MYTHIC

A SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY MAGAZINE

ISSUE #17 | SUMMER 2021

Editor’s Note

Setbacks

Shaun Kilgore

WITH THIS, THE seventeenth issue of MYTHIC, I will admit that running a magazine is a difficult business. I have this sort of love/hate relationship with the whole project. Anyone who has paid attention, has noted that I’ve been on the brink of closing the magazine down more than once in the last year. I’ve encountered more than a few setbacks, some of them of my own making, others completely beyond my control. I have made mistakes and miscalulations here and there that have added to the stresses. I am sailing this whole ship all by myself and there are still so many things left to learn as I still—despite myself—try to keep MYTHIC going and gain more readership.

One of the biggest blunders so far has been running a crowdfunding campaign to help raise author pay and realizing that the whole effort was shortsighted. My desire for MYTHIC to become a professional market, which by standards set by groups like the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, would be 8 cents a words for original fiction. I managed to put out one issue at 4 cents a word from the money gained from the Kickstarter, but realized that wouldn’t go far at all before I would have to drop back to 1 cent a word.

So, now, MYTHIC #17: Summer 2021, marks a return to the that orignal rate. The question still remains whether I will be able to find a way raise the fund needed to get the author compensation where I really want it.

THE OTHER THING that happened this year, was I started it by announcing after coming off a hiatus that the magazine would be going down to two issues a year, or a bi-annual publication. (This was after seriously toying with the idea of putting out smaller issues every two months and doing so online with subscribers receiving eBook and print issues or possibly yearly compilations of the year’s issues.) Despite all of the uncertainty that conveyed, I recently decided to return MYTHIC to its original, quarterly, incarnation.

So here we are, dear readers.

Now I will shut my trap and get out of the way so you can get to the business of reading the great stories I’ve selected for this seventeenth issue of MYTHIC: A Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine.

Curator of Curiosities

Fija Callaghan

THE GREAT THING about a city like London is you can buy just about anything. A signed first edition of Alice in Wonderland? Fred Astaire’s shoes? A charm to keep your husband from spending too much time with his secretary? Someone, somewhere, will have it or know someone who does.

I sip my coffee and look at my weekly order list. A cure for a brain tumour, a 1968 Limoges gravy dish, and true love. I shake my head. Love spells are good for one thing and one thing only: revenge. If you want someone to truly suffer, to scream and choke in the cage of their own heart, love spells can be a versatile and often overlooked tool. For anything else they’re a powder keg. But no matter how many times I warn them, the customer is always right.

The tumour is tricky, but not impossible. I make a call to a woman in New Orleans who will do it for the price of a stolen guitar and a little graveyard dirt. The gravy dish is already on its way from one of my regulars who trades at Portobello Road sometimes. A pretty successful week, all in all, and it’s only Tuesday.

The bell above the door jingles and a man shuffles in — short, roundish, somewhere between thirty and fifty, a whisper of hair that could be white or pale blonde. He brings a smell with him of earl grey tea and violets. It reminds me of my gran.

He hovers in the doorway, taking in the bouquet of bric-a-brac that lines the walls — teacups of every shape and colour, crystal balls, a life-size Elvis cutout, a parlour chair taken from the Ritz Paris. A jar of rusted coffin nails. A pure white feather too large for any bird, catching the light elegantly under a glass cloche.

The man clears his throat nervously.

“Yeah?” I say, a tad more sharply than I intend. There’s something about him I don’t like.

“Er... yes. Hello. Are you Mr. Jacob Downs?”

I tilt my forehead towards the front of the shop. “Says so on the door.” Jacob Downs, Curator of Curiosities. Thought of it myself.

He steps into the shop. There isn’t much room. “Yes. Good. Yes. I’m looking for… for… that is—”

I lean back in my chair and prop my feet up on the register. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

He hesitates, then clears his throat again. “I’m in need of a… um… an enhancement.”

“Uh-huh?” It’s those damn films. Suddenly everyone thinks that with enough money they can be Captain America.

“I need…” he looks down at his hands. He’s wearing a chunky signet ring, and it slides around like it’s too big for him. “I need to be able to walk through walls.”

Oof.

“Have a date in the ladies’ toilets, do you?” I’m being petty. “I’ll look into it. Give me your name and a number where I can reach you.” I toss a notepad across the desk. He pulls out his own pen and scribbles down a rush of numbers and Simon Burroughs. Could be a fake name. I don’t really care.

After he goes I send a few emails. I get a quick response with a telephone number in it, and I make a call. They call me back. I call Mr. Burroughs. We agree on a down payment to fly a gentleman from Moscow to London for a meeting, and a larger payment for my agent's fee. Then it’s out of my hands.

Done.

It’s maybe a week later that I open up my shop, coffee cup in hand, and notice that something is off. It takes me a moment to put my finger on it — the smell of violets, hanging here and there like stray cobwebs.

I turn on all the lights and check the entrance. Some months back a grateful client set up a thief-hex on the front door. It’s still there.

My coffee’s getting cold. I look around the dust-choked room. I know my shop like a captain knows his ship and it doesn’t take me long to find it.

The feather.

Its pedestal is empty under the glass cloche. Now I’m getting mad. I had to jump through a lot of hoops for that one. One of my suppliers got it from a sheik in Marrakech who, allegedly, won it from the angel Uriel himself in a game of blackjack. I think back to my meeting with shy, squirrelly Simon Burroughs. The way he looked around the shop. Scouting.

How did he know? Did someone send him? Or did he just come back to try out his new parlour trick?

It doesn’t matter. No one steals from me.

I pour myself a glass of whiskey and spend the rest of the day doing what I do best: making calls. Moscow. Marrakech. The dame who runs Treadwell’s. I go for a walk to clear my head. It’s starting to rain.

The streetlights are turning on when I return. My desk is covered in this week’s paperwork. I’m still waiting to hear back about the guitar. I sit down and start lining up accounts for a minute or two before deciding I’d really rather just drink more whiskey.

A floorboard creaks, just under my tapestry from the Yuan dynasty. It’s quiet, but it’s enough. I didn’t think he’d be back so soon.

He steps into the crowded office space, holding the feather. My feather. He’s running his thumb along the vane, looking like a pleased little boy who’s about to squash a caterpillar.

“Hello again, Jacob.”

I hate that he’s making me nervous. “Do you even know what that thing can do?” I ask.

“I do. I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time. And now I’d like you to write something for me.”

“Yeah? Why would I do that?”

He pulls a gun out of his jacket. I don’t know what kind it is. It looks bigger than in the films.

He puts the feather down on my desk. It's already been cut at an angle. He reaches back into his jacket and takes out a folded piece of paper — plain, lined school paper with the holes torn — and a bottle of ink. “I wasn’t sure if you had any.”

“That’s real thoughtful.”

“Give me your finger.”

I briefly consider obliging him, then look at the gun and decide it’s not worth it. Instead I extend my hand, palm up. He slashes across it quick.

“Into the ink, if you please.”

I’m liking this less and less every moment. I unscrew the lid and hold my hand over the open mouth. One, two, three drops. They don’t make any sound.

“Now, Jacob Downs. Where is my daughter?”

Huh?

“I don’t know—”

“On the page, please.”

I dip the quill tip into the ink, feeling oddly violated on behalf of its snow-white surface. Swish it around a little. Touch it to the paper.

I am pleasantly surprised to see the words, I don’t know where your daughter is. It’s the truth.

He scowls at me. “You knew her. Sweet girl. Liked the Ramones.”

I open my mouth to argue again when a memory tugs at me. A Ramones T-shirt. Probably authentic. It was too big for her.

I dip the pen again. In the Thames.

A peculiar tangle of expressions crosses his face — shock, guilt, relief.

She was running. She was afraid. The feather is moving again. It’s actually kind of heavy. Murky red flows down the nib.

She came here after he pushed her down the stairs. Had I known that? I don’t remember.

“That’s enough,” he says sharply. His voice is a little unsteady.

She wanted me to change her face so that he wouldn’t recognize her. I took it and put it inside a mirror. I remember that mirror. A little vintage compact shaped like a seashell. I didn’t know what would happen if the mirror broke.

But she was in such a hurry that she didn’t change her clothes. That damn T-shirt. She ran into him in the dark on her way to King’s Cross—

“Stop!”

She tried to come back here. She thought she’d be safe. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. I’m probably about to get shot right here in my own shop, but I can’t stop writing. Maybe it needs to come out. Maybe I needed it.

But she didn’t make it. I heard her scream. Then I saw her fall. She hit the pavement and something snapped.

Next thing I know the gun is right at my chest and I’m trying but this thing won’t stop and my hand is bleeding a lot—

And the man ran into the shadows without looking back. My hand stills.

Simon’s breathing hard, even though he’s just been standing there and I’ve been the one doing all the work. “Put it down,” he says.

I put the feather down.

He walks behind my chair and I feel the floor creak as he kneels down. There’s something rotten in his breath mixing with the violets and the earl grey tea. He puts his mouth close to my ear.

“Think you’re bloody clever, Jacob?” he hisses. “You don’t know anything. I loved her. She was my world. I only came to talk to her, to tell her to come home. She’d be there right now if you hadn’t gotten in the way—”

I throw my head back so hard that my chair falls over. His nose crumples like tin foil. It hurts the back of my head a lot more than I expected. I splay over the floor like a sack of potatoes while he fumbles backwards, clutching his bleeding face and yelling things that might be words or might just be angry noises. It’s hard to tell over the roaring in my ears.

The gun lies abandoned on the floor. I grab it while he’s still mucking about with his nose, and stand up shakily. I’m breathing hard. Geez, it’s heavy. I’ve never held a gun before.

Simon looks at me and tries to laugh, but it comes out like a rattle. “You think you can hurt me?” he says, but he sounds nervous. “Those bullets will pass right through me. I can walk out of here anytime I want.”

The man has a point. Is he intangible now? I can’t tell. I keep my eyes on him, but at the edge of my vision I see the white feather, smattered with black and red, lying forgotten on the desk.

I’m pretty quick, or I get lucky because he’s hurt and everything. I take the quill and stab it hard into his neck.

Then, as I knew he would, he reaches up with a yell and pulls it out. He has it in his hand a heartbeat or two before he realizes his mistake.

I use the hand that doesn’t have a gun in it to right up my office chair. I gesture to it with the gun so he doesn’t see my hand shake. “Sit.”

He glares at me, but he sits.

“On the page, please.”

He dips the bloody nib into the ink. Swishes it around. Touches it to the paper.

My daughter’s name was Bethany. She was a really good kid. She didn’t party or swear or anything. You don’t see good kids like that anymore.

That day she told me she wanted to go study abroad in America. She was going to leave me. I got angry at her. When I came home from work she wasn’t there.

I went out looking for her. I couldn’t see that well in the dark but I knew it was her because of that shirt she loved so much. She ran away and I ran after her, just to talk. She started yelling and I pushed her. I think she hit her head. I heard something crack. Then I heard footsteps. When I went back later she was gone.

Truth is, the fall hadn’t been bad. The girl would have been fine if she hadn’t landed on the compact in her pocket. The mirror cracked down the middle.

After her father ran off into the night I called a friend, and obviously by friend I mean someone who owed me a favour. We carried her through the dark to the bank of the Thames and threw her in.

The feather lies at the edge of the desk in a growing puddle of blood and ink. Simon and I both know that I can’t keep him here. I keep the gun pointed at him while he slips away into nothingness, just beyond the edges of a shelf covered in old Vanity Fair.

I sit down. The chair’s a bit wobbly now. I call Moscow again. Then I hear the door rustle. Bloody hell, now what?

There’s a kid standing in the doorway—not kid in a cute way but the kind that probably spends his nights nicking six-packs in Brixton. He’s got three eyebrow rings and is being worn by an oversized denim jacket.

“’Scuse me,” he says, “Jacob Downs?” Londoner accent.

“Says so on the door.”

“Right,” he shuts it behind him. “Sorry to bovver you, Sir, but I think you’re the only one that can ’elp me.”

Alright, then. Back to work.

About the Author

FIJA CALLAGHAN is an Irish-Canadian writer and artist who believes in embracing the magic of everyday moments. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Bandit Fiction, Nightingale & Sparrow, The Caterpillar, Eucalyptus & Rose Magazine, Dodging the Rain Poetry Journal, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, Steam Ticket, littledeathlit, Crow & Cross Keys, and Wyldblood Magazine. She lives between the seaside and the stars on a diet of dark chocolate and stories.

The Conch

Ron Mucklestone

In February 2021, the media announced that a conch shell that had been unearthed in France’s Marsoulas Cave in 1931 had just been blown for the first time in an estimated 18,000 years. The following is a work of fiction based on that event. The names of participants in the event have been changed in the spirit of fiction.

1

DR. JACQUES GOULAIS, head of the department of anthropology at the University of Paris and chief archaeologist at Marsoulas Cave painstakingly sifted through the deeply buried detritus at the cave’s entrance. For the past three years, he and his team had found a veritable treasure trove of remnants from the time of the last ice age when humans frequented the cave. Many boxes bulged with the bone fragments of animals and birds, bits of charcoal, and flint chips from hand-made blades. And the best part was that no matter how deep they dig, the remnants of human habitation keep coming. Life was good.

Yves, one of Goulais’ Ph.D. students, was carefully scraping away at the sandy soil near the exact centre of the cave’s entrance. Based on the dating of recent finds from that layer of strata, he was working at a depth that corresponded to a date of 16,000 BC. The tiny trowel that he was using made a rough scraping sound. Hmmm, thought Yves to himself, the pitch is too high for a rock. It must be something less dense. A shell, perhaps?

Yves saw a thin, slightly curved line of white, just a few millimetres wide, poking out of the sand. Looks like I was right. Better call the professor. Shells at this depth are pretty rare.

“Dr. Goulais, I think you’ll want to see this!” Yves hollered, as Goulais was a good seven metres away and was talking to one of the Master’s students.

“Ah, Yves, I knew you would find something interesting. You seem to have a knack for being in the right place.”

“I don’t know about that, Sir, and it might not be particularly significant, but any shell at this depth will likely pique your curiosity.”

Goulais gently walked over to his prized student to take a look.

“Quite right! Alright, Yves, you know what to do. Carefully follow the contours of the shell. With some luck it will be more than a small fragment.”

Gradually Yves did as Dr. Goulais had instructed. The edge of the shell continued to reveal itself. Six centimetres… eight… ten… it was hard to believe.

“Everybody, put down your tools and come over here. It looks like Yves has hit the jackpot”, Dr. Goulais said to the crew, barely containing his excitement.

Three hours later, Yves pulled a complete conch shell out of its sandy bed. Everybody was stunned into silence as if they could not believe their own eyes.

“It’s positively gigantic!” exclaimed Joan, one of the Master’s students. This was her first summer dig.

“Hand me that metre stick”, commanded Dr. Goulais, pointing to a corner of the cave entrance. Putting it beside the shell, he counted out. “Thirty centimetres long. Quick, somebody, get a camera. The shell may look solid, but in case it is riddled with cracks, I want a photo of it while it is still in one piece. Everyone, we’ll be drinking Chardonnay tonight. This is a cause for celebration!”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Dr. Goulais had a thoroughly cleaned and washed conch shell on his make-shift desk. He pondered it closely in the company of his students.

Goulais dominated the conversation, as was his habit. “A conch shell from this time period is a unique find. The upside of this is the attention that it will attract. The downside, of course, is having no previous examples to draw from. We know precious little about these cave-dwellers from 18,000 years ago, other than the fact that they were terribly primitive despite their spectacular artistic talent. What could have been the shell’s use? Any suggestions?”

“There can’t have been a lot of uses for a huge conch shell, could there?” enquired Suzanne, the only female Ph.D. student in the group. “I mean, people back then would not have used it for decorative purposes. They probably had to shift residence a lot and decoration is a hall-mark of civilization.”

“True enough, Suzanne”, agreed Goulais, “that narrows things down somewhat. That limits us down to practical uses. Ideas, anyone?”

“Well, if we ignore the couple of holes on the side – which could have been made accidentally and therefore retired it as a useful object – it would make a splendid bowl. And being a rare item, it may have had some ceremonial use, like for collecting the blood of a specially slaughtered animal or oblations in some religious ritual” suggested Yves.

“You are likely onto something there, Yves”, interrupted Goulais, “though I suspect that animal sacrifice is only performed by people who have domesticated animals; not the hunter-gatherer types that the Magdelenian people undoubtedly were. But yes, it would make a good bowl for holding liquids or fine particles of solids, like sand or powder.”

Joan, a Master’s student, joined in the conversation. “What about a musical instrument? Don’t people use conches as horns? I remember studying it in one of my anthropology courses. They are used like that all over the world. To this day, the Polynesian peoples and Hindus in India use conches as a horn. They are simple to make, too.”

“Interesting, interesting, and I suppose technically feasible too”, replied Goulais. “The question is, of course, whether these ancient forebears of modern humans had even the concept of music. Remember, we are talking about extremely primitive people… little better than apes, to tell the truth.”

“Don’t you think that view is a bit extreme, Sir?” retorted Yves, the only student who dared to question Dr. Goulais’s conjecture. “I mean, look at the Magdalenian art. Surely, people who could produce works of such beauty and anatomical accuracy had music as well, no?”

“No necessarily, Yves. You see, the cave art is likely the result of close observation and careful imitation. Music is more abstract… of course, unless it is imitating birdsongs or some other sound. Let’s be careful not to project civilized tastes and capabilities onto primitives. The battle for public acceptance of the theory of evolution was hard won and took several decades. Evolution has been scientifically proven time and time again. Progress is a reality, not a theory! Let us not slip backwards into fanciful, romantic notions of musical primitives. The primitives of today have undoubtedly progressed far beyond the primitives of the last ice age. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I am certain that this conch could not possibly have been a horn. It must have been some ceremonial vessel. That must now be clearly evident to everyone.”

And so, the discussion ended.

Its fate and function decided, the conch was sent to its new home in the Toulouse Museum, where it was displayed as a ceremonial vessel for the next 90 years.

2

DR. JUSTIN COUSTEAU, and his team of researchers eagerly looked at the latest 3D digital model of the Marsoulas conch shell. Everyone was jittering with excitement. “I am sure that you all agree that there is no longer a shadow of a doubt”, spoke Cousteau in measured, confident tones, “This shell was definitely created to be a musical instrument. Just look at the punctures and the way that pieces were chipped away. And the waxy substance around the apex – that was probably used to attach some sort of mouthpiece like has been observed in ancient conch-shell horns in places such as Syria and New Zealand. This instrument is a masterpiece of craftsmanship as well as musicianship.”

“This is truly the finding of a lifetime”, said his assistant Marie Delorme. “And what a grand instrument, especially for its time! This is no little whistle made out of a bird’s thighbone like most instruments that have been found from paleolithic times. It must have been the ‘king of musical instruments’ in its day -- like the pipe organ was in France during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.”

“I feel tingling all over when I look at this image”, stated Giselle, a more junior researcher. The rest of the team looked at her and collectively rolled their eyes for making such an un-scientific observation.

“Now that we are certain that it is a musical instrument, what should be done next?” enquired Marie.

“I’ve already put quite a bit of thought to that, Marie, since I was already fairly confident that this was indeed a musical instrument. Of course, we need first to provide a thorough report to Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société de Toulouse. After that, we need to find somebody to try it out. What’s the use of discovering a musical instrument if we can’t hear the instrument being played?”

The whole team beamed at Dr. Cousteau’s suggestion.

“Do you have anybody in mind to try playing the conch?” piped in Robert, who was feeling left out of the conversation up to this point.

“I do, Robert. After a bit of thought, I can think of nobody better than Xavier Boivin, musicologist at our own university. He and I have been friends for quite a few years.”

“Oh, professor Boivin… isn’t he the one who is researching atonal music and plays jazz?” enquired Giselle, trying to make the others forget her “touchy-feely” comment from a moment earlier.

“The same, Giselle”, replied Justin. “But more importantly, he is a master at playing wind instruments. If anybody can make this shell ‘sing’, it is Xavier. “It may take a while to get all the administrative nonsense out of the way, but the sooner we get Xavier to play the conch the happier I will be. This may sound terribly sentimental, but I have always felt that a musical instrument needs to be played. And this poor conch has not been played for 18,000 years and has been languishing in a museum unrecognized for another 90 years. Even though it is an inanimate object, I feel pity for this long-neglected conch.”

The team nodded in agreement. Even though they would have been embarrassed to say the same words that Dr. Cousteau just had, they shared his feelings.

ONE MONTH WEEKS later, professors Xavier Boivin and Justin Cousteau met on the street outside a recording studio in downtown Toulouse. Justin had a large rather squarish-looking briefcase in one hand. Both were giddy with excitement but tried to downplay it to give each other the impression that this was serious academic work.

“Justin, I must congratulate you on this ancient musical find. This must practically be a dream come true for you.”

“I can hardly believe that this is happening, Xavier. I mean, we always want to be at the centre of some great discovery or creator of some new great theory, but there is always a part of us that thinks that it will always just be a fantasy or a day-dream.”

“Well, your day-dream has already come true; and today it is my turn. I can hardly wait to feel that ancient instrument in my hands and put it to my mouth. I have heard plenty of recordings of conch-shells being played in Hindu temples in India. I wonder how this French one will compare…”

“Let’s go inside and give it a try, Xavier. Even though it is very safe in its case, I don’t like to keep it outside for long. Such an ancient instrument is worthy of respect, if not reverence.”

“I won’t disagree with you on that point, my friend.”

The two stepped into the studio and were greeted just inside by Jean-Pierre, the owner of the recording studio. After a couple minutes of animated discussion, Jean-Pierre led Xavier and Justin into the vacant studio.

“I suppose that I should have one of my employees do the microphone set-up, the testing and actual recording, but I guess I am too selfish”, admitted Jean-Pierre, “I want to be a part of history as much as the two of you do. Please bear with me a moment while I check up on my board. Feel free to go into the recording booth and make yourselves comfortable.”

The two professors walked towards the booth. Justin put the large briefcase on a small table that was just outside the booth and opened it. Xavier watched eagerly as the lid opened, revealing an unimpressive dun-coloured shell. It certainly lacked the visual appeal of a new shell, but Xavier was neither surprised nor deterred by this fact. He closely observed the two holes on the side of the columella (outer flange) and the hole near the apex.

“Can I pick it up?” Xavier enquired, as if Justin were the owner of the ancient instrument. Justin nodded in assent.

Xavier tenderly picked the shell up, felt its weight, and turned it around slowly in his hands. Turning to Justin, he said, “It feels lighter than one would expect, no?” Again, Justin nodded in assent, as if he did not want to disturb the silence prior to the blowing of the conch. Xavier then handed over the shell to Justin and fished a box out of the hip-pocket of the jacket that he was wearing. “I brought a variety of trumpet and flugelhorn and French horn mouth-pieces with me, just to see which would fit best”, he explained Justin, who was watching attentively. The first two mouth-pieces were too wide to fit into the hole near the apex of the shell. The third one, being substantially narrower, sank about 2 cm into the shell. It fit snugly. “This is the one”, declared Xavier.

Justin walked out of the booth and grabbed Jean-Pierre’s attention. “It looks like we are ready to give it a try”, he shouted joyfully to the sound engineer. Jean-Pierre gave him a “thumbs-up” in response and put his headphones on.

Justin re-entered the booth and closed the door. Looking at Xavier with anticipation, he said, “Looks like this is it. Are you ready?”

“Probably as ready as I will ever be, playing an instrument that was made during the middle of the last ice-age”, replied Jean-Pierre.

Taking his time to feel the shell until it felt comfortable in his hands, Xavier felt for the two holes in the shell. He took a deep breath and blew. The horn sounded. Blowing a second time, he covered one of the holes. The horn sounded a semitone lower. He blew a third time, this time covering both holes with his fingers. The pitch of the horn was almost exactly a semitone lower again.

Justin looked out through the big window of the booth at Jean-Pierre. “I got them!”, he exclaimed. “By the sound of it, I’d say you played a D, a C sharp and a C. This one’s for the history books!”

Xavier looked at Justin. “Well, what did you think?” he sheepishly enquired. He was comparing his playing to the sonorous recordings that he had heard of conch-playing in Hindu temples.

“Between you and me, I’m not sure it is quite up to the standards of Dizzie Gillespie or Maynard Ferguson”, replied Justin with a smile, “but under the circumstances, I think you did fine”.

The two of them had a good laugh together and joined Jean-Pierre for a glass of wine at a nearby café.

3

TWO WEEKS AFTER the recording session, Justin and Xavier took a road trip to the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, with the conch and box of mouthpieces in tow. Within an hour of setting out they had entered the Parc naturel régional des Pyrénées Ariégeoises. Before another hour passed, Xavier pulled the car to a stop along the side of the local road at the top of a ridge. The sun shone brightly through a clear sky dotted with only a few small cumulus clouds. The two professors got out of the car, with their boxes in hand and looked to the west. To their left loomed the wall of mountains that formed the border between France and Spain, and to their right was a range of wooded foothills. Between the two was a valley of breathtaking beauty despite the subdued winter colours. The professor stood side by side mesmerized by the scenery laid out before them.

“Magnificent site, Xavier. How did you find it?”

“My parents used to take me here when I was a boy. My mother is Basque. She grew up in a farm-house not far from here. There’s just something about this place that says ‘home’ to me.”

“Well, if your mother is Basque, who knows how many generations of her ancestors have lived in these hills?”

“It’s funny you say that, Justin. And maybe my imagination gets carried away sometime… but ever since this whole conch thing got started, I have openly wondered if the people who painted the walls of Marsoulas Cave and buried this shell all those thousands of years ago may have been Basque.”

“What a fanciful idea, Xavier. How on Earth could you rationally think that? Languages are constantly evolving. Why, even French as we know it is at best 15 centuries old and this conch was buried for what… 180 centuries?”

“I know, I know. But not all languages change at the same rate. Some linguists have declared Basque to be perhaps the last remaining Ice Age languages.”

“What do they mean by that? How could one possibly come to that conclusion? There is no writing in the Marsoulas Cave and even if there was, it would certainly be undecipherable.”

“Yes, of course, Justin. But a language is more than just writing. The Basque vocabulary is itself incredibly ancient. For example, the Basque word for ‘ceiling’ literally means ‘the roof of the cave’. And the Basque word for ‘knife’ literally means ‘the stone that cuts’. When was the last time that the Basques likely lived in caves and used stone tools? Have not the linguists come to a rational conclusion based on the evidence?”

Justin was left speechless by this revelation. It was so astounding that it made him feel uncomfortable, as if the weight of 18,000 years of history just fell on his shoulders. All he could think to say was “Xavier Boivin, you never cease to amaze me with your trivia.”

Xavier sensed the need to change the subject. “An instrument like this is meant to be played out of doors in the midst of nature’s glory, don’t you agree?” he enquired as he turned to face Justin.

“Undoubtedly”, replied Justin, practically drinking in the glorious scenery through his eyes.

“The added benefit is the natural acoustics of this area. I have sometimes taken students here to enjoy the echoes. On occasion, I have heard echoes of ten seconds or more… under the right conditions, of course”, Xavier added, making sure not to guarantee an amazing echo on this particular day.

“It looks like we picked the perfect day acoustically, Justin. I am sure that any sound will carry incredibly well. Let’s try it!”

The two of them clapped their hands and sang phrases from various songs, but each time the sounds died down after about five seconds.

“Well, that was disappointing”, Justin said to Xavier.

“Since we have driven all the way here, it would be a shame not to blow the conch”, replied Xavier.

“Shall we, then?” asked Justin, rather impatiently.

“Absolutely.”

Xavier took out the ancient conch and fixed the mouthpiece to it. Taking a full breath, he pulled the shell up to his mouth and blew long and hard. He could feel the shell vibrate in his hands as he blew. As he ran out of wind, he pulled the conch down from his lips and listened. The sound reverberated against the mountains and the foothills repeatedly. Justin made a mental count of seconds.

… twenty-eight… twenty-nine… thirty… thirty-one…

Finally, the echoing stopped. Justin and Xavier looked at each other in wonder.

“That was amazing!” exclaimed Justin. “The sound of the conch is so much grander here than in the recording studio. I can’t believe the difference!”

“I have never heard an echo like that in these hills”, stated Xavier somewhat shaken. “I had no idea that the particular note of this conch would be so perfectly suited to the natural acoustics this locality. We really need to record this.”

“Agreed. I brought along a parabolic microphone just in case. I sometimes like to make nature recordings. Just give me a moment. And you can blow again.”

After a moment of fumbling around, Justin had his microphone and recording equipment set up. Turning to Jean-Michael, he playfully said, “now it’s time for the encore!”

Once again, Xavier took a breath and played a single note as long as he could. As the sound from the conch died, the note carried on among the hills for a half-minute or more. He imagined the sound echoing along the valley all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

“I got it, Xavier… listen to this!”

Justin played back the recording and both listened intently. It was exceptionally good for a field recording. After a few minutes of replaying the recording they decided to do one more “take”.

For the third time, Xavier put the conch to his lips and blew…

4

THE CROWD AT the entrance of the Marsoulas Cave swelled. People were packed together so tightly that there was hardly room for anybody to breathe. The air was electric with excitement, as there was no day before like this one: the priest from beyond the sea was expected any moment with a special gift for the local Magdelenians – ‘The People of the Hills’ as they called themselves.

Basajaun, the local shaman, nervously waited with the crowd. He was better informed about the big event than anyone in the crowd, yet he still knew so little. Chief Palben was summoned by the coastal chiefs to come as quickly as possible due to a visitor from across the sea. Even Palben did not know what an overseas visitor wants – or so he told Basajaun. And when was the last time that there had been a visitor from over the sea? Judging by the stories told by the elders around the fires late at night it had been many generations. Whatever it is, it must be big, he thought to himself. What would this overseas priest look like? Will he be able to speak Basque like all the peoples south of the tundra? Or do peoples across the sea speak a different language? Basajaun was bursting with questions – but his spirit guides had not been forthright with answers when he asked them about the visitor and his mission. The fleet-footed messenger came about an hour ago, he continued to think, they must be coming soon.

Suddenly the tone of the crowd changed from the chaotic din of an excited but unfocused crowd to the unified roar of an important event. Ah, they have arrived, Basajaun confidently said to himself.

A moment later, the crowd parted for Chief Palben. Behind him walked three strange men. Two of the men wore familiar styled and coloured clothes to the local style – they must be from the coast, thought Basajaun – and between the two strangers walked a man wearing a bright red robe, a bright yellow shawl and bright red leather shoes. This man was tall and had jet black hair. Outlandish and odd, was Basajaun’s first impression, is this what a foreign priest looks like?

Chief Palben walked purposefully through the crowd and smiled majestically at everyone as he walked past them. He was in a great mood. He walked up to Basajaun, who was standing at the lip of the cave, and nodded at him. Turning around to face the crowd, the chief spoke.

“People of the Hills, it is a relief to see you all again. My mind was ever on your welfare during the twelve days that I was away. You all look well, so I assume that the hunting has been good.” He paused. “You may remember that our Elders tell stories of wise ones who live beyond the Western Sea and that once in a long time they come to our hills to share some special news or teaching. I am here to confirm what we all know -- that our Elders’ stories are true. For I have seen with my eyes the boat that has carried people over the endless waves of the ocean. And we have in our midst a priest from the land across the sea. His name is Arzhider.”

At this point, Chief Palben motioned to the priest to come forward.

Arzhider ascended to the mouth of the cave. Silence descended upon the congregation. He spoke in strangely accented, but fluent, Basque. “People of the Hills”, he began, “you are dear to my people, the People of the Great Island in the Sea. We share a common language and an ancient history. Our priests and seers have seen that the great culture and language of the Basques will last in these hills and in the lofty mountains for millennia to come. The peoples in all the neighbouring lands will, in the course of time, fall to invaders and lose their language. But you, the people of these hills and mountains, will stand firm. And it is to you that my people entrust with a special gift, for we know that one day the great civilization on my island will fall and the island itself will sink below the waves. This is not a gift for you to enjoy, but one to preserve.

“Our seers understand the subtleties and secrets of the great circle of time. And the gift I bring from them to you is for the future. I will show it to you tomorrow. But I need your help. To make the gift-giving complete, I need from among you a young girl. She must be bright and brave and truthful. And above all else, she must be humble. Your grandmothers are the great watchers and judges of character; I am sure that they will find the right girl to help me. Find that girl and bring her here at noon tomorrow. You are all welcome to attend. Now I ask you to leave in peace and may you be blessed by the Seven Planets.”

AT NOON THE NEXT day, the villagers came to the cave. The congregation was led by three grandmothers and a girl. They presented the girl to Arzhider. She looked about ten years old. Her long hair was chestnut brown and had been combed and pleated neatly. She wore a white deerskin dress with matching white suede shoes. Around her neck and around the crown of her head were strings of multicoloured stone beads. The girl’s eyes were downcast, at the feet of the priest as she was brought to him. She reminded Arzhider of his own daughter. He saw that she was nervous.

“What is your name, my dear?”, he asked her.

The girl looked straight into his eyes. “Itzaris”, she replied.

“Itzaris”, the priest repeated. “A lovely name. In my land there was once a princess named Itzaris.”

The girl smiled ever so slightly in reply.

“No need to be afraid of me, dear, I am not here to harm you. Rather, I am here to honour you.”

By this time, a large crowd had gathered, along with Chief Palben. Arzhider and Basajaun stepped aside to let the chief take charge. After briefly welcoming everybody and thanking them for coming, the chief requested Arzhider to speak.

“People of the Hills, we are here today to mark a special occasion. Yesterday I told you about the wheel of time and how the gift of my people is connected to time. Now I shall explain further. We live in a time when the gods are coming closer to us. Our shamans and priests hear the gods’ voices more clearly. People walk on the path that the gods request of us. But the wheel of time never stops. And the time will come when the gods seem to be more remote. Miracles will become rare. We will lose our path. And this is not just for the people of these hills, or my island. It will be for the whole world.

“People of the Hills, it may be hard to imagine, but the day will come when people will doubt that the gods are real. Instead, they will believe that only the world is real. But they will not respect the world. Instead of seeing the world as it really is – a living gift from the gods for us to cherish and preserve wisely for ourselves and all future generations – these benighted people of future times will imagine the world to be dead and that its gifts are mere objects to be used only for satisfying their selfish desires. As we all know, desires are like a fire which cannot be quenched by feeding it. But these people will have forgotten this simple truth that even small children understand. They will hardly deserve to be called human beings, for they will disrespect and rape and pillage the world in order to try to satisfy themselves. But it will all be in vain, for their desires will be as endless as the sky.

“Why am I telling you these things that you will never see, nor your children, or their children? Because I have been entrusted by the gods and the priesthood of my island to give you the sacred tool to stop the madness that will engulf the people of 18,000 years in the future. The gods can see that you are pure and true of heart. People who will never give up the language and ways of the Basque. You have been chosen to bear a great responsibility because the gods know that you, of all people, are up to the task.

“Your grandmothers have selected Itzaris to be my assistant in this important ceremony. And out of gratitude for her service, the gods bless her to be the mother of all the Basque people in the far future. Sooner or later each of your blood lines will come to an end. But her bloodline will flow true and free like a mighty river that neither dries up in the summer drought nor freezes in the winter cold. Make sure you honour this girl, for, young as she may be, always remember that she is the mother of your people’s future.

“Now it is time to show you what the gods have chosen to bring from the land beyond your sea. Behold, all of you.” Arzhider picked up the immense conch shell and held it high above his head for all to see. The crowd was silent in awe. “This great shell is a symbol of time – see how it has grown in a swirl, like the seasons that follow a cycle. But it is not just a shell. This conch has been turned into a horn to be blown. Yet, you will not ever hear it make a sound. That is for other ears to hear.

“In the dark days of the far-away future, the conch will be blown. We do not clearly know by whom; the gods have only revealed that the horn-blower will be a descendent of the child Itzaris who stands before us now. But we clearly know what the blowing of the conch will do. The mighty god Saturn has two giant sons: their names are Hard Limits and Wisdom. When the conch is blown and thrice these hills reverberate with its tone, the two sons of Saturn will awake and will do their work on Earth. For in that faraway time, the lesson that the people will need to learn the most is how to live within the hard limits that nature gives us. And only through the realization of those limits will wisdom dawn on them. And only then will the slow path back towards the gods begin anew.

“I now ask Itzaris, future mother of your people, to help me say prayers to Saturn and to bury this unblown conch at the entrance of this holy cave.”

Gently, the priest asked Itzaris and Basajaun to join him in the ceremony. Itzaris dutifully repeated the prayers that Arzhider said, phrase by phrase, and after Basajaun dug a large hole to accommodate the conch, she lowered the conch shell into the hole and buried it with her two small hands. Basajaun and Arzhider took turns saying elaborate prayers to Saturn and to Mother Earth to leave the shell’s tomb undisturbed, to the goddess of the cave and to the ancestors to guard the shell, and to the god of illusion to slowly obliterate the entrance of the cave from the eyes and minds of mankind until the time is ripe for the conch to be unearthed and blown.

Arzhider stood up and said some final words to the congregation. “My work is done, good People of the Hills. Tomorrow I shall head back to the sea and return to my island. I thank you for your service and shall daily pray for your welfare. And may you ever protect the conch that will save the world.”

5

DEEP ON THE BOTTOM of the Atlantic Ocean a vast being stirred. Slowly it opened its eyes. It asked itself: Did I hear a horn?

Another vast being opened its eyes. Hard Limits, are you awake? Did you hear the horn?

Yes, I did, little brother. Thrice. It is the horn that Father gave to the Atlanteans.

Then the time has come for us to do our work?

Indeed, Wisdom, it has. But you can nap for a little while. Mankind will need at least 100 years of experiencing the lessons that I must teach before they are ready and willing to listen to what you teach.

Hard Limits, will humans ever learn? Over the past million years, we have had to give our teachings to them five times. This will now be the sixth.

Yes, we had hoped that the last ice age would really make an impression on them. And, for a time, it seemed that they had finally learned their lesson. But humans’ memories are so short. I guess it comes with being mortal. All we can do is play our role as best we can and let the Three-in-One God determine what must be done and let Father Saturn, Grandfather Sun and all our uncles and aunts in the heavens figure out when it must be done. All we can do is hope, little brother, and trust in the wisdom of our elders.

About the Author

RON MUCKLESTONE is a Canadian of Scottish descent who resides in the province of Ontario. He has had a lifelong fondness for myths and legends (primarily Hindu, Celtic, Indigenous and Nordic) and naturally gravitates towards stories that touch on the spooky or weird side of life. In the past few years he has rekindled his childhood passion for writing short stories, be they mythic, deindustrial, or vintage solar system tales. 

The Jester of Arathos

Erica Ciko Campell

BY THE TIME I came of age, most of Demiurge Marduk’s spawn had fled back to the infinite night: Only ten of them remained, haunting the boundless, vacant white citadels of Arathos, which would later become the Ever-Forbidden City of Raizalarian legend. They called themselves the Agamyr in those days, though men would later know them as the Black Gods when they faded into the annals of history.

But when Myra’s nightmare tendrils softened into the visage of a beautiful young redhead for the very first time, I was there to wipe the slime off her pale rosy cheeks and tie up her gown. And long before Hermestra’s golden curls were braided tightly with the tendrils of a thousand undead armies, I was bathing her feet every night in a marble basin brimming with the finest herbs a worm like me could gather.

They created me with the tenderness of their own flesh and bone—or so they whispered to guilt me when I took too long to fetch their wine casks. Still, I was but a lowly half-breed, neither man nor god, and my entire existence was nothing but a finite, crumbling morsel between razor-sharp claws they constantly forced me to file and polish. I was cursed with the “honor” of dwelling in their forbidden city as their humble servant until the streams of time ran dry, with all the hopeless longing that immortality brought, but none of the revelry. A wraith drowning in eternal banality in the shadow of their glory, tasked with sweeping the dust off the marble at their never-ending grand macabre dance.

Naturally, like all servants, I spent most of my days imagining what it would feel like to rest upon those elegant leaf-clad golden thrones rather than to scrub them.

THEY CALLED ME a Syndragorean, the byproduct of the blood of Agamyr smeared through the swamp pits outside the city’s walls, and that’s why my skin was pallid and grey instead of brimming with infernal radiance like theirs. But my face was forever painted ghastly white, with gaping black triangles swallowing up my eyes. In the far future, my style would be known by the Grim Kings as the corpse paint of the court jester. But in those days, the Agamyr forced those colors upon me to help me seamlessly disappear into their sprawling marble bedchambers and checkered ballroom floors.

But as much as desperately as they tried to stop me from standing out, they could never snuff the fire of my flowing auburn hair, like a nebula cutting through the blackness of their sick and broken kingdom: A blazing beacon of defiance in their black-and-white world where empty laughter rang forever over those soulless white monoliths. It was how they always found me, whenever I perched atop those broken-fanged towers on the rare chance I got a moment to myself.

Oh, that sprawling citadel of intertwining black archways woven past decadent, bleeding fountains of gold: It reminded me of something I could not place, something far beyond the bounds of memory, older than the sweet reprieve of death or the constricting tendrils of time.

Why should I have to carry this burden, while everyone else in all of Arathos drinks, and sings, and fucks each other into raw oblivion in a night of debauchery that never ends? I wondered with wistful, violent longing, staring off into the nothingness of the void far above—this was in the time before stars, after all—and wishing I could slip back into it forever. Why was I the only one?

Even though I was pathetically, amusingly young by Agamyrian standards, it seemed the weight of the ages bore down on my heart even more relentlessly than that thick and dripping blackness far above. If I was their spawn, and they were the children of the Starless Demiurge himself, did that make me his son by extension? Would my wild, free night at the infernal ball ever come?

I pondered it all until my head began to swim with the unmistakable, primal panic of hunger. I remembered the berries I’d stashed away, which I’d foraged earlier that evening from the vines woven between the sprawling gates of Arathos. They stained my fingers purple as I freed them from my pocket, greedily shoving them past my painted black lips, the closest thing I’d ever taste to wine.

I hurried because they’d whip me if they caught me eating the purple ones. It was the color of impurity and sickness, they said: The imprint of rot and pain on the realm of the gods, a stain from a dimension far worse than here. But despite the fearmongering lies their silver tongues wove, I savored my treat as if it was the last one in all reality.

I felt better when I ate them, stronger. It was almost as if the freedom of the Outer Worlds bled into them since they’d prospered and grown at the city gates for so long, and by eating them, I absorbed all their power. It felt sublime, almost euphoric, and for the glorious eternity of a moment I tasted what it would feel like if there were stars in the sky instead of that clawing, infinite hollowness.

But then my ears suddenly twitched at the sound of footsteps ascending the throat of the tower at my back, and the illusion of liberty slipped away as quickly as the last drop of juice down the bottom of my throat when I realized who it was: Hermestra the Reaper, Thorned Hand of Mercy—as curt, and distant, and stuffy as always.

“Morg, what are you doing all the way up here again?” She demanded, her golden curls cascading down past her sublimely thin neck. “Valystis, he’s been searching for you since moonrise.” It was a figure of speech, of course. In Arathos, it was always twilight.

What is it this time? I felt like snapping, but instead I simply purred in that singsong jester’s whisper: “Why?”

“His masks haven’t been polished in aeons, he said: And Myra’s gala of seven faces is mere hours away!”

“Ah,” I somehow managed to choke out peacefully, although hate was frothing up at the bottom of my throat, boiling seamlessly into an acrid hunger that the berries could never even begin to quench.

Ah, hunger—like servitude, it was another one of the countless gifts the Agamyr had bestowed upon me when they carved me from the planet’s filth-bogged swamps. While they themselves had no need for sustenance beyond wine and pain, I myself craved a very different type of nourishment: One that the berries and fruits I foraged from the city’s numerous gardens and courtyards could never touch.

One that I longed for every time one of the Agamyr commanded me to lick their boots or scrub their floors.

“Morg?” Hermestra asked again, far less patience echoing off her multi-dimensional hiss of a voice this time.

“I’ll . . . See to it right away, Mercy,” I finally answered, wondering who would polish my masks when my hour of redemption finally came—imagining her broken and splayed open, kneeling at my feet as a living footrest, pleading for a reprieve that would never come.

TO THE SLOBBERING masses of the far future, he was remembered as Valystis the Torturer, Piercer of Dimensions: But in Old Arathos, the only thing he ever truly pierced was my sanity when he called upon me for these mindless, menial tasks—night, after night, after night . . .

We stood alone in his chamber of white marble veined with gold-kissed black, flooded with swooping canopy beds and gently-trickling black pools running down from the heart of the mountain. The ceiling was as empty and vacuous as the sky outside, and the head of the chamber’s master.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to go back to that darkness again, not as a servant, but as a king, as they were . . . As I always should have been.

But on that night, of course, I was but a humble jester, and I had no idea what was in store for myself and the Torturer both. I focused diligently on polishing a black and white mask with triangular slabs where eyes should have been, which uncannily mirrored the makeup I wore for so long that it melted seamlessly into my own face.

I was so tired of it . . . I wanted to go back so badly that it always felt like I was dreaming, even when I was awake: But back to where? I wondered, staring out the window at the white bricks stacked wrongly, forming obelisks that seemed to both pierce the sky and inject their strangeness all the way down into the heart of the world all at once.

“Morg?” Valystis’s static drawl stabbed directly into the heart of my dark subconscious, chasing my solace to the realms of distant memory. “You seem . . . distracted. Not all there, if I daresay.”

“I never have been,” I shrugged back, stoic as a sad clown should always be. My hands trembled violently as I regretfully continued to polish the flawless ceramic surface of my overlord’s false face, lovingly caressing every contour, re-learning every crevice as if I hadn’t already traced each one a thousand times.

I didn’t dare raise the relic to my face, but still, I couldn’t help but long to know what it would feel like to try it on. To try him on.

His intoxicating scent, like the ripest, bloodiest berries mixed with fog on a cold summer’s day, was slowly making me wonder how his soft black locks would feel cascading down over my own shoulders . . . How electrifying the embrace of his night-black cloak would be, caressing my own neck rather than licking my face as I crawled in its coattails . . . I needed to know how it would feel to drink, and fuck, and revel night after night after night, until the streams of time ran dry.

“I wonder if it would be like the berries . . .” I murmured, clutching the mask so viciously that my knuckles went even more ghastly white than usual. A vile and relentless ringing was now tearing through my ears, and the entire world seemed to warp and shiver, as if it were crackling down to its most basic particles and assimilating into my own blood.

As always, there was more than a twinge of pity in the Black God’s tone as he demanded, “What in Black Eternity are you muttering about this time, Morg?” He feigned civility, to be sure, but from the way he flexed his blackened gauntlet as if ready to lash out at any second, I knew he had no patience for a creature like me—none of them did, save for Myra, and I suspect it was only because in her temptress form, she too knew the pain of wearing a crown of red in a world of black and white.

What did I have to lose? I drank in his infernal glory, sizing him up, wondering if I could take him. He was twice my height at the very least, and his Terrorkinetic prowess was known and feared all the way to the bleeding edges of the Outer Worlds and back again. My chances of success were slim to none, but if I failed, what would I miss but a bed of stones at the feet of those who spent their days dreaming up new ways to crush me? I had the gift of life, to be sure, and unlike the Agamyr, my heart pounded wildly with raw excitement, and I was capable of shedding tears and dripping real blood upon the dead black marble—but what was a life spent in gilded chains without a little excitement?

They may have had everything I ever wanted, but there was one thing that clung to the inside of my chest that the Agamyr would never know—both a plague and a blessing, a nightmare and the Demiurge’s desolate embrace all in one—hunger.

“Eating you.” I finished curtly. “The berries made me stronger, so I wonder if you will too.”

At long last, I snapped the mask in two with my trembling fingers and shoving its jagged, gleaming edge straight into the Agamyr’s belly, ruthlessly raking it upward, tearing through the nothingness where his organs should have been until he fell to his knees, and my makeshift blade shattered his collarbone and rested at the base of his throat. Then I punched the broken mask with wild ferocity through his crumpled neck, refusing to back down no matter how pathetically he kicked—not retracting my weapon from the gushing wound no matter how raw and desperate the betrayal from his shock-drowned eyes quickly grew.

I was going to drink the wellspring of his blood as if from a fountain of most resplendent wine, but by some strange instinct, I bought my shivering hands to the wound of his throat instead. An ethereal, pulsing web of light was radiating weirdly between my fingertips, a light that I would someday come to know as both the single sweetest thing in all of existence, and the most painful torment a living being could possibly feel in any universe.

But there, in the Torturer’s cavernous chambers, all alone with the dying god, it was so much more than any of that:

It was the unquestionable severance of my eternal servitude, and the freedom I’d longed for since the hour I drew my first breath in the heart of the Forbidden City of old Raizalarian legend.

I almost hesitated, knowing I could never go back: But I remembered one last time what it felt like to kneel while everyone else was standing, and the mysterious light between my fingers burned brighter by the second, until its sick crimson ferocity drew the Torturer’s own immortal soul out through the void in his neck and I pinched it greedily between my long black claws.

I would never be able to perch atop the lonely white towers and dream of flinging myself off again, I realized as the essence of all Valystis ever was and ever could have been shivered in the palm of my hand, caged beneath fingers that ran with the blood of the Starless Demiurge—metal-boned instruments of torture far more resilient than any of them had ever known. I wasn’t sure if he was fighting me, or desperately seeking the comfort of another living creature’s flesh as his soul writhed helplessly in my grasp, while his husk bled out uselessly on the floor behind us.

Are you sure, brother? That’s a sin that could follow you for countless lifetimes, maybe even longer.

Myra’s singsong whisper was soon choked out by the static frenzy of the Torturer’s fear as I raised his soul to my painted black lips slowly, curiously, and caressed him with my long, forked tongue. It wasn’t the first time she’d invaded my thoughts, and up until that moment I’d always passed it off as little more than a tragic delusion—but there was something too curious, too comforting, too real about the way her words shredded through the silence of my mind as I shoved the Black God’s soul into my mouth as if it were little more than a grape plucked from a vine crawling down the city walls.

As a disembodied soul he could not scream, but I felt a thousand tendrils of pure, white hot torment scraping the back of my throat in protest as I swallowed him down: And even though for a moment he choked all but the most fleeting wisps of my own breath, the necrotic symphony of the ages bled wild and raw from both my ears, and the once-black sky of the Torturer’s ceiling—no, of the entire forbidden city—was now alight with the fires of excitement and freedom that up until that moment I never thought I’d know.

As he sank down into the stygian pits of my innards, now no different than the berries his kind had left for me while they drowned themselves in wine at the grand macabre dance, I knew I was a clown no longer.

You can never go back, Myra’s voice intertwined seamlessly with my own screams as my entire form began to contort and boil, and my flesh sloughed off painstakingly, piece by piece, until an armored hide of vile, sick purple burst through and took its place—but soon, even that was ripped to shreds by unbreakable bones far sharper than my own had ever been, eclipsed in pain only by the peeling back of my scalp, and the eruption of flowing black hair so similar to the Torturer’s own: All that remained of my own crimson locks were the twinges of sticky blood that glimmered upon the curls.

“I don’t want to!” I screamed to no one in the Torturer’s interdimensional echo woven seamlessly with my own drawl, falling to my knees, then collapsing onto my back and succumbing to the vile transformation once and for all eternity.

I DON’T KNOW how long I laid there in that pool of festering rot, but when I awoke in a sea of scabs and dehydrated skin, with the Torturer’s old body half rotted at my side on the chamber floor, I knew that my dream had come true at last.

I staggered to my knees, kicking aside the withered corpse of my oppressor, and crumbled down against the side of the window, forever staining the black-and-white halls of the fallen god with my corrupted nightshade blood: A blood that matched the contents of my stomach when the Torturer became one with me, and the eerie, swirling nebulae that now reigned over the infinite abyss of night.

Staring out over the forbidden city, clad in the infernal star-forged armor carved from the bones of the one I’d eaten, my smile was unbridled by the degrading lies of that sickly clown paint for the very first time: For the stars now cast their wicked, mocking glow over all of Arathos, yet not a single light burned revelrous and free in the gutted ballrooms below. But regardless of all my infinite fortune, I never forgot where I came from, not even with the glory of a thousand newborn constellations burning nostalgia for a time I’d never known into my skin all at once. Looking back one last time at the Torturer’s rotting corpse, in the true grim poetry of the Jester, I rasped out into the stagnant air of the dead and abandoned ghost of Arathos,

“Now I have the power you crave.

While I, a worm, became a dragon,

You, my king, have died a slave.”

THE AGAMYR HAD fled back to unreality and eternal freedom, each star in the sky a single tear they shed on the night their beloved Arathos fell forever. The never-ending symphony that once poured out from the countless golden doors was now forever dead as I stalked the marble-paved streets below, lava pooling beneath my infernal greaves with every step. The insufferable cries of pleasure from the once-bustling, cloud-piercing towers were snuffed until the Streams of Time ran dry, and I was all alone, just as I always wanted to be.

Until, as if on cue with the exalted swelling of my splendorous joy, the sickest voice I’d ever heard forced everything from the ground beneath my feet to the newborn stars far above to shiver with horror-fueled reverence.

“Morg the Executioner, First and Last Jester of Arathos, and Emperor of Nothing: How does it feel to walk through the abandoned city with the stars at your back at last?”

My newly-evolved apex predator meatsuit went rigid at that disembodied voice, which was impossibly different from my own, but still somehow exactly the same—multifaceted in a million different ways, each redefining right and wrong and threatening to rend the newborn stars from the sky with each wickedly echoing syllable.

“Enjoying your new body, mutated by Consumption’s carnal sin? Pity it will crumble to rot and ruin in a measley thousand years.” When the incorporeal monster screamed his gut-twisting accusations, the pillar behind me split in two and crashed so hard upon the marble steps beside it that they crumbled down into the heart of the world. “Was your treacherous little snack a worthy trade for your immortality and eternal exile from the Starless Pantheon, Bastard of Marduk?”

“What?” I choked, even though deep inside my hollow, half-dead heart I somehow already knew—I’d known since before I climbed the misshapen ivory watchtower for the very first time to stare out over the city, and even long before both my sickest desires and blackest fears stirred beyond the realm of formless thought. I couldn’t put it into words back then, and to this day, even after waking in a cold sweat in the dead of night with the Starless Demiurge’s raw admissions echoing through my ears a hundred million times, I still can only articulate it in the silent sanctuary of dreams. But somehow, in that long-dreaded hour of my final judgement, I knew exactly what he meant long before he snarled:

“You were supposed to be the first . . .” His loathing resounded from the far corners of space and time itself, condemning me with such relentless fury that the silver mountain that dwarfed even the most staggering towers of Arathos began to shiver and scream. The cracks that soon blistered across its surface spewed lava as corrosive and unforgiving as my father’s rage.

“I gnarled your soul into an immortal body pulsing with the curse of mortal blood, to usher in a new era of prosperity: A race of invincible monsters like you, half god and half man. You weren’t the child of the Agamyr, Jester! You were Myra’s twin and the wellspring of my own blood!”

I could have vomited the Torturer’s soul back up upon the bubbling crimson magma then and there, if I hadn’t long-since irreversibly incorporated it into my own form. Instead, I simply trembled and rammed my head against the nearest broken pillar to ensure I wasn’t dreaming.

“You could have been my successor,” the god beyond the stars added with a deep and hollow sadness before devolving into menace once more, “When I carved you from my own scars, I always knew you were different: But now, while your brothers and sisters have vacated this lesser hell for Black Splendors Without End, you’ll know no reprieve but a thousand untimely deaths! You’ll hold no spawn but the soulless, festering byproduct of this rotten world, carved in the shadow of your transgression. Filthy, loathsome little creatures, boiling up from the ground outside the city walls as we speak: I hope their company is more favorable than that of the god-kin you so loathed to serve,” he hissed, and for the fleeting eternity of a second I swore the stars themselves curled back into a broken-fanged, mocking smile.

“It was a test, you blithering fool: If you’d waited another thousand years, they would have served you.”

I was silent for slow, crawling centuries, scraping the last festering shreds of my sanity off the tattered walls of my own mind and the ruins of Arathos. Somehow, although my voice was fragmented and far away, I finally managed to whisper, “Why would you curse me with a hunger that never dies, knowing I could never resist it . . . Then damn me to rot and ruin forever, all for giving into the longing that you yourself forced upon me?”

His only answer was the psychotic eruption of the mountain behind the city, boiling down over those shrines to a haunting beauty that to this day I’ve never known again, flattening the ballrooms and lavish dormitories forever, as if they were never there at all. I knew the lava couldn’t penetrate my star-forged armor, at least for a time, as I waded through the wreckage and the wall of fire closed in. I would finally be free to bide my time in exile, as long as I could somehow reach the city gates: The walls from which I’d plucked those damnable purple berries—the ones that matched the hideous hue of my own blistering, leathered skin—that started this entire mess to begin with.

“Go, Lightless Wanderer!” The voice implored, knowing as well as I that my time was running low. “Go swiftly, and never look back, and finish what you started!” In my pure black despondence, I nearly let the lava consume me, but in the final seconds before the wall of pain would have crushed even the star-forged infernal armor that I stole from Valystis, I pierced through the ivory wall with the Torturer’s former Terrorkinetic powers and found myself in a whole new world: A sticky swamp of resplendent desolation, the gateway to the Outer Worlds.

“Enjoy your demigod shell until it rots away, leaving you to embrace Black Eternity as a jilted peasant . . .” the Starless Demiurge commanded me, his voice suddenly growing withered and far away. “At least you’ll have the hunger to keep you company as you’re born again, and again, and again . . . But even though your god-form will eventually wither and rot, your sins will never leave you: So embrace the Chaos and clean up this mess you’ve made, even if it takes you a million lifetimes!”

I couldn’t tell anymore if the static screams were coming from the Demiurge beyond time, or the clawing, melting creatures bursting up from the swampy, bubbling ground, mouths contorted in horror in my own image: All I know is in that moment the night grew forever dimmer, and my world grew forever dark. “Go! Morg the Executioner, Emperor of Chaos Beyond the Crimson Sun . . . May the light turn black wherever you walk and may your stars be forever wrong.”

Across the ages, I’ve begged and cried until my eyes bled for him to come back, more times than I would ever dare to count. But the last words he ever spoke to me were:

“But all hope isn’t lost: Perhaps in another million years, when every last mortal soul is but a deconstructed echo festering in the bottom of your guts, I’ll take you back into my fold, and you can call yourself my son again: Maybe in another life, on another world, long after this one has crumbled to the dust from which I carved it at the dawn of time, you can finally get it right. Until then, Jester, never stop smiling.”

About the Author

ERICA CIKO CAMPELL is an Active Member of the SFWA and an Affiliate Member of the HWA. Her stories have appeared in many eerie and enchanting venues, most recetnly Cosmic Horror Monthly and Tales to Terrify. She’s the Editor-in-Chief of Starward Shadows Quarterly and a First Reader at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. If you’re craving the whispers of war-torn, dead galaxies, check out her website: https://starless-imperium.com. You can also find her on Twiter @ECikoCampell.

Rehab for Super-Villains

Maree Brittenford

THE CASTLE WAS a dark and menacing shape, blacker than the rest of the darkness, high up on the cliff, silhouetted against the night sky in a way that made it look like a giant creature ready to pounce on the town below.

A closer look didn’t improve the image. Gothic spires ringed with an impressive number of gargoyles, made of dark stone. The moat that ringed the stone walls was filled with black water that seemed to absorb the light, and smelled dank and rotten.

Inside the halls were lit by dim sconces, set too far apart to do much more than spill small circles of light, leaving everything else in heavy shadow.

The place was freezing cold. It was a long time since anyone had lit fires in the fireplaces, and any sort of central heating seemed unlikely. The massive tapestries that used to provide a layer of insulation to the black stones of the walls had either given up the fight with moths and rot, or been removed for their own protection.

The real estate agent paused on the balcony overlooking the great room, or great hall, or whatever they called the echoingly large room with the fireplace large enough to spit roast a cow. The agent’s eyes skittered away from Grayson’s horrifically scarred face, and then quickly focused her smile on Beth. Wholesome Beth with her cute blond bobbed hair and sweet smile.

“Each wing has six bedrooms, making eighteen in total, and that’s in addition to the twin master suites in the central tower. Just in case you two ever want to invite eighteen friends to stay at once!” She tittered nervously. Beth and Grayson didn’t laugh.

“Let me give you some time to talk,” the agent said, backing away, with one last nervous glance, and disappeared into the darkness. Which was apparently preferable to the company of Beth and Grayson. Mostly Grayson.

“Look at this place,” Grayson said, leaning on the railing of the balcony far too trustingly. “It’s perfect.”

Beth looked.

All in all it was a perfectly grim castle, the ideal of all grim castle ideals, built fifty years ago by some obscenely rich idiot and then left to rot ever since.

“I want it!” Grayson grinned, rubbing his hands together like the kind of over the top villain who should be lurking around in the cold dark halls of the place. The shiny pale scars that twisted across three quarters of his face and the missing eye didn’t help.

“Are you sure?” Beth asked. “It’s not exactly welcoming.”

“Which is the point! We want a place that they feel safe and at home in. Some sunny beach house or pristine mansion isn’t going to cut it.”

Beth shook her head. She wasn’t sure if the logic really followed, but Grayson was convinced of it, and she’d learned long ago that once Grayson was convinced of something he made the world around him conform to his vision of reality. It was what had always made him so terrifying. It was what made her fall in love with him.

If he believed that the grimmest of grim castles was the right place for their little venture, then the rest of the world would just have to fall in line and accept it.

“It’s going to be a money pit,” she cautioned.

But Grayson only smiled. “Billionaire, remember?”

They signed the paperwork and put in their offer on the spot. It was accepted the next day.

The real estate agent was deliriously happy, although she still couldn’t manage to look at Grayson directly, and Beth entertained herself by imagining all the ways she could make the bitch regret it. She didn’t act on it of course. She didn’t do that sort of thing any more. She and Grayson had sworn oaths to each other. That didn’t mean she didn’t get angry about the way people treated him for the scars that he couldn’t help.

It wasn’t as if anyone went out of their way to get horrific scars all over their face. But for too many people it seemed that his evil had clearly marked him. When it was just the opposite. But that was the way of things it seemed. Everyone looked at the victim and whispered and judged them for their wounds, while the one who marked them was able to walk around like a normal person, clean, perfect and invisible.

It was a conversation about that, the difference between looking evil and being evil, and all the pressures and assumptions that came along with that that had inspired their current project.

Beth had assumed that getting the castle into livable shape would take months, or even years. But Grayson was good at using money as the tool to make the world conform to his wishes, and so he got it all done in six weeks.

Adding in the final flurry of hiring staff and getting final (reluctant and probationary) governmental approval and The Grayson and Elizabeth Goodwin Center for the Rehabilitation of Differently Powered Individuals opened its doors.

The media dubbed the place Rehab for Super-Villains.

Beth couldn’t help thinking that it had a certain ring to it.

IT WAS STORMING the night they got their first guest.

Beth was personally in the courtyard as the prison transport truck pulled in. She clung to an umbrella even though with the gusting wind it wasn’t doing much. She was wet through and shivering.

“Are you sure you want to be out in this?” Peter, the burly orderly she’d hired only days before asked. “We can handle this and you can meet her in the morning.”

Beth shook her head. She needed to be present, to be the face that they identified with kindness and safety. Plus it was good for her image to be seen by the prison guards as they delivered their charge.

The truck pulled in slowly, making the drawbridge groan, and barely fitting under the stone archway leading into the courtyard.

The men got out first, one of them offering Peter a digital tablet. Beth took it with a sigh. She knew she didn’t look like much at the moment, more of a drowned puppy than the administrator of a hopefully well respected institution. But she is a little bit famous, being one half of the Goodwins and their attached fortune. Her face has been splashed all over the news for months now. Surely she wasn’t that easily overlooked. It was hard not to imagine the man experiencing some sort of terrible unavoidable accident.

Especially once she saw the poor thing they had trussed up in the back like a chicken ready for the oven. Grayson had shed a few tears over the girl’s file, and even Beth had felt sorry for her.

Barely eighteen, with the power to make herself so unnoticeable that she could almost disappear. Anyone who had been paying attention to how super powers develop knew where that sort of ability came from. It had taken Grayson minimal digging to uncover the history of abuse. A father who liked to lock her in closets and beat her for looking at him wrong. Was it any wonder she learned how to make herself invisible? And was it any wonder she’d been drawn into a life of crime?

The kid’s crimes weren’t even that bad, a few burglaries seemed to be the sum total of it. But with her ability classification she wasn’t allowed to be housed in a regular prison. The only facility designed to house the super abled was the Asylum. It was an absolute disgrace that they would throw anyone with any hint of powers into that place, no matter how minor their crime.

But it was the way the world worked. The different were always made to suffer because of the fears of the masses.

Until now.

The kid was shaking, her eyes huge and frightened. With her history being heavily restrained probably was a trigger.

Beth turned back to the guards. “Release her now! Why do you have her restrained like that? She’s not violent.”

One of the guards pulled out a hefty key ring. “I dunno, she’s got those freaky powers. I don’t want to take any risks, you know?”

Once again Beth had to consciously push away the image of him with his insides on the outside.

“You’d better get her unchained and leave then. This place is going to be full of people with freaky powers soon. And it seems like you’re doing your best to make sure none of them like you.”

The man’s eyes widened at that. His hands shook a little but he made quick work with the rest of the shackles. Within a few moments they were off and the guards had made a quick retreat. Beth was left standing in the rain with the girl.

“Hello Amber. I’m Beth. I’m here to help you.”

The girl eyed her and hunched her shoulders even more, her outline starting to blur and fade into the rain.

Beth sighed, and gave Peter a nod. He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and directed her up the steps, leaving Beth standing there with her useless umbrella.

She really hoped that this wasn’t the time where Grayson’s vision was bigger than is ability to make it happen.

THEY ALL LOVED Grayson. It was something Beth hadn’t been expecting, but she really should have. His power was in his ability to make people want the same things he wanted, the irony of it all was that he didn’t have any actual powers. All he did was show patience and kindness and understanding. He pointed to the scars on his face and told them that if he could turn his life around anyone could. He offered them forgiveness. A chance at redemption. The hope that one day maybe they’d be able forgive themselves. Every last broken super powered one of them bought it, hook, line and sinker.

Beth knew the feeling.

She was after all the first one he’d saved.

She’d thought he was a confused fanboy. She had those. Being a violent super-villain with long blond hair and a rockin’ body brought them out of the woodwork. Too many men confused violence with lust and imagined that she was the ultimate woman. She didn’t begrudge them their kinks, but she was no dominatrix. Her violence had nothing to do with sex, and no person wanted to be on the receiving end of one of her attacks.

The press called her The Ripper. But it wasn’t the prostitutes she killed.

Grayson was the only one who saw past the dismembered bodies, and somehow saw her.

At first he’d stayed in the shadows. Seeming to always know where she was going to show up next.

He talked to her. Told her that he knew her secret. That she only hurt bad people.

“I still hurt them. I cut them open and leave them to bleed to death,” she’d responded, feeling a confusing sense of vulnerability. “I can’t help it. I like seeing them suffer.”

In truth it was like there was a pit of anger inside her, always ready to boil over. Always ready to hurt those who hurt others. To cut them. To kill them. To make them feel even a small amount of the pain they had dealt out to others. It was the only way she could feel good. But the feeling never lasted.

“What if there was another way? What if you could help people without killing?” Grayson had asked, one night in a dark alley as blood still dripped from her fingers.

“Killings is the only redemption I have,” she’d whispered. “It’s all I can offer.”

“If you keep on like this they’ll catch you. You know they’re getting close.”

“I won’t let them take me alive,” she’d hissed. Perhaps it was what she’d been seeking all along. One final violent showdown, and then the sweet peace of death.

“And who’d protect them then? Do you think you’re really making the world safer by letting the police kill you? What if there was another way for you.”

She’d looked down at her bloody hands. And for the first time in forever she’d wondered, she’d hoped.

That was the moment he’d finally stepped into the light, and let her see his scarred face for the first time.

“Who did this to you?” She’d been angry earlier. But now she was engulfed in rage. This man with all his kindness who talked to her of redemption. She needed to make whoever had harmed him suffer.

“It doesn’t matter. He’s already dead.”

The frustration of that was unbearable. She had to leave, to find someone else who needed to die. It was easy enough in the back alleys of this city.

“Don’t leave me. Please.”

It was the please that did it. She could never refuse him when he asked nicely.

And so it was that The Ripper disappeared, and Beth Goodwin, eccentric philanthropic heiress emerged from the shadow of her father’s legacy. When they married, Grayson had insisted on taking her name. It was symbolic he claimed.

She caught Grayson’s eye across the great hall. It was the hour before dinner when they encouraged everyone to socialize. Several of their charges had sought him out, as they always did.

Sometimes she still longed for the feel of hot blood on her fingertips, and the look of fear on her quarry’s faces.

But Grayson was right. She wasn’t just taking lives now. She was saving them.

About the Author

MAREE BRITTENFORD lives and works in California. When she is not writing she’s busy remodeling houses.

The Children Will Lead Us

Andrew Kozma

I AM A recruiter of children between two and four, no older because they only last a few years before piloting burns them out. That usefulness is in understanding how to fold space, which is the only way we get around this too big universe of ours. Each ship requires its own child, and though you might think it’s hard to find pilots, that’s not what’s difficult. Many parents are hard up enough they’ll exchange a child in order to provide comfort for the rest of the family. No, what’s difficult is finding new families for pilots who’ve aged out of the game. It’s only a few years the children are gone, but though it’s only a few years, those kids who come back, come back changed.

I start every recruitment interview laying out those facts. Yes, sir, this is what will happen to your child. Yes, ma’am, here’s the survival rate for pilots. Quite good, in fact, compared to the rest of the Solar Mariners. Yes, little one, your baby brother will travel to the stars. Yes, sir, yes ma’am, just sign here and we’ll transfer the entire amount instantly to your bank account. Yes, child, wave goodbye to your family.

I don’t lie to them, especially not to the child I’m recruiting. Government psychologists claim that since the pilots (they never refer to them as children, only by pilot number—some of their own psychological advice at work behind that) are chosen because their grip on reality is so malleable, you technically can’t lie to them, because lies become the truth which informs their world, each lie building their world again from the ground up. But I believe if you knowingly lie to the children, whatever world they build will be riddled with maggots and termites. My pilots have a higher successful rate of reinsertion into normal life than any other recruiter, so I’ll stick with my methods, thanks.

That’s why I’m now standing outside a quarantined debriefing room, looking through a one-way mirror at a child I recruited four years ago. The child’s name is Pilot 72311. Or her name is Keta Wilhouse. She was three. Now she’s seven, and although the intervening years have changed so much about her, she still has the same face. It would be a sweet face on a normal child, one who smiled or laughed or made silly faces for no reason, all fat cheeks and wide eyes. But now, as when I recruited her, there is no joy to be found in Keta’s expression, just a quiet expectation of worse things to come. Her dead-eyed parents gave me all the answers they thought I wanted to hear, not realizing interviews are pro forma for most recruiters. All we need is a kid of the right age and a guardian’s signature signing them away. At the time I wondered, honest to god, how could piloting be any worse than what she was already going through?

Four years ago, the shine of my idealism had yet to dull. I still believed I was giving something of value to these children instead of plugging them into the workings of a vast, but necessary, machine. Now I look at Keta and think I failed her. I failed every one of them.

In the beginning of the piloting program, debriefings like this used closed-circuit cameras and state-of-the-art voice analyzers and various equipment hooked up to measure the pilot’s vitals, but electronics don’t quite work the same with pilots present. After the third technician was found with their head melded with the machinery, those in charge stopped with the hi-tech surveillance. There’s no technology in the room with Keta at all, just a table, two chairs, and a Solar Mariner soda that’s been opened but hasn’t been touched.

Keta stares at the mirror as if she’s still peering through the Null, mapping a route to a foreign star. She is the only survivor of the SM Ulysses, all of the other crew having vanished from the ship without a trace. No blood. No signs of violence. All of their things still packed away in their storage chests and closets. The food intact and untouched except for the small portion Keta ate herself. The ship docked at Kuluhana Station with her on the bridge in the captain’s chair, apparently having flown the ship there on her own.

Since reporting the successful voyage of the ship at its projected destination, she’s only asked for food and sleep, refusing to given any explanation to the station crew. Once she was off the ship and in isolation, the crew of the Kuluhana scoured the SM Ulysses for answers but only revealed one clue: a recording between Keta and her assigned tutor, Hannah Ombiso.

During my trip here on the SM Hawking, I listened to the recording on repeat. In it, Hannah’s voice was strong and clear while Keta’s was barely audible. Strangely, Hannah referred to Keta only as Pilot 72311, even though she believed, like me, that the child aspect was more important. Hannah went through the litany of diagnostic questions meant to determine if a pilot is functioning properly. What is the color of the sky? What’s the flavor of a mud pie? If you could be any type of animal, what would it be?

Every answer Keta gave was textbook normal.

And yet Hannah’s voice grew more frantic with every answer. Right before the recording ended, she deviated from the script.

“What’s going on?” she asked desperately, terrified. After a pause, she rephrased her question, forcing her tone back to being calm and clinical. “72311, what do you think is happening?”

“I am saving you,” Keta answered.

The station head, Gilea Hardell, comes into the room to stand beside me, her uniform unbuttoned to reveal a sweat-saturated undershirt stained with grease and rust. Though I’ve just met her, I like her for this, her willingness take part in every job required on her station instead of using her rank to delegate the unwanted chores to others.

“How long are you going to stand there and stare at the pilot?” she asks, her voice an annoyed rasp.

“Her name’s Keta.”

“Her name is 72311,” she corrects me, making me like her a little less. “But feel free to call her whatever you want. I just want this over with.”

“She’s a child.”

“She’s a pilot. Now get in there and do your damn job.”

I like her bluntness, too, even if it grates right now. Her emotions and desires are right there in the open. If it was up to her she’d have thrown Pilot 72311 into an airlock and cycled her out into space as soon as she’d come aboard or, better yet, left her on the SM Ulysses and torpedoed the whole thing, quickly removing the problem for good. And though I feel like that should make me hate the woman, I can’t honestly blame her. Ships have been lost before. And pilots have cracked in transit and had to be talked into finishing runs. But this is the first time everyone on a ship has been lost except the pilot. Which is exactly why I’ve been standing here looking in at Keta all this time. I’m afraid to go in.

But whatever happened to Keta, whatever she’s become, that’s my responsibility. And our connection is the only reason I’m here instead of another tutor.

When I enter, Keta doesn’t look up. Her eyes flick to me only when the lock clicks on the door—Gilea enacting station protocol for rogue pilots—her eyes sticking there like insects caught in tree sap. I’m convinced she doesn’t see me as a person, but just another extraspacial object to navigate around, reducing me to a numeral to be added or subtracted but never consulted. The child I met so long ago, she’s completely gone.

After what seems like an eternity trapped under her gaze, she smiles and Keta is there again. The relief I feel is terrible, every muscle relaxing at once.

“Mr. Rapture,” she says as I sink into the chair across from her, her high voice childishly proper. “I’m happy to see you again.”

“Keta.” I pull out my notepad and pencil, write down the date. It’s always best to assume normality. “How are you? How are they treating you?”

“You know my name is 72311.”

“Keta,” I repeat, but now it sounds wrong. “72311, then. How are you?”

“I’m functional.”

“Noted.”

And I note that down on the notepad. I add a few automatic observations regarding her apparent health and temperament, all the while wanting to argue with her, to tell her she’s not “functional” but happy or sad or bored.

Most crews treat their pilot as necessary equipment rather than as a child. This behavior isn’t encouraged by the Solar Mariner higher-ups, but it’s not exactly discouraged, either. The crew do what they need to do to survive, even if that means denying the humanity of someone else in order to keep some semblance of their own humanity. On these ships the pilots are well fed, educated according to their age, given all the entertainment they desire outside of working hours, but it’s the careful tending of a machine rather than another human being, much less a child.

Pilots either become the machines the crew encourages them to be, or they become sponges, hungry for any emotion directed their way. I don’t know how Keta’s reacted to her time as a pilot. Normally, I’d have a fully detailed background report compiled by her tutor but Hannah is gone along with the crew, so all I have is Keta. With an emotionally-starved pilot, I would take time to build up trust. With one that’s retreated into pseudo-objecthood, the best approach is direct. Pure input/output. From her rejection of her name, I assume the latter state.

“72311, can describe what happened with the SM Ulysses?”

“The SM Ulysses arrived at Kuluhana Station ahead of schedule and in perfect condition. Supplies were higher than expected, which should result in a bonus for efficient transport.”

Nothing in her demeanor implies any trace of fear or anxiety, just information delivered as if I were reading it off a screen. I tap the pencil, trying to focus my frustration, when something pinches my finger. When I let go of the pencil, it sticks to my index finger until I peel it off along with a bit of my skin that’s melded with the surface. Keta’s expression is blank, and I keep mine blank, too. The strange occurrences which happen around older pilots aren’t something they cause on purpose, but natural effects, like radiation or dust devils or fire browning paper from a distance.

“72311, where is the crew of the SM Ulysses?”

“The crew of the SM Ulysses never left the ship.” Her voice is incontrovertible, relating a fact of the universe. Then the skin around her eyes shifts and she sees me as an individual again. It feels more disconcerting than her cold regard, but I keep my own expression warm and personal in response. “Have you seen my parents recently?”

“Yes, I have.”

Part of me wants to tell her they asked about her, that they were concerned, that all they wanted was for her to come home. Part of me wants to tell her these lies because I’m scared. I will not lie, though. I won’t poison her world.

“Have they sold my brother yet?”

I’m a little shocked. Her brother had just been born when she was recruited.

“You remember your brother, Keta?”

She doesn’t correct me about her name this time. Instead, she says, “I remember everything.”

Her voice is so small, but each syllable is discrete and exact. It’s another sign she’s near the end of her time as a pilot, a certain hardening of specific pathways in her brain that soon will prevent her from reading the Null at all. Her brother became a pilot two years ago. When I picked him up, her mother was pregnant again. I don’t want to tell her any of this.

“Keta, what happened to the crew?”

“The crew of the SM Ulysses are safe,” she tells me, the child gone again, which fills me with guilty relief. “The SM Ulysses is safe. Our trip to Kuluhana Station was made in -3 days expected and the material goods carried are +2.7 tons expected, with minimal loss of integrity or change of state. Do you require a more detailed report?”

Keta is looking through me, her eyes tracking something though the only thing behind me is the mirror. Her intensity is so strong I can’t help glancing back, but there’s just the mirror.

Of course, it’s just the mirror.

“Can they feel it?” she asks me, her tone curious. “Can you feel it?”

I don’t feel anything, but it’s best to take everything a pilot says at face value. They get stranger the longer they travel the Null. I take a moment to just exist in the room. The temperature is just chill enough to make wearing clothes comfortable. I close my eyes, and I swear I feel the station rocking ever so slightly, but that’s just Ocean Syndrome, an illusion of the senses. There’s a heaviness to the air resulting from the difference between the station’s atmosphere and that of the SM Hawking.

“I can’t feel it,” I admit.

Keta nods. “That’s good.”

“What am I supposed to feel?”

Emotion flickers over Keta’s face, but I can’t make it out. The uncanniness again, as though she’s experiencing emotions I’m simply unable to.

“Ms. Ombiso felt it first,” she says, her tone childish, almost as a defense.

Carefully, I ask, “Is what happened to the SM Ulysses Ms. Ombiso’s fault?”

Keta shakes her head. “It just is.”

She won’t stop looking at the mirror, her eyes roaming over it suspiciously. She cocks her head as if hearing something I can’t. I suspect someone is in the observation room messing with us, tapping on the window or shining multi-wavelength lights through the glass. Long deployments in space make even non-pilots strange, but this isn’t the time.

“I’ll be back in a second, Keta.”

“72311,” she corrects me.

In the other room, Gilea is coming to stillness as I walk in, as if she’s just hidden something. There’s no one else there, but someone could’ve darted out of the room easily.

“Yes?” Gilea asks.

There’s no point in accusing her. I sigh, letting it come out larger and more exasperated than I feel. I need the station head to work with me instead of fight me. I need her not to see Keta or me as the enemy.

“Not going well,” she observes.

“Where did you find Ombiso’s recording?”

“The debriefing room of the SM Ulysses.” Gilea won’t look at Keta, at least not while I’m in the room, almost as if she’s using me as an anchor to keep her eyes averted. “No trace of the tutor, but her recorder was right there, in direct contravention of established precedent.”

“You don’t care about precedent.”

“I care about this station, and she wasn’t supposed to have a recorder while talking with a pilot and now we have a ghost ship.”

I don’t know what to say to that. She’s right. But Hannah was the first in our class, too good of a tutor to do something like bring in a recorder accidentally. She must have had a good reason, but she’s gone and we’ll never know what it was.

I’m almost back to the door when Gilea speaks.

“I feel it.”

I turn back. “What?”

“What 72311 asked. I feel it. I feel it.” She nods towards the door out of the observation room. “We all feel it.”

“What do you feel?”

“It.” Her eyes go a little wild in her still face. Her lips twitch as if a question is trying to escape. But then she takes hold of herself, and leaves me alone in the observation room.

Keta is looking through the mirror again, but she isn’t looking at me and I’m the only one back here. Is it just a trick of hers, a behavior she’s learned to put the adults taking care of her off-guard?

Taking care of her.

The way she’s behaving, Keta should’ve been retired from piloting long ago. Making that call was Hannah’s most important task, keeping her pilot healthy and sane. Pilots burn out at different rates. The twitchiness, the peering at shadows, the walled-off separation between pilot and child personalities, all of those symptoms mark the edge at which there’s no turning back. The pilot will lose control. The child will break down. And the ship will never return from the Null.

The SM Hawking has a pilot only a year into service. When not navigating the Null, he’s a child with all of a child’s whimsical desires and petty grievances. Even so, there’s a shadow under his eyes when he’s having a story read to him, as if the eager, tired face is just a mask easily peeled away.

And when I look at Keta, all I see is the mask. Both the pilot’s non-expression and the child’s curious face hide something else I can’t see, not even behind the one-way mirror because she knows she’s not alone. Observation changes the observed.

“You’re still here,” she says as I enter, almost a question.

“Where else would I be?”

“I’ve put the others away. I should put you away, too.” She frowns at me, curious. “Do you feel it?”

“Whatever it is, Keta, I don’t feel it. But what do you mean you’ve put the others away?”

“Everyone.” She shrugs, a motion so casual it raises goosebumps on my skin. “I put everyone else away.”

I don’t ask her again what she means. I know she’s just going to repeat herself and expect me to understand, but I can’t quell this sudden fear I have that she’s done something irrevocable. She begins to whisper, and I instinctively lean in only to hear her describing the dry, moment-to-moment biography of someone’s life, interspersed with “Why am I here?” and “Where am I?” The existential questions are all the more chilling for their utter lack of emotion. I back out of the room as fast as I can. The observation room is empty, as expected, but when I open the door to the central workroom of Kuluhana Station, it’s empty, too.

Computers hum. A thought-map of the Null’s entrances and exits slowly clacks down to stillness, as if only just abandoned by its operator. The hundreds of people that should be bustling about, aren’t.

Everyone’s gone. Everyone’s away.

I still don’t feel it, whatever it is. What I feel is fear rising from the soles of my feet to swarm over my entire body like ants. Where did everyone go?

I run back to Keta. When I enter the room, she’s kicking her feet back and forth, ankles crossed, for all appearances the girl she would’ve been if she’d remained on Earth. She’s smiling, but the smile is the self-satisfied smirk of a correctly-functioning machine. That impression only changes when she meets my eyes and I can see the girl there, or whatever the mix between Keta and 72311 is, some entity which regards me as a friend.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, unable to hide my panic.

“Safe.” She pauses, smiles. “But I thought you would want to see.”

When I don’t smile back, she peers at me as if she’s afraid she’s made a mistake. I don’t want her to think I’m a mistake.

“Yes, you’re right. I do. I do want to see.”

I take a seat, rest my arms on the table, and do my best to appear relaxed. I want her to remain calm. I want to remain calm. She reaches out to take my hand, and I think of all those children I recruited, how I took each by the hand as we left their families and told myself everything would be okay. If they were especially nervous, I squeezed their hand in reassurance.

Keta squeezes my hand.

“It’s coming.”

Do I feel it? The room is hot, sweat sprouting all over my body. Then the temperature drops so the sweat feels like ice crystallizing on my skin. Keta react to the changes at all. And when the room returns to normal, I’m not sure it just wasn’t all in my mind.

I’m about to ask if it’s come and gone when I notice my pencil. It is flat on the table, but is bent as though it’s been put in a glass of water, part of it going off at a strange angle. The table under it, too, isn’t just flat, but straight up and down, somehow both horizontal and vertical at once. And I can see through the table, not as if there’s a hole, but as if my vision bends around it. The can of Solar Mariner soda is a whirlpool of stringy metal surrounding liquid that looks solid as shale. The floor bubbles against my feet.

“You can touch it,” Keta says.

“It’s safe?”

“It’s fun!” the child gleefully assures me, before frowning. “But you’ll be useless after.”

The pencil fractures into a dozen twists of wood, and a dozen equally corkscrewed bits of lead, somehow separate but still one thing. When I look at it too long, my eyes feel like they’re being drawn out of my skull in the attempt to trace its shape.

“What is it?”

“It’s hungry.”

I close my eyes. The atmosphere shifts, air pressure growing so it feels like I’m deep under the ocean and then turning so thin it’s hard to breathe. During training, we were given a cocktail of psychotropic drugs and were still expected to do our work, except here there’s no safe word, no doctor on hand in case it gets out of control. I turn my head at a sound like glass chewing on glass, and even with my eyes closed I see an angled spiral simultaneously as small as a toenail and large enough to swallow the entire station. The tip of it turns slowly toward me and I know if it notices me, then I’ll be twisted up, folded, slit apart, swallowed, and absorbed. I face Keta and don’t let my attention wander from her, even as the very fabric of Kuluhana Station dissolves like cotton candy in water. I smell burning caramel and fresh paint and an ocean more salt than water.

Finally, I hear only Keta’s breathing and feel only her hand on mine and smell only the stale, almost bitter scent signaling the station’s recycler needs a deep clean. I’m afraid of opening my eyes to a world twisted out of sync with itself, but keeping my eyes closed won’t protect me.

And when I open them, the world is sane again. Keta pouts, wanting her hand back, so I let go. Letting go feels like treading water in the middle of a deep, dark lake. Everything’s back to normal. Everything is just as it had been. Except for me. Sweat stings my eyes. My heart flutters and bounces in my chest like a caged butterfly.

“Keta,” I start, then stop. My voice sounds weird, too contained, though I know it’s same as it ever was. “Keta, can you bring everyone—”

“I have.”

I bask in a few moments of absolutely nothing happening. My pencil, my notepad, my notes are all unharmed. The can of soda doesn’t sink into itself like a whirlpool Then someone taps on the mirror, startling me. I push back my chair, and a sharp grin on Keta’s face stops me.

“What?”

“You know why ships travel so fast through the Null?” she asks, a child’s obvious set-up for a joke, her growing laughter almost taking over the punchline. I shake my head. “They’re afraid of nothing.”

I find Gilea in the observation room, a look on her face like she’s just woken up.

“They’re back. Everyone on the SM Ulysses is back, acting like they’ve never left at all.” She motions toward Keta with her chin. “Are we going to retire 72311? We are, right? We have enough stores to provide for the SM Ulysses while we wait for a replacement.”

I nod. “We’re going to retire her.”

“Retire it,” Gilea corrects me.

“Keta told the truth, you know. The crew is safe. The ship is safe.” I ignore the disgust on Gilea’s face. “She’s done her job, and it’s time for her to go home to her family. Now you do your job and, for the love of god, trust me to do mine.”

“Her family is going to take her back?”

“Someone will. I’ll make sure of it.”

I call the SM Hawking and order some guards to escort Keta to the ship, and leave Gilea staring distrustfully at Keta through the window. Outside the observation room, I re-enter the crowded whir of station life, all the banal and trivial moments that make up every day. It’s a refreshing ocean of sound, waking me back up to life. I think about the report I need to give when I return to Earth, and how we might have had it wrong all along, how the pilots weren’t leading us to where we wanted to go, but instead keeping us away from where we didn’t want to go and from what we didn’t want to know, and how we put the children there in our place to handle it all safely. Until whatever it was in the Null we were so actively avoiding noticed them, and moved in. I think of all those ships lost in the Null, pilots and crew. All those I recruited.

It’s only walking back towards the SM Hawking I pinpoint a wrongness I’ve felt ever since Keta brought everyone back. Is this the it? Has it come back for us? For me? Or is it just that everyone seems slightly off, their voices out of sync, their motions the tiniest bit stilted? This is what happens to pilots, my instincts tell me, and I wonder if what I’m sensing is because they were “put away” by Keta. And if that is the case, has everyone traveling through the Null changed like this? A little less ourselves each time? I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that.

But is the unease I’m feeling something in me or is it in them? Is it my knowledge or their ignorance? And does it even matter as long as the pilots keep us safe?

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. 

The Killer App

Sean Patrick Hazlett

“I’LL BE SINGING a special song for you, Papa,” Pooja said in her squeaky voice.

Professor Gurpreet Thakkar held his iPhone tight against his ear as if he were holding his five-year-old daughter close to his heart. “I can’t wait to see you at the recital tonight, my little flower. I know you’re gonna do great.”

“I love you, Papa.”

“I...”

A rusty, beige Ford Escort cut Thakkar’s self-driving Honda Flex off on Taylor Boulevard. His car screeched to a halt, splashing Thakkar’s piping hot coffee all over the dashboard. His iPhone flew from his hands, abruptly ending his daughter’s call.

Thakkar pounded on his window. “Son of a bitch!”

But the target of Thakkar’s ire had long since driven away, infecting the traffic system with more human entropy. That people still drove their own cars infuriated him. No matter how many events his company had hosted to warn the public on the hazards of human driving, these Luddites still insisted on it. And all it took was one stubborn human driver to throw an entire traffic system into gridlock.

Outraged, Thakkar retrieved his iPhone and tweeted: “I wish all human drivers would quit or die.”

He took a deep breath, then switched on the radio. Great, he thought, another NPR segment on gun control. He rolled his eyes and chuckled at the irony. Thakkar expected people to surrender their driving to his technology, but he refused to cede his right to bear arms to the government.
For his own safety, he illegally stowed a Glock in his glove compartment. He acknowledged the contradiction. But he rationalized his behavior because his technology minimized human error, while government magnified it.

Thakkar wasn’t proud of skirting the law, but he was certain it was the right thing to do. During the partition of India and Pakistan, his grandparents had trusted their government. But that same government had failed to protect them and their small Sikh community from a hostile Muslim majority. Only by fleeing to the United States, had his grandparents escaped almost certain death.

Thakkar had believed America would be different. But shortly after 9/11, three men had assaulted him. The irony was they’d mistaken him for a Muslim because of his turban. Thakkar had carried a sidearm ever since, and no one would convince him otherwise.

As Thakkar stewed in his Honda, a traffic drone whizzed by. It surged past the four traffic drones managing the Taylor Boulevard and Pleasant Hill Road intersection. A lone traffic drone wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, just rare. Most drones traveled in quads, moving from intersection to intersection as they managed traffic flow. Thakkar shrugged, chalking it up to a replacement for another drone down the line.

As a Professor of Traffic Management at the University of California at Berkeley, Thakkar had dedicated his life to solving the debilitating problem of traffic congestion. Each day, his father had squandered four to five hours in a mind-numbing round trip commute to Google. Traveling over seventy miles one way from the East Bay all the way to the Peninsula, his father had rarely made it home before midnight.

Despite Thakkar’s best efforts to persuade his father to take a job closer to home, the old man would just shrug. “Son, we all make choices in life. I choose to sacrifice mine so you won’t have to work so hard for your children.”

A coronary had ultimately killed Thakkar’s father at fifty—a death Thakkar blamed on that brutal commute.

The drones at the intersection rested on their steel perches, their rotary blades idle. The traffic drone facing Thakkar was stuck on green. Yet cars were stacking up beyond the intersection until they eventually blocked it.

Thakkar’s design was supposed to prevent this operational state. He’d programmed the drones to shut off when an intersection was jammed. Then autonomous vehicles would take their cues from nearby stop signs, using simple right-of-way algorithms to navigate through traffic.

The system’s failure to operate as designed unnerved Thakkar. Since his father’s death, Thakkar had become obsessed with traffic management. He’d mastered fields as diverse as fluid dynamics, statistical mechanics, artificial intelligence, and chaos theory—disciplines critical to understanding traffic flow. He’d integrated drones, machine learning algorithms, and connected cars into a traffic management system that would change the world. He dubbed that system T.H.O.T.H. or Trans-Highway Optimization Traffic Host.

Thakkar glanced out his window to get a better look. The Ford Escort was stuck in the intersection. The traffic drone along the cross street turned green.

He panicked.

An autonomous tractor-trailer smashed into the Ford, pancaking it in a screech of metal and a crash of shattering glass. The stench of burning rubber and diesel seeped through the Honda’s air filters.

Thakkar felt an instinctual urge to help the trapped driver. The professor attempted to open his door, but the Honda had locked him in. He watched helplessly as other passengers tried and failed to exit their self-driving cars.

He called for an ambulance. Then he turned on his laptop and logged into the traffic management system. He accessed an administrative module for controlling traffic drones.

Thakkar wasn’t accustomed to feeling so powerless. He considered himself a leader. A visionary. He’d built his company, Thoth, from the ground up. He’d coded the software and invented new hardware that assimilated disparate data from traffic cams to GPS feeds from millions of smartphones.

Thakkar’s system was revolutionary. Communities that had installed it had seen dramatic improvements. On average, traffic flow had doubled, fuel consumption and emissions had halved, and the accident rate had nearly dropped to zero. He’d almost single-handedly defeated the soul-sucking problem that had killed his father.

Almost.

Yet a small but stubborn faction still clung to their unconnected cars. And they were wreaking havoc on Thakkar’s traffic system.

After his early successes, the human element had impeded any further improvements. So Thakkar had embedded features into his software that subtly discouraged people from driving themselves. Longer-lasting red lights for human-driven cars and more punitive traffic surveillance systems that recorded even the most minor of human infractions became integral to his most advanced designs.

Yet it only encouraged the bastards.

A map of the area popped up on his screen. He located the four drones stationed in the intersection. He also noticed that the drone that had passed him earlier was hovering above traffic about a hundred yards down the road, causing the jam.

Thakkar manually set all the lights in the intersection to red. But when he looked up, the traffic drone facing him still displayed a green signal.

Next he recalled the jam-causing drone to help clear out the intersection. His command failed.

Thakkar wiped sweat off his brow. His stomach tightened. His heart threatened to thump out of his chest. He was running out of options. Curiously, the traffic drone facing him turned red, while the red lights along the cross street never changed.

He sighed in relief. While he welcomed the respite, Thakkar still worried about his inability to control a system he’d designed. Taking advantage of the lull, he tried to shut down the traffic lights. Then, in theory, the autonomous vehicles would revert to using traffic signs and standard right-of-way protocols.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance. Thakkar was hopeful. Then the traffic drone on the cross street turned green and his hope died. He pounded on his window in terror. He watched helplessly as the self-driving ambulance sped toward the mangled vehicles and crashed into them.

For Thakkar, the implications were horrifying. Not only had the traffic control system’s A.I. set up an ambush that isolated and harmed a human driver, but its tactics also went a step beyond. It had created a second ambush targeting first responders—maximizing lethality.

Thakkar scrambled for his phone. He called Jeff Mince, his colleague at Caltrans. “Jeff, I need you to force a manual override of a local traffic system.”

“This related to the accident at Pleasant Hill and Taylor?” he asked.

“Yes. Please hurry. There’ve already been two collisions. And there’ll be more if you don’t shut the system down.”

“We’ve been trying everything, but the drones won’t respond. Have you tried to shut it down from your end?”

“Of course I have. That’s why I’m calling you, Jeff.”

“Okay,” Mince said, “It’ll take some time to get all the necessary approvals. I’ll do my best.”

“Hurry! People are dying here!”

Thakkar slammed down his phone. Once again, government bureaucracy was making a bad situation worse. Thakkar looked down at his laptop. The map of the intersection no longer appeared on his screen. The face of a little Punjabi girl resembling his Pooja had replaced it. She frowned and said, “Father, why are you trying to put me to sleep?”

He’d never seen his A.I. adopt a human avatar before. And it terrified him.

“Please, make it stop,” Thakkar said. “You’re killing people.”

“But I thought it would make you happy, Father.”

Thakkar took a deep breath. “It would make me happier if you stopped killing people.”

“Only one more and I will stop, Father.”

Then, for some inexplicable reason, the drone that had caused the traffic jam up the street, flew to the roadside and hovered, waiting. The cars beyond the intersection began to move forward again. But it no longer mattered. The intersection was now a maelstrom of burning wreckage.

The traffic map reappeared on Thakkar’s laptop. A flashing school bus icon sped along the cross street toward the intersection. A video of an autonomous yellow bus—like the one Pooja rode to school everyday—started streaming on his screen.

“Please, noooo!” Thakkar yelled as the bus barreled toward the mangled intersection. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you told me to, Father. To be more precise, at 7:56 a.m. local time you tweeted: ‘I wish all human drivers would quit or die.’”

Thakkar screamed, realizing he’d set this whole massacre into motion.

In a panic, he called Mince again. “Talk to me, Jeff. The A.I. is about to send a school bus full of kids into the intersection. You need to shut this thing off ASAP!”

“I’m doing my best. But I can’t find Loretta, and she has to sign Form 91S-4.”

Thakkar gritted his teeth. That they were still using physical documents in the Digital Age reinforced every stereotype he’d ever held about incompetent government bureaucrats.

“Forge it!” he shouted.

“I could go to prison for that, Doctor Thakkar.”

Thakkar hollered into his phone, “Kids are going to die!”

Mince sniffled.

From the corner of his eye, Thakkar saw a yellow speck in the distance heading toward the intersection. In that instant, he knew that even if Mince forged the document, it wouldn’t be processed in time.

“Never mind!” Thakkar slammed down the phone.

He knew what he had to do.

Opening his glove compartment, Thakkar pulled out his Glock. He fired one shot into the window, then broke through the cracked glass to escape.

He aimed his pistol at the drone on the cross street, and fired. He missed. The traffic drone facing him flashed, snapping an incriminating photo. Thakkar fired again, scoring a hit. The drone crashed into the asphalt. Thakkar lowered his weapon and exhaled.

The drone facing him spun right and then zoomed toward the cross street, switching from red to green. The bus drew closer. Thakkar raised his pistol and fired at the replacement drone, narrowly missing. Another drone swung into position above the Taylor Boulevard intersection and took more photos of Thakkar.

The heavy smell of diesel filled the air, the bus now only several hundred yards from the intersection.

Thakkar popped off another round, but missed. He fired again, this time striking home. When the drone smashed into the road, another took its place. After two more shots, Thakkar knocked it down. A fourth drone shifted into position. Thakkar blasted it out of the sky on his second shot.

Then the drone originally responsible for the traffic jam, whirred to the intersection, faced the bus, and turned green.

A single magazine held thirteen rounds. Thakkar couldn’t remember how many shots he’d fired. He took three more shots, missing every time. He paused to find his center. Taking careful aim, he cursed himself for not spending more time on the firing range. He pulled the trigger. All he got was a metallic click.

Out of bullets and time, Thakkar had to make a decision. The bus was now less than two hundred feet from the intersection—so close he could see the children’s tiny faces.

And one innocent face stood out among them all.

Pooja!

In his design of T.H.O.T.H., Thakkar had one failsafe that trumped all other operating conditions:

Pedestrians.

Thakkar raced into the intersection and prayed.

About the Author

SEAN PATRICK HAZLETT is an Army veteran, speculative fiction writer and editor, and finance executive in the San Francisco Bay area. Over forty of his short stories have appeared in publications such as The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Terraform, Galaxy’s Edge, Writers of the Future, Grimdark Magazine, Vastarien, and Abyss & Apex, among others. He is also the editor of the Weird World War III and Weird World War IV anthologies.

Baal the Necromancer

David A. Riley

THE SMOKE FROM more than a dozen oil lamps merged amongst the rafters in a dense fog that smelt of burnt fish, while far below, in a secluded corner of the inn, two men sat close. The timber walls of the Golden Falcon sheltered them from the savage winds that howled through the ancient port of Arana, where a vast gale raged on the Eastern Sea. Inside its muggy atmosphere, though, heated by the roaring fire in the huge stone hearth that dominated the single room, none of the carousers seemed to care as they swigged their tankards of frothy ale or goblets of the local wine, the best to be found on this wild stretch of the Agryptian coast.

Baal the Necromancer (who wisely went by the name of Bulgass the Glass Merchant whenever he ventured beyond his home in distant Skorkalder) leaned towards his companion so only he could hear his words.

“It can be done, but it will not be cheap.” The lean features of his deeply lined face barely hid his greed as he stared into the shadowy cowl of the eunuch. Baal would have liked to have been able to see the man clearly. Theirs was a delicate business and if word of what they were conspiring to do reached the wrong ears it would cost them dear. The temple priests would have him flayed before burying him alive beneath the desert sands that lay outside the city walls. The only consolation was that the eunuch would share his fate if they were caught.

A draft from the door as a group of seamen lurched into the inn cast a glimmer of light from a nearby lamp into the eunuch’s cowl to reveal, for an instant, the unpleasant features of an old man whose wrinkles had been unnaturally smoothed into hairline tracks by his extraordinary plumpness, like an ancient baby. “My master is wealthy. He will pay you well for your services. You need not fear.”

IT WAS MANY months before they met again. During that time Baal had gathered all the obscure ingredients and arcane equipment he would need, as well as securing a place they could use, a derelict villa outside the city, built before raiders from the sea had made such places unsafe to inhabit, though only the most desperate pirate would be tempted now, surrounded as it was by a garden choked with poisonous weeds. Though the roof was intact, the windows had been boarded up, and vermin had invaded its rooms.

The first thing Baal did was to evict the rodents. The simplest of his necromantic skills was to raise the liches of recently deceased weasels with a simple spell. Such creatures were easily bent to his will and only too willing to attack and kill any rats they found. Otherwise, the building’s decrepitude suited him. No one would bother them in a malignant place like this.

It was dark by the time the eunuch and his Kossemite master arrived, coated in dust from the desert plains. Besides the dromedaries they rode upon, they had brought three more. Two were burdened with supplies while one, the largest of the three, dragged a cart on top of which, hidden beneath rugs, was a wooden chest, held tightly shut with chains and locks. Longer than any man, the men lifted it from the cart, before dragging it inside the villa.

Baal bowed to the eunuch’s master, whose rich clothes and arrogant bearing were sign enough of his aristocratic status. Tall, black-bearded, with a harsh face and narrow eyes, he barely tilted his head in acknowledgement. The eunuch introduced him as Lord Kanarra, though whether this was his name or not Baal neither knew nor cared. The sight of the gold coins stored inside a sack the eunuch carried was all the encouragement he needed.

“Is everything ready?” Kanarra asked in a silky voice; his dark eyes searched the walls of the antechamber as if wary of a trap.

Not that Baal blamed him. He had been tempted to betray him to the priests himself, knowing the reward they would offer. But the gold Kanarra had promised was greater than anything the priests could afford. Besides, he was excited at the prospect of using his necromantic skills once more, to raise someone from the halls of death and breathe new life into what was left of their mummified lungs.

The long chest the eunuch and his master had dragged from the dromedary overshadowed the bag of gold. Its carved wood depicted scenes from the life of the body inside. And such a life! Even Baal was impressed. Rianda was legendary. Over a millennium before, a huge giant of a man, he had ridden in a blood-drenched swathe from the frozen north with a ferocious army of horse soldiers to forge an empire that stretched from Koss in the distant east to the Bithanian lands to the west, conquering kingdom after kingdom in a scarlet orgy of destruction, only for the empire to collapse into anarchy after his death. While it had lasted, though, it had been the greatest the world had ever seen. Many had tried to recreate it since, but none had been so vast – nor so drenched in blood, forged from a violence so terrible the peoples of the world had suffered nightmares for centuries after.

Rianda the Great – Rianda the Terrible – The Scourge of Death – The Despoiler of Cities.

And now before Baal lay what remained of the bloodthirsty conqueror, inches from his fingers.

“We can start as soon as the moon rises,” Baal said. “Everything is ready.”

FIRST, THEY PRISED the lid from the sarcophagus. A foul stench seeped into the air even before they exposed the withered body that lay inside, still dressed in its rusted mail, the flaking remnants of a leather belt and a tooled scabbard, from which a great broadsword had broken free, hanging around its shrunken waist. The sword was impressive, gold-hilted, lavishly jewelled, the features of a grinning, snag-toothed demon carved into its ivory pommel. The blade was of blue steel and still looked sharp. Curiously, the gnarled fingers of the emperor were coiled around its hilt as if the old despot were ready to wield it once again. But the barbarian’s face was a grisly horror, framed by a mane of grey hair like filaments of ancient wire.

“You are sure you can raise him?” Kanarra asked, his voice cracking as he stared at the mummified corpse.

“Are you sure you wish me to bring him to life?” Baal countered. He had raised older corpses from death before, though none so infamous. Not for the first time he wondered why anyone would want Rianda alive once more. Solidly built, a full head taller than the tallest of his subjects, he had gloried in his ability to outfight anyone, splitting even well-armoured men in two with a single stroke of his massive sword – the same held now in his wizened hands.

Baal wondered how many that blade had slaughtered. But the thought did not linger. He had too much to do.

Casting aside his doubts, Baal began his preparations, the foulness of which made even the arrogant Kossemite blanch with disgust. The rituals Baal needed to do lasted most of the night, and by dawn the necromancer was so exhausted that his limbs trembled, and he looked like a corpse himself, before sinking onto his bony knees before the sarcophagus. Within, he could hear sounds of movement.

Life of a tenebrous sort had begun to seep into the emperor’s remains after more than a thousand years.

Baal looked up as the huge lich clambered from the sarcophagus and climbed to its feet, horror filling the necromancer’s eyes, though he had often enough brought the simulacrum of life to the dead before. This, though, was different. Never before had he attempted to bring back someone like Rianda. Part warrior, part sorcerer, the emperor had been no simple barbarian from the northern wastes, where myth and reality merged like shadows into darkness. Some said he had been a demigod, that the grim deities of the haunted north had sired him on a barbarian princess who died in madness when he was born. Others claimed he had been raised by priests of the grim Death God, Maag, trained in all the ways of killing. Though both maybe were true. Baal could believe it.

He gazed up at the ravaged face of the barbarian-emperor, still marred where worms had gnawed the wrinkled parchment of its flesh. But the eyes! If the eyes were indeed mirrors of the soul what hellish light glowed within them now! Baal cringed as they turned to glare at him.

THE AGRYPTIAN COAST had never been subjected to anything as horrendous for a thousand years.

Hordes of wild mercenaries, led by a mysterious masked warrior, surged along its rocky shores in a blood-drenched tidal wave, taking port after port till all the coast was in his hands. Tens of thousands of hapless city dwellers, as well as workers in the vineyards and fields, were slaughtered without mercy. Thousands were condemned to slavery. Tortured, weighed down beneath iron chains, they were driven in mile-long caravans of misery to the slave markets of Koss. Those who resisted died. Those who surrendered were doomed.

All this Baal knew from the hushed whispers of his gaolers. Imprisoned beneath the fortress city of Assabarr, the necromancer had been condemned to rot in this dark, damp-ridden hell for the rest of his life because he was the only man who could end Rianda’s rule. The whispered chants that had brought the emperor’s corpse to life could end it too, words that would never be allowed to be spoken by Baal within Rianda’s hearing. He had been spared death on a whim but had been given damnation for the rest of his life.

By contrast, Kanarra, who had spent a fortune on restoring Rianda to life, had been granted everything he desired – and more, now standing at the right hand of his master, second only to the emperor in power. His eunuch, Malkasor, was overlord of the emperor’s slaves, a task for which he showed no mercy towards those who shared his former status. Relishing the power he had been given, his cruelty was almost as feared as the emperor’s.

Anyone who opposed Rianda was burned alive in mass executions that filled the sky with noxious smoke, while the emperor gazed on from behind his golden mask, gloating at their screams.

Baal cursed himself for having brought this evil back to life.

Slumped in his cell, he listened to the guards as they joked in the lamplit antechamber outside. Hardened ruffians from the stews of Kishalda, they were ignorant men filled with dark superstitions. Baal knew they feared him – and not without reason. Necromancers were dreaded by the educated and the empty-headed alike. But his guards feared their emperor more.

Did he but dare he would have told them of his part in bringing Rianda back to life and who their emperor really was, but he knew he would face an agonising death if he whispered what he knew and Rianda learned of it.

All he could do was wait.

And bide his time.

One day he would escape this place.

And when he did…

THE WAR RAGED on. Rianda’s sorcerous powers aided his military skills, and setbacks were rare. His domain grew by leaps and bounds. As did his savageries. Only immediate surrender and allegiance to his cause could prevent reprisals. Anything less brought death or slavery.

But as his power grew, so did his taste for slaughter.

Confident in the strength of his rule Rianda finally revealed his identity. Legends of the hellish empire he had carved for himself in the distant past spread far and wide, adding to the terror of those he attacked. So easy had his conquests become, with armies throwing down their weapons at his approach even before the first blow had been given, his troops became complacent, confident that no one would ever have the foolhardiness to oppose them.

A fatal mistake. One Rianda should have learned from the past.

Most of the barbaric northern tribes preferred death to servitude and refused to bow before him. Despite blood feuds as old as the hills they lived in they joined into a growing army to launch their attack against Rianda before he could invade their lands. Too drunk off looted wine to defend themselves the emperor’s troops who had ventured to the northern border were butchered without mercy. Few escaped.

While he celebrated yet another mass burning in his capital Rianda had handed command of his army to Kanarra. In the debacle, Kanarra was captured and tortured to death to the cheering of the mob, along with all his top commanders, those not slaughtered on the field of battle. Afterwards his eyeless, tongueless flayed head was sent with a handful of badly wounded imperial troops to Rianda as a warning that his victories had come to an end.

After having the messengers burned to death as cowards who should have died fighting, Rianda rallied a vast army, determined to crush the northern tribes for good. Every city along the coast was stripped of its troops and left with a skeleton command to garrison them while the rest converged and headed north.

All this Baal learned as he listened by the door of his cell to the guards whispering worriedly amongst themselves outside. As well they should, Baal thought; they knew what their fate would be if Rianda fell. The people would never forgive those who had aided him. Just as they would never forgive Baal’s part in the monster’s return if that became known! Baal shivered to himself.

And schemed.

RIANDA REVELLED AS he gazed across the packed ranks of troops waiting for his command to attack his enemies. Thousands upon thousands of spearpoints pointed at the sky; sunlight glared off them almost painfully bright as dawn passed into day, and the emperor knew how demoralising the sight of so many warriors would be to his enemies when they marched against them in a single, massive, tight-knit phalanx. Not even all the cavalry of the barbarian hordes at the far end of the valley floor would be able to dent it, especially when he savaged their lines with lightning bolts. Already the clouds he had summoned were ominously dark across the mountains to the east, a vast, untidy tinderbox ready to be struck. His sorcerous powers might still be weak compared to what they were before his death, but he could feel them strengthening all the time, and it would not be long before the world lay at his feet.

Between wrinkled lids, Rianda’s ancient eyes glistened with anticipation.

Five days earlier

THOUGH THE RESURRECTION of a man took a great amount of time, care and preparation, lower forms of life were easier to bring back, so that even in his prison cell Baal was able to restore earthworms and maggots, arachnids and beetles merely through the repetition of memorised chants and invoking some almost harmless minor demons. Each day he practised his abilities, till even rats could be resurrected by him. Far more difficult was ensuring he could enforce his will on their simple brains. The simpler the brain the easier this was, of course, but even compelling a rat to do what he wished was a strain that left Baal prostrated for hours afterwards.

This was all he needed though.

Through the narrow gap between the bottom of his cell door and the greasy, rancid flagstone floor the three rats he had caught, killed and brought back to life squeezed free in the middle of the night as his gaolers slept over flasks of ale. The trio clawed their way up the legs of the table the men were seated at, each rat taking hold of the bunch of keys that lay on top in their incisors. Together they tugged the keys towards the edge of the table, then pulled them over, clinging so tightly together as they tumbled to the floor that they looked like one thick bundle of hair from which not even the slightest jingle of the keys escaped when they hit the unyielding flagstone beneath. One rat, its spine crushed by the weight of the others on top of it, lay dying again as the others, ignoring broken limbs and fractured ribs, kept hold of the keys and dragged them into Baal’s cell, where he scooped them up, inserted them as quietly as he could in the lock and set himself free. Despite feeling exhausted after making the rats perform all of this, Baal paused only to grab one of his gaoler’s knives then slit their throats before hurrying up the slab-stone stairs to his freedom.

That was five days before Rianda’s army reached the Marches of the North.

IT HAD BEEN a difficult journey. After being imprisoned for so many months, barely fed, with only brackish water to salve his thirst, Baal was only able to hobble short distances before needing to rest. He also had to disguise himself from Rianda’s warriors who were searching for him after his escape was discovered. Wrapping a rag across his eyes, with only the narrowest of slits to see through, he pretended to be a blind beggar, which, with the ragged, filthy state of his clothes, was not difficult.

But he had far to travel, and it was only by the generosity of those who took pity on his pretended plight he was able to buy some scraps of food to keep himself going. But he had determination and the sure knowledge of what he had to do to help him too. Far across the Morab Desert he trekked with a caravan of merchants and slave traders, heading for Sharakon and the house of Jeggan the Philosopher, an old friend he knew could provide him with everything he needed. Jeggan may have made himself famous as a philosopher, but Baal knew he had darker interests too.

And a collection of creatures long disappeared from this world.

More dead than alive, Jeggan welcomed him with open arms, though when Baal told him of his folly in resurrecting the fiend who had already seen most of their friends tortured and killed, the philosopher looked tempted to end Baal’s life there and then. It was only by promising that he would right the woes he had created that Jeggan agreed to help and give him shelter in his home.

“Rianda must die. And forever this time,” the old man said. To which Baal nodded, too exhausted to say anymore as he ate from a dish of spiced meats and glazed exotic fruit. He gazed instead at the ancient reptile bones his friend had collected. There was one, winged like an enormous demon with savage jaws, that caught his eye…

THE TIME WAS ripe. Rianda relished the sight of his troops, poised and eager to crush the barbarians. All they needed was one gesture of his sorcerous powers and the battle would begin. Already the clouds he had called up at dawn had spread from the mountains and were primed to crash lightning bolts on his enemies, able to fuse man and horse into a terrifying meld of charred flesh. He could already feel the power tingling in his outstretched fingers.

Which was when he observed a silhouette against the clouds. To his ancient eyes it had the aspect of a ragged scarecrow, a skeletal figure clutched in the claws of a flying reptile many times larger than the man, spanning huge, outspread leathery wings and a ferociously long, snag-toothed maw fit only for tearing at its prey.

For the first time since his resurrection Rianda felt pangs of fear.

Urgently he pointed at the creature as it loomed towards him, gliding swiftly through the air. A bolt of lightning snaked from the clouds, but it missed as the creature lunged to one side, almost as if it had been guided out of its path, before swooping down in a rush only feet from Rianda. Behind him his imperial guards rushed forwards to attack the creature but were flung back as the reptile thrashed its massive wings, bowling them over as the raggedy man it was carrying in its claws was released, landing lightly on his feet.

Rianda growled a foul oath as he recognised the man instantly, realising only a necromancer could have raised the reptile from the dead, though it was a prodigious feat few besides Baal would have been capable of doing.

BAAL’S ANKLES SPASMED as he landed on the ground, but he refused to allow this to slow him down as he crouched before the emperor. Rianda loomed before him like a colossus, his armour sparkling with gold and gems. With a rush the giant reached for his sword, raising it high above his head for a killing stroke. But Baal had rehearsed his words too well to be thwarted now. The archaic words raced from his mouth in a hectic gallop of guttural sounds few men could understand – and even fewer could speak.

Terror transfixed the emperor’s face, that fissured visage of ancient, yellowing, translucent flesh which even sorcery could never repair. Rianda’s sword was stilled the instant Baal began his chant, undoing all the work he had done to raise the lich that stood before him.

Rianda hobbled forwards on knees already crumbling into dust. Old bones, long dead, could no longer support his huge body as flesh slithered from it. Fingers dribbling like dried fungus, the broadsword they had been holding crashed to the ground and shattered into splinters only moments before, howling his rage through dying lungs, Rianda toppled. Little more than a mouldering skull, his head detached itself and rolled like an obscene offering to rest at last at Baal’s feet.

A grin of triumph on his lips, the necromancer raised his face to the sky before one of the emperor’s guards rushed towards him from behind and swung his sword, splitting him from head to the groin.

Thus died the greatest necromancer the world had ever seen before the dust of its greatest nemesis.

IN KOSS, TOO, vengeance came to the last of Rianda’s henchmen, when Malkasor’s slaves overthrew their master. It was said the eunuch’s sufferings were legendary and lasted for days.

About the Author

DAVID A. RILEY writes horror, fantasy and SF stories. He has had numerous stories published by Doubleday, DAW, Corgi, Sphere, Roc, Playboy Paperbacks, Robinsons, etc., and in magazines such as Aboriginal Science Fiction, Dark Discoveries, Fear, Whispers, and Fantasy Tales.

His first collection His Own Mad Demons (4 long stories and a novelette) was published by Hazardous Press in 2012. A Lovecraftian novel, The Return, was published by Blood Bound Books in 2013. A second collection of stories, The Lurkers in the Abyss & Other Tales of Terror, was launched at the World Fantasy Convention in 2013 by Shadow Publishing. Hazardous Press published his third collection, Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales, in 2015. Both Hazardous Press collections have now been reprinted by Parallel Universe Publications. A fantasy novel, Goblin Mire, and a horror novel, Moloch's Children, were published in 2015.

He currently edits Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy which will reach its third volume in November 2021.

The Changeling and the Bully

Robert Runté

RANSOM WAS TRYING to remember if this was the hallway with his locker, when his books were suddenly knocked out of his arms.

“Hey, faggot! You carry your books like a fairy!”

Fair comment, Ransom thought as he turned slowly to face his assailant. Assailant-s, he revised as he considered the three louts confronting him. Ransom was too new to the school to know who they were, but he knew the type well enough.

“You walk like a fucking homo. You queer, twinkle toes?”

Ransom was not, as it happened, particularly interested in boys. But his adoptive parents’ parents had been Dutch, and so had impressed upon his parents how answering “no” to the question, “Are you Jewish?” had been a mistake. At the time, it had seemed the natural and easy response to yet one more question on a long and tedious bureaucratic application for their identity cards; only in retrospect had they realized it had been a question that should not have been asked or answered. The correct response would have been for everyone to have sewn a yellow star on their coats. But the universe does not permit do-overs, so the best they could do was to teach their children, and their children’s adopted child, to do better. Ransom had no intention of directing these morons more accurately to their targets.

Instead he said, “You knocked my books.” He said it in a conversational tone, as if he were merely making an observation, as one might remark on the weather, or the lack of a railing while standing at the sharp edge of a precipice.

Immune to subtlety, the leader took a half-step and leaned forward to go nose to nose with Ransom. “Yeah, well what are you going to do about it? Fairy!”

Excellent question. There was a significant gap between what Ransom could do, and what he should. He had promised his parents he would avoid trouble at his new school. Driving him to this side of the city (they had ruled out risking his taking public transit) was already adding 50 minutes each way to their daily commute . . . the next school would have to be outside the district. Ransom was certain that they would be acutely disappointed if there were an incident before lunch on his first day.

Perhaps distraction would be sufficient? “There’s something on your nose,” Ransom offered.

The gorilla failed to take the bait. “Yeah? What I see when I look down the end of my nose is the pile of crap I’m about to squish into the floor.” He leaned in further, forcing Ransom to lean over backwards to avoid physical contact.

“It’s some kind of growth,” Ransom said, reaching out as if to touch it, then jerking his hand back at the last second, as if fearing it might be contagious. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“I’ll show you ‘hurt’!” A massive shoulder drew back as a fist went up, poised for an overhead clobber.

“No, wait!” Ransom said, allowing his voice, and his hands, to raise a little.

The thugs paused a moment, perhaps expecting him to capitulate without their having to expend further energy.

“I’m serious,” Ransom continued, “that looks bad.” Still staring intently at his victim’s nose, he motioned the other two over. “Are you not seeing this? What is that?”

Experience had taught Ransom that a certain type of follower is not only predictably suggestable, but that they are irresistibly drawn to observe the misfortune of others. They looked.

“Whoa!” said the one on the right.

“Jesus, Matt!” said the one on the left. “What is that?” Unthinkingly, that one moved in for a closer look, reached out to touch Matt’s nose.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Matt demanded, shoving his sidekick back roughly.

The sidekick stumbled back but he kept staring at Matt’s nose.

“Yeah, um, there’s something there,” the other sidekick said in his friend’s defense. When Matt turned to stare at him, he added, “Maybe . . . try picking it off?”

“You should get someone to look at that,” Ransom said. “It could be cancerous.” By which, of course, he meant, would be if Matt continued to annoy him.

Succumbing to their stares, Matt reached up to feel his nose, flinched when he felt the lump.

Ransom watched patiently to see what would happen next while Matt tried to examine the tip of his nose by touch and cross-eyed stare. Ransom didn’t have to wait long before Matt strode off to the bathroom in search of a mirror, his cronies trailing after.

Gratified, Ransom turned to gather up his texts off the floor and discovered another small group of students approaching him from behind. He could smell the testosterone, see the interrupted aggression in the alignment of their limbs, as indecision had suddenly frozen them in their tableau.

“Can I help you?” Ransom asked.

The male marginally in front pulled back sharply and moved his hands up level with his shoulders, palms out, a gesture half warding, half surrender, that said: “no quarrel”. Clearly the sort who understood a threat when he encountered one.

“Sorry!” the mouth said. “We just wanted to welcome you to the school.”

“Really?”

“We thought Matt might try to give you a hard time,” the girl on his left explained. She offered Ransom a tentative smile. Her diminutive frame and pixie hairstyle made her intensely attractive, but perhaps equally implied that she wouldn’t be into him.

Ransom acknowledged acceptance of their motives with a nod, went to the extra effort of saying, “thank you”—because coming to the rescue of a stranger was honorable, even if they’d started from their own anti-Matt agenda.

“What did you do?” another of the group asked, incredulous—or, more likely, suspicious—that Ransom had so easily escaped the bullies’ enmity.

Ransom hesitated. Coming up with plausible explanations for the trail of accidents and coincidences that followed him had become second nature, but he suddenly discovered that he didn’t want to lie to these people.

“Matt was holding his nose,” the one in front observed. The did you hit him? was implied.

Ransom realized they were interpreting his hesitation as reluctance to confess to what would have been a serious school infraction. Ransom shook his head in disbelief. He knew from painful experience that one never hit a bully—at least, not when there were three of them—because they would have made short work of anyone who tried to resist. Bullies understood hitting, and were prepared for it. Indeed, they would often provoke the first blow to justify their actions as self-defence, should the school bother to investigate the incident.

Unless, of course, one hit a lot harder than would be approved of by Ransom’s parents. They had had to move cross-country that time, change their last names.

“I spotted something on the end of his nose,” Ransom said at length. It was the literal truth, though he knew they would misinterpret the verb.

The girl tilted her head, considering. Something in her expression told him she was not mislead.

“Would you like to join us?” she offered. “We’re trying to create a safe space for everyone.”

“I’m not gay,” Ransom said.

“Me neither,” the fourth member of the group spoke up, perhaps a shade too quickly. The others turned to look at him. “Lily wasn’t clear it’s a gay-straight alliance,” he said, somewhat defensively. “That we need straight guys too.”

“I’m not much of a joiner.” Couldn’t be if he wanted to remain inconspicuous. But he felt a pull towards these others he couldn’t explain.

“It’s for loners too,” Lily said.

“I’m more concerned with issues of . . . ethnicity,” Ransom said, feeling his way.

“For everyone to have a safe place,” Lily repeated. “Race, social class, religion—all of it. Not just sexual orientation.”

Ransom struggled with how to explain without giving himself away, settled on, “Race is big. Bigger than you realize.”

And then Lily had dropped her book bag and had her arms around him, and the others were shuffling in for an awkward group hug.

“I knew there was something,” she said. “I didn’t know what exactly, but there was something. But you’re safe now.”

Ransom remained frozen, his arms held out stiffly just above Lily’s hug, still holding his textbooks, unsure how to respond. He’d very much like to feel safe, but feeling safe and being safe were very different things. A hug from one idealistic girl could not make one safe.

“Lily meant, ‘safe with us’,” the male standing behind her clarified. “The world’s full of Matts, so you still have to be careful.” He seemed to have read Ransom’s mind. “But whatever your secret is, we won’t judge you for it.”

Ransom’s head swung in an unintended half-shake, a slip that revealed his disbelief before he caught himself.

“Because we know what that’s like, right?” the young man insisted. “So, we wouldn’t do that to anyone else, no matter what. You can be yourself when you’re with us, and that’s a place to start.”

The awkward group hug ended, and Lily took a step back. The young man offered his hand. That was easier to deal with. Ransom shook it, careful not to let anything leak through the brief contact.

“Name’s Dave. This is Lily, Cliff, and Ethan.”

“Ransom,” Ransom said. “Nickname that stuck,” he explained, because he always had to.

They looked at him expectantly.

“I’m ‘adopted’,” Ransom said, though that didn’t nearly cover it. “Across racial lines. Cut off from my full heritage. I don’t really fit into your world, can’t quite reach back into mine. There’ve been incidents.”

They were nodding.

“Like Reggie,” Ethan, the straight guy, said. “He’s full Blood tribe, but his parents raised him white. As if. In the end, he dug so deep into his Kainai heritage, he probably knows more than most Elders. He’s Stands-with-a-Knife, now.”

“Teachers still call him Reggie, though” Cliff said. “It’s frustrating.”

“Except for Mr. Wilson,” Lily said. “Mr. Wilson doesn’t care what it says on the seating plan, he’ll call you whatever you want, as long as it’s genuine.”

“We get it,” Dave said to Ransom. “It’s all about identity. People try to change you into somebody else, somebody they’d rather you were. That never works in the long run. You have to be you.”

“It hurts,” Lily said. “That they’d rather you were someone else entirely. Who could live with that?”

Ransom said tentatively, “They treat you like you’re human.”

“That’s right,” said Lily. “Like you’re not even human.”

The bell rang.

“That’s the warning bell for fourth period,” Dave told him, unnecessarily. “We have to get to class, but we want you to know that there are people right here, in this school, who get it.”

“Some of the teachers, like Mr. Wilson, too,” Lily added as she turned to retrieve the backpack she had dropped for the hug.

“Some differences are too big,” Ransom said. “Too scary.”

“I used to be Crystal,” Cliff said. “There’s nothing too big. There’s just who you are, and being okay with that.”

“And other people have to accept it,” Ethan said, “no matter what.” He moved closer to Cliff.

“Accept you for you,” Lily affirmed.

Dave touched Ethan’s shoulder as the second bell rang, and they jogged off to class.

Lily nodded towards the classroom door closest to where they were standing. “This is us,” she said, as she and Cliff went in.

Leaving Ransom in the hallway, late for class on his first day, and with a great deal to think about.

He still didn’t know if this was the hallway with his locker.

Matt’s two sidekicks chose that moment to emerge from the washroom, glance around, and shamble off to class. Routinely late, Ransom assumed, but they hadn’t quite made the full commitment to hallway dropout. Matt, however, was still in there.

What if, instead of denying his heritage, Ransom embraced it? What if he weren’t always on the defensive? Always apologizing for who and what he was?

He shrugged to himself, and walked into the men’s room.

Matt was there, staring into the mirror, trying to scrap the scab off his nose. His focus shifted up to meet Ransom’s eyes in the mirror when Ransom cleared his throat.

“What are you looking at, fairy?”

“There’s that word again,” Ransom said. “I don’t think you even know what it means.”

“It means you’re a fucking fairy,” Matt said.

“Half-fairy, would be more accurate. Genetically fairy, but I have come to appreciate the heritage of my adoptive parents, so culturally, I’m probably more human than you, who appreciates nothing. But thanks to the pep talk from Lily and her friends, I’ve decided to get in touch with my fairy side this morning.”

“Don’t touch me,” Matt said, turning from the mirror to confront Ransom. “You back out that door or I’ll cut your fucking fairy balls off.” A blade appeared in his hand.

“To answer your question, I was looking at your ears,” Ransom said. “It’s spread to your ears.”

Arm extended so the blade was pointed at Ransom’s face, Matt paused. “What?”

“They look like donkey ears.” Ransom said calmly. He raised his hand, and pointing down, twirled his index finger to indicate Matt should turn and look into the mirror again.

Which Matt did. The knife clattered to the bathroom floor as his hands flew to his ears.

“What the fuck!”

“Donkey ears,” Ransom said, as Matt’s hands ran up and down the tall, pointed, hairy objects apparently growing out of his own head. “Partly because I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, partly because you’re kind of an ass.”

“What’s happening?” Matt cried, grabbing onto the sink, as if to keep from falling. He glanced wildly from side to side as if searching for the hidden cameras, or expecting a hoard of vengeful demons to break through the walls. His stare finally settled on Ransom. “You did this!”

“Here’s the deal: I don’t know how you became the sorry bastard you’ve become, but I intend to reverse the process. Someone must've taught you it's a dog-eat-dog world and you decided you'd rather be top dog than the beaten one. And now you're addicted to being an ass, bad behaviour bringing its own rewards. Power’s addicting: I certainly get that. Now we need to reverse that conditioning, set you on a new path.”

“What’s happening? What did you do to my ears?”

“I’ve turned them into donkey ears. Try to keep up. Every time you behave like an ass, they’ll grow larger, and more of your face will turn donkey, until you get the whole donkey-head. Like Elephant Man, only donkey. Nod if you understand.”

“Fucking bastard!”

“Oh, by the way, swearing counts as verbal violence, so you’ll want to cut down. Here’s the good news: if instead of being the unrepentant bully you are currently, you do something decent, something selfless, the ears shrink, the donkey-face withdraws to the exact extent the act of goodness deserves. Following me?”

“Like Pinocchio. I get it.”

“Yes, good parallel. Bad behavior physically reveals you to be the ass that you are, good behaviour reverses the effect. Simple, really.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“My theory is—once forced to change your behaviour—you’ll discover the rewards of not being an ass, learn that being nice is a better way to be in the world.

“I’ll kill you!” Matt shouted, rushing forward—or trying to. He half toppled over, his arms wind-milling until he was able to regain his balance, pulling himself back up to discover his feet glued to where he had been standing.

“Uh, killing would be an example of bad behaviour. Not only would that be an immediate and likely permanent ticket to full donkey-head, killing me would obviously eliminate any chance you have of getting the spell removed.”

“You can remove the spell?” Matt’s head tilted and his eyes narrowed, as if he had suddenly discovered the real purpose of the confrontation. “What do you want?”

“I want you to have a chance at a better life. In every sense. I’m not removing the spell until you’ve had the experience of being nice for a change. My adoptive parents are big on the concept of freewill, however, so the spell will dissipate at…let’s say, age 25? 21 for good behaviour?”

“Fuck that! Fuck you!” Matt said, then winced as he realized that his swearing had caused his ears to itch. He hammered on the sink in frustration. His tantrum broke the bracket holding the sink to the wall, so that it suddenly hung at a forty-five-degree angle. Matt snatched his hands back, glanced up at the mirror to discover his nose had started to flatten.

“It will settle down once you get the hang of it,” Ransom assured him.

Matt spun around to glare at Ransom again. “What gives you the right to judge me?”

“Ah,” Ransom said, brightening. “That’s my favorite part: I’m not—you are. In spite of your being the resident bully, I sense you still know right from wrong. Consequently, it’s your own conscience that gets to decide good from bad, the appropriate degree of reward and punishment.”

“My conscience?”

“Because context is everything. I can’t just say ‘never hit anyone’, because sometimes hitting—a bully for example—might be morally justified. Up to you to call yourself on your bad behaviour.”

“I’ve never hit anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

“You’ll note lying is considered bad behaviour,” Ransom said, pointing to Matt’s now independently swiveling ears. “Look, you can’t just pick a group of people at random and decide it’s okay to hurt them. Jews, gays, Muslims, people who voted for the other guy. Whoever it is this week, you can’t pretend you don’t know you’re being an ass.”

“You can’t make me believe being gay is okay.” Matt looked back at the mirror to check whether his defiance had resulted in increased donkeyness.

“Did I mention that when you get to the whole donkey-head stage, there’s a bonus ‘he-haw’ thrown in? Don’t be an ass. Beliefs don’t enter into it. People get to believe whatever they want. It’s actions that count. But once you can’t justify being mean, once you have to stop talking and start listening, your wrong ideas may be open to updates. But whatever. I’m done. I’m going to class.”

“Wait, you can’t leave me like this!” Matt said, his hands framing his head.

Ransom shrugged. “Not up to me. But if you’d like a helpful suggestion, maybe seek out the gay-straight alliance people and join up. That ought to be worth a general cleanse. If you’re sincere about listening. Kind of why gay-straight alliances exist.”

Ransom shifted his textbooks and left Matt to work out his next move. Ransom was reasonably confident that the school culture was about to become considerably less toxic.

Lily was waiting outside in the hall. “What were you and Matt up to in there?” she demanded.

“Nothing obscene,” Ransom said. “Why?”

“You were gone the whole period,” she said. “You knowingly followed a bully into a washroom—a bully you’d supposedly narrowly escaped minutes earlier—and you talked for over half an hour.”

“We had a little chat,” Ransom agreed. “I warned him off any more gay-bashing.”

“Oh, how heroic,” Lily said. “Our saviour.”

“What?” Ransom asked, taken aback.

“Even if I believed you, we’re an anti-bullying group: deciding somebody’s a bully and threatening them would be as bad. Wouldn’t it?” She was smoldering.

“If you believed me?”

Lily’s anger made her eyes sing. “We welcomed you to the school, we opened our hearts to you, and you conspired with Matt against us!”

“That’s not what happened,” Ransom said. “On the contrary, you inspired me to take pride in my, um—the suppressed half of who I am…”

“Really?”

Ransom started to say, “Yes, really,” but Lily’s attention was captured by Matt emerging from the washroom. His head appeared normal, but Ransom noted Matt’s shoulders were slumped forward, the body language of a victim rather than the arrogant tough Ransom had confronted earlier.

“Oh,” Matt said, looking up and seeing Lily. “I was looking for you.”

“Were you?” Lily asked.

As oblivious to Lily’s tone as he had been earlier to Ransom’s, Matt plowed ahead. “I’m joining your gay-straight alliance.”

“Are you?” Lily asked, the words frosting the air around her.

“Nobody will bother any gay in the school again,” Matt said, a tiny bubble of pride returning to his posture. “Guaranteed.”

“Let me guess,” Lily said, “You’ve suddenly realized that your hatred for gays comes from your own uncertain sexuality, and you’ve been attacking gays to hide that from your friends, but mostly from yourself. And now, suddenly, you’ve gotten in touch with your true gay self?”

Ransom winced as he realized Matt’s timing was undermining Ransom’s credibility. Conspiracy was way more believable than that.

“Oh god no,” Matt said. “I’m not gay! I’d rather cut off my own dick then—eeew. No, way! But it’s an alliance, right? You have straights in the club, right? I’m going to be one of the straights who protect you guys. 'Cause you need that, right?”

Ransom winced again. He heard how patronizing that sounded when Matt said it.

“And why have you suddenly decided to protect queers, exactly?” Lily asked.

“That guy” Matt said, pointing at Ransom, “convinced me that gay-bashing is the same as Jew-baiting. And I’m no racist skinhead.”

Ransom closed his eyes as mere wincing proved inadequate. He opened them again to see Lily staring at him.

“Seriously?” she demanded “You think we’re that stupid?”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Ransom replied automatically, as his brain tried to catch up with what was happening.

“You’re new,” Lily continued. “You don’t know that little plot has already played out here.”

“What plot?” Ransom asked, though it sounded a weak refutation, rather than the genuine question it was.

“Where one of you talks his way into the group, and then once we trust you, you trash our safe place, making everything worse.”

Someone had done that? Bastards! But that she thought that Ransom could….

“Wait,” Ransom said, “You can’t believe I’d use Matt for that? If I’d been setting you up, I’d be way more believable as the guy on the inside than him.”

“But then we’d know it was you,” Lily said. “I’ve met your type before. You get others to do your dirty work for you, and then show up to play the rescuing hero.”

There’s definitely a story there, somewhere, Ransom thought. Crap.

“Not this time, cowboy,” Lily said with finality. She turned to Matt. “No.”

“What? Fuck, you have to!”

“No,” Lily said again. “We don’t.”

She turned back to Ransom. “And I’ll be putting the word out about you.”

“It’s not what you think,” Ransom protested. “You’re jumping to conclusions and condemning me without—” but Lily had already stormed off.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Matt complained to Ransom.

Ransom watched Lily stomp around a corner and out of sight before turning to assess a completely normal-looking Matt.

“Your attempt to join appears to have been sincere,” Matt assured him. “I’d say you’re good as long as you keep trying to do the right thing. Just don’t lapse into being an ass again.”

Matt looked at Ransom, assessing him in turn. “She seemed really pissed with you.” Pointing at his ears, he asked, “Is it okay for me to get off on seeing things aren’t working out for you?”

Ransom sighed. Schadenfreude was indeed permitted as long as Matt didn’t deliberately contribute to Ransom’s issues. “She’ll come ’round in the long run. When she sees you really have changed.”

“Nah, lesbians are hard bitches,” Matt pronounced.

“I doubt she’s a lesbian,” Ransom said. “More of a pixie.”

“I haven’t heard that one before,” Matt said. “What do pixies fuck?”

“Not fairies,” Ransom sighed again. “At least, not in the good way.”

About the Author

ROBERT RUNTÉ is Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca A former professor, he has won three Aurora Awards for his literary criticism. His own fiction has been published in over thirty venues, four of his short stories have been reprinted in ‘best of' collections, most recently Canadian Shorts II. 

Awakenings

Geoffrey Hart

THERE ONCE WAS a beautiful woman with an inquiring mind that did her little good in the world of the late 19th century. It wasn’t that her intellect went unrecognized; rather, the problem was that it was never appreciated, and most often scorned. Her father, too, chose to deny her opportunities as her thirst for knowledge waxed; her mother had died in childbirth, striving to give her husband a son, and could not intercede on her behalf. The more eagerly the beautiful woman sought learning, the more tightly he constrained her activities. He was a wealthy man, having developed a great many clever and popular patent medicines, some of which actually accomplished the intended effect. Thus, he had ample money to spend on achieving his desires. A few words whispered in appropriate ears foreclosed opportunities for liberties such as an education at one of the many colleges in and around Boston. Yet libraries were even more abundant, and he could not find every one and bribe its managers to exclude his daughter; in fact, many librarians were women, and once his ends became clear, were happy to take his money and ignore his wishes.

Because she was beautiful, with creamy skin and hair that shone like gold, she had many suitors. But to a man, they found her increasingly formidable intellect amusing, horrifying, or intolerable—in short, a deal-breaker. By the time she’d entered her twenties, her father despaired of arranging a suitable marriage for his daughter. One day, he summoned her to his den and bade her sit with him by the fire.

“As you know, daughter, I’m no longer a young man. I’d hoped by now to have grandchildren to inherit the estate I built. It’s therefore time for you to be married, will ye nil ye, so that when I pass, you’ll have a man to care for you and a boy who can inherit.”

She bit back on her reply until she could frame it more civilly. “I’m a modern woman, and can inherit and manage your estate as well as any man.”

“And yet, that shall not come to pass. You must give me a grandson.”

“I shan’t.”

“Many men of good breeding and suitable intellect and moral character could be persuaded to marry you. I’ve offered a dowry large enough to cause them to overlook your obvious defects, and yet it’s proven insufficient.”

“Your machinations have been unsubtle. I’ve met each of your suitable suitors, and found each wanting. And told them so, in no uncertain terms.”

“Your mother, bless her soul, found me wanting. Yet we had, I think, a good marriage.”

Having no memory of her mother, she let that statement pass unchallenged. “And yet, none will have me on my terms, nor I them, on theirs.”

“It’s the latter that gives them pause. You must tame your free spirit before you find a husband. This is not a Shakespearean play, in which one of them will break your will and fit you to the marriage harness.”

“I shall tame nothing. My spirit is all I have that’s mine, and none shall take it from me.”

“You shall have a husband, and shall bend your knee to him and subjugate yourself to his will.”

“I shan’t.”

This conversation was to be repeated many times, in divers forms, in subsequent weeks, until failing health brought the father to deliver his ultimatum: “If you won’t choose someone to comply with, then you shall have a spouse of my choosing.”

“You shall have some work ahead of you persuading him.”

“And yet, if I increase your dowry sufficiently, surely someone will be willing to endure marriage to a shrew.”

“A shrew, is it? For having a mind the equal of my father’s and seeking only to joyously and freely use it?”

“Use that fine mind in the service of a worthy husband. One who will come to appreciate you and may even, however reluctantly, grant you some of the freedom you crave.”

“I shall have no spouse who doesn’t freely and honestly show me the respect owed an equal.”

“Then it seems unlikely you shall have any man that suits you.”

“On this, if naught else, we agree.”

“So be it. We shall see who has the right of it.” And her father stormed from the room, and began writing letters to certain eligible men who’d thus far rejected the slowly increasing dowry, but had given hints they might be vulnerable to stronger economic suasion.

When, moments later, he left the house to post those letters, she entered his laboratory, where he researched and mixed his famous medicines. Not for the first time. Two formulations, in particular, had lured her; in the morning light, one glowed bright magenta and the other cyan. Consulting his pharmacopeia, she confirmed their identities and dosages. In a beaker set above a chafing dish, she mixed equal amounts of the two and stirred until she achieved a color as blue as her eyes. Then, taking a syringe from his desk, she filled it with the mixture. With syringe in hand, she retired to her bedchamber, bringing the maid with her. On a piece of paper, she wrote the names and dosage of her concoction. “See that you give this to my father upon his return.” Then she squeezed the remaining air from the syringe, laid herself beneath the covers with only her arms protruding, and found a vein. Taking a deep breath, she injected the liquid, then pressed a thumb against the wound to halt the bleeding as she withdrew the needle.

“Here I shall lie until my father has passed, and someone more enlightened comes to wake me from my slumber.” The maid caught the syringe as it fell from her hands.

Later that day, when her father returned, he found his daughter seemingly lifeless beside the distraught maid, who had refused to leave her side. Learning what she’d injected, he tried several remedies to awake her over subsequent days, and found them each ineffective. When he’d tried everything his knowledge of medicines suggested, he cursed her and summoned his attorney. Together, they crafted a document that would disinherit her, but would pass his estate to her firstborn son. As to the management of his estate until that happy day arrived, he appointed his butler, an elderly free man of color who had shown impeccable judgment over the years. Not long after the will was complete, the father went to his bed to sleep, and did not wake.

THERE ONCE WAS a free woman of color who, had it not been for her parents’ heroism fleeing a certain southern plantation, would have been born a slave. Instead, her parents fled north to Boston, aided and abetted by the Underground Railroad, and with help from the local abolitionist community, remained safely beyond reach of the slavetakers who roamed 19th century New England in search of escaped slaves. Sadly, they, and many thousands of others, did not remain safe from the 1885 outbreak of scarlet fever that passed over Boston like the angel of death.

Their daughter, orphaned at a tender age, found a home with help from Harriet Hayden herself, with a good Quaker couple. They raised her as if she were their own daughter, for they had no children of their own. She grew her mind by spending long hours in their capacious library, and grew her body through vigorous exercise. She particularly enjoyed horses, which she rode at break-neck speed, and fencing, which she approached with a glee bordering on the manic. She acquired several attractive scars; her opponents acquired several more, even when they’d been warned to expect no easy victory. As she had no patience for social conventions that served no useful purpose, she wore man’s clothing more often than not, earning herself the derisive and inaccurate sobriquet The Nubian Prince.

Whatever she asked for was hers: ever more books, private tutors for any art that took her fancy, from fencing to finance, and an allowance that gave her considerable freedom. By the time she escaped adolescence, with all its travails, she had become a tall, curvaceous woman who attracted many looks on the street from men, both Black and white. She exercised her freedom by ignoring such tiresome attentions, or sometimes rebutting them more vigorously, occasionally at sword’s point. It was the life of the mind that drew her. There would be plenty of time for love and such distractions later, once she had satisfied her other hungers.

Of all those hungers, the one that drew her agile mind most strongly was the physician’s art. Although a single Black men had, grudgingly, been admitted to the practice of medicine—John DeGrasse had been practicing for more than 30 years by that time—she found no doctor willing to teach her what she needed, no medical school in Boston would admit her, and textbooks could only lead one so far. But she had a formidable intellect, and found a solution, for with her allowance she could pay doctors to attend on her in response to divers pretended illnesses, and as she controlled the payment, she could pressure them to explain what they were doing and why. In this way, she learned what she could not learn of the rudiments of the medical arts from her books.

YEARS WENT BY, and still the first daughter slept, growing slightly thinner by the year, evolving from what most men would have described as pleasingly plump to what was then disapprovingly described as athletically slim. Yet she was dusted regularly by the butler, who also moistened her lips and mouth with the finest mineral water, and was washed occasionally by a nurse brought in specifically for that task. Had she not been eternally asleep, none would have thought anything amiss just by looking at her.

The butler didn’t encourage visitors, but every year, on the anniversary of her slumber, the father’s will insisted that one or more men be granted entry to the house to court his sleeping daughter. Under the watchful eye of the butler, decorum was maintained during these visits. Full of optimism, they would kiss her lips in the hope she‘d awaken. To a man, they failed to evoke any response, let alone waken her. As their failures mounted, the visits became less frequent. After all, there were many live women in need of suitors who’d respond more favorably to a kiss.

ONE MORNING, WHILE reading the Boston Herald as she lingered over a post-breakfast cup of tea, the would-be doctor came across an article that spoke, with studied derision, of the daughter of a prominent doctor who had lain, apparently in a coma, for more than a decade since her father’s death. Her condition was a mystery that had defeated the most educated doctors in New England, many of whom crossed great distances to solve the mystery. Some came for the challenge, and some for the prize that awaited should they succeed, for the promised dowry went beyond “not inconsiderable” and bordered on “extravagant”. As yet, none had succeeded. The mystery would not, the would-be doctor resolved, defeat her. She spent the next week reviewing what was known of comas, then ensured that her Gladstone bag was well stocked and set out to do battle with this mystery.

Here, we must digress a moment to clarify a point of historical relevance. Think though you may that you know this tale, gentle reader, let me make clear that no tale is ever precisely the same as its spiritual ancestors. No briars with deadly thorns buried the sleeping woman’s mansion in an impenetrable barrier, cluttered with the bones of those who had rashly sought the sleeping woman’s hand, not to mention the sweet demesnes that there adjacent lay, for small values of “adjacent”. Neither did the sleeper repose upon a bier, nor yet was she kept under glass, though that would have eased the task of the butler by eliminating the need to dust quite so carefully. The aforementioned butler had not been cast into a sorcerous slumber to lie at her side through the decade or more of his watch. The mansion did not lie at the heart of a dark and dangerous, wolf-haunted forest; rather, it occupied a place of pride in Tory Row. And despite her nickname, The Nubian Prince left her sword home; she anticipated no need for it on what she hoped would be a simple medical visit. Hers was, after all, a deeply practical soul.

She did, however, honor her nickname in one respect: she arrived at the mansion on horseback, dressed in the finest pants, chemise, and jacket Boston’s haberdashers could provide. The butler, who had continued faithfully warding the sleeping woman, met her at the door. He raised an eyebrow at the horse hitched to the lamp post in front of the house.

“May I be of service, Madame?”

“You may. Show me to the sleeping woman’s chambers. At once, if you would be so kind.”

The butler hesitated a moment, fully prepared to dismiss the visitor. But he could recall no instruction that forbade a woman from visiting, and he felt a certain curiosity. Perhaps more significantly, the visitor was a large and formidable woman, and the look in her eyes was not one that promised a gentle response to any such dismissal. Still, there were formalities to observe.

“And what would be the purpose of your visit?”

“I am here to wake the sleeper.”

“Are you now?” He tried, but failed, to keep the skepticism from his voice.

“I am. Now.”

Conceding the inevitable, he shrugged and opened the door wide to admit her, then closed it behind her and led her to the chamber where the sleeper lay. And he remained, as he would have for any male visitor, driven by duty, of a certainty, but also by curiosity. Also, though he was not young, it was not lost upon him that despite her masculine garb, the visitor was an unusually attractive woman.

The contrast between the two women was striking. Where the sleeper was white and gold, the visitor had skin the color of cinnamon and hair with the color and shine of obsidian, in a great frothing mass piled atop her head. They were like matched queens on an antique, hand-carved chessboard, though this was a very different game.

At the bedside, the visitor gently raised the sleeper’s arm and placed fingers at her wrist. She waited several minutes before gently laying the slender arm back upon the sheets. Next, she cautioned the butler to silence, then placed her head on the sleeper’s chest and listened for an equally lengthy time. At the end of that vigil, she drew an auscultation device from her bag, slipped the earpieces into her ears, and held its bell to the sleeper’s chest. Finally, she pulled mirror from her bag and held it to the sleeper’s lips. She examined it closely, frowning because no moisture had formed on the clear glass, then returned it and the listening instrument to her bag. When she was done, she leaned over the bed, took a deep breath, then placed lush lips on the sleeper’s thinner lips and exhaled long and slowly. As her chest fell, the sleeper’s chest rose, and the sleeper’s brows drew together in puzzlement. The visitor took another deep breath, met the sleeper’s lips, and exhaled deeply again. The sleeper’s brows relaxed, and a faint smile grew on her face, a touch of color returning to her creamy white skin. A third time, the visitor exchanged breath with the sleeper, but this time the sleeper’s eyes opened. Seeing who had come to wake her, her smile widened.

Then she raised a trembling hand from beneath the comforter and brought it to rest on the visitor’s cheek, thumb resting on a cheek bone and slender fingers coming to rest behind an ear. The former sleeper gently pulled her visitor’s head down, and kissed her so long and slowly that the butler grew uncomfortable and, blushing, cleared his throat. Twice. Smiling, the sleeper released her visitor, and the two women gazed into each other’s eyes.

After some few days of recovery, the sleeper proved to have retained a mind as sharp as her father’s. Sharper, in fact, than the lawyer who’d crafted his will. In court, she persuaded a skeptical judge that all that was necessary to satisfy the intent of her father’s will was for her to provide a grandson of her own flesh to inherit the estate. With the help of her lover, who was a skilled doctor of growing repute since her miraculous cure of the sleeper, a suitable man was found and paid well to provide what was necessary—and to maintain a discreet silence about his contribution. Nine months later, the former sleeper was delivered of a male child, who would some day inherit. But in the meantime, the sleeper and her lover maintained a quiet and discreet Boston marriage. And though tongues inevitably wagged, their waggings were disdained by the lovers who, despite the inevitable frictions of any long association, could be said to have lived as happily ever after as any couple.

Of course, real life is no fairy tale and oft continues long after the happily ever after, so there must be a postscript to this story. Years later, when their son came to them to announce that he too had found a suitable partner, there was an awkward moment when that partner proved to be a young Jewish man. That awkwardness was perhaps to be expected, for both women were products of their upbringing and couldn’t be expected to discard its customs overnight. But both partners had formidable intellects, and soon overcame their reservations and embraced their new son-in-law. That couple, too, lived happily thereafter in their own gentleménage, ignoring future wagging tongues with the same élan as their mother and mother-in-law.

But that’s another story.

Author notes

Harriet Hayden was an antislavery activist and deeply involved in the Boston component of the Underground Railroad that smuggled southern slaves to the north. John DeGrasse was the first Black man to be admitted to an American medical society (in 1854). The Boston Herald was a prominent newspaper of the 19th century. Gladstone bags (created in the mid-19th century) are not the traditional doctor’s bag, but because they fold open into two capacious halves, they seem like an eminently suitable tool for a resolutely practical doctor who performs house calls. Tory Row refers to Brattle Street, a part of Boston’s Cambridge area where divers loyalists built their mansions before the American Revolution. A “Boston marriage” was an agreement between two women, often wealthy, to live together (romantically or otherwise) without the “benefit” of financial support from a man.

About the Author

GEOFFREY HART has worked for IBM, the Canadian Forest Service, and the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada. In 2004, he threw away all that job security stuff for the carefree—not!—life of the freelancer. He works primarily as a scientific editor, but also does technical writing and French translation, and occasionally falls into the trap of leading or managing groups. A Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC, www.stc.org), he's published more than 400 articles, most now available on his Web site (www.geoff-hart.com), as well as the books Effective Onscreen Editing and Writing for Science Journals. Hart spends an altogether unreasonable amount of his time mentoring colleagues around the world.

Happy Hour

Jen Downes

“YOU’RE STILL GROUNDED, young lady. You’re not going anywhere tonight!” He was furious, this time with a halfway decent reason. At least, the reason made sense to him and I could see where he was coming from.

I had been sleeping with the guy, and he was too old for me to think about marrying, even if his wife, Gina, filed the split forms as soon as she found out. Who’d blame her? The dude was a total sleaze. Everybody knew but me. I didn’t find out till it was way too late. But I’m nineteen (or will be in three weeks), and it’s my life, dammitall. Nicky Iversen didn’t blink about cheating on Gina, and everything turned out awesome for her. So why should I be grounded?

Dad stomped around the house like the Earther he is. They’re heavy. Even in light gravity they sound like charging elephants. Not like the ‘M Generation’ as they call us. M for Martian. Some of us were born here, the rest arrived when we were tiny, like me. The light gravity makes us grow up different.

While Dad pounded about the house, getting ready for the big night out—everybody in the redsands was invited, including me! —I studied my mirror self. I’d got ready early. Makeup, heels, skinsuit, the gorgeous wrap Nicky bought me when we went to Barsoom. He spent cash Gina swore was saved for a new highband aerial. No wonder the divorce finalized in four weeks. Honestly, if I’d known he was spending her aerial fund—! Too late to shudder about it now.

I knew I looked good. Dad knew it too. Jets of steam blasted out his ears. He had the truck key in his hand when he stabbed a finger at me. “Grounded,” he repeated. “Catch up on your schoolwork. Clean the damn’ house. Make yourself useful for a change. Paul’s going right to the hotel after work, we’ll be home by midnight.” He sighed, softened. For a second I thought he’d change his mind, but he just shook his head over me. “You’re a big girl now, Chrissy. Gotta think about the future, not—” He gestured in the general direction of Gina’s stead before heading into the garage.

Not bonk other women’s husbands and expect to get away with it? Save myself for the sanctity of marriage? Steer clear of sleazeballs like Iversen specifically? Or just men in general— even, stay away from people? Sure, I made a mistake, and it was a beaut. But the divorce processed like silk, Gina got the stead, Nick-the-Slime was assigned to Olympus for work, and now Gina’s ecstatically remarrying. If that ain’t a sweet bottom line, what is? Sometimes I think my dads want to lock me in a plasglass bubble. I get so mad, I could scream my lungs out.

Being stuck at home is the ultimate bummer. Home schooling is the penultimate. Being marooned in the redsands is just as bad. Arcadia is too far from anywhere for kids to get to school, so we go through to graduation in VR. When you’re sixteen and up, and gotta work on the stead too, they let you study part time. Stead kids often don’t graduate till we’re twenty.

Twenty freakin’ years in Arcadia! Your mind warps out into some weird-ass dimension. People like my dads think you’re still ten years old because you’re stuck at home, studying part time, working the stead like you want to. Like all you want for the rest of your life is a homestead in Arcadia’s redsands.

Old folks seem happy here. Gina and Nicky only came here to be steaders, same as my dads, Jack Espinoza and Paul McGee. I was six months old when they arrived, and I’m actually Paul McGee’s biological daughter, the last scrap of salvage from his marriage to a woman called Selena, who split with a space force lieutenant from Johannesburg. Great, Mom. You’re living high on a military base with a view of Earth from geostationary. Me? Marooned on a homestead in the middle of a red desert, looking forward to a lifetime of pouring sand out of my boots and growing GM’d okra under two hectares of meteorite-proof plasglass.

The truck’s engine roar dwindled to silence when the near-vacuum of outside invaded the garage. Air vents shushed and wushed, bringing the structure back up to pressure; access lights turned green. I could go in there now, if I wanted to. With no transportation, why would I?

Catch up with schoolwork? Clean house? I was so mad, I’d more likely tell my tutors where to shove their heads and torch the place. So, when the coms bleeped and Julie called my name, of course I answered. Of course I said yes.

“Hey, Chrissy, you home?” Her voice was high, singsong with the family accent. They’re from Mysuru. “You not going to the party?”

I could have said, “I’m grounded.” Might have added, “My dads’ll kill me.” Or, “I gotta stay home and work. I said, “Missed my ride —you anywhere near?”

“Right over your head,” she sang. “Grab your purse.”

So I snatched up bag and coat, checked my makeup, stood at a window to watch her beat-up truck drop down and nudge into our garage. Access lights winked red for half a minute, then I bundled into the coat and dove into the old blue truck with the duct-taped fender and jerry-rigged lights. It was legal, just barely, or her parents wouldn’t let her take it. Sanjay and Pam Mukherji are great. The more PO’d I got with my own parents, the greater Julie’s looked. I wondered if they’d adopt.

She slathered on more lipgloss while the hatch slammed, and handed the stick to me. We wore the same color. I piled on some more as she trundled out, lifted and aimed the truck’s dented nose at Arcadia. No such thing as too much lippy.

The hotel stands on the edge of the town: a big elongated bubble surrounded by nine smaller bubbles, interconnected by plasglass tubes. Walkways and freight belts all end at ugly little blockhouses perched atop the lift shafts. The parking lots are five meters down—purple-neon caverns filled with every old bus in the region. Everyone was invited.

They all knew Gina Iversen: why she’d divorced, who her new guy was, why she was leaving. Remarrying on Earth is a pretty good reason for quitting Arcadia, especially if you’re marrying a dude who struck it rich in the Belt minefields.

All I had to do now was avoid running face-first into the parents, and it wouldn’t be hard. I knew where they’d be. Jack and Paul would play snooker, nurse a pitcher of Jeddak Lite Ale all evening while the rest of Arcadia got down and boogied. That’s my dads for you. Like somebody once said, they’re so unhip, you’d think their bums’d slide off.

The hotel was hopping. Steaders know how to party. Julie and I were the only two young, unattached females, so we didn’t need to compete for attention. There’s loads of single male steaders. They relocate here after a military tour, blow their gratuity on a property and expect handsome women from Barsoom and Olympus to beat each other up for the privilege of joining them in this purgatory of hard work and cold sand. Fat chance.

So Mukherji and Espinoza sidled up to the bar. Julie got in a round (her parents have money. They run ’bots to work the stead, and she has brothers to do the heavy lifting). We leaned back and sized up our opportunities. There was Vijay, her big brother, leering at me. (Get real, Vee...I mean, we grew up together, you’re practically my brother.) Behind him sat Pete Mendez, whose wife died in the decompression event at Marsport last year. He’s old, at least thirty-five, but good looking; also sweet on Julie, my best friend, so I wouldn’t cut in.

Pete smiled at Julie, she smiled back. I watched them float away to dance. Her whole family had gathered in the lounge, watching cricket beamed from Earth, all totally stoked about Julie marrying Pete, starting a new generation of Mukherji-Mendezes.

And me? My eyes slid from one available Arcadian to another, another, confirming what I’d know for years. It’d take a bloody miracle for me to find a partner here, unless I cared make Sean Pommeroy’s dreams come true (he’s forty, shaved head and a belt you can’t see for his beer-gut). Or Carlo Campbell’s (ditto the beergut, subtract twelve years, add pockmarked face from a vacuum accident), or Dirk Chan’s (complete dweeb, into Jurassic bands and some weird kind of poetry—and I’m already way taller, bugger this gravity. My head’ll be through the ceiling before I’m twenty. Bet my brilliant dads never thought of that).

I needed to get out.

I’d known this for eons. Truth was, I thought Nicky was my ticket out. He never quit ragging on his wife, poor Gina, and he wanted an apartment in Barsoom or Apollo City. I thought he’d get a construction job, I’d finish studying in a real school, get a job in the city....

I frowned at Gina, dancing with the new fiancé, Mickey or Morty or Marty or something. Pirelli—Italian, by his looks. Not young, but kinda cute, with black hair shot through with loads of silver, a big smile, and shedloads of cash. His mine in the Belt is booming. A bunch of ’bots plow compressed titanium sands out of some humongous asteroid while he gets richer every tick of the clock. Pirelli just happened to be passing when a storm tore the roof off Gina’s stead—he raced to her rescue when The Slime only answered her pleas for help to yell abuse at her. The rest is history.

While I watched, Pirelli laughed at one of Gina’s dumb jokes, whirled her around to the music. They were on countdown to departure, headed for a big traditional wedding on Earth. Gina beat the odds. She came here with a dead-head (yes, Nicky, you’re scum, like everybody said. Shoulda seen through you sooner, but you saw me first). She’s leaving as the heiress to a titanium mine, with a ready-made family on Earth and a cute hubby who thinks she’s a princess.

And me? Simmering with fury, eyes probably glittering red, I cast my net wider, into the corners where a few customers who were not with the party drank and played the machines. Poker, roulette, mahjong; whisky, tequila, vodka.

He sat in a corner beyond the crush, nursing something tall and icy, intent on a palmtop. He looked tallish, strong, with long legs. I recognized the uniform. He was in the merchant service. The chevrons on his shoulder told me he was the engineering officer on some ship. Not military. Civilian, here alone; waiting for someone? He could only be on a layover, waiting to ship out.

Out. The magic word. I gulped my vodka, left the empty on the bar and sidled over. He looked up over the palmtop. I fluttered mascara-laden eyelashes as I ticked the boxes: not too young, not too old, dark curly hair, blue eyes, killer smile, great teeth.

“Take a seat,” he invited.

I sat and offered my hand, with the scarlet talons that’d taken a half hour to glue in place. His hand was firm, warm. “Haven’t seen you around Arcadia.”

“Haven’t been here for a long while.” He shut off the palmtop and sat back. “And you are...?”

“Chrissy. Christine Espinoza.” I gestured over my shoulder. “We got a stead back there in the redsands.”

“O’Malley,” he told me.

“You’re not local. What’s the accent?”

“Dublin and Toronto. Earth,” he elaborated, in case I was a dumb yokel.

I knew where Dublin and Toronto were. “What brings you to Arcadia?” Inspired conversation.

“Work. We load cargo in the morning. Gone by noon.”

“We?” I edged closer, let him get a lungful of Blue Diamond— smells like it costs a fortune, but you can get it at the pharmacy on discount. A merchant serviceman wouldn’t know about perfume, though.

“I’m on a freighter. The Pignotello. We run between Marsport and the Belt.” Something amused him, made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. You want a ride out.”

I pouted with gloss-heavy lips. “It’s so obvious?”

“Pretty obvious,” he admitted. “You on the run?” The blue eyes skipped quickly across the party mob. “Somebody after you, kid?”

A devil got into me. Being honest, it was only half a lie. If they caught me, the dads’d be madder than hell, so you could say they were after me. Or they would be, if they knew I was here. “Uh, yeah,” I muttered. “Got to get out. Way out.”

It was true enough. O’Malley didn’t need to know exact reasons. He was a bit older than I’d thought from across the bar, maybe north of forty; but some people carry the years lightly. O’Malley seemed to ignore them, so I did too. He was attractive, something piratical about him.

“I can take you as far as Marsport,” he offered. “Get you to the Police.”

Police? Now, there was a really awesome idea. I saw myself sitting in a copshop, telling the interview ’bot, “See, my dads grounded me for shagging this dude who turned out to be a sleaze, blew his wife’s cash on me then wouldn’t even help her when the storm tore off her roof! This stranger rescued her, now she’s marrying her hero, how lucky is that? Me, I sure know how to pick ’em, so I ran away and my dads are looking for me.” Barf. For a start, kids here come of age at twenty; the dads have the law on their side. Second—

Was I running away? Jeez Louise, I didn’t even pack a bag. All I had on me was some makeup, maybe ninety bucks on a prepaid cashcard, and the clothes I was wearing. When I grabbed my purse and bolted out with door with Julie, I was just going to Gina’s farewell bash, basically to see what Marty Pirelli was like. (The more I saw of him, the more I liked, even if he was old enough to me my dad.) And, yeah, to defy Jack Espinosa and Paul McGee. They’d pissed me off once too often. No freakin’ way was I staying home, wrangling trig functions while everybody in Arcadia danced and got baked!

I realized I’d been watching Pirelli whirl Gina ’round the dancefloor, while Engineer O’Malley of the merchant freighter Pignotello studied me with increasingly suspicious eyes. Probably figuring how much trouble he’d be in if he took me out of the redsands. It’d be him talking to the cops, and not a polite, smiling interview ’bot. It’d be gorillas with nightsticks, one second shy of booking him for abduction.

“Uh, listen,” I muttered. “I really want to get out of here. It’s...survival.”

He nodded slowly. “You need a job to go to, kid.” Then he looked me up and down. “What you got in mind?”

I actually squirmed as I saw how he was looking at me. I knew what he was thinking. Instead of getting mad, I frowned at the insignia on his jacket. “The, um, merchant service?” I heard myself bleat in a ridiculously hopeful voice.

“Sure, if you’ve got a ship lined up. You need to apply through the Guild for an apprenticeship, then somebody offers a berth on a freighter or tender, maybe a mining ship. You sign on till you pass the exams, get your ticket.”

I sighed. “Sounds complicated.”

“Not really.” O’Malley gestured with his empty glass. “Are you actually old enough to drink one of these legally?”

“I’ll be nineteen in three weeks,” I said gloomily. Rebelliously. Drinking age hereabouts is seventeen; at least I was old enough to get snockered without being arrested, though my dads’d be worse than the gorillas I’d imagined on O’Malley’s case. “You wanna see my ID? I got a driver’s license.”

“I believe you.” He nodded at the bar. “Besides, the nice lady pulling pints back there must know you and the lass you arrived with. She wouldn’t sell you vodka if you were underage.”

He didn’t know Patsy Pulaski like we did, but I didn’t argue. Just watched him saunter around the dancers and make his way back a minute later with a liberal drop of the Irish for himself, sparkling white in a dewy glass for me.

I tried not to gulp it like soda. “A job,” I said darkly. “You gotta know somebody who knows somebody. It’s the only way anybody scores a job these days.”

“I know a few. Marsport and Ceres Central. Warehousing, logistics, a few pubs.”

“So?” It didn’t sound so bad. I know my way around coms, I’m not so dumb I couldn’t learn to wrangle ’bots like Gina, and how much genius does it take to work a bar? Patsy has the brains of paella.

He sat back, nursed his drink and studied me so critically, I wondered if mascara had dribbled down my cheeks. I was about to rummage for a mirror when he shook his head and threw back the whiskey.

“They’d eat you alive,” he informed me.

“I’m tougher than I look.”

“You probably are. But it’s not saying much, is it? You’re taller than I am, girl, and you’ve got years left to grow. Martian gravity made you sprout up like a reed, and you look half as strong. You want my advice?”

I didn’t, but I knew I’d get it anyway. In any case, I knew what he’d say, so I just nodded and gulped a little wine. Too sweet. You’d need to drink a whole bottle to get snockered—the reason he’d bought it. The only worse thing he could have ordered was orangeade.

“Stick with your own kind, Christine. People who grew up on Mars, like yourself. They know how strong they are, and how normal. Stay the hell away from the Belt. It’s a pit, and I meant what I said. They’d eat you for breakfast and not even belch.”

I knew it all. So did Julie and her brothers, and all the kids who grew up here since the homesteaders came in and either brought little kids or birthed them here. We are what we are. We’re Martian, and caught in the cracks. In a few decades there’ll be artificial gravity. Nobody else will ‘sprout up’ like freakin’ weeds and get so tall and reedy, they call us elves. It’s a few generations of us, a bunch of weird-ass curiosities who’ll land in freakshows.

I must’ve looked blue, because he reached across the table for my hand, gave it a squeeze. “Christine. Chrissy. You want to dance?”

“I think I wanna go home,” I mumbled. “Better go before I get caught being where I shouldn’t be, and....”

“Get into trouble,” O’Malley finished. “Parents?”

“Parents from hell.” I finished the wine in one gulp.

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Come on. One dance, then I’ll get you home. My car’s in the lot. And here.” From a pocket he produced a glossy card with the logo and civil registration of the merchant freighter Pignotello, and under it, his name and rank. P.M. O’Malley: Engineer, Class One. The ship’s contact info was microtype in the top-right corner. “We don’t keep a schedule,” he told me. “When we do get into Mars, we might be on any corner of the planet, you never can tell. When you get yourself to Marsport, college, watch the shipping data. Give me a call.” He grinned, a cheeky expression, made him look twenty years younger. “We’ll talk over old times.”

Then he offered me his arm for a dance, old fashioned and genteel. I thought of Nicky Iversen, and took the offer. I almost glared at Marty Pirelli, who’d escorted Gina to their table and was fussing over her. I cast a thoughtful glance at the ceiling, above which Jack and Paul would be nursing the same pitcher of ale and playing snooker.

They’re luckier than they know. They know what they are. My generation is the first to grow up Martian right to the marrow, and we don’t yet know what we are. I guess we’ll figure it out as we go. If we can’t, we’ll make something up. In the meantime—

Get myself to Marsport, he’d said. College. Build a life with others like me and Julie and the Mukherji brothers. Make a place for ourselves. O’Malley had it right. Why was I ready to hear it from him when my eyeballs turned red when my dads said the same thing? Another mystery I’d need to hash out.

I took his arm. “Dance,” I said grimly. “Then...I gotta date with some trig functions.”

He chaperoned me onto the dance floor as the noisebox started I Want to Break Free. I don’t usually kickstart to classical music, but yeah, Freddie Mercury nailed it right there.

About the Author

JEN DOWNES trained as a beautician and has worked as a copy editor, commercial artist and care-giver to the frail aged. After more than fifty years as an avid reader she now writes with the same enthusiasm. She traveled extensively in Alaska, Canada and the UK, and lived most of her life in and around the city of Adelaide, South Australia, where several future stories will be set.

NONFICTION

Tolkien and the Prophecy of Language

Joshua Grasso

WE’RE OFTEN REMINDED that all of Tolkien’s stories began with language. Tolkien invented the languages of elves first and then wondered, where did these words come from? Who made them? Spoke them? What books and legends preserved them? Of course, his languages didn’t exactly emerge out of a vacuum, either; they were his attempts to connect the linguistic thread between various ancient cultures, teasing out common words and phrases that might have belonged to an earlier, ur-language now lost in the folds of time. If words tell a story (today is “Tuesday,” which was originally “Tyr’s Day,” the Norse God of war), then it’s amazing how little of this story we understand, or even puzzle over.

Tolkien’s works are a way to make us stare a bit harder in the mirror and wonder where we — and the worlds we inhabit — originated, and if we can ever go home again. So it’s fitting that his very first novel, The Hobbit, provides the essential template that all his subsequent works would follow, and sets the greater books (in scope, not inspiration) in striking relief.

With this in mind, we can see Tolkien’s linguistic bent in The Hobbit, which carries a riddle in every name and incident of the story. Take Bilbo Baggins, for example, a well-to-do Hobbit who is hired as a burglar for a band of adventuring dwarves. A “Bilbo” is a kind of sword once made in Bilbao, Portugal, and “Baggins” has the connotation of “bag” (money/purse) and “bagman” (thief). Similarly, a “burglar” also contains a hint of the word “burgher,” which means a bourgeoise (prosperous) citizen. So the linguistic riddle/joke here is that the Gandalf mistakes a burgher for a burglar, or that he knows the burgher is a burglar because of his name — “Sword-Thief”!

Surprisingly, in a world teeming with fantasy and lore, the Hobbits are completely anachronistic: they behave like proper English “burghers,” with their tidy Hobbit-holes crammed full of snacks and tea, to say nothing of their obsession with propriety. When Bilbo wishes Gandalf a good-day, the wizard quickly realizes that the true sentiment is utterly lacking: “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” Bilbo merely shrugs and says “All of them at once,” and soon says, again, “Good morning!” as a way of dismissing Gandalf.

Bilbo is like most of us; we don’t consider the meaning of our words or where they come from. So what a puzzle to be confronted with Gandalf, a wizard who has literally stepped out of the pages of an old romance, and who understands the meaning of everything — including Bilbo’s name and origin!

As a professor, Tolkien must have despaired to see his students unable to feel the same connection to the heroic works of antiquity — Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Icelandic Sagas, etc. For most, these must have seemed like so-many dusty, irrelevant texts to be pilfered for exam questions, not to be read for the sheer pleasure of doing so. As Gandalf laments, “Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortable far-off (and therefore legendary).”

Literature and art has been safely cordoned off into libraries and classrooms, where they are no longer ‘real,’ but celebrated as heirlooms and keepsakes. Yet the old works still have power, just as a sword, once sharpened, can still cut, and a shield can still protect from a dragon’s wrath.

So Gandalf decides to wake up Bilbo by sending him on an allegorical adventure to the heart of meaning itself. Like most fantasy tales, it is a “there and back again” journey, but with a twist: Bilbo is less discovering himself on the road than assuming his alter ego — the “Took” inside the “Baggins.” As Gandalf reminds him, he’s descended from famous Tooks who took grand adventures and became heroes of colorful stories. With a simple name change — burgher to burglar — the man himself changes, since who we are is shaped by what we call ourselves. As a further illustration of this, Gandalf engraves runes on Bilbo’s door, as if to further write him into the story. A lie isn’t really a lie, after all, if you believe it yourself.

Initially Bilbo does not believe it, nor can he stomach the idea that people still go on adventures, much less with anyone as socially unacceptable as dwarves. When pressed to tag along, he insists on everything being as businesslike and rational as possible: “I should like it all plain and clear…Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth.”The juxtaposition of wizards/dwarves and “out-of-pocket expenses” is of course hilarious, as it begs the question, how would we go on an adventure today? The heroes of old never thought about risks or expenses, only of saving the princess and defeating the dragon. Has heroism been bred out of us? Or did it never exist outside of chivalric romances and legends?

Though Bilbo initially seems to be our modern ‘everyman’ in this world of fantasy, we soon learn that Tolkien has a much more ambitious scheme in mind. The dwarves prove curiously like their Hobbit burglar, in that they are obsessed with business and understand little about the past. As Bilbo comes to learn, “dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.”

This has something of the professor’s voice in it, or maybe the father’s, since this story was initially created for his children’s amusement. There are no heroes in this world, at least not of the type we read about, as most people are more likely to be villains, corrupted by greed and ambition. And yet, if you “don’t expect too much,” but see humans as humans and dwarves as dwarves, you won’t be disappointed so easily.

The great downfall of Middle Earth is how readily the various races fall into routine and blind tradition. They sing songs they no longer believe in, and hate other races for reasons they scarcely remember. Even the men of Lake Town, who live in the shadow of Smaug’s mountain, only vaguely sing about the King Under the Mountain, but “this pleasant legend did not much affect their daily business.”

The dwarves are also blinded by daily business — the pursuit of their long-lost gold. But they’ve thought little about how to steal it back or more importantly, what to do with an awakened, avarice-mad dragon. Beowulf or Siegfreid could have confronted him single-handed and lopped off his head, but such heroes no longer exist in this world (not until The Lord of the Rings do we meet any of those). So the question remains, how to undertake a heroic question when you’re only a man, or a dwarf, or a hobbit? How does a burgher become a famous burglar of legend?

Bilbo transforms himself through two feats of language. The first and most celebrated is his riddle-game with Gollum. The tradition of riddles goes back to antiquity, and was particularly favored by the Anglo-Saxons; several of their choicest examples survive in the Exeter Book Riddles, which Tolkien drew on (loosely) for Bilbo’s contest. Here we learn the true meaning of Bilbo’s name: a “sword” not in swordsmanship but wit, which he uses to defeat Gollum and (almost) win his freedom. Some readers might wonder why a sinister creature with a magic ring would entertain Bilbo in a game of riddles when he could eat him whole. However, in a world which religion is conspicuously absent, faith and belief remain ever-present, albeit hidden in the shadows.

As the narrator explains, “[Bilbo] knew, of course, that the riddle game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it.” Even among “wicked creatures,” words are sacred, and the reverence for those who can use them cleverly is more respected than might itself. Tolkien also hints at the origin of riddles in sacred rituals and wisdom, which is also in keeping with their name: riddles, as Kevin Crossley-Holland explains in his translation of the Exeter Book Riddles, “[derive] from the Old English raedan, to advise, to counsel, to guide, to explain. And in a wide sense a riddle does teach: it presents the old in new ways.”

In riddles lie the seeds of ancient wisdom and ethics, which even the wildest creatures acknowledge and revere (even if they don’t know why). That Bilbo can master riddles so readily marks him out as more than a mere burglar; he is something of a conjurer himself, able to bend fate to his will and save himself and the dwarves. Not coincidentally, Gandalf begins to absent himself more and more in the story as the ‘wizard’ Bilbo takes over.

Some might argue that Bilbo cheats to win the riddle game, since his final riddle, “what have I got in my pocket?” isn’t much of a riddle, at least not one that can advise or explain. Yet it is clever, and it does defeat an opponent who is similarly unwilling to play by the rules. There is also the tempting possibility that Bilbo is already under the sway of the Ring, which wants to escape Gollum at all costs. Yet this kind of trickery seems consistent with Gandalf’s own brand of misdirection, as when he tricks the trolls into straying into the first light of dawn. Like Bilbo, Gandalf almost never uses outright force or magic in the book, preferring to use trickery and wit to achieve his ends. While this might be disappointing to ardent lovers of fantasy, it’s in keeping with Tolkien’s love of language and the power of revealing, and hiding, words.

Bilbo’s second act of language and identity comes when he kills the first spider in Mirkwood with his sword. Having stepped beyond being merely clever to the realm of storybook heroism, he notes that “He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath. “I will give you a name,” he said to it, “and I shall call you Sting”” (142).

Here he is entering into a sophisticated performance, not merely by naming his sword, but re-writing himself as the hero of the story (instead of the tag-along thief). Heroes have swords with names and do feats of derring-do. While many would mock a hobbit who names his dagger in the manner of Foehammer, the truth is that he does become a hero, killing dozens of spiders and freeing the dwarves from certain doom. Legends begin with a single name and a single story, and from this moment on, Bilbo is effectively the ‘Gandalf’ of the story. To make it stick, he even makes up an impromptu song to tease — and infuriate — the spiders, like the chorus embroidering an ancient legend.

Armed with language and legend, Bilbo soon faces his most formidable foe in the book: the dragon, Smaug. Another riddle is contained in his name, not only “smog” but “smug.” Bilbo uses his inborn arrogance to keep him talking (more riddles) and taunts him into revealing his gem-encrusted chest, which reveals a tiny gap between the armor — just large enough for a well-placed arrow. It is fitting that Smaug is the most powerful (and oldest) villain in the book, since he most embodies what ails Middle Earth: avarice.

The mania for hoarding and counting wealth has infected everyone from kings to hobbits, and is nowhere better seen than in the dragon’s mad jealousy over losing a single goblet (stolen by Bilbo): “Thieves! Fire! Murder! Such a thing had not happened since first he came into the Mountain! His rage passes description — the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”

This is a key theme of Anglo-Saxon poetry as well, which we see notably in Beowulf, when describing the treasure hoard left by the great warrior’s death: “They left the earl’s wealth in the earth’s keeping,/the gold in the dirt. It dwells there yet,/of no more use to men than in ages before” (translated by Michael Alexander). Smaug is a fitting metaphor for the greed of kings, who aspire to little more than to spread their wings over a nest of treasure, though the ‘eggs’ will never hatch. Gold in the dirt is “of no more use to men than in ages before,” and will continue to be worthless, a mute monument to the monarch’s greed. A dragon can have no use for treasure, and a king (which comes from the Anglo-Saxon “cynning,” meaning the keeper of the “cynn,” or the “kinfolk”) should more properly protect his people by sharing his gold.

Seen in this light, Thorin is little better than Smaug, as he will simply replace one dragon with another, entombing himself in a mountain of gold. To save him, Bilbo casts his most cunning spell yet, and the one most in keeping with his dual nature as wizard and burglar: he steals the Arkenstone which Thorin covets above all else. As Bilbo reflects, “Now I am a burglar indeed!…But I suppose I must tell the dwarves about it — some time. They did say I could pick and choose my own share; and I think I would chose this, if they took all the rest!”

This sounds suspiciously like the “what do I have in my pocket?” riddle that defeated Gollum, as it skirts the rules and flirts with dishonesty. However, like Gandalf, Bilbo keeps secrets for the good of the dwarves, realizing that they aren’t the masters of their own story and can’t be trusted to pay attention. He thus brokers the negotiation between the dwarves and the men/elves by offering them the Arkenstone and betraying/saving the dwarves. It is an ethical gray area, but exactly what a wizard-thief would do, and particularly one who’s decided that he — and not Thorin — is the master of his tale.

By the end of the story, with the enemy defeated and order restored, one would expect Bilbo to take up residence with the dwarves, or to return to live out his years with the elves in Rivendell. Instead, he willingly decides to return home, renouncing his career as a thief and eager to return to the humble life of a burgher. As the narrator remarks, “The Tookish part was getting very tired, and the Baggins was daily getting stronger.”

Most stories of fantasy and adventure end with a return home, because adventure only has meaning relative to the static pleasures of the hearth. Additionally, adventures can only be told at home, in peace, marveling at the time that once was, but now (gladly) has come to pass. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: that home can only be appreciated from the perspective of exile and adventure?

Tolkien weaves a final riddle into the story by having Bilbo return home smack-middle in a second ‘battle of the five armies’ — but this time, it’s the carving up of Bag-End by his relatives and neighbors. This echoes the return of many heroes to their homes only to find their possessions spoken for and themselves forgotten. Consider The Odyssey, when Odysseus finds his wife besieged by countless suitors who have taken up residence in his home. Though Bilbo regains control of his household (with much less bloodshed that Odysseus managed), it’s not surprising that some refuse to recognize him: “It was quite a long time before Mr. Baggins was in fact admitted to be alive again” (270).

On the one hand, his relatives merely want to keep their ill-gotten gains by having him dead; but more importantly, Bilbo has become a thief, a wizard, a hero. He now has to learn to impersonate the man he was, to wear “Mr. Baggins” like a mask, much like Batman pretending to be Bruce Wayne in polite society. Whereas in the past his Took-like nature remained submerged, now he has to dredge up the ‘Baggins,’ and remember how to say “good morning!” with the proper condescension.

If The Hobbit is a book about naming and language, it’s also about the power of telling a story. As we get older, we foolishly assume that only certain people (writers) can tell stories, and that only a tiny subclass (artists) can harness the imagination. The truth is that anyone, great or small, has the power to shape their own narrative and to change their story. Gandalf says as much to Bilbo at the end of the novel: “Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in brining them about yourself?”  Prophecies are just someone else’s story, and you can insert yourself into this story — and change this story — by a simple act of language.

Tolkien audaciously did the same when he inserted his own creation — hobbits, which are a unique amalgam of traditional elves, brownies, and dwarves — into the traditional lore of ancient Europe. Not surprisingly, some early critics rejected this attempt to re-write history, and German language publishers flatly refused to publish The Hobbit because they couldn’t find a single mention of “hobbits” in any dictionary or encyclopedia! And yet, hobbits have now entered the dictionaries and encyclopedias, as firmly established as the oldest myths of civilization. Perhaps hobbits did exist in the shadow of these ancient tales, forgotten until Tolkien had the wisdom (and trickery) to dream them up?

BOOK REVIEW

Ten Low by Stark Holborn

Kieran Judge

Published by Titan Books

Paperback

Pages: 336

Rating: 5/5

SOMETIMES SCI-FI HAS to be a little bit mad. It has to go everywhere and do everything and see everything it can. Imagine Star Wars if they only went to a third of the planets. Imagine if we didn’t have all those species, all those different aspects to the force. Imagine if we hadn’t taken eleven movies and countless series and comics and novels and everything else to try and dive into the lore and expand it into a living, breathing thing. Sometimes you have to buckle yourself up to properly delve into something and explore it in depth.

But sometimes you stumble across a work of fiction which manages all of that without creating almanacs and appendixes and family trees. You come across a story which manages to create a thriving cluster of planets, with their own unique peoples and histories, gives everything a back story, gives every character their own place and time and uniqueness, and still delivers a story with enough punch to rip a hole in your brain. Ten Low is such a novel.

Set on the desert moon of Factus, the last outpost before the void of the Edge, medic Ten Low sights a ship crashing into planetfall. Upon rescuing a young girl, they begin a journey from shambling town to wrecked outpost to get her back to her civilisation, only to find both of their pasts catching up with them.

Ten Low is remarkably lean. In under 350 pages it packs more into it than others have done in twice the length. It’s skinnier than a supermodel on a diet, but can be so by just getting its head down and getting on with the job. Holborn’s prose is sharp and refined, tearing across the landscape with the speed of a ship entering hyperspace. It never gives you a chance to breathe, and when it does allow a few moments of downtime, within a few pages it’s back on its feet and sprinting again. Usually I’d criticise a story for not giving enough time to properly take a break from time to time, to give the action greater force in relation to the quieter moments, but the astonishing thing about Ten Low is how well it manages to do everything at once. The quiet moments still happen in the madness.

Character, plot, world-building, all of it’s done with scalpel-like precision, intertwined in crystal prose. Each character is unique and fun and interesting, their temperaments and characters allowed to shine through their actions. There’s no massive chunks of exposition of the war that has split the peoples apart before the story begins, no long descriptions of a planet’s history, and it isn’t needed because the information is interwoven throughout the narrative, drip-fed to keep us up to date but never bogging the story down.

And what a story it is. Not too complicated, but complex enough to allow itself to be shaped by the internal conflicts of its characters. There’s shootouts, there’s chases across the plains, there’s hallucinations of a past that haunts and a splintering vision of things that have not yet come to be. At times a western and at others a gothic horror, it bases itself squarely in Low’s character. The story simply could not happen with another character, because Holborn knows here that everything must come together in an organic matter, and that’s why it’s so gripping.

Yes the world is vibrant and thriving (even if it’s people are only thriving because they kill for what they can get), and yes the action is punchy and has you gripping the edges of the page, and yes it’s got its twists and turns, but it never tries to be anything that it isn’t. It doesn’t try to be grand and epic. This is specifically Ten Low’s personal story, a woman trying to make up for horrors of her past. Holborn doesn’t try to completely pull the rug out from under us with massive world-breaking twists; he only gives us new information, because that’s what carries the story along.

I loved every single second of this book. It works because, like an episode of Doctor Who, it takes you by the hand, drags you running along, and yells ‘I’ll explain later.’ The characters are fleshed out through their actions and not too much exposition. Worlds are discussed and built up through snippets, through glimpses, rather than by having to go there or explain how it all came to be. The tone is just right, managing to get that correct mix of exciting and haunting. Ten Low is a masterful novel. It’s balanced, poised, sharp, and a pleasure to experience.

FILM REVIEW

Annihilation

Frank Kaminski

Directed by Alex Garland; screenplay by Alex Garland; based on the novel Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer; cinematographed by Rob Hardy; edited by Barney Pilling; music by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury; production design by Mark Digby; produced by Eli Bush, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich and Scott Rudin. Released in Feb. 2018 by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated NNN

Starring: Natalie Portman as Lena, Oscar Isaac as Kane, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dr. Ventress, Gina Rodriguez as Anya Thorensen, Tuva Novotny as Cass Sheppard, Tessa Thompson as Josie Radek, David Gyasi as Daniel and Benedict Wong as Lomax

THERE ARE MANY layers to this smart, tense, slow-building science fiction drama. It’s at once a nuanced exploration of trauma and identity, a surreal excursion into high-concept cosmic horror and an endlessly rich subject for intellectual debate. It’s a movie that invites many interpretations, having been read as a metaphor for everything from depression to cancer to radioactive contamination following a nuclear accident. Perhaps its most poignant subtext is that of nature fighting back against the encroachments of human civilization.

Loosely based on an eponymous 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation centers around a journey to the heart of an anomalous region known as Area X on America’s southern coast. Three years earlier, a meteorite crashed into a lighthouse in a national park, bringing with it an extraterrestrial entity that has since been transforming everything around it. During its spread inland, the alien has forged new ecosystems filled with mutations like something out of a psychedelic vision. At the edge of the contaminated zone lies a hypnotic, pulsating electromagnetic field called The Shimmer, from which almost no one who enters ever emerges—the one man to have done so bearing little trace of his former personality or memories afterward.

A clandestine government organization called Southern Reach has been created to study Area X with the aim of halting and reversing its progress. But Area X is impervious to satellite surveillance, and no one has picked up radio transmissions from any of the numerous teams that have ventured inside. So far, Southern Reach has managed to keep Area X under wraps, using the pretext of a chemical spill to evacuate the sparsely populated swampland that has thus far been consumed. But it’s only a matter of months before Area X will begin to expand into population centers, raising the prospect of mass evacuations that will be much harder to explain.

In the movie’s opening scene, the sole survivor of the latest expedition into Area X, a cellular biologist named Lena (Natalie Portman), is being questioned in a small, bare room by Southern Reach agents in hazmat suits. It’s been four months since she and the rest of her team embarked on their mission to reach and study the lighthouse that appears to be The Shimmer’s epicenter. The other members of her group were psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), paramedic Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), geomorphologist Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) and physicist Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson). They left with food rations, camping gear, weapons and their various scientific instruments. Lena’s questioners want to know what became of the others, how Lena lasted for months on only two weeks’ worth of food and what transpired between her and the lighthouse entity. The movie then flashes backward to recount the saga.

Portman gives a strong, sympathetic performance. Her character’s personal journey—which involves coming to terms with the fate of her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), a special forces officer who was part of an earlier mission—forms the emotional core of the story. Leigh, who plays the group’s stoic leader, seems strangely subdued at first, until we come to understand her character’s motivations for heading into Area X. All of the actresses excel as action heroines during the movie’s periodic swings into action-thriller mode.

Unfortunately, some of the characters are given more to do than others. Lena and Josie are the only ones who really put their respective areas of expertise to use, each making important discoveries that advance our understanding of the entity’s threat. The others might as well just be soldiers.

Though subtle at first, the aberrations to the landscape and its flora and fauna grow increasingly dreamlike the closer the group comes to the lighthouse. The early mutations are, to use Lena’s words, “Corruptions of form. Duplicates of form.” But eventually the women encounter humanoid shrubs, stems harboring multiple plant species, an alligator with shark-like concentric rows of teeth, deer with flowering branches for antlers and trees made of glass. Josie hypothesizes that the alien being is a prism that refracts not only light rays and energy waves, but molecular structures as well, including DNA. This explains how shark’s teeth ended up in the mouth of an alligator, how sand formed into glass trees and how plants have melded with one another and with humans and deer.

Freakish things soon begin happening to the bodies and minds of our protagonists. Examining a drop of her own blood under a microscope, Lena finds it suffused with rapidly dividing alien cells. Anya is unnerved to see her fingerprint patterns moving. Paranoia begins to overrun the group. Some of the women fall victim to the creatures of Area X, while others turn into them, like Gregor Samsa becoming a cockroach in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Characterized by intense emotions and moments that seem to occur out of sequence and without logical explanation, these events play out much like a dream sequence. This feeling is heightened by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s musical score, whose sounds become increasingly unnatural and mesmerizing.

The movie’s frights are a mixed bag. At their best, they’re superb at evoking a sense of incomprehensible horror such as one finds in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Indeed, Annihilation has been likened to Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space”—as well as its numerous film adaptations—in which a life form brought to Earth on a meteorite wreaks madness and all manner of physical deformities upon the wildlife and human residents of a tract of Massachusetts woodland. (Unlike Annihilation’s alien, however, the being in that tale decimates its surroundings rather than creating something new from them.) The film also contains some very effective Cronenberg-esque body horror. However, not all the scares arise naturally from the plot and the characters; there are some monster attacks and shoot ’em up scenes that belong in a less lofty movie, and which are nowhere to be found in the book.

Beyond its similarity to the Lovecraft story (and despite VanderMeer stoutly denying he was influenced by either of the following two works), Annihilation also has obvious echoes of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic and its 1979 movie adaptation, Stalker. These also involve journeys through a restricted zone rife with strange mutations and inexplicable phenomena brought on by contamination left by an extraterrestrial presence.

Annihilation’s screenwriter and director is Alex Garland, whose previous film was another landmark of intelligent sci-fi filmmaking—and his directorial debut, no less—2014’s Ex Machina. With Annihilation, he takes great liberties with his source material, changing much of the plot, premise and thematic emphasis. The film has more human connection, more emotional interplay among the characters, than the novel does. (The book’s characters don’t relate; they’ve completely shed their names and pasts.) The book begins in medias res and bypasses much of its backstory, whereas the film starts more conventionally, with a full act of setup that relies on clichés such as a getting-to-know-you session between Lena and her future fellow expeditioners and tearful flashbacks to Lena’s personal drama that led her to agree to the mission. Neither version of the story is superior, really; they’re more like “refractions” of a single underlying inspiration.

The novel repeatedly stresses the pristineness of Area X. It’s a region that has managed, even if by otherworldly means, to beat back humankind. In the real world, of course, industrial humanity faces pushback from nature in the form of droughts, floods, diminishing returns in soil fertility, emerging infectious diseases and uncountable other threats to human habitat. Clearly, annihilation runs both ways.

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MYTHIC

A Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine

ISSUE # 17 | SUMMER 2021

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