera was her mother, not the hesitant woman who always hid in her drawing room, knitting endless scarves, her dreamy eyes trained away from anything that might matter or that might hurt. Kirsimarja could become her mother, and she’d probably been well on her way.

“Kirsimarja.” Mistress Pulvera clasped her hand tightly. “If you do decide to wait and marry Ola when he comes back, I would truly welcome you as my lawdaughter. I wasn’t sure before, but you’ve grown up now. Together we could make a good life. Better among the grapes than among pig shit. And I wouldn’t care where you would beget your sons, as long as you did. Even a strong young serving man or a trader wouldn’t be out of the question. Together we could rule Ola, and his father won’t live long.”

It was too much for Kirsimarja to process. It was like the valley had become a strange country and she had no map. No longer a safe, delineated space, where men and women, cannonball maker and powder grinder, bow maker and food provider, each knew his place and placidly shuffled through the seasons. This new country was full of chasms and dangerous underground streams. Poisonous weeds shot up between the wholesome ones, and she couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

But all these thoughts aside, she was sure Mistress Pulvera knew nothing about Ola’s death. She stood up, turned Mistress Pulvera’s cool dry clasp into a handshake goodbye and left.

She ran out the door and stomped down the path, each downward step jarring her knees and spine, but she welcomed the pain, the tension in her thighs. At the fork she hesitated. She’d planned on getting home to eat, but she might as well talk to Arto. She should have done it when she’d bumped into him, twice, this morning.

What had Mistress Pulvera meant about Arto being out of the question? She liked him. If she could choose among every young man who wasn’t Ola, it would be Arto. He’d make a good husband, she was sure.

She passed a field of small cannonball gourds. At harvest time, everyone pitched in. How many of the cannonballs had she stuffed with olive shrapnel and doused with wine accelerant? Too many to count. They were packed in the leaves she stripped off the arrowroot shafts and sent to the front. As was almost all the produce from the valley, the poisonous herbs, the nightmares, the arrow shafts, the cannonballs, the grape fuel. Only the Vittlers grew foodstuffs, artichokes, rye and oats, grain if the summer wasn’t too dry. Funny. Everything the valley produced was for war, even their sons.

Pirkitta’s bitter words about the pointlessness of the war rang in Kirsimarja’s head.

On the other side of the front, would there be farms like here, dedicated to growing crops for war? Crops of produce and crops of people? What did the enemy even look like? People, like in the valley? Or deformed monsters? There were no lays, no wall hangings, no engravings showing the faces of the enemy.

She stopped and vomited bile into a patch of nettles below an ancient, twisted apricot tree. The birds above flew up, startled. Rooks or crows, prized for their feathers for fletching arrows, so their forays into the crops were tolerated.

Late afternoon sunlight, striped by the apricot trees to her right. Orange apricots, and orange gourds, and golden yellow flowers twining across the ground. Boom zucchini.

Everything was about the war.

She wiped her mouth, retched again. Nothing came out, she hadn’t eaten all day. She tried to weep, but her eyes were dry. Had she wept out her life’s allotment already, like her stony-faced, dry-eyed grandmother?

She stood, swaying. No. She wasn’t grieving, she was angry. Angry at her parents, at all the adults, for blinding themselves to the truth. The wasted life of the valley.

She trudged down the path again, slipping her hands into her apron pockets, Ola’s finger bone cool against the side of her hand. Did she even care anymore who´d murdered Ola? Nobody else did. Ola’s mother wanted to rule the farm, with or without her son. Kirsimarja could live out her life there, keeping silent about the murder, pretending to wait for Ola. Have babies from random farm hands. She’d be contented, busy, supported by the strong woman at her back.

Or she could follow her feet to Arto’s farm and see what he’d have to say. She turned over the conversations she’d had that day. Arto was the one who’d been dismissed by everyone. Even by her. Looking back with her new, wide-open eyes, he’d seemed evasive even as he dogged her steps.

The path veered away from the apricot groves to meander between stalks of green grain and budding artichokes. Back to where she’d found Ola’s mail shirt and his sword. A lone figure with a hoe slashed at invisible weeds with slow, methodical strokes. He looked as if he had been doing this without cease since sunup.

“Arto!” she called out, although she wasn’t sure it was him.

The figure straightened, pushed his hat back and shaded his eyes. A hand lifted in a grudging wave.

Arto trod across the field, as slow and methodical as his hoeing had been. With a sinking heart, she realized she hadn’t spoken to the sweet boy she remembered in a long time. Not really spoken. Since the death of his father he’d been this silent, gruff shape with a brow that had furrowed early.

Arto’s father had died not long after Ola’s departure. Which of the two had created the change in Arto?

He stopped fifteen feet away from her.

“Arto.” Kirsimarja didn’t know how to continue. “I want to talk to you about Ola.”

A loud wet clap sounded. They both flinched, but it was just an overripe boom zucchini exploding.

“I’m busy, Kirsimarja. Can’t it wait?” He turned away, not waiting for her answer.

Kirsimarja grabbed his arm. She was sick of people evading her questions. “No. It has to be now.”

He sighed, and with the sigh his whole body seemed to soften and sag. He pulled off his hat and pushed his hair back. It had grown long and unkempt, and it looked like he hadn’t trimmed his beard in weeks. She hadn’t noticed this morning.

“Let’s get into the shade.”

She walked after his bent shoulders in their faded shirt across the fields into the courtyard. He had vines trained over his outdoor table to give shade.

Arto followed her gaze. “I eat them. Did you know the fruit was delicious?”

Of course she knew that. Hadn’t she picked grapes every harvest until her fingers bled? Of course the pickers ate them. One could cure olives as well, and boil sugar from arrow canes. That didn’t mean people did. They were for making war.

“Sit down,” Arto said. “You look hot. Want something to drink? Eat?”

Tears pricked in Kirsimarja’s eyes. Nobody else had offered her this common courtesy. But it might be another evasive tactic.

Arto fetched cool water from his well and some slices of last week’s bread and olive oil to soften it.

Kirsimarja couldn’t stop herself from gulping down the water and gobbling up the food. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

Arto nodded at her dusty, stained work dress and dirty hands. “Weeding everybody’s fields?”

Looking into his tired eyes, Kirsimarja wished she could tell him everything. She put her hands on his. Her fingertips would know if he lied. “It’s about Ola,” she said. “Did you kill him?”

She clapped her hands over her mouth. That wasn’t what she’d meant to say.

Arto’s hand shot out and tipped the jug of water off the table. It broke with the soft pop of earthenware. “What? You cost me his love, and now you accuse me of murdering him? Are you insane? He’s at the front. We would have had notice of his death.”

“I didn’t meant to say that. I don’t think you’d killed him! “

Kirsimarja pushed her scarf back from her face. In spite of the shade it seemed unbearably hot here. “I found his finger bone in the nightmare field this morning, and the rest of him scattered all over the valley. He’s dead, Arto. I’m sorry.”

Arto didn’t speak. The frown marks between his eyebrows deepened and smoothed out again. “So you know.”

“Know what?” Why did people speak in riddles all the time?

“Ola and me.” Arto’s eyes were downcast as he picked at a hangnail.

“What is there to know about Ola and you?” She’d never stood between Ola and his friends. Why would he say that?

Fragments of today’s conversations echoed in her ears.

“You cost me his love,” hadn’t Arto said that just now? “Ola could be a very understanding husband…” “Arto is out of the question.” Mistress Pulvera’s words.

Kirsimarja couldn’t breathe. She’d never…people just didn’t…it couldn’t be true.

“You two were….what?”

Arto squared his shoulders and looked her in the eye. “We were lovers. He turned his back on me and said he couldn’t love me anymore, that he had to become the head of his family and be a proper man.”

She looked into Arto’s stubborn, sad eyes and knew it was true. She and Ola had shared no more than a peck on the cheek, had maybe held hands as he walked her back to her parents after an evening of courting. She’d thought he was being kind, or shy, or respectful. Instead Ola’s hands and lips had touched Arto with a tenderness and passion she’d never known from him.

Well. Now she knew. Today she’d become a woman, had finally opened her eyes and mind to what really happened between people and in the world. Her stomach roiled from the revelation, her hands were clammy, but she could do this. Accept it.

“It’s all right, Arto. You love who you love,” she said. She could learn to mean that.

Arto barked a laugh. “You say that? Oblivious Kirsimarja?”

“That was probably true. But I’m no longer that girl. And I know now what you did. And I forgive you.”

Arto turned white. “You can’t mean that.” His hands trembled.

Kirsimarja grabbed them between hers. They were ice cold. “Yes I do.”

“You forgive me?”

“Yes. He was yours. I see that now.”

Arto began to cry, the hoarse, broken sounds of a man who hadn’t cried since childhood. “I didn’t mean to do it. But I was so angry. At him. At you.”

In her mind she saw two men fighting, kissing, or maybe both at the same time. Then one of them turning away, and the other lifting a stone and striking with it.

Oh Mother. He was the one who’d killed Ola.

She jerked her hand back and staggered up from the table. Her already empty stomach heaved again. Arto was the murderer. Kind, gentle Arto. No, passionate, Ola-loving, Ola-killing Arto.

Arto didn’t move.

Kirsimarja stared at the broken pitcher. Nobody had come to clean it up. Arto didn’t like his people hovering around. She could go fetch him some water and nobody would find that strange. She walked into his dim kitchen and found another pitcher and a wooden cup. Her hand played with her nightmare-soiled gloves. It would be so easy to drop them accidentally into his cup, wouldn’t it?

She returned to the patio with pitcher and cup. After a while, the white-faced man across the table lifted his head, tears tracking through the dust on his face. He poured himself some water and drank it down.

A strange calm descended on her as she waited. She’d learned all these horrible things in one day and she was still standing. She was stronger than she could have imagined.

Arto licked his lips. He looked at his cup, at the wet glove in her hand.

“Kirsimarja, did you…”

She didn’t answer.

He picked up the cup, a beautiful, simple thing from whorled olive wood. “I guess I deserve it. How long until it starts working?”

Kirsimarja didn’t answer.

He sank back in his chair.

She couldn’t stand it anymore. She grabbed the pitcher and poured herself a cup. She tossed it down in a few gulps and slammed the cup down on the table.

“So.”

Arto gaped. “Ola doesn’t deserve your death.”

“You’re an idiot,” Kirsimarja said. “I didn’t poison you. You’re like me. The worst thing I could ever imagine already happened to me. Nothing left to have nightmares about.”

He didn’t answer.

“Well? What’s your worst nightmare?

“Being a murderer. Being found out,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“There you have it. You’re right in the middle of it. Nothing else can ever be as bad.”

He buried his face in his hands.

To know everything was to understand and forgive. Revenge would have been pointless. Kirsimarja didn’t understand Arto’s depth of passion, and maybe she never would, now. Maybe she was a little jealous of it, but she wasn’t sure if she was jealous over Ola or over Arto.

This man sobbing his eyes out was the only person in the whole valley who’d had the guts to live what he felt. Even if he’d killed Ola, he was the only man she felt connected to.

“I don’t want to stay here. We have no life. We just pretend to, while we give everything we have to the front. Our produce, our sons. At least you only grow food,” she said.

Arto said nothing.

She knew what she had to do. The war would never end. Not as long as every landowner made money from it. She wanted to live in a place that was at peace. No more war. “I have to leave here.”

He looked up.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

He looked at his comfortable shaded patio, the golden fields that beckoned through the archway.

They both knew this valley like they knew the landscape of their own bodies. They’d never known any other smells, or vistas, or people. She had no idea either what the outside world looked like, or how she’d live. But she couldn’t stay. Her heart had been broken here. And so had his.

At last he nodded. “I’ll come with you.”

Kirsimarja took the fingerbone shard out of her pocket, but it no longer spoke to her.

Arto touched the long-healed break in Ola’s bone. Together, they put it on the altar for the housegods, poured wine over it, added a gob of pig fat and lit it on fire. While the sacrificial smoke still wrote on the sky with a thin black finger, they walked away.

They’d lived their nightmares here. They couldn’t stay.

About the Author

Bo Balder lives and works close to Amsterdam. She is the first Dutch author to have been published in F&SF and Clarkesworld. Her fiction has also appeared in Escape Pod, Nature and other places. Her sf novel “The Wan” was published by Pink Narcissus Press. For more about her work, you can visit her website or find Bo on Facebook.

The Prom Monster

Andrew Kozma

“THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE wearing?” my mom asks, barely able to keep the horror from her voice. I shut the door to my room in her face. In some other families, that might be the start of a war, or at least a grounding, but my mom’s used to it by now. And it’s her fault, really, since she’s the one who taught me the sanctity of my own room, a private space that was only mine, fully and completely.

“You don’t have to wear it, mom, so I don’t see why you care?” I yell through the door.

But I do see. The dress isn’t a dress in her mind. It’s candy-striped in white and violet, and it’s too short, far enough above my knees I’d be sent to the Principal’s Office if I wore it to school. I went for old fashioned shoulders which are as big as pom-poms. Leg-of-mutton sleeves! It’s high-collared but has a wide-open back and fits tight almost all around. I mean, it’s hideous, but that’s the point!

It’s not the point for my mom, obvs.

To her, IT’S PROM! Which meant so much to my mom that she wants it to be perfect for me, and perfect for my mom has a very specific meaning. She wasn’t dating the quarterback, but the star kicker. She wasn’t a cheerleader, but she’d been the highly-praised comic relief in the school musical. She didn’t get trashed, but pleasantly buzzed. She didn’t lose her virginity, but went to all three bases in that horrible baseball metaphor I don’t know enough baseball to understand. My friends, we use fencing metaphors for sex. Wrestling. Cross-country. Baseball is just so boring.

Mom sighs, having simply opened the door and walked in despite it being my private domain. Her expression is so utterly lost I can’t even be mad at her.

“My god, Jeannette, you look like an umpire.”

“A vampire?” I say, hopefully.

“An. Umpire.”

“No. I don’t.”

But as she doesn’t argue and I don’t say anything more, I see it. My chin length hair frames my face like a jagged edged helmet, and the dress, from the front, looks less like a dress than a uniform, one that involves arguing and perhaps more than one pummel to the face.

I wanted the dress to look hideous, but it hurts more than I thought it would to be proven right, to actually be hideous-looking.

And yet, mom smiles. “You are going to be the best-looking, worst-dressed girl at the prom. It’s going to be glorious!”

In the sad-shadowed hallway leading to the Holiday Inn ballroom, I go over the ways my mom wanted this night to be as opposed to the way they actually are.

Dress: terribly terrible instead of ephemerally beautiful.

Date: nonexistent (i.e. friends equally single) instead of the lead in the school play (Bradley Wills) whose mother is my mom’s best friend.

Ride: a short walk in a light rain after a long bus ride instead of the limo my mom would’ve paid for.

Meal: a value meal from Chicken City, the diet coke erasing the calories from the chicken sandwich and waffle fries, instead of a mother-daughter dinner at Hugo’s which was originally reserved for me and Bradley.

Corsage: ratty-looking dandelions picked on the way here and tied into a wristlet instead of a circle of rainbow miniature roses mom wanted to pin over my heart.

Hotel: wherever I find a place to crash instead of the room at this very Holiday Inn my mom all but forced on me.

And now that I’m faced with the strobing lights from the open door at the end of the hall, I’m not really sure why I rejected every offer my mom made. She was going to pay for it all! Here I am in my eBayed dress paid for by the meager tips from my summer job at the Get Stuffed Diner. I’m wearing shoes scavenged from the Bargain Box thrift store, in fine shape but white and red polka dots (each shoe alternating base and dot color) and covered in bedazzled rhinestones I believe used to spell out a name but now looks like I stumbled through a children’s craft fair.

Chirpy pop music leaks from the ballroom like liquid from an overstuffed trash bag. The edges of a toxic cloud of perfume and cologne burn my nostrils. I’m scent-free myself, but I’m wearing an aggressive mask of make-up with cat-eyes and abalone eyeshadow and lips so red and crisply edged it looks like I’ve been drinking blood. My look should make it easier to stride into the prom, but I can’t force myself to do it. Not yet. There’s a ball of something swelling in my stomach I’m afraid is fear, but I can’t admit that to myself.

“Jean genie, what are you doing out here?”

I startle like a deer and turn to see Ricardo.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” I growl. “I thought you were already inside.”

I’m afraid he’s going to look me over in disgust, even though we’d planned our outfits together. And the thing is, even though he’s wearing a midriff-baring tuxedo and his pants are slit up to the knees so they dance in a fringe when he moves and his hair is up in a messy mohawk, he looks amazing. So much better than I ever imagined. He’s even matched me with the cat-eyes, though his are messy and asymmetrical and even more badass because of it.

It takes me a moment to meet his eyes, because I’m afraid of what I’ll see in them. But when I finally do, I can see the grin in them he’s keeping from his lips. Even so, I’m afraid to ask what he thinks.

“You say one shitty thing about the way I’m dressed, and I’ll tell your mom where you keep your porn.”

“On the internet? Oh, what a threat!”

I narrow my eyes, and he throws up his hands in mock-surrender. “Fine, fine, you look great. That’s what you want to hear, right?”

“Not exactly.”

“Um…okay, give me a second.” He steps around me, peering at every detail of my outfit in just a few seconds. The silence is so complete between us, I blush. “You look like the unholy angel of bad taste. That better?”

“Suitably glorious,” I drawl.

Ricardo bows, his arms extended towards the ballroom. “Ready to destroy merely mortal minds?”

“Utterly.”

We walk arm in arm to the prom. A guy in an ill-fitting tux rushes past us, his jacket flapping from one hand while a crushed corsage in his other hand sheds petals like fall leaves.

“Out of the way, weirdos,” he says, almost as an afterthought.

Ricardo whispers, under his breath, “You really do look amazing, you know?”

I pretend not to hear him, because at that point we’ve reached the doors and step through, together, into the disco-balled, pop-music-beated dance of our high school lives.

Prom! my mom’s voice echoes in my head.

I want to be disgusted by it all. I want to look around at all my high school compadres and see them in their foolish formal uniforms—their tuxes of all the same style and color, their dresses in only a few accepted colors and fashions—and think how silly they look. How completely and utterly ridiculous. I want to look down on them. To crush their normal, stupid, vapid dreams beneath the toes of my idiotic heels.

But I can’t.

“Idiots,” Ricardo mumbles, but even he’s awed by it all. I let him lead me away from the door as a few other stragglers noisily enter behind us, their excited, chirping voices clear even through the music of our parents’ childhood.

I’m not wrong. The red and blue and green lights dropped from the ceiling are gaudy, but go perfectly with the chintzy tablecloths and hotel chairs with gold cushions that look stolen from a thrift store in the Heights. The band is older—hired by the teachers instead of the student band the seniors wanted—and outfitted like they want to be thought of as cool by their parents. They’re called The Rejekts. And the rest of the senior class, they’re dressed so boring they might as well be paper dolls.

And yet none of that matters. They are having fun. Even those who are standing against the wall, eager to dance but unwilling to look foolish. Even those at the punch table sniping at each other with insults only thinly veiled as compliments. Despite everything, they’re having a blast. It’s in the air, an electric hum, an oppressive heat, a mix of saliva and germs coughed out by the flu-infected, and now we’re all carriers, all fit to be thrown into a pile and burned to save everyone beyond the walls of this prom.

Ricardo slides a cool, plastic cup into my hand. The punch is pooled with sherbert, and in the dim light of the ballroom it glows like an exotic, undersea creature, a seaslug from the depths of the ocean popped into goo without the pressure of tons of water overhead to keep its body intact.

“Drink,” Ricardo says, nudging the cup towards my lips.

He drinks and I drink and beneath the cold, soothing punch something harsh scours my throat, and I only barely keep from coughing.

“What’d you do?”

Ricardo looks into my eyes as though there’s something written on them.

“Do you feel better?”

“Maybe?” I think for a second. “Yes?”

“That’s what I did. I made you feel better.”

“I can’t believe you spiked the punch!” I swallow the last word just as Ms. Prince strolls by, dressed in an Adult Prom Dress which, strangely, on her, looks neither out-of-place nor desperate. “I mean spilled. I can’t believe you spilled the punch!”

As I correct myself, I purposely hit Ricardo’s hand and force him to spill his cup, the sherbet and half his punch slurping out onto the floor. Don’t ask why. I’m an idiot. In my head, this would keep Ms. Prince from noticing us and what I’d said about spiking the punch, but now she’s stopped and is already shaking her head.

“Jeannie. Ricardo.” She gives each of us a knowing stare. “I like your outfits. Very trash punk.”

She stands near the spill and motions to Mr. Trask, who rushes to the wall to get a mop from behind a potted tree. We mutter thanks and apologies and wander off.

“Why’d you do that?” Ricardo hisses, sipping at the remains of his drink.

“You spiked the punch. She heard me!”

Ricardo pulls a bottle from his pocket and shoves it in my face before I can stop him.

“Tabasco?”

“God, J, I’m not throwing hooch in the punch without people knowing. That’s dirtbag ignorant.”

I can’t help laughing. “Hooch?”

Ricardo rolls his eyes. “My uncle’s visiting. Showed up late last night and wouldn’t let me go to sleep. Whenever he’s here I catch his language like a cold. So come on, dame, let’s shake a leg!”

He puts the bottle away, grabs my hand by the fingertips, and draws me out onto the dance floor. The other people on the floor are standing more than dancing and, right then, the music stops for a moment between songs and we’re the only ones moving. It’s as though we’re in a dream. I forget what we’re wearing and that our entire plan was to bust up this stupid, societal construct of a dance with our outlandish clothes and our scorn but instead I’m just happy to be there, at prom, with Ricardo.

“Have you ever thought…” Ricardo starts, but then trails off. He looks into my eyes and seems to lose himself there for a moment, and my breath catches in my throat, and there’s a gigantic thud like an earthquake-toppled building crashing to the ground and he stops whatever it was he was going to say and I realize I should never have summoned that monster this morning. To be fair, it was five a.m., I’d already hit snooze a dozen times, and before I have my morning orange juice, the world is a nightmare made flesh.

I have only myself to blame as Ricardo spins away from me to face the wall behind him which is being ripped away in large chunks like a four-year-old attacking their birthday cake. He lets go of my hand in an action repeated throughout the room, everyone, for a moment, completely alone in their fear. As the wall opens up more and more, large inhuman hands exposing more of Houston’s light-polluted night sky, people clump together. The girls sniping at each other only minutes before now huddle in each other’s arms. Couples hide under the skirts of tables. The girls on the track team, always the smartest of us, are already out the main door, managing to escape just before a thrown piece of wall seals the rest of us inside. The fire exits all lead to whatever’s destroying the wall.

Whatever, I say, but I know what it is. Or at least I know what I summoned. A creature from the outer realms imbued by me with a hatred of all things prom. More of the wall slips out of view, no more substantial than sugar.

Ricardo latched onto my shoulder with one hand.

“What the fuck is that?”

Its human hands, each the size of a UPS truck, are pink as icing, but that’s where any semblance of humanity ends. Those hands dissolve into wrists which are just tentacles, writhing like eels or worms or baby snakes. The body is a sea urchin thing, needles pulsing in and out of an unidentifiable center, managing to look both flexible and hard as iron all at once. The head has holes for eyes and a mouth, each so black and dark they look like they lead straight into space, and the flesh there has the consistency, shape, and texture of a piece of gum chewed into tastelessness.

All of that is horrifying. It’s a creature which makes no sense to the eyes, so much it hurts to look at and my eyes keep trying to slide away. But the worst thing about it is the dress.

“What is it wearing?” a nearby girl says, her dress uncannily resembling the one on the monster.

“Oh my god, is that tulle?” another girl says.

“My dress is silk,” the first girl says, anger cutting through her fear.

I only barely resist from saying, “Who wore it better?” because the very fact I even thought of saying that, right now, when we all might be about to die, means I’m freaking out and haven’t yet realized it.

The tulle dress is an awesomely beautiful rose-colored creation which drapes prettily over the monster’s hip-placed masses of tentacles and spines, and manages, somehow, to look like a rose. And smack in the middle of the dress, directly above the cinched-in waist and below the twin mass of rubbery, worm-faced cleavage is a skull. Not a real skull. Nothing scary. But a skull like you’d see on a patch you might wear on a jacket or sew onto your backpack. That “you” in that sentence being me.

“Jeannie,” Ricardo starts, real horror now in his voice. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” I protested, trying to get away from him, because I don’t know what I’ve done, only what I meant to do, which was to break the prom so thoroughly no one would ever think of taking part in something so stupid and self-indulgent again.

But getting away from Ricardo means getting closer to the monster which has now torn down the wall almost entirely, filling the fresh opening with its pink, black, gaudy, fleshy, spiny self. It’s only been like a minute at most since it first attacked the wall, but there are no sirens filling the air, no blue-and-red flashing light, because no one is coming to save us. A lone security guard in some bastardized mixture of hotel and police uniforms cowers against the wall that’s crumbling and he’s the first to die as a section of wall topples over onto him. As though in utter sympathy for the murder it just committed, the monster roars and the entire ballroom shakes. Silvery spittle flies from the monster’s mouth and smoke rises from where it lands. The band’s guitar player starts screaming as a globule lands on his arm, the colors of the instrument and his arm blurring together, and it isn’t until his raw, shrill scream pierces the ongoing roar of the monster that I truly realize how quiet it’s been, how every one of us (except the track girls) has been almost casual in our attempts to protect ourselves, as though we can’t quite believe what’s happening.

And now the chorus of the entire senior class (and guests) erupts into a cacophony. The monster oozes into the ballroom on a dozen rubbery legs, the tip of each surprisingly delicate in the way it punches a hole in the parquet floor. The monster reaches down with its mammoth hands and picks up Raju who was almost certain to be crowned prom king but now is being jerked and smushed like a paper doll. Sarah, his date, trips into one of the holes the monster’s made, her beautiful black hair ribboning out behind her before she’s swallowed up completely. The monster weaves from side to side like it’s sick, needles on its body twisting, dangling, and crashing to the ground to snap into pieces. A black slurry rises from the broken bits of monster, staining the air. Through the darkness, the normal world is twisted and changed, each stain a sooty window to another horrifying reality.

I’m crying, but I’m not sure why. I’ve hated all of high school, every minute of it, and Ricardo and I only kept ourselves sane by dreaming of all the ways we could leave it, and what we’d do after we were free. Raju was always a jerk to me. I didn’t know Sarah at all, but knew she’d made countless freshman cry, even when she was a freshman herself, because what’s the use of being popular if you can’t lord it over the unpopular?

But I didn’t want anyone to die.

I run toward the monster, screaming the incantation I used to summon it. I don’t have the scented Jesus candle or the unused fishnets or the coconut juice I sacrificed to bring this thing into existence, but held tight to my thigh by my garter is the corked vial which lured it here. I snatch it as I run, thinking that maybe if I throw the vial to the monster, it’ll be satisfied and leave. I want…

I want to go back to that moment right before it arrived, when I was holding Ricardo and he was holding me, and it felt like we were about to share something so true and real between us and, at the same time, like we’d already shared it, trapped in some type of glorious and too-beautiful time loop.

Before I can throw, someone tackles me from behind, and I slam down to the hard floor with just enough time to get my hands before me to break my fall.

“What are you doing?” Ricardo yells into my ear, scrambling up beside me. “You think your death is going to solve anything? Why is your hand bleeding? Oh my god, I’m sorry!”

From anger to tears in less than a second is only one reason I treasure Ricardo. Also, his apparently magical ability to distract me from a major injury. My hand is bleeding because the vial of monster lure was smashed between it and the ground and my palm is now a single, seeping wound. The smell of the vial is divine, the essence of freshly-baked cookies or the scent of someone you love when your faces are pressed together.

The monster isn’t roaring. It turns to focus on me, its black-hole expression flattening into joy. Buckets of spittle slop from its open mouth, a burning, fuming pool of acid growing into the floor between us. My hand doesn’t hurt, but it burns. I can’t even wiggle my fingers. Maybe the tendons are cut? I think about my own maiming dispassionately, because what does it matter if I’m about to be monster food?

Ricardo says something and I don’t understand a word, but his wide brown eyes and fear-filled face snap me into action.

“Get away!” I say, pushing him back with all my might, a bloody print staining his tuxedo top. A glistening silvery smear in the blood makes me think the lure is on him now, too, but I can’t do anything about that. I scream and walk backwards towards the monster. “It wants me, and only me!”

One of the monster’s needles smashes into the ground not twenty feet to my right. Ricardo doesn’t run. He stares at me. Then he stares past me, up and up and up toward the monster. This is it. I regret nothing, I tell myself, but I regret everything. All I ever did and all I never did. All this monster is, erupting from my sadness and loneliness like a tumor.

The roar is so loud my thoughts wash away.

Another roar joins it, even louder, and I’m knocked to the ground again.

The noise doesn’t end. Arms are around me. I’m huddled against a wall and Ricardo is there, his face stained with dust and blood. He’s holding my bloody hand, and in it there’s another vial. Across the wrecked ballroom, through the emptiness which used to be a wall, two monsters dance. One in a beautiful dress, the other in a handsome tuxedo. The earth twists and shakes as they bite each other and the stars fall.

About the Author

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Reckoning, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

Sand Trap

D.A. D’Amico

YASMIN HIROSE ADJUSTED her hardhat and squinted at the sharp pinpoints glittering against the ocher-colored sand.

“Is that an egg?”

The cracked half meter dome sparkled with mosaic precision from its matrix on the terraced north face of the long excavation trench. Beside it, still partially buried, lay an impossibly high clear plastic platform shoe. The skeleton of what appeared to be a long-expired goldfish drooped within its hollow interior.

“It’s called a Disco ball, if you can believe it,” Arwa Akef said excitedly from her position on her knees beside the object. “There’s an unexpected layer of 1970s above the anticipated fill. Fascinating.”

Yasmin stared at the little bleached skull in its plastic prison, its blank eye sockets forlorn and somehow accusing, and shook her head. Fascinating wasn’t the word she’d have used. Gruesome seemed more appropriate, but their orders had come down from the Union heads. The ancient landfill had to be cataloged before it became subsumed by the new containment facility under constructed nearby.

A pair of yellow leather boots wiggled from the lower terrace behind Arwa. That would be Christine Mkende, Yasmin thought. The new girl.

“What’ve you got, Christine?” Yasmin asked amiably.

A head popped out of an undercut of rust-colored dirt. The girl’s dark face smiled up at Yasmin with shining eyes and cheeks caked with mud. “So far, a Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox, two rusted Slinkies, a lump of fossilized Play-Doh, and...”

She yanked a meter long slab of rusted metal from a pocket of earth. Flecks of chrome still clung to the stubby wing-shaped item, its flared tip containing an eye of ruby glass that glowed balefully in the bright daylight.

“It’s the rear bumper from an automobile, late 1950s,” the girl said triumphantly.

Yasmin smiled. They got so excited when they first started. A few years under the hot sun, and under the hotter Union rules, and the girl wouldn’t be so chirpy.

“Bag it and tag it,” Yasmin said. “Good work—”

The hiss of a fast-approaching truck interrupted her. She frowned. Trucks weren’t supposed to travel this close to the dig site. There was a beacon on the main road, and the auto-drivers were set to maneuver the excavation before heading in towards the new containment facility.

“Not another one.” Kento Minsky stepped around the glossy grey polyhedron of the break shed, squinting under his lemon-colored hard hat at the cloud of dirt racing towards them.

“It’s the second, no, third this week...” Arwa shouted from the pit, her voice trailing off as she pulled what looked like a bent hula-hoop from the parched earth.

“Fourth,” Yasmin said as she marched onto the spur road with her hands on her hips. There must be a human behind the wheel. Machines knew how to listen to orders.

The truck barreled closer, its shimmering mag coil glowing a faint lavender beneath the sloping box of the cab. Yasmin raised a calloused hand. She tried to look bored, but a part of her had never trusted vehicles with people in them. Human drivers tended to be rebellious, looking for reasons to show off, and she didn’t want to become some hotshot’s next accident.

This driver was no exception to the hotshot rule.

He swerved unexpectedly. The truck’s hiss pitched into a scream. A rush of grit swept over Yasmin, peppering her with tiny knife-blades of rock as the truck cantered, spinning sideways and missing her by millimeters.

She spat, the dry tang of rust and limestone souring her mouth as she moved slowly to the side of the vehicle, her legs shaky and her heart racing.

“An auto-driver wouldn’t have done that,” she said in a tone far calmer than she felt as the truck started rolling.

The thick orange hose wrapped like a turban around the vaulted top of the containment cylinder shook, contemptuously discharging a glob of something viscous and mucus-like at her feet as the rig glided away. She hopped back. The hose convulsed, twisting as if ready to pop from its housing.

“Minsky, stop that truck!”

She turned her back on the vehicle and knelt in the loose gravel to peer at the sapphire-colored accretion at her feet. It bubbled like a tiny volcano. Small appendages oozed greasily away from the main lump, and then a featureless head inflated like a spit bubble over the top of the thing. As she watched, it heaved itself up on stubby blue legs and took a tottering step towards the excavation to Yasmin’s right.

“Nope.” Yasmin solemnly tipped out the remainder of this morning’s coffee, a caramel, pumpkin, chocolate-mint macchiato that cost half a day’s pay, and leaned in. The minuscule cobalt form seemed to glance up at her and understand her movements. It spun to flee. One diminutive hand shot up and gave her the finger as she up-ended the cup and slammed it down. It was less than an hour into her shift, and the headaches were already starting.

“Arwa, hand me a shovel, will you,” Yasmin said holding the struggling container to the ground. “And Minsky, get that driver over here.”

Arwa handed her a flat-bladed shovel made from a carbon composite that gleamed with ribbons of golden sparkles. It weighed almost nothing, but it bit easily into the soil surrounding the upturned cup.

“The last thing we need is a handful of this stuff running free.” Yasmin held the base of the cup as she hefted it into the air balanced on the shovel blade. She could already feel the self-aware slurry morphing, the smell of it something like a combination of cinnamon and cloves.

“I need the tool,” she said calmly, holding the cup further from her body. “Now, please.”

In its unused state, the blue slurry was as harmless as beach sand, but after being exposed and infused by the gelatinous neural networks the great artificial intelligences who guided mankind in everything from global climate change prevention tactics to auto-tune synchronization in popular hip-hop ballads, the gloop became volatile, highly reactive, and prone to mimicry. It could take on the properties of things around it, and there was far too much variety in this patch of old landfill to let something so dangerous escape.

Arwa grasped the shovel handle in one hand, passing a snub-nosed crystal wedge to Yasmin with the other. The tip of the gun-shaped device glowed with a plasma-violet light almost too bright to look at.

“Ready?” Yasmin asked.

Arwa nodded, and with that signal Yasmin lifted the cup.

Caramel yellow teeth gnashed under smoldering pumpkin-orange eyes. The foaming mass of mocha-colored fluid expanded with a mint-scented spray, springing onto Arwa’s overalls. She screamed. Yasmin tugged the trigger, and the fast-moving creature dissolved.

A smear of sapphire-colored sand dribbled harmlessly over the young woman and across the shovel blade as Yasmin took a deep breath, glancing around.

“Show’s over,” she said forcefully to the three-person team. “Get back to work.”

“Boss?”

“Yeah?” Yasmin glanced at the smaller woman.

Arwa stared back, her body tense and ready for flight. Her voice shook as she spoke. “Why don’t they just use the tool every time?”

“It’s fine for the little guys,” Yasmin said as she picked up the shovel and turned toward the truck, now stalled near the lower excavation. “But it wouldn’t do much to a bigger sample. It’s a localized magnetic pulse. You’d need a much bigger charge to collapse this stuff for long, and that’s what the new facility’s for.”

THE DRIVER, A smallish man, bearded but balding, and wearing a dark blue jumpsuit that made him resemble the cobalt-colored sludge, hopped onto the running board of his rig. A dirty hand shot out and flipped her the finger just as the mag skirt suddenly and unexpectedly activated and the truck started gliding backwards along the track.

With a surprised look, the driver fell from the running board, sliding clumsily into the trench as Yasmin dived to the side. Her right leg slid painfully into the test pit. Her other knee slammed gravel. She tasted dirt as she fought for purchase, her fingernails raking the spoil at the edges of the trench as she spat grit.

“You stupid son of a—”

The truck dipped. It’s mag skirt flared, raising its front end into the air before winking out like a spent flash bulb. The whole rig collapsed. Ozone washed like a hot breeze through the air as the rig tilted onto its side with an earth-shaking crash. The expulsion hose ruptured, flailing the air above her head, and a kiloliter of brilliant bluish sand gurgled greasily into the surrounding dig.

IT STARTED SMALL. Yasmin barely had time to roll away from the trench before a handful of brightly colored marbles and dull silver jacks erupted from the pit like popcorn from a hot griddle. The ground shook. Ominous roaring filled the air with the smell of gasoline and motor oil, and blaring rock and roll music a century out of date assaulted her ears. What had Christine said about that automobile she’d found?

“Get everyone away from the dig!” Yasmin shouted as a fully intact, cherry-red, 1958 Plymouth Fury thundered onto the track. Its headlights blazed malevolently as it spun away, spitting gravel like hail over the scattering crew.

“I knew it!” Christine yelled from behind a grading table.

“Not now,” Yasmin growled. She turned, spotting Kento Minsky under the tool kiosk. “Minsky! Get the union rep on the line and tell her we have an... incident.”

The young man saluted awkwardly, and crawled backwards out of sight. Yasmin turned back towards the trench just as a line of bright red hula-hoops rolled by. The trailing hoop dipped as it changed direction, leaping the gap in the test pit. It had noticed her.

“Crap.” Yasmin scrambled to her feet and ran for the break shed.

The hoop followed. She weaved and dodged, but it caught up with her about three meters from the shed’s doorway, twirling over her head and across her torso, contracting like a hungry boa constrictor. She gasped. It tightened, and as she gripped it the hoop became a rope, a cinch that knocked her to her knees. Frantically, she searched for the tool, but it must have been lost in the confusion.

“Arwa!” She yelled, suddenly frightened. She could handle a dab of slurry, but this was too much. “Find the tool.”

She couldn’t see if the girl reacted or not. The cords of rope had begun to drag her backwards toward the pit where a terrible rhythmic whooping noise had started up. Horses erupted from the first terrace carrying buckskin-clad warriors with oversized headdresses of colored eagle feathers. It was the most egregious misrepresentation of indigenous peoples she’d ever seen. She rolled her eyes as they galloped toward the truck, circling it and striking with bows and arrows and stone-tipped lances.

“Hold still, Boss.” Arwa scrambled over on her knees, the tool held like a pistol in her left hand. She aimed it at the cords, and they dissolved.

“Thanks.” Yasmin grasped the tool. Her arms tingled from the constriction, but it felt good to have the security of a weapon. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

THEY JOINED CHRISTINE behind the glossy grey polyhedron of the break shed. Overhead, squadrons of Frisbees circled like hordes of tiny flying saucers, their curved undersides wobbling as if they were being held aloft by strings. Yasmin took a shot at one, but they were too far away for the tool to be much use.

“You’re the expert, Arwa,” Yasmin said taking her gaze from the sky. “What’s the worst we can expect from this breach?”

Arwa frowned. “If you’re asking me what might be in that pit, I couldn’t say for sure. But the 1950s were rife with westerns—Gunsmoke, Tales of Wells Fargo, Have Gun Will Travel, The Life & Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Restless Gun, Wagon Train... you name it. The old American west was really big a century ago. Each one of those shows had its own merchandising; lunchboxes, toy guns, books, phonograph recordings, and a dozen other cast-off items that could be influencing that slurry. If I were to guess, I’d expect to see—”

A shot rang out, followed by a bugle blast. Cowboys, gunslingers, and soldiers in blue uniforms stormed from the farthest end of the trench. Most raced toward their buckskin-clad counterparts who’d surrounded the truck. One or two of the seedier looking types ambled toward the shed, six-guns held contemptuously at their sides.

“Cowboys?” Yasmin finished the girl’s sentence. “So, from 1950s strata we’re getting 1880s animations?”

“Could be worse,” Christine said.

Yasmin leaned out and pressed the tool at the nearest gunslinger. He disassembled, making a puddle of cobalt-colored sand on the gravely ground. The second man spat, glanced at the powder, and drew his weapon. He was fast, but Yasmin was faster, and he joined his comrade as a pool of viscous grit beside the shed.

“How much worse?”

KENTO SHOWED UP a few minutes later, out of breath, and saying that the Union was on the problem, but it’d take a while to get units out there.

“Your instructions are to contain the incident until then,” he finished with a shrug.

“We need something bigger than this,” Yasmin said, the tool held loosely in her right hand. Beyond the shed, Slinkies were emerging from the nearest tier of the trench like a mass of slivery snakes.

“How about this?” Christine pulled one of the butane torches from the shed, and flicked it on. Bluish flame danced a few centimeters above the outflow. She waved it once in the air before creeping out onto the track.

“Get back here!” Yasmin hissed.

Christine smiled. “It’s fine. Look.”

Wherever the girl waved the flame, the Slinkies curled back, bending in gracefully gravity-defying arcs as they retreated.

Yasmin shrugged. If it worked, it worked. She raced out and flanked the girl, striking at the snake-like springs with the tool, leaving little mounds of blue sand in her wake. They must have destroyed dozens as they pushed the things back toward the pit. She even managed to dissolve a few of the mangier-looking cowboys who’d moseyed over to see what all the fuss was about.

Then the butane ran out. The flame died, and the tide of animated enemies pushed forward.

“Back! Back to the shed!” Yasmin shouted as she jammed the tool into the face of a cartoon mouse wearing red shorts, yellow shoes, and fat white gloves. It exploded with a laughing cry, and Yasmin sputtered as a cloud of sand washed over her.

“I can’t. We’re cut off!” Christine stopped suddenly. Yasmin smashed into her, pushing the frightened girl in the direction of the overturned rig.

“Head for the truck instead,” she said. “It’s clear.”

THE RIG LAY on its side, its inactive mag skirt glowing a coal-colored grey as they climbed up its sloping metal housing. Inside, they found the driver slouched over the control console. He held a palm-sized device against the windshield HUD, and seemed to be trying to fill out an accident report. Under RESPONSIBLE PARTY he’d written in NONE.

Yasmin shook her head, glaring at him. He quickly wiped the screen, but his features showed no remorse. There’d be hell to pay when this thing was over, and she could guarantee it wouldn’t be her paying.

“Can you get this thing powered up?” She asked breathlessly. Seeing the mag skirt tilted like that had given her an idea.

“We’re on our side,” the driver croaked in a reedy voice. He stared at her, and then at the cockpit exit as if he hoped she’d just leave.

She sighed, turning to the controls. “We don’t need it rolling. I just want the mag skirt activated.”

Outside, century old rock and roll music blared, heavy on the percussion. An internal combustion engine roared to life, and the rig’s cockpit filled with brilliant yellow light. The Plymouth had returned.

“I got this,” Christine said. She grabbed the tool from Yasmin’s hands and dived from the truck.

“No!” Yasmin shouted, but the girl was already on the ground, yelling and waving her arms to attract the wheeled beast.

The auto revved its engine. Gunshots and war cries echoed over the dig site. Silvered Frisbees changed trajectory. Slinkies slunk, and Hula-Hoops rolled ominously across the dusty gravel.

Yasmin spun. She grabbed the driver by the collar and pulled him close, the stench of sweat and dollar store cologne nearly overpowering her. “I don’t care how you do it, but get that mag skirt online. Understand!”

The man swallowed, nodding slowly. Yasmin released him. Then she jumped from the truck without a look back. If he didn’t get the rig operating again, she and Christine both would be dead.

“WHAT DO YOU think you’re doing? I told you to stay in the truck.” Yasmin yanked the tool from Christine’s hands and held it in front of herself like a shield.

Ahead, parties of feathered warriors circled blue-clad soldiers and assemblages of toys reanimated from rusted remnants and corroded images stenciled on lunchboxes, clothing, glass, and advertising. The 1958 Plymouth Fury drove slowly between them, seeming to pace impatiently, its chromed grill a gruesome approximation of a leer. Behind, stood nothing but the dead grey face of the inactive mag skirt.

“This is it, isn’t it?” The girl’s voice faltered as she crept back a step.

Probably, Yasmin thought. But she couldn’t think of anything more encouraging to say than: “The Union’s not going to be happy.”

An automobile horn blared. The Fury leapt forward with a gleeful squeal of tires. Smoke and dust billowed, clouding the sky and darkening the sun. The ground trembled in anticipation as hordes of reanimated AI slurry rushed furiously forward like one berserk creature.

They came on fast, too fast. Yasmin barely had time to thrust the tool in front of her before slamming her eyes closed to await the inevitable.

Christine screamed. Yasmin screamed with her as a rush of hot air washed over them, scouring them with sharp needles of grit.

Then a crash rocked the earth behind them, followed by a dizzying sensation and the heavy smell of ozone. Yasmin opened her eyes. The truck was upright again. Its mag skirt flared a bright violet as it backed slowly away from the heap of blue sand nearly encasing the two women.

“What do you know,” Yasmin said in a stunned voice. “That driver came through after all. I didn’t think he had the brains.”

Christine laughed, but there were tears in her eyes as Kento Minsky and Arwa Akef rushed over. They tugged the two women from the mounds of sand and led them back to the shed where coffee was handed out, and congratulations thrown around.

“Tragedy averted, and we’re still only half way through our shift.” Yasmin tried to sound glib, but her legs trembled. She was getting too old for field work.

“Yea, but now the rest of the shift is going to feel boring,” Kento said with a wide smile.

“I’ll take that over—” Yasmin started to say, but a sharp grinding noise interrupted her.

The rig had started up, and the driver was busily shoveling the last of the blue sand into the test pit. Yasmin put her palm over her face, incredulous.

“He knows that stuff’s not going to stay inert for long, doesn’t he?”

Christine took a slow step backwards. “I don’t think so...”

“Arwa.” Yasmin sagged, sighing with a weariness that made her feel a thousand years old. “What’s the strata in that pit?”

“1930s,” the woman whispered.

“How bad can that be?” Kento asked, still not understanding the magnitude of the problem. “What’s the worst? Radio, Babe Ruth, Josephine Baker, Charlie Chaplin, the Lindy-Hop?”

A roar erupted from the pit. Blue flame shot out, and a highly stylized rocket, complete with fins and round port holes tore into the sky. Kento Minsky squinted up, swallowing.

Yasmin poured out her second coffee of the day. “How about Al Capone, Adolph Hitler, Flash Gordon...”

A deep, maniacal laugh echoed over the site, followed by a booming baritone. “Bow, petty Earthlings, to your new Emperor!”

“... And Ming the Merciless, of course,” Arwa finished as she slowly put her cup down. “The Union really isn’t going to like this.”

About the Author

D. A. D’Amico takes his writing far too seriously. He allows his characters to walk all over him, making demands in loud voices, eating all the chips, and wrecking up the joint. If it weren’t for their typing skills, he’d throw the bunch of them out. He’s had nearly eighty works published in the last decade in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, and Shock Totem, and his personal favorite, MYTHIC. He’s a winner of L. Ron Hubbard’s prestigious Writers of the Future award, volume XXVII, as well as the 2017 Write Well award. Collections of his work, links to anthologies and magazines he’s be in can be found on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/D-A-DAmico. His website is: http://www.dadamico.com. Facebook: authordadamico, and on painfully rare occasions twitter: @dadamico.

The Headsman of Garth

Mike Adamson

MEN FEARED CLOTHENO, Headsman of the Province of Garth, and with good reason. A tall, pale, ascetic man, descended out of the priesthood of the Sunhawk and Moonstag, he wandered east to Garth in the year after the Restitution, when the false god Sho’Tan was expunged from the annals of Avestium. Here his martial skills and grim demeanour won him employ with the office of a local Magistrate, and he rose quickly, coming to the attention of Chief Magistrate Vorno.

Avestium was a land of laws, passed down from the ancient codes of the line of kings, and each province administered them in the name of the royal lineage. Vorna was old when Clotheno first stood before him, and the intuitions of the ex-priest told him the Magistrate was a good man who served the cause of right. In the depravations of the false god the land had suffered badly, and banditry and brigandage flourished as men sought merely to survive. Curbing those excesses took time, and the Magistrate’s men-at-arms worked hard to make the highroads, farms and taverns safe once more.

Thus had been born the legend of justice in Garth—the soldiers who tracked down the wrong, Vorno who convicted them by law and Clotheno who dispatched them, with rope, water-butt or axe. Truly, those for whom profit had come to mean pillage thought twice before crossing the shire-lines, for the unmarked graves of bandits could no longer be counted by ought but those who dug them.

Myrfan was the jewel of the province, capital and fortress, and its towers looked east upon white mountains whose fangs bisected the world, and beyond which lay the dreaming lands of Sarepan upon the sunrise shores. Each morning the executioner was wont to stroll upon the walls of the city, to meditate upon the beauty of the world, and his role within it; none would speak to him and many drew away, their cheer darkened, as he strode through the bustling marketplaces, for it was said his tread brought doom.

On one such sun-bright morn he was called to the audience chamber of the Chief Magistrate and found Vorno, silver now, hair a spectral spill from beneath his cap of fur, beard a white cataract upon his breast, in his robes of state, enthroned behind his great desk. The headsman bowed low to his benefactor and took the seat offered, to wait upon his master’s pleasure.

“You have served me well, Clotheno. I could ask no more of any man. You have discharged your duty unflinchingly, and with consummate skill.” The voice was gruff, roughened with age, and the headsman required no clairvoyance to know the message which awaited him. “In truth, your skills have outlasted my own. It is time for me to retire. I have been offered a post as advisor to our good king in far off Tarantium, and I have decided to accept. This means a new Chief Magistrate will be administering the province of Garth, and I hope you will serve him as faithfully as myself.”

Clotheno’s reply was slow and measured, as all his words had ever been. “My thanks, my lord. But it is justice I have served, before its personification. I shall continue to do so while there is life within me. For justice has gifted me purpose and balance, and no man can ask more.”

A cup of wine was offered and drunk, and the executioner went forth to his chambers to ponder his relationship with a new administrator. He was not perturbed, for the law was the law, and all functioned within its overarching precepts.

Clotheno needed that structure, for the years he spent in the thrall of Sho’Tan had left him hollowed out, believing nothing, shattered mentally and physically. Many had not survived, and many more had flowed away from the Temple of the Inland Sea to seek new meaning far away. His crisis of faith was long and severe, and his confidence in celestial truths and the wisdom of sages destroyed so completely as to never return. Now only the law mattered, the practical application of a code originated by humans for human benefit, and in its mechanistic working he found comfort.

Too often he dreamed of the days of Sho’Tan, woke bathed in sweat, ready to do battle, to strike back against the being which consumed soul and will, and reduced him and so many like him to mindless automata; but for his inner fury no remedy existed. Only in his work, and to ride upon the sea of grass, did he find solace, and in the companionship of Tallia, the stable girl who cared for the horse his position earned him. Thus, upon the occasion of his 200th execution he was pensive, pondering the change in office, for he cherished life’s predictable harmony.

At the appointed moment before the assembled civic dignitaries, the clerics and public witnesses, he swung the great axe and a head went into the basket. He was rewarded with a polite ripple of applause and rinsed the blade in the water butt nearby. The act was a solemn one but so familiar it occasioned no drama for him, and when he looked up at the Magistrate’s box he found a second seat of honor, occupied by a younger man in the fine robes of the king’s service. My new master, he thought blankly, and no flicker of expression reached his pallid features.

CHIEF MAGISTRATE PRAETEAN was thirty years Vorno’s junior, a brisk man of scholarship and ambition, but with a keen eye for the law the headsman saw at once. They were introduced at a general banquet to formally farewell the retiring Chief Magistrate, and the quiet, ominous executioner was alone in a crowd. Not given to open socialization, he was a stark sentinel of the office, and others let him be. He bowed to the new man, made some quiet comments, but later Vorno took him aside and they shared a drink by elaborate candelabra as the celebrations continued.

“Give him your support, Clotheno, my friend, and Praetean will excel, I’m sure. I will be here for a couple of weeks in a consultative capacity, while closing down my household for our move to the capital. Any difficulties, you’ll be able to reach me as always. From tomorrow, my office is his, and I’m sure he’ll have some changes to make.”

“Little can change in the art of swinging an axe,” Clotheno said with a deathly smile. “Nor setting up the drowning butts or preparing a noose. My art is a timeless one.”

“I’m sure,” the old judge said with a quiet smile in return. “It’ll be a sad day for Garth when you step down.”

Praise was pleasant but Clotheno was conscious of a silent longing, a wish to be praised for something constructive rather than its opposite. As a warrior he had done all the calling demanded, and as an instrument of justice he had brought the cold sobriety of skill and certainty to the task. Yet more and more he found his meditations focusing upon the clockwork simplicity of justice itself. Do this, suffer that—always in proportion, always meted dispassionately. Thieve a chicken, replace the bird plus ten hours labor for the deprived party. Drunk and disorderly, a week’s hard labor for the community. And so on, up the scale of fines, incarcerations, floggings and mutilations. As headsman he only worked when the capital offenses were tried, and as the rule of law had once more asserted itself the frequency had faded somewhat. Sometimes a whole week would go by now, and he was sure a day would come he worked but once a month. Perhaps there would be no need for the province to employ an expert at all, and what would become of him then? Often his thoughts tugged north and east, to the lands of the Zelinski horse lords, those wild, free peoples of the endless plains between Avestium and Thule, and he was fascinated by the contrast between their codes and the strictures of the law he served. Perhaps he would read of their law, and compare the tracts of the two lands.

PRAETEAN WAS A new broom indeed. He rearranged the senior office, changed around the staff, the rosters and responsibilities. He instituted staff meetings twice per week and all members of the civic council were required to be present. He wanted everyone up to date on all business. Clotheno was impressed and gave the stern bureaucrat his undivided attention. Much of the business was of no interest to him and he found his mind drifting, but the second staff meeting shocked him to his soul, something he would not have credited even possible. If he could have changed to a paler shade of white people would have witnessed it at that moment.

A young cleric was reporting on his assessment of the judicial archive, the files of which went back far beyond the time of the false god, and Praetean had asked for a clinical analysis of the practical accuracy of the law as it was currently applied. He brought the standards of the capital and assessed the province accordingly, looking for improvements, and when the cleric, in the course of a dreary presentation, commented that the mean accuracy of conviction, as determined by information collected post-sentencing, sometimes by years, was some 85%, many heads nodded with smiles. Clotheno, however, was profoundly disturbed, and listened more closely as offenses were discussed. It was simple enough to pay compensation to a person falsely convicted of theft and assigned penalties of labor or fines, but it was harder to make amends when the law incorrectly took away years of a person’s life, and impossible to undo corporal punishment.

While he had never doubted all reasonable discourse was entered into, if the statistic applied across the law, as the cleric seemed to imply, then he had executed at least thirty innocent people. When that thought rose about him like banshees from an open grave, the meeting grayed out and he felt disconnected, a roaring in his ears. The law in which he had placed such faith—a word he now despised—seemed to have let him down. It was pretentious to assume the law made no mistakes, but he had been willing to assign a far smaller error factor than seemed to prevail. Even one life, taken unjustly, was too many, and for the system to proceed in full knowledge of its own inadequacy was unacceptable to him.

Somehow, he remained silent until the meeting was dismissed, then walked out upon the citadel walls to clear his head. The day was old, an autumn sun declining over the valleys of the west, and a freshening wind reminded him of the inevitability of the turning season. Soon the Year of the Crab would become the Year of the Lion, and the snows would come down from the north, birds would fly south for the winter…and humans would carry on, uncaring, with the world they had made.

The sense of artificiality struck him the most terrible blow. He leaned against the parapet near a watch tower and felt for a moment as if he would be physically ill. Thirty innocent people—men and women of this province—had been sentenced inaccurately, found guilty of the heinous crimes they had fervently denied, words of refusal and supplication at lip to the bitter end, which had come—with admirable swiftness—at his hands.

Most of all, he was haunted by a young man accused of murdering his teacher, for he recalled there had been much doubt in that case, and the judge’s verdict a bitter division among the farmsteads where the crime had taken place. Was the real culprit still out there somewhere? Was that young man in a premature grave because the system was imperfect?

So much for this offence, so much for that. It had seemed so simple, and now Clotheno felt his world turn upside down. He was swept with a bitter regret and felt massively inadequate—a tool, used by those whose hands remained clean in matters of gravity. He realized, slowly and with difficulty, he had replaced the comfort of spirituality with a similar dependence on a mechanistic system, and now it too had fallen short of the high standards he demanded.

The world was imperfect, Vorno would tell him, and people did the best they could. The king’s justice was as fine an instrument as they were capable of fashioning, and until it was improved upon, it would be obeyed. There was nothing else. The grim acceptance of error left him shaken and the very foundations of his reality seemed to crumble.

Clotheno made his way back to his quarters, a simple house of adobe and thatch in the precinct below the citadel, and fell upon his cot to think deeply, his senses whirling. They had made of him a murderer, everything he had sworn to punish. He tried to remind himself, 170 times he had definitely acted in righteous interest, but what of the rest? Society seemed to shrug and apologize with the ineffectuality of words, a feeble dressing upon a gushing wound. As his world had tumbled around him when the false god’s thrall was lifted, so it tumbled again as the idol of the law was demonstrated flawed. All the times he had listened from the public loft above the courts, heard the judge’s considered statements and believed justice would always be served with equal vigor—and now he felt taken in, abused and manipulated.

Perhaps, he thought, the real problem was trying to enforce order upon chaos.

This was a wholly new notion to him and he calmed a little as he considered it.

If religion was a system by which limited mortals attempted to coordinate, predict and understand the working of a vast and measureless universe, then the law was a system by which the same flawed beings attempted to regulate their own behaviour. Values differed between people, therefore codes differed, and in distant lands things may be very different indeed. But they were all systems—agreed codifications whose transgression carried penalties.

Heart thumping in his chest, the executioner sat up slowly, went to his water pail and washed methodically, his robe discarded. Did he no longer believe in natural justice? This question set him thinking carefully and he found he could not set it aside. Perhaps natural justice was the only sort—transgression met with payment in full. His mind was clouded, but as he washed and dressed he calmed. He knew what he must do, and in his heart had already rejected the broken edifice that called itself civilization.

TALLIA WAS PERHAPS the last person he wanted to see, yet her presence was balm to him. Alone of all the people of this city, she had seen something in the ex-priest and not shunned him. The lanky girl in leather and fur entered the tavern of the Three Coins, off King’s Way, as the twilight thickened, and saw him at a rear table near the hearth. He supped on stew and ale, his hood thrust back to reveal his pale features and the dark hair which had grown back – he swore it would never be touched by a blade in all the days remaining to him when he set aside the falsity of holy orders.

The stable girl raised a hand and came to keep him company, seeing none other would share a table with him. A silent, grim-faced serving girl brought a turkey leg and greens, an ale jack on the side, and the executioner kept his silence, not knowing how to tell his only friend he was leaving. She was attuned to his moods, though, and could tell something was wrong.

“I’ll miss you,” she said softly at last.

He smiled, knowing he seemed a death’s head as he did so, the stigmata of his trade invading his very flesh. “Am I so obvious?”

“Only to me,” she whispered. “Where will you go?”

“Somewhere wild,” he murmured. “Somewhere beyond laws and systems, where I can be who and what I am without being a cog in someone else’s machine.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she added, then ate for a while in silence, enjoying the fire close by. At last she sighed and raised a tawny brow at him. “Won’t they have need of you?”

“There are others with the skill to do as I have done,” he grunted, “and perhaps less compunction. I was a fool, Tallia, a fool to think any system made by men could be perfect.”

“We are not perfect,” she whispered. “How can what we make be any better than ourselves?”

“How indeed? That question has no answer, but I can no longer be the instrument of a flawed but absolute system.” He sat back with a sudden satisfaction in his decision. “I feel a weight lifted from me. My tomorrows are undefined, I know not where I shall wake or what I will see, but each day will be different, and I shall make of it what seems best to me.”

“You have found freedom, then,” the girl murmured. “Many within these walls would envy you.”

“The artifice of their world is their safety,” the ex-priest grunted, wiping out his bowl with a hunk of bread. “Not one in a hundred has what it takes to do without it all. Could you turn your back on all you know?”

“Not forever, perhaps, but to see the unknown would be worth the risk.”

Clotheno blinked with a smile of a softness of which he had no longer thought himself capable. “Are you offering to come with me, Tallia?”

“There are times the wilds promise much,” she said simply.

“But not safety, not comfort. I cannot say what I will find out there, and ultimately I seek only myself.” He passed a hand across the table and squeezed her arm for a moment. “It touches what little remains of my heart that you would consider it, but I cannot....” He withdrew his hand and his face clouded once more. “Where I go is a grim road.... If the universe wills it, our paths shall cross once more.”

“As I said when I came in, I shall miss Clotheno. And if I am the only one who does, it is enough.”

THE CITY BY night was a murk of torches, and Clotheno walked softly, dressed in leathers and a cloak of fur against the chill of the starlight hours. The city watch was abroad, many feasting fires burned still, and camps beyond the walls hosted nomads and travellers whose song was heard across the rooftops of the city.

The headsman moved with a strange, cold resolve, for as the hours went by his certainty grew ever stronger that the city represented a futile and corrupt attempt to place order upon a wild and uncontrollable reality. As he had eschewed religion he found himself quite ready to eschew law, all systematization forced by human agency upon life. Perhaps, he thought, nature was the only reality, and among the birds and the wind, the rippling grass and the sky, he might find the harmony to set his fractured soul to rights.

But he could not leave without making certain farewells, and certain things clear.

He had taken his horse from the stables, fitted out with bedroll and saddle bags, his weapons and all he might wish to take from this place, and left payment for them in full on the rough wooden table in his lodgings, in a small strongbox with a letter to the new magistrate in a fold of heavy-stock paper propped against it. He felt it right to explain himself, to settle his debts, and in this realized natural balance was the only thing in which he still believed. He knew his head start would be a matter of hours, twelve at the most, but he accepted the odds, for he knew how the law worked in this province.

The house of Vorno was on the high side of town, within the outer wall but on a slope among the abodes of other well-to-do citizens. The rambling structure was surrounded with garden and a low wall, and he had tethered his horse in the alley which ran behind the gardens, and placed a coil of hemp upon the parapet of the garden wall in the shadows beneath a spreading tree, soon to shed its leaves as the season turned.

Then he walked around to the front door and knocked, was greeted by a servant and asked to see the Magistrate urgently.

“Clotheno, my friend, what is it at this hour?” came the graveling sound of the old man’s voice as he appeared in the hallway, wrapped in a cloak of green against the evening air.

“Urgent matters, Magistrate. May I speak to you in confidence?”

“Of course. My study....”

“The garden would be more discrete,” the headsman murmured.

Vorno could have taken exception to any notion his household was not secure, but indulged the wish with an easy grace, showing the headsman into his garden where they could walk far from the nearest torch, in the gentle light of the stars.

“Magistrate, I find I cannot continue in my accustomed role.”

“You...wish to retire as executioner?” Vorno’s tone rose in surprise. “The province loses a good man in this.... Can you tell me why?”

“I will do my best, sir. I have encountered a crisis. I fear I have lost my faith in the verity of the law.”

“The...verity of the law?”

“I heard at this afternoon’s general meeting, three in every twenty decisions is in fact incorrect.”

“Ah.” The judge walked with hands behind his back. “The uncertainty.” He sighed. “It is most regrettable but we are fallible, and for all our best efforts we make mistakes. In every way possible, restitution is made on those occasions. Regrettably, there are times this is impractical.”

“What do you do when the sentence was a hundred lashes, but the wrong man received them?”

The Magistrate looked sidelong at Clotheno, hearing the troubled tone of his voice. “Compensation is paid. A gold piece per stroke. And the apologies of the court. I have only ever made such restitution once, and the need was deeply regretted.”

“A lot of money, indeed. And when the sentence calls for the loss of a hand, say?”

“I don’t believe it has ever occurred, but in that situation the state would be obliged to provide a servant.”

“Has it never occurred because the error has never been made, or because the state cannot see its way to paying such a price, despite the honorable appearance of such a rule?”

“What are you getting at?” Vorno grunted.

They paused under the tree, far from the house, and spoke in hushed tones. “Let me put it another way. I am an executioner, and according to the cleric I heard today, I have put to death thirty innocent people. They were convicted and executed on your orders and I never once questioned them because I believed the law was accurate, if not in every case then certainly in those meriting capital punishment.” His cold eyes found the sparks in the judge’s by the dim blue luminescence of evening. “Can you assure me I have not taken innocent lives?”

The Magistrate sighed deeply. “I understand why you are troubled, my friend. I am troubled, by the same token. The sad fact is there are times we cannot be absolutely sure, and judgment is made on the weight of odds, of what is more likely to be the truth. Should a witness lie under oath and thus take another’s life, his or her own life will be forfeit, having manipulated the state into judicial murder. I do not believe this has ever occurred. I can tell you, as a friend and as a compatriot in the business of rendering the law, every pain is taken to consider every detail, no judgment is rushed, and your skills are employed only when necessary.”

“It seems I have worked consistently for years. Are the hearts of men truly so filled with evil they must be snuffed out in such numbers?”

The judge spread his hands with a rueful sound. “Brigands were dealt with in large numbers, but those days have now gone by. That battle has been won.”

Behind the judge, Clotheno saw the coil of rope on the wall and had already selected the branch over which he must toss it. It would be so easy, simplicity itself. A disabling blow to the old man’s neck, then he would join those he had sent to the next world, hauled high among the branches and perhaps unnoticed until the carrion birds gathered the next day. Clotheno would be far away by then.

Still, something stayed his hand. “I have taken 200 lives in my service here,” he murmured. “It seems you cannot rule out the possibility of error in at least some of those cases. Would you risk an estimate of how many?”

“I would prefer not to,” was the rumble in response. “To think of even one sends chills through me. I am very sure the average of 85% across all cases is misleading. Likely, petty cases are less accurately dealt with simply because they are trivial, and offences warranting death far more so, due their gravity. This alone reduces the error to a handful.”

“A handful,” Clotheno repeated softly. “A handful of lives, accidentally snuffed out because they were in the wrong place, knew the wrong people, said the wrong things... Because the wrong conclusions were reached.”

“I cannot say beyond all doubt I have not made mistakes,” Vorno whispered, and the headsman heard a tremor in his voice. “If I have done so, then all I can say is this: I have made these errors in the service of the law, of my king and of the common good, and I will answer for my shortcomings in whatever way His Majesty requires. And if he should require none and there still be fault, then it will be to the powers that rule beyond death’s shadowy door I shall make my pleas.”

Clotheno heard the verity of the statement, he was assured the judge believed these things fully and completely, and something in him was calmed. In that moment he felt his first impressions of the Chief Magistrate, long ago, had not been misplaced, and the law, for all its acknowledged fallibility, was not lightly applied. He sighed, eyes closed for a long moment, and looked up at the stars when he opened them, to hold silence for a while.

“Can I not dissuade you from leaving?” the judge asked softly.

“My resignation is signed,” Clotheno murmured and managed a faint smile. “I have had enough blood for one lifetime. It is time I seek my fortune elsewhere.”

“Go in peace,” Vorno murmured, and offered a strong, cool shake of the hand that was a thank you from the man, the law and the land.

HOW STRANGE, THE ways of fate, Clotheno mused as he rode on into the new day, his great dark horse covering the meadowland and woodland tracks with tireless ease. I went there to repay the lives I took in error with that of their thief, and found no blame to attach.

The rope he had recovered from the alley side of the wall and left over a stable gate lower in the town before passing the north gate in the small hours and showing Myrfan his back for the last time.

For a while he had stood in the street below the boarding house where he knew Tallia lodged, warring with his conscience. Should he offer her the thrill of the new and the dangerous, as she had hoped for? Or leave her in safety and comfort? The latter carried his heart, for though he would have valued her company greatly, he did not overstate matters when he told her he rode into the unknown. To have a companion upon a journey of self-discover was one thing but a passenger did not strike him as wise, and he could not say which she would be in the end. And it was solitude he sought.

The country opened out through farms and woods, hamlets and orchards, and he put the mountains to his right hand. Out there, ahead, were the endless grasslands, the world of the horse lords, and tomorrow beckoned: no more executions for Clotheno of Avestium, and perhaps, somewhere among the hardy tribes in the far-flung lands, men would learn to fear him no longer.

About the Author

Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike returned to study and secured qualifications in marine biology and archaeology. Mike has been a university educator since 2006, is a passionate photographer, master-level hobbyist and journalist for international magazines.

The Last Defense

E.L. Bates

(Previously published in Empyreome Magazine in April 2017)

TEL WAS IN the middle of a lecture on the causes and consequences of the Third Ahjari War when every communications device in the classroom went off simultaneously. One or two she might have dismissed as her students failing to obey her charge to turn off all personal devices at the start of each class. Every single one, including her own? That meant emergency override.

“Well,” she said, interrupting her own words while looking at the sea of frightened faces in the hoverdesks filling the classroom. “Let’s see what the government thinks is more important than the Third Ahjari War, shall we?”

That got a few subdued giggles, but those quickly faded as everyone turned to the emergency message blazoned across their communicators.

Principal Minister Goran regrets to announce that we of the Yinara system are officially at war with the Rimalja system. Effective immediately, no travel will be permitted between the two systems. All Rimaljans in our system are asked to report to their local embassy; all Yinarans in the Rimalja system must do likewise. For now, we ask the people of Yinara to stay calm and wait for further developments. Thank you.

So much for the official report. Tel had been expecting this as tensions had risen between the two systems for many tides now. What interested her more were the personal messages beneath the official one—messages that should not have made it onto her private device. The one from Admiral Karan was easily explained: if the government could override personal security codes for emergency messages, the military could do the same. The one underneath that meant Dag was up to his old hacking tricks again.

From Admiral Karan: General Ames, please contact me as soon as possible. We need your expertise. Things are in dire straits here, the Rimaljans could attack at any moment. Diplomacy has failed us. We are not prepared for another war. Please, even if you only come in as a consultant, we need you, Tel.

Tel shelved that to think about later. She went on to the next message.

It’s war, General. We in or out?

The smile that crinkled the corners of Tel’s eyes didn’t quite make it to her lips. That was Dag, all right.

She couldn’t think about her response yet. She had a classroom of students to tend at the moment.

War. The word spread around the room, a murmur first, growing to an angry shout. Daniel, a brown-skinned male who could trace his ancestors back to an ancient line on Old Earth, slammed a fist down on his desk, sending the hover unit skittering around the room, bouncing off other desks and causing a wave of chaos. Some students began to cry, some to shout, others to argue. One started to scream.

Tel didn’t need to raise her voice or clap her hands to gain control of a mob. She wished she had her laser pistol with her—nothing could stop a crowd in its tracks like a bolt of killing light fired into the ceiling—but it was locked into the vault in her house on Yinara Prime, along with her sword and insignia. She did still carry a vibroknife in her boot and her command rod in her bag, but she didn’t want to actually injure any of her students, only calm them down.

She touched the control panel on her desk, bringing all the hover units down to the floor and dimming the lights. After a few startled yelps, the students quieted.

“Done panicking?” Tel asked, inserting an edge of command into her voice. “Good.” She brought the lights back up to normal and met the gazes of her wide-eyed, silent students. Tel perched on the edge of her solid wood desk. “Let’s talk. Reasonably.”

“What happens now, Professor?” blurted Tatiana, who at twenty-three turns and the mother of one was a good bit older than the rest of the class, and still seemed like a baby herself to Tel’s eyes.

“I’m not entirely sure.”

The last war had begun when the Yinarans tried to leave the Rimaljan Imperium. Diplomatic channels had failed, and finally the Yinarans began a rebellion, which led to war. Nobody had expected them to win—one small system of only three habitable planets—but their rebellion sparked other systems to fight for their independence as well, and the Imperium, unable to fight on all its fronts, was forced to make peace. They were left with only their original system and a handful of colonies, while the Yinarans and the others had begun to establish their own independent governments.

There had been no formal declaration of war back then, no warnings for enemy peoples to get to their embassies, no calm requests for citizens to wait for further developments. It had been bloody, brutal, and swift. This neat and tidy announcement turned her stomach.

“What does it mean about Rimaljans reporting to the embassy?” asked another student. Tel had to scramble for his name—Hessa, that was it. He had the distinctive coppery green tone to his skin that the dwellers of the moon Crethsona, in the Rimaljan system, had developed over the last few thousand years. “My mother is Rimaljan—or was—what’s going to happen to her? What about my siblings and me?”

“You’ll be treated as the traitors you are,” snarled a student from the back.

“I will not tolerate talk like that in my classroom,” Tel said, her voice low and dangerous.

“We’re at war, Professor!” protested someone else.

For stars’ sake, she knew war better than any of these children could imagine. Tel reminded herself that the reason she had changed her surname when she took this job was because she didn’t want to be identified as General Teleria Ames anymore. She’d inhabited the role of Professor Tela Rushton for nearly forty years; she could hardly complain if her students didn’t realize their history professor was a celebrated hero of the war for freedom.

“Our system is at war with another system,” she answered. “That does not mean that we will start battling individuals here in this classroom. In here, everyone is treated on his, her, or its own merits. At the moment, I am far more inclined to sympathize with an individual fearing for his family than one slinging around nasty names and accusations without stopping to think about them.”

The mouthy student stood up. Ah, Jeanne de Frâme. Tel should have known. The girl was not exactly renowned throughout the university for her restraint and ability to reason. “My Great-Uncle Albert fought in the war for freedom!” she declared.

Indeed, Tel remembered him well. A snotty-nosed private determined to be a hero, who caused the death of nearly his entire unit through his arrogant idiocy. He’d have been court-martialed if they hadn’t been so desperate for troops.

“He says that we were weak and cowardly to accept the peace terms with the Imperium, that we should have crushed them, back when we had a chance! He knew that they’d come after us again. He knew they’d never be content to let us live as free beings! Every Rimaljan is part of their plot, he says. He says—”

Tel held up her hand. She couldn’t listen to any more of that drivel. Before she could speak, Daniel interrupted.

“What a load of rubbish! The only reason the former Imperium has begun this war is because of how badly damaged the freedom wars left them. With all the independent systems trading with each other and refusing to trade with Rimalja, their economy was destroyed. All their young people had been conscripted and killed, or else left to find work or marriage on other systems, like Hessa’s mother. If we are at war again, it is our own fault!”

Tel had heard that sort of statement before, usually from someone too young to know anything about the realities of war. Perhaps the economic sanctions against the former Imperium had been too harsh, but what Daniel didn’t seem to realize was that all the newly independent systems had also lost their best and brightest during the war, and were struggling even more to build their governments and economies from the ground up. They could not be concerned for what the sanctions against Rimalja might mean for that system when it took all they had merely to survive.

The debate heated up, with Jeanne leading one side and Daniel the other, and students like Tatiana and Hessa sitting silently and looking more and more afraid.

Tel put a hand to her head, pushing back some wandering gray hairs.

She was too old for this. She’d taken this job to do something positive after all the death and destruction she had dealt out during the war. She wanted to contribute to Yinara’s future, to pour into future generations. Now it seemed it was all for naught.

She shook herself out of her gloom as her communications device pinged again. She glanced down. Another unsigned message, again most likely from Dag.

Rimaljans have invaded the outer moons without warning, including the university. General, tell me you aren’t still at that light-forsaken school?

Tel swallowed. Suddenly the question of what they were going to do next was much more immediate and much less academic.

Ways of thinking Tel had long since put behind her snapped into place as easily and smoothly as breathing. She switched her communicator over to verbal and put a call in to the president’s office.

“Yes, what is it now, Professor?” asked the harassed secretary. “If your students are having a collective meltdown, you’ll have to get in line. So is every other class.”

“It isn’t that,” Tel said, one eye on the students now swiveling their heads to pay attention to her conversation. “I have just received word that the Rimaljans have invaded this moon, among others. I suggest immediate emergency evacuation.”

There was a startled silence, both in the classroom and on the other end of the device.

“Impossible!” snapped the secretary, his voice nonetheless sounding shaken. “The university is neutral ground. They wouldn’t dare invade here.”

“It is also where a large portion of the best-trained minds in Yinara are gathered,” Tel pointed out. “If the Imperium—sorry, the Rimaljans—can capture or wipe out the students here, they’ll take out our future military leaders as well as crushing the hearts of Yinarans back on the mainworld.”

“How do you know this?” the secretary asked.

Tel hesitated. If she revealed herself as General Ames, there wouldn’t be any more argument, but was she ready to do that? Dag’s earlier question nagged at her. We in or out? She’d already fought one war. She wasn’t sure she could do another.

The important thing right now was to get the students and faculty to safety. Her desire for anonymity meant nothing beside that urgent need. “I am—” she began, when Jeanne screamed and pointed to the transparent wall of windows lining one side of the classroom. Every head followed the direction of her finger.

Three short-range fighters, their blade-shaped silhouette that of the distinctive Rimaljan aerials, screamed past the window, flew in a circle, and landed on the sports field.

“I have visual confirmation of Rimaljan forces!” Tel snapped at the secretary. “They are on the playing fields. Tell the President to sound the alarm, get everyone to the tunnels and the evacuation ships, now!”

Before the secretary could answer, Tel switched back to written communication and responded to Dag.

At university, have to hold off Rimaljans on the ground long enough to let civilians escape.

Then Tel faced her students, now frozen at the window, watching troopers pour out of the aerials.

“Why are you all standing here? Don’t you remember the drills? I expect the alarm to go off—”

Right on cue, the air filled with the wail of the evacuation alarm. Tel had never been so thankful that the founders of the university had been paranoid nit-pickers who insisted on a way for the entire population to get off the moon in case of disaster. There were entrances to the tunnels from every building, and each one led to the ancient ships that were still maintained and in running order.

The entire class fled for the door. Only Daniel hung back, watching her.

“Aren’t you coming, Professor?”

It was going to take a long time to get every classroom, every dormitory, all the outbuildings and staff houses emptied. Not to mention getting people through the tunnels and into the ships, and getting the ships out of the caverns and into the air. Too long. The Rimaljans would be on them before the last stragglers got through, and might even find the tunnels themselves. Somebody had to fight a rearguard action.

Tel smiled and nodded at Daniel. “Don’t worry about me. You get the rest of the class to the nearest tunnel. I’ll be along when I can.”

It was a pity Angie wasn’t here. Tel could use her booby-traps right about now.

While she was wishing, she might as well wish for the entire command team. Dag, her hacker; Angie, her demolitions expert; Felix, who was a better fighter hand-to-hand than most were with weapons; mistress of disguise Elanna; intelligence operative Prthna; and Lucky, who could pilot anything. Together, they led Misfit Brigade, the smallest brigade and most rag-tag unit in the army.

Alas: Lucky was dead, killed in the last days of the war. Felix had passed away a few years ago, a peaceful death. Angie was a grandmother, and the rest were scattered across the system.

Tel hated what she had done during the war, but she had done it to the best of her ability, and she’d kept more of her people alive doing it than any other officer. She was fiercely proud of her people, even as she strove to move past the things they had done. The things she had commanded them to do. Their deeds and misdeeds were on her conscience, not on theirs. With every student she sent into the galaxy, she felt that weight tip a little more toward a balance. Only now, it seemed the universe demanded something else of her.

Without the Misfits, she’d have to do the best she could on her own. General Ames’s last stand? She supposed she might go down in history that way. Perhaps someday, a hundred years or more in the future, another professor might stand in this exact classroom and lecture students on the opening days of the Second Yinaran-Rimaljan War, and the heroic sacrifice of General Teleria Ames to get the entire university population to safety.

More likely, she’d go down in a footnote somewhere as an anonymous teacher who tried to hold off the invaders with some small measure of success.

Tel had gotten enough glory to choke on it in the last war. She’d thrown out all her medals the same day she’d locked away her weapons. If she could ensure even one more student got to the ships who wouldn’t have otherwise, that was as good a way to go as any. At least her message to Dag meant she wouldn’t be entirely forgotten.

With the last of the students out the door, Tel reached into her bag and pulled out the rod given her when she’d made brigadier general. With a snap of her wrist, Tel extended the rod to twice its length. Her thumb pressed the slight indentation on the bottom, and hardened armor plates slid around the entire length save for where her hand gripped. She twisted the handle, and spikes popped out along the armor seams on the top half. Tel’s fierce grin showed her teeth. Now it was a proper Misfit’s weapon.

She hadn’t realized she still had an audience. She looked up from her modifications to see Jeanne hanging in the doorway, goggling at her.

“What’s that, Professor?”

Tel gave her a glare that should have withered the girl in her tracks. “None of your business,” she said. “I told you to get to the tunnels!”

“You’re going to fight them, aren’t you? I want to help!”

“Under no circumstances.”

“There’s three aerials that we saw, which means sixty soldiers, and probably more that landed elsewhere,” Jeanne said. “Even with your nifty ... thing ... you can’t possibly hope to beat them all.”

“I don’t need to beat them,” Tel said. “Only slow them down. And the longer you stay here, the less chance I have.”

Jeanne shook her head. “I’m with you.”

“So am I,” said Daniel, moving out from behind Jeanne, jaw set.

“I thought you disapproved of this war,” Tel said, exasperation bubbling up in her.

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to see my fellow students get killed,” he said.

“I’m in, too,” said the third member of this rebellious trio of classmates. Tatiana joined the other two.

“No,” Tel said. “Absolutely not. You have a daughter to return to.”

“And I want her to have a safe galaxy to grow up in!”

Tel opened her mouth to argue with them all. This was no place for these students. Then she closed it.

She had been fifteen when she participated in her first battle. She’d had as little idea of what she was getting into then as they did now. She’d been thrilled to think of fighting for independence, of glory and honor, to strike a blow for Yinara. She’d been far more naive than any of them, even Jeanne. They weren’t children, as young and innocent as they seemed to her. And they deserved a chance to do what their hearts told them was right.

“Very well,” she said. “But you must promise to obey my orders, no questions or arguments. This is not the classroom, and debates have no place here. If you can’t do that, you’ll get us all killed. Understand?”

“Who are you?” Daniel muttered under his breath, but all he said aloud, along with the two girls, was, “Agreed.”

“Then find something to use as a weapon and follow me.” Tel shouldered past them. She stopped in the hallway, almost emptied of students and teachers, and looked back. “Don’t worry if you can’t kill. In fact, I’d rather you not, for your own sakes. Injure or knock unconscious, take them out of the fight however you can. It’s harder than you might think to end another being’s life, however much you feel they deserve it. That’s not weakness. It’s what makes us human.”

Jeanne tossed her long, light-brown hair behind one shoulder in a practiced gesture. “That’s what sets us apart from those Rimaljan scum!”

“No,” Tel said, eyes bright and voice hard. “They are human, too. Once you forget that, once you start ‘other-ing’ them, that’s when you become the very monster you accuse them of being. Mark me well, Jeanne. We’re all only human, doing the best we can from where we stand. It just happens that we’re standing on opposite sides of the matter.” She doubted her words would have much impact, but maybe someday, should Jeanne survive past this fight, they would sink in and make a difference. “Let’s go.”

Even while arguing with the students, Tel had been running a plan of the building through her mind—old habits die hard, and she’d memorized the layout of the entire university in her first week as a professor there. There was a defensible staircase down the hall from where they stood, across from and above the main doorway into the building. With a blaster cannon or even her phase rifle she could have held off sixty soldiers for hours at the top of the staircase, protected by its curve, aiming downward at the door through which soldiers could come through only a few at a time. With nothing but her rod and her students’ makeshift weapons, they’d have to put more effort into it.

“Right, here’s the plan.” She looked out the window at the soldiers approaching. More aerials had landed elsewhere on the campus, meaning soldiers were converging on the other buildings, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Fight this battle, she reminded herself, not the next one.

The moon was small, its sole continent even smaller, but even so the university was too sprawling for one person or even a dozen to cover the entire grounds. She had to hope that most people would make it to the tunnels in time, and that once word went out through the Rimaljan troops of a defense in one of the buildings, more soldiers would converge on them here, giving the others a greater chance to reach the evacuation ships.

“I’ll catch them by the door,” she said. She glanced over her three troopers, assessing their battle-readiness. “Jeanne, any that get past me, catch at the first curve on the stairs. Don’t worry if you can’t stop them all. Daniel, take the next curve, stop the ones that Jeanne can’t. Tatiana, you’re at the landing, our last line of defense. The soldiers that get by the rest of us are your responsibility. You’ll all be protected by the stairs from laser blasts, but don’t move or you’ll be an open target. Remember, toss them off the stairs, break their kneecaps, knock them out, but try not to kill. I’ll do that part. Any questions?”

Tatiana hefted a wooden leg she’d smashed off an antique chair in the hallway. Her eyes were drowning in fear, but she licked her lips and took up a stance at the head of the stairs.

Daniel had pulled two heavy wooden spheres out of a sporting display case and linked them together with wires pulled from somewhere, making a kind of crude, handle-less flail-and-chain. His chin jutted out in ferocious determination as he gave her a short, sharp nod and took his place.

Jeanne had raided the same display case as Daniel. She’d pulled out a heavy angled trophy with sharp edges along the bend to use as a knife substitute, and in her other hand she carried a heavy bat. She seemed as cool and calm as she ever did in class as she crouched at the first curve. Tel had to admit that the girl had more gumption than her great-uncle.

Tel positioned herself beside the main door. She closed her eyes and settled herself. Fighting mode came back more quickly than she would have believed possible, though there was a tremor in her hands she’d never had before.

Then the door burst open and there was no more time to think.

Tel swung without looking and felt the rod slam into the stomach of the first soldier through the entrance. Even as she disengaged, she lifted her leg and kicked the one next to him in the knee, driving him backward into the next two soldiers approaching. She whirled on instinct, dodging a laser blast that lifted the hair on the back of her neck, and smashed the spiked end of the rod into another soldier’s face. That one dropped the phase rifle she was holding. Tel snatched it out of midair, switching her rod to her left hand and whacking another soldier in the back of the head as she did so. Then the rifle was secure in the crook of her arm, and she sprayed the doorway with indiscriminate fire.

A few had slipped past her; she heard Jeanne and Daniel engaged in battle. If Tatiana was fighting, she was silent as she did so.

The phase rifle sputtered and died, the curse of those effective but short-lived weapons. Tel threw it in the face of a Rimaljan sergeant and went back to work with the rod. The Rimaljans were falling back, caught off-guard. They clearly hadn’t expected any kind of organized defense, especially not one this ferocious. A less experienced individual might have hoped that meant she could win, but Tel knew this was only prolonging the fight. Eventually numbers would tell, the students would falter, or her age would get the best of her, and the Rimaljans would get past them.

That was all right. She wasn’t here to win. This was a delaying action, that was all. Each second they held the soldiers off was another chance for the rest of the school to get to the ships. After that, their fate was in their pilots’ hands.

Another soldier fell at her feet. Tel couldn’t even remember killing this one. The young woman held a laser pistol in her death grip.

“Here! Professor! Toss me the gun!” Jeanne shouted.

Tel slid on one knee, broke the pistol free with a practiced twist, and risked a glance over her shoulder to place the toss. Jeanne waved a hand over the curve, and Tel arced the gun to land in her palm. The spat-pat-pat of laser pistol fire filled the air behind her. She hoped Jeanne was an experienced enough shot to not nail her in the back.

A big soldier loomed before her, and Tel slammed the rod toward his head. He dodged, caught the rod in one hand, and ripped it from her grip. Tel cursed between her teeth. Old age! Thirty years ago no brute could have wrenched her weapon from her. Never mind, she had other defenses.

The soldier wasn’t expecting an old woman to press a hand-to-hand attack. She used all his weight and strength against him, grabbing his hand, twisting his arm, using his own momentum to swing him around and throw him into the oncoming soldiers. He vanished into the dogpile, but her rod was gone, too. Tel wiped a smear of blood from her upper lip—her own or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell—and pulled her vibroknife from her boot. She hated close-quarters weapons like these, but they were better than nothing.

“Tati, one got past me!” shouted Daniel, followed by a thump as Tatiana threw that one off the landing. “Jeanne, on your left!” Splat-scream as Jeanne shot the soldier. Good. She’d suspected Daniel, with his eye for detail, would be a good one for that middle post. Jeanne, the ferocious one, stemmed the tide of whatever Tel let through, Daniel could watch the entire battle and still work a defense, and Tatiana was their last bastion as well as having the best chance of surviving and escaping, for her daughter’s sake, whenever Tel at last was overwhelmed.

So far adrenaline and experience were on her side, but she could feel herself slowing. More and more were getting past her; more and more frequently she escaped being shot, stabbed, or smacked by the barest moment. It couldn’t last. She really was too old for war. We’re out, Dag, she thought wryly, dodging another flying fist and tripping its owner neatly, stabbing downward as he fell. We’re definitely out.

“Look out, Professor!” came the cry from Daniel, but too late. Tel half-turned, taking the blast meant for her heart in her upper arm instead. It was enough. Pain and exhaustion flooded her in an instant, shocking in their intensity. She lost her grip on the vibroknife, staggered backward, and was nearly overwhelmed by the sudden rush of soldiers. So this was how she’d go. She only hoped the students would be sensible and flee.

Instead, she heard a banshee wail, followed by the thwack-whack of Daniel’s flailing spheres and firing of Jeanne’s pistol as the students rushed down the staircase toward her instead of away. Two hands slid beneath her armpits.

“I’ve got her!” Tatiana shouted. “Cover us!”

Tel tried to tell them to leave her, to run for it, but her mouth wasn’t working properly, and the idiots wouldn’t have listened anyway. They wanted to be heroes, they had seen her fight, they believed in her. They wouldn’t fail her, because they had faith she couldn’t fail them. They were fools. They were children.

They were beautiful.

Tati got her up to the landing. Daniel and Jeanne, both now armed with rifles and pistols alike, followed, flinging themselves down on their stomachs at the top of the stairs to fire down and keep the Rimaljans at bay. Slowly, life returned to Tel as Tati bound her arm with a strip torn from a university flag on display down the hall.

“I’m sorry there’s nothing better,” she said. “No emergency medical kits when you need them.”

Tel struggled to a sitting position. “Listen to me,” she said. “You three need to go, now. You’ve done all you can. We slowed them down, now it’s time to run.”

They looked at each other briefly, before Jeanne and Daniel returned to shooting. “What about you?” Jeanne asked.

Tel shook her head. “I can’t run. Too old, too tired. Leave me the guns. I’ll buy you time.”

“No,” said Tati.

Tel closed her eyes. She didn’t have time for this. They didn’t have time. “You promised to follow my orders.”

“Not stupid ones,” Tatiana said. “Not ones that are you sacrificing yourself for us. We’re in this together, Professor, all four of us. Or should that be General?”

Tel opened her eyes to stare at the bright, determined face.

“You are General Teleria Ames, aren’t you?” Tati demanded. “I recognized the rod. Grandmother told me about it. Told me that you could always know when General Ames and the Misfits were around because, one, you’d always see that altered rod thumping away at the enemy, and two, they always pulled off the impossible. And I saw the way you fought.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in denying it. “Your grandmother was in the war?”

Tati nodded. “Not in your brigade. She fought under General Mason.”

Mason had been a good man, a good leader and a cunning warrior. Dead now, like so many others. “Listen to me,” Tel said. “I’m not a legend. I’m a person. One person. Even if half the stories they tell about me were true, that’s the past. I can’t fight like that anymore. I can’t pull off a miracle. I’m telling you now to run, because I can’t save you if you don’t.”

“Then we’ll save you, Prof—General,” Jeanne said. She tilted her head back long enough to grin at Tel. “General Ames, huh? My great-uncle hated you, always said your reputation was exaggerated. I can’t wait to tell him how wrong he was.”

“We’re not leaving you behind, General,” Daniel said. “Isn’t that one of the mottoes of your brigade? Never leave a person behind?”

That was one of the false rumors. They’d had to cut their losses many a time, leave too many people to die in order to get the job done. Tel had felt every betrayal like a stab in her gut.

“Actually,” she said. “We were generally too busy to come up with any mottoes.”

“Well, that’s our motto,” Tati said. “No professor left behind. Jeanne, hand me one of those guns.”

Tel felt tears prick her eyes as Tati joined the other two. They could hold off the Rimaljans for a while, but what happened when the phase rifles ran out? The laser pistols would only be effective for so long before the Rimaljans overwhelmed the stairs with sheer weight of numbers. There had to be something she could do, some plan to fulfill their faith in her ... but what? She was out of resources, and out of ideas.

Then a familiar howl filled her ears. For a moment, Tel thought she was hallucinating. It came again, and this time she knew it was true.

Perhaps she wasn’t out of resources after all.

The other three heard it as well. Their gunfire slackened as they hesitated, looking around.

“What is it, Professor?” Daniel asked. “Rimaljan weapons?”

“No,” said Tel, unashamed of the tears now streaking her cheeks. “It’s the Misfits.”

Prthna had started the howl, the traditional war cry her people had used for generations. The rest had picked it up, and it had become a way for them to announce themselves on the field of battle. Tel looked out the window. Here they came, pouring out of an old, battered troop ship, Dag and Prthna at their head. Gray-haired, balding, hands speckled with liver spots, faces lined, some of them half deaf or blind, many of them missing limbs from the war. Grandmothers, grandfathers, and those who never had a chance to become either because of the hidden wounds the war had dealt. If Tel squinted she could almost see Lucky, Felix, and the rest of the ghosts of the past running alongside them.

The Rimaljans didn’t have a chance. The Misfits hit them like an ocean wave and kept on going, flowing into the building while Daniel, Jeanne, and Tati stood up and cheered.

“Dag, I meant for you to alert Admiral Karan, not come yourself,” Tel said, wiping her eyes with her good hand while her faithful old friend fussed over her other arm.

“Couldn’t leave our general in a bind,” he said gruffly. “Prthna and I and the rest here had already come together to talk over our plans for the war when your message came through. Lucky Prthna settled on a planet so close to the university moon, eh?”

“We can’t stay, General,” Prthna said. “We took care of this lot, but there’s more Rimaljans on the other side of the university. We’re an extraction team, not a planetary defense.”

“The evacuation ships just broke orbit, with some of our fighters guarding them,” Dag said, checking his wrist tracker. “There’s nothing left to protect here, General. Save you, and these three. New recruits?”

“Yes, sir.” Jeanne grinned.

“By all means, let’s get out of here,” Tel said.

Prthna threw one arm around Tel’s waist and with Dag supporting her other side, they staggered down the stairs and toward the transport. Out of the corner of her eye, Tel saw Tati stop and grab something from the mass of dead soldiers, but she couldn’t take the time to worry about it.

Strapped into a seat, an aged medic fussing over her arm, Tel still didn’t breathe properly until they broke orbit and, after trading a few token shots with the Rimaljan destroyer, entered deep space. Then and only then did she lean her head back and let the tension flow out of her muscles.

Tatiana unstrapped and came to squat next to her. “I found this, General,” she said. “I thought you might want it back.” She held out the white rod, a little battered now, but still functional. Tel took it in her good hand. She pulled in the spikes, retracted the armor, and shrank it back down to what it had begun life as: a mere symbol.

“So,” said Dag, perching on the other arm of her seat. He nodded at the rod. “We in, or was this one last hurrah?”

Tel found the path ahead clear. She looked at her old team and new, and she knew there was only one choice. She had enjoyed being Professor Tela Rushton, but the galaxy needed General Teleria Ames. It was time to let go of her guilt and do what she could to keep this generation alive. After all, that was what she’d wanted from teaching, wasn’t it? To give these students the best life possible? The definition of a best life had shifted the moment this war began, but her goals had not. She clenched her fist around the rod.

“We’re in, Dag. We’re all in.”

About the Author

A storyteller from the time she could talk, as soon as E.L. Bates learned to write she began putting her stories on paper and inflicting them on the general public. She is a firm believer in the power of story to convey truth, hope, and joy in a way nothing else can. When she gets a spare moment she enjoys reading, knitting, ice skating, and exploring the beautiful English countryside alongside her family. You can find her online at stardancepress.com.

NONFICTION

Why Not Out There: Possible Life on Extra Solar Planets

D. A. D’Amico

IT’S BEEN THEORIZED life could exist under the permafrost of Mars, in the methane lakes of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, beneath the icy water crusts of Jupiter’s moons, Enceladus and Europa, and maybe even in the high-atmospheric clouds surrounding the hellish heat of Venus’s interior. If it’s proven true, and if life is this common so close to home, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that it might exist in some form on worlds much further away?

So far, more than four thousand worlds have been confirmed orbiting stars other than our own. Most searches concentrate on the "Goldilocks Zone", the area around a star’s orbit where liquid water could possibly exist on a planet’s surface. Planets discovered in this choice location have been few. Most are gas giants, their atmospheres far too alien to host life as we currently understand it, but there are organisms on this planet already which can withstand incredible extremes; microbes that can survive boiling or freezing, can endure the vacuum of space, and can resist radiation that would kill most animals.

What might life look like on some of the more interesting worlds already discovered? Below are three hypothetical examples from three very real exoplanets.

First, we’ll look at Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own sun at only 4.2 light years distance. The sun is a red dwarf. Its exergy is less intense than Sol’s, meaning its "Goldilocks Zone" is much closer. To date, only two exoplanets have been discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri b is a rocky world not much more massive than Earth, normally a good sign, but the planet appears to be tidally locked to its sun. One side is permanently in daylight, the other forever in darkness.

A world like this might look like a poor choice for the development of life. Any water on the day side would instantly turn to steam, condensing on the dark side to form icy rivers that would flow back into the day side. Neither night nor day would be habitable in any sense of the word, but a thin band between these two extremes might be benign enough to offer a safe harbor.

Convection pushes hurricane force winds filled with dust and debris across a jaundiced orange sky, obscuring a feeble blood-colored sun that looks nailed in place against the thick haze of the horizon. The stench of ozone seems to ooze up from the hard ground as lightning slams the earth nearby as a silky mass of pale hair-like tendrils clings to a mat of fine needle-like shoots. It’s bulk flows behind like a cometary corona. Larger whip-like appendages lash out, impale the earth and contract, dragging the creature into the shadow of a cement-like mound of fresh dirt.

It waits patiently above the rough hole opposite the windside mound, feelers dipping into the darkness below until one of the wedge-shaped blind burrowers stumbles across its tendrils. Quickly, lance-like strands stab down from the swirling mass. The tiny creature is impaled, and its body lifted slowly toward the beak-like maw beneath the streaming corona.

Life, everywhere, may be brutal and difficult with survival of the fittest as its one universal constant.

The planet HAT-P-7b, an exoplanet over a thousand light years from Earth, was discovered in 2008. More massive than Jupiter, it orbits very close to its star, and it is one of the darkest planets ever discovered. While this is interesting in itself, HAT-P-7b’s real claim to fame is its clouds. They’re composed of corundum, the mineral which forms rubies and sapphires. Scientists have speculated that it rains gemstones on HAT-P-7b!

Being a gas giant, any life on this unique world would most likely exist well above its crushing surface.

Perpetual tornados slash through a plum-colored sky, dragging sheets of aluminum oxide rain the color of a deep bruise. Lightning flashes high above. Below, a sea of boiling gases burn hot-iron red from the intense pressure and gravity. Rubies and sapphires shoot through the clouds with the velocity of high-powered rifle bullets as pyramidal-shaped creatures drift with the prevailing gusts. Gas bladders under thick iridescent scales, cool in the infrared pouring off the surface, buoy them above the impenetrable lower clouds as they feed on patches of the thin organic soup suspended in the upper atmosphere.

Something umbrella-shaped stalks these creatures from the folds of an opaque corundum cloud. The segmented plates along its flanks open and close as the predator closes the gap, its pleated bio-luminescent frill pulsing as it unfolds to engulf its prey.

The final world in our tour is 1SWASP J1407b, or Mamajek’s Object. This planet orbits V1400 Centauri a little over 400 light years from Earth, and it appears to be the only world in this star system. Rightfully so, since this "Super Saturn" has a ring system more than 90 million kilometers wide, hundreds of times larger than our own ringed world. It may be going to far to suggest life occurring on a world like this, but a large gap in its ring system two thirds of the way out suggests the presence of an exomoon not very much smaller than the Earth. Life there would have a view like no other in the universe.

Brilliant rings stretch in hazy stair-like bands diagonally beyond the lime-colored clouds, glowing in vibrant brassy tints that fill the heavens. Shooting stars punctuate the gaps like the memory of rain, but the only water on the surface is long frozen, locked in a frigid layer beneath seas of ethane and methane.

Lumpy, bowl-shaped creatures move in glacial slowness in the super-cooled atmosphere, slug-like footpads churning the thick bluish slush as they feel their way over the terrain, taking in hydrogen and exhaling a greasy smear of dirty methane that signals their speed and direction to others of their kind.

A wedge of intense cobalt brilliance begins to emerge from the horizon. It is the immense gas giant rising like the morning sun, and it signals a change in the seasons.

The creature turns, seeking the shelter of a deep methane lake. It cannot get caught in the blazing "sunshine" of the huge planet’s radiation. But it is already too late. A fog of ethane gas has begun to cloud the lowlands, disrupting the creature’s sense of direction. It is lost.

Life can exist almost anywhere, under almost any circumstances, and in ways we can’t even imagine. Organisms thrive under our feet. They float in our air. Bacteria and viruses swarm through our very bodies. Life is all around us. It is us, and we’re just bits of stardust.

Scientists have proven planets outside our solar system aren’t rare, and if life can happen here in such wondering multitude and diversity, why not out there?

NONFICTION

Is Genre a Four-Letter Word?

Joshua Grasso

HERE ARE THE plots to three novels: can you tell which are fantasy novels?

* The son of a twisted duke is killed in a bizarre accident, and his innocent fiancée finds herself a prisoner of a haunted castle, pursued by the duke himself. Only the strange, twisting corridors of Otranto can save her now, where statues cry bloody tears and giant helmets exact their unholy revenge.

* A sailor is shipwrecked on an island and wakes up to find that ant-sized people have captured him. They dub him the “Man Mountain” and force him to do various menial tasks (like saving the entire kingdom with his own urine), until, terrified by his potential power, decide to kill him and parcel off his body to various parts of the kingdom. But the “Man Mountain” has other ideas...

* Two knights are captured in battle and thrown into a dungeon for life. Through the bars, they glimpse a garden outside tended by a beautiful woman: both of them fall madly in love with her, and vow eternal hatred on the other, since only one can lay claim to her heart. Eventually, one knight is pardoned while the other manages through subterfuge to escape. Once free, the second knight prays to Mars to assure him victory, while the other prays to Venus; both god and goddess grant each one success in love and battle. This causes quite a debate in Olympus, and Jupiter has to stand in judgment as to which lover will live with the maiden—and which will die in defeat.

So which are the fantasy novels? The answer is simple: none of them. Each one is a work of “classic literature” published by academic presses and used in tens of thousands of high school and college classrooms each year. The first one, and the trickiest, comes from Walpole’s early gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). The second, a little more familiar to most, is from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). And the final one, a plot which the author borrowed, and which Shakespeare also stole for a very late play, is from “The Knight’s Tale,” the very first installment of The Canterbury Tales (1476). So search as you will through the fantasy and science fiction section of the bookstore (or clicking through the same section in Amazon), you won’t find a single copy of these books. They’re all great literature, classics, poetry, or the more popular term, literary fiction.

And yet, if someone borrowed one of those plots today to weave together a novel where an astronaut lands on a strange planet of tiny aliens who abduct him, would that also be literary fiction? Or even just “fiction”? No, it would be science fiction, genre fiction, and to some people, merely “pulp fiction.” The same is true for any number of books with knights, haunted castles, shipwrecked sailors, or indeed, most works set in the ancient past. Fantasy. Juvenile literature. Maybe Young Adult at best. The implication is that these plots aren’t sufficiently literary to engage our minds or to make us think, feel, and examine the “human drama” that continues to be enacted.

Unless, of course, a book sells particularly well...then people start hedging their bets. The Harry Potter books, for example, have always held a respected place in the fantasy section...though you can also find them in Young Adult and mainstream fiction (depending on the bookstore). Or what about The Martian? Basically Robinson Crusoe (which reads like fantasy) set on Mars...yet you will rarely find it in the science fiction section. No, it’s “fiction” through and through.

Why? Simply because it sells well and people like it—and that goes for people who have never watched an episode of Star Trek or read ten pages of Dune. So if a plot doesn’t doom a novel to a specific genre, why is that so often the case in traditional publishing? Why isn’t Frank Herbert (who wrote the Dune books) also found in fiction, when his books are quite more complex and interesting than The Martian, and why does J.K. Rowling get the literary mantle when it is forever denied to someone like Clifford Simak or Robert E. Howard (both of whom have sold countless books themselves)?

In the end, the problem lies with the bugbear of “realism,” which is hilarious given that we’re talking about fiction. If a book isn’t sufficiently realistic then it is seen as less important, or less serious, than the more “sensible” books in the market. Even among the science fiction community, there is often great snobbery about books that don’t pay tribute to hard science and instead fall back on the softer science of Star Wars (I’ve heard day-long debates on whether or not ‘parsecs’ is a measurement of speed or distance—as in Han’s comment, “it made the Kessel Run in less than 5 parsecs”). The Martian is given a pass since it’s composed of wall-to-wall hard science—and very impressively, too. Yet Dune, which is far less technical when it comes to “folding space” is seen as a talky space opera which is more suitable for nerdy preteens than your local biology professor.

Of course, fantasy is also expected to worship at the altar of realism—we need psychologically believable characters who are always consistent and plausible (and preferably, anti-heroes). With realism goes an expectation of defying the conventional tropes, even if doing so becomes a convention in itself: every heroine is a badass, basically usurping the ‘male’ role and saving the day. Wonderful on the face of it, but what about a novel that goes back to older traditions and stories? The beauty of folklore and fairy tales is their defiant refusal to make sense: characters act strangely, as in a dream; events appear and disappear following their own logic, and it’s the work of the reader to stitch them together. God help the modern novelist who attempts such innovation! Surely there are some women who long to be princesses, or who would rather be magic users, or bards, or scholars? Does ever hero or heroine have to wield a sword to be “heroic”? Is kicking ass the only way to “kick ass”?

Worse still, if you use magic, it had better work like science! The idea that magic should follow strict rules and laws probably comes from role playing games, where it does by necessity...but this is storytelling! In the Arthurian Legends, does Merlin explain the logistics of his spellcraft? What about Circe? Do we see the actual recipe that goes into her spells transforming men into beasts? Of course not. It’s fiction, fantasy, make-believe. The sense of wonder and mystery that surrounds it is half the fun, and all the author’s intention (whoever they were). If magic existed, I imagine it would work differently for each person, much the way writing does. No one writes the same way, or understands exactly how it works. It just does. That’s why there are so many self-help books for authors, most of them contradicting each other. Would it be any different for magic and magicians?

While we all like to read a story and believe in it—Coleridge called it the “willing suspension of disbelief”—we can also take it too far. An agent once told me that Young Adult readers will only read a heroine that is the same age as they are, more or less. They want to see themselves in the novel, like wearing a costume and playing make-believe. I couldn’t disagree more.

I never read to wear borrowed clothes. I read to be a spy—I want to peek on a world of wonders that I don’t personally take part in, and that looks nothing like myself. I don’t need to see myself writ large (or small) in a novel; I just want to experience something mysterious and divine, or else see the mysterious and divine in the world around me. Either one will do, but I’m not a literary narcissist. I want to read beyond and outside myself. And I don’t demand that the books make sense or follow the rules of my own world. I only ask for one thing and even that is negotiable: make me never want to close the book. Keep me turning the pages in wonder, delight, confusion, anger, and frustration. Any story that does that, in any genre, has done its work.

In conclusion, I will admit that works of fantasy and science fiction (even if they’re not classified as such) tend to keep me turning the pages more than others. I read widely and in every possible style and genre, but nothing excites me more than a story set in the distant past or the far-flung future. These are stories that simply delight me. Even when they’re old, they seem brand new. Even the cover of a castle enveloped by mist with twin moons on the horizon makes me eager to crack open the book and get lost in the pages. I wager that a lot of people would feel the same if we removed the stigma of genre of “fantasy” (or whatever other genre). Look at the run-away popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies; everyone seemed to love them, even people who would have gagged at the very sight of a hard bound copy of The Simarillion. Why? Because films are almost genre neutral, as we also see with superhero films (how many fans of Wolverine actually own any X-Men comics?); the point being, that when we look at books as books, and fiction as fiction, we expand our horizons. We look at stories, and not types or genres or categories.

Reading is fun. It makes life worth living. So why reduce it to a dry set of analytics or algorithms? Only a complete idiot thinks that numbers can encompass the diverse reasons that we read and value art. Or not “idiots”—that’s too strong a term. Let’s call them “people who don’t read books.” 

Pirates of Titan

by Dylan T. Jeninga

A YOUNG WOMAN huddled in an abandoned mining tunnel, bleeding from a hole in her right arm, a gift from her now ex-lover and former captain. She struggled with bloody hands to tear a ribbon of cloth from her coverall for a makeshift tourniquet. She had nothing left—only a few rupiahs in spending money and her pistol. Her ears pricked as she fumbled with the fabric strip, the voices of her once crewmates echoed from the shadowy passageways. They were getting close. She brushed the dark, sweat soaked hair from her face and began crawling, painfully, further into the dark.

THE TITANIAN SKY was overcast with mustard haze. Frigid, oily rain fell in drops like quarters and pounded against the muddy frame of a layer-printed plastic habitat. Printing was cheap on Titan, hydrocarbons being readily available, which was a blessing for a wanted woman in hiding. The main drawback was that the life support reflected the price.

Kira shielded the guts of the simple air filtration system from the downpour with one hand and sought the source of its malfunction with the other. Her fraying exosuit shielded her from the cryogenic temperatures without, its neon yellows and greens faded on worlds that received more sunlight than this one, but it made the work awkward. The slick rain made it worse. She ought to return the cover and wait out the storm, but she was reluctant to give up on this particular system even for a little while: if the air inside the habitat was allowed to accumulate too much methane from the atmosphere, an errant spark could be deadly.

Overhead, A shoal of squid-like Ropen drifted, looking for all the world like long, fleshy kites. Kira didn’t give them much thought; the natives tended to stay far above their Earthly visitors.

A frozen, poisonous world where one might explode if they didn’t keep their air clean; It wasn’t the ideal place to raise a family, but it was great for hiding. She could even pretend, sometimes, that she was a child on Venus again, standing in a warm morning drizzle beneath the churning blue clouds.

She muted her mic and swore venomously as she battled the machinery. The strain of holding her arm aloft was waking her old wound, and she had to lower.

“Mami.” The voice of her young son, Tirta, came over the general channel. She revived her mic.

“Yeah, bayi?”

“There are people coming down the road.”

Kira started. “Yeah? If this is a joke, I’ll dump you in the sea.”

“No!” Tirta insisted. “There are three!”

“Alright, get inside right now.” Kira switched the private channel she shared with her husband and replaced the cover of the AF system. Their son would do as he was told, when her voice took that tone he knew it was no time to mess around. So did her spouse.

“Yasu.”

“What is it, sayang?” he said. “Gas leaking in?”

“I wish. You inside?”

“Ya, in the greenhouse.”

Kira packed her equipment and hurriedly trudged through the mud to the shipping container-turned-toolshed she kept behind the house. “I need you to get suited up and get Tirta’s O2 refilled, then go hide in the reeds. And grab my gun.”

Yasu was silent as Kira reached the shed. “Someone coming?” he finally said.

“Tirta says three. He should be inside any minute.”

“I hear him.”

“Good. Be fast, hun.” Kira tossed her tools into the shed and made for the front of the house.

Yasu was there, and Tirta. Her husband’s eyes were wide beneath his yellow-tinted visor. Across the furrowed mud of their blackroot field, three suited figures were stepping off their speckled kuda, five-footed Titanian steeds dissimilar to horses but equally useful. Even through the downpour, it was obvious when the riders unpacked gauss rifles.

“I loaded it.” Said Yasu, handing Kira pistol and gunbelt. “Please be careful, sweetheart.”

The weapon felt familiar in Kira’s hand, even after years of disuse and in the weight of an alien moon. She strapped the belt on and holstered it as her family made a beeline for the forests of black, chitinous reeds that surrounded their homestead.

The visitors were making their way through the field, the foremost of them wearing a black suit with snowy white roses painted on their helmet. They led their pentapedal mounts, the creature’s wide feet churning dark soil as they walked.

“Hey, I’d appreciate it if you kept your animals out of my blackroot.” Kira called.

The decorated figure stopped and consulted with one of his companions, who led the steeds out of the field while the other two resumed their approach.

Cops? Kira hoped so. Police at least wouldn’t poke a hole in her suit and leave her to choke.

“Kira Hastif?” The leader asked as he approached, gauss rifle hanging casually beneath his arm. “I am Marshal Marco Taban. My partner here is Sheriff Ira Darmadi.” He gestured to the woman beside him. His Saturn Indonesian was fluent, despite his Earther accent.

“Nobody here by that name,” Kira replied. “Sara Ota. Anything I can do for you officers?”

The Marshal turned to his escort, who unclipped a scanner from her belt. “We obtained Hastif’s genetic profile from the Interplanetary Patrol. All I need is a small sample from you. Let’s go inside.”

“Uh, well,” Kira said, “I’m gonna need to see a warrant before I turn over any hairs.”

“And you are right to insist,” said the Marshal, fishing a tablet from his suit pocket and presenting it to her.

“Okay, you got me.” Kira sighed. “But my last name really is Ota. I got married.”

Taban extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Ota, and congratulations.”

They shook. The man’s grip was Earther strong; it was unlikely he’d been on Titan overly long.

“There was no need to send those others away—your spouse and child, I presume? We’d like to be friendly.”

Kira hesitated. “So you brought your big guns… to be friendly?”

“A precaution.” The Marshal assured her. “You’re not under arrest. Shall we carry on indoors? I don’t know about you, but I’d like to warm up.”

Unsure, Kira nonetheless radioed her family to emerge from hiding. They only had so much oxygen, after all, and with Yasu around at least the odds would be a little better. Reluctantly, she beckoned for the lawmen to follow.

“YOU WERE IDENTIFIED at the Pantei Berbatu trading post a kilometer and a half south of here. A scavenger recognized you from an Interplanetary Patrol bulletin.”

“A mudder thought he recognized me, eh? And you came all the way out here on that?”

Taban leaned against the moist plastic wall, clad in a tidy police coverall. They had left their exosuits, skins blazing with cold, in the habitat’s airlock. The Sheriff and her deputy had tied down their kuda and come in after her family, and now the four of them were crowded into the cabin while Kira and Taban talked in the adjacent greenhouse.

“Out here past the Belt, sometimes a settler’s word is all we have. And my hope is that mudder’s hunch will lead me to Gabriel Tury.”

Kira’s breath caught in her throat. “Gabe?”

Taban nodded. “Have you been in contact with him recently?”

“No. Honestly, Marshal, I came out here to get away from him more than you. I was doing a fine job avoiding the law before.”

“So you were.” Taban smiled. “What happened? Between you and Mr. Tury?”

Kira unzipped her coverall and freed her right arm to reveal the angry white eye of a gunshot scar.

Taban clucked. “Well then, you’ll be troubled to know that he’s been on Titan for a while now. And that he’s become something of local legend.”

It was the likelihood of being followed—Saturn Liner tickets were not hard to trace—that had driven Kira to lose herself in the Titanian wilderness to begin with. After meeting Yasu and having a child, she had taken them still further out, far from civilization but resultantly far from news. If she’d heard Gabe was nearby, they would have run again, maybe to another moon altogether.

“I’ll get right to it.” The lawman went on. “I want to draw him out, and I need bait.”

It took a moment for the Marshal’s words to sink in, and when they did Kira responded reflexively. “No. I’m sorry.”

“Not even for your family? Surely, you don’t want your son to grow up with the threat of Mr. Tury over his head.”

The greenhouse was suffocatingly humid. “They need me here, I’m the only one with any mechanical experience.”

“You won’t be gone for long, I promise.”

Kira shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Do you think,” Taban said cooly, “that your family would be better served to have you imprisoned?”

She was reminded of the man’s gauss rifle, still hanging at his side, while she had been made to turn her own weapon over to Sheriff Darmadi. Unhappily, she wiped the sweat from her brow.

“What would I be doing?”

“Contact him and arrange a meeting. We’ll put a tracker on you, and keep a close eye. All you need to do is draw Tury out, and we’ll take over. In return, I’ll forget I ever found you, and I’ll make sure the local precinct forgets as well. You can return to farming blackroot in the boonies, you can even pick up and disappear if you want. No one will try to stop you, at least not in my jurisdiction.”

The lawman seemed to regard the plan as a sure thing. Kira flexed her stiff right fingers.

“You’d just let me go?” She asked.

Taban nodded. “A few months after Gabriel arrived on Titan, he usurped the throne of a man named Pak Suprapto, who managed the illicit narcotic sales in Mambang.  We found his body floating on the Kraken Sea in an airtight shipping crate. The cold had seeped in and blackened his flesh before he finally suffocated.”

It wasn’t hard for Kira to believe. When they were together, Gabriel used to do all sorts of horrific things in the name of forging a reputation as a pirate.

“After that, the bodies really piled up. His network extends from Mambang to New Bokor, Ubud, Seldonport… and the amount of keriaan being confiscated off world has more than doubled.”

The colloquial moniker for a local fungoid with a peculiar and euphoric effect on the brain, keriaan was a product of the unique life chemistry of Titan. It was illegal on most worlds and incredibly rare, being difficult to grow outside of its natural setting, and Kira had stolen more than her share of it.

“I’m responsible for apprehending fugitives in this territory, but I’m willing to let the little fish go if I can catch the big one; if you’ll pardon the Earthly metaphor.”

“We didn’t have fish on Venus so much as spiny eels, but I get your drift.” Kira looked again to the cabin where the police were keeping watch over her family. It might be possible to go along with their plan, then escape when their guard was down—but the life of a fugitive was no life for a child. Tirta and Yasu were prisoners here as much as she was, and for her crimes. But with Gabe gone and the cops off her back, even for a while…

“I also want three Saturn Liner tickets to Ceres Station. First class.”

Taban scoffed. “Third class.”

“And I want to have my gun when I meet him.”

The Marshal shrugged. “If it wouldn’t put him off, I’d let you take a grenade launcher.”

THE TRIP TO Mandang on kudaback took the better part of two days, with a rest stop at the overgrown box that was the Pantei Berbatu trading post. Kira thought she might find the mudder who identified her, but no one inside showed any hint of recognition when they walked in. Instead, she thought of how her son had cried when she left, and how Yasu had said only “you better come back, sayang.”

Mandang was enormous, two tent-like domes and a sprawl of printed homes not unlike her own. Surrounding the city, great expanses of reed forests had been cleared to make way for the plantations that harvested Titan’s singular flora. Mighty barges pulled into port where they were loaded up with fresh plants and sent off to be sold to Inner System pharmaceutical corporations. Above, distant Ropen circled languidly.

To Kira, the sight of that city, perched on the ebony shore beside a sea like molten gold, was a breath of fresh air. To be around people again...

Unfortunately, she saw little of the city’s populace. Her time was spent at the police station, a plastic wart sprouting from the side of the original dome. After their arrival, she had used Taban’s computer to send a message to one of Gabriel’s old network IDs, and then been escorted to a cell to wait for his response. Thankfully she didn’t have wait long, he agreed to meet at the Lumpur dock provided she came alone and at the hour of his choosing. Taban was delighted, it was exactly what he had hoped for.

The feeble, diffuse sunlight was fading when Kira arrived at the dock a day later. Far from the bustling hive of the barges, it consisted of little more than a single plastic walkway extending over the methane “water”. A solitary speedboat was lashed to it, bobbing gently.

The cold grew worse with dusk, overpowering the thermals of her exosuit, and Kira wished she could duck into the nearby bar and bring feeling back into her extremities. Apart from that lonely establishment, the street was quiet, with every other building turned over to housing plantation laborers.

Taban had planted a tracker in Kira’s suit and then sent the sheriff and her lackeys ahead to get in position atop the printed apartments before discreetly escorting her to the meeting point.

Kira let her bad hand rest on the butt of her pistol. Despite the tremors, she had never learned to shoot with her left. She was berating herself when the bar’s exit airlock cycled, releasing half a dozen figures who turned in her direction. Her eyes jumped uneasily between them. None of them looked like Gabriel, but their suits made identification difficult.

One of the mob, a head taller than the others, pushed to the front of the crowd carrying a small stainless steel cylinder, electric sparks crackling from one end. Casually, the figure tossed the device in Kira’s direction.

At the cylinder’s touch the mud vaporized into a cloud that settled in a coat of frost on Kira’s visor, obscuring her vision. That same instant gunshots sounded, deep and booming in Titan’s thick atmosphere. Practiced habit drew her gun from its holster, but before she could shoot blindly she was pushed to the ground and her weapon knocked away.

“Taban!” Kira heaved, her voice drowned by gunfire. She pushed herself up, arms sinking into the icy slush, but was knocked back once more. Strong hands gripped her shoulders and began to drag her through the mire.

The sounds of fighting grew more intense and her captor picked moved more quickly. She reached over her head and grabbed at their ankles.

“Cuk!” A woman’s voice exclaimed, and with a splat its owner toppled. Kira tried to wipe the ice from her faceplate, but succeeded only in smearing it with mud. She recognized that voice.

“Beth?” She shouted in wonder.

“Come on, blo’on,” said the voice, gripping her by the helmet and dragging her once more. Kira tried to wrestle free, but Bethany Castile had always been an ox.

The drumbeat of firearms faded as Kira was dropped on a smooth, bobbing surface - the boat - and it was replaced with a hiss as the vessel’s cabin pressurized.

As the engine rumbled to life she cracked the seal on her helmet and tossed it aside. She was indeed on the boat she had seen waiting at the dock. Around her, the figures from the bar milled, patting each other on the shoulder and exclaiming elatedly.

Beth crouched beside her, muck caked over her enormous suit. Slowly, grunting painfully, she removed her own helmet.

She appeared much as Kira remembered her: gaunt face, hair cropped close to the skull, sad, sunken eyes. She and Beth had been close, during the old days. They used to fight together, drink together, make each other laugh.

Beth sat back, unzipped the torso of her suit, and carefully peeled it back. The coverall beneath was stained with blood.

“Boss!” One of the men exclaimed, rushing to her side. He was short and red bearded, Kira didn’t recognize him. “They got you!”

“Its alright.” Beth placated. “The nicked me. Suit sealed it up before there could be any frostbite. Get me a patch.”

Redbeard moved to the other side of the cabin, grabbed the first aid kit hanging on the wall, and brought it over.

“Who’d we lose?” She inquired, applying a med patch.

“Lnu.” Redbeard said. “The Marshal got him before the Sheriff could take him out.”

Beth grimaced. “But she got ‘im?”

“That’s what she said. Him, and a few of the deputies who never fell in line.”

“Good.” She relaxed as the drugs on the patch set in. “Hey,” she addressed Kira warily.

“Hey.” Kira had thought about seeing Gabriel again on many a sleepless night, but never Bethany. She’d tried not to think about her old friend.

“Good to see you again, bud.” Beth said.

“Yeah.” Kira replied.

“You okay? It got crazy out there.”

Kira nodded.”Gabe sending you to do his dirty work now?”

“He’s busy. Our operation has changed a lot since you… left.” Beth leaned forward. “Sorry, by the way. This isn’t how I wanted us to meet again.”

“Yeah, kidnapping.” Kira replied. “It’s nice.”

Bethany wheezed merrily, a hearty, contagious cackle that used to drain the tension from a room. Kira couldn’t help but grin. “Well,” Beth finally said, “it’s not like you were gonna come on your own.”

“Hell no I wasn’t.”

“And you and Gabe have a lot to work out.”

Kira’s smile disappeared. “Do we? He shot me, remember?”

“Are you sure?” Beth asked. “Things were… nuts that day.”

“It was him.” Kira replied coldly. “I told him it was over and he got mad.”

“Look,” Beth placated, “He says he’s sorry, even if it wasn’t him. The way he tells it, you were stressed, which is completely understandable, and you… had a meltdown and tried to run off with the crew’s money. I’ve seen things like that happen. When I was a pit fighter, I saw good fighters completely lose it. It even happened to me a couple times. If Gabe hadn’t gotten me out-”

“He told you I tried to rob you?” Kira replied, suppressing her disbelief. Of course, she thought, Gabe would have his own version of her departure.

“That’s what he says. If it did happen, nobody would blame you anymore.”

“We had a talk like this before I ran.” Kira said. “You didn’t believe me then either.”

The big woman struggled for words. “It’s not that I don’t, I just don’t know what to believe. You’re both important to me.”

Kira shook her head, black hair swaying slowly in the low Titanian gravity. “He shot me, Beth!”

“I know! And I know he’s always had a temper. Obviously he’s not a saint, but he does use some of his money to make life better in the plantation communities. You at least need to give him a chance to apologize, and if he tries anything again I’ll kill him for you.”

Kira pulled herself up to a bench by a window. Fat Titanian raindrops drew slow paths across the plastic.

“It is good to see you.” Beth added after a moment.

AFTER A COUPLE hours of nothing but frothy methane waves they finally arrived at their destination.

Tucked in an alcove beneath a rocky overhang was a ship concealed in the mist. A tugboat, of the kind used to shepherd corporate barges, but far from its home at the docks. Surrounding it were a number of small speed boats like the one they currently occupied, a few coming and going on errands around the Kraken Sea. On the tugboat’s bow was stenciled The Siren.

What held Kira’s attention, however, was the score of Ropen perched upon its deck.

“Looks like we’re making a sale.” Beth explained. “Told you things changed.”

They pulled up to the hull of the larger craft and fastened their helmets. Someone above lowered a rope ladder, which Kira was ordered to climb, with Beth and the others following close behind.

As she reached the top, Kira got her first close look at the towering natives of Titan. They stood at twice her height on five ribbon arms, each tipped in delicate feelers, and supporting a wide, thin kite of a body. As she watched, several of them emerged from the fog like flying molluscs and settled beside their comrades, moving with grace that contrasted their enormous frames. Jewelry and things that might be weapons hung from their limbs, glinting like glass.

And fixed among them, flanked his men, was Gabriel. She recognized him even after her absence and despite his new indigo exosuit, the way he held himself was uncomfortably familiar. He was addressing the crowd of Ropen. “You can see, these are good batteries.” He said with the singsong of a showman, “A blow to the top will break the seal and release a surge of heat.”

As he spoke, a slender woman beside him translated his words to the gurgling language of the Titanians. She seemed to be doing her best to mimic Gabriel’s tone and salesmanship.

“Observe,” Kira’s former lover said, removing a fusion battery from the crate before him. With a quick strike he smashed the cap of the battery against the crate’s lip, eliciting a pop and a sustained spark. The Ropen stirred with apparent approval.

“Ice.” Gabriel ordered, and a speckled chunk was brought forward. With a dramatic flair, Gabriel held the sparking end against its surface.

“Ten sacks of keriaan for the crate.” He said.

If the spark had made the Titanians happy, the resulting plume of steam pleased them still more. One of them, brown with darker spots, bellowed in its strange baritone, conversing with the translator.

She turned to Gabriel. “The shoal leader agrees.”

The demanded number of woven sacks were deposited on the deck, and the crate of batteries was lifted into the air by the aliens. They took to the sky, departing like a school of fish, leaving one of their members behind. This one, a blotchy black and grey, remained motionless until the translator addressed it. It responded in terse grunts.

“Captain, this guy is telling us to pack up and leave. Again.” The woman said, “Says it’s got friends who don’t like our evil toys.”

“Tell it to go away.” Gabriel said, turning his attention to Kira as the final Ropen lifted ominously from the deck.

“Go on, bud.” Beth said from behind her as the last of her abductors topped the ladder and helped the man who had lowered it raise it back up. Kira was overcome with the desperate compulsion to throw herself overboard and make for the shore, there to face a clean death by hypothermia rather than confront her ex.

“It’s alright.” Gabriel called solemnly. “I’ll come to her.” He took long strides, hands outstretched, like a father taking his child into his arms.

Kira made efforts to slow her breathing as Gabriel embraced her.

“Asu, sweetheart, It’s so good to see you alive. I worried every day.”

“Okay.” Kira muttered.

The captain held her at arm’s length, saying nothing. He looked to Beth and the crew.

“Beth, please take Kira to her room, and stay with her. Get her anything she needs. I need to see to our new inventory.”

Kira was led through a narrow airlock into the wheelhouse. Containers of batteries lined the cabin walls, and Bethany pushed a stack of them aside to reveal an exosuit locker with her name printed on the door.

“Gabe always insisted.” Beth explained as Kira stripped off her suit and hung it within. She then led her through the bowels of the ship to the crew deck, where a room was similarly Kira’s. Inside, she found all of the things she had left behind when she had run, all her belongings nearly as she had left them on Gabriel’s old rocket.

“He kept it all?” Kira’s eyes were wide. She picked up a flier for CR59 JUMP, a bossa nova/dangdut fusion band she had once loved. It was from her first date with Gabe, and he had gotten the band members to sign it.

“Of course,” said Beth.

Kira put the flier down. “I agreed to help that cop. He coerced me, but I think I would have eventually agreed even if he hadn’t.”

Beth’s eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

“Because I’m married now.” Kira said.

“Wait, what?”

Kira nodded. “And we have a son. I didn’t say anything earlier because I don’t want Gabe to know they exist, who knows how he’d react. But we can’t live in fear of my ex forever. That’s why I was at the docks when you picked me up.” Beth seemed about to reply, but Kira pressed on.

“They need me. My husband is a farmer, he has no technical experience, and Tirta’s just a kid.”

“I…” Beth rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Wait.” Kira said. “Let me tell him. He should hear it from me.”

“Are you actually going to tell him?”

“I will, I promise.”

Beth nodded after a pause and departed, leaving Kira alone in her cabin.

She found she was locked in. She searched for a way to force an escape, but the door was sturdy, and she knew Beth was no doubt waiting right outside.

With nothing else to do, she passed the time going through her old belongings. Aside from the flier, she found her forgotten clothes, books, tools, and the little stone figurines of Martian Water Gods she had once collected. In one of her toolboxes she found an old, worn screwdriver, which she spirited into her coverall pocket.

There was a knock at her door. A moment later, Gabriel came through, still clad in a chilled exosuit, sans helmet.

Last time Kira saw his face, he was maddened, raging, slinging curses and bullets wildly. Today he looked as handsome as he always had, dark and well groomed, with alert brown eyes and a boyish face that managed to be charming, terrifying or self assured depending on what he was after.

On his hip was his beloved Petier II Repeater.

Kira rose from her seat on the bed when he came in. Neither of them spoke.

“Why?”  He finally said. Kira realized with surprise that he was holding back tears.

“What?”

“Why did you leave? I needed you, and I thought you needed me too.”

Kira’s was incredulous. “I couldn’t take it anymore. And then you shot me.”

Her old lover managed to look hurt.

“I would never.”

“Really? I’ve got a scar that says you would.”

Gabriel’s voice was calm. “When you ran off, there were a lot of bullets flying—”

Kira laughed. “Bullets you shot! You looked right at me and pulled the trigger—”

“That’s ridiculous—”

“Said you wouldn’t let me leave—”

“You were taking our money—”

“Yeah,” Kira interrupted, exasperated. “I heard that’s the ‘official’ version.”

“So whoever it was that shot you I don’t blame them. I’m just ashamed it was my woman who did it.”

“You babi kimak—”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Ngentot lu bajingan tolol—”

The freezing mesh of Gabriel’s gauntlet struck Kira across the face and sent her sprawling onto the floor. His fist was raised in warning of another strike when Kira leapt for him, planting a punch on his perfect face.

Unfortunately, she didn’t hit as hard as she used to, and Gabe shrugged the blow aside, bringing his fist down on her again. Stunned, her mind went to her concealed screwdriver. She fell back, reaching for it, when she found herself facing Gabe’s drawn pistol.

“Gabe,” She said anxiously, “don’t.”

“You’re crazy. Unstable. You’re a danger to yourself and my crew.” The sorrow in his voice didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Gabriel. I’m sorry.” Kira replied, raising her hands.

They stood like that for a long moment, the black mouth of the repeater barrel reaching hungrily for Kira, Gabe overcome by the same calculating, cold spirit that had fired at her in anger once before. She realized, this time, there was nowhere for her to run.

Finally, he lowered the gun. Kira realized she’d been holding her breath.

“You’re bleeding.” Gabriel said, eyeing her temple. He spoke in the soothing tone he always employed after a fight, the reasonable calm that used to make her feel ridiculous for being angry. “I’m sorry. You just… you have this effect on me. You make me so mad, I just…” He holstered his gun, turning his back to her. “I’ll get the doctor.”

As he shut the door, Kira found herself shaking uncontrollably. She sat on the bed as blood ran down her cheek.

A YOUNG MAN had come in a few moments later and escorted her to a maintenance-locker-turned-makeshift-infirmary. There, a spindly old woman examined the side of her head while absently growling Ropen words and phrases. Evidently, the doctor was also the translator.

“I’m Luiza.” The elder had said. “This will take just a moment.”

Kira needed stitches and the medical equipment available was less than par; it was a while before Luiza was willing to dismiss her as “patched up.” She was given pain meds for a mild concussion, along with an order not to sleep and not to “pick at it.”

Her trips to the infirmary reflected a change in her status: she was free to roam the lower deck of the ship, which encompassed only her cabin, the galley, the cargo hold and the infirmary. Her newfound freedom was unexpected, and she surmised it was Gabriel’s way of apologizing to her. She carried her screwdriver at all times, in case an opportunity to make a break arose.

She got a decent picture of his new operation. Far from the raiding of the old days, the tugboat served as the center of a drug network that saw keriaan harvested by the Ropen and shipped to settlements across Titan. In exchange, the natives received the fusion batteries, which Luiza explained they found desirous.

“Started learning the local language a bit after I got here,” she said while removing her stitches a few days later. “Always loved xenos. I also speak Low Canal Martian and a few words in Maxwell Venusian. Anyways, the captain saw a chance to open up trade with the Ropen, thought he might finally have found something of ours they want.”

“What’s that?” Kira asked, wincing as Luiza pulled the string out of her skin.

“Heat.”

“As in warmth?

“Yep. Think about it. This frozen mud ball hasn’t an atmosphere for fire. I mean, the air’s downright explosive when you get it indoors, but out there, they can’t get a flame going, they never even thought to try.”

“So how did he convince them it was something they wanted?”

“Took some work.” The doctor mused. “Had to demonstrate the concept first. Visited a few of the big shoals and put on demonstrations. It didn’t take them long to grasp the implications, to their credit. Better tools, better weapons, better jewelry. They melt the ice and refreeze it into new shapes. Can’t get enough of it.” She looked thoughtful. “Well, except the grey and black one. That fella doesn’t seem to like us much.”

Kira was curious. “It doesn’t?”

“Mhmm. A reactionary type, I guess. Or maybe just over-cautious. Thinks our stuff is dangerous. I’ve heard it arguing with its shoal leader a couple times.”

Kira remembered the glinting weapons the Ropen carried. “Maybe it has a point.”

Luiza shrugged. “Who knows? I do get the impression their wars are lot nastier now. But then, they’re smart, they’d have fire by now if their planet allowed it. The way I see it, we’re just helping them evolve.”

So the week went on. Kira spent most of her time alone. Apart from Luiza, Kira interacted little with the crew, most of them apparently having joined Gabriel’s operation after he came to Titan. It was evident they thought of him as Robin Hood and they his merry men, and he gave generously to churches, temples, hospitals and orphanages all around the Kraken Sea. There, at least, was an explanation for the disloyalty of the Sheriff to Taban. Apart from her limited investigations, the solitude gave her plenty of time to worry about Yasu and Tirta.

She spoke to Beth again only once. Her friend had finally lost her temper, but not in the way Kira would have hoped.

“You punched him?!”

“He gave me a concussion! You kidnapped me!” retorted Kira.

“Jancuk!” Beth cursed.

“You said you’d kill him,” Kira said.

“I didn’t expect you to start things!” The big woman sputtered. “And I don’t feel good keeping your family secret, either. Or the fact that you went along willingly with the police.”

“Beth, please. You can’t tell him.”

Her friend looked tired. “He’s not a monster. If you’d just explain to him—”

“I can’t.” Her hand went up to the healing scar on her head. “At least, not yet.”

Beth sighed. “I’ll try to smooth things over with him. Hang tight, okay? I told the rest of the crew to leave you alone, so, no more incidents.”

“No more incidents.” Kira nodded. “Thank you.”

Later that day Gabriel met again with the Titanians, and Kira thought she might take the distraction as a chance to escape. To her disappointment, she was kept under watch for the whole visit. When the Ropen finally left, Gabriel could be heard celebrating through the thin plastic walls. Warfare, it seemed, had broken out between two large shoals and his fusion batteries were in high demand. A king’s ransom of keriaan was brought below decks. The crew drank and sang late into the night.

Kira was woken by a knock on her door. Sleep had been elusive, as it had each night in the week since her arrival, and she rose sluggishly from her bunk to answer.

Standing there was one of Gabriel’s men, fresh from the outdoors and stinking of gas.

“The captain wants you on the deck.” He said implacably.

Kira nodded her drowsy assent and shut the door to get dressed. The screwdriver was in her pocket as her guard directed her to the wheelhouse. As she opened her locker, she carefully transferred it to a pouch on her exosuit, taking pains to block her actions from view. Suiting up, she scratched the caked mud absently from her faceplate, wondering what it was that Gabe wanted with her outside after dark. The mystery sharpened the ever-present anxiety in her gut.

Finally, she stepped out into the cruel Titanian night. The rain of daytime was snow when the sun set; enormous flakes impossible on a larger world flitted down around her. A blanket had already settled on the deck, and Gabriel was waiting in it with half a dozen of his gun-toting followers.

Kneeling before them was a man wearing a helmet decorated with white roses.

“What is it?” Kira asked, the night air chilly even with her suit’s thermals completely up.

Gabriel answered. “Don’t know him, sayang? He’s a Marshal, got a badge in his pocket. Beth pegged him inside our perimeter.”

Even without seeing his face, Kira could tell Taban was in a bad place. He was holding his leg painfully, and through his clenching fingers an emergency patch was evident.

“Had a… hunch.” He gasped. “Tracking keriaan shipments…” He must have guessed Kira hadn’t told Gabriel about the tracker. His voice faltered, and he shivered violently, as if the gunshot had shorted his thermals.

Gabriel knelt before him and held up his head. “Really? You’re the first, then. Funny enough, the Sheriff warned me about a Marshal who wanted to turn my girlfriend into a trap. He’s dead, supposedly.”

Taban groaned. “I have to wonder,” Gabriel said, standing, “if there might be a connection. Beth, tell me, when you brought Kira here, were you followed?”

Beth stood back, rifle slung over her shoulder. “No, sir.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hm.” Gabriel stood up and faced Kira. “What do you think, sayang?”

Kira shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe Beth just didn’t see him.”

Gabriel nodded.

“Could be, could be.” He said. “But I doubt it. Cops are wiley, you can’t trust them. Sheriff Darmadi claimed to have killed this man, yet here he is. Maybe she also failed to mention a tracking device planted on your suit?”

Even with his helmet on, Kira could feel his watchful eyes on her.

“Oh, you think?” She said, doing her best to sound surprised. “I feel like I would have noticed.”

“Sir.” Piped Beth guiltily. “...Kira isn’t telling you everything.

The captain looked from Kira to Beth, and back again. “What isn’t she saying?”

“I wanted to tell you earlier, but she asked me not to. She collaborated with this man. Willingly.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.” Beth went on. “She wanted the lawman to arrest you because-”

“Diam!” Kira shot. “Don’t!”

“-Because she has a family and she’s afraid you won’t understand.”

Gabriel didn’t move. He just looked at Kira and whispered, “A family?”

“Captain!” Came a voice from among the men. “Ropen!”

The night dark was thick and impenetrable, with only the beam of the wheelhouse light to illuminate the dancing snowfall. At the edge of the light, balanced at the nose of the boat, the diamond silhouette of one of the natives towered darkly over the huddled humans before it.

“The hell?” Gabriel sounded more annoyed than surprised. “Does the blo’on think we’re dealing now? Wake up Luiza.”

As he spoke, two more Titanians alighted on the deck, then a dozen more. The very first of them slid smoothly into the light, revealing its skin to be a blotchy grey and black. Weapons of glassy ice, hard as steel, glittered in the yellow light.

Everything was quiet. Men stirred uneasily as the Titanians swayed gently in the icy breeze, anchored to the deck by their long, slender arms. Gabriel backed toward the airlock, hand on his repeater.

Finally, a grey-and-black tentacle lashed.

Its barbed tip punched a hole in the faceplate of the man it struck. He screamed, collapsing in the slow motion of low gravity, as all at once the Ropen descended like a swarm of wasps, stinging and gouging with pointed arms. Guns fired wildly into the air, blowing holes in the thin Titanians, but it only made the aliens more belligerent. Men were pierced, their suits ripped asunder, their bodies flung into the frigid sea.

“Get inside!” Gabriel shouted. Kira saw he had, in the confusion, managed to down the commanding Ropen, and now was dragging it by one of its feebly writhing limbs. Bethany plowed toward the door like a juggernaut, clearing the way, with Gabriel and Kira following after.

Gabriel’s prisoner was too long to fit in the airlock chamber, so he forced it in, bending its light body with a snapping sound. Inside the wheelhouse, the alien flopped onto the floor, leaking clear, watery blood.

“Cuk!” Gabriel hissed. The Ropen moaned, its voice higher in the thinner air of the cabin. It’s skin sizzled and popped as it lay, the methane that made it up vaporizing into gas. With a whine, the hostage died.

The Titanians, seeing their general taken, scratched and battered at The Siren, their growling bellows resounding in a deafening cacophony. The viewport was an angry tangle of ribbons and barbs.

“Terkutuklah engkau semua.” Gabriel said, visibly shaken. “Beth, go below and tell everybody what’s going on. Get them suited up and ready to fight.”

“Yes, Captain.” Bethany replied, turning and stomping down the ladder that led to the lower decks.

The tugboat creaked as the Titanian throng surged against its side, setting it rocking. Kira braced herself against a bulkhead as the wheelhouse tipped sideways, throwing Gabriel from his feet. One of the battery crates toppled with a crash, sending silver cylinders rolling across the floor.

Kira took in the spilled batteries, the disintegrating Ropen carcass on the floor, and her stumbling captor. She thought, maybe, she saw a chance.

She shuffled carefully as the Ropen rocked the vessel again, their low banshee wails mingling with the beating of their arms as Gabriel righted himself.

“Gabe!” Kira called, grabbing his face and turning it towards hers. “Gabe, I need you!”

“Sinting lu!” Her ex-lover responded, knocking her away. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I love you!” Kira insisted above the din. “You were right! I always needed you, I was just confused!”

“Omong Kosong. You have a ‘family’.”

“I can explain.” Kira replied, drawing him in.

Gabriel pushed her back again, leveling his pistol at her. “Don’t touch me, Asu.” He spat. “I have enough to worry about right now.”

Kira placed her hand on his gun and lowered it calmly, discreetly feeling for the safety. “I have something to confess.” She said, putting her arm around his waist. “But I’m so scared, sayang.”

“Confess?” Gabriel growled as she flipped the switch on the side of his gun. The clamor outside was deafening as the Ropen dug into the hull with their blades.

“It’s something I have to show you,” Kira shouted, reaching slowly into her suit pocket.

“Get off me-”

Gabriel’s order was cut short as Kira plunged the screwdriver into his stomach. His indigo exosuit was tough, but she pushed hard, holding the tool in her good arm and leaning into the blow. He gave a quick gasp and threw her off, staring down at the embedded handle with bewilderment.

Kira stooped down quickly, scooping up one of the loose batteries. When she looked up, Gabriel had his gun trained on her.

Nothing happened.

He examined the weapon with consternation, looking it over and seeing the engaged safety. He primed the gun to fire once more.

With the unearthly moan of a score of alien voices, The Siren tossed again, threatening to tip the ship onto its side. Kira slid back across the floor slick with alien innards, and Gabriel came down on top of her.

Gabriel jammed his elbow into her throat. As he brought his pistol to bear, Kira swung at it with the battery.

The boat rocked again and they were separated, Gabriel’s repeater skittering away as they fell to the floor. She crawled desperately toward the airlock as he scampered after his gun, both of them coated in the evaporating Titanian remains.

There was a stomp of boots climbing the ladder as Kira pulled herself into the airlock. Beth, accompanied by a crowd of angry thugs, exclaimed suddenly.

“Gabe! Don’t shoot!” She cried, voice muffled by the sealing airlock door. “What the hell is going on?”

“I wasn’t going to.” Gabriel said, smooth and sad. “Kira’s gone mad! She stabbed me, and now she’s trying to get outside with those things!”

As if to support his point, there was a rattle like a mighty hailstorm as dozens of alien blades harangued the hard plastic hull.

“He’s lying!” Kira called through the airlock door, her voice shifting in pitch as the breathable air was displaced by the heavier Titanian atmosphere.

“Kira,” Beth called. “Don’t go out there. Those Ropen will kill you.”

“So will he.” Kira answered.

“That’s crazy.”

“Please, Beth, let me go. My family needs me.”

“Override the door.” Gabriel ordered. “She’s lost it.”

The airlock door popped open as the automatic seal was broken. Kira grabbed the handle, holding it in place with all her strength.

“Beth, get it open.”

The fingers of Bethany’s worn gauntlets appeared around the door’s edge, and she began to pull, Kira pushing against her. It slid torturously aside, Kira fighting for every inch of the widening gap.

“Kira! This is crazy!” Shouted Beth.

“He’s crazy!” Kira groaned, putting her weight into the struggle, trembling with the effort. “I don’t know why you won’t see it!”

“Lets talk about it,” The big woman said. “Don’t go out there!”

“Jack, Sabar,” said Gabriel, determined, “help her get the megancuk door open.”

Summoning the last of her tenacity, she released her hold on the door and swung the battery hard into her friend’s fingers with both arms. There was a resounding crack as the cap gave way and Bethany jerked her hands back with yelp.

Kira frantically forced the door shut and pried the cap free, unleashing a flurry of sparks. She dropped the device to the ground as the airlock completed its cycle.

“Ngentot lu bajingan tolol!” Gabriel raged. “You blo’on! You want to die?”

“Sorry, Beth.” Kira said as the exterior airlock opened. She didn’t hear her friend’s response as she leapt out onto the deck and shut the door behind her.

Some distance in the air, the great dark shadow of the Titanian mob was gathering speed for another run at tipping the boat. Kira searched frantically through the scattered bodies, seeking one with white roses on its helmet.

“Mrs. Ota!” A voice called feebly. “Get down!” There was the marshal, lying a few yards away. His suit was scratched but he wasn’t obviously hurt, apart from the wound Beth had given him.

“Can you move?” She called, picking her way hastily toward him. She was keenly aware that the airlock was cycling once more, this time to admit Gabriel and his men. “We gotta jump ship!”

“The Ropen!”

A squirming cloud descended on Kira, battering her with ice and lifting her bodily into the air. She felt a sting as a frozen point punctured her suit, and she flailed wildly, dislodging the blade in her effort to resist the Titanians.

She was freed suddenly by a powerful yank on her foot. Her exosuit sealed her wound as Taban gripped her heel, pulling her hurriedly toward the edge of the boat with muscles hewn in Earth’s mighty gravity well.

In the wheelhouse, Gabriel threw the interior airlock open. The sparking battery within was exposed to the confined air of the cabin, now a veritable soup of oxygen and methane gas.

The tubgoat erupted in a stupendous fireball Kira and Taban hit the surface of the Kraken.

KIRA’S HOMESTEAD DIDN’T appear to have fallen apart in her absence, which was a relief, but she’d need to be sure. Each of the life support and greenhouse systems would need to be thoroughly inspected before she was satisfied.

Tirta had hugged her, crying, and then Yasu had privately done the same. He promised to prepare a great meal to celebrate, with the Marshal invited - although the lawman had gratefully declined. The speedboat they had commandeered had limited medical supplies, and he needed to rest for a while.

“As I promised,” he said as Kira was seeing him off, “we won’t bother you again. And you’re clear to settle somewhere else if you’d like. The tickets are waiting for you. First class.”

Kira smiled, thanked him and watched him go. She flexed her right hand, barely noticing the stiffness—for the first time in years, the System was open to her. She looked up at the ever present clouds, letting the rain splatter against her faceplate. Somewhere beyond, they would make a new home. Somewhere warm. Maybe Venus.

About the Author

Dylan T. Jeninga is an enthusiast of the fantastic yet (perhaps marginally) credible, and it was this interest that drew him to science fiction when he was a young boy, and more recently to the clasic tales of our old Solar System as it ought to have been. Born near the Wisconsin/Illinois border on the last day of 1993, he now lives in Chicago with his wife (who, the reader may be sure, has a hand in shaping everything he creates). He works as an improvisational actor/hopefully temporary shop clerk, and he writes everythig from realistic adventures among the planets to sojourns to the distant stars.

The Tree and the Wind

by Tom Jolly

IAIN MCAFFEY WRESTLED against the wind, straining to pull the door shut to MacKinley’s Pub. The door produced a rising whistle as the gap closed, as though being choked to death, and the thick wooden frame shuddered as he finally won the battle. “Whew!” he gasped, pushing back his hood and trying to straighten his mop of red hair with hooked fingers while looking around for Will and Robert. He caught their eyes through the Thursday-night crowd and they raised their pint glasses to him. He shucked off his wet long coat and hung it on a hook near the door with a dozen others, then navigated through the wooden pillars and noisy patrons to their table. A pint of beer sat alone, waiting for his hand to raise it.

“Bless the both of you!” Iain cried. “Scoot over, will you?” He slid in next to Will.

“Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. I know how you like those foo-foo beers,” Will said dryly.

“And it’s warm by now,” added Robert. “You were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago. Overtime at the poetry factory?”

“When the muse calls, you have to listen,” Iain said. “Anyway, it was just traffic, I haven’t written a thing in a week. The wind is insane out there. Add that to a bit of drizzle, and you know how folks drive in Boston. Besides…warm beer…just like being back in dear Olde England, right?” Iain looked up and caught the furtive gaze of a tall, gaunt figure at the bar. The strange man’s hair was a tangled mass of black waves churning on the ocean, as though he’d absorbed the storm from outside and carried it inside with him. When Iain stared back, the man turned away to nurse his stout.

Iain lowered his voice. “Do either of you know that crazy looking fellow in the black mac at the bar? Looks homeless?”

Will and Robert glanced over. “I think I’ve seen him on the street around here a few times,” Robert said. “Probably bummed the beer he’s got.”

The strange man picked up his beer and moved away across the bar.

“Must have heard you,” Iain said.

“Against this background noise? I don’t think so,” Robert said. It was true; the jukebox was playing some old folk tune from The Corries, and there were twenty other people chatting with raised voices around them, all striving to be heard above all the other racket. The cold wind outside whistled through the cracks in the door and windows, making the fake-log gas fire dance in the hearth.

Iain shuddered. “Too bad you couldn’t get a table closer to the fire.”

“Yeah, this weather is mad. One of my friends lost some roof tiles. Had a roofer out to fix it who nearly got blown off; he caught the rain gutter on his way down. Got some new tiles on, but now he needs a new rain gutter,” Robert said.

“And here we moved away from the Isles so we wouldn’t have to put up with the dismal weather,” Will said.

“I thought it was for your tenure-track at Harvard,” Robert replied.

“Maybe that helped,” Will admitted. “I’m glad I’m living in a stone house, though. It’ll hold up just fine to the bloody nor’easter!”

The three were laughing when a dark apparition loomed up next to their table, casting an obscuring shadow across them, sloshing a bit of black stout onto the wooden planks of the table. “Dinnae doubt the power of a nor’easter, lads,” the man said in a voice like chains dragged across a dock. “Idle boasts such as yours have called its power down on stronger men than ye, and they suffered its wrath.”

The strange man stood tall and stared down at them, chilling them into silence, a silence that enveloped even the tables around them. His morose aura hung over them like a heavy mantle, sucking the life out of their conversation.

Robert coughed into his hand once, averting his eyes from the gaunt apparition, and looked to Will and Iain. “O…kay. So, how was work today, guys?” he asked.

Before either of them could reply, the man spoke again, “Lest ye doubt, there’s the tale of the Tree and the Wind. Some might speak of it as a child’s tale, some as a cautionary tale. For me, it’s just history. Listen and learn, laddies.” He had a Scottish accent, or at least a fairly good imitation of it from an American’s viewpoint.

“You aren’t going away, are you?” Robert asked.

The Scotsman glared at Robert and shook his head, though it was unclear whether it implied pity or was an answer to his question.

“Arthur McCready was a drunk and a braggart,” the Scotsman started out low, rolling the sentence up into a breaking wave. “He lived in a wee fishing village on the coast of Maine, even before it deserved to have a name. There was a pub, like this one, but smaller, quieter, and draftier.”

“So, not like this one at all, then,” Robert interjected.

“I want to hear this, Robert,” said Iain. “Shush.”

“Arthur was drunk and loud,” continued the Scotsman. Robert opened his mouth again, but closed it with a snap when Iain glared at him. The Scotsman winked at Robert. “Drunk and loud!” he shouted over the voices at nearby tables. With a flamboyant wave of one hand, he took a giant swig of beer with the other and slammed the pint glass down on the table, sloshing more of the dark fluid across the warped boards, flooding the channels of decades-old initials scratched into the surface. “And Arthur McCready was angry with the storms,” he continued. “The wild swells of the rolling waves kept him from the ocean, and his livelihood was fishing. So there he sat in the pub, drinking away his meager profits from the last outing, getting angrier by the second. And finally, he called out for any to hear, ‘The wind be damned! At least I live in a house of such strong oak that no mere wind could bend its mighty wood! No mere storm can touch me within me own dwellin’!’ boasted he.

“Nary a sound came from the rest of the fishermen around him. Indeed, it was the silence of fear. The irate swirl of wind and dust gusting around their feet told them; the Nor’easter had heard. The Wind knew of his boast.” The stranger finished off his own pint as if putting a period on a sentence, then stared into the remaining foam as though the story had been drunk away. “Story-tellin’ does make a man thairsty,” he said.

A substantial part of the pub was listening to his stentorian delivery, enthralled by his voice, and didn’t really have a choice anyway, but it took only moments for a new stout to appear in his hand. He took a swig and smacked his lips. “Ah, the nectar of the Gods! And speaking of the Gods, the other patrons of that doomed pub quaffed the dregs of their pints, threw on their coats and stumbled through the gathering tempest outside to batten down the hatches, such as they could, on their boats and their houses. Having heard Arthur McCready’s ill-considered boast and curse against the Gods, they knew they would all suffer.” He paused, staring out a window as at some long past memory as a thin sheet of rain driven by a light gust painted the glass. He took a breath, guzzled some more beer, and continued.

“With both a curse and a boast rolled up into McCready’s declaration, the Wind was fiercely angered. While Arthur sat alone in the pub and glared defiantly at the weather outside through the warped windows, the Wind gathered force across the waters. When the breath was sucked out of the fire in the hearth, darkening the room with a smoky haze, he knew it was time to go, and he knew he’d made a mistake.

“He struggled up the muddy road, battered about by the Wind, falling so often that his legs and arms were a maze of scratches and gouges from the rough stones of the road and the gorse along his path. The Wind kept building, however, buffeting him mercilessly and pummeling him with hail as he fought his way home.

“Home! He slogged up the path to the highest hill, taking shelter under an enormous oak tree, where he stopped and shook his fist in defiance at the terrifying storm pounding the coast.

“In the nameless town below, the angry Wind tore the fishing boats from their moorings and cast them like wee toys against the docks and into the houses of the fishermen. The planks of wood spun about like straw, the mortared stones like sand, the bundled thatch like a million flying brooms sweeping the sky, and all were cast onto the low hills along with the crushed bodies of the fishermen and their wives and bairns. The Wind sucked energy from the white foam of the cresting waves, and drew the bitter cold from the arctic air so the glaciers melted, and even from the heartless ice of black space, and scoured that rocky beach clean of buildings, life and bones, purged of braggarts and boasters who might claim that they stood against the monster’s powerful and icy breath and lived to talk about it. ‘Liars!’ the Wind shouted. ‘Ye spinners of tall tails, see what the breath of a god can truly do!’”

The Scotsman swung his arms wide and took a deep breath as though to continue his sermon on the mighty Wind. He caught the eye of every man at the table and held them still, then leaned slowly forward. “M’empty again,” he said, tapping his glass with a soft tink. Someone took his pint glass away and replaced it with a full one. He lifted it, took a long draught, and set it down carefully, staring thoughtfully into its dark froth.

“And Arthur McCready died then?” Will asked.

The Scotsman looked up at Will and shook his head, his knotted, unkempt hair falling onto his creased forehead, shadowing his dark eyes. “Nae, lad. Arthur McCready knew what the Nor’easter could do. And the tree under which he took shelter was no ordinary oak tree, but a thousand-year old gnarled pillar twenty feet wide at the base with enough cracks and crevices amongst its roots to house all the animals of the Ark, and acorns so big they could kill a careless man walking in its shade when they fell. This is the oaken home he spoke of in his boast, not the flimsy rotten boards of the little shack he kept in the fisherman’s village. This was his true home, where he lived alone, what the Celts called Crann Bethadh, what the Americans just call the Tree of Life. Between two roots of this titan he’d built a door with cast iron bands holding the planks together, and inside this room was a dirt floor and a bed, and such whatnots as he needed to survive.”

“A toilet?” Robert interjected.

The Scotsman glared at Robert with huge, dark, and slightly mad eyes. Robert cleared his throat timidly and sipped his ale, looking anywhere but at the Scotsman.

“The Wind found him, of course,” the Scotsman continued. “His was the only heart left abeat on the coast, and the Nor’easter could sense the fearful pounding of it in the air, even from miles away.” He took another drink from his beer, a momentary lull in the storm of the story. The adjacent tables had become quiet, waiting for the next gust from the Scotsman. He looked around slowly and continued, “Cold, dusty wisps of air swirled around his ankles in his hidey-hole, slipped out through the cracks of the thick oak door, and found their way back to their master, the Nor’easter, who began to gather even greater forces than before. And that might have been the end of McCready, were it not for the Tree. For ye see, a tree kinnae live a thousand years without acquirin’ a will of its own. And it would be damned before it bent to the Wind. Any wind.”

On cue, the thick door of the pub rattled loudly, causing everyone within hearing distance of the tall tale to jump or cry out. The Scotsman grinned insanely, then continued.

“The Wind probed and pushed at the massive door wedged between the roots, and after all, it was just a door, so the Wind took a deep breath laced with balls of ice the size of your head and pounded against the thick oak board and the steel bands. But the very act of attacking the base of the Tree caused a million leaves to fall before the door, creating a thick mat protecting it; flexing, compressing and bending with every blow.

“The Wind fell back and planned. Clearly the oak was not so ready to give up its tiny meaty prize. The Wind vowed to topple the mighty Tree, tearing the roots out of the ground to expose Arthur McCready. Once again it harnessed its vast resources from around the globe, slamming into the Tree with all its might! But the Tree bent just enough that the winds arced across it as on an eagle’s wing, avoiding the brunt of the turbulent attack. The roots clutched the ground like a vice, digging down so far that it suckled on the molten lava miles below and drew iron into its roots. The Wind then brought lightning to bear upon the Tree, but there was so much iron within its limbs by then that the lightning sputtered and failed even as it struck.”

“Sensing its failure here, too, the Wind looked around for new resources to aid it in its battle, and found a peat bog nearby. Once more it gathered its powerful breath, drawing clouds within itself, and struck down at the bog with a thousand bolts of lightning, shaking the countryside. The bog was set afire, and the next blast of Wind tore up vast sheets of the tinder-like bog and threw the pyric pieces of peat at the Tree. But in its indiscriminate effort to tear up the flaming bog, it also threw hundreds of corpses at the Tree, for this is where the village had buried their dead for centuries. The Tree of Life being what it is brought those corpses back to life to aid it, and tasked them with crawling through its twisted limbs and patting out the fires where they had taken hold. When the fires were tamed, the undead lost their raison d’etre and fell to the ground, where their peaty essence, like an undead Scotch, was absorbed by the tangle of roots, bringing even further strength to the Tree.”

The Scotsman stopped to take another long drink. The entire bar was worshipfully quiet except for a few sipping sounds. Iain cleared his throat as though to speak and the Scotsman, still drinking, held up one finger and waggled it at him. Then he put his glass down.

“So the Wind was pissed,” he continued. “Not British pissed, but American pissed, you understand. Angrier than a hornet’s nest in a butter churn! It brought to bear its mightiest form, the hurricane, and spent a whole day off the coast, drinking up a good part of the ocean to increase its bulk. Then it dragged this massive destructive vortex, this dark column of doom, and dropped it squarely on the giant oak. This swirling maelstrom of death tore at the limbs of the oak, but the limbs of the oak were so gnarled and twisted that the Wind lost its way as it blew through the dark passages of its branches, slamming into itself and spending its own strength uselessly. The leaves on the Tree were so plentiful that when they were stripped from the branches, they clogged the storm with their weight. When all was said and done, the storm was no more than a groundhog’s sneeze crawling across the landscape, but this had been a storm like none other that Maine had ever seen. And though the Wind had failed to destroy the hiding braggart, Arthur McCready, or the oaken home he’d boasted about, it had, by a fortuitous accident, managed to drop a whale on his front door. He could not leave his rabbit hole.”

The Scotsman shrugged widely and drank again. Robert was a little surprised that the man could still speak coherently. The Scotsman put his beer down and continued.

“The Tree, o’ course, bein’ the Tree ‘o Life, bore no ill will to the Wind, or to Arthur for braggin’ about his tiny crook in its roots. It made a deal with Arthur to show him a path through its roots using a will-o’-th’-wisp to guide him, avoiding the unfortunate and confused whale, if he would spend his life caring for the young ones, for during the storm the giant oak had dropped a hundred acorns the size of boulders, and each one of these contained the seed of a human to replace the ones destroyed in the village, some full grown, some wee bairns, just as they were when they passed. But the acorns would have to be buried, and the people would grow out of the ground, and Arthur was tasked with tending to them until they could be snipped off at the root and brought back into town to take up where each left off.

“The Wind, humbled somewhat by the Tree, allowed Arthur to live, as Arthur’s penance under the Tree’s close scrutiny was much longer and more painful than the mere ripping of limb from limb would have been, and the Wind, though deprived of that small satisfaction, felt it was fair.

“Arthur was glad to take to the task presented to him, and he rebuilt the ramshackle shelters, sheds, and hovels from the tons of driftwood and debris blanketing the countryside. He built boats and wove nets and made fishing poles and harvested more villagers from the field around the tree every week, pulling weeds from between their toes as necessary and shouting away the crows that tended to show excessive interest in the meaty crop.

“Part of his penance for his ill-thought boast was that he had to tell his tale to anyone who came through the town and stopped at the wee tavern there. And he became fairly skilled at it.

“Arthur McCready, though he was working ten times as hard as he used to, never complained and was never happier. He lived a long, long life, a gift and a curse from the Tree. Eventually, as all small villages fare, the young moved away and the elderly passed until there was nary a soul to speak to, and nawt but tall grass and ruins to mark the borders of the village. But as far as anyone knows, he’s still a-wanderin’ and tellin’ his tale.”

The Scotsman swirled the last dregs of his stout in the bottom of his glass, tilted it up and downed it. Though clearly the story had come to a close, the entire pub remained hushed. People hesitantly restarted forgotten conversations. The Scotsman put his glass down on the table, placed both palms flat on the table, and leaned forward. The pool of beer he’d sloshed onto the table seemed to disappear into his splayed fingers. Softly, he said, “And that’s why ye doon’t go braggin’ aboot sech things. Ye never ken who or what might be listenin’.”

He stood up straight, wrapped his long mac about him, and headed for the door. The heavy door seemed to blow open just as he approached it and a gust of wind barged in, taking all the coats off the hooks at the entry and flinging them haphazardly about the room. The Scotsman strode out into the storm and the door slammed shut behind him.

They stared at the closed door, the whistling wind still slipping through the cracks around the edges.

“Interesting story,” Will finally said, breaking the heavy silence. “Complete hogwash, of course, but well delivered.” He lifted his beer to take a sip and found that his glass was empty. Looking around, he saw that all their pint glasses were empty.

Robert leaned forward, peering at a small spot on the table. “What’s that?” he asked softly.

Iain squinted at the small green spot. “I think it’s a leaf. Growing out of the table.”

“I mean, my house is stone,” Will continued. “Stone! What kind of storm could take out a stone house. Stupid. You lads ready for another round?”

A sheet of rain slapped the side of the pub, making the patrons near the window shift in their seats uneasily.

Iain stood up. “Y’know, I think I might call it early tonight. Busy day tomorrow, and all. Get home, batten down the hatches. That’s a nasty storm brewing out there.” He pulled out his phone and called for a ride. “You boys enjoy.”

Robert shifted his gaze from the leaf to the door and back again. “Yeah, I’m thinking the same. Call it a night.” He stood up, pulling his coat from the back of his seat. He tossed some money on the table. “Enjoy your beer.”

“You boys going to let a little puff of wind sort you out? Or did the bedtime story scare you?” Will said. His taunt was swallowed by a gust of wind when someone opened the front door. He shook his head, but watched as several other patrons headed for the door with Iain and Robert. They didn’t turn around.

“It’s just wind!” he shouted at them, but they didn’t hear.

The door closed. Will glared stubbornly at it, then angrily plucked the tiny leaf from the center of the table and threw it on the floor. He stood to get another beer while the pub’s windows rattled in their frames like old bones, and the rain fell like scattered acorns.

About the Author

Tom Jolly is a retired astronautical/electrical engineer who now spends his time writing SF and fantasy, designing board games, and creating obnoxious puzzles. His stories have appeared in Analog SF, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction, New Myths, and his recent story collection, “Damn the Asteroids, Full Speed Ahead!” (at Amazon). He lives in Santa Maria, California, with his wife Penny in a place where mountain lions and black bears still visit, especially if you own any chickens. You can discover more of his stories at www.silcom.com/~tomjolly/tomjolly2.htm. 

Takeout

Arnaldo Lopez Jr.

I’M HARVEY HICKMAN and I’ve got the most dangerous job in America… I’m the pizza delivery guy.

Oh, I know, I know. Some people argue that the Chinese food delivery guys have it just as bad, but c’mon, the guys that deliver your Chinese food travel in gangs that ride around in hopped-up Japanese crotch rockets and they carry fully automatic weapons (even though they’re still illegal). Maybe mailmen, uh, mailpeople did have it tough for a while, but the post office was going bankrupt anyway and once everyone went strictly email, well that was the end of that—so no, it’s me alright. And that’s why the chicks love me and all the guys hate me, ‘cause they all wanna be me (I mean the guys, not the girls).

It all started when the Rift happened. BTR (Before The Rift), I was just a skinny loser with perennial acne, a crappy car, and an even crappier job—pizza delivery guy. I mean, I couldn’t get laid if I were an egg! Even tips from my customers were rare. I’d be standing in someones doorway wearing that stupid “Pizza Pete’s” paper hat on my head, my hand held out for some sort of gratuity, and more often than not I’d get the door slammed in my face. What really burned me was hearing them all laughing at me from the other side of those doors. Now, not only do I get big tips, but there are plenty of times when a beautiful woman will show up at the door and pull me inside for a little “afternoon delight.” Ah yeah, life sure is sweet now… but hey, don’t get me wrong—it’s still dangerous as hell. Literally.

I don’t exactly know what happened, maybe nobody does, but the word on the street is that about a year ago some scientists working on a sort of secret collider project on a little island in the East River accidentally tore open a hole in the so-called fabric of time and space. Well, whatever it is they did, it turned into a real mess… or as an army colonel once spit into the T.V. cameras during an interview, “A real clusterfuck!”

You see, that tear in space or whatever—what we now call the Rift—allowed all kinds of creatures from some other dimension (or whatever!) to enter our world and cause all kinds of trouble. At first it was just Manhattan, but soon after it became the tri-state area, and then the whole country! All kinds of weird animals and monsters were soon roaming through every neighborhood, attacking and eating people, pets—anything they could catch. There were hundreds, heck, thousands of them—all different kinds, but they all had two things in common: they were all mean and they were all hungry.

The cops put up a good fight at first, but it was just too big a job. It took the military to get things under control, but as the weeks and months wore on it became clear that these creatures (Rift Dwellers we call ‘em) weren’t going anywhere—they were the new reality. But folks still had to make a living, and the president even got on T.V. and told everyone to continue with their lives and go back to work. A lot of people did just that, and a lot of ‘em got killed. So then it became legal for everyone to carry a gun, and so the majority of folks formed armed carpools and were able to get back to work, but by then the damage to what they call the National Psyche had been done. Plenty of people were still really afraid to go out, with hundreds of thousands of folks stuck in their homes or offices—too afraid to get out and work, shop, or get something to eat without being eaten themselves. People were starving, and law enforcement and the military were stretched too thin to be everywhere at once.

That’s when guys like me became the new Rock & Roll gods!

Another Friday and I’m sitting in the back room at Pizza Pete’s’ with my feet up and my 3-D glasses on—watching a movie between gigs. And there will be another gig soon, my eighth of the day so far since Fridays are our busiest days.

“YO HARV,” CAME Joey’s voice from out front. “Have another delivery for you—lock and load, babe!” That’s Joey Riccio, he owns Pizza Pete’s. I never actually met Pizza Pete, in fact I don’t know if there ever was a Pizza Pete.

I walk out into the dining area, past the heat of the ovens, and nod hello to the regulars. The regulars are actually three guys and two women that were here when the Rift happened and have been too scared to leave since. They look a little bedraggled now; their eyes have dark circles under ‘em and their hair’s a little dull and shaggy. Marla, that’s one of the women, was pretty once and she used to smile a lot. Now she still smiles a lot, but in that weird kinda way that tells you she’s close to losing it. I’ve offered to escort them home plenty of times (especially Marla), but they’ve always been too scared to leave.

“You got two cheese pies, same address, right across from the park. You also got a pepperoni pie, buffalo wings, and a couple of two-liter sodas mid-town,” Joey said, taping invoices with the addresses on them onto the boxes.

I take the boxes and wings, and slip them into the wide vinyl sleeve that’ll help keep them nice and hot. Next I grab the sodas and drop them into my backpack. Lastly, I check my weapons. My main arsenal consists of a Mossberg semi-automatic sawed-off shotgun, a .38 Colt Diamondback Revolver with the heat-dispersal vents along the top of the barrel, a two-shot .22 Magnum Derringer, and a really, really big Bowie knife.

I prime the shotgun, sling the pack onto my back, grab the vinyl case with the pizzas and wings in it, and back out of the door.

At first the bright blue sky of outside dazzles me, but my eyes adjust quickly enough and I make it to my car without incident. I put the pizzas and sodas on the passenger seat, and turn in time to see a Bagger and two Hump-Lizards heading my way. A Bagger looks exactly like a plastic supermarket shopping bag, and it floats in the air or scoots along the ground just like those bags do when a breeze gets a hold of ‘em. But then you notice that there ain’t no breeze and by then it may be too late—the Bagger whips itself over your head and suffocates you. Then it slowly starts to digest you, but eventually other R.D.’s (Rift Dwellers) find your fresh corpse and help themselves to the feast. Hump-Lizards are Mastiff-sized lizards with humped backs that ooze acid, 3-inch claws, and 6-inch fangs.

I considered blasting them but changed my mind, jumped in my car, and took off instead. I mean, c’mon, I had to get those pizzas delivered in 30 minutes or less!

Speaking of my car, I got rid of the Yaris and now I drive a black, armored, super-charged, 2013 Chevy Camaro with bullet-proof windows and tires. This baby’s basically a tank that can do 240 M.P.H. on a straightaway, and shatter windows for a block when I crank the system up and blast music from the six titanium-reinforced exterior speakers. Holla!

I delivered the first pizzas to an address on East 71st Street and Fifth Avenue with virtually no problem—I just wound up running over a couple of love-sick vampires, dodging some real persistant Baggers, and blasting a Raticorn (kind of a giant rat with tusks and a horn) that came running out of Central Park and right at me.

The second delivery was a little more eventful. It was in the “Lipstick” building on 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue. A few office workers got stuck there when the Rift happened and just never went home. There’re a lot of places like that all over—people saw their friends, family, even heavily-armed military guys get torn apart right in front of their eyes and it freaked them out. They don’t want to end up some R.D.’s meal and figure it’s a whole lot safer to stay put… and they’re right.

While I’m getting the pizza out of the car I hear a roar off to my right and it’s getting closer—I already know what’s coming and I brace myself. They come zooming around the corner in tight formation, the sun gleaming and glinting off their helmets and Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycles. A Chinese food delivery gang and, wouldn’t you know it, they’re making a delivery at the same address I am. They stop right behind my car and drop onto their kickstands in unison; like they’ve been rehearsing it for years. I finger the safety off my shotgun.

The leader of the gang saunters over to where I’m standing, checks the skies and removes her helmet—shaking free her long, glossy black hair. Oh shit, it’s Lisa Lim; so that means that this gang is the Sunny Garden crew… a very tough bunch.

“How ya doing Harvey,” She says, putting one hand on her hip and resting the other on the snub-nosed Heckler & Koch fully automatic rifle slung over her shoulder on a Hello Kitty strap. “What are you doing in Sunny Garden territory?”

I sigh and repeat what I’ve told her a bunch of other times, “It’s only Sunny Garden territory as far as Chinese food is concerned—I deliver pizzas.”

She laughs and I can hear the rest of her all-female gang laugh under their helmets. I think I already mentioned how I don’t like being laughed at.

“If I say it’s Sunny Garden territory Harv,” Lisa says. “Then I’m talking about any and all food; and that includes your lousy pizza!”

More laughter. Then her voice and attitude get much more serious. “But tell you what, we’re going to do you a favor and deliver your stale pizza for you… isn’t that nice of us Harv?”

While she’s talking I’m trying to figure a way out of this mess. I check my watch—I only have 7 minutes to go before the customer gets a free pizza and it comes out of my pay. I’m sweating. I figure I can take Lisa and maybe two of her crew with the shotgun, but then they’d just chop me to bits with those automatic weapons of theirs. Then, as if she were reading my mind:

“Don’t try anything stupid Harv,” Lisa says as she swings her rifle in my direction. I notice that the rest of her gang does the same. In unison again. Like synchronized swimming. Cute.

“JUST GIVE US the pizza, whatever you have in the backpack, your weapons, and your wallet. If you’re real nice and quick about it, we might let you keep your car.” There’s more laughing, so I don’t feel too bad about what happens next. Very slowly and deliberately I pull my knife out. I check my watch—4 minutes to go.

Lisa sees me slide the 12-inch blade from its leather sheath and her eyes go wide in surprise. I hear the loud click as she snaps the safety off her rifle.

“That was a very stupid thing to do Harvey,” Lisa says menacingly as she levels her rifle at me.

I take a deep breath and use it to yell one word as loud as I can, “Incoming!!!” I point above and behind them, and luckily a few of them do turn to look. It’s their yelps of fear and surprise that makes them all turn and look. That’s when they see the Baggers, hundreds of them, coming right at us.

Lisa’s gang forgets all about me as they point their weapons at the fast-approaching R.D.’s and begin firing. The noise is incredible! I haven’t heard a racket like that since the early days of the Rift. Lisa’s firing her weapon too, and to their credit, the Sunny Garden crew shred dozens of the Baggers – but there are plenty of the little bastards to go around. Lisa’s gang really is doing a good job of fending off the attacking Baggers; but then they’re all wearing helmets. In fact, the only ones not wearing helmets are…

Lisa stops firing her rifle at the Baggers long enough to once again turn it towards me, “Saved some for you Harv,” she yells over the clatter of her gang’s guns.

I figure I’m done for and mouth some quick prayers—thankful that at least I’d finally gotten laid (quite a few times actually!) before I died.

Suddenly a Bagger swoops down and covers Lisa’s head, immediately wrapping its translucent appendages around her neck and pressing itself tightly against her face to deprive her of oxygen.

LISA DROPS HER gun and opens her mouth to scream, or maybe take a gulp of air; I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t succeed at either. She starts pulling and clawing at the Bagger, but it’s fastened itself onto her pretty tightly; and its skin is tougher than it looks. I check my watch: two minutes.

I grab my pizza bag again and start for the building when I spot a shopping bag bulging with Chinese food hanging from Lisa’s motorcycle, and I make a decision. I take my knife, slice through the elastic cord holding the food, and grab the bag before it hits the ground. I spin on the ball of my foot, knife flashing, and I cut open the Bagger on Lisa’s face, saving her life but opening up a gash on her pretty face that’s gonna leave a nasty scar. I duck under and slice apart a Bagger that was coming for me and sprint for the building; with at least twenty of those Bagger bastards right behind me.

I make it inside, leave the Baggers outside, and grab the elevator to the third floor. As soon as the doors open I run to suite 3404, my sneakers squeaking as I skid to a stop in front of the doors and press the buzzer. The door opens and a gorgeous brunette with soft gray eyes and a beautiful smile is standing there. She’s wearing a blazer that matches the color of her eyes; part of what was once a chic business suit. I check my watch: 19 seconds to spare.

“Well, another minute and I would have gotten a free pizza,” she says with that great smile.

“Nineteen seconds,” I say with a smile of my own. We exchange food for cash, and I remark, “That’s a lot of food for just one person…”

“Yes it is,” she says with another smile as she opens the door wider and steps aside.

I start to step inside when I notice that there are already two other guys in the room. The older guy, in shirt sleeves and tie, salutes me with a glass he’s holding; the clear liquid inside sloshing around.

As soon as realize my mistake I quickly step back out of the room. What I thought was an invitation was just her showing me she already had company. Now, I just stand there feeling idiotic and I can sense the color rising in my face. The woman in the gray blazer notices of course and says, “Those are my neighbors from suites 3406 and 3409… they’re lawyers.” She whispers the last two words as if she’s imparting some secret knowledge to me in confidence.

“We were just going to eat and watch the news, see if anything’s changed. You’re, uh, welcome to join us,” she hurriedly adds at the end.

I hear the faint rat-a-tat of gunfire from outside; Lisa’s gang still doing battle with the Baggers. Then I remember the Chinese food I’m carrying.

“I, uh, gotta deliver this,” I stammer as I hold up the torn shopping bag with the Chinese food inside. Something must have spilled because it’s leaking some sort of brown sauce.

“Oh!” She says in surprise. “You deliver Chinese food too?”

I can only nod dumbly and turn away, heading back to the elevators. During my elevator ride up to the 11th floor, I mentally kick myself over and over for losing it during my delivery to suite 3404.

“That was the old Harvey Hickman,” I admonish myself. “The new Harvey Hickman is a red-hot lover, monster killer, and ass-kickin’ Chinese food delivery gang fighter!”

By the time I reach the 11th floor, I feel a lot better about things and I ring the buzzer next to a highly polished wooden door. A brass plaque on the door reads, “Rift Systems: Division 1.” Rift Systems? The Rift? Could this be a coincidence? I look around and see that there are no other offices or suites, which means that this Rift Systems: Division 1 (whatever that is) takes up this entire floor. The hair goes up on the back of my neck; there’s something weird about this.

I’m about to press the buzzer again when the door opens and some military-type ushers me inside. The soldier closes and locks the door behind me.

“Put that on that table over there,” he says. “And try not to get whatever’s leaking outta there on anything.”

I NOD AND look around; more than just a little surprised at what I see… The entire 11th floor looks like it’s been converted into a gigantic lab, with steel tables, computers, screens, gadgets, cubicles and scientists all over the place. There are soldiers too, although not many, and I wonder what the hell is going on.

“How much will that be son?”

The voice, tinged with a slight southern accent intrudes on my thoughts so suddenly that I jump. Another soldier, this one an officer I guess by all the ribbons and medals on his jacket, walks over to me and asks again, “So, what do we owe you?”

I remember the amount written on the invoice stapled to the bag and I tell him. He counts out several bills and I see him add a $10.00 tip for good measure.

“Thanks, uh, thank you sir,” I say as I stuff the cash into my pocket.

The officer glances at my weaponry and nods approvingly. “Glad to see you’re loaded for bear, son,” he says. “Times call for it! But hopefully that’ll all be in the past soon and things can get back to normal.”

“Normal?” I ask as I look around the room. This guy is starting to scare me. “What do you mean normal?”

The officer puts a big, meaty hand on my shoulder and points at a guy in a lab coat. “See that man there? He is the world’s foremost expert on the Rift and he’s figured out a way to close it,” he says.

“C-close the Rift?” I ask. My head swims; I can feel the old Harvey Hickman bubbling to the surface.

“Here let me introduce you to the man that’s going to save the world,” the officer says as he steers me toward the guy in the lab coat. “This is something you’ll be able to tell your kids and grandkids about someday!”

WE WALK OVER to where the man in the lab coat is standing, talking to two foreign guys in tweed jackets.

“Professor,” the officer says; interrupting their conversation. “I know you’re busy but I just wanted to introduce you to a fan… or at least he will be once you get rid of this goddam Rift!”

The professor stops his conversation long enough to turn towards us. He’s a regular looking guy, about my height, a fringe of graying black hair surrounding about ¾ of the dome of his bald head, and he’s wearing glasses. “A fan huh?” The professor says this while he looks me up and down like I’m some kind of specimen. “Come back in another three months, the Rift will definitely be gone by then and you can be a fan all you like, until then I’m too busy to talk to some delivery boy.”

The professor turns his back on me and dismisses us with a wave of his hand. He continues his conversation with the two guys in tweed and basically forgets I ever existed. Just like the bad ol’ days B.T.R. (Before The Rift), when everyone pretty much dismissed the old Harvey Hickman as being someone unimportant; someone of little or no consequence… while I’m having this, uh, revelation, the officer has me by the arm and he’s leading me back to the door.

“Sorry about that son,” the officer says. “The professor’s a busy guy, but hey at least you got yourself a nice tip out of it!”

Suddenly, I make up my mind—I know what I have to do…

I spin on the ball of my foot, much like I did with Lisa and the Baggers earlier, and I march back towards where the professor was still conferring with the two guys in tweed.

“Hey kid, what are you doing? The professor’s too busy to talk to you right now,” the officer calls out loudly from behind me. “You have to leave now, let’s go!”

The other soldiers look on curiously; they’re all carrying sidearms but no one reaches for their weapon.

THE PROFESSOR, MAYBE wondering what all the yelling is about turns around and faces me. I whip out the Colt and shoot him exactly two inches above the bridge of his nose. The guys in tweed look on in shock until I shoot them too. Then all hell breaks loose.

By the time I leave that suite on the 11th floor, everyone in it is dead. I feel bad about the soldiers, they were only doing their job, but I had to stop the Rift from being closed… had to.

My backpack is heavy with all of the harddrives and other electronic filing equipment I plan to toss into the Hudson. Whatever hardware or software I couldn’t carry out of there I made sure to thoroughly destroy. I found a couple of manuals with lists of passwords for a series of online backup files that I plan on deleting as soon as I can get to a public computer in an internet café or somewhere…

I feel a stitch in my side and I put my hand there—it comes back wet with my blood. One of the soldiers back in the suite must have hit me. It’s not serious, I’ll live.

I take the elevator to the lobby and peer outside through the glass doors, expecting to see Lisa and her crew still out there waiting for me. To my relief, they’re gone – although it looks like they took the time to tag my car with that lousy silver spray paint that’s impossible to get off.

I limp to my car as quickly as I can, toss my backpack, the pizza bag, and my shotgun in, and climb behind the wheel while the sun starts to go down on another day. In the distance a sticky-cat yowls its welcome to the coming night, while from somewhere closer I hear the coughing sound made by a Fool You-Kill You. Soon all of the night creatures will be up and adding their own weird and unearthly sounds to the chorus.

I reload my weapons, start the car and put it in gear. I pull a u-turn and point my car’s nose uptown, towards the George Washington Bridge. I know a doctor in Jersey that’s terrified of leaving his home and he owes me a couple of favors, I’m sure he’ll patch me right up. Then it’ll be back to delivering pizza… and killing monsters.

About the Author

Arnaldo Lopez Jr. was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY., and before retiring had been employed by the MTA for twenty-eight years and was formerly employed as a dispatcher with the NYPD.

He’s sold articles to Railway Age magazine, The Daily News magazine, Homeland Defense Journal, and Reptile & Amphibian magazine; scripts to Little Archie and Personality Comics; and short stories to Neo-Opsis magazine, Lost Souls e-zine, Nth Online magazine, Blood Moon magazine, The Acentos Review magazine, Feed Your Monster e-zine, Fangs and Broken Bones horror anthology, Swallowed by the Beast horror anthology, Trembling with Fear horror anthology, Monsters Attack horror anthology, and the “A reflection of Me”: An AAMBC Anthology.   He was also editor of Offworld, a small science fiction magazine that was once chosen as a "Best Bet" by Sci-Fi television.   His first novel, Chickenhawk, is the winner of two International Latino Book awards.

Mr Edison’s Explorers

Matthew Hooton

“Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials were used, until finally the shred of bamboo now utilized was settled upon.”

—Thomas Edison, Harper’s 1890.

September 14th, 1880

WHAT IS IT about the walking palms and close greens of this wet palace that narrows thought? Fredricks told me yesterday that he has begun to imagine his own birth here amongst tangled fig roots and vines. Lessing says the jungle listens to his thoughts. None speak of Hokkaido or of what we encountered there last year.

This morning a Heliconius alighted upon my tin cup to sip sugar from the rim, all the while flexing its wings and casting a tiny, sun-dial shadow over my tea. They flutter in great numbers here, flame-lusting after vertical beams of sunlight that slip through the rafters of canopy. Hundreds will attach themselves to a single hanging vine, decorating the tendril in all shades of orange, red and blue. Such marked wings I have never encountered save for upon painted kites imported from the Orient.

September 18th, 1880

THE BEST OF news yesterday afternoon! Lessing and I interrupted a marching line of leaf cutters, my companion following them to their colony, and myself traveling in the opposite direction to the source of the green they had sliced with their mandibles for transport. No, it was not the rare bamboo we have been seeking these long years, but a large grove of Guadua sarcocarpa, useful nonetheless, and proof that we may yet discover that which Mr. Edison so covets here in Amazonia.

And even this stand of clacking stalks was magnificent: three times my height, each trunk the circumference of my good leg. Oh how they rattled their Morse with the shifting breeze! I sent my own message with theirs in your direction, dearest sister. That we might meet again before another Christmas passes in the sweltering upside-down seasons of the Antipodes. That I might look upon the face of my new nephew, who you and Walter should not have named for my sake, even if I am flattered beyond words. I only pray now that I shall return to you all in one piece and triumphant, so that I might live up to the name one so precious to me now shares.

Anon…

IN MY WONDER and awe at the skeletal clacking of the bamboo, I failed to notice that which Lessing could not miss closer to the ants’ colony: a subtle predator overtaking and destroying the leaf cutters in the most insidious and treacherous manner. A fungus, if one can believe it! It seems to infect individual ants, causing them to veer and wander from their disciplined line, the insects eventually latching fast to a tendril or twig, where they slowly convulse as the fungus grows within them, killing them and leaving them locked in grisly rigour mortis. And from their exoskeletons sprout crystalline shoots, fine as the hair upon a child’s arm, until they have become a fungal monument, growing like some forgotten and moulding apple upon a pantry floor.

Lessing has taken this as an ill omen, though I know not why. Truly he and Fredericks are becoming more superstitious by the hour, and though I remind them that Nature is but the Lord’s hand acting to balance all we see, they insist that there is a malevolence here, even if I am blind to its presence. Perhaps this is true, for I am lost again and again in the close beauty of parrot song and the shocking pastels with which our Creator has chosen to decorate even the tiniest of tree frogs here. Mr. Edison was right to send us to this place, and I remain steadfast in my faith that we will find his bamboo and contribute to the great new age of science that is so apparently dawning in our lifetimes.

But enough of such subject matter. I think of the three of you often, and wonder at your health, and at the coming of this holiest of seasons in Bath. I am optimistic still that you should look for me at the Christmas market this very year. I shall be hobbling upon this leg that will not heal, but I will have strength to hold my namesake and sing carols with you just as we did as children in Rochester (though my voice shall not ring as true in pitch, even if yours remains as lovely as ever).

September 21st, 1880

I CONFESS I am nearly too fatigued to write this today, after the disturbing events and dreams of the night past. The entire encampment was woken by Fredricks’ screaming in the night when a vampire bat managed to untie his tent flaps before climbing onto his prone body to feast upon the toes of his left foot (for none of us uses a bedroll in this sticky heat). Bats, we have learned, are more dextrous than they appear, and are a constant menace to our fruit and food supplies. Desmodus rotundus, the vampire bat, is only the span of a man’s hand, not much larger than a tea cup, and yet in its colonies will descend en mass to leech blood from livestock and large mammals. We have a local here, Pedro, who is in charge of our mules, and who remains vigilant through the nights for this reason.

A curious note: these bats do not attack their prey from the air, but alight and approach on all fours, scuttling upon the ground and piercing hide or skin with needling teeth, then lapping up the blood with their tongues. I am told by our local help that there is a quality to the creatures’ saliva that prevents the blood on a wound from congealing. Forgive me for this grisly exposition, sister. Were it not for your interest in botany and zoology and your robust constitution, I would not write such an account. Indeed, I would spare most who travel in our circles such grim details.

Fredricks is not seriously injured, though we must now watch him carefully for signs of madness, for these flying rodents carry rabies, and many other fearfully compromising infections. After the commotion, I could not sleep, and lay in my tent staring up at the moonlit canvas, our small clearing bright in the midst of the dark jungle that stretches endlessly from Belém and the coast to the very feet of the great Andes. And lying awake, I watched a giant Pamphobeteus nigricolor, yes, you will recognise the latin from your reading, creep on eight hairy legs in a slow line across the tent’s ceiling in my very own nightmarish shadow-puppet theatre. In truth, I do not fear these gentle creatures, larger than my hands, for they show no aggression towards humans, but their presence on this night, after the ruckus of Fredricks’ bat, sent me at last into fitful dreams, in which I watched a grisly pantomime unfold: there I stood, like Dickens’ Ebenezer, as you and your husband wept bitterly before a still and quiet bassinet, its edges covered in the same crystalline fungal fibres that consumed so many unfortunate insects. The room: painted light blue, with a hanging net of lace curtains around the child’s cradle. And oh how you wailed, struggling to break free from your husband’s arms around you! At last he dragged you from the room, and my ethereal self was left alone in that hushed space, bruised winter sunlight through the high windows, and no movement from the bassinet, save for the imperceptible multiplying of the deadly fungus. The unnatural silence chilled me to my bones, sister, even as I woke to a sweltering morning, knowing full well that it was but a dream, and that I would, in good time, return to Belém to find proof of you and your son’s good health in the form of a letter, and to bundle my own journals to send in return. I pray it will be so.

September 24th, 1880

IT SEEMS THAT Lessing has taken it upon himself to send samples of our predatory fungi to the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as to Royal Society in London. I should be pleased, as he will surely name me on any paper or record of expedition, and yet I cannot help but suspect he has acted in haste, sending a local porter with his package back to Belém prematurely, perhaps to ensure that any true and meaningful credit for such a discovery will bear his name for all of history.

When I challenged him on these grounds he scoffed at me. Do you remember the diving birds of Dejima? he asked. Trained to catch fish for their masters, but never feasting themselves? I am not content to act as a mere tool. As if this were the case for any of us, though his analogy is incorrect in any case. He was referring to the cormorants of Nagasaki that dive with snares wrapped around their necks, allowing them to swallow only small fish, while holding larger catches in their mouths. There is, I believe, no shame in enjoying smaller fish while sharing the larger for the greater good. My Japanese surgeon explained as much to me through our translator there, though Lessing wouldn’t know this, as he so often refused translation for fear it would inhibit his own unfailingly acute observations.

But I am debasing myself in pettiness. Forgive me, sister. You know my nature as well as anyone, and I will not dwell upon my own selfish perception of this minor injustice for long. We have had excellent news from New York in any case: Mr. Edison has received our samples from Hokkaido and Kyoto, and experiments to use the fibres of bamboo as filaments for his electric bulbs are underway. Perhaps the horrific events there were not the markings of failure we imagined then. The great wizard of glass and electricity is pleased with our work, according to our agents at the London office, and may even invite us to tour his facilities in America.

October 1st, 1880

FORGIVE THE HASTY and unsteady hand, sister, for I cannot cease trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement. We paraded deep into the northern jungle yesterday, setting out upon rubber tappers’ trails, then cutting our own path with machete. Seven miles northwest of our basecamp, at the foot of a great craggy hillock, we encountered what appeared to be a cluster of Alouatta caraya, which the locals call black howler monkeys. Strange not to hear them, for, as their common name suggests, they are indeed naturally boisterous, and there are claims that their vocalisations are louder even the the trumpeting of an African elephant. And yet here they were still and unflinching, so that we thought them dead and mummified somehow. And even when I first saw the white, crystalline hairs from their ears and noses, I assumed that we had misclassified some previously unrecorded sub-species of emperor tamarin, those lovely little moustachioed creatures coveted by zoos around the globe. But of course my optimism soon faded, as we realised it was, yet again, our predatory fungus. I needn’t tell you how shocked we were to see its seemingly lethal interaction within a mammalian population. And yet, how could we know whether the fungus had caused the deaths of these creatures, or simply infected insects that were feasting upon them post mortem?

The locals were reluctant to trek further into the jungle, and, for once, not even Lessing verbalised his suspicion that our guides were more superstitious than scientific (an outrageous claim from my companion, who sees no hypocrisy in his own insistence that this jungle is the devil’s earthly lair). Yet we all pushed on, until we reached a settlement of natives near the bank of a tiny tributary. And here we discovered the workings of the true devil hidden beneath this canopy of greenery and flower: an entire village mummified in hair-like spores, children and the elderly on sleeping mats in huts, and a group of men and women reclined against a giant rubber tree in the centre of the settlement, faces painted in all shades of red, tattoos over their torsos, and yet none moving, the white crystalline horror sprouting from mouths and ears.

We ran, I am not ashamed to say, though I hobbled behind the rest, the wounds from the giant boar that killed poor Jacobs on Hokkaido throbbing with each step. Dearest sister, you must contact the Royal Society and have them telegram New York as well. I know your esteemed husband has connections to both. We have written each society directly, but must know there is a failsafe. Tell them that the samples Lessing sent in haste may be dangerous.

October 7th, 1880

FREDERICKS IS LOST in fever. We cannot know if it is the result of the bat’s bite upon his toe, or of our encounter with the uncategorised mycelium. Even Lessing admits now that he would not have his own name on such an efficiently malevolent species, though perhaps his legacy in disaster is already sealed.

We travel day and night to Belém, to the coast, marching for our lives, praying that the samples sent onwards have not yet been forwarded overseas. Only time will tell. I fear that I will soon be unable to keep up with the pace of my companions, for my leg is turning septic in the humidity, and it is clear that the bones were not set correctly. I worry constantly that our letters, abroad and to you, will not arrive in time, that all will fall silent, and I dream each night of London and then the high street of Bath gone dark in winter sleet, windowsills iced and street lamps dimly wrapped in fog. And the white that spreads is not snow, but the heart-stopping parasite sent to your home isle by our band of well-meaning explorers in an act of curiosity and wonder gone wrong. Perhaps the Good Lord will intervene and our parcels will never reach London or New York. Perhaps we are immune to this crystalline army of assassin spores, and the horrors of Amazonia will fade in our memories, become a tale we tell our grandchildren each All Hallow’s Eve. Perhaps, dear sister, the cold will save us.

I remain, as ever, your steadfastedly devoted and loving brother, on this the brink of calamity. I will not write again, but will send these letters and diaries ahead with a local. I pray it will be enough to divert disaster.

In filial love,

M—

About the Author

Matthew Hooton is the author of the novels Deloume Road and Typhoon Kingdom, and has written fiction and non-fiction for a number of venues internationally. He teaches at the University of Adelaide, where his research ranges from Korean history through Jim Henson’s Muppets and the stunts of Evel Knievel.

The Eyes of the King

Stephen Pimentel

SPRAWLED ON HIS throne with his chin cupped in his hand, Niqmaddu, king of Ugarit, contemplated the retreating figure of the priestess. How dare she issue instructions to him while the city was at war? He looked to Arhalbu, his eldest son and heir, now general over the army. Arhalbu ran his hand through his beard, as he often did when pondering something new.

Tharriyelli, the queen mother, sat on a throne of her own, betraying no reaction to the priestess’ sudden visitation. She, without a doubt, was the uncast lot. The last attendant of the priestess was not yet out of sight when the king spoke.

“So, Arhalbu, you heard the words of the priestess.” He stressed the last word. Would Arhalbu object to the implicit denial that the prophecy came from Athirat? “What would you advise me to do?”

Arhalbu smiled sardonically, as if sharing a joke, but took his time before replying. “The eyes of the king are abroad, seeking out the troops of Amrit. If we seal the city for thirty days, they won’t be able to deliver their captives for interrogation, and we’ll remain ignorant of Amrit’s plans.”

“Just so.” Niqmaddu looked down the rows of columns to the entrance. He lowered his voice to a murmur and spoke as if to himself. “The eyes of the king roam over the earth.” He looked to Arhalbu again. “When are they are expected to return?”

“Within the week.”

“Then we can’t seal the city and shut out our men. I’d be blind. I must learn the mind of Amrit.”

“You’re already blind if you’d set aside the words of the goddess so quickly.” Tharriyelli stood up from her throne and took a step toward Niqmaddu. “You think her warnings are idle?” In spite of her age, the queen mother was still imposing, arrayed in the purple robes of her royalty. “You’d risk her curse rather than wait for news of Amrit?”

In her youth, when she had given up the robes of Athirat to marry the old king, she was deemed the most beautiful woman in the city. Now elderly, nubility no longer cloaked her fierce spirit. She ruled nothing save herself, but in that kingdom she was quite secure.

The king smirked. “Does Athirat speak to you also of this curse?” he asked. “Do you hear the goddess speak by your prophetic gift?”

“You wish to put the gods to the test?” she asked.

The king paused. Was she taunting him? Trying to embarrass him? He must not give her satisfaction. “Unless my memory fails, the priestess did not say just when the gate must be barred.” He held up his hand, palm outward, in a gesture of decision. “I will give the order to seal the city for thirty days as soon as my men have returned, as long as they report no danger that would bid me to do otherwise.”

“Not wise.” Tharriyelli sat back on her throne and stared directly at the king. “You play like a child by the edge of a cliff.”

NIQMADDU RECLINED ON his side in the banquet hall, the air filled with the sweet smell of honeyed figs newly set on the table by servants as others cleared away the remnants of roast duck, truffles marinated in wine sauce, and fried leaks in melted cheese. The sofa to his right, a wedding gift for his wife, sat empty as it had since her death. Arhalbu reclined on the sofa to his left. Only the queen mother sat upright in a tall wooden chair. Idiosyncratic and indifferent, she had taken up the use of the chair at table when age had made it difficult to get up from a couch.

Water ran from pipes into ceramic washbasins, filling the hall with a gentle burbling sound. Niqmaddu sipped the dark red wine from his bowl. He reflexively savored its earthy, tannic taste, though his thoughts were far from the food before them. In spite of the warm, spice-scented autumn air, the few feet between the king and the queen mother had been cold throughout dinner, chilled by her response to the prophecy.

A soldier rushed into the room and bowed quickly. “My lord,” he said, his breath coming in hard, short gasps. “I have word from our men. They have tracked a merchant caravan from Amrit, now a league from the city.”

Niqmaddu swung up from the couch abruptly, taking a step toward the wheezing man. “You’re certain that it came from Amrit?”

“Yes. It traveled to Amrit from the south, stayed for two days, and continued north. The messenger just arrived with the news.”

Arhalbu stood up and looked to the king, ready to receive instruction. Niqmaddu did not hesitate. “Have the caravan intercepted and brought into the city. We must interrogate these merchants,” the king said. Arhalbu nodded and turned to leave the hall. He stopped abruptly, jolted by the queen mother’s voice.

She did not rise from her chair; not one of her limbs moved. She sat stiffly, and her voice was sharp and clear, no longer that of an elderly woman. “Thus say Athirat: You, O king, have mistaken the pride of your eyes for wisdom, and lifted yourself above the gods. You have thought yourself wiser than Danel, ferreting out secrets hidden to men. You would not heed the warning of the gods and shall therefore suffer their curse. From the head of the city to the toe, the blood of Ugarit shall be poured out before your shade goes to the pit. Seven times you shall curse the earth, eight times beg the rider of the clouds to send no dew, no rain, no waters from the deep. You have raised your heart above the gods, and they shall cast it down.” She fell silent, hands folded in her lap, as placid as a mountain on a still winter day.

The king felt his face flush and words leap from his tongue with hardly a thought. “How long have you been plotting with the priestess of Athirat? Whom would you place on my throne?”

Tharriyelli rose with her usual grace, a swan slipping onto land from a placid lake. “Attendant!” Her handmaid came forward and bowed. “Take me to my chambers.” Without another word, the queen mother left the hall, the servant walking beside her.

Niqmaddu locked eyes with Arhalbu and smiled unkindly. “What are you waiting for?” he asked.

Arhalbu blinked and opened his mouth as if about to speak; instead, he quickly nodded again and hurried out.

THE SPOKED WHEELS rumbled and the donkeys’ hooves clopped against the paving stones as the beasts drew four heavy wagons through the narrow portico beneath the great tower, its massive doors drawn open. Niqmaddu stood still in the broad courtyard, his back to a tall fountain-statue of Baal Hadad, water softly gushing into the basin at its feet. The west wind brushed his face with its familiar whisper, but it carried an unsettling note. The hint of an odd scent? The palace scribe he had summoned stood at his side.

He watched a squad of his soldiers lead the caravan forward, Arhalbu walking beside them and barking orders, supervising every detail with his usual care. His hand rested on the hilt of a dagger hanging in a jeweled scabbard from his belt. The merchants trailed behind on foot, unbound but closely guarded, sullen and unsettled by their arrest. When the caravan came to rest before the king, Arhalbu stepped forward and nodded.

Niqmaddu gestured toward the merchants. “Bring their chief to me,” he said.

Arhalbu signaled a soldier, and one of the merchants was bustled forward, rough hands on each shoulder. The traveler was middle aged and dressed in the robes of a prosperous Amorite of the highlands, his long beard streaked with grey and lightened with dust from the road. He cast his eyes downward before the king—distressed, perhaps even angry, but not quite defiant—and bowed.

“What may I do to please your majesty?” he asked.

“You have come from Amrit?”

“Yes.” The merchant wrinkled his face quizzically.

“Ugarit is at war. You have no objection if we search your caravan?” The king made no pretense that this was truly a question.

The merchant winced as if struggling to muster his strength for a reply. “Our wagons, save the last, contain nothing but our ordinary merchandise.” He shifted his weight with a look of discomfort. “The last wagon is sealed. It contains a load that we were contracted to carry.”

“And what is that load?” Niqmaddu had no doubt of his right to this information.

“I do not know,” the merchant said. “We were placed under oath not to unseal it until we reached Halab.”

He brazenly admits concealment? Niqmaddu shot a fierce look at Arhalbu. “Search the wagons one by one,” he said. “I want all the merchandise identified and any tablets read. Or scrolls.”

Arhalbu gestured to two soldiers standing by the nearest wagon. They climbed inside and began carefully lifting and inspecting each item they encountered, calling out descriptions for the king. Fine linen dyed in bright colors, ornamented silver vessels, bronze figurines for use as offerings, carved ivory plaques, scarab jewelry of lapis lazuli and carnelian; the catalog went on and on.

“Ah! Lord!” One of the soldiers lifted a carved wooden chest containing several papyrus scrolls. He handed it down from the wagon to Arhalbu, who set it down before the king. Niqmaddu waved for the scribe. The man carefully unrolled each scroll and read it, moving his lips and softly murmuring in the Phoenician dialect. When he was done, he held up one of the larger scrolls. “This one is an inventory of the goods,” he said. “The rest are records of purchases and sales.”

“Any mention of Amrit?” the king asked.

“Only that they bought the jewelry there, my lord. Nothing but what I’d expect to find.” He bowed to the king and put the scrolls back in the chest, which Arhalbu returned to the wagon.

The soldiers searched the second and third wagons, and the scribe read their scrolls with the same result. “There’s nothing of interest in these wagons, my lord,” the scribe said.

“So it would seem,” the king said. The fourth wagon was obviously the key. He strode over to it. Arhalbu and the scribe followed with the chief merchant, hemmed in by soldiers trailing behind. The wagon’s frame was tightly enclosed in a canvas cover fitted with leather straps and bound with thin ropes. An ivory amulet of Athirat was knotted to one of the ropes. The depiction of the goddess was familiar. She wore nothing but a full, layered skirt of the old style. Her hair was bound up, and she held a sheaf of wheat in each hand. Niqmaddu fingered the ties, lightly tugging at them. He avoided touching the amulet.

The merchant dropped to his knees and prostrated himself. “Until now, O king, you have done me no harm. I beg you, leave sealed what was sealed under oath to the gods.”

Niqmaddu smiled at him. “Tell me, merchant. Why would the gods be so interested in hiding things from me, indeed, the very things the enemies of Ugarit wish to hide? Isn’t it convenient for my enemies to hide behind the gods, bringing them to their lips the moment I draw near to unmasking their schemes?”

The merchant remained prostrate and did not answer. Niqmaddu stepped back from the wagon and nodded to his son. Arhalbu drew his dagger, the iron blade slipping from its scabbard with a sigh. He cut through one rope, then another. The amulet fell to the paving stones with a clatter. Something shifted in the wagon and pressed for an instant against the canvas, making a sound like a footstep on sand. Arhalbu paused and motioned for the soldiers to draw in toward the wagon. He resumed cutting the ropes, now more quickly, impatience gaining the upper hand over care. When the last rope was severed, he grabbed the canvas by its straps and pulled. The heavy cloth resisted, seemingly pinned by something in the wagon. Arhalbu grasped the straps firmly with both hands, braced himself, and heaved until, with a great sweeping motion, the canvas came free from its frame.

An avalanche of wheat poured over the side of the wagon; in the falling grain, like small boats going over a waterfall, dark forms scrabbled and scurried in the air, darting in all directions when they thumped to the floor. Rats? Niqmaddu couldn’t clearly see the creatures; they seemed to vanish an instant after they appeared. And the stench! Niqmaddu had more than once walked among the corpses after a battle, and his stomach was not weak, but the noxious vapor emerging from the wagon seemed worse than the rotting of the dead.

“What is this grain infested with?” Arhalbu asked, brushing wheat from his tunic with disgust.

Niqmaddu clenched his gut, striving not to be sick. “Search it,” he said. “I want anything hidden in that wheat.”

A soldier climbed into the bed of the wagon, his nose wrinkled in disgust. He pulled away the remaining canvas and began combing through the wheat, using his dagger to sift through the remaining load. A few more dark creatures emerged from the mound and fled, chittering and leaping to the paving stones below. Definitely rats . . . of some sort. “There’s nothing here but droppings and fouled grain,” the soldier said.

Niqmaddu pursed his lips. “Escort the merchants to the prison,” he said. “They shall remain as guests of Ugarit until we have a satisfactory explanation.” The soldiers led the merchants out of the courtyard, gripping their arms and driving them forward. When they were out of sight, Niqmaddu spoke in a lower voice to Arhalbu. “Careful not to kill them. They’re no use to us dead. I want them ready to talk, the sooner the better.”

THE PALACE GARDEN was quiet as Niqmaddu reclined on the veranda for his afternoon rest. He usually found the gentle sound of water flowing from the irrigation pipes soporific. Not today. Arhalbu had excused himself, sending word by a servant. The king glanced at Tharriyelli resting on her finely carved ivory chair. He shifted on his own sofa, trying to get comfortable, closed his eyes and inhaled the combined scent of the grape vines, herbs, and fruit trees. He began a familiar game of trying to pick out each tree by its distinctive smell, calling to mind the year his father or grandfather had added it: olive, fig, pomegranate, almond, date palm, pear.

Someone entered the garden. Niqmaddu jerked his head at the sound. A soldier approached the king, walking with exaggerated formality, and bowed. Niqmaddu swung his feet to the floor and sat up expectantly.

“General Arhalbu remains indisposed,” the soldier said. He hesitated and swallowed hard. “He sends me to convey that the chief of the Amorite merchants begs an audience with you, lord.”

“I’m surprised it took so long,” the king said.

Tharriyelli sighed and shook her hand. “It makes no difference. It’s their presence, not anything they may tell you, on which the city’s fate turns.”

“And just how will their presence affect us?” the king asked.

Tears welled in the queen mother’s eyes. “Find out for yourself!” she said. “Interrogate them! You’re the master at ferreting out secrets, the one who must know all things.” The words caught in her throat, and she began to sob.

Niqmaddu’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the ivory arm of his sofa. How dare she blatantly try to undermine him and then act hurt? He struggled to control a wave of rage and the urge to unleash his tongue at her. He forced himself to stand up with as much exterior calm as he could muster. “I believe I shall,” he said.

THE BARE, UNDERGROUND room felt cool, and the air had a musty smell, unpleasant except that it reminded the king of his childhood, when he had wandered the maze of storerooms beneath the palace, eager to escape for a while from his tutors. He would sometimes find abandoned artifacts—already ancient when his grandparents had been young, they told him—and so these underground rooms, the oldest in the palace, held a fascination for him, always hinting of mystery. The prison cell in which he stood, facing the merchant chief, was one of these rooms. Its oil lamps casts dark shadows against the close walls and low ceiling.

“When I was boy, I sometimes traveled to Amrit with my uncle on trade visits,” the king said. “I was most impressed by its temple. Do the prophets still stand in front of it, declaring the oracles of the gods?”

“They do indeed, my lord.”

“How they puzzled me. You must forgive the ignorance of a child: Why, I used to wonder, must the gods speak through prophets rather than appear to us directly?”

The merchant seemed to ponder the question a bit. “Perhaps they can be heard more easily than seen.”

Niqmaddu chuckled. “Have you, a merchant, heard the gods through a prophet?”

“Yes, I have, even in Amrit. A prophet of Athirat told me I would receive a contract there that would bring me great wealth.”

Wouldn’t you know. Niqmaddu shook his head. “You didn’t receive such a contract, did you?”

“Yes, from the royal physician of Amrit, for the sealed load.” The merchant looked Niqmaddu squarely in the eyes. The king expected to see some expression of guilt or deception in the merchant, but he could see no guile in him.

“The royal physician? Matinu of Arvad, the great wizard?”

“Some say he is a wizard.” The merchant shrugged. “I know nothing of such things.”

“But you had no idea what the wagon carried,” the king said.

The chief merchant sighed heavily. “I spoke the truth to you when you brought us to the city. The wagon was loaded and sealed by the physician’s men out of our sight.” His shoulders slumped a bit.

The king broke into a broad smile. “You’ve been most helpful,” he said. “I think we can send you on your way very soon.”

The king strode out of the room, giddy with excitement, and grinned at the guards in the corridor. At last he had uncovered a crucial clue: Matinu’s hand in this affair could only indicate some sort of plot. He motioned one guard to close the heavy wooden door behind him and sent another to summon Arhalbu to meet him immediately in the throne room. They would discover Matinu’s plot and solve this puzzle once and for all. Niqmaddu wound his way up the narrow stairways and through the palace, turning the conundrum over in his mind as he walked. Matinu was renown for his great lore and craft; he rarely acted without purpose and would never do so toward a city at war with his own. But what could be the purpose of a sealed wagon filled with rotten grain?

The king emerged from the narrow, dim corridor into the broad, brightly lit throne room. He blinked and looked around. Tharriyelli sat on her throne, as though she had been waiting for him. What damnable game is this? And where is Arhalbu? His son was never late for an urgent summons. Niqmaddu took a few steps towards his throne. There was a shuffling sound from the eastern entrance. Arhalbu’s voice echoed from the corridor as though he was speaking to someone near him. He came into the room, limping and leaning on a servant. The king took several heavy steps toward him and felt his face flush. Could Arhalbu be drunk? How dare he engage in such foolishness at a time like this? The king stopped short, assaulted by a revolting stench. Arhalbu’s eyes were glassy and bloodshot, his skin pale and glistening with sweat. Large swellings, black and partially ruptured, bulged from his neck, oozing pus and blood.

“Pestilence,” Arhalbu said. “A dozen men in the barracks and more in the city.”

Niqmaddu stood still, his body frozen but for his blinking eyes, trying to make sense of the stricken figure before him. Clenching his fists, he turned his back on his son, unable to blot out the dawning indictment. He staggered toward the throne and collapsed into it. He squeezed his eyes shut and finally saw the wizard’s stratagem: the caravan, the wagon, the pestilent curse. “You have seen the plan of Amrit?” Tharriyelli asked. His cry, anguished and forlorn, echoed through the palace.

About the Author

Stephen Pimentel writes science fiction and fantasy, mostly short stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a software engineer. Before moving to California, he worked for a technology startup near Washington, D.C. He has worked on various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout his career. He is @StephenPiment on Twitter.

Hedions

David Scott Anderson

THE DAY WE learned our own star could serve as a lens was a revolution. Its impossibly bright, blue-white surface acted as a sort of misdirection on a cosmic scale, a distraction to mask the true beauty lurking beneath the surface. Its power was its mass, which bent and magnified the near-invisible fabric of space and time just beside it. A telescope for the Gods. Our four moons rotated overhead; their rocky, barren surfaces occasionally passed through the line of sight and blighted our view, as though a large speck of dust had been momentarily caught in our new Eye’s viscous film. We focused into the Distant Void and stared outward. 

Wild images flew in, and we knew immediately that they would forever change our understanding of the Universe, each other, and the Great Mystery. Our species became child-like in its awe—like a sightless one suddenly gaining vision, opening his eyes, and realizing for the first time that he stood at the periphery of an endless sea of kaleidoscopic flowers, which ebbed against a backdrop of cerulean ocean, with wispy clouds stretching out into eternity. 

Then we saw intelligent life. We called them Hedions, and their fiery hatred and lust for destruction were things we had never known. We watched the surface of their world—massive oceans, snow-tipped mountain ranges, white clouds caught up in whirling storm systems—with frenzied interest, compelled to know more but feeling guilty at our uninvited prying. They travelled on tiny mahogany ships, with yet tinier flags flapping against tumultuous ocean wind; the bipedal creatures would crash ashore on the distant lands of agrarian peoples with archaic technology. The less developed were no match for their new visitors. The men from the ships wore shimmering metallic armor, and they delivered unbridled carnage; the conquering party killed and burned and raped for sport, and they caged countless others. The imprisoned would sometimes poke emaciated fingers through the iron bars of their cells to feel the familiarity of kin. Their captors quickly prevented this, separating the cages with distance and wooden planks. The enervated victims eventually huddled in the soiled corners of their cells, curled their frail bodies in on themselves, and appeared to relinquish all hope.

Our obsession with the Hedions emerged mostly because we could not understand their behavior. How theirs had become so different from our own remained a mystery. We evolved synergistically with our planet, enmeshed with the structures of nature. The Hedions, however, appeared to be at war their surroundings, preferring to conquer and subjugate everything, from the less fortunate of their own species to the very land upon which they dwelled. Like them, we have an abundance of fertile land with myriad creatures. Though our planet is tidally locked—half forever cast in darkness and half eternally set ablaze—we cherish the diversity of life this has spurned. Our ancestors rode on the backs of Scyras—massive, bioluminescent beasts which ventured up from The Black, their wings pulsing with every color in the Void, lighting up the far side of our world like a pocket galaxy. We too built fires, and shared food and shelter, whispering stories of creation to our young and watching curiosity catch fire behind their deep, green eyes.

Even as our world shuddered and exploded with fire and smoke during the Great Haze, and we were forced to retreat into the muddy spaces our ancestors had forged deep underground long ago, we offered respect to the time shared with those lost. Our species has always known that existing cycles must cease, and new journeys must begin. We recognize that the Great Mystery was not meant to be solved in a day; its deceptive insights can only be chipped away at over millennia. We could not comprehend war. Meaningless violence was the most sacrilegious act one could commit, so rare that it has always been seen and treated as an illness. We would latch onto an Afflicted One with the love of a thousand embraces, all encircled, eyes cast skyward with blue tears streaked across our faces. We begged them to heal or to be healed.

Decades collapsed into centuries; we could not look away from the Hedions.

They built stone houses and floors of concrete, wiping away the verdant forests and ice which had first drawn us to gaze at their planet. We watched as our galactic neighbors developed at a dizzying pace that eclipsed our own progression; paving streets for sleek metallic vehicles and propping up throngs of tower structures like spikes, which crawled up toward their clouds and eventually poked through. Whereas our world had kept its variegated textures and multitude of life, theirs had devolved into a profusion of grey. Dissatisfied even with the clouds they had been given, the lanky creatures propped up giant concrete structures which spewed out their own murky, ersatz imitations.

The Hedions became a part of us, ever-burrowing into our collective consciousness like a growth with no known cure. For once we realized that all knowledge was not good knowledge. Our own people started fighting, ripping at each other’s clothing, and baring sharp fangs at strangers who wandered too close. We wondered at the thought that the Hedions might one day discover us as us we had discovered them. A slow panic loomed at the idea that they might build massive, harrowing ships which could survive the Void; that they might travel to us, vanquish us as we had watched them do to so many of their own. Elders formed alliances and begot enemies, each vying for lands and titles and power, attacking and killing neighbors. It was as though the disease of the Hedions’ violence had seeped through our lens and infected us even from this great distance.

Over time and across the vast expanse of the Void, we began to hear them and see them with increased clarity. Our Elders had spent centuries improving our collective sense of listening, too, and the sounds pierced us and surprised us with their softness, their beauty. The images were an amalgamation of Hedion life—pale, puffy faces screaming into microphones, rich red hues of starlight melting over their horizon, mothers smiling warmth and love toward the wondering faces of their young. But more than anything we saw complete, relentless violence. These new sensations added an element of reality to their presence, established them not merely as a collection of images but as a tangible thing, something that could be heard, felt, touched. It only deepened our anxiety.

As time continued to grind away and new generations of us watched them, tiny aircraft began to weave through their planet’s sky with the agility of the countless flying insects in our world. Eventually, a white speck shot through their atmosphere and into the Void, toward their moon, toward us. One day we watched as a series of world-shattering plumes of fire and smoke consumed a portion of their world, and all that remained were debris and ruin, the detritus of innocent Hedion life. The light from that event burned a hole in our collective Eye—their first act of interstellar violence.

The fable that the Hedions might travel to our world evolved into a grim expectation. We built weapons, supposedly in preparation for their mythic arrival, but always used against one another. The Scyras, suddenly fearful, flew off to the distant Glowing Spires of The Black which were out of our reach. We built walls and locked ourselves away, placing our newly independent states on the other sides of mountains, or across vast, glimmering silver oceans.

At last, we saw The Light.

It came from the Hedion star system, just beyond the atmosphere of their planet, and it shone directly at us; not in our general direction, but at us. From the moment The Light passed through our Eye, we knew it was unnatural, something made. The Hedions’ Light flashed powerful deep-violet hues, cutting out intermittently to form patterns. Our Elders deciphered meaning from it. Among other mathematical sequences, our cosmic neighbors appeared to be saying Hello. Over the centuries we had learned that this was a common trick of theirs, feigning peace until conquest was within reach, and only then unleashing their true intentions—baring their deceptively dull teeth and crushing spirit first, then life. We received and decoded all their messages but sat in a collective silence. We didn’t dare attempt a response. Our world stood frozen. We wondered if they had been viewing us just as we had been viewing them. If so, for how long?

We knew that we were viewing their past; it had taken this light almost forty years to hurtle through the Void and into our beloved Eye. The speed with which they advanced their technology, and the callous way they dominated and razed everything in their wake, made that distance suddenly feel uncomfortable, unsafe. And if we did see them explode out toward our planet, they would have already been traveling for decades, perhaps just behind the light-waves which signaled their departure in the first place.

In a way, the Hedions had already arrived. We wondered in secret if they possessed some hidden ability to contaminate the minds of all living things. Perhaps the sickness came attached to the light they emitted. Our factions now did battle like them; our children bounded around the tall red forests, splashing mounds of dirt and red leaves to imitate the large explosions they had grown up watching, just like Hedion young. We had always thought that corruption of mind and soul would be obvious, something that we could notice and prevent, or at least retreat from. But over all these centuries, we learned from the Hedions that an infection of this scale is anything but sudden; it burrows like things die: a slow, inexorable withering.

Our technology had begun advancing rapidly at about the same time we had started warring with one another. We wanted to survive, and our species learned that nothing incited innovation like the pernicious fear of oblivion that now loomed over our heads. It hung above us everywhere, like the foggy, thick atmosphere which enveloped our planet and appeared thinner every few years.

Nature submitted to our will, and we designed implausible tools for destruction and protection. We developed monstrous, biosynthetic trees which we planted at even intervals over our entire planet’s surface. They grew almost limitlessly skyward; their ridged trunks were black as night and more than a hundred meters wide; thick, imposing branches reached the upper parts of our atmosphere and interlaced, over time creating a dense protective shell around our entire world. The weaving branches left holes scattered throughout which allowed starlight to shine through. Our planet became specked with a blend of golden-blue light and dark shadow, as though the ground itself was transforming from lightness to darkness, innocence to guilt. We learned to harness the energy from all living organisms around us—learning to steal it, compress it, and unleash it on adversaries across great distances. We perfected this craft and, almost by accident, created an explosion so powerful that it mirrored the life-devouring plumes we had watched almost a century before on the Hedion world. The blast was so hot and bright that it melted the edge of our Eye, and a long stream of melted glass and metal dripped down from it, as though one of the Gods were crying at what we had become.

We were so busy preparing that we almost missed the fateful day. Our preparation and sacrifice would finally mean something; we were to be tested at last.

The Hedions were coming.

They did build massive, harrowing ships which could survive the Void; they did see us, and eventually we heard them say as much. Light arrived through our collective Senses that depicted corpulent Hedion leaders standing at podiums in regal outfits, pointing to the stars and claiming to their subjects that Aliens had been found. The swarming mass of creatures roared and slammed their hands together in a violent display of approval, as their ruler proclaimed that they would traverse the Void and meet us. The deep-violet hues of The Light flickered mechanically to provide instructions for their arrival.

The most heartrending part was not that they would arrive and annihilate us, for we had already been destroying each other for generations. It was that the Hedions would arrive to find a species cold and menacing just like them, and they would conclude that all sensible life in the Universe must be this way—that hostility and violence could be presupposed, something inherent in all things. However, we would know in our souls that it wasn’t true, and we would die off with the unrelenting knowledge that we had lost ourselves eons ago, killed off by the festering malady of premonition.

We could see the end long before it came, see ourselves huddled in muddy caves, watching our protective trees dissolve and rain fire on the forests and abandoned cities below. Perhaps we would launch our weapons at them, but they would have no effect because the Hedions were built this way, and we were no more than children attempting a cheap imitation. We would huddle together and wail, not about those lost during the invasion, but at the millions of us that we had culled and betrayed ourselves.

We watched through our Eye as the Hedions launched an incredible armada of space-faring vessels, one of which was nearly as large as their moon. We had spent centuries waiting, preparing, watching. Now we stood—billions of tear-streaked green eyes and long, forlorn faces—staring into the Void, with our arms outstretched, weeping and calling out to the ghost of us, begging it to return so we could die with dignity and grace.

About the Author

David Scott Anderson is an emerging writer with no previous publications. He earned his BA in English from the University of Arizona, and now teaches and works in Tucson. David also studies Computer Science and Astronomy, and these subjects often influence his writing.

Fiddle in the Middle

Dawn Vogel

WYNDETH DIDN’T EXPECT to see Cerys on the bus. She crossed herself and muttered under her breath, imbuing the motion and the words with warding magic, creating an invisible shield between herself and her sister.

The bus rocked, and Cerys half-fell, half-slid into the sideways-facing seat beside Wyndeth, brushing up against the edge of Wyndeth’s ward. “Ouch,” Cerys said, rubbing at her arm. “No hug then?”

“Not unless you’ve renounced your demon-loving ways.”

Cerys smirked. “Never.”

To the outside world, Wyndeth and Cerys Paton couldn’t look any less like sisters unless one of them had been of a different skin color. Wyndeth was blonde and plump, while Cerys had jet black hair and was all sharp angles under layers of black clothing, to Wyndeth’s blindingly white summer dress and shawl. Night and day they were, and in temperament too.

“How goes your crusade, then?” Cerys asked. “Convert any sinners lately?”

Wyndeth pursed her lips, her expression turning even more sour. “The Good Lord tells me to start with those closest to me, which appears to be you.”

“The closest, eh? Go find Eiluned, then. She’s closer to you than I’ll ever be.”

“Have you seen her?”

Cerys shook her head. “She said she’d find us when she was ready.” She sighed. “I’ve half a mind to look for her anyway, but I know that won’t find her any faster.”

“Not unless she’s ready to be found,” Wyndeth said.

The bus stopped, disgorged passengers, and took on new ones. As the bus returned to motion, a young couple, clinging to each other for balance, jostled toward Wyndeth, but Wyndeth’s ward prevented them from making contact with her. The young woman smiled, sheepish, and apologized, no doubt thinking the solid surface she had encountered was Wyndeth’s body.

Wyndeth waved off the young woman’s apology. “Think nothing of it, dearie.”

The couple continued down the bus, taking seats in the middle portion of the bus, and not giving the two witches a second glance.

Silence reigned for a moment. “So what are you doing on the bus?” the two sisters asked one another at the exact same time.

Cerys chuckled at the synchronicity. “Oh, do tell, sister mine.”

“I was here first,” Wyndeth said. “Which means I have the right to know your answer first.”

“Just because you’re older—”

“No. I was on the bus first. You intruded on my space.”

Cerys cast a wan smile at a young man nearby who had been staring at them. Suddenly, he turned his gaze to his phone as though it was the most interesting thing in the world. “Alright, then, just keep your voice down. I’m headed to meet with some like-minded folks. We’re discussing forming a coven, if you must know.”

Wyndeth frowned. If Cerys was thinking toward a coven, that meant other witches serving the forces of darkness in her city. “Where will you meet them?” she asked, trying to keep her tone casual.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Cerys asked. “Your turn now. Why are you on the bus?”

Wyndeth pointed at the bag near her feet. “Market day.”

“Ooh, did you find somewhere that grows organic sage?” Cerys asked, trying to peer into Wyndeth’s bag.

Wyndeth shook the hem of her long white skirt over the top of the bag, concealing the contents. “That’s my business, not yours.”

“Even I need a good source for sage,” Cerys said, crossing her arms over her chest. She sighed deeply, then smiled at Wyndeth. “Listen, sister mine, if you’d like to come along to my coven meeting, we’ll welcome you. You’ll just need to perform a few rituals with us—”

“And swear fealty to your demons,” Wyndeth said. “No thank you, missy. The Good Lord protects me and mine, and I will not forsake him.”

Cerys shrugged. “Well, suit yourself. By the way, the demon fealty is optional.”

The bus stopped again, a mother with two young daughters disembarking. The younger one stared at the witches as her mother gently pushed her toward the exit, but the girl didn’t look away.

“In any case, I’m almost to my stop,” Cerys added. “But we’ll be thinking of you.”

“And I’ll pray for you,” Wyndeth replied.

WYNDETH WOKE TO pounding on her apartment door. The sun was just cresting the horizon, bathing the world in a faint light. Wyndeth pulled herself from bed, and as her feet touched the floor, she was struck with the realization that she hurt.

No, not just hurt. She ached, with a pain of the sort she had never known in her life. Her legs refused to support her as she stood, and she crumpled to the floor, crying out as she did.

“Wyndeth, I know you’re in there,” Cerys shouted.

“Give me a moment, missy,” Wyndeth snapped. “You woke me.” She crawled toward a sturdy backed chair at her desk and used it to pull herself upright, wincing at the creaks and groans from her joints.

Above her desk, the polished glass covering one of the many serene landscape paintings she had collected of the years reflected back a face far more haggard and aged than she was accustomed to seeing. She turned to see if someone else was in her room but saw no one. Turning back to the painting, she prodded gently at her face, and the image reflected there did the same.

“Dear Lord, if I have offended you, show me how to make this right,” she murmured under her breath.

She hobbled toward the doorway to her room and clutched at a ceremonial staff propped against the doorjamb. It was sturdy enough to act as a sort of walking stick, and she made her way across the living room with its assistance.

She barely recognized Cerys when she opened the door. Her sister’s hair had taken on streaks of white amidst the black, her facial features sagged, and she looked as though she might actually have an ounce of fat on her body after all.

“What have you done?” Cerys spat, shoving past Wyndeth without warning.

Wyndeth frowned. Her apartment was warded against other witches entering. Even her sisters. Especially Cerys. “How did you get in here?”

Cerys turned around and frowned at her. “No wards. They’re ... oh dear. Your magic is gone too?”

Wyndeth shook her head. “No, it ... oh. I suppose it must be.”

“But I thought you took mine,” Cerys said.

“I prayed for you, like I said I would, but I’d never ask the Good Lord to take away your powers. Are you sure you haven’t taken mine?”

“I mentioned your name to the demons, but I always do. And I wouldn’t ask them to take your powers either.”

Wyndeth frowned. Cerys might be the consort of the Father of Lies, but she was earnest now. “If not you, then who?”

Cerys shook her head. “I haven’t the faintest idea, sister mine.”

“Then we’d better figure out how to find Eiluned.”

NEITHER WYNDETH NOR Cerys carried a cell phone, and without access to their magic, they had no way of contacting the other if they found a lead. So they travelled the city together in search of their other sister.

They’d each vetoed the first half dozen of the other’s ideas on who to ask about Eiluned’s location, as Wyndeth didn’t trust anyone who would ally themselves with her sister, and Cerys felt the same way about Wyndeth’s compatriots.

“Sven,” Wyndeth suggested after they boarded a bus near Wyndeth’s apartment. “He’s neutral.”

Cerys sighed loudly. “He’s also old and smells like cabbage.”

Wyndeth raised an eyebrow at her sister. “As though you always smell of roses yourself?”

“Nightshade, actually,” Cerys said as they sat side-by-side, just as they had the previous day. She held her wrist up to Wyndeth’s nose. “New perfume.”

Wyndeth wrinkled her nose and jerked away from her sister’s wrist, but the faint scent made its way to her nostrils anyway. “I suppose it could be worse, all things considered.”

“So, where do you figure on finding Sven?” Cerys asked.

“I saw him at the Market last week, but it’s Wednesday, so he’s off work.” Wyndeth thanked the Lord once again that she wasn’t in a position where she had to work a mundane job. “So I suspect he’ll be out in one of the parks near where he lives.”

Cerys shook her head, her lips a firm line. “When we find who did this--”

Wyndeth held up a warning hand to her sister, careful not to make contact with her. “One step at a time, missy.” A hint of a smile crept across her lips. “Though I certainly hope we will get a chance to make them pay for their indiscretions.”

“There’s Sven,” Cerys said, pointing out the window and pulling the cord to notify the driver that they wanted the next stop. “Good witch, bad witch?”

“Lord knows you aren’t the good witch, sister,” Wyndeth said.

“I do my best,” Cerys replied, her tone terse, as they clambered down from the bus.

As they approached Sven, his gaze darted between them. He backed away slowly, his sandaled feet scuffing across the pavement until he reached the edge of the park. With grass beneath his feet, he finally spoke. “I don’t know what you want, Patons, but I don’t want no part of it.”

“We’re looking for Eiluned,” Wyndeth said, trying to will Sven to calm himself. Without her magic, it had no real effect, but she hoped she could at least not alarm him farther.

“Ain’t seen her,” Sven replied, not moving now that he had the park behind him.

“Are you sure, Sven?” Cerys asked.

“Yep, I’m sure. But you could look for her down at the theater, maybe? She’s been teaching some kids to sing.”

Wyndeth and Cerys looked at each other. Wyndeth frowned, but Cerys nodded. “That does sound like her,” Cerys said with a shrug.

The sisters turned to walk away, and Sven called out to them. “Hey, ain’t you gonna leave me with a blessing, Wyndeth?”

Wyndeth spun to snarl at Sven about her missing power, but she caught herself just in time. “Of course, Sven.” She made a quick gesture in the air, meaningless without power behind it. “Go with the Good Lord’s blessing.”

“Thank you, Wyndeth,” Sven replied, bowing his head in her direction.

Cerys shook her head when Wyndeth returned. “Faking your faith? What is this world coming to?”

“Not my faith, just faking the magic. Let’s just go find Eiluned,” Wyndeth said quietly. “The sooner the better.”

CACOPHONOUS SINGING POURED out from the theater, with one fine voice like a thread of light weaving through the mess. The sisters nodded at one another as they walked in.

By the set of Eiluned’s narrow chin, she knew her sisters had arrived without actually seeing them. She shook her head in their direction, her wild red curls bouncing around her face.

Wyndeth took the hint and sat in one of the rows, out of view of the children, though still within their scream-shout-singing range.

Cerys waited in the aisle a while longer, but eventually took a seat on the opposite side of the aisle from Wyndeth and pulled a flask from her bag.

Wyndeth shot her sister a stern look and gestured toward the flask.

“What, you want some too?” Cerys asked, holding it out toward Wyndeth.

“No,” Wyndeth mouthed.

“Suit yourself,” Cerys said, taking a swig.

Finally, Eiluned called a stop to the music, though she still talked to the children for a while longer, before releasing them from her charms, shrieking like banshees. Once the last child had left the theater, Eiluned marched up into the seats and stood between her sisters. “So, it’s come to this, eh?”

“We need your help,” Wyndeth began.

“I know you do,” Eiluned replied, shaking her head. “Gone and lost touch with the source.”

“It’s been stolen,” Cerys said.

Eiluned arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow, then closed her eyes and spread her hands, fingers splayed toward the ground. “So it has,” she said.

“Will you help us?” Wyndeth asked.

“I’ll tell you where it’s gone, but I’m not going to help you get it back,” Eiluned said.

“Why not?” Wyndeth asked.

“Because you’ll fight the whole way, with me trying to smooth things over between you. I’m through being your fiddle in the middle, sisters. I’ll tell you where your magic’s gone, but the two of you are going to have to get it back. Together.”

Wyndeth shot a glance at Cerys, who shrugged in response.

“What other choice do we have?” Cerys asked.

THE BUS TOOK Wyndeth and Cerys to the university campus, and the dowsing rod Eiluned had loaned them pointed to the grassy quadrangle in the center of campus, bedecked with blooming cherry trees all around. Though the day was gloriously sunny and warm for the season, the quad was nearly empty, save for a couple picnicking right in the center of it. The dowsing rod pointed straight at them.

“I’ll take care of this, then,” Cerys said, rolling up her sleeves and marching forward. Before she set foot on the grass, something repelled her, knocking her down and forcing her across the brick sidewalk away from the quad.

Wyndeth walked over to her sister and shook her head. “Your darkness betrays you, missy.” She dropped the dowsing rod on Cerys’s stomach and turned to examine the quad. There were no signs of what was keeping people away from it, but Wyndeth had her suspicions. Wards would knock people down if they tried to enter the quad, just like what had happened to Cerys. But people were walking past and not even giving the lush green field a second look, which told Wyndeth there was deeper magic at work here too—misdirection.

Had she been able to see the magic, she could have located the point where the two intersected and drive a wedge in there. But she had no magical sight with her powers removed, so the best she could do was pray and hope she chose the right spot, lest she be embarrassed like Cerys had been.

Wyndeth reached her hand toward a spot she thought seemed likely to house the divide between the two spells. The resultant jolt of magical electricity told her she had been wrong. At least she’d held her ground, unlike Cerys.

Cerys rose again, watching Wyndeth through narrowed eyes. “Peeling back the layers?”

Wyndeth hesitated, then nodded. “I would be if I could.”

Cerys looked at the couple and shouted. “Hey! Let us in!”

Neither of the people within the quad looked up.

Cerys raised her fists, as though to pound on the outside of the spells.

Wyndeth reached out and grabbed her sister’s arm to stop her from being flung backward again.

And then, a spark.

It was small, barely anything, but for the fraction of an instant when Wyndeth touched Cerys’s arm, before Cerys jerked away, some small drop of magic flared between them.

Cerys looked at Wyndeth’s hand, then rubbed her arm. “Did you feel that?”

Wyndeth nodded. “Light and dark don’t mix.”

“Except when they have to,” Cerys said, holding out her hand.

Wyndeth stared at her sister’s hand, warring between taking it and spurning it. She’d never needed anyone else’s help before, why should she now?

The answer was simple. Because without Cerys, she had nothing. No magic, and no ability to regain her power. Her faith was strong, but it only was the flavor of her magic, not the source.

And the same could be said for Cerys. Her darkness was not where her magic came from, though it colored what she did.

Wyndeth stretched her hand toward Cerys’s, slowly, hesitantly, only making contact through their fingertips at first. The spark danced between them again, growing larger as they allowed more of their hands to touch.

As they finally clasped hands, as they had done when they were girls, with Eiluned between her elder and younger sisters, the spark turned into a flame, engulfing their hands.

Wyndeth wanted to pull away at the sight of it, but as soon as she realized it wasn’t burning her, she held fast.

So did Cerys.

They looked together to the quad and saw the magical workings that protected the place from outside forces. They saw the cracks between the wards and the misdirections.

And they saw the look of surprise on the faces of the young couple.

“We’ll be wanting what you took from us,” Wyndeth said, striding forward and wedging her free hand into one of the cracks.

“And we’ll be wanting to ensure you never steal from us again,” Cerys said, matching her sister’s motions.

With their hands in the cracks, they pulled open a gap in the magic and stepped onto the lush grass of the quad.

The couple had risen from their picnic, the young woman in the lead. The young man called after her, “Rose, don’t.”

Rose jutted out her chin. “You expect us to just give you back your powers? You were squandering them.”

“We were using them for our own purposes,” Wyndeth said. “That’s hardly squandering.”

“But you could do so much more,” Rose said. She reached behind her and took the young man’s hand. Between them, an enormous ball of magical fire bloomed. They raised their joined hands and hurled the spell toward Wyndeth and Cerys.

Wyndeth nearly released Cerys’s hand as they both reacted to the incoming blast with their own warding gestures. Only the connection between their hands allowed their spells to come to fruition, forming a mismatched but mostly effective shielding spell that covered them both against the attack.

The two sisters looked at each other, realizing their near error. Wyndeth could tell that Cerys was thinking the same thoughts as she was. They’d have to go simple, the first spells they ever learned, as children. The ones they both knew almost instinctively. The ones that matched.

“A draining?” Cerys suggested.

“I know just the one,” Wyndeth replied.

Together, Wyndeth and Cerys moved their free hands in a mirror-image unison, sketching out the shape of the spell. They held their shield in place, and as they worked, the edges knitted together more cleanly, blocking every assault from the young couple.

The young man had taken a step backward and was trying to pull Rose along with him. “They’re figuring it out, Rose. We should go.”

“No, David,” Rose said, redoubling her efforts. Through gritted teeth, she growled, “I’m not giving up this much power without a fight.”

“Fight it is, then,” Wyndeth said, completing the last of the gestures of the draining spell. She looked at Cerys and smiled. “Now.”

Wyndeth and Cerys both snapped their fingers, and the sound echoed from every side.

David released his grip on Rose’s hand and ran, but the spell kept him from going far. Rose took the brunt of the effects directly, bathing her form with a crackling silver energy.

Ghostly forms leapt from Rose and David’s bodies and toward the sisters.

Wyndeth smiled at the beam of pure white light, even as she tried to ignore the dark, roiling energy rushing toward Cerys. She wanted to release Cerys’s hand before her magic returned to her, but it was as though their hands were fused together.

The power surged over the sisters, knocking them both flat on their backs.

Wyndeth pulled herself into a sitting position, coughing as she did. The couple was running away, both at a rapid pace now, though Rose glanced back over her shoulder as they did.

Something burned in Wyndeth’s throat, and she raised both her hands to cover her mouth.

Both her hands.

She looked around frantically and saw Cerys sitting beside her. Where her sister’s hair had always been jet black, Cerys now sported a lock of brilliant white that fell to the left side of her face.

Cerys looked at Wyndeth and chuckled.

“What are you laughing about?” Wyndeth asked, picking herself up from the ground. Her magic was back, and her aches and pains were a thing of the past.

“Your hair,” Cerys said. “The black suits you.”

Wyndeth ran her hands through her hair, pulling her white blonde hair in front of her eyes. And there, on her right-hand side, was a streak of black that mirrored Cerys’s white. “Oh.”

“Well, at least there’s something good to come out of this,” Cerys said, twirling her shock of white hair around one of her fingers.

“What’s that?” Wyndeth asked, glaring at her sister.

“At least we didn’t wind up completely combined and looking like Eiluned. Could you imagine being a ginger for the rest of your life?”

Wyndeth chuckled. “I can’t say that I can, missy. Thank the—” She trailed off. Somehow, thanking the Lord didn’t seem like the right thing to do right now. She grinned. “Thank our family’s lucky stars that our magic’s back and not combined like Eiluned.”

“Amen to that,” Cerys said with a chuckle. “That wasn’t so bad after all, now that all’s said and done.”

Wyndeth opened her mouth to disagree, but Cerys was right. Even with their power pulled from their bodies, she and her sister had enough magic to fend off the full force of their combined magic, almost as though the combination itself was stronger than the sources. That was a fascinating train of thought, one she’d have to pursue further. Even if it meant pursuing it with her sister.

“Your coven,” Wyndeth said slowly. “Do you still have room for one more? Just for some experimentation, of course. I won’t renounce the Good Lord.”

Cerys squinted at Wyndeth for a moment, then nodded. “There’s always room for another Paton girl in any coven of mine. And perhaps I can give your Good Lord a try too.”

About the Author

Dawn Vogel’s academic background is in history, so it’s not surprising that much of her fiction is set in earlier times. By day, she edits reports for historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business, co-runs a small press, and tries to find time for writing. Her steampunk adventure series, Brass and Glass, is available from DefCon One Publishing. She is a member of Broad Universe, SFWA, and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her husband, author Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. Visit her at http://historythatneverwas.com.

Ibn and the Djinn

Calie Voorhis

Every momentous journey starts with a party, a feast, a celebration. As a famous poet once said, “Pleasure has six forms: food, drink, clothes, sex, scent and sound.” (Mohammed ibn al-Karim al-Katib al Baghadi)

IBN BATTUTA SWAYED on his camel and cursed the sunlight, regretting his excesses; the throbbing in his head, the scent of stale perfume rising from his robe, the gurgle of an over-sated stomach, and tenderness in his groin—exacerbated by the hard hump—all the way to his stubbed toes, the result of drunken exuberance—and wished, with both brain and body, for the journeying to his new job to end. Fame awaited him in Tanja, not on the road.

The caravan stretched before him and behind him, a line of insects crawling through the endless scorched desert. Sour acid burned his throat. He belched. Two more weeks of scalding heat, privation, then his arrival at the cool confines of the college. His heart yearned to be among the paper and ink. Every ache longed to be soothed in spring-fed water, tended by sweet maidens, lavished with chilled grapes and warm lamb.

The vision of the maidens, doe-eyed and buxom, with ample hips and pear-shaped rears, lulled him into a stupor, so he sat, half-awake, half-asleep, blinking occasionally to find himself still in the desert, as though he floated through a sand ocean, with Tanja many ‘amyal distant.

The second day he rued his situation more than the first, a new layer of soreness and sunburn added from the ride, none of his other needs alleviated in any substantial way. Nothing in his packs offered surcease; wine dried his throat faster, even the figs unpalatable with the grit of sand. Tanja and the job he yearned for, had worked for so hard; days and nights writing, reading, editing, remained as distant as the occasional mirages.

Day after day passed in the same way, up before sunrise, lurching through endless sand, sleeping, or trying to, in the heat of noon with the camel his sole shade, then back to the trek through the twilight, until the cold of night stopped the caravan, and every evening, he went to bed, if such the sand could be called, without even reading material.

Nothing broke the monotony of the ocean. No djinn appeared with a wish, no rocs floated overhead, just the tracks of vipers marred the sand and mundane conversation his only contact.

On the twelfth day, bandits attacked, black figures leaping over the dunes, scimitars drawn. Ibn sat up straight, knowing the customary routine—a few exchanged threats, a demand for goods—already prepared just in case. Then, a return to the trek—so close to Tanja he expected the spires of the university towers to emerge over the next set of dunes.

He grabbed his pen from his belt, balanced a sheet of paper on the camel’s hump, and started recording the event for posterity, hoping one day to work it into a lecture, nonchalantly of course, and with himself in a greater heroic role rather than mere scribe.

Wait—what was happening? A guard crumpled to the sand, then another. The bandits whistled, shrieked, and advanced. Ibn found himself in the middle of the fray. The camel, with more presence of mind, dodged, sending the sky above whirling as he fought for balance. The caravan’s guards tried to fend off the raiders, but were outnumbered.

“I’m a scholar,” he shouted at the approaching man, waving his pen and shoving the piece of paper down his robe. “See?”

A blade whistled too close. “Not the hands. I need my hands.” Panic shot through his spine.

The bandit didn’t listen, severing the left pack. There went the rest of his supply of wine. Ibn grabbed the reins and kicked the beast forward. She shook her head, and locked her knees. Ibn hammered his heels into her ribs. She didn’t respond.

The scimitar sliced a piece of his robe, which fluttered down to the ground. Ibn untied the right pack of figs with fumbling fingers, and tossed it at the bandit.

“Take it.”

“Of course,” the bandit replied, moving closer. “I was going to anyway.” He laughed, the action causing his mustache to wrinkle like a caterpillar and raised his scimitar. “We won’t be leaving any witnesses.”

Ibn jerked the reins. The camel, damned beast, snorted, flinging spit.

Shrieks filled the air. The men of the caravan fell, unable to stand the onslaught, unprepared for an actual fight. Women screamed, held tight in bandits’ arms. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck. He was going to die here, in the midst of nowhere.

Ibn grabbed his penknife and lunged over the hump with trembling hands. The bandit didn’t even move, Ibn’s reach falling short, the tiny knife no match for the large curved sword, notched and nicked from past raids.

The scimitar flashed in the air, blade catching the sun.

He did the only thing he could. He stabbed the camel. She whirled her head around with a wide-eyed snort of surprise, jolted upright, and ran.

Ibn clung to her hump, the reins fallen from his hand. Heart racing, he watched the bandits pursue, one reaching within a hand span, before the camel raced ahead. He let the beast have her way, trusting she knew the route. She settled after the initial run into a loping gait, swaying him back and forth, the nausea of the attack making him almost seasick. They’d be at the oasis soon, he prayed. The camel quieted into a steady walk, long legs cutting through the sand, the warmth of her seeping through.

The hole in his robe flapped in the wind, and the thumping of his heart kept him awake, for a while, until his nerves calmed, and he once again fell asleep, slumped forward with the scent of the ripe beast tickling his nose and floating into his dreams. The feast of his sleep tasted of camel hair and grit.

A howling woke him. He blinked, wiped his eyes with the edge of his turban. The world grayed; sand obscured the air, falling like rain in a thin haze of dust. He cleared his throat, tried to spit.

He twisted. He was alone, unable to see more than the length of his outstretched arm, wandering in a formless void, barely able to make out the sky from the ground.

The camel kept plodding, lurching forward up dunes and sliding down, yet still the sandstorm persevered.

The gloom persisted, never sank into night, never dawned into day. He ran out of water, and tossed the skin behind him, fear prickling him, longing for the cured figs in his now gone packs.

The camel slumped after some undeterminable, yet eternal, amount of time; sagged to her knees, then keeled over on her side, trapping his leg underneath. He wormed out, digging through the sand, throat even more parched by his exercise, and knew, deep in his bones, that death stalked him. Once his leg was free, he sat, his turban edge tucked over his mouth, sand encrusting his nostrils, thinking. Finally, he bent over, slit the camel’s vein with the sharp knife and drank the warm, congealing, salty fluid, giving thanks to the Beloved and praying for the camel. The fluid revived him, even as it increased his thirst.

Once satiated, he staggered to his feet, and with slow determination, strode forth. The storm had to have an edge, a boundary, and he would find it.

Ibn Battuta plodded on, still dreaming of willing virgins, or better yet, experienced matrons, until his legs gave out. Then he crawled, until darkness swept him down into her path.

HE AWOKE ON a great plain, the skin of his face itchy and tight, sand in every crevice and pore, clogging his nose, and worming its way down his throat. The blazing ball of fire in the sky seared the sand white, sent spikes of pain and floating dots through his vision.

There—in the distance—his heart hammered at the sight, a viridian green spot shone. An oasis, the Beloved be thanked. The brave camel had almost taken him there.

He forced himself upright, reeled forward. Hope made him run.

With every step the oasis retreated.

If he’d had tears to spare, he would’ve wept. Nothing but a mirage. Still, he kept crawling, forward the only way to move, determination driving him on. His knees bled from sharp stones, his palms were lacerated with a thousand tiny scratches.

His hand slipped on something smooth. He lurched, halted, caught by the new sensation, and dug into the pebbles and sand. A glass bottle, stoppered, with liquid, or smoke, or something that flowed like either, spiraled inside. The blue glass caught the sun, sent pools of water to dance on the plain.

With a feeling of fatality, and still hoping perhaps this was a bottle of water forgotten by a former traveler, he tore the seal and pulled the cork. Before he could raise the flask to his lips, the maiden of his dreams emerged, billowing out of smoke and puffs of dust, swirling into coherence in front of him, tilted almond eyes cast down demurely. Her skin glowed, sunlight caressing her bare arms; her breasts, covered in a jeweled abaya of the finest silk, swelled high. She advanced, hips swaying. Saliva gathered in the dry cavern of his mouth.

Never had he come across something like this, not in reality, if this half-alive stretched skin self was truly still real.

“Master,” she said in a low voice, so he had to strain to hear her. “What is your wish?” Her voice was soft, feminine, and the memory of every other woman he’d ever known faded.

He gaped. Her beauty caught in his chest. It took him a few tries before he could speak, a good thing as his body prevented him from letting the first thoughts out of his head.

“There’s a catch,” he said. There always was. Djinn were dangerous, left-over from the first war against the Beloved. Still, she was beautiful, so small and petite, he could not believe her truly deadly, at the worst just impish.

“One wish.” She inclined toward him, the perfume of her skin rising to tickle his nose with a scent of sun-warmed roses.

“Then this is easy, with my one wish, I will ask for more wishes.” He wanted to touch her skin, to feel if she was silky and cool, or powdery and hot.

“One wish,” she repeated. He shivered, knowing she meant the exact words.

He could be rich, sultan of an emirate, with nobles under his command, women to tend his every request. If he asked for riches, how would she twist his desire? Would he end up an old, pendulous man, unable to enjoy women, the tastes of fruit sallow in his mouth?

He spat to clear his throat, yearning for liquid. “Do you have water?”

“Is that your wish?”

“No. Just a hope.”

She continued to stare at him, a scar bisecting her left cheek. Where it should have marred her perfection, it enhanced.

“I could ask for you,” he said. “Bind you to my service with the power of the djinn mine to command.” His pulse raced. Infinite power, under his control. He would travel over space in a blink, the world his to wander in, his to conquer.

The djinn smiled. Ibn retreated. In the expression that should have been joy, he saw contained rage, and a pulsing of fire, long trapped, waiting for a chance to strike.

“That would be unwise,” she said. The flames of her shimmered the desert, noticeable even through the rising heat on the plain.

Ibn wanted to sit, to curl up in shade, and think. His body shook with weariness, his head spun from lack of water, a dearth of nourishment, and he wanted his room at Tanja.

“Decide,” she said, reaching out a hand to caress his cheek. Her slim fingers rasped against the stubble of his unshaven beard, ground fine sand into his skin, as she pressed the essence of the desert into him. “Soon.” He backed away from her banked fires.

“Do you impose a time limit on all your favors? Your bed partners must find you disconcerting.”

She swung her hair at him. A thousand razor blades embedded in the long tresses sliced at his skin, tore apart the fraying fabric of his robe, leaving thin white lines that bubbled red drops. The pain followed. Ibn gasped, choking. No more humor. The creature was implacable as the desert, and her beauty had begun to terrify him.

“If I freed you, what would you do?”

The djinn’s eyes blasted red. “Continue the war against humanity,” she said. The words echoed across the plain.

“Direct, aren’t you,” Ibn replied. “Couldn’t lie or anything.”

“No. Unlike humans,” the word a curse in her lips, “the djinn never lie, never prevaricate.”

The creature would feel no gratitude. Anything he asked for she would distort. Everything he tried would be an error. He was going to die out here, in the midst of this desolation, never having reached Tanja, never having bathed again. There would be no more dusky women.

“I could wish,” he started. The djinn stepped even closer to him, so near he smelled the carnage of her breath, the heat of her skin burning at his soul. “You back in your bottle.”

She paled, the fire retreating. “Please,” she said, a whisper barely heard over the rustle of the afternoon wind. “I’ll do anything. Don’t make me go back to that prison, to eternal loneliness.”

Pity for her started to creep into his head. He shook the emotion away.

She lifted her arms up, tilted the perfect oval of a face back. The sky darkened. A cool breeze shivered the hairs on his arm, ruffled through his hair with a hint of moisture.

Lightning crackled, rain pattered down, big fat drops.

Ibn tilted his face to the sky and drank the rain, each drop of precipitation refreshing his soul. He caught the rain in cupped hands and gulped all he could.

“No.” He ran his hands through his hair and wiped sand from his arms, delighting in the refreshment, the coolness of his soaked robe.

She glared. “I can give you all your dreams, just let me be free. One wish. I will grant you whatever you want, no tricks, no fakeries.” She tempted him. “Let me show you.”

The world spun at the crisp jerk of her head, black hair cascaded against the gray sky, reaching out to surround him with warmth, the texture of rose petals brushing over his entire body.

A shriek of startled laughter. He was immersed in a warm pool, hands rubbing his back, while women tended to his feet. A multitude, in all the shapes and sizes of his preferences. Short girls and matronly tall women, round and plump, skinny and boyish with sharp hips and pert bosoms, surrounded him, chattering, offering him wine, honeyed figs, peppery strips of lamb.

He ate, gulping down chunks, and washed the meat down with gulps of dry white wine tasting like peaches. He shoved lumps into his mouth, grabbing at a handful of figs for his pocket, lurching for a bottle.

“No,” he said, shouting the word, though it tore at him.

The djinn screamed in frustration. The women dissolved, skin tearing away in strips; a red mist filled the air, until it too faded. The figs fell through his fingers, the bottle of wine evaporated though he tried to clutch it close.

“Anything,” she said. Her pointed teeth snapped at him, neck elongating like a viperous snake. “Perhaps you’d prefer this, then.” Her fingers clutched his arm, sharp nails digging deep into his skin. He lurched back.

Again, her hair covered him in a veil. The skin around his eyes tightened, the world blurred into a rush of motion, landscapes spinning by, coalescing into brief images. Faster and faster they raced, protected in the lee of her hair. The air heated around him.

Ibn and the Djinn rose now, higher and higher, flames peeling at his flesh, the heat of the desert channeled from the being with him, till he screamed from the pain.

“Give me what I want, and I’ll stop.” The burning ceased for a moment, blessed coolness washing like water over his skin. “I’ll give you the world, just give me your wish and set me free.”

She showed him then, all the delights of the cities, the countrysides. He saw himself a rich man, a harem filled with women, children dancing in evening courtyards. He was famous, a scholar, world-traveled, and his books filled a library. All he had to do was wish for it all--for everything, and his dreams would come true.

For a moment, temptation overwhelmed Ibn, his first son’s hand tight in his, his wives clustered about. This could be his.

“So I thrive. The rest of humanity?”

Her face was implacable and he read in her eyes a long and painful death.

No. He could not, would not, even for his future. The creature’s dangers had to be bottled, corked, stopped. She could not be set free, no matter what it gained him.

“No.”

The word choked in his throat at her scowl. His neck tightened, his chest struggled to expand, fought to force air from his lungs.

He pushed at the djinn. Her fire ate at his palms; her hair sliced his skin with a million slivers.

“No. I wish you back.” The words tore his throat.

They were on the plain, the afternoon sky stretching overhead in a bowl of intense blue. The fire dissipated.

The djinn howled, rage flowing from her lungs. She shrank, tumbling in a turmoil of fog, sucked down into a void. With a last scream, she fell into the bottle.

Ibn replaced the stopper, his hand shaking, and sat down heavy on the ground.

He sighed. Everything could have been his. The women, the wealth. Now all he had was the endless desert.

Perhaps he could trick her. He started to draw the plug.

No. She must stay. He heaved himself to his feet, shielded his eyes from the sun, and began walking. At least her rain had quenched his thirst and his stomach was full of lamb. And he had the memories of the women, all he could ever want, to keep him company on the journey. He tucked the bottle into his sash and trudged on through the sand.

About the Author

Calie Voorhis is an internationally published short-story writer and poet.  A fanatic of the fantastic in fiction, she’s an alumnae of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.

REVIEW

The Bone Shard Daughter

by Andrea Stewart

Stephen Reid Case

WITH 2020 AND everything it’s brought, the need for good epic fantasy and richly imagined secondary worlds to get lost within seems greater than ever. In the first book of the Drowning Empire series, Andrea Stewart offers exactly that with the expanse of the Phoenix Empire, stretching across the Endless Sea in a shifting archipelago of islands. There are clear echoes of Earthsea here, but both the history and geography are more troubled. For one thing, these islands drift with the seasons and occasionally—as the opening scenes of the novel make horrifically clear—sink without warning, carrying entire cities down with them.

Early on in The Bone Shard Daughter, we learn that the inhabitants of the Empire were not the first to dwell on the islands. The Sukai Dynasty, which has ruled the Phoenix Empire for generations by the novel’s start, gained power by defeating the mysterious Alanga, and since then rulers have claimed their rule prevents the Alangas’ return. It’s not clear what this return would look like, though across the Empire Alanga artifacts have been waking. The price the inhabitants of the Empire pay for the Sukai protection is the bone tax, a trepanning ritual that all children endure in which a shard of skull is removed to send to the capital island. There the Emperor uses the shards to power constructs: animal-like creatures that function as spies, soldiers, or bureaucrats. These constructs keep the Empire running and are puppets powered by the bone donor’s life force. A shard might sit in storage for years, but when it’s eventually used to power a construct, the donor, even a hundred miles away, will sicken as their life is slowly drained.

Against this background, there is growing unrest in the Empire. Besides awakening artifacts and sinking islands, the Emperor has cut himself off from the people, isolating himself in the palace and ruling solely through his bone shard constructs. On the outer islands people grumble and rebellion simmers. Into this landscape Stewart places her three protagonists like chess pieces on the board: Lin, daughter of the Emperor, who lacks her memories and must fight to retrieve them while she learns the bone shard magic; Jovis, a smuggler turned folk-hero who becomes a reluctant symbol of rebellion while searching the islands for his kidnapped wife; and Ramali, who falls in love with a governor’s daughter while she works to improve the lives of the oppressed farmers of her island. Throughout the tightly structured arch of the novel’s narrative, these three lives will intersect as the Empire convulses.

The Bone Shard Daughter is a satisfying debut. Stewart has laid out both the large-scale stakes (survival of the Empire) alongside the specific motivations of her characters: Ramali, driven by love and a sense of social justice, Jovis by the need to rescue his wife, and Lin with the desire for knowledge that will allow her survival. By the book’s end things have been ratcheted to a satisfying conclusion that still leaves plenty unanswered questions for the next volume. In particular Lin’s story builds through careful, secretive beginnings, to growing violence, and ultimately to a single wrenching confrontation with the Emperor. The suddenness and savagery of this final encounter was one of the book’s most effective payoffs and sets the stage for the next phase of events in the tottering Empire.

For all that worked in this novel though, I wanted more. The background for the novel’s events—the Endless Sea, the drifting islands, the cultures that dwelt there, the legends of the vanished Alanga—felt more told than actually shown in this debut. As effectively as the characters and circumstances were arrayed, it felt that they played out on a static, almost cutout background. Traveling the sea, for instance, was too easy, and every island felt like every other island. We were told as readers there were different cultures among the islands of the Empire, but I didn’t feel it. The depth is there though, waiting just below the surface. Stewart has wisely left many unexplained questions, such as the true nature of the islands themselves and secrets hidden within the sea, and as she continues to establish this world and reveal it to us as readers I hope she’ll dive into these depths.

REVIEW

10 Billion

A graphic novel by Marcu Knoesen,

based on an original story by John Michael Greer

Illustrated by Darryl Knickrehm

Frank Kaminski

PEOPLE IN THE modern industrial world tend to believe either that our current civilization is destined to advance forever, or that it’s imminently doomed to collapse. That is a longtime lament of author John Michael Greer, who rejects both views. The former is fallacious, he argues, because it ignores the fact that infinite growth of anything is impossible, whereas the latter flouts the overwhelming body of historical evidence showing that civilizations end gradually, not abruptly. In a 2013 blog post titled “The Next 10 Billion Years,” Greer outlined an alternative scenario in which our current society neither grows forever nor crashes spectacularly, but slowly runs its course. A brilliant critique of present-day human hubris, this scenario reveals our civilization to be subject to the same natural processes as all civilizations that have come before it.

10 Billion vividly reimagines Greer’s blog post as a graphic novel. Told and illustrated in an immersive comic book style, it gives potent visual form to the original text. Marcu Knoesen’s adaptation is completely faithful, using Greer’s essay as an almost verbatim script, but adds some elements out of narrative necessity. For example, Greer’s piece, being more of a scenario than a story, mostly lacks characters and interpersonal conflicts, hence Knoesen’s creation of determined billionaire businessman Mr. Davon. He’s bent on achieving immortality by transferring his consciousness into an artificial intelligence his company is developing. However, progress on this breakthrough has stalled, and Davon has decided to turn to the counsel of a famed oracle known as “the Master,” whose predictions have been astoundingly accurate. Upon journeying to the Master’s remote forest dwelling, Davon is permitted a glimpse into an unexpected, almost incomprehensibly strange future.

The divination ceremony takes place around a fire. The wizened Master sits in a lotus pose while robed priestesses sprinkle spiritual herbs into the fire. As its flames grow, they send vast smoke tendrils into the sky, and the Master into an otherworldly trance. Some of the book’s most captivating images show the Master entering into his prophetic state. As his mouth begins to gape and his eyes roll backward, his shift in consciousness is conveyed by illustrator Darryl Knickrehm through canted and low-angle perspectives, outward-rushing radial lines and washes of bright color.

As with Greer’s original scenario, the Master’s prophecy consists of 10 snapshots, each peering 10 times further into the future than the one before. The first one looks 10 years ahead. Consistent with Greer’s mantra that civilizational decline happens gradually, the world seems little-changed. Global population has peaked at around eight percent above what it is today. Oil companies have managed to keep liquid fuel production steady despite the relentless march of depletion. The ever-rising costs of weather-related disasters continue to pound the economy. As living conditions keep worsening across the developed world, politicians and the media continue insisting emptily that a return to prosperity is around the corner. Proponents of fusion power, artificial intelligence, interstellar migration and other supposed saviors of our modern way of life are no closer to realizing their dreams. Neither are those whose hopes for a better future lie in the prospect of a global cataclysm capable of wiping out the evils of industrial civilization.

Davon is initially unimpressed. “This is seeing the future?” he asks contemptuously, figuring he could have predicted as much. He demands the Master look further, whereupon we’re allowed a glimpse at life a century from now. The illustrations and captions here do a great job of showing how incremental changes pile up over time. We see that wars, pandemics and famines have ravaged the world; and that public health, civic order and the human population have all plummeted. There are images of hospitals and service stations turned to ruin, famous landmarks half-submerged by rising waters, shantytowns littered throughout the streets of forsaken cities and hillsides blanketed with headstones. The businessman now turns from dismissive to rapacious. Leaning in toward the Master with a conspiratorial grin—like Satan trying to tempt a monk—he exults, “A crisis is always an opportunity for those who take it!”

But the Master’s next set of predictions puts an end to Davon’s scheming. Davon is dismayed to learn that by the 3020s, the troubles of the early 22nd century will have been not a temporary crisis to be profited from, but one phase of a permanent decline. Not only will artificial intelligence never be invented, but the entire technological regime of our time will have long since disappeared in the course of a bitter dark age. A greatly reduced human population will be living lives very different from ours on a planet that hearkens back to the tropical, nearly ice-free Earth of 50 million years ago. Their technologies will reappropriate the remains of ours in ingenious ways.

Desperate for reassurance that the modern world will eventually return, Davon implores the Master to keep looking into the future. The Master does so, but his next few rounds of prophecies only further dispirit Davon. Ten millennia from now, industrial civilization has vanished from memory and five subsequent global civilizations have come and gone. One hundred millennia from now, the climate impacts initiated in our time have finally played out and humanity is on its 79th global civilization, which is no closer to fusion power, artificial intelligence or interstellar travel than we are today. A million years from now, humans live in aerostat cities on an ice age Earth. With the passing of more millions of years, humanity’s influence lessens and a series of non-human sentient species inherits the Earth. Billions of years hence, Earth succumbs to the expanding sun, and the remnants of her demise seed life elsewhere.

The wonders to behold in this grand exercise in speculative future history are a sci-fi illustrator’s delight, and you can tell Knickrehm is having a great time with them. The movie director, writer, magazine editor and illustrator is a sci-fi aficionado who has aptly branded himself “Creator of the Fantastic.” Greer doesn’t go into detail about the physical appearances of the various life forms he imagines succeeding modern-day humans, leaving Knickrehm’s imagination to run wild. Knickrehm dreams up creatures that look as distant in time from us as the alien-looking beings that inhabited the warm, shallow seas of the early Cambrian.

As fascinating as these windows into a possible far future are, they aren’t what 10 Billion is really about. What the book is truly about is the psychological journey of a man whose belief system is dashed by a look into the future. When Davon first meets with the Master, he does so fully believing in the conventional wisdom of our time. He believes technological “progress” to be impervious to ecological limits. He thinks nature is obliged to give humans all the resources we need to keep “advancing.” Most grandiosely of all, he assumes human prowess to be so indomitable as to render the very destruction of Earth by our sun a mere inconvenience, one to be skirted by simply growing out of our earthly existence and spreading across the galaxy. All these assumptions are upended.

Knoesen could just as easily have had his main character be a doomsayer as an acolyte of faith in progress. This individual would go in expecting details of a near-term apocalypse of epic proportions, only to be disappointed. To this person, the oracle’s prophecies would reveal that while human activity is indeed having grave impacts on the planet, we flatter ourselves as a species to think that we’re mighty enough to destroy her. The doomsayer would be dumbfounded to learn of the innumerable ways in which humanity will come to flourish in the wake of our current civilization and its legacy of ecological impacts. The insignificance of industrial civilization would stand out just as sharply as in the existing version of the story. And the chief lesson also would be the same: namely, that since we can’t count on some almighty force—be it progress or apocalypse—to determine the future for us, we should all actively work to bring about the best possible future for our descendants.

Though I applaud the idea of using the graphic novel format to spread Greer’s ideas to a wider audience, I should note that those who aren’t already familiar with Greer’s work won’t be able to appreciate this book quite as fully as those who are. Like the blog post on which it’s based, 10 Billion mentions some important terms and concepts without defining or explaining them, since they had already been explored in depth in previous blog entries. Those who have been reading Greer for some time will immediately grasp these elements; those who haven’t, won’t.

Fortunately, this situation doesn’t arise often enough to affect the entire book. And Knickrehm’s fine illustrations are exemplary in their ability to convey the gist of a complex or unfamiliar concept through simple imagery. For these reasons, I recommend 10 Billion as an accessible introduction to Greer’s extensive body of scholarly writings on the future of industrial civilization.

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MYTHIC

A Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine

ISSUE # 16 SUMMER 2021

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