Lavinia Whateley - Lightspeed Magazine

Lightspeed Magazine
Issue 28, September 2012
Table of Contents
Editorial, September 2012
“The Green Leopard Plague”—Walter Jon Williams
(ebook-exclusive)
The Eternal Flame—Greg Egan (novel excerpt)
Interview: John Scalzi
Artist Gallery: Frank F. Hong
Artist Spotlight: Frank F. Hong
Artist Gallery: Galen Dara
Artist Spotlight: Galen Dara
“My Wife Hates Time Travel”—Adam-Troy Castro (SF)
“The Streets of Ashkelon”—Harry Harrison (SF)
“Boojum”—Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (SF)
“Sun Dogs”—Brooke Bolander (SF)
“The Last Supper”—Scott Edelman (fantasy)
“The Seven Samovars”—Peter Sursi (fantasy)
“Heartless”—Holly Black (fantasy)
“Monster, Finder, Shifter”—Nina Kiriki Hoffman
(fantasy)
Author Spotlight: Walter Jon Williams (ebook-exclusive)
Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro
Author Spotlight: Harry Harrison
Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolander
Author Spotlight: Scott Edelman
Author Spotlight: Peter Sursi
Author Spotlight: Holly Black
Author Spotlight: Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Coming Attractions
© 2012, Lightspeed Magazine
Cover Art and artist gallery images by Frank F. Hong
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
www.lightspeedmagazine.com
Editorial, September 2012
John Joseph Adams
Welcome to issue twenty-eight of Lightspeed!
Sad tidings this month: Just as we were about to go to
press with this issue, we lost two legends: science fiction
author Harry Harrison and moonwalker Neil Armstrong.
Coincidentally, we had one of Harrison’s most
famous stories slated for reprint in this issue: “The Streets
of Ashkelon.” I consider it quite an honor to be able to
publish the story in Lightspeed, as, in addition to being a
bona fide classic, it is a story that was also very important
to me personally. It is the story of a missionary who goes
to spread his religion to an alien culture, and the
irreparable harm that results. I first read the story when I
was in college, and, though at that point in my life I was
pretty much done with religion, reading it really helped
cement in my mind the idea that being an atheist was not
only morally acceptable but morally preferable. (Your
mileage may vary, of course.) But what has made it stand
the test of time, I think, is that it is no mere anti-religious
tract; it is high-concept pure science fiction in the most
classic sense. But what pleases me more than being able
to publish the story is the fact that I was able to express
my gratitude to Harry Harrison for writing it, and to let
him know how important and influential the story was to
me.
Ad Astra, gentlemen.
On a happier note, this issue is scheduled to be published
on September 1, and according to the Worldcon website,
this year’s Hugo Awards will be presented on September
2. So while we have no news to report right now, we’re
hoping that some good news will be coming our way
shortly after this issue drops. I’ve said this before, but
when you’re up for an award and the voting closes, at that
point they’re kind of like Schrödinger’s Awards—until
the results are announced, the nominee is in a
superposition: you’ve both won and lost the award until
someone observes the results, thereby forcing the
quantum waveform to collapse . . . and your cat to huff
some poisonous gas. Or something like that.
In any case, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:
We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy
Castro (“My Wife Hates Time Travel”) and Brooke
Bolander (“Sun Dogs”), along with SF reprints by
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (“Boojum”) and Harry
Harrison (“The Streets of Ashkelon”).
Plus, we have original fantasy by Nina Kiriki
Hoffman (“Monsters, Finders, Shifters”) and Peter Sursi
(“The Seven Samovars”), and fantasy reprints by Scott
Edelman (“The Last Supper”) and Holly Black
(“Heartless”).
On the nonfiction side of things this month, we’ve got
something a little bit different for you. As usual, we’ve
got an artist showcase on our cover artist (Frank Hong),
along with a feature interview with bestselling author
John Scalzi, and our usual assortment of author
spotlights.
The difference this month is instead of a second
feature interview, we’ve got a second artist showcase for
you, to, well, showcase the talents of our house illustrator,
Galen Dara. Over the last few months, Galen has been
illustrating one or two stories for us every month (all of
which you can find via the Illustrated by Galen Dara tag:
lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/illustrated-by-galen-dara),
and we just wanted to change things up a bit so we could
shine the spotlight on her because we think she’s been
doing amazing work.
For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is
“The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter Jon Williams.
And our excerpt this month is from The Eternal Flame by
acclaimed author Greg Egan.
Our issue this month is again sponsored by our
friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Seeds of
Earth, the first in an exciting new space opera series by
Michael Cobley. You can find more from Orbit—
including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—
at www.orbitbooks.net.
It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And
remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be
notified of new Lightspeed content:
Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter
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Twitter: @lightspeedmag
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Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe
Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks
for reading!
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of
Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Other
Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures
on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living
Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for
the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award.
Forthcoming anthologies include: Epic (November, Tachyon), The Mad
Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), and Robot Uprisings
(2013, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide
to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
The Green Leopard Plague
Walter Jon Williams
Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid
gazed out at the horizon from her perch in the
overhanging banyan tree.
The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of
night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the
sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white
cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a
brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising
sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and
brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned
the many islands spread out on the horizon.
The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She
slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out
along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed
lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure
traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the
deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the
shallows atop the reefs.
She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the
ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin,
and then she pushed off and dove head-first into the
Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush
of bubbles.
Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.
After her hunt, the mermaid—her name was Michelle—
cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the
reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the
rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she
could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that were
the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the
water and gulped her first breath of air.
The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral,
and tide and chemical action had eaten away the
limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above.
Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms,
pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems.
Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it
still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the
tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from
the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the sauceredge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.
Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in
the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She
tucked her wings away—they were harder to retract than
to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate—
and then Michelle slipped her feet through the loop. At
her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in
silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright
green-dappled forest canopy.
She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt
perfectly at home in the treetops.
During her excursion she had speared a yellowlip
emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She
filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and
tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of
interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet
raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale
flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove,
eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous
evening and saving the other for later.
By the time Michelle finished breakfast the island
was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and
coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering
illicit downloads to tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock
of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school
of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.
It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well.
With sure, steady feet she moved along a rope walkway to
the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its
crown, and then straddled a limb, took her deck from the
mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her
messages.
There were several journalists requesting interviews
—the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This
pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer
any of the queries. There was a message from Darton,
which she decided to savor for a while before opening.
And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it
at once.
Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d
actually been carried for nine months in his mother’s
womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost
everyone else she knew. He had a sib who was a famous
astronaut, and a McEldowney Prize for his Lavoisier and
His Age, and a red-haired wife who was nearly as wellknown as he was. Michelle, a couple years ago, had
attended a series of his lectures at the College of Mystery,
and been interested despite her specialty being, strictly
speaking, biology.
He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when
she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered a good
thing. “I have a research project for you, if you’re free,”
the recording said. “It shouldn’t take too much effort.”
Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old
bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no notion of
what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her
whatever outrageous fee she asked.
Her material needs at the moment were few, but she
wouldn’t stay on this island forever.
Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at
her own console, Michelle could see his red-haired wife,
Katrin.
“Michelle!” Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to
know who called without turning around. “Good!” He
hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for
<concern>. “I understand you’ve suffered a loss,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, her answer delayed by a second’s
satellite lag.
“And the young man—?”
“Doesn’t remember.”
Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was
remembered.
Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. “Are
you all right?” he asked.
Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. “I’m
getting better.” Which was probably true.
“I see you’re not an ape anymore.”
“I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives,
all that.” And welcome isolation.
“Is there any way we can make things easier for you?”
She put on a hopeful expression. “You said something
about a job?”
“Yes.” He seemed relieved not to have to probe
further—he’d had a realdeath in his own family, Michelle
remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he
didn’t want to relive any part of that.
“I’m working on a biography of Terzian,” Davout
said.
“. . . and his Age?” Michelle finished.
“And his Legacy.” Davout smiled. “There’s a threeweek period in his life where he—well, he drops right off
the map. I’d like to find out where he went—and who he
was with, if anyone.”
Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively
unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan
Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.
“It’s a critical time for him,” Davout went on. “He’d
lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died—realdeath,
remember—and if he decided he simply wanted to get
lost, he would have all my sympathies.” He raised a hand
as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there,
made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand.
“But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s
changed for him. In June he delivered an undistinguished
paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanishes.
When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver
the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered
the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.”
Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly
impressed>. “How have you tried to locate him?”
“Credit card records—they end on June 17, when he
buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After
that he must have paid for everything with cash.”
“He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?” Michelle
pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. “Did you
try passport records?”
<No luck> “But if he stayed in the European
Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport
when crossing a border.”
“Cash machines?”
“Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple days
prior to the conference.”
The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then
smiled. “I guess you need me, all right.”
<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. “How much
would it cost me?”
Michelle pretended to consider the question for a
moment, then named an outrageous sum.
Davout frowned. “Sounds all right,” he said.
Inwardly Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned
toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. “I’ll get
busy, then.”
Davout looked grateful. “You’ll be able to get on it
right away?”
“Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures
of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible,
especially from around that period of time.”
“I have them ready.”
“Send away.”
An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s
deck. <Thanks> she flashed. “I’ll let you know as soon as
I find anything.”
At university Michelle had discovered that she was
very good at research, and it had become a profitable
sideline for her. People—usually people connected with
academe in one way or another—hired her to do the duller
bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references,
or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life.
It was almost always work they could do themselves, but
Michelle was simply better at research than most people,
and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle
herself usually enjoyed the work—it provided interesting
sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and
provided a welcome break from routine.
Plus, this particular job required not so much a
researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this
particular art.
Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned
from old photographs. Davout had selected well:
Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most
of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the
ones that showed him older were of high quality, or
showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the
biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.
The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of
the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a
tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark,
bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind
them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas
in a cloisonné vase, and above the table a large portrait of
a stately looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath
the table were stowed—temporarily, Michelle assumed—
a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little
golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either
for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed
a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple:
she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and
Terzian dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a
sense that the photographer had caught them almost in
motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from
one place to another.
Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, wellshaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian
as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine,
powerful physical presence that came across even in the
old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football
player than a famous thinker.
Michelle called up her character-recognition software
and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s
work, something she was reasonably certain her employer
would never have done if he’d been doing this job
himself. Most people using this kind of canned software
didn’t realize how the program could be fooled,
particularly when used with old media, scanned film
prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images
scanned by machines that simply weren’t very bright. In
the end, Michelle and software between them managed an
excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating
its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length
of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the
length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of
these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.
The mermaid downloaded the data into her
specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the
electronic world.
A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there,
and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries,
commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home
movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of
the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, post
cards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and
images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security
video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at
some time, had been turned into electrons and made
available to the universe at large.
A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the
Lightspeed War—none of it had seemed worth targeting,
or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.
What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere
in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of
absence—Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule—there would have
been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating
ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the
video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des
Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and
that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found
lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in
Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St.
Pauli district—Michelle had found targets in exactly
those places during the course of her other searches.
Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then
lifted her arms above her head and stretched—stretched
fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes,
the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in
a silent shriek.
Then she leaned over her deck, again, and called up
the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till
last.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why won’t you talk to
me? I love you!”
His brown eyes were a little wild.
“Don’t you understand?” he cried. “I’m not dead! I’m
not really dead!”
Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface
of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the
heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded
by the dark, shadowy towers of mangrove. Something
caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet,
and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the
daggerlike bill of a collared kingfisher speared a blueeyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red
coral head. The kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it
stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient double
duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet
and bubbles and the kingfisher was airborne again.
Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral
head, then over a pair of giant clams, each over a meter
long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid over them,
withdrawing the huge siphons as thick as her wrist. The
fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells
were a riot of colors, purples, blues, greens, and reds
interwoven in an eye-boggling pattern.
Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces
wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked up her
feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow
tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake with the sea.
Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or
thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were made of
coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some
lakes were connected to the ocean through tunnels and
caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes
contained forms of life unique in all the world, evolved
distinctly from their remote ancestors; even now, after all
this time, new species were being described.
During the months Michelle had spent in the islands
she thought she’d discovered two undescribed species: a
variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone
that was patterned strangely with scarlet and a cobaltblue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka-
dots, that had undulated past her one night on the reef,
flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-knot
tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the
anemone had been sent to the appropriate authorities, and
perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by
having a Latinate version of her name appended to the
scientific description of the two marine animals.
The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a
few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull her wings
in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest
fluttering of their edges. The tunnel turned up, and
brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings
and flew over brilliant pink soft corals toward the light.
Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous
environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.
The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine
lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves, and shadow,
and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to
see the boat bobbing on the tide. She stopped short, her
wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she
recognized the boat’s distinctive paint job, a bright red
meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.
Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance
away—Torbiong might be fishing, and sometimes he did
it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a
wave before Michelle could unblock her trachea and draw
air into her lungs to give a hail.
“I brought you supplies,” he said.
“Thanks,” Michelle said as she wiped a rain of
seawater from her face.
Torbiong was over two hundred years old and
Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes away
by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and
had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned, unlined face. He had
traveled over the world and off it while young, but
returned to Belau as he aged. His duties as chief were
mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had
money from hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had
built and that others managed for him, and he spent most
of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing.
He had befriended Darton and Michelle when they’d first
come to Belau, and helped them in securing the
permissions for their researches on the Rock Islands. A
few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed
to bring supplies to Michelle in exchange for the
occasional fish.
His boat was ten meters long and featured a
waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven
pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint
were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the brilliant yellow
of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were
decorated with grotesque carved faces, and dozens of
white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden
statues of the kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.
Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae,
flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears, radar, and a
satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could
command the boat from an elaborately carved throne of
breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls,
radio, audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio
speakers, a depth finder, a satellite navigation relay, and
radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy
were whistles tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing
noise when the boat was at speed.
Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As
Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving, screeching
electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the
earpieces of his headset—he normally howled it out of
speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the
fish. At night she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he
raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his skull on
betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles
shrieking.
He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio
onslaught before switching off his sound system.
“You’re going to make yourself deaf,” Michelle said.
Torbiong grinned. “Love that music. Gets that blood
moving.”
Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the
gunwale between a pair of cowries.
“I saw that boy of yours on the news,” Torbiong said.
“He’s making you famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
“He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him.”
“He’s dead,” Michelle said.
Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands.
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“Watch your head,” said Michelle.
Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him
into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped over the
edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant
and then stepped to the bow to haul in his mooring line
before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang,
Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her
banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her rope
elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her,
she’d folded away her gills and wings and was sitting in
the sling, kicking her legs over the water.
Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea,
salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last several weeks
Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which
didn’t grow here, and Torbiong had included a large
package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream
to go with them. Michelle thanked him.
“Most tourists want corn chips or something,”
Torbiong said pointedly.
“I’m not a tourist.” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I don’t
have any fish to swap—I’ve been hunting smaller game.”
She held out the specimen bag, still dripping seawater.
Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the
back of his boat. “I got some chai and a chersuuch
today,” he said, using the local names for barracuda and
mahi mahi.
“Good fishing.”
“Trolling.” With a shrug. He looked up at her, a
quizzical look on his face. “I’ve got some calls from
reporters,” he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke
out. “I always make sure to send them tourist literature.”
“I’m sure they enjoy reading it.”
Torbiong’s grin widened. “You get lonely, now,” he
said, “you come visit the family. We’ll give you a homecooked meal.”
She smiled. “Thanks.”
They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed
away on its jets, the whistles building to an eerie, spine-
shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed
her specimens and groceries. With a bowl of blueberries
and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her
deck, and checked the progress of her search spiders.
There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the
death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished she’d given
her spiders clearer instructions about dates.
The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was
a not-very-well focused tourist video from July 10,
showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa
Croce in Florence. A statue of Dante, also not in focus,
gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain
clouds. As the camera panned across him he stood with
his back to the camera but turned to the right, one leg
turned out as he scowled down at the ground—the profile
was a little smeared, but the big, broad-shouldered body
seemed right. The software reckoned there was a 78%
chance the man was Terzian.
Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few
passes of the software decided the chances of the figure
being Terzian were more on the order of 95%.
So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of
European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the
video, but then the day was cloudy and rainy and Terzian
didn’t have an umbrella.
And his wife had died, of course.
Now that Michelle had a date and a place, she refined
the instructions from her search spiders to seek out
images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and
then expand the search from there, first all Tuscany, then
all Italy.
If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had
him nailed.
The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders,
were duds. The software gave a less than 50% chance of
Terzian being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and
refinements of the image reduced the chance to something
near zero.
Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp
right there in the image—Paris, June 26, 13:41:44 hours,
just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of Euros and
vanished.
<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.
The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out
of the frame—no doubt this time that it was him. He was
looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people.
There was a dark-haired woman huddled on his arm, her
face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart
warmed at the thought of the lonely widower Terzian
having an affair in the City of Love.
Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so
drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out on the
pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.
And then, as the scene slowly settled into her
astonished mind, the video sang at her in the piping voice
of Pan.
Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his
backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the sound
spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone
on. Even the Slovenian woman who had been drowsing
realized that something had changed, and blinked herself
to alertness.
“I’m sorry,” he said in French. “But my wife just
died, and I don’t feel like playing this game anymore.”
His silent audience of seven watched as he gathered
his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture room,
his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden
floor.
Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right.
He’d been uncertain about commenting on Baudrillard in
Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own
language, a cheery compare-and-contrast exercise
between Baudrillard’s “the self does not exist” and
Rorty’s “I don’t care,” the stereotypical French and
American answers to modern life. There had been seven
in his audience, perched on creaking wooden chairs, and
none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or
condemned him for his audacity.
Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian
had felt the anger growing, spawned by the sensation of
his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Lights,
its every cobblestone a monument to European
civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left
Bank, reading to his audience of seven from a paper that
was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a
footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum
and to answer, I don’t care?
I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this
drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?
I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the
Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his Latin right. I am
in pain, and therefore I do exist.
He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Île de la Cité,
with lunch as his excuse and the thought of getting
hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had
absolutely nothing to do until August, after which he
would return to the States and collect his belongings from
the servants’ quarters of the house on Esplanade, and then
he would go about looking for a job.
He wasn’t certain whether he would be more
depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.
You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in
Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and you’re
eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine.
And if that isn’t a command to be joyful, what is?
It was then that the Peruvian band began to play.
Terzian looked up from his plate in weary surprise.
When Terzian had been a child his parents—both
university professors—had first taken him to Europe, and
he’d seen then that every European city had its own
Peruvian or Bolivian street band, Indians in black bowler
hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place,
gazing with impassive brown eyes from over their guitars
and reed flutes.
Now, a couple decades later, the musicians were still
here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler
hats for European styles, and their presentation had
grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and
CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular
Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass
of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored
medley of old Abba songs.
Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados
sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.
The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian
looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent,
but he could barely remember tasting it.
Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And—for
God’s sake—was that band now playing Oasis? Those
chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like
“Wonderwall.” “Wonderwall” on Spanish guitars, reed
flutes, and a mandolin.
Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of
cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise
in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the
bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that
rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was
stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate
to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.
The man falling into the street, his face pinched with
pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were,
seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.
Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.
There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.
Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a
briefcase.
And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes
from the Peruvian band. Wonderwall.
Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three
men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the
fallen man—someone had to take charge here. The fallen
man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and
he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.
The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek
after another.
Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk
and looked around at faces that all registered the same
sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A
French doctor? All his French seemed to have just
drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are
you all right? and How are you feeling? seemed beyond
him now. The first aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo
school was ages ago.
Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The
wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face.
In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning
a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again
at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness
that mirrored his own.
Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty,
people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk.
Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped
kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward them from
the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of
relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal
with this now.
He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm
was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at
the woman who had just huddled her face into his
shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath
wraparound shades.
“Please,” she said in English a bit too musical to be
American. “Take me out of here.”
The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they
made their escape.
He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself,
good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To
the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow
colors beyond a screen of plane trees.
Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a
green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He
didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he
suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym
bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging
him on the ass. Surreptitiously he slid his hand into his
right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still
there.
Wonderwall, he thought. Christ.
He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized
comment, just in case the woman was genuinely
distressed.
“I suppose he’ll be all right,” he said, half-barking the
words in his annoyance and anger.
The woman’s face was still half-buried in his
shoulder. “He’s dead,” she murmured into his jacket.
“Couldn’t you tell?”
For Terzian death had never occurred under the sky,
but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and
warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion
of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked
only in part by morphia.
He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden
relaxation.
Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.
Reflex kept him talking. “The police were coming,”
he said. “They’ll—they’ll call an ambulance or
something.”
“I only hope they catch the bastards who did it,” she
said.
Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men
who let the man fall, and then dashed through the square
for his papers. For some reason all he could remember
about them were their black laced boots, with thick soles.
“Who were they?” he asked blankly.
The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian
saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. “I
suppose they think of themselves as cops,” she said.
Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles,
within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on
sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the
front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She
put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor
between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed
she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have
to bolt at any moment.
Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He
wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.
Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for
them both. “No,” she said suddenly. “I want ice cream.”
Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and
ordered in French. She was around his own age, twentynine. There was no question that she was a mixture of
races, but which races? The flat nose could be African or
Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed
by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion
could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green
eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive
mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a
knot behind her head could be African or East Indian or,
for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be
beautiful—and also too striking, Terzian thought, to be a
successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily
identified.
The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward
Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still
there.
“My name’s Jonathan,” he said.
“I’m,” hesitating, “Stephanie.”
“Really?” Terzian let his skepticism show.
“Yes.” She nodded, reaching in a pocket for
cigarettes. “Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you
know my real name or not.”
“Then you’d better give me the whole thing.”
She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and
enunciated clearly. “Stephanie América Pais e Silva.”
“America?”
Striking a match. “It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese
name.”
He looked at her. “But you’re not Portuguese.”
“I carry a Portuguese passport.”
Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.
Instead he said, “Did you know the man who was
killed?”
Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette
did not ease the tremor in her hands.
“Did you know him well?”
“Not very.” She dragged in smoke again, then let the
smoke out as she spoke.
“He was a colleague. A biochemist.”
Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into
the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss,
and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.
“Shit,” she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a
nervous movement of her fingers.
“Are you a biochemist, too?” Terzian asked.
“I’m a nurse.” She looked at him with her pale eyes.
“I work for Santa Croce—it’s a—”
“A relief agency.” A Catholic one, he remembered.
The name meant Holy Cross.
She nodded.
“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” he asked. And then
his skepticism returned. “Oh, that’s right—it was the
police who did the killing.”
“Not the French police.” She leaned across the table
toward him. “This was a different sort of police, the kind
who think that killing someone and making an arrest are
the same thing. You look at the television news tonight.
They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or
any suspects.” Her face darkened, and she leaned back in
her chair to consider a new thought. “Unless they
somehow manage to blame it on me.”
Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind,
men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face
of the victim.
“Who, then?”
She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette
smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”
Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most
sensible answer.
“The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile
drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “They’re intellectual
property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”
At that point the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee
along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge
glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit
syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of
cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick.
Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.
“I love ice cream,” she choked, and then her eyes
brimmed with tears and she began to cry.
Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and between
sobs choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating
in great gulps, and swiping at her lips and tear-stained
cheeks with a paper napkin.
The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his
glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed
Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.
Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid
her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the
table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call
someone to take her off his hands?
The latter, for preference.
He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her
own grew sodden.
His skepticism had not survived the mention of the
Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to
be a con—a scam was based on basic human desire,
greed or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual
property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of
targeting academics from the States, luring them with a
tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering
for . . .
Eventually the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the
half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another
cigarette.
He tapped his wedding ring on the tabletop,
something he did when thinking. “Shouldn’t you contact
the local police?” he asked. “You know something about
this . . . death.” For some reason he was reluctant to use
the word murder. It was as if using the word would make
something true, not the killing itself but his relationship
to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some
kind of power over him.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to get out of France
before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but
that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and
they’re probably watching it.”
“Because of this copyright.”
Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “That’s right.”
“It’s not a literary copyright, I take it.”
She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.
“Your friend was a biologist.” He felt a hum in his
nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the
next question.
“Is it a weapon?” he asked.
She wasn’t surprised by the question. “No,” she said.
“No, just the opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette
and sighed the smoke out. “It’s an antidote. An antidote
to human folly.”
“Listen,” Stephanie said. “Just because the Soviet Union
fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is
still there—the only difference is that its moral
justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and
extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The
old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s
great, but more countries just meant more palms to be
greased—all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve
got more inspectors and tax collectors, more customs
agents and security directorates than there ever were
under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their
own populations, because no one else will do business
with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource
that people want.”
“Trashcanistans,” Terzian said. It was a word he’d
heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former
Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and
paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime
was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the
country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought
that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow
translated into freedom for the fatherland.
Stephanie nodded. “And the worst Trashcanistan of
all is Transnistria.”
She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi
back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned
the television to a local station, but muted the sound until
the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun
of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives
underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with
tragedy.
The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized
bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance
around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not
wanting Stephanie to think he wanted to get her in the
sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while
Stephanie disposed herself more comfortably, sitting
cross-legged in its center.
“Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by
Stalin,” she said. “It was made up of Bessarabia, which
was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the
beginning of the Second World War, plus a strip of
industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the
Soviet Union went down, Moldova became
‘independent’—” Terzian could hear the quotes in her
voice. “But independence had nothing to do with the
Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet
elites going off on their own account once their own
superiors were no longer there to retrain them. And
Moldova soon split—first the Turkish Christians . . .”
“Wait a second,” Terzian said. “There are Christian
Turks?”
The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his
Armenian-American worldview.
Stephanie nodded. “Orthodox Christian Turks, yes.
They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their own
autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova.”
Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and
her lighter.
“Uh,” Terzian said. “Would you mind smoking in the
window?”
Stephanie made a face. “Americans,” she said, but
she moved to the window and opened it, letting in a blast
of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill,
sheltered her cigarette from the wind, and lit up.
“Where was I?” she asked.
“Turkish Christians.”
“Right.” Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale.
“Gagauzia was only the start—after that a Russian
general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types
created a rebellion in the bit of Moldova that was on the
far side of the Dniester—another collection of Soviet
elites, representing no one but themselves. Once the
Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanianspeaking oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped
in as peacekeepers, complete with blue helmets, and
created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other
government. And that meant more military, more border
guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and
customs duties, and uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms
needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees
who could be put in camps while the administration stole
their supplies and rations . . .
“But—” She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer.
“Transnistria had a problem. No other nation recognized
their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural
resources, barring the underage girls they enslaved by the
thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the
population was leaving as fast as they could, restrained
only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no
other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer
people whose productivity the elite could steal to support
their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a
lot of obsolete Soviet heavy industry geared to produce
stuff no one wanted.
“But they still had the infrastructure. They had power
plants—running off Russian oil they couldn’t afford to
buy—and they had a transportation system. So the outlaw
regime set up to attract other outlaws who needed
industrial capacity—the idea was that they’d attract
entrepreneurs who were excused from paying most of the
local taxes in exchange for making one big payoff to the
higher echelon.”
“Weapons?” Terzian asked.
“Weapons, sure,” Stephanie nodded. “Mostly they’re
producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s guns, but the
guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking
and data havens, but the authorities couldn’t restrain
themselves from ripping those off—banks and data run
on trust and control of information, and when the
regulators are greedy, short-sighted crooks you don’t get
either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech.
They’ve got companies creating cheap generic
pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents . . .” Her look
darkened. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that, not
when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t
afford to cure. And they’ve also got other companies who
are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their
own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to
the elite, these companies remain completely
unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows
what they’re doing in those factories, and the government
gives them security free of charge.”
Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting
Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant plants with
untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an
unsuspecting world. Transgenic elements drifting down
the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its
saline environment . . .
“The news,” Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the
television.
Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute
button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that
announced the news began to fade.
The murder on the Île de la Cité was the second item
on the broadcast. The victim was described as a “foreign
national” who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests
had been made. The motive for the killing was unknown.
Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same
item on another channel. The story was unchanged.
“I told you,” Stephanie said. “No suspects. No
motive.”
“You could tell them.”
She made a negative motion with her cigarette. “I
couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find them. All I
could do is put myself under suspicion.”
Terzian turned off the TV. “So what happened
exactly? Your friend stole from these people?”
Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her
wrist. “He stole something that was of no value to them.
It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay.
And—” She turned to the window and spun her cigarette
into the street below. “I’ll take it out of here as soon as I
can,” she said. “I’ve got to try to contact some friends.”
She closed the window, shutting out the spring breeze. “I
wish I had my passport. That would change everything.”
I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He
closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the white face so
completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.
He was so fucking sick of death.
He opened his eyes. “I can get your passport back,” he
said.
Anger kept him moving until he saws the killers, across
the street from Stephanie’s hotel, sitting at an outdoor
table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately
—he didn’t need to look at the heavy shoes, or the broad
faces with their disciplined military mustaches—one
glance at the crowd at the café showed the only two in the
place who weren’t French. That was probably how
Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn’t
dress or carry himself like a Frenchman, for all that he’d
worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away
before they saw him gaping at them.
Anger turned very suddenly to fear, and as he
continued his stride toward the hotel he told himself that
they wouldn’t recognize him from the Norman restaurant,
that he’d changed into blue jeans and sneaks and a
windbreaker, and carried a soft-sided suitcase. Still he felt
a gunsight on the back of his neck, and he was so nervous
that he nearly ran head-first into the glass lobby door.
Terzian paid for a room with his credit card, took the
key from the Vietnamese clerk, and walked up the narrow
stair to what the French called the second floor, but what
he would have called the third. No one lurked in the
stairwell, and he wondered where the third assassin had
gone. Looking for Stephanie somewhere else, probably,
an airport or train station.
In his room, Terzian put his suitcase on the bed—it
held only a few token items, plus his shaving kit—and
then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it
in his hand. The key was simple, attached to a weighted
doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.
The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him
on first sighting the two men began to shift again into
rage.
They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty
mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair of empties
as well.
Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk
Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone
simply through drunkenness.
Perhaps they already had.
He was angry when he left his room and took the
stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in the hall.
He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door
behind him.
He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly
high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed that the sun
seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe
France was very far to the west for its time zone.
Stephanie’s didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of
nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic bag she
already carried. He took it from the little closet, and
enough of Terzian’s suspicion remained so that he
checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was
Steph. Pais, and not another.
He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel
documents from the bedside table and tossed them in. He
added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed
her toothbrush and shaver into her plastic travel bag and
put it in the duffel.
The plan was for him to return to his room on the
upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising suspicion
by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning,
carrying two bags, he’d check out and rejoin Stephanie in
his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room,
and where the air almost would by now reek with her
cigarette smoke.
Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a
double handful of Stephanie’s t-shirts, underwear, and
stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d
done this was when he cleaned Claire’s belongings out of
the Esplanade house.
Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his
hands and let the fury rage like a tempest in his skull.
And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the
corridor, and then a stumbling thud.
Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk
baboons in them.
Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this
room, this dead-end where he could be trapped and killed.
He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and
stepped to the bed and picked up the duffel in one hand.
Another step took him to the door, which he opened with
one hand while using the other to fling the duffel into the
surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other side.
Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years,
not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain reflexes don’t
go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands
of times—certainly not the front kick that hooked upward
under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless
into the corridor wall opposite.
A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact
that he was bigger than these guys. He could really knock
them around.
The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol but
Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and drove the point
of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the
automatic with both hands, took a further step down the
corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around
Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and seventy degrees and
drove him head-first into the corridor wall. When he’d
finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into
the barrel of his own gun.
Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph
inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue echoed it. It
was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the
trigger.
Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?
Except the first man hadn’t realized that his side had
just lost. He had drawn a knife—a glittering chromed
single-edged thing that may have already killed once
today—and now he took a dangerous step toward
Terzian.
Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man
and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized
at just this moment it wasn’t his partner who held it.
Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing
happened his rage melted into terror and he ran. Behind
him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner
and crash to the floor.
Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard
the thick-soled military boots clatter on the risers above
him. He dashed through the small lobby—he sensed the
Vietnamese night clerk, who was facing away, begin to
turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door
and ran into the street.
He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun
still in his fist, and he put it in the pocket of his
windbreaker.
Some moments later he realized he wasn’t being
pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s passport
was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife
man and hadn’t retrieved.
For a moment rage ran through him, and he thought
about taking out the gun and fixing whatever was wrong
with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting
the documents one way or another.
But then the anger faded enough for him to see what a
foolish course that would be, and he returned to his own
hotel.
Terzian had given Stephanie his key, so he knocked on
his own door before realizing she was very unlikely to
open to a random knock. “It’s Jonathan,” he said. “It
didn’t work out.”
She snatched the door open from the inside. Her face
was taut with anxiety. She held pages in her hand, the
text of the paper he’d delivered that morning.
“Sorry,” he said. “They were there, outside the hotel. I
got into your room, but—”
She took his arm and almost yanked him into the
room, then shut the door behind him. “Did they follow
you?” she demanded.
“No. They didn’t chase me. Maybe they thought I’d
figure out how to work the gun.” He took the pistol out of
his pocket and showed it to her. “I can’t believe how
stupid I was—”
“Where did you get that? Where did you get that?”
Her voice was nearly a scream, and she shrank away from
him, her eyes wide. Her fist crumpled papers over her
heart. To his astonishment he realized that she was afraid
of him, that she thought he was connected, somehow,
with the killers.
He threw the pistol onto the bed and raised his hands
in a gesture of surrender. “No really!” he shouted over her
cries. “It’s not mine! I took it from one of them!”
Stephanie took a deep gasp of air. Her eyes were still
wild. “Who the hell are you, then?” she said. “James
Bond?”
He gave a disgusted laugh. “James Bond would have
known how to shoot.”
“I was reading your—your article.” She held out the
pages toward him. “I was thinking, my God, what have I
got this poor guy into. Some professor I was sending to
his death.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “They
probably bugged my room. They would have known right
away that someone was in it.”
“They were drunk,” Terzian said. “Maybe they’ve
been drinking all day. Those assholes really pissed me
off.”
He sat on the bed and picked up the pistol. It was
small and blue steel and surprisingly heavy. In the years
since he’d last shot a gun he had forgotten that
purposefulness, the way a firearm was designed for a
single, clear function. He found the safety where it had
been all along, near his right thumb, and flicked it off and
then on again.
“There,” he said. “That’s what I should have done.”
Waves of anger shivered through his limbs at the
touch of the adrenaline still pouring into his system. A
bitter impulse to laugh again rose in him, and he tried to
suppress it.
“I guess I was lucky after all,” he said. “It wouldn’t
have done you any good to have to explain a pair of
corpses outside your room.” He looked up at Stephanie,
who was pacing back and forth in the narrow lane
between the bed and the wall, and looking as if she badly
needed a cigarette. “I’m sorry about your passport. Where
were you going to go, anyway?”
“It doesn’t so much matter if I go,” she said. She gave
Terzian a quick, nervous glance. “You can fly it out,
right?”
“It?” He stared at her. “What do you mean, it?”
“The biotech.” Stephanie stopped her pacing and
stared at him with those startling green eyes. “Adrian
gave it to me. Just before they killed him.” Terzian’s gaze
followed hers to the black bag with the Nike swoosh, the
bag that sat at the foot of Terzian’s bed.
Terzian’s impulse to laugh faded. Unregulated,
illegal, stolen biotech, he thought. Right in his own hotel
room. Along with a stolen gun and a woman who was
probably out of her mind.
Fuck.
The dead man was identified by news files as Adrian
Cristea, a citizen of Ukraine and a researcher. He had
been stabbed once in the right kidney and bled to death
without identifying his assailants. Witnesses reported two
or maybe three men leaving the scene immediately after
Cristea’s death. Michelle set more search spiders to work.
For a moment she considered calling Davout and
letting him know that Terzian had probably been a
witness to a murder, but decided to wait until she either
had some more evidence one way or another.
For the next few hours she did her real work,
analyzing the samples she’d taken from Zigzag Lake’s
sulfide-tainted deeps. It wasn’t very physical, and
Michelle figured it was only worth a few hundred
calories.
A wind floated through the treetops, bringing the
scent of night flowers and swaying Michelle’s perch
beneath her as she peered into her biochemical reader,
and she remembered the gentle pressure of Darton against
her back, rocking with her as he looked over her shoulder
at her results. Suddenly she could remember, with a near
perfect clarity, the taste of his skin on her tongue.
She rose from her woven seat and paced along the
bough. Damn it, she thought, I watched you die.
Michelle returned to her deck and discovered that her
spiders had located the police file on Cristea’s death. A
translation program handled the antique French without
trouble, even producing modern equivalents of forensic
jargon. Cristea was of Romanian descent, had been born
in the old USSR, and had acquired Ukrainian citizenship
on the breakup of the Soviet Union. The French files
themselves had translations of Cristea’s Ukrainian travel
documents, which included receipts showing that he had
paid personal insurance, environmental insurance, and
departure taxes from Transnistria, a place of which she’d
never heard, as well as similar documents from Moldova,
which at least was a province, or country, that sounded
familiar.
What kind of places were these, where you had to buy
insurance at the border? And what was environmental
insurance anyway?
There were copies of emails between French and
Ukrainian authorities, in which the Ukrainians politely
declined any knowledge of their citizen beyond the fact
that he was a citizen. They had no addresses for him.
Cristea apparently lived in Transnistria, but the
authorities there echoed the Ukrainians in saying they
knew nothing of him.
Cristea’s tickets and vouchers showed that he had
apparently taken a train to Bucharest, and there he’d got
on an airline that took him to Prague, and thence to Paris.
He had been in the city less than a day before he was
killed. Found in Cristea’s hotel room was a curious
document certifying that Cristea was carrying medical
supplies, specifically a vaccine against hepatitis A.
Michelle wondered why he would be carrying a hepatitis
vaccine from Transnistria to France. France presumably
had all the hepatitis vaccine it needed.
No vaccine had turned up. Apparently Cristea had got
into the European Community without having his bags
searched, as there was no evidence that the documents
relating to the alleged vaccine had ever been examined.
The missing “vaccine”—at some point in the police
file the skeptical quotation marks had appeared—had
convinced the Paris police that Cristea was a murdered
drug courier, and at that point they’d lost interest in the
case. It was rarely possible to solve a professional killing
in the drug underworld.
Michelle’s brief investigation seemed to have come to
a dead end. That Terzian might have witnessed a murder
would rate maybe half a sentence in Professor Davout’s
biography.
Then she checked what her spiders had brought her in
regard to Terzian, and found something that cheered her.
There he was inside the Basilica di Santa Croce, a
tourist still photograph taken before the tomb of
Machiavelli. He was only slightly turned away from the
camera and the face was unmistakable. Though there was
no date on the photograph, only the year, but he wore the
same clothes he wore in the video taken outside the
church, and the photo caught him in the act of speaking to
a companion. She was a tall woman with deep brown
skin, but she was turned away from the camera, and a
wide-brimmed sun hat made her features
indistinguishable.
Humming happily, Michelle deployed her software to
determine whether this was the same woman who had
been on Terzian’s arm on the Place Dauphine. Without
facial features or other critical measurements to compare,
the software was uncertain, but the proportion of limb and
thorax was right, and the software gave an estimate of
41%, which Michelle took to be encouraging.
Another still image of Terzian appeared in an undated
photograph taken at a festival in southern France. He
wore dark glasses, and he’d grown heavily tanned; he
carried a glass of wine in either hand, but the person to
whom he was bringing the second glass was out of the
frame. Michelle set her software to locating the identity of
the church seen in the background, a task the two
distinctive bell towers would make easy. She was lucky
and got a hit right away: the church was the Eglise StMichel in Salon-de-Provence, which meant Terzian had
attended the Fête des Aires de la Dine in June. Michelle
set more search spiders to seeking out photo and video
from the festivals. She had no doubt she’d find Terzian
there, and perhaps again his companion.
Michelle retired happily to her hammock. The search
was going well. Terzian had met a woman in Paris and
traveled with her for weeks. The evidence wasn’t quite
there yet, but Michelle would drag it out of history
somehow.
Romance. The lonely mermaid was in favor of
romance, the kind where you ran away to faraway places
to be more intently one with the person you adored.
It was what she herself had done, before everything
had gone so wrong, and Michelle had to take steps to reestablish the moral balance of her universe.
Terzian paid for a room for Stephanie for the night, not so
much because he was gallant as because he needed to be
alone to think. “There’s a breakfast buffet downstairs in
the morning,” he said. “They have hard-boiled eggs and
croissants and Nutella. It’s a very un-French thing to do. I
recommend it.”
He wondered if he would ever see her again. She
might just vanish, particularly if she read his thoughts,
because another reason for wanting privacy was so that he
could call the police and bring an end to this insane
situation.
He never quite assembled the motivation to make the
call. Perhaps Rorty’s I don’t care had rubbed off on him.
And he never got a chance to taste the buffet, either.
Stephanie banged on his door very early, and he dragged
on his jeans and opened the door. She entered, furiously
smoking from her new cigarette pack, the athletic bag
over her shoulder.
“How did you pay for the room at my hotel?” she
asked.
“Credit card,” he said, and in the stunned, accusing
silence that followed he saw his James Bond fantasies
sink slowly beneath the slack, oily surface of a dismal
lake.
Because credit cards leave trails. The Transnistrians
would have checked the hotel registry, and the credit card
impression taken by the hotel, and now they knew who he
was. And it wouldn’t be long before they’d trace him at
his hotel.
“Shit, I should have warned you to pay cash.”
Stephanie stalked to the window and peered out
cautiously. “They could be out there right now.”
Terzian felt a sudden compulsion to have the gun in
his hand. He took it from the bedside table and stood
there, feeling stupid and cold and shirtless.
“How much money do you have?” Terzian asked.
“Couple hundred.”
“I have less.”
“You should max out your credit card and just carry
Euros. Use your card now before they cancel it.”
“Cancel it? How could they cancel it?”
She gave him a tight-lipped, impatient look.
“Jonathan. They may be assholes, but they’re still a
government.”
They took a cab to the American Express near the
Opéra and Terzian got ten thousand Euros in cash from
some people who were extremely skeptical about the
validity of his documents, but who had, in the end, to
admit that all was technically correct. Then Stephanie got
a cell phone under the name A. Silva, with a bunch of
prepaid hours on it, and within a couple hours they were
on the TGV, speeding south to Nice at nearly two
hundred seventy kilometers per hour, all with a strange
absence of sound and vibration that made the French
countryside speeding past seem like a strangely
unconvincing special effect.
Terzian had put them in first class and he and
Stephanie were alone in a group of four seats. Stephanie
was twitchy because he hadn’t bought seats in a smoking
section. He sat uncertain, unhappy about all the cash he
was carrying and not knowing what to do with it—he’d
made two big rolls and zipped them into the pockets of
his windbreaker. He carried the pistol in the front pocket
of his jeans and its weight and discomfort was a perpetual
reminder of this situation that he’d been dragged into,
pursued by killers from Trashcanistan and escorting
illegal biotechnology.
He kept mentally rehearsing drawing the pistol and
shooting it. Over and over, remembering to thumb off the
safety this time. Just in case Trashcanian commandos
stormed the train.
“Hurled into life,” he muttered. “An object lesson
right out of Heidegger.”
“Beg pardon?”
He looked at her. “Heidegger said we’re hurled into
life. Just like I’ve been hurled into—” He flapped his
hands uselessly. “Into whatever this is. The situation
exists before you even got here, but here you are anyway,
and the whole business is something you inherit and have
to live with.” He felt his lips draw back in a snarl. “He
also said that a fundamental feature of existence is anxiety
in the face of death, which would also seem to apply to
our situation. And his answer to all of this was to make
existence, dasein if you want to get technical, an
authentic project.” He looked at her. “So what’s your
authentic project, then? And how authentic is it?”
Her brow furrowed. “What?”
Terzian couldn’t stop, not that he wanted to. It was
just Stephanie’s hard luck that he couldn’t shoot anybody
right now, or break something up with his fists, and was
compelled to lecture instead. “Or,” he went on, “to put
this in a more accessible context, just pretend we’re in a
Hitchcock film, okay? This is the scene where Grace
Kelly tells Cary Grant exactly who she is and what the
MacGuffin is.”
Stephanie’s face was frozen into a hostile mask.
Whether she understood what he was saying or not, the
hostility was clear.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“What’s in the fucking bag?” he demanded.
She glared at him for a long moment, then spoke, her
own anger plain in her voice. “It’s the answer to world
hunger,” she said. “Is that authentic enough for you?”
Stephanie’s father was from Angola and her mother from
East Timor, both former Portuguese colonies swamped in
the decades since independence by war and massacre.
Both parents had with great foresight and intelligence
retained Portuguese passports, and had met in Rome,
where they worked for UNESCO, and where Stephanie
had grown up with a blend both of their genetics and their
service ethic.
Stephanie herself had gotten a degree in
administration from the University of Virginia, which
accounted for the American lights in her English, then got
another degree in nursing and went to work for the
Catholic relief agency Santa Croce, which sent her to
every war-wrecked, locust-blighted, warlord-ridden,
sandstorm-blasted camp in Africa. And a few that
weren’t in Africa.
“Trashcanistan,” Terzian said.
“Moldova,” Stephanie said. “For three months, on
what was supposed to be my vacation.” She shuddered. “I
don’t mind telling you that it was a frightening thing. I
was used to that kind of thing in Africa, but to see it all
happening in the developed world . . . warlords, ethnic
hatreds, populations being moved at the point of a gun,
whole forested districts being turned to deserts because
people suddenly needed firewood . . .” Her emerald eyes
flashed. “It’s all politics, okay? Just like in Africa.
Famine and camps are all politics now, and have been
since before I was born. A whole population starves, and
it’s because someone, somewhere, sees a profit in it. It’s
difficult to just kill an ethnic group you don’t like, war is
expensive and there are questions at the UN and you may
end up at The Hague being tried for war crimes. But if
you just wait for a bad harvest and then arrange for the
whole population to starve, it’s different—suddenly your
enemies are giving you all their money in return for food,
you get aid from the UN instead of grief, and you can
award yourself a piece of the relief action and collect
bribes from all the relief agencies, and your enemies are
rounded up into camps and you can get your armed forces
into the country without resistance, make sure your
enemies disappear, control everything while some
deliveries disappear into government warehouses where
the food can be sold to the starving or just sold abroad for
a profit . . .” She shrugged. “That’s the way of the world,
okay? But no more!” She grabbed a fistful of the Nike
bag and brandished it at him.
What her time in Moldova had done was to leave
Stephanie contacts in the area, some in relief agencies,
some in industry and government. So that when news of a
useful project came up in Transnistria, she was among the
first to know.
“So what is it?” Terzian asked. “Some kind of
genetically modified food crop?”
“No.” She smiled thinly. “What we have here is a
genetically modified consumer.”
Those Transnistrian companies had mostly been
interested in duplicating pharmaceuticals and transgenetic
food crops created by other companies, producing them
on the cheap and underselling the patent-owners. There
were bits and pieces of everything in those labs, DNA
human and animal and vegetable. A lot of it had other
people’s trademarks and patents on it, even the human
codes, which US law permitted companies to patent
provided they came up with something useful to do with
it. And what these semi-outlaw companies were doing
was making two things they figured people couldn’t do
without: drugs and food.
And not just people, since animals need drugs and
food, too. Starving, tubercular sheep or pigs aren’t worth
much at market, so there’s as much money in keeping
livestock alive as in doing the same for people. So at
some point one of the administrators—after a few too
many shots of vodka flavored with bison grass—said,
“Why should we worry about feeding the animals at all?
Why not have them grow their own food, like plants?”
So then began the Green Swine Project, an attempt to
make pigs fat and happy by just herding them out into the
sun.
“Green swine,” Terzian repeated, wondering. “People
are getting killed over green swine.”
“Well, no.” Stephanie waved the idea away with a
twitchy swipe of her hand. “The idea never quite got
beyond the vaporware stage, because at that point another
question was asked—why swine? Adrian said, ‘Why stop
at having animals do photosynthesis—why not people?’”
“No!” Terzian cried, appalled. “You’re going to turn
people green?”
Stephanie glared at him. “Something wrong with fat,
happy green people?” Her hands banged out a furious
rhythm on the armrests of her seat. “I’d have skin to
match my eyes. Wouldn’t that be attractive?”
“I’d have to see it first,” Terzian said, the shock still
rolling through his bones.
“Adrian was pretty smart,” Stephanie said. “The
Transnistrians killed themselves a real genius.” She
shook her head. “He had it all worked out. He wanted to
limit the effect to the skin—no green muscle tissue of
skeletons—so he started with a virus that has a tropism
for the epidermis—papiloma, that’s warts, okay?”
So now we’ve got green warts, Terzian thought, but
he kept his mouth shut.
“So if you’re Adrian, what you do is gut the virus and
re-encode it to create chlorophyll. Once a person’s
infected, exposure to sunlight will cause the virus to
replicate and chlorophyll to reproduce in the skin.”
Terzian gave Stephanie a skeptical look. “That’s not
going to be very efficient,” he said. “Plants get sugars and
oxygen from chlorophyll, okay, but they don’t need much
food, they stand in place and don’t walk around. Add
chlorophyll to a person’s skin, how many calories do you
get each day? Tens? Dozens?”
Stephanie’s lips parted in a fierce little smile. “You
don’t stop with just the chlorophyll. You have to get
really efficient electron transport. In a plant that’s handled
in the chloroplasts, but the human body already has
mitochondria to do the same job. You don’t have to create
these huge support mechanisms for the chlorophyll, you
just make use of what’s already there. So if you’re
Adrian, what you do is add trafficking tags to the reaction
center proteins so that they’ll target the mitochondria,
which already are loaded with proteins to handle electron
transport. The result is that the mitochondria handle
transport from the chlorophyll, which is the sort of job
they do anyway, and once the virus starts replicating you
can get maybe a thousand calories or more just from
standing in the sun. It won’t provide full nutrition, but it
can keep starvation at bay, and it’s not as if starving
people have much to do besides stand in the sun
anyway.”
“It’s not going to do much good for Icelanders,”
Terzian said.
She turned severe. “Icelanders aren’t starving. It so
happens that most of the people in the world who are
starving happen to be in hot places.”
Terzian flapped his hands. “Fine. I must be a racist.
Sue me.”
Stephanie’s grin broadened, and she leaned toward
Terzian. “I didn’t tell you about Adrian’s most interesting
bit of cleverness. When people start getting normal
nutrition, there’ll have a competition within the
mitochondria between normal metabolism and solarinduced electron transport. So the green virus is just a
redundant backup system in case normal nutrition isn’t
available.”
A triumphant smile crossed Stephanie’s face.
“Starvation will no longer be a weapon,” she said. “Green
skin can keep people active and on their feet long enough
to get help. It will keep them healthy enough to fend off
the epidemics associated with malnutrition. The point is
—” She made fists and shook them at the sky. “The bad
guys don’t get to use starvation as a weapon anymore!
Famine ends! One of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse dies, right here, right now, as a result of what
I’ve got in this bag!” She picked up the bag and threw it
into Terzian’s lap, and he jerked on the seat in defensive
reflex, knees rising to meet elbows. Her lips skinned back
in a snarl, and her tone was mocking.
“I think even that Nazi fuck Heidegger would think
my project is pretty damn authentic. Wouldn’t you agree,
Herr Doktor Terzian?”
Got you, Michelle thought. Here was a still photo of
Terzian at the Fête des Aires de la Dine, with the darkskinned woman. She had the same wide-brimmed straw
hat she’d worn in the Florence church, and had the same
black bag over her shoulder, but now Michelle had a clear
view of a three-quarter profile, and one hand, with its
critical alignments, was clearly visible, holding an ice
cream cone.
Night insects whirled around the computer display.
Michelle batted them away and got busy mapping. The
photo was digital and Michelle could enlarge it.
To her surprise she discovered that the woman had
green eyes. Black women with green irises—or irises of
orange or chartreuse or chrome steel—were not unusual
in her own time, but she knew that in Terzian’s time they
were rare. That would make the search much easier.
“Michelle . . .” The voice came just as Michelle sent
her new search spiders into the ether. A shiver ran up her
spine.
“Michelle . . .” The voice came again.
It was Darton.
Michelle’s heart gave a sickening lurch. She closed
her console and put it back in the mesh bag, then crossed
the rope bridge between the ironwood tree and the
banyan. Her knees were weak, and the swaying bridge
seemed to take a couple unexpected pitches. She stepped
out onto the banyan’s sturdy overhanging limb and gazed
out at the water.
“Michelle . . .” To the southwest, in the channel
between the mermaid’s island and another, she could see
a pale light bobbing, the light of a small boat.
“Michelle, where are you?”
The voice died away in the silence and surf. Michelle
remembered the spike in her hand, the long, agonized trek
up the slope above Jellyfish Lake. Darton pale, panting
for breath, dying in her arms.
The lake was one of the wonders of the world, but the
steep path over the ridge that fenced the lake from the
ocean was challenging even for those who were not
dying. When Michelle and Darton—at that time apes—
came up from their boat that afternoon they didn’t climb
the steep path, but swung hand-over-hand through the
trees overhead, through the hardwood and guava trees,
and avoided the poison trees with their bleeding,
allergenic black sap. Even though their trip was less
exhausting than if they’d gone over the land route, the
two were ready for the cool water by the time they arrived
at the lake.
Tens of thousands of years in the past the water level
was higher, and when it receded the lake was cut off from
the Pacific, and with it the Mastigias sp. jellyfish, which
soon exhausted the supply of small fish that were its food.
As the human race did later, the jellies gave up hunting
and gathering in exchange for agriculture, and permitted
themselves to be farmed by colonies of algae that
provided the sugars they needed for life. At night they’d
descend to the bottom of the lake, where they fertilized
their algae crops in the anoxic, sulfurous waters; at dawn
the jellies rose to the surface, and over the course of the
day they crossed the lake, following the course of the sun,
and allowed the sun’s rays to supply the energy necessary
for making their daily ration of food.
When Darton and Michelle arrived, there were ten
million jellyfish in the lake, from fingertip-sized to jellies
the size of a dinner plate, all in one warm throbbing
golden-brown mass in the center of the water. The two
swam easily on the surface with their long siamang arms,
laughing and calling to one another as the jellyfish in
their millions caressed them with the most featherlike of
touches. The lake was the temperature of their own blood,
and it was like a soupy bath, the jellyfish so thick that
Michelle felt she could almost walk on the surface. The
warm touch wasn’t erotic, exactly, but it was sensual in
the way that an erotic touch was sensual, a light brush
over the skin by the pad of a teasing finger.
Trapped in a lake for thousands of years without
suitable prey, the jellyfish had lost most of their ability to
sting. Only a small percentage of people were sensitive
enough to the toxin to receive a rash or feel a modest
burning.
A very few people, though, were more sensitive than
that.
Darton and Michelle left at dusk, and by that time
Darton was already gasping for breath. He said he’d
overexerted himself, that all he needed was to get back to
their base for a snack, but as he swung through the trees
on the way up the ridge, he lost his hold on a Palauan
apple tree and crashed through a thicket of limbs to
sprawl, amid a hail of fruit, on the sharp algae-covered
limestone of the ridge.
Michelle swung down from the trees, her heart
pounding. Darton was nearly colorless and struggling to
breathe. They had no way of calling for help unless
Michelle took their boat to Koror or to their base camp on
another island. She tried to help Darton walk, taking one
of his long arms over her shoulder, supporting him up the
steep island trail. He collapsed, finally, at the foot of a
poison tree, and Michelle bent over him to shield him
from the drops of venomous sap until he died.
Her back aflame with the poison sap, she’d whispered
her parting words into Darton’s ear. She never knew if he
heard.
The coroner said it was a million-to-one chance that
Darton had been so deathly allergic, and tried to comfort
her with the thought that there was nothing she could
have done. Torbiong, who had made the arrangements for
Darton and Michelle to come in the first place, had been
consoling, had offered to let Michelle stay with his
family. Michelle had surprised him by asking permission
to move her base camp to another island, and to continue
her work alone.
She also had herself transformed into a mermaid, and
subsequently a romantic local legend.
And now Darton was back, bobbing in a boat in the
nearby channel and calling her name, shouting into a
bullhorn.
“Michelle, I love you.” The words floated clear into
the night air. Michelle’s mouth was dry. Her fingers
formed the sign <go away>.
There was a silence, and then Michelle heard the
engine start on Darton’s boat. He motored past her
position, within five hundred meters or so, and continued
on to the northern point of the island.
<go away> . . .
“Michelle . . .” Again his voice floated out onto the
breeze. It was clear he didn’t know where she was. She
was going to have to be careful about showing lights.
<go away> . . .
Michelle waited while Darton called out a half-dozen
more times, and then Darton started his engine and
moved on. She wondered if he would search all three
hundred islands in the Rock Island group.
No, she knew he was more organized than that.
She’d have to decide what to do when he finally found
her.
While a thousand questions chased each other’s tails
through his mind, Terzian opened the Nike bag and
withdrew the small hard plastic case inside, something
like a box for fishing tackle. He popped the locks on the
case and opened the lid, and he saw glass vials resting in
slots cut into dark grey foam. In them was a liquid with a
faint golden cast.
“The papiloma,” Stephanie said.
Terzian dropped the lid on the case as he cast a guilty
look over his shoulder, not wanting anyone to see him
with this stuff. If he were arrested under suspicion of
being a drug dealer, the wads of cash and the pistol
certainly wouldn’t help.
“What do you do with the stuff once you get to where
you’re going?”
“Brush it on the skin. With exposure to solar energy it
replicates as needed.”
“Has it been tested?”
“On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys,
though.”
He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat.
“Can it be . . . caught? I mean, it’s a virus, can it go from
one person to another?”
“Through skin-to-skin contact.”
“I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their
children?”
“Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental
barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it. If mothers
want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it
deliberately.” She shrugged. “Whatever the case, my
guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as
they’re green healthy babies.” She looked down at the
little vials in their secure coffins of foam. “We can infect
tens of thousands of people with this amount,” she said.
“And we can make more very easily.”
If mothers want to infect their children . . . Terzian
closed the lid of the plastic case and snapped the locks.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said.
Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking
as if she’d anticipated his objections and was humoring
him. “How so?”
“Where do I start?” Terzian zipped up the bag, then
tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see her defensive
reflexes leap in response. “You’re planning on unleashing
an untested transgenetic virus on Africa—on Africa of all
places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy
history with pandemics. And it’s a virus that’s cooked up
by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-country with a
murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much
confidence that this is going to be anything but a
disaster.”
Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she
were wishing there were a cigarette between them. “I can
put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal studies
worked. Adrian had a family of bright green rhesus in his
lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah,
liquidated.”
“So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull
the plug?”
“Money.” Her lips twisted in anger. “Starving people
can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so they’d have to
practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of
endless bad publicity, which is exactly what outlaw
biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There
are millions of people who go ballistic at the very thought
of a genetically engineered vegetable—you can imagine
how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenetic bell
pepper would freak at the thought of infecting people with
an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t
worth the risk. They closed the project down.”
Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. “But Adrian
had been in the camps himself, you see. A displaced
person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he
couldn’t stand the thought that there was a way to end
hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that
nothing was being done with it. And so . . .” Her hands
outlined the case inside the Nike bag. “He called me. He
took some vacation time and booked himself into the
Henri IV, on the Place Dauphine. And I guess he must
have been careless, because . . .”
Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian,
strong in the knowledge that he’d shared quite enough of
her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green
landscape that was beginning to take on the brilliant
colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and
white-capped in the distant east, and nearby were
orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves,
and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The
Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.
“I’m not going to be your bagman,” he said. “I’m not
going to contaminate the world with your freaky biotech.”
“Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die,” Stephanie
said. “And it will be for nothing.”
“My experience of death,” said Terzian, “is that it’s
always for nothing.”
She snorted then, angry. “My experience of death,”
she mocked, “is that it’s too often for profit. I want to
make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to
crash the market in starvation by giving away life.” She
gave another snort, amused this time. “It’s the ultimate
anti-capitalist gesture.”
Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were
just that. Gestures didn’t change the fundamentals. If
some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just
use bullets, or deadly genetic technology he bought from
outlaw Transnistrian corporations.
The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over
two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant came by
and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
“You should use my phone to call your wife,”
Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her
sandwich. “Let her know that your travel plans have
changed.”
Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.
“My wife is dead,” Terzian said.
She looked at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Brain cancer,” he said.
Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had
first complained of back pain, and there had been an
operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There
had been a couple weeks of mad joy and relief, and then it
had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain
and that it was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She
died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.
“Do you have any other family?” Stephanie said.
“My parents are dead, too.” Auto accident, aneurism.
He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and his partner
Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each
other and left Claire the Victorian house on Esplanade in
New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had
sold for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the
furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and Uncle
Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one
thousand.
He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot
of money, enough to float around Europe for years.
Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.
There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. “I’ve read
spy novels,” he said. “And I know that we shouldn’t go to
the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go
anywhere near Nice.”
She considered this, then said, “We’ll get off at
Avignon.”
They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying
always in unrated hotels, those that didn’t even rise to a
single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in gîtes
ruraux, farmhouses with rooms for rent. Stephanie spent
much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on
her cell phone and achieved only sporadic success, a
frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was
never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she
thought they were going to get the papiloma off her
hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved
in this conspiracy of hers.
They attended some local fêtes, though it was always
a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe to appear in a
crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats
and shades and ended up looking like a cartoon spy.
Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets,
lost some pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine,
and gained a sun tan. He made a stab at writing several
papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in
internet cafés.
He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if
only Claire had been with him.
“What is it you do, exactly?” Stephanie asked him
once, as he wrote. “I know you teach at university,
but . . .”
“I don’t teach anymore,” Terzian said. “I didn’t get
my post-doc renewed. The department and I didn’t
exactly get along.”
“Why not?”
Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on
his display. “I’m too interdisciplinary. There’s a place on
the academic spectrum where history and politics and
philosophy come together—it’s called political theory
usually—but I throw in economics and a layman’s
understanding of science as well, and it confuses
everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in American
Studies—nobody in my philosophy or political science
department had the nerve to deal with me, and nobody
knows what American Studies actually are, so I was able
to hide out there. And my doctorate is in philosophy, but
only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who
was willing to chair my committee.
“The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy
department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or Hume or
whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by
adding Maynard Keynes and Leo Szilard. And if you
teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to
acceptable stories about the past and not toss in ideas
about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the
noumenon, and of course you court crucifixion from the
laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche.”
Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. “So where do
you find a job?”
“France?” he ventured, and they laughed. “In France,
‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not necessary to have a
degree, it’s just something you do.” He shrugged. “And if
that fails, there’s always Burger King.”
She seemed amused. “Sounds like burgers in your
future.”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate
enough interesting, sexy, highly original papers, I might
attract attention and a job, in that order.”
“And have you done that?”
Terzian looked at his display and sighed. “So far, no.”
Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him.
“You’re not a conventional person. You don’t think
inside the box, as they say.”
“As they say,” Terzian repeated.
“Then you should have no objections to radical
solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that don’t
cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world.”
“Hah,” Terzian said. “Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an
economist.”
So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa.
Another famine was brewing across the southern part of
the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood and
drought, a startling combination. The Horn of Africa was
worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food
shipment stuck in Mogadishu and before letting it pass
the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the
meantime people were starving, dying of malnutrition,
infection, and dysentery in camps in the dry highlands of
Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa
was worse than the Somali warlord, at this stage
permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.
And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking
about.
“What’s your solution to this?” she demanded of
Terzian. “Or do you have one?”
“Test this stuff, this papiloma,” he said, “show me
that it works, and I’m with you. But there are too many
plagues in Africa as it is.”
“Confine the papiloma to labs while thousands die?
Hand it to governments who can suppress it because of
pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You
call that an answer?” And Stephanie went back to
working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for
another stalk down country lanes.
Terzian walked toward an old ruined castle that
shambled down the slope of a nearby hill. And if
Stephanie’s plant people proved viable? he wondered. All
bets were off. A world in which humans could become
plants was a world at which none of the old rules applied.
Stephanie had said she wanted to crash the market in
starvation. But, Terzian thought, that also meant crashing
the market in food. If people with no money had all the
food they needed, that meant food itself had no value in
the marketplace. Food would be so cheap that there
would be no profit in growing or selling it.
And this was all just one application of the
technology. Terzian tried to keep up with science: he
knew about nanoassemblers. Green people was just the
first magic bullet in a long volley of scientific musketry
that would change every fundamental rule by which
humanity had operated since they’d first stood upright.
What happened when every basic commodity—food,
clothing, shelter, maybe even health—was so cheap that it
was free? What then had value?
Even money wouldn’t have value then. Money only
had value if it could be exchanged for something of
equivalent worth.
He paused in his walk and looked ahead at the ruined
castle, the castle that had once provided justice and
security and government for the district, and he wondered
if he was looking at the future of all government.
Providing an orderly framework in which commodities
could be exchanged was the basic function of the state,
that and providing a secure currency. If people didn’t
need government to furnish that kind of security and if the
currency was worthless, the whole future of government
itself was in question. Taxes weren’t worth the expense of
collecting if the money wasn’t any good, anyway, and
without taxes government couldn’t be paid for.
Terzian paused at the foot of the ruined castle and
wondered if he saw the future of the civilized world.
Either the castle would be rebuilt by tyrants, or it would
fall.
Michelle heard Darton’s bullhorn again the next evening,
and she wondered why he was keeping fruit-bat hours.
Was it because his calls would travel farther at night?
If he were sleeping in the morning, she thought, that
would make it easier. She’d finished analyzing some of
her samples, but a principle of science was not to do these
things alone: she’d have to travel to Koror to mail her
samples to other people, and now she knew to do it in the
morning, when Darton would be asleep.
The problem for Michelle was that she was a legend.
When the lonely mermaid emerged from the sea and
walked to the post office in the little foam booties she
wore when walking on pavement, she was noticed.
People pointed; children followed her on their boards,
people in cars waved. She wondered if she could trust
them not to contact Darton as soon as they saw her.
She hoped that Darton wasn’t starting to get the
islanders on his side.
Michelle and Darton had met on a field trip in
Borneo, their obligatory government service after
graduation. The other field workers were older, paying
their taxes or working on their second or third or fourth or
fifth careers, and Michelle knew on sight that Darton was
no older than she, that he, too, was a child among all
these elders. They were pulled to each other as if drawn
by some violent natural force, cataloguing snails and
terrapins by day and spending their nights wrapped in
each other in their own shell, their turtleback tent. The
ancients with whom they shared their days treated them
with amused condescension, but then that was how they
treated everything. Darton and Michelle didn’t care. In
their youth they stood against all creation.
When the trip came to an end they decided to continue
their work together, just a hop across the equator in
Belau. Paying their taxes ahead of time. They celebrated
by getting new bodies, an exciting experience for
Michelle, who had been built by strict parents that
wouldn’t allow her to have a new body until adulthood,
no matter how many of her friends had been transforming
from an early age into one newly fashionable shape or
another.
Michelle and Darton thought that anthropoid bodies
would be suitable for the work, and so they went to the
clinic in Delhi and settled themselves on nanobeds and let
the little machines turn their bodies, their minds, their
memories, their desires and their knowledge and their
souls, into long strings of numbers. All of which were fed
into their new bodies when they were ready, and reserved
as backups to be downloaded as necessary.
Being a siamang was a glorious discovery. They
soared through the treetops of their little island, swinging
overhand from limb to limb in a frenzy of glory. Michelle
took a particular delight in her body hair—she didn’t
have as much as a real ape, but there was enough on her
chest and back to be interesting. They built nests of
foliage in trees and lay tangled together, analyzing data or
making love or shaving their hair into interesting tribal
patterns. Love was far from placid—it was a flame, a
fury. An obsession that, against all odds, had been
fulfilled, only to build the flame higher.
The fury still burned in Michelle. But now, after
Darton’s death, it had a different quality, a quality that
had nothing to do with life or youth.
Michelle, spooning up blueberries and cream, riffled
through the names and faces her spiders had spat out.
There were, now she added them up, a preposterous
number of pictures of green-eyed women with dark skin
whose pictures were somewhere in the net. Nearly all of
them had striking good looks. Many of them were
unidentified in the old scans, or identified only by a first
name. The highest probability the software offered was
43%.
That 43% belonged to a Brasilian named Laura Flor,
who research swiftly showed was home in Aracaju during
the critical period, among other things having a baby. A
video of the delivery was available, but Michelle didn’t
watch it. The way women delivered babies back then was
disgusting.
The next most likely female was another Brasilian
seen in some tourist photographs taken in Rio. Not even a
name given. A further search based on this woman’s
physiognomy turned up nothing, not until Michelle
broadened the search to a different gender, and discovered
the Brasilian was a transvestite. That didn’t seem to be
Terzian’s scene, so she left it alone.
The third was identified only as Stephanie, and posted
on a site created by a woman who had done relief work in
Africa. Stephanie was shown with a group of other relief
workers, posing in front of a tin-roofed, cinderblock
building identified as a hospital.
The quality of the photograph wasn’t very good, but
Michelle mapped the physiognomy anyway, and sent it
forth along with the name “Stephanie” to see what might
happen.
There was a hit right away, a credit card charge to a
Stephanie América Pais e Silva. She had stayed in a hotel
in Paris for the three nights before Terzian disappeared.
Michelle’s blood surged as the data flashed on her
screens. She sent out more spiders and the good news
began rolling in.
Stephanie Pais was a dual citizen of Portugal and
Angola, and had been educated partly in the States—a
quick check showed that her time at university didn’t
overlap Terzian’s. From her graduation she had worked
for a relief agency called Santa Croce.
Then a news item turned up, a sensational one.
Stephanie Pais had been spectacularly murdered in
Venice on the night of July 19, six days before Terzian
had delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.
Two murders . . .
One in Paris, one in Venice. And one the woman who
seemed to be Terzian’s lover.
Michelle’s body shivered to a sudden gasping spasm,
and she realized that in her suspense she’d been holding
her breath. Her head swam. When it cleared, she worked
out what time it was in Maryland, where Dr. Davout
lived, and then told her deck to page him at once.
Davout was unavailable at first, and by the time he
returned her call she had more information about
Stephanie Pais. She blurted the story out to him while her
fingers jabbed at the keyboard of her deck, sending him
copies of her corroborating data.
Davout’s startled eyes leaped from the data to
Michelle and back. “How much of this . . .” he began,
then gave up. “How did she die?” he managed.
“The news article says stabbed. I’m looking for the
police report.”
“Is Terzian mentioned?”
<No> she signed. “The police report will have more
details.”
“Any idea what this is about? There’s no history of
Terzian ever being connected with violence.”
“By tomorrow,” Michelle said, “I should be able to
tell you. But I thought I should send this to you because
you might be able to tie this in with other elements of
Terzian’s life that I don’t know anything about.”
Davout’s fingers formed a mudra that Michelle didn’t
recognize—an old one, probably. He shook his head. “I
have no idea what’s happening here. The only thing I
have to suggest is that this is some kind of wild
coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence,” Michelle
said.
Davout smiled. “A good attitude for a researcher,” he
said. “But experience—well,” he waved a hand.
But he loved her, Michelle insisted inwardly. She
knew that in her heart. Stephanie was the woman he
loved after Claire died, and then she was killed and
Terzian went on to create the intellectual framework on
which the world was now built. He had spent his modest
fortune building pilot programs in Africa that
demonstrated his vision was a practical one. The whole
modern world was a monument to Stephanie.
Everyone was young then, Michelle thought. Even the
seventy-year-olds were young compared to the people
now. The world must have been ablaze with love and
passion. But Davout didn’t understand that because he
was old and had forgotten all about love.
“Michelle . . .” Darton’s voice came wafting over the
waters.
Bastard. Michelle wasn’t about to let him spoil this.
Her fingers formed <gotta go>. “I’ll send you
everything once it comes in,” she said. “I think we’ve got
something amazing here.”
She picked up her deck and swung it around so that
she could be sure that the light from the display couldn’t
be seen from the ocean. Her bare back against the rough
bark of the ironwood, she began flashing through the data
as it arrived.
She couldn’t find the police report. Michelle went in
search of it and discovered that all police records from
that period in Venetian history had been wiped out in the
Lightspeed War, leaving her only with what had been
reported in the media.
“Where are you? I love you!” Darton’s voice came
from farther away. He’d narrowed his search, that was
clear, but he still wasn’t sure exactly where Michelle had
built her nest.
Smiling, Michelle closed her deck and slipped it into
its pouch. Her spiders would work for her tirelessly till
dawn while she dreamed on in her hammock and let
Darton’s distant calls lull her to sleep.
They shifted their lodgings every few days. Terzian
always arranged for separate bedrooms. Once, as they sat
in the evening shade of a farm terrace and watched the
setting sun shimmer on the silver leaves of the olives,
Terzian found himself looking at her as she sat in an old
cane chair, at the profile cutting sharp against the old
limestone of the Vaucluse. The blustering wind brought
gusts of lavender from the neighboring farm, a scent that
made Terzian want to inhale until his lungs creaked
against his ribs.
From a quirk of Stephanie’s lips Terzian was
suddenly aware that she knew he was looking at her. He
glanced away.
“You haven’t tried to sleep with me,” she said.
“No,” he agreed.
“But you look,” she said. “And it’s clear you’re not a
eunuch.”
“We fight all the time,” Terzian pointed out.
“Sometimes we can’t stand to be in the same room.”
Stephanie smiled. “That wouldn’t stop most of the
men I’ve known. Or the women, either.”
Terzian looked out over the olives, saw them shimmer
in the breeze. “I’m still in love with my wife,” he said.
There was a moment of silence. “That’s well,” she
said.
And I’m angry at her, too, Terzian thought. Angry at
Claire for deserting him. And he was furious at the
universe for killing her and for leaving him alive, and he
was angry at God even though he didn’t believe in God.
The Trashcanians had been good for him, because he
could let his rage and his hatred settle there, on people
who deserved it.
Those poor drunken bastards, he thought. Whatever
they’d expected in that hotel corridor, it hadn’t been a
berserk grieving American who would just as soon have
ripped out their throats with his bare hands.
The question was, could he do that again? It had all
occurred without his thinking about it, old reflexes taking
over, but he couldn’t count on that happening a second
time. He’d been trying to remember the Kenpo he’d once
learned, particularly all the tricks against weapons. He
found himself miming combats on his long country hikes,
and he wondered if he’d retained any of his ability to take
a punch.
He kept the gun with him, so the Trashcanians
wouldn’t get it if they searched his room when he was
away. When he was alone, walking through the almond
orchards or on a hillside fragrant with wild thyme, he
practiced drawing it, snicking off the safety, and putting
pressure on the trigger . . . the first time the trigger pull
would be hard, but the first shot would cock the pistol
automatically and after that the trigger pull would be
light.
He wondered if he should buy more ammunition. But
he didn’t know how to buy ammunition in France and
didn’t know if a foreigner could get into trouble that way.
“We’re both angry,” Stephanie said. He looked at her
again, her hand raised to her head to keep the gusts from
blowing her long ringlets in her face. “We’re angry at
death. But love must make it more complicated for you.”
Her green eyes searched him. “It’s not death you’re in
love with, is it? Because—”
Terzian blew up. She had no right to suggest that he
was in a secret alliance with death just because he didn’t
want to turn a bunch of Africans green. It was their worst
argument, and this one ended with both of them stalking
away through the fields and orchards while the scent of
lavender pursued them on the wind.
When Terzian returned to his room he checked his
caches of money, half-hoping that Stephanie had stolen
his Euros and run. She hadn’t.
He thought of going into her room while she was
away, stealing the papiloma and taking a train north,
handing it over to the Pasteur Institute or someplace. But
he didn’t.
In the morning, during breakfast, Stephanie’s cell
phone rang, and she answered. He watched while her face
turned from curiosity to apprehension to utter terror.
Adrenaline sang in his blood as he watched, and he
leaned forward, feeling the familiar rage rise in him, just
where he wanted it. In haste she turned off the phone,
then looked at him. “That was one of them. He says he
knows where we are, and wants to make a deal.”
“If they know where we are,” Terzian found himself
saying coolly, “why aren’t they here?”
“We’ve got to go,” she insisted.
So they went. Clean out of France and into the Tuscan
hills, with Stephanie’s cell phone left behind in a trash
can at the train station and a new phone purchased in
Siena. The Tuscan countryside was not unlike Provence,
with vine-covered hillsides, orchards a-shimmer with the
silver-green of olive trees, and walled medieval towns
perched on crags; but the slim, tall cypress standing like
sentries gave the hills a different profile and there were
different types of wine grapes, and many of the vineyards
rented rooms where people could stay and sample the
local hospitality. Terzian didn’t speak the language, and
because Spanish was his first foreign language
consistently pronounced words like “villa” and
“panzanella” as if they were Spanish. But Stephanie had
grown up in Italy and spoke the language not only like a
native, but like a native Roman.
Florence was only a few hours away, and Terzian
couldn’t resist visiting one of the great living monuments
to civilization. His parents, both university professors,
had taken him to Europe several times as a child, but
somehow never made it here.
Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the
center of town, on occasion taking shelter from one of the
pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point,
with thunder booming overhead, they found themselves in
the Basilica di Santa Croce.
“Holy Cross,” Terzian said, translating. “That’s your
outfit.”
“We have nothing to do with this church,” Stephanie
said. “We don’t even have a collection box here.”
“A pity,” Terzian said as he looked at the soaked
swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. “You’d clean
up.”
Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed
against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast lighting
storm. “Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing
and bury him in a church,” Terzian said.
“I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him.”
It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had
built this church, that had paid for the stained glass and
the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the
great names of Florence: Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni,
Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course
Machiavelli. This structure, with its vaults and chapels
and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised
by successful bankers, people to whom money was a real,
tangible thing, and who had paid for the centuries of labor
to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined
silver.
“So what do you think he would make of this?”
Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of
Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he’d been
exiled in his lifetime.
Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus
with its Latin inscription. “No praise can be high
enough,” she translated, then turned to him as tourist
cameras flashed. “Sounds overrated.”
“He was a republican, you know,” Terzian said. “You
don’t get that from just The Prince. He wanted Florence
to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it
fell into the hands of a despot, he needed work, and he
wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at
despotism a little too clearly, and he didn’t get the job.”
Terzian turned to Stephanie. “He was the founder of
modern political theory, and that’s what I do. And he
based his ideas on the belief that all human beings, at all
times, have had the same passions.” He turned his eyes
deliberately to Stephanie’s shoulder bag. “That may be
about to end, right? You’re going to turn people into
plants. That should change the passions if anything
would.”
“Not plants,” Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and
right at the crowds. “And not here.” She began to move
down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo’s ornate
tomb, with its draped figures who appeared not in
mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a
difficult engineering problem.
“What happens in your scheme,” Terzian said,
following, “is that the market in food crashes. But that’s
not the real problem. The real problem is what happens to
the market in labor.”
Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head
away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out of the
basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an
end, but rainwater still drizzled off the structure. They
stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the
piazza.
The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces,
most of which now held restaurants or shops on the
ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered
with canvas and scaffolding. The sound of pneumatic
hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a
hand in the direction of the clatter.
“Just imagine that food is nearly free,” he said.
“Suppose you and your children can get most of your food
from standing in the sunshine. My next question is, Why
in hell would you take a filthy job like standing on a
scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking
at Stephanie’s side along the piazza. “Down at the bottom
of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor
goes almost entirely for the necessities. Millions of them
cross borders illegally in order to send enough money
back home to support their children.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“The only reason that there’s a market in illegal
immigrants is that there are jobs that well-off people
won’t do. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore
old buildings. Build new buildings. The well-off might
serve in the military or police, because there’s a certain
status involved and an attractive uniform, but we won’t
guard prisons no matter how pretty the uniform is. That’s
strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring
classes are too well-off to labor, who guards the prisons?”
She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. “So
I’m supposed to be afraid of people having more choice in
where they work?”
“No,” Terzian said, “you should be afraid of people
having no choice at all. What happens when markets
collapse is intervention—and that’s state intervention, if
the market’s critical enough, and you can bet the labor
market’s critical. And because the state depends on ditchdiggers and prison guards and janitors and road-builders
for its very being, then if these classes of people are no
longer available, and the very survival of civil society
depends on their existence, in the end the state will just
take them.
“You think our friends in Transnistria will have any
qualms about rounding up people at gunpoint and forcing
them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their
palaces kept nice and shiny. The liberal democracies will
try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet
that we’re going to want our sewers to work, and
somebody to carry our grandparents’ bedpans, and the
trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what I’m
afraid of is that when things get desperate, we’re not
going to be any nicer about getting our way than those
Sovietists of yours. We’re going to make sure that the
lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of
them to convince the other half that we mean business.
And the technical term for that is slavery. And if someone
of African descent isn’t sensitive to that potential
problem, then I am very surprised.”
The fury in Stephanie’s eyes was visible even through
her shades, and he could see the pulse pounding in her
throat. Then she said, “I’ll save the people, that’s what
I’m good at. You save the rest of the world, if you can.”
She began to turn away, then swung back to him. “And
by the way,” she added, “fuck you!” turned, and marched
away.
“Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!” Terzian called,
taking a step after. “That’s the choice you’re forcing on
people!”
He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now,
and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying that he knew
some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no
anarchist he’d ever met had ever even seen a real anarchy,
or been in one, whereas Stephanie had—drop your
anarchist out of a helicopter into the eastern Congo, say,
with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on
his back, and see how well he prospered . . .
But Terzian never got to say any of these things,
because Stephanie was gone, receding into the vanishing
point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back
and forth across her butt like a pendulum powered by the
force of her convictions.
Terzian thought that perhaps he’d never see her again,
that he’d finally provoked her into abandoning him and
continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off
the bus in Montespèrtoli that night, he saw her across the
street, shouting into her cell phone.
The next day, as with frozen civility they drank their
morning coffee, she said she was going to Rome the next
day. “They might be looking for me there,” she said,
“because my parents live there. But I won’t go near the
family, I’ll meet Odile at the airport and give her the
papiloma.”
Odile? Terzian thought. “I should go along,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Carry that gun
into an airport?”
“I don’t have to take the gun. I’ll leave it in the hotel
room in Rome.”
She considered. “Very well.”
Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in
Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined relic of a
bygone order, and once more considered stealing the
papiloma and running. And again, he didn’t.
They didn’t get any farther than Florence, because
Stephanie’s cell phone rang as they waited in the train
station. Odile was in Venice. “Venezia?” Stephanie
shrieked in anger. She clenched her fists. There had been
a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in
Rome, and all planes had been diverted, Odile’s to Marco
Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had
somehow found rooms for her despite the height of the
tourist season.
Fiumicino hadn’t been reopened, and Odile didn’t
know how she was going to get to Rome. “Don’t try!”
Stephanie shouted. “I’ll come to you.”
This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets
to Venice. Despite Stephanie’s excellent Italian the ticket
seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up
their mind which monuments of civilization they really
wanted to see.
Strange—Terzian had actually planned to go to
Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to deliver a
paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern
Thought.
Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he’d
read the paper after all. It wasn’t a prospect he coveted:
he would just be developing another footnote to a
footnote.
The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the
landscape like a green flood. The train slowed at one
point—there was work going on on the tracks, men with
bronze arms and hard hats—and Terzian wondered how,
in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the
tracks would ever get fixed, particularly in this heat. He
supposed there were people who were meant by nature to
fix tracks, who would repair tracks as an avocation or out
of boredom regardless of whether they got paid for their
time or not, but he suspected there wouldn’t be many of
them.
You could build machines, he supposed, robots or
something. But they had their own problems, they’d cause
pollution and absorb resources and on top of everything
they’d break down and have to be repaired. And who
would do that?
If you can’t employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you
can’t reward people for doing necessary labor, then you
have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities
at gunpoint, like Pol Pot, because there’s work that needs
to be done.
He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair
and wondered what jobs would still have value.
Education, he supposed; he’d made a good choice there.
Some sorts of administration were necessary. There were
people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or
salesmen and who would do that job whether they were
paid or not.
A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some
coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn’t quite able
to identify. And then he thought, labor.
“Labor,” he said. In a world in which all basic
commodities were provided, the thing that had most value
was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the
work itself.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s labor that’s rare and valuable,
because people don’t have to do it anymore. The currency
has to be based on some kind of labor exchange—you
purchase x hours with y dollars. Labor is the thing you
use to pay taxes.”
Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. “What’s
the difference between that and slavery?”
“Have you been reading Nozick?” Terzian scolded.
“The difference is the same as the difference between
paying taxes and being a slave. All the time you don’t
spend paying your taxes is your own.” He barked a laugh.
“I’m resurrecting Labor Value Theory!” he said. “Adam
Smith and Karl Marx are dancing a jig on their
tombstones! In Plant People Land the value is the labor
itself! The calories!” He laughed again, and almost
spilled coffee down his chest.
“You budget the whole thing in calories! The
government promises to pay you a dollar’s worth of
calories in exchange for their currency! In order to keep
the roads and the sewer lines going, a citizen owes the
government a certain number of calories per year—he can
either pay in person or hire someone else to do the job.
And jobs can be budgeted in calories-per-hour, so that if
you do hard physical labor, you owe fewer hours than
someone with a desk job—that should keep the young, fit,
impatient people doing the nasty jobs, so that they have
more free time for their other pursuits.” He chortled. “Oh,
the intellectuals are going to just hate this! They’re used
to valuing their brain power over manual labor—I’m
going to reverse their whole scale of values!”
Stephanie made a pffing sound. “The people I care
about have no money to pay taxes at all.”
“They have bodies. They can still be enslaved.”
Terzian got out his laptop. “Let me put my ideas
together.”
Terzian’s frenetic two-fingered typing went on for the
rest of the journey, all the way across the causeway that
led into Venice. Stephanie gazed out the window at the
lagoon soaring by, the soaring water birds and the dirt
and stink of industry. She kept the Nike bag in her lap
until the train pulled into the Stazione Ferrovie dello Stato
Santa Lucia at the end of its long journey.
Odile’s hotel was in Cannaregio, which according to
the map purchased in the station gift shop was the district
of the city nearest the station and away from most of the
tourist sites. A brisk wind almost tore the map from their
fingers as they left the station, and their vaporetto bucked
a steep chop on the greygreen Grand Canal as it took
them to the Ca’ d’Oro, the fanciful white High Gothic
palazzo that loomed like a frantic wedding cake above a
swarm of bobbing gondolas and motorboats.
Stephanie puffed cigarettes at first with ferocity, then
with satisfaction. Once they got away from the Grand
Canal and into Cannaregio itself they quickly became
lost. The twisted medieval streets were broken on
occasion by still, silent canals, but the canals didn’t seem
to lead anywhere in particular. Cooking smells
demonstrated that it was dinnertime, and there were few
people about, and no tourists. Terzian’s stomach rumbled.
Sometimes the streets deteriorated into mere passages.
Stephanie and Terzian were in such a passage, holding
their map open against the wind and shouting directions
at each other when someone slugged Terzian from
behind.
He went down on one knee with his head ringing and
the taste of blood in his mouth, and then two people
rather unexpectedly picked him up again, only to slam
him against the passage wall. Through some miracle he
managed not to hit his head on the brickwork and knock
himself out. He could smell garlic on the breath of one of
the attackers. Air went out of him as he felt an elbow to
his ribs.
It was the scream from Stephanie that fortified his
attention. There was violent motion in front of him, and
he saw the Nike swoosh and remembered that he was
dealing with killers and that he had a gun.
In an instant Terzian had his rage back. He felt his
lungs fill with the fury that spread through his body like a
river of scalding blood. He planted his feet and twisted
abruptly to his left, letting the strength come up his legs
from the earth itself, and the man attached to his right
arm gave a grunt of surprise and swung
counterclockwise. Terzian twisted the other way, which
budged the other man only a little, but which freed his
right arm to claw into his right pants pocket.
And from this point on it was just the movement that
he rehearsed. Draw, thumb the safety, pull the trigger
hard. He shot the man on his right and hit him in the
groin. For a brief second Terzian saw his pinched face,
the face that reflected such pain that it folded in on itself,
and he remembered Adrian falling in the Place Dauphine
with just that look. Then he stuck the pistol in the ribs of
the man on his left and fired twice. The arms that
grappled him relaxed and fell away.
There were two more men grappling with Stephanie.
That made four altogether, and Terzian reasoned dully
that after the first three fucked up in Paris, the home office
had sent a supervisor. One was trying to tug the Nike bag
away, and Terzian lunged toward him and fired at a range
of two meters, too close to miss, and the man dropped to
the ground with a whuff of pain.
The last man had ahold of Stephanie and swung her
around, keeping her between himself and the pistol.
Terzian could see the knife in his hand and recognized it
as one he’d seen before. Her dark glasses were cockeyed
on her face and Terzian caught a flash of her angry green
eyes. He pointed the pistol at the knife man’s face. He
didn’t dare shoot.
“Police!” he shrieked into the wind. “Policia!” He
used the Spanish word. Bloody spittle spattered the
cobblestones as he screamed.
In the Trashcanian’s eyes he saw fear, bafflement,
rage.
“Polizia!” He got the pronunciation right this time.
He saw the rage in Stephanie’s eyes, the fury that
mirrored his own, and he saw her struggle against the
man who held her.
“No!” he called. Too late. The knife man had too
many decisions to make all at once, and Terzian figured
he wasn’t very bright to begin with. Kill the hostages was
probably something he’d been taught on his first day at
Goon School.
As Stephanie fell, Terzian fired, and kept firing as the
man ran away. The killer broke out of the passageway
into a little square, and then just fell down.
The slide of the automatic locked back as Terzian ran
out of ammunition, and then he staggered forward to
where Stephanie was bleeding to death on the cobbles.
Her throat had been cut and she couldn’t speak. She
gripped his arm as if she could drive her urgent message
through the skin, with her nails. In her eyes he saw
frustrated rage, the rage he knew well, until at length he
saw there nothing at all, a nothing he knew better than
any other thing in the world.
He shouldered the Nike bag and staggered out of the
passageway into the tiny Venetian square with its covered
well. He took a street at random, and there was Odile’s
hotel. Of course: the Trashcanians had been staking it out.
It wasn’t much of a hotel, and the scent of spice and
garlic in the lobby suggested the desk clerk was eating his
dinner. Terzian went up the stair to Odile’s room and
knocked on the door. When she opened—she was a
plump girl with big hips and a suntan—he tossed the
Nike bag on the bed.
“You need to get back to Mogadishu right away,” he
said. “Stephanie just died for that.”
Her eyes widened. Terzian stepped to the wash basin
to clean the blood off as best he could. It was all he could
do not to shriek with grief and anger.
“You take care of the starving,” he said finally, “and
I’ll save the rest of the world.”
Michelle rose from the sea near Torbiong’s boat, having
done thirty-six-hundred calories’ worth of research and
caught a honeycomb grouper into the bargain. She traded
the fish for the supplies he brought. “Any more
blueberries?” she asked.
“Not this time.” He peered down at her, narrowing his
eyes against the bright shimmer of sun on the water.
“That young man of yours is being quite a nuisance. He’s
keeping the turtles awake and scaring the fish.”
The mermaid tucked away her wings and arranged
herself in her rope sling. “Why don’t you throw him off
the island?”
“My authority doesn’t run that far.” He scratched his
jaw. “He’s interviewing people. Adding up all the places
you’ve been seen. He’ll find you pretty soon, I think.”
“Not if I don’t want to be found. He can yell all he
likes, but I don’t have to answer.”
“Well, maybe.” Torbiong shook his head. “Thanks for
the fish.”
Michelle did some preliminary work with her new
samples and then abandoned them for anything new that
her search spiders had discovered. She had a feeling she
was on the verge of something colossal.
She carried her deck to her overhanging limb and let
her legs dangle over the water while she looked through
the new data. While paging through the new information,
she ate something called a Raspberry Dynamo Bar that
Torbiong had thrown in with her supplies. The old man
must have included it as a joke: it was over-sweet and
sticky with marshmallow and strangely flavored. She
chucked it in the water and hoped it wouldn’t poison any
fish.
Stephanie Pais had been killed in what the news
reports called a “street fight” among a group of foreign
visitors. Since the authorities couldn’t connect the
foreigners to Pais, they had to assume she was an
innocent bystander caught up in the violence. The papers
didn’t mention Terzian at all.
Michelle looked through pages of follow-up. The gun
that had shot the four men had never been found, though
nearby canals were dragged. Two of the foreigners had
survived the fight, though one died eight weeks later from
complications of an operation. The survivor maintained
his innocence and claimed that a complete stranger had
opened fire on him and his friends, but the judges hadn’t
believed him and sent him to prison. He lived a great
many years and died in the Lightspeed War, along with
most people caught in prisons during that deadly time.
One of the four men was Belorussian. Another
Ukrainian. Another two Moldovan. All had served in the
Soviet military in the past, in the Fourteenth Army in
Transnistria. It frustrated Michelle that she couldn’t shout
back in time to tell the Italians to connect these four to the
murder of another ex-Soviet, seven weeks earlier, in Paris.
What the hell had Pais and Terzian been up to? Why
were all these people with Transnistrian connections
killing each other, and Pais?
Maybe it was Pais they’d been after all along. Her
records at Santa Croce were missing, which was odd
because other personnel records from the time had
survived. Perhaps someone was arranging that certain
things not be known.
She tried a search on Santa Croce itself, and slogged
through descriptions and mentions of a whole lot of
Italian churches, including the famous one in Florence
where Terzian and Pais had been seen at Machiavelli’s
tomb. She refined the search to the Santa Croce relief
organization, and found immediately the fact that let it all
fall into place.
Santa Croce had maintained a refugee camp in
Moldova during the civil war following the establishment
of Transnistria. Michelle was willing to bet that
Stephanie Pais had served in that camp. She wondered if
any of the other players had been residents there.
She looked at the list of other camps that Santa Croce
had maintained in that period, which seemed to have been
a busy one for them. One name struck her as familiar, and
she had to think for a moment before she remembered
why she didn’t know it. It was at a Santa Croce camp in
the Sidamo province of Ethiopia where the Green Leopard
Plague had first broken out, the first transgenetic
epidemic.
It had been the first real attempt to modify the human
body at the cellular level, to help marginal populations
synthesize their own food, and it had been primitive
compared to the more successful mods that came later.
The ideal design for the efficient use of chlorophyll was a
leaf, not the Homo sapiens—the designer would have
been better advised to create a plague that made its
victims leafy, and later designers, aiming for the same
effect, did exactly that. And Green Leopard’s designer
had forgotten that the epidermis already contains a solaractivated enzyme: melanin. The result on the African
subjects was green skin mottled with dark splotches, like
the black spots on an implausibly verdant leopard.
The Green Leopard Plague broke out in the Sidamo
camp, then at other camps in the Horn of Africa. Then it
leaped clean across the continent to Mozambique, where
it first appeared at an Oxfam camp in the flood zone, then
spread rapidly across the continent, then leaped across
oceans. It had been a generation before anyone found a
way to disable it, and by then other transgenetic modifiers
had been released into the population, and there was no
going back.
The world had entered Terzian’s future, the one he
had proclaimed at the Conference of Classical and
Modern Thought.
What, Michelle thought excitedly, if Terzian had
known about Green Leopard ahead of time? His
Cornucopia Theory had seemed prescient precisely
because Green Leopard appeared just a few weeks after
he’d delivered his paper. But if those Eastern Bloc thugs
had been involved somehow in the plague’s transmission,
or were attempting to prevent Pais and Terzian from
sneaking the modified virus to the camps . . .
Yes! Michelle thought exultantly. That had to be it.
No one had ever worked out where Green Leopard
originated, but there had always been suspicion directed
toward several semi-covert labs in the former Soviet
empire. This was it. The only question was how Terzian,
that American in Paris, had got involved . . .
It had to be Stephanie, she thought. Stephanie, who
Terzian had loved and who had loved him, and who had
involved him in the desperate attempt to aid refugee
populations.
For a moment Michelle bathed in the beauty of the
idea. Stephanie, dedicated and in love, had been
murdered for her beliefs—realdeath!—and Terzian,
broken-hearted, had carried on and brought the future—
Michelle’s present—into being. A wonderful story. And
no one had known it till now, no one had understood
Stephanie’s sacrifice, or Terzian’s grief . . . not until the
lonely mermaid, working in isolation on her rock, had
puzzled it out.
“Hello, Michelle,” Darton said.
Michelle gave a cry of frustration and glared in fury
down at her lover. He was in a yellow plastic kayak—
kayaking was popular here, particularly in the Rock
Islands—and Darton had slipped his electric-powered
boat along the margin of the island, moving in nearsilence. He looked grimly up at her from below the
pitcher plant that dangled below the overhang.
They had rebuilt him, of course, after his death. All
the data was available in backup, in Delhi where he’d
been taken apart, recorded, and rebuilt as an ape. He was
back in a conventional male body, with the broad
shoulders and white smile and short hairy bandy legs she
remembered.
Michelle knew he hadn’t made any backups during
their time in Belau. He had his memories up to the point
where he’d lain down on the nanobed in Delhi. That had
been the moment when his love of Michelle had been
burning its hottest, when he had just made the
commitment to live with Michelle as an ape in the Rock
Islands.
That burning love had been consuming him in the
weeks since his resurrection, and Michelle was glad of it,
had been rejoicing in every desperate, unanswered
message that Darton sent sizzling through the ether.
“Damn it,” Michelle said, “I’m working.”
<Talk to me> Darton’s fingers formed. Michelle’s
fingers made a ruder reply.
“I don’t understand,” Darton said. “We were in love.
We were going to be together.”
“I’m not talking to you,” Michelle said. She tried to
concentrate on her video display.
“We were still together when the accident happened,”
Darton said. “I don’t understand why we can’t be
together now.”
“I’m not listening, either,” said Michelle.
“I’m not leaving, Michelle!” Darton screamed. “I’m
not leaving till you talk to me!”
White cockatoos shrieked in answer. Michelle quietly
picked up her deck, rose to her feet, and headed inland.
The voice that followed her was amplified, and she
realized Darton had brought his bullhorn.
“You can’t get away, Michelle! You’ve got to tell me
what happened!”
I’ll tell you about Lisa Lee, she thought, so you can
send her desperate messages, too.
Michelle had been deliriously happy for her first
month in Belau, living in arboreal nests with Darton and
spending the warm days describing their island’s unique
biology. It was their first vacation, in Prague, that had
torn Michelle’s happiness apart. It was there that they’d
met Lisa Lee Baxter, the American tourist who thought
apes were cute, and who wondered what these shaggy
kids were doing so far from an arboreal habitat.
It wasn’t long before Michelle realized that Lisa Lee
was at least two hundred years old, and that behind her
diamond-blue eyes was the withered, mummified soul
that had drifted into Prague from some waterless desert of
the spirit, a soul that required for its continued existence
the blood and vitality of the young. Despite her age and
presumed experience Lisa Lee’s ploys seemed to Michelle
to be so obvious, so blatant. Darton fell for them all.
It was only because Lisa Lee had finally tired of him
that Darton returned to Belau, chastened and solemn and
desperate to be in love with Michelle again. But by then it
was Michelle who was tired. And who had access to
Darton’s medical records from the downloads in Delhi.
“You can’t get away, Michelle!”
Well, maybe not. Michelle paused with one hand on
the banyan’s trunk. She closed her deck’s display and
stashed it in a mesh bag with some of her other stuff, then
walked again out on the overhanging limb.
“I’m not going to talk to you like this,” she said.
“And you can’t get onto the island from that side, the
overhang’s too acute.”
“Fine,” Darton said. The shouting had made him
hoarse. “Come down here, then.”
She rocked forward and dived off the limb. The
saltwater world exploded in her senses. She extended her
wings and fluttered close to Darton’s kayak, rose, and
shook seawater from her eyes.
“There’s a tunnel,” she said. “It starts at about two
meters and exits into the lake. You can swim it easily if
you hold your breath.”
“All right,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Give me your anchor.”
She took his anchor, floated to the bottom, and set it
where it wouldn’t damage the live coral.
She remembered the needle she’d taken to Jellyfish
Lake, the needle she’d loaded with the mango extract to
which Darton was violently allergic. Once in the midst of
the jellyfish swarm, it had been easy to jab the needle into
Darton’s calf, then let it drop to the anoxic depths of the
lake.
He probably thought she’d given him a playful pinch.
Michelle had exulted in Darton’s death, the pallor, the
labored breathing, the desperate pleading in the eyes.
It wasn’t murder, after all, not really, just a fourthdegree felony. They’d build a new Darton in a matter of
days. What was the value of a human life, when it could
be infinitely duplicated, and cheaply? As far as Michelle
was concerned, Darton had amusement value only.
The rebuilt Darton still loved her, and Michelle
enjoyed that as well, enjoyed the fact she caused him
anguish, that he would pay for ages for his betrayal of her
love.
Linda Lee Baxter could take a few lessons from the
mermaid, Michelle thought.
Michelle surfaced near the tunnel and raised a hand
with the fingers set at <follow me>. Darton rolled off the
kayak, still in his clothes, and splashed clumsily toward
her.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Michelle replied. “You go first, I’ll follow
and pull you out if you get in trouble.”
He loved her, of course. That was why he panted a
few times for breath, filled his lungs, and dove.
Michelle had not, of course, bothered to mention the
tunnel was fifteen meters long, quite far to go on a single
breath. She followed him, very interested in how this
would turn out, and when Darton got into trouble in one
of the narrow places and tried to back out, she grabbed
his shoes and held him right where he was.
He fought hard but none of his kicks struck her. She
would remember the look in his wide eyes for a long time,
the thunderstruck disbelief in the instant before his breath
exploded from his lungs and he died.
She wished she could speak again the parting words
she’d whispered into Darton’s ear when he lay dying on
the ridge above Jellyfish Lake. “I’ve just killed you. And
I’m going to do it again.”
But even if she could have spoken the words
underwater, they would have been untrue. Michelle
supposed this was the last time she could kill him. Twice
was dangerous, but a third time would be too clear a
pattern. She could end up in jail for a while, though of
course you only did severe prison time for realdeath.
She supposed she would have to discover his body at
some point, but if she cast the kayak adrift it wouldn’t
have to be for a while. And then she’d be thunderstruck
and grief-stricken that he’d thrown away his life on this
desperate attempt to pursue her after she’d turned her
back on him and gone inland, away from the sound of his
voice.
Michelle looked forward to playing that part.
She pulled up the kayak’s anchor and let it coast away
on the six-knot tide, then folded away her wings and
returned to her nest in the banyan tree. She let the breeze
dry her skin and got her deck from its bag and
contemplated the data about Terzian and Stephanie Pais
and the outbreak of the Green Leopard Plague.
Stephanie had died for what she believed in,
murdered by the agents of an obscure, murderous regime.
It had been Terzian who had shot those four men in her
defense, that was clear to her now. And Terzian, who
lived a long time and then died in the Lightspeed War
along with a few billion other people, had loved
Stephanie and kept her secret till his death, a secret
shared with the others who loved Stephanie and spread
the plague among the refugee populations of the world.
It was realdeath that people suffered then, the death
that couldn’t be corrected. Michelle knew that she
understood that kind of death only as an intellectual
abstract, not as something she would ever have to face or
live with. To lose someone permanently . . . that was
something she couldn’t grasp. Even the ancients, who
faced realdeath every day, hadn’t been able to accept it,
that’s why they’d invented the myth of Heaven.
Michelle thought about Stephanie’s death, the death
that must have broken Terzian’s heart, and she
contemplated the secret Terzian had kept all those years,
and she decided that she was not inclined to reveal it.
Oh, she’d give Davout the facts, that was what he
paid her for. She’d tell him what she could find out about
Stephanie and the Transnistrians. But she wouldn’t
mention the camps that Santa Croce had built across the
starvation-scarred world, she wouldn’t point him at
Sidamo and Green Leopard. If he drew those conclusions
himself, then obviously the secret was destined to be
revealed. But she suspected he wouldn’t—he was too old
to connect those dots, not when obscure ex-Soviet entities
and relief camps in the Horn of Africa were so far out of
his reference.
Michelle would respect Terzian’s love, and
Stephanie’s secret. She had some secrets of her own, after
all.
The lonely mermaid finished her work for the day and
sat on her overhanging limb to gaze down at the sea, and
she wondered how long it would be before Darton called
her again, and how she would torture him when he did.
—With thanks to Dr. Stephen C. Lee.
© 2003 by Walter Jon Williams.
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Walter Jon Williams has been nominated for eleven Nebula awards, six
Hugos, and the World Fantasy Award. “The Green Leopard Plague,” which
won a Nebula in 2004, was inspired by a scuba vacation in the island nation
of Palau. His latest work is The Fourth Wall, the third book in his series of
near-future thrillers featuring game designer Dagmar Shaw. Learn more at
walterjonwilliams.net.
The Eternal Flame
Greg Egan
(Orthogonal, Book Two)
Chapter 1
“Carlo! I need your help!”
Carlo opened his rear eyes to see his friend Silvano
halfway down the ladder that led into the workshop. From
the tone of his words this was not a casual request.
“What is it?” Carlo turned away from the microscope.
A bright afterimage of the fragment of wheat petal he’d
been examining hovered for a moment against the soft red
light from the walls.
Silvano halted his descent. “I need you to kill two of
my children,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. I’m not that
strong.”
Carlo struggled to make sense of these words. He had
seen his friend’s co just a few days before, and she’d been
as emaciated as any woman on the Peerless.
“How could there be four?” he asked, not wanting to
believe that there were any, that Silvana had given birth at
all. As far as he knew she’d still been studying, and if the
event had been planned they’d never mentioned it to him.
Maybe this request was some kind of sick prank. He’d
drag himself all the way to their apartment and there
Silvana would be, whole as ever.
“I don’t know,” Silvano replied. He offered no whywould-you-doubt-me bluster, no theories about the reason
for the calamity—none of the adornments it would be
tempting to add to bolster a fabrication. Carlo scrutinized
his face as well as he could in the moss-light, and lost
hope of any kind of deception.
He extinguished the microscope’s lamp, then pulled
himself away from the bench and moved quickly around
the workshop, two hands on the guide ropes as he
gathered the drugs and equipment he’d need. He knew
exactly what doses would euthanize a vole or a shrew by
body mass, and it didn’t take much calculating to
extrapolate from that. He wasn’t committed to any course
of action, but if he ended up doing what Silvano had
asked of him any delay would only make it harder.
Carlo grabbed a small box to hold the paraphernalia
and moved toward the ladder, packing as he went.
Silvano ascended quickly ahead of him. It was only when
they were traveling side by side down the corridor, their
ropes emitting the same forlorn twang, that Carlo dared to
start searching for a way out.
“Are you sure no one’s offering an entitlement?” he
asked. It was a desperately slim chance, but they could
detour to the relay station and check.
“I spent the last three stints looking,” Silvano replied.
“No one’s selling at any price.”
A small group of people had entered the corridor
behind them; their voices echoed off the gently curved
walls. Carlo increased his pace, then asked quietly, “So
you were planning to have children?”
“No! I just wanted to find a way for Silvana to stop
starving herself.”
“Oh.” Everyone craved the same kind of ease, but to
put too much hope in such a slender prospect was asking
for disappointment.
“Her studies were becoming harder and harder,”
Silvano continued. “She couldn’t concentrate at all. I
thought it would be worth it, just to let her stop worrying
and eat normally. An extra entitlement wouldn’t have
committed us to anything, and I could have re-sold it if
we’d ended up not needing it.”
“So why didn’t you wait?” Carlo demanded angrily.
“How many people did you expect to die in three stints?”
Silvano began humming and shivering. “She couldn’t
take the hunger any more. She kept saying, ‘Let’s do it
now, and at least my daughter will have a few years
before it’s her turn to suffer.’”
Carlo didn’t reply. It was hard enough watching
someone you loved tormented by the need to convince her
body that it was living in a time of famine, but to learn
now that all of this self-deprivation had been to no avail
was cruel beyond belief.
They reached the ladder leading inward to the
apartments. Carlo forced himself to continue. A
generation ago, anyone in his place would have offered to
forego a twelfth of their own entitlement to help out their
friend, and with enough contributors the extra mouths
would have been fed. That was what his parents had
done. But the crop yields hadn’t risen since, and he
wasn’t prepared to diminish his family’s share any
further, forcing his own descendants into an even more
precarious state. As for the chance of Silvano finding a
dozen such benefactors, it was nonexistent.
At the top of the ladder it was Silvano who hung
back. Carlo said, “You stay here. I’ll come and get you.”
He started down the corridor.
Silvano said, “Wait.”
Carlo halted, fearful without quite knowing what he
dreaded. What could make this worse? Some complicated
directive on how he should choose which pair should
survive?
“You don’t think you and Carla might . . . ?” Silvano
began haltingly.
“You left that too late,” Carlo said. He spoke gently,
but he made sure not to offer his friend the slightest hope.
“Yes,” Silvano agreed wretchedly.
Carlo said, “I won’t be long.”
The corridor was empty as he approached the
apartment, but the fixed gaze of the same three faces kept
repeating as he dragged himself past a long row of
election posters, all bearing the slogan MAKE THE
ANCESTORS PROUD. The fact that he was still in
Silvano’s sight made hesitation unthinkable: he pushed
the curtains aside and followed the guide ropes in. There
were no lamps burning, but even by moss-light Carlo
could see at a glance that the front room was deserted.
Silvana’s notebooks were stacked neatly in a cabinet. He
felt a pang of grief and anger, but this wasn’t the time to
indulge it. He made his way into the bedroom.
Silvano had left the children encased in a tarpaulin
that was tethered to two of the ropes that crossed the
room. Carlo couldn’t help imagining the couple
themselves inside the same enclosure, steadying their
bodies for the bittersweet end. He had never had the
courage to ask any of his older friends—let alone his
father—what they believed had passed through their co’s
mind in those final moments, what comfort the women
took from the knowledge that they were creating new
lives. But at least Silvana would have had no way of
knowing that nature in its capriciousness was about to
deliver twice the consolation she’d been expecting.
Carlo dragged himself closer to the bundle. He could
see movement, but mercifully there was still no sound.
The tarpaulin had been rolled into a rough cylinder, with
the cord that threaded through the holes along two of the
sides pulled tight to close the ends. He unknotted the cord
at one end and began loosening it, his hands trembling as
he felt the infants respond to the disturbance. Part of his
mind skidded away from the task, conjuring fantasies of a
different remedy. What if he could call on, not a dozen
friends, but the entire crew? When a woman scourged her
body with hunger to protect the Peerless, surely they all
owed her children a simple act of decency—whether they
were close to her family or not. A few crumbs less in so
many meals wouldn’t be missed.
But he was deluding himself. Sharing the load among
strangers wouldn’t diminish it: when the pleas started
coming from every corner of the mountain—once every
stint, not once in a lifetime—all those lesser demands
would still add up the same way. In the long run nothing
mattered but the size of the harvest and the number of
mouths to be fed. If the rations were spread any thinner
one bad harvest could see the entitlements torn up—and a
war over the crops would leave no survivors.
One end of the tarpaulin was open now. Carlo peered
into the gloom of the tunnel, then reached in and took the
nearest infant in his hands. She was a tiny limbless thing,
her eyes still closed, her mouth gaping for food. Her
tympanum fluttered, but the membranes were not yet stiff
enough to make a sound.
The child squirmed in his grip. Carlo emitted a series
of soothing chirps, but they had no effect. This girl knew
that he was not her father, not the one who had promised
to protect her. He reached down and placed her on the bed
below, where a second tarpaulin covered the sand.
The next one he extracted was her sister, not her co.
Both were distressingly undersized, but both appeared
equally healthy. Carlo had been clinging to the hope that
with so little maternal flesh to go around one of the pairs
would have died of natural causes already, or failing that
a stark asymmetry in their prospects might have spared
him any need to make the choice himself.
He placed the second girl on the bed; her sister was
already drifting, her wriggling launching her up from the
tarp. “Stay there,” Carlo entreated them both, pointlessly.
Some instinct had driven their brothers to retreat into
the dark depths of the birth tent; Carlo pulled the cord out
completely at his end and opened up the whole thing to
the moss-light. Against the spread of the gaily patterned
cloth the boys looked impossibly diminutive and fragile,
and they chose this moment to become audible, humming
plaintively for their father. Carlo wished he’d sent Silvano
further away. If these children had been his own, this was
the point when he might have lost his mind and tried to
kill the man he’d sent to halve their number.
This was wrong, it was insane, it was unforgivable. If
he reneged now, what would happen? A few of Silvano’s
friends would take pity on him, and help keep the family
of five from starving. But once those friends had children
of their own, the cost of their charity would grow much
steeper—and once Silvano’s children had children, the
situation would be impossible. Unless Carlo was willing
to declare to his co: “These two belong to us now, to raise
as our own. You’d better stuff yourself with holin,
because in my weakness this is what I’ve done to you:
your flesh that was made for the ages will perish now,
just like mine.”
Carlo dragged himself along the rope and snatched
the nearest of the boys. The child writhed and hummed;
Carlo spread his hand wide to deaden the boy’s
tympanum. “Which one is your co?” he muttered angrily.
He grabbed the side of the bed and pulled himself down.
Co recognized co from the earliest age, and their fathers
could always see the link, but how was a stranger who
hadn’t witnessed the fission itself meant to be certain?
He held the boy beside each female sibling in turn.
Carlo was humming now himself, though not as loudly as
the unrestrained brother. He tried to picture all four bodies
still in contact, before the partitions softened into skin and
split apart: first the primary one dividing the pairs, then
the secondary ones dividing co from co. He’d watched the
whole process often enough in animals. With a free hand
he prodded the underside of the boy’s torso, the place
where he would have been connected to his co more
recently than he’d been joined side by side with his
brother. Just beneath the skin there was a patch of
unusual rigidity, flat but irregularly shaped. Carlo probed
the same spot on one of the girls. Nothing. He checked
her sister, and found the mirror image of the boy’s
fragment of the partition.
He hesitated, crouched above the bed, still trying to
imagine how this could have ended differently. What if
the four friends had made a pact, long ago, to feed each
other’s children and forego their own, if it ever came to
that? Was that the stark, simple answer they’d all failed
to see—or would the promise of security have poisoned
them against each other, leaving them afraid that it would
be exploited? Carla had never starved herself quite as
diligently as Silvana, so what kind of life would she have
had if she’d been endlessly harangued by a woman with
every reason to urge her to show more restraint?
Carlo scooped up the chosen boy’s co and pulled
himself along the rope into the front room, a child
clutched awkwardly in each free hand. From the box, he
took two clearstone vials and a syringe. He extruded an
extra pair of arms, uncapped the first vial and filled the
syringe with its orange powder. When he held the sharp
mirrorstone tip to the base of the boy’s skull he felt his
own body start shuddering in revulsion, but he stared
down his urge to take the child in his arms and soothe
him, to promise him as much love and protection as he
would lavish on any child of his own. He pushed the
needle into the skin and searched for the angle that would
take it between two plates of bone—he knew the invariant
anatomy here was not that different from a vole’s—but
then the tip suddenly plunged deeper without the drop in
resistance he’d been expecting upon finding the narrow
corridor of flesh. The child’s skull wasn’t fully ossified,
and his probing had forced the needle right through it.
Carlo turned the boy to face him, then squeezed the
plunger on the syringe. The child’s eyes snapped open,
but they were sightless, rolling erratically, with flashes of
yellow light diffusing all the way through the orbs. The
drug itself could only reach a small region of the brain,
but those parts it touched were emitting a barrage of
meaningless signals that elicited an equally frenzied
response much farther afield. Soon the tissue’s capacity to
make light would be depleted throughout the whole
organ. In this state, Carlo believed, there could be no
capacity for thought or sensation.
When the boy’s eyes were still Carlo withdrew the
needle. His co’s tympanum had been fluttering for a
while, and now her humming grew audible. “I’m sorry,”
Carlo whispered. “I’m sorry.” He stroked the side of her
body with his thumb, but it only made her more agitated.
He refilled the syringe with the orange powder, quickly
drove the needle through the back of her skull, and
watched the light of her nascent mind blaze like a
wildfire, then die away.
Carlo released the limp children and let them drift
toward the floor while he resorbed the arms he’d used to
hold them. His whole body felt weak and battered. He
spent a few pauses steadying himself, then he pushed out
two fresh arms and filled the syringe from the second vial.
When a speck of the blue powder spilled onto his palm
the sensation was like passing his hand above a flame. He
gathered the damaged patch of skin into a small clump,
then hardened the tips of two of his fingers and sliced it
off.
He picked up the boy. A world away, his brother was
still calling out for help. Carlo reinserted the needle, and
forced himself to take his time delivering the poison lest it
burst from the wound and escape into the room. The
boy’s eyes had already been dull, but now the smooth
white skin of the orbs began to turn purplish gray.
When the plunger could be driven no further, Carlo
withdrew the needle carefully and set the dead boy down
beside the cabinet. He refilled the syringe and turned to
the boy’s co. When he gripped her a spasm passed
through her body; he waited to see if there was any more
activity, but she remained still. He slid the needle into her
brain and sent the blue powder trickling through.
Carlo returned to the inner room. He set the boy he’d
spared down on the bed beside his co, then unknotted the
end of the tarpaulin that had remained attached to the
guide rope. In the front room he brought the bodies
together, positioning them as they would have been before
they’d separated, and rolled them into the tarpaulin. He
folded the empty parts of the cloth together and secured
the shroud with cord. Then he packed the syringe and
vials back into the box he’d used to bring them.
As he approached Silvano in the corridor, his friend’s
whole body contorted with anguish. “Let me see them!”
he begged Carlo.
“Go and tend to your children,” Carlo replied. A
woman was approaching them—one of Silvano’s
neighbors on her way home—but then she saw what
Carlo was holding and she retreated without a word.
“What have I done?” Silvano wailed. “What have I
done?” Carlo pushed past him and moved quickly down
the corridor, but he waited by the ladder until Silvano
finally entered the apartment. Comforting the surviving
children—holding them, feeding them, letting them know
that they were safe—was the only thing that could help
him now.
Carlo descended past the level of his workshop, past
the test fields where the seedlings he was studying grew,
past the shuddering machinery of the cooling pumps,
until he reached the base of the ladder. He dragged
himself along the outer corridor, picturing the void
beneath the rock.
A man was emerging from the airlock as Carlo
approached. He removed his helmet and glanced at the
tarpaulin, then averted his eyes. Carlo recognized him: he
was a miller named Rino.
“There’s no greater waste of time than the fire watch,”
Rino carped, climbing out of his cooling bag. “I’ve lost
count of how many shifts I’ve done, and I still haven’t
seen so much as a flash.”
Carlo placed the children’s bodies on the floor and
Rino helped him fit into a six-limbed cooling bag. Carlo
hadn’t been outside for years; agronomy was considered
important enough to keep him off the roster entirely.
Rino snapped a fresh canister of air into place and
checked that it was flowing smoothly over Carlo’s skin.
“Helmet?”
Carlo said, “I won’t be out that long.”
“You want a safety harness?”
“Yes.”
Rino took one from a peg on the wall and handed it to
him. Carlo slipped it over his torso and cinched it tight.
“Be careful, brother,” Rino said. There was no hint of
irony in his form of address, but Carlo had always found
it grimly inane that the friendliest appellation some
people could offer was a death sentence.
He carried the bodies into the airlock with him, slid
the door closed and started laboriously pumping down the
pressure. A loose edge of the shroud flapped in the surge
of air across the confined space as he delivered each
stroke. He unreeled a suitable length of the safety rope,
engaged the brake on the reel and hooked the rope into
his harness. Then he crouched down, braced himself
against the outrush of residual air and pulled open the
hatch in the floor.
A short stone ladder rising up beside the hatch made
the descent onto the external rope ladder easier. Carlo
used four hands on the rungs and held the children in the
other two. As his head passed below the hatch the trails
of the old stars were suddenly right in front of him—long,
garish streaks of color gouged out of the sky—while
behind him the orthogonal stars were almost point-like.
He glanced down and saw the fire-watch platform
silhouetted against the transition circle, where the old
stars blazed brightest before their light cut out.
Carlo descended until he felt the safety rope grow
taut. He clung to the children, unsure what he should say
before releasing them. This boy should have lived for
three dozen years, and died with children of his own to
mourn him. This girl should have survived in those
children, her flesh outliving every man’s. What was life,
if that pattern was broken? What was life, when a father
had to plead for an assassin to murder half his family, just
to save the rest from starvation?
So who had failed them? Not their mother, that was
sure. The idiot ancestors who squatted on the home
world, waiting to be rescued from their own problems?
The three generations of agronomists who had barely
increased the yield from the crops? But then, what good
would it do if the fourth generation triumphed? If he and
his colleagues found a way to raise the yield, that would
bring a brief respite. But it would also bring more fourchild families, and in time the population would rise
again until all the same problems returned.
What miracle could put an end to hunger and
infanticide? However many solos and widows chose to go
the way of men, most women would rather starve
themselves in the hope of having only one daughter than
contemplate a regime where for every two sisters, one
would be compelled to die childless.
And if he was honest, it was not just down to the
women. Even if Carla, given her say, had proved willing,
he would not have been prepared to throw away his
chance of fatherhood to raise these children as his own.
“Forgive us,” Carlo pleaded. He stared down at the
lifeless bundle. “Forgive us all. We’ve lost our way.”
He let the children slip from his arms, and watched
the shroud descend into the void.
Chapter 2
Straining against the harness that held her to the
observation bench, Tamara cranked the azimuth wheel of
the telescope mount. Each laborious turn of the handle
beside her nudged the huge contraption by just one arcchime, and though she still had strength to spare there
was nothing to be gained from it: a governor limited the
speed of rotation to prevent excessive torques that might
damage the gears. The soft, steady clicking of the wheel,
usually a reassuring, meditative sound, drove home the
machine’s serene indifference to her impatience.
When the telescope was finally pointed in the
direction of her last sighting of the Object, she lay flat on
the bench and wriggled into place beneath the eyepiece.
As she brought the image into focus she was granted as
glorious a vision as she could have hoped for: there was
nothing to be seen here but the usual mundane star trails.
The trails were exactly as Tamara remembered them,
so she knew that she hadn’t mis-set the coordinates.
Twice now, the Object had escaped the field of view that
had framed it just one day earlier. Such elusiveness
proved that it was crossing the sky faster than anything
she’d seen before.
Tamara turned the secondary azimuth wheel until she
was rewarded with a small gray smudge of light at the top
of the field, then she adjusted the altitude to center it. To
the limits of the telescope’s resolving power, the Object
was simply a point. Nothing in the cosmos was close
enough to the Peerless to reveal its width, but even those
orthogonal stars that had remained fixed in the sky for
three generations showed color trails at this
magnification. To possess a point-like image the Object
had to be moving slowly—but the only way a slowmoving body could cross the sky as rapidly as this was by
virtue of its proximity.
She ran her fingertips over the embossed coordinate
wheels, recorded the numbers on her chest, then
computed the angle between the Object’s last two
bearings. Symbols blossomed on her forearm as she
worked through the calculation. In both of the intervals
between sightings the gray smudge had moved about two
arc-pauses—but the second shift was slightly greater than
the first. The true speed of the Object was unlikely to
have changed, so its quickening progress against the
background of stars could only mean that it had already
moved measurably closer.
The change was far too small to yield accurate
predictions, but Tamara couldn’t resist working through
some crude estimates. Within a period perhaps as short as
four stints—or perhaps as long as five dozen—the Object
would make its closest approach to the Peerless. Just how
close that would be was impossible to say, without
knowing how fast the thing was moving through the void,
but the lack of a discernible color trail put a ceiling on its
speed. The upshot was, the Object would pass by at a
distance of, at most, nine gross severances. In
astronomical terms that was positively propinquitous:
about a twelfth the distance of the home world from its
star. No living traveler among them had ever been so
close to another solid body.
Tamara resisted the urge to bolt from the observatory
and start spreading the news; the protocols dictated that
she should complete her shift in the face of anything less
than an imminent collision. But it would not be wasted
time; the Object could easily be accompanied by fellow
travelers, fragments from the same parent body with
similar trajectories. So she duly worked her way across
her allotted segment of the sky, hunting for another speck
of light or a dark silhouette against a star’s band of
colors. Field after field was unblemished, as usual, but
whenever the tedium of the search reached the point
where her thoughts began to stray to the emptiness in her
gut, she turned her mind back to the Object itself and
savored again the thrill of discovery.
When she’d done her duty—with no further
revelations—Tamara slipped out of the harness and
pushed herself through the hatch at the base of the
observatory. She drifted across the gap that separated the
telescope’s stabilized mount from the imperceptibly
spinning rock below, and her momentum carried her into
the entrance tunnel, returning her to the Peerless proper.
She grabbed a guide rope and dragged herself along to the
office. Roberto was there, ready to start his own shift,
while Ada was studying for an assessment, poring over a
tattered set of notes on the art of navigational astrometry.
“I do believe we should expect company!” Tamara
announced. She gave her fellow observers the three data
points and waited while they made their own calculations.
“It does look close,” Roberto confirmed.
“How bright is it?” Ada asked.
“Five,” Tamara said.
“And you’ve only just seen it?”
“You know what it’s like, trying to spot things close
to the horizon.”
To Tamara, they both sounded a shade resentful. She
knew there’d been no special skill in what she’d done,
and her luck would attract no great esteem. But what lay
ahead now was open to everyone: the chance to observe a
body of orthogonal matter in unprecedented detail.
“I wish we had some way to pin down the distance,”
Roberto lamented.
“Do I detect a hint of parallax envy?” Tamara joked.
On the home world, astronomers had had it easy: wait
half a day and your viewpoint moved by the planet’s
width; wait half a year and that became the width of the
orbit. Once those baselines had been measured, the
shifting angles they created had been revelatory. But
whether you imagined it was the Peerless itself that was
moving day by day, or the Object, without knowing the
relative velocity to fix the baseline between successive
views the most you could glean from the angles alone was
the timing of the encounter, not the distance.
Roberto hummed with frustration. “This thing might
come close enough for us to resolve its shape—and
maybe even structural features, impact craters . . . who
knows? Think how much more valuable all that would be
if we knew their scale!”
Ada said, “It sounds like the perfect job for an
infrared color trail.”
“What kind of gratitude is this?” Tamara demanded.
“I bring my two friends the find of a lifetime, and all I get
are fantasies about how things could be better!”
Ada was indignant. “What fantasy? I’m serious! The
chemists have never made infrared a priority before,
because they’ve never had a good enough reason.”
Chemicals sensitive to ultraviolet light had been
known since before the launch, but no one had managed
to achieve the same feat at the infrared end of the
spectrum. Imaging a slow-moving object’s color trail in
ultraviolet wasn’t all that helpful; even infinitely fast UV
would lie closer to violet in the trail than violet was to
red. But an infrared trail could stretch out to many times
the length of the visible portion.
“And this will count as a good reason?” Roberto was
amused. “The last time I asked for a favor from the
chemists, I was told to wait until they’d solved the fuel
problem.”
Ada said, “Maybe we can find a chemist who’s
itching for a break. If you’ve spent half your life bashing
your head against the same old problem, why not try
something easier?”
“No, they all want the glory too badly for that,”
Roberto declared. “Who’s going to waste their time
inventing infrared-sensitive paper when they might be on
the verge of inventing a way home?”
Tamara tried to put herself inside a chemist’s skin.
The Peerless’s reserves of sunstone, burned in the usual
manner, would barely be enough to bring the mountain to
a halt, let alone carry their descendants back to the home
world. She’d understood that unsettling fact since
childhood, but to someone who’d made the fuel problem
their vocation what interest could there be in the
astronomers’ petty concerns? The orthogonal cluster and
the debris that surrounded it were just obstacles to be
avoided, and while gathering statistics on the distribution
of this hazard was a worthwhile activity, it wouldn’t take
an infrared color trail to recognize a head-on collision.
Then again, surely every chemist was at least a little
curious as to how the sprinkling of orthogonal dust that
had adhered to the surface of the Peerless had threatened
to set the rock on fire, in the days before spin. Tamara
wondered if she could sell them on the notion that
establishing the size of any craters on the Object might
shed light on that mysterious reaction. The trouble was,
any ordinary rock that had struck the Object would have
done so at such a great speed that the most likely result
would have been, not a crater, but an all-obliterating
fireball. The Peerless itself was almost certainly the only
ordinary object in the region that had ended up more or
less matching velocities with the orthogonal material—
and if a leisurely encounter between the two kinds of
matter was ever to be repeated, the Peerless would have
to be involved again.
Tamara looked up at her friends and realized just how
blind she’d been. Roberto had been right to refuse to
accept the same old regime of half-useless observations;
Ada had been right to insist that there could easily be
better methods within their reach. But all three of them
had been too timid by far.
Tamara said, “Why don’t we go there?”
Roberto blinked. “What?”
Ada emitted an excited chirp. “You mean start the
engines and . . . ?”
“No, no!” Tamara cut her off. “The Peerless is too big
and unwieldy, and it would be insane to waste that much
fuel. We should build a smaller rocket, just for this
journey—something we can take as close to the Object as
we dare. Then we can measure what we like, observe
what we like . . . carry out experiments, maybe even bring
back samples.”
Ada held up her navigator’s manual, regarding it with
an almost fearful new respect. When Tamara had studied
the same notes, she’d assumed that the only use she’d
ever make of them would be to teach the theory to the
next generation, keeping the knowledge from withering
away while they waited for the infinitely remote prospect
of commencing the journey home.
Roberto’s stunned expression gave way to one of pure
delight. “If the tiniest speck of orthogonal rock is a
liberator for calmstone,” he said, “who knows what the
same material in bulk could do to our fuel?”
Tamara said, “I think we might be able to interest the
chemists in helping us find the answer to that.”
[End Excerpt]
From the book Eternal Flame by Greg Egan.
Copyright © 2012 Greg Egan.
Reprinted by permission of Night Shade Books.
All rights reserved.
Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF
novels Diaspora, Quarantine, Permutation City, and Teranesia. He has won
the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His
short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone,
Asimov’s, and Nature. Egan holds a BSc in Mathematics from the University
of Western Australia, and currently lives in Perth.
Interview: John Scalzi
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
John Scalzi is the New York Times bestselling author of
the Old Man’s War series, which consists of Old Man’s
War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale,
and the recently announced The Human Division
(forthcoming). Other novels include Agent to the Stars,
The Android’s Dream, Fuzzy Nation, and, his latest,
Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas. Scalzi has also
written a number of nonfiction books, such as Your Hate
Mail Will Be Graded and 24 Frames into the Future, and
he posts essays regularly on his popular blog, Whatever.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by
John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit
geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and
the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various
geeky topics.
Your new novel is called Redshirts. What’s it about?
“Redshirts” is a concept that goes back to the original
Star Trek series. The idea is that Kirk and Spock and
Chekov go down to a planet on an away team, and they
take Ensign Jones, the security ensign, with them. And
somebody’s got to be killed, and who’s it going to be? Is
it going to be Kirk? No. Is it going to be Spock? No. Is it
Chekov? He’s going to get hurt, but they’re not going to
kill him. So it falls to Ensign Jones to die horribly for
dramatic effect.
When the original series first came out, people started
knowing statistically it was a really bad idea to be going
on these away teams with the captain, and they started
calling these people redshirts, and it’s become a common
enough phrase in science fiction culture and in geek
culture that when I did a story about these sorts of
characters on a spaceship, it was just a natural title
choice.
The whole idea behind the book is that these
undercard ensigns and crew members start trying to avoid
going on these away teams, and trying to figure out how
they can stop this thing from happening in a larger sense.
And then the story goes from basically what I think
people are expecting to a kind of weirder territory. Which
it would have to, if you want this to be more than a
single-joke novel.
Since the book is sort of a parody of Star Trek, we’re
just wondering how big of a Star Trek fan are you, and
what do you think are some of the strengths and
weaknesses of the franchise?
I would say I’m a medium-sized Star Trek fan. I love the
universe that it’s created. I’ve seen the original series,
obviously. Next Generation is probably my home Star
Trek fandom, if you want to call it that. And then I really
actually like the brand new movie, except for five minutes
where Spock—who is supposed to be a science officer—
just unleashes a whole spiel of completely non-scientific
stuff.
It’s a pretty good universe. There’s lots going on,
people care about the characters. The science in it is
frequently horrible, and that’s one of the things that I pick
up on in Redshirts. But if you can live with the horrible,
horrible, bad, awful science that doesn’t make sense, then
it’s not a bad place to live.
Redshirts is dedicated in part to Wil Wheaton, who of
course starred on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and
whom you’re friends with. How did you two get to
know each other, and do you know what Wil thought
of the book?
Wil and I have a mutual friend in common named Mykal
Burns. I’ve known Mykal since he was in junior high,
and Wil knew him originally through his wife Anne.
Wil had started reading my books for Audible. He’d
done Fuzzy Nation, The Android’s Dream, and Agent to
the Stars. So I wrote Redshirts, and clearly it seemed like
this would be a book that would be up his alley, so I sent
it to him, just going, “Hey, would you like to read this?”
and he comes back going, “Oh my god, I love this so
much!” So that made it easier to sort of co-dedicate it to
him. It’s co-dedicated to him, to our mutual friend Myke
Burns, and then to the two producers of Stargate
Universe who I worked with primarily while I was that
show’s creative consultant.
Speaking of celebrities, Redshirts also has a theme
song written by Jonathan Coulton. How’d that come
about?
Back in 2005, while I was writing The Android’s Dream,
it was right around the time that Jonathan Coulton was
just getting started, so I thought, “Hey, this might be a
thing where I can get him to write songs for this. That
would be amusing.” And so out of the blue—and he had
no idea who I was; I think Old Man’s War had just come
out or something like that—I said, “Hey, you should do
this. Write three or four songs about this science fiction
book that I’m doing, and here’s the book,” and I sent it as
an attached file.
So basically I was the creepy dude who said, “Hey,
you should work with me, and here’s my book, so why
don’t you read it? And I love your stuff.” I think his
entirely rational response at that time was just, “Oh,
attached file, crazy dude, hit delete,” and that was the last
that you ever heard of that. Years later we met, and got
along very well, and I mentioned that to him, and he was
like, “Oh, I didn’t know. If I had known, maybe things
would have been different.” And I was like, “There’s no
possible way you could have known. I did everything
wrong in approaching you with that.”
Last year, when Fuzzy Nation came out, I had Paul
and Storm do a song for it, and that actually worked out
very well, which convinced me that this was sort of a fun
thing to do with each of the books. So this time around I
sent him an email and said, “Hey, remember when I was
that creepy stalker dude? Now I’m going to do it again,
but this time you know who I am.”
Years ago I heard you joke that you were part of a
movement in science fiction called the “New
Comprehensible.” Do you think that overall science
fiction is too inaccessible to new readers?
We have some of the best writers in science fiction and
fantasy today that we’ve ever had in the genre. That said,
one of the things is that when you have people who are
really engaged on the literary side of writing, as many of
our current really excellent writers are, there is a question
of how approachable it is to someone who is just coming
fresh into the field.
I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my
words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don’t mean that
to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I
write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law.
And my mother-in-law reads Nora Roberts and she reads
Julie Garwood, and she’s going to read my stuff because
I’m her son-in-law and she loves me, and I don’t want her
to get lost. So what I do when I’m writing this stuff is I
think, “How am I going to communicate all the ideas that
I want to communicate, and at the same time make it
something that Dora—my mother-in-law—will be able to
follow?” If I can make something that she’s going to be
able to follow and be interested in, and have a good time
reading, it seems likely to me that I should be able to get
just about anybody to follow it.
For me at least that’s the way it’s worked. There’s not
a week that goes by that I don’t get an email from
someone who says, “I don’t read science fiction, but I
read yours and it was amazing, and I was totally able to
follow it. This is great.” And my response to that is
always, “That’s wonderful. Here are some more writers
that you should look at.”
Are there any other specific books that you tend to
recommend to people who are new to the genre?
A lot of the intake for science fiction used to be younger
readers, so the classic example would be the Heinlein
juveniles. Right now we have an entire segment called
YA, which is basically doing the job that science fiction
or fantasy used to do. There’s a lot of uptake in science
fiction that way. Scott Westerfeld and Suzanne Collins
are both very good examples of science fiction books that
have been written recently that have become—obviously
—extraordinarily popular. For older readers, it’s easy to
send them to Pat Rothfuss, as an example. I actually like
Steven Brust’s work quite a lot. I think it’s very easy to
get into if you’ve never read any fantasy before, especially
because it almost has a noir-ish quality to it, so any of the
books that he has in the Jhereg series, I think, are a great
way to get involved with that.
Richard K. Morgan is a great way to start, because his
work is filled with action and cool ideas. There’s the new
book series that is coming out by Ty Franck and Daniel
Abraham under the James S. A. Corey name. Leviathan
Wakes is the first title in that.
I recently heard you describe Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy as an “extinction-level event for humor in
science fiction.” What do you mean by that?
Star Wars was an extinction-level event for a certain kind
of science fiction movie that just preceded Star Wars. Just
before Star Wars, between 1968 and about 1976, most of
the big science fiction films were dystopic in one way or
another. You started with Planet of the Apes, you went
through Omega Man, Silent Running, and Logan’s Run.
And they were socially conscious, and they were sort of
going, “Look, we’ll do terrible things if we don’t change
our ways,” and so on and so forth. Then Star Wars came
in and was like, “I don’t care about any of that. Look, I
got lasers! I got guys with lighty swords and they’re
swinging them at each other! I got this mystical force, and
all this stuff that’s cool, and there’s explosions!” And it
really just wiped off the map all that dystopic fiction.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think that from
the point of view of a viewer, eight years of dystopic
science fiction is about as far as you want to go. But
immediately afterwards, everything else in science fiction
was, “Let’s do that thing that Star Wars did so well.”
Which made perfect sense, because adjusted for inflation
it made like a billion dollars at the box office. In the same
way, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously
successful. It was tremendously funny. I remember
reading it when I was 12 and just being certain I was
going to pee myself. But at the same time, it was so
successful that it basically defined what humor in science
fiction was going to be for the next couple of decades.
And the problem with that, in this particular case—and
this was a problem that they ran into with the movies that
were trying to capitalize on Star Wars as well—is that
you can put all the elements there, but unless you’ve got a
spark that really makes it fly, it’s just not going to work.
In this particular case, Douglas Adams had
something that most of the folks who were trying to
replicate his humor didn’t. He was British, he was a
farcisist, and he knew what he was doing in terms of
having that particular type of humor. Other people can
ape that sort of humor, but if it doesn’t work then it just
fails miserably. And I certainly know that with, for
example, Agent to the Stars or The Android’s Dream,
those are pretty funny books, and I consider them
basically comedies, but we didn’t market them like that,
and part of the reason that we didn’t market them like
that is because there was the concern that if they were
marketed as humor, that they just wouldn’t sell. I mean,
my publisher in the UK at the time, Tor UK, passed on
Fuzzy Nation because they’re like, “Oh, it’s a humor
book, and humor doesn’t sell.” One of the things I say
about Redshirts is that it took me eight books to finally be
at a point in my career where I could come out with a
book and say, “This is meant to be a funny book,” and we
didn’t have to make any bones about it.
Given that, do you have any advice that you would
give to new writers who want to write funny science
fiction?
Well, one, I would encourage people to attempt to write
amusing science fiction. I think it’s much easier to sell
amusing science fiction in a short story market than it
would be for the novel market. The dynamics of those
markets are separate things. I think that the way that it
worked for me was that I spent, like I said, eight novels—
not just getting to a point where I could write a humorous
novel, but each of the novels that I write have moments of
humor and levity and sarcasm and everything else, and
that people got used to the idea that this was something
that I did.
I think things are changing. I mean, I do think that we
are in flux. And this is going to sound obnoxious, but I
think that one of the nice things about Redshirts getting
onto the actual best-seller list and doing as well as it has
been doing, is that it is kind of a wake-up call that the
science fiction audience—regardless of the long-held
superstitions or beliefs of those who publish the stuff—is
more than happy to entertain the idea of humorous
science fiction.
You described Douglas Adams as a “British
farcisist.” Do you see Redshirts or any of your other
books as falling into a particular style or tradition of
humor?
I’m an American sarcasticist. [laughs] No, I think my
sense of humor comes from a long trail of American
humorists that stretches all the way back into the ’20s. I
mean, some of my touchstones for humor are James
Thurber, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, and a lot
of the humor that I have comes through dialog that comes
through screenwriters like Ben Hecht or William
Goldman or Elaine May or Larry Gelbart, who wrote
Tootsie and MASH. A lot of my humor comes from
newspaper columnists like P.J. O’Rourke, or Molly Ivins,
or Mike Royko. To a lesser extent, Dave Barry. Also
outside the science fiction genre. For example, Carl
Hiaasen, or Gregory McDonald, who wrote the Fletch
books, and Elmore Leonard.
Your blog, Whatever, has been described as having
one of the few readable comment sections online. Why
do you think that is?
It’s because I will mallet into oblivion anybody who gets
out of line and is too obnoxious. I have a long-standing
comment policy where I say, “Here are the rules, stick to
them, and you won’t have any problem.” So that’s part of
it, too: If you have rules, and everybody knows them and
everybody can see them, and they’re easily referable to,
then most people are going to follow them.
The second thing is that I do actively moderate. If
people don’t follow the rules, then I will either tell them
to straighten up, or if they don’t straighten up I will
remove their posts. And if they become too much of a
problem, I will moderate them, or eventually ban them.
And because I don’t tolerate people trolling or being
horrible to each other, or making just absolutely cookiecutter arguments that they got off of talk radio, or
wherever else they got them from, it means that the
people who do that sort of crap don’t stick around on my
site too long.
I mean, when I write something that is controversial,
and goes outside my usual sphere of people who read and
comment and link in—for example, the thing about the
lowest difficulty setting, which happened very recently—
occasionally, we will get people in who are not the usual
gang, in terms of commenters, and when that happens a
lot of them don’t pay attention to the comment rules, and
the comment threads can get kind of funky. And like I
said, that’s when I have to go in swinging the Mallet of
Loving Correction, as I call it, and clearing it out.
Your career as a novelist seems to have benefited
enormously from your online presence. How
important do you think it is for writers these days to
post photos of bacon taped to their cats?
The bacon on the cat thing has been done. [laughs] I
would suggest that they try something else instead. If you
are someone like me, who really enjoys writing in an
extracurricular sort of way about a whole bunch of other
stuff, and having your own website makes it easy to do it,
and you have time and the interest to build the site over
many, many years, and maintain it so it doesn’t just
become an outlet for marketing, marketing, marketing,
then it’s great. If you are doing it because a publicist or
marketing person said to you, “Oh, you should have a
blog,” and you go, “OK, well, I guess I should do that,”
and sort of dutifully put things on your blog, or dutifully
put things on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, then it’s
not going to work for you at all.
The simple fact of the matter is that there’s no right
way to market yourself—or no one right way. There’s not
something that’s just going to work for everybody. There
are very successful writers who have almost absolutely no
web presence at all. Neal Stephenson is a perfect example
of that. His website, as far as I recall the last time I was
there, was basically, “This is why I’m not on the web,
this is why I don’t answer mail, this is why I don’t do any
of this crap.” And it doesn’t seem to have had a negative
impact on his career at all, because ultimately his books
are fantastic and people are interested in the books. On
the other hand, you have people like me and Cory
Doctorow, who are these sort of public internet
individuals, and there’s definitely a benefit for us to
having our online presence in terms of what we do in our
fiction.
But at the same time, there are also people who have
huge web presences, or huge Twitter presences or
whatever, who don’t particularly see the benefit of it for
anything else they do, because the books are not
necessarily of interest to anybody else, or just for
whatever reason the fame doesn’t transfer. And the fact of
the matter is that even with what I do, there’s a large
circle of people who read my website, and there’s a large
circle of people who read the science fiction, and there’s
overlap between those two circles, but the overlap is not
as big as a lot of people think. There are some people who
have read my blog for 10 years or more who haven’t read
any of my books, because they’re like, “Eh, I’m just not
interested in that,” or “I would have to pay money for
that.” And then there are other people who I know read
my science fiction, and they’re like, “I know you have a
blog, but I never read the blog because I don’t want to
know too much about you, because inevitably you will
disappoint me.”
Which is a totally valid thing. I think there are science
fiction and fantasy writers out there who, you know,
people have read their prose and loved their prose, and
then have gone to seek them out online and discovered
that their political opinions are completely anathema to
what they believe, and now they can’t enjoy the prose as
much. That sometimes happens to me. I mean, Old Man’s
War came out and was championed by Instapundit and a
bunch of other conservative folks, and it’s military
science fiction, so the assumption was that I was this at
least vaguely conservative writer. And then they come
over to my website and—surprise!—I’m basically a
generic United States screaming liberal.
I’ve literally had people leave messages—emails or
posts—that go, “I’m disappointed that you feel this way.
Now I can no longer read your books.” And my response
to that is always, “One, kiss my ass. I’m not going to stop
saying what I want to say just because you won’t read my
books anymore. And second of all, what do you expect?
I’m a human being. I have opinions. It doesn’t matter
where you are on the political spectrum, I’m inevitably
going to have an opinion or I’m going to say something or
I’m going to do something that’s just going to annoy
you.” If the only people that you ever read are people who
completely line up with you on every single
social/political/technological thing—I mean, I had
somebody stop reading me because I snarked on Apple
products one time. But if that’s your criteria, the number
of people that you’re going to eventually allow yourself to
read is very, very small.
I’ve heard that your editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden,
first got interested in your fiction after reading an
essay you wrote about Robert Heinlein. Can you tell us
what that essay was about?
The essay was talking about lessons from Heinlein in
terms of storytelling. His dialogue was believable as
things that people would say to each other, as opposed to
exposition being hidden as speech, for example. He was
also concerned about entertaining people and making
them have a good time with the reading.
The reason that I brought that to his attention at the
time was that he had mentioned something on his website
prior to me writing this piece on Heinlein regarding
Heinlein and his ability to write good transparent prose
and characters and so on and so forth, and so I sent him
the email apropos to that.
I warned him at the time, I was like, “I’m sending
this to you because this is relating to this Heinlein thing
that you did. It appended when I serialized Old Man’s
War on my website, but don’t read that, because if I’m
going to submit it to you, I’m going to do it the way that
you’ve already asked me to do. But this can be read on its
own.” Patrick didn’t listen to me. He read the essay, and
he was like, “OK, now I have to see if this book that he’s
appended this to is actually anything like that,” and then
he read it, and that’s when he made me the offer.
And so in retrospect people are asking me, “Isn’t that
sort of daring him not to read your book? So you were
trying to do some sort of three-dimensional chess with
him?” And my answer to that is, no, actually, I assumed
that someone in Patrick’s position actually has no interest
in randomly reading everything that gets put up on the
web because, you know, who has time? I just didn’t
realize that Patrick had that particular sort of curious
behavior of going, “Well, now I have to see if what he’s
written here matches up with what he wrote in his book.
Oh my god, it does. I think I should buy this.”
You mentioned earlier that you served as a consultant
for the TV show Stargate Universe. How did that come
about, and what was your role in the show?
Basically, one of the producers had sent me an email
going, “I read Old Man’s War and I loved it. It’s perfect.
Write for us for Stargate Atlantis.” And my response to
that was, “Thank you very much, you’re very cool. I can’t
write for Stargate Atlantis because I don’t watch it.” And
if you don’t watch something, and you come in and you
write an episode for it, then it’s basically going to be
terrible, and I didn’t want to be the guy who wrote a
script that was terrible and just got put out anyway
because the producer thought I was a cool dude.
Then he said to me, “OK, that’s fair enough. If we do
another Stargate television show, would you like to be
involved with that?” And I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.”
Because to start on the ground floor of an established
universe and build it up from that foundation? That’s
totally something that I would want to be behind. And he
says, “Great.” And then I didn’t hear from him for about
another year, and I completely forgot about it, because
really that’s one of those future things that’s along the
lines of, “Hey, let’s do lunch sometime,” right?
And then a year later, he’s like, “OK, remember when
I said that we were thinking about doing another Stargate
TV show? Well, we’re going to do it, and it’s called
Stargate Universe, and here’s the first script. Is this
something you want to be involved with?” And basically
what we decided that I was going to do was—for the first
season, at least, and it eventually went through the couple
of seasons—that I was going to act as their creative
consultant. And that meant looking at all the scripts and
offering them opinions about stuff relating to a) the
science of what they were doing, because I have a little bit
of a background in science stuff—I had written a book on
astronomy and had done science-related articles for a
while—and then b) give them character and script notes
so that they could make sure that what they were doing
dramatically was working as well. So basically what
would happen is that they would send me a script, and I
would go through it and go, “OK, here in this scene, this
scientific thing that you’re trying to do here is wrong.
Here’s what actually happens in the real world, and
here’s a way that you can fudge it so that you can do what
you’re trying to achieve without having to completely
overhaul the script.”
In Stargate Universe, the idea is that there’s this
spaceship that gets flung billions of light years away from
anything, and there’s no way for them to return home.
One of the things that I told them that they needed to do
was actually not do the thing that everybody else does,
which is kill off their crew members and just shoot things
indiscriminately, or use resources indiscriminately. I was
like, “Every bullet you use is a bullet you don’t have
anymore, and for this ship that actually matters.”
Or as another example—and this is a great story
because it relates to Redshirts—I’m reading a script from
the first season, and it has a crewman walking down the
hall, and it literally says in the script, “Redshirt walks
down the hall.” And you’re like, “Okay, that dude’s not
making it to the end of that hall.” And true enough, a
couple sentences later the hall explodes and the guy dies.
And I pointed out to them, “You can’t kill off all your
crew members in a very casual way, because the way that
this television show is designed, you can’t replace them.
And so eventually, if you kill them off at the rate that
you’re killing them off, by the end of the season there’s
just going to be the five main stars and that’s it.” So my
innovation for redshirts in Stargate Universe—and if you
watch the two seasons you’ll see that this actually bears
out—is that relatively few people die, but a lot of them
are really horribly maimed. I don’t know if that’s
necessarily a better thing for a redshirt, you know, that
instead of being dead it’s like, “Oh, he merely lost all his
blood,” or whatever it was that happened to them, but we
didn’t kill them off indiscriminately.
You know, one of the things that I haven’t done,
because I had no experience with it, is script writing. And
basically I was paid for two straight years to look at
scripts and see how they function, and see how they work.
And as a result of that, now when I get to the point where
I feel it’s time to write a script—which I hope to do in the
reasonably near future—I have real world, practical
experience.
Is there anything that you can say about the upcoming
scripts that you might want to write?
Well, no. I mean, if I’m going to write a script, I’ll
basically write a script like I wrote my very first novel,
and the very first novel I wrote, which was back in the
mid-’90s, I was like, “I’m going to write this novel. I’m
not going to worry about whether it’s good. I’m not going
to worry about whether it’s something I can sell. I’m just
going to write it to see if I can write it, and when it’s
done, I’m going to take a look at it and say, ‘Okay, these
are the things I did well. These are the things I need to
improve on,’ and then use that to write the second novel.”
And in fact that’s what I did. The first novel was really a
lot of fun to write because I didn’t put any pressure on it
to be good. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to be
novel-length. I did learn quite a lot, so that the next novel
I wrote was Old Man’s War, which I was able to sell.
So in that case, the first script that I write will literally
be something that will be fun, something that I’m not
planning to sell, and something where I’m just going to
write it to see what I do easily and what things are
difficult for me, so that the second one will be easier. At
this moment I sort of have it in my brain to adapt The
God Engines into a script, because out of all the things
I’ve written, that’s the one that’s the most appropriate
length for a feature film. But as I said, if I’m going to do
it, the one thing I would caution everybody would be not
to expect me to then sell that. It would be more of, “I’ve
written this script for The God Engines, and oh my god is
it horrible, but now I’ve learned something, and I will try
something else.”
Last year you published a novel called Fuzzy Nation,
which you described as an “experiment.” In what way
was it an experiment, and what did you learn from
doing that experiment?
It was an experiment in the sense that reboots happen all
the time in movies and television and comics, but they
don’t happen that often in literary stuff, and so it was an
experiment to see if that was just because practical
considerations make it difficult, or if it was really just a
horrible idea, and the reason that it doesn’t happen very
often is because it’s a horrible, horrible idea.
What I did was I picked a Golden Age science fiction
story that I really enjoyed, which was Little Fuzzy. It’s a
great story, H. Beam Piper did a fine job with it, and it
was nominated for a Hugo in 1962. But it’s also very
much a piece of its time. You can tell it was written in the
early ‘60s by the way that the men acted, and the way that
the women acted, and some of the cultural assumptions of
the story at the time. So I thought it would be fun to take
the basic story idea of Little Fuzzy and bring it into
current time and current sensibility, not just in terms of
socially, but also in how we craft our protagonists these
days, how we frame the fundamental issues of story, and
so on and so forth. So that was part of the experiment, to
see if the story itself—the idea of, here are these cute and
fuzzy creatures, they could be sapient, and if they are
sapient there are going to be huge implications—to see if
that story itself was durable, or if it was a creature of its
own time.
Now, one of the nice things about doing this with
Little Fuzzy is that Little Fuzzy, the novel itself, was in
the public domain, so that there was no question about
copyright, and that’s one of the reasons why these things
are so infrequently done. For example, rebooting Star
Trek wasn’t a problem because Paramount owned Star
Trek, and it was in their interest to keep that property out
there and moving and going forward. However, most
books are not owned by corporations, they’re owned by
individuals, and to be fair, if somebody came up to me
and said, “Old Man’s War was great, but I want to reboot
it and start from scratch,” my response would be, “Mmm,
probably not.”
In this particular case, it helped that since it was in
the public domain, that wasn’t a concern. And again, this
was something that I wrote just for my own amusement. I
honestly didn’t have plans to sell it to a publisher at all.
What happened is that as I wrote it, I thought, “This is
good,” and then my agent called me and said, “What are
you doing?” because I was uncharacteristically quiet and
he hadn’t heard from me, and if I don’t send him books
he doesn’t make money from me. And I said, “Well, I just
wrote a novel, but I don’t think that you’re going to be
able to sell it.” And his response to that really was,
“Challenge accepted. Send it.”
Even though the book was in public domain, which
meant that there were no copyright issues, the H. Beam
Piper estate still exists. We let them read it, and they liked
it, so we worked out a deal where the H. Beam Piper
estate gets a cut of the profits, and they also gave us an
endorsement. So that made things a lot easier to sell. So it
was an experiment. It was an experiment in updating a
story, it was an experiment in the feasibility of rebooting a
science fiction classic, and it was also sort of an
experiment in how people would respond to a classic of
the genre being rebooted in this way. And the good news
is that on all fronts it worked out very well.
And now of course people are like, “Well, now you
should reboot . . .” and they give me the idea of some
other thing that they want to reboot. I’m like, “Yeah, but
I’ve done it once, it’s time to move on to something else.”
This is the proof of concept that this doesn’t necessarily
have to be a horrible idea. That doesn’t mean that I want
to keep doing it again and again and again. I might write
a sequel eventually to Fuzzy Nation, the book I wrote, but
if I do that, that’s going to be something else again
entirely, separate from taking another classic of science
fiction and rebuilding it from the bottom up.
When we solicited questions for this interview, about
20 people wanted us to ask you if you intend to chain
your laptop to your wrist. What’s the deal with that?
I lost my Mac Air at an airport for the second time in a
month, last Tuesday. The first time I was furious, I was
stomping around, I just couldn’t believe it. But the second
time it was more of just, “I cannot believe I have just
done this again.” Because really, it just makes you feel
stupid. And I can see the computer, right? I know exactly
what happened, which was I’m working on it at the
LaGuardia Gate 5 US Airways Terminal, and they’re
calling our flight, so I go and I unplug the cord from the
outlet, and I wrap up the cord and I put it away, and I zip
up my bag and I’m ready to go, and I forgot that I left my
computer there. I didn’t close it up and put it in first, so
I’m just—ugh.
So I’ve called LaGuardia, and I’ve called US
Airways, and they’re both looking for it. The nice thing
about the Macs is that they have the “Find My iPhone” on
the iCloud, so I can see it, right? It hasn’t been opened.
It’s just sort of there somewhere. As soon as it opens up
and someone tries to access the internet with it, it’s going
to lock up and it’ll put up a message that says, “Hi, I’m a
locked computer, please return me to . . .” and gives all
my contact information. But the problem is that until that
happens, it’s lost. Now, when I lost my computer the first
time, three weeks ago, at the Nebulas, I went and bought
a spare laptop, a little Acer netbook. It was like 250
bucks. So that’s what I’m using now, and I think that was
also the case of, you know, “Oh, well, I’ve got a backup.”
But it doesn’t change the fact that I managed to lose
the same computer twice in a month. And people are like,
“Now you’re going to have to Crazy Glue it to yourself!
Handcuff it to yourself! Graft it into your brain like a
BrainPal!” But I think that the real key may just simply
be to not be as frazzled as I have been. I mean, my tour
started June 3rd, and it is now the very end of the month.
My tour officially stops on July 1st, so I will have been—
you know, with the occasional day at home to do laundry
and make sure my pets and family recognize who I am—I
will have been on tour for a month, and I think that the
whole thing of being a little frazzled meant that my Mac
Air was lost at LaGuardia. Hopefully I will get it back,
and if I don’t . . . that’s the worst part, because part of my
brain is like, “Argh, I can’t believe you’ve lost your
computer again,” but then there’s a little part of my brain
that goes, “But now you can get one of the new
MacBooks with the retina screen! Woohoo!” I really want
to get my old computer back and not have to spend more
money.
Are there any new or upcoming projects that you’d
like to mention?
I’m working on a video game right now with a company
called Industrial Toys, which is headed by Alex Seropian,
who’s one of the cofounders of Bungie and who helped
make Halo. So that’ll be cool. We haven’t made the full
announcement of the name of the game and everything
else like that, but that’s been a lot of fun. And when we
can finally announce it, that’s going to be awesome.
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show
podcast. It is hosted by:
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of
Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Armored,
Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New
Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We
Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The
Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a
three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter
@johnjosephadams.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of
Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec,
and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction,
Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s
contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including
The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s
attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable
Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson
Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and
fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly
at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He
lives in New York.
Artist Gallery
Frank Hong
Artist Spotlight: Frank Hong
J. T. Glover
Frank Hong is a Toronto-based artist who specializes in
concept art, environments, and design. He came to fantasy
and science fiction via video games, and it shows in
environments so immersive it makes the viewer want to
walk into the painting. His work has been featured
various places, including Imagine FX, and he has worked
on a number of major movies, including Godzilla and the
forthcoming Pacific Rim.
“Dawn of the Round Table” has a very clear sense of
motion, nicely complemented by the overall pattern of
lights and darks. The title brings Arthurian stories to
mind, not so much the distant future. Can you tell us
about your inspiration for the painting?
The original motivation came from an art contest called
“Up Lift the Universe,” which is a science fiction-based
story where human and aliens made contact years ago. I
borrowed ideas from that as a basis to imagine a
transportation system in space, much like our train
networks. This piece displays a docking station at
“Dawn,” where the ship makes its stop on the train track.
What are your favorite kinds of scenes to paint?
I really enjoy painting vast and epic landscape scenes
filled with atmosphere, sometimes filled with science
fiction elements too. Creating a believable landscape true
to the fictional background is a very exciting process. It
involves a lot of in-depth research and brainstorming to
reach a point where the environment created could be
“real,” but is still being pushed as far out of reality as
possible.
What changes have you seen in your work in the time
since you graduated?
My work has certainly become more mature. It has
changed in a way that’s more efficient. I am able to
respond to revisions a lot more quickly because I’m more
professional in organization, using a lot of layers, and
keeping multiple backups and copies. The design process
has become more fluent, with fewer hiccups, and I
learned to communicate better with my director to achieve
a desirable result. All of these are tied to working
professionally, and not so much with personal pieces.
When I find time, very infrequently, I still enjoy messing
about with no rules in mind, and bringing a bit of fun
back into art making.
Which artists influenced you most heavily when you
were learning your craft? Did any particular picture
or artist in particular lead you to change your
practice?
There were too many to list; I remember how I marveled
at all sorts of concept artists from all over the world, and
I’m lucky to have become a part of the industry. I also
learned a lot from tutorial DVDs, namely from masters
like Dylan Cole, Raphael Lacoste, and many more.
Your personal site includes various galleries, as well
as a link to sample animation you’ve done. Do you
want to keep doing 2D down the road, or would you
like to move entirely toward 3D?
I don’t think I’ll ever go entirely 3D. I use 3D as a tool to
complement my 2D designs. Whether it’s for perspective
or camera mapping, I would still use Photoshop as my
main weapon. I find it much faster and more fluent to just
paint out what needs to be done, and then perhaps hand it
off to the 3D artists who rightfully do 3D much better
than I could. I find them to be two completely different
roles. I won’t try to take their position, because that’s
what 3D artists are really good at, nor would I abandon
my area of expertise. There is still tons of room to explore
in 2D designs.
What tools do you use most often for creating concept
or matte art?
I use Photoshop, a lot of references, and a good tablet. So
far I haven’t used too much 3D aid in my works, although
that’s an area where I’m slowly learning to be more
proficient.
Your bio mentions being inspired by the games you
grew up with. Can you name a few, and tell us if they
still influence your art today?
I had a long background in games—ever since I was tall
enough to reach a mouse. It’s probably why I decided to
become an artist; I was always fascinated by the art and
design for games and movies. It became clear when I
chose to make art professionally that gaming was going
to be my first direction. Having played almost every game
that’s relevant, I tried to distinguish good art design from
the bad ones. Some of the great games still influence my
design decisions to this day. My favourites include the
Metal Gear Solid series, Command & Conquer, and
Halo.
What are you playing these days? Do you still get new
ideas and inspiration from games?
For sure I still do, and I draw a lot of new ideas from
modern games. These new titles are getting really
elaborate and sometimes hard to improve on. I’m
currently playing Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3, and being
a bit of a motorhead, I’ll always go back to GT5.
Many of your paintings have a great sense of depth
and scope. While there’s obviously a long tradition of
painting on a large scale, from murals to gigantic
canvases, I don’t see that as commonly with F/SF art,
given how artists tend to focus in on people or
creatures. What leads you to paint at the depth and
scope you do?
You are right, artists do tend to focus more on people and
creatures, and environment art becomes almost secondary
to these designs. Problem is, someone would have to take
up this task! Almost 70% of concept art generated is
environment concepts because of the vast number of
levels and dungeons that have to be made for an entire
game; for movies, every set and scene has to be
illustrated, and people almost become scale references in
those illustrations. When I go to an art show or
convention, I’m usually one of the only artists selling
environment art. That doesn’t upset me at all, because
I’m supplying a growing demand, while it is harder for
creature/character artists due to the heavy competition.
Having said that, environments with depth and scope
were my own obsession before I figured out it wasn’t a
bad idea financially. I find myself more attached to cool
scenery than the generic “bald space marine” of a main
character.
What are you working on these days?
Most recently I was working in the art department of the
upcoming movies Pacific Rim and Robocop.
J. T. Glover has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in Dark Recesses
and Underground Voices, among other venues. Born and raised in the
Pacific Northwest, he currently resides in Richmond, Virginia with his wife
and a not inconsiderable number of fur-bearing friends. By day he is an
academic reference librarian specializing in the humanities.
Artist Spotlight
Galen Dara
Artist Spotlight: Galen Dara
Robyn Lupo
How would you describe your aesthetic? What’s
beautiful to you?
I like the dark. And have an affinity for the symbolic, the
poetic. Things hinted at, the play between hidden and
obscured, abstract and real. I like trees and bones and
internal organs and birds. Also, I like things reduced to
their most basic idea and shape, with all the excess
stripped away. Some of my favorite artists are Kent
Williams, Jillian Tamaki, Amano Yoshitaka, Ashley
Wood, John Jude Palencar, Eric Fortune, Zdzislaw
Beksinski, etc.
What are your favorite tools to work with? How long
does it take for you to learn a new technique?
I currently use Photoshop and Painter. I am kind of a hack
and slash sort of artist: putting down large areas of paint,
then carving away with an eraser, painting more, erasing
more. Hacking, slashing, carving away till I have the
forms I want. Towards the end of a painting, I start
concentrating mostly on the negative spaces. I use a lot of
textures and only a very few brushes. That is probably my
weakest area; there are so many features available in my
art software that I just don’t utilize. One of my goals this
year is to push myself to pick up a few new tricks and
techniques. (I’m a quick learner; it just takes me a while
to break out of my comfort zone.)
Do you explore other mediums—I know you’re an
avid photographer, but is that a different focus to your
art, or more like a hobby? Or is there no difference?
I love photography and it was with a camera that I first
got back into digital art making after my son was born.
It’s currently on the back burner as I build up my
illustration career but I am very intrigued to start
incorporating photography and other mediums into my
illustrations. We are moving into a place where I will
have my own dedicated studio area and I am looking
forward to having the space to get back into traditional
mediums: My background is in painting, installation art,
and mixed media assemblages. I would love to find ways
of incorporating these into my digital illustrations. The
way that Dave McKean creates art is something I aspire
to, the way he has of mixing a broad range of mediums.
How did you get started?
I have always been artistically inclined, but it took me a
while to find my focus in it. Eventually (after a lot of
poking around) I got a degree in painting (that detoured
into installation art during the very last semester). But
after I had a baby it all got put on the back burner for a
while.
I got serious about making art again a few years back
and it was during the time that Jaym Gates and Erika
Holt were putting together their first anthology, Rigor
Amortis. John Remy had a story in it and mentioned to
Jaym and Erika that if they were interested in illustrations
for their book he knew an artist friend (me). Hence, I was
re-introduced to the art world doing little ink zombie
erotica drawings. That was the start of something
awesome, a fun opportunity that grew from there.
(Including further creative projects with Jaym, Erika, and
John over the past few years.)
Do you have any rituals or routines that you get into
before you start producing art? What’s an average
creative day for you like? Is there a different process
for doing something for Lightspeed?
When I illustrate short stories, the first thing I do is read
the story with a highlighter, marking all the phrases and
lines that catch my imagination. I’m looking for key
details that might be pivotal to the illustrations (i.e., a
description of the character or location), but more often
than not, I’m looking for the feel or the symbol of the
story. The little poetic elements that put a hook in me.
[Note: You can view all of Galen’s Lightspeed
illustrations here:
lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/illustrated-by-galen-dara —
ed.]
That’s ambiguous, I know, but the bottom line I’m
aiming for is a marked up story and a jumping off point.
Then I start finding my reference imagery. Looking for a
color scheme, looking at how other artists have handled
similar ideas, looking for just plain old photo reference so
I can draw things more accurately (I take a lot of my own
reference too, if I’m trying to nail a particular pose, etc.).
And then I just have to jump in and start drawing
(digitally, with a Wacom tablet). I have an idea of what
I’m aiming for, but once I start drawing it takes on a life
of its own and usually begins to boss me around a bit.
I’ve learned to just trust this process; if I fight back too
much I just end up with a mess. Sometimes I end up with
a mess anyways, and have to start from scratch. It
happens. My average creative day? Hehehe, well, it
usually involves desperately trying to cram as much
drawing time as I can in and around my family’s
schedule. I aim for 6 hrs a day. I long for more,
sometimes get it, but take whatever scraps I can.
What’s your favorite work you produced? What’s
your favorite by someone else?
I’m always aiming to make my new favorite piece, but I
really like the one I did recently for Aidan Doyle’s
Lightspeed story, “Ghost River Red.” And, hmmm, my
favorite by someone else? That’s hard, that’s always
changing too. I haven’t mentioned James Jean yet, he is
incredibly diverse, and I love all of his work.
Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her
graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video
games. She is personal assistant to three cats.
My Wife Hates Time Travel
Adam-Troy Castro
From the very beginning—which I guess is also the
middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved
and arrange events by some scheme other than strict
chronological order—there was never any way of
knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, was going
to invent time travel. Neither one of us was a physicist,
theoretical or applied; we weren’t even qualified for
rewiring the wall sockets or fixing the dead laptop. As far
as life skills were concerned, I had a little more
imagination and she had a little more practicality. She did
more of the household repairs and I did more of the heavy
lifting. That was it. Neither one of us seemed equipped to
completely rewrite the laws of space and time, and before
we found out that it’s what we were fated to do, neither of
us had ever particularly included it among our ambitions.
Before we found out that one of us was fated to invent
time travel, my wife always had a little more antipathy
toward the premise than I did. Whenever we sat on the
couch watching some show where somebody traveled into
his personal past and intersected with his past self in
some way that either rewrote his personal history or
somehow cemented his pre-existing destiny in place, I
was always the one who thought it cool and my wife was
always the one who complained that it made her head
hurt. She had no head for paradoxes. Whenever she
encountered one of those narrative Möebius Strips, she
always winced and declared that time travel made no
sense.
Since finding out that one of us was going to invent
time travel, we’ve argued almost nonstop over the likely
suspect. I foolishly concluded in her hearing that it was
going to be me. She read this as me calling myself
smarter than her. Maybe she was right. I had to apologize
for condescending. Then I said it was probably her and
she got mad again, because it blamed her for everything
that’s happened since. Sometimes I think that if I had a
working time machine now I’d go back and warn my
prior self that it’s not an argument worth having, that I’m
fated to be wrong whatever position I take. Then I realize
that believing it desirable to tinker with the small
mistakes and larger heartbreaks of one’s past is precisely
the kind of messed-up thinking that has made our current
lives, the lives before we create time travel, such a parade
of hellish interruptions.
This much we’ve agreed on. Since we’re both fairly
bright but not world-class geniuses, the secret to time
travel has to be fairly simple, the kind of thing so obvious
in retrospect that it just gets overlooked until somebody
woolgathering about something else entirely makes a
connection nobody has ever made before, slaps his
forehead, and cries, “Eureka!” That could turn out to be
either one of us. We’re not brilliant, but we’re both
Eureka prone. Maybe in some versions of the future it
was her and in other versions it was me and in still other
versions it was both of us collaborating, maybe on one of
those long drives where there’s nothing but us and the
highway, heading toward my in-laws, or hers.
It all seemed to depend upon where we were or what
we were doing when we invented time travel, but some of
the future versions of ourselves who came back to us gave
the impression that they were hiding the invention from
the other. They certainly each did whatever they could to
keep the other one in line. There was one version of my
wife hailing from about twenty years in the future who
popped in all shimmering the way they do, while the
current version of my wife was home alone and on her
hands and knees looking for an earring that had come
loose and bounced somewhere she couldn’t find it. The
future version of my wife told my current one that in her
timeline it had been considered lost for seven months and
only found by accident much later. The trick, the future
version of my wife said, was that it hadn’t skittered
underneath anything, as my current wife believed, but had
unpredictably bounced in another direction entirely, and
neatly hooked itself on the wire framework of a statuette
in the corner. It was the kind of hiding place a small
inanimate object like an earring could not have found for
itself unless it had been deliberately trying. The only way
the current version of my wife ever would have found it—
had the future version of her not interfered—would have
been to dust the statue for the fortieth time since the
incident and for the very first time ever, register the
telltale clink.
None of this would have been even worth mentioning
had I not walked in the door at that moment, seen the two
versions of my wife together, and said hello to both of
them . . . at which point, the one from the future cried out
in sudden fear and disappeared. We had no idea why that
future version of my wife would be afraid of me, and her
little cry was a sore subject between the current version of
my wife and myself until a version of me from some
future where men wear an entire ring of differentlypatterned cloth ties, hanging from both the front and back
of their collars, showed up after dinner to say we
shouldn’t worry about the reasons, because a further
future version of me had intervened and talked the
offending future me out of doing whatever horrible thing
he had done.
Unfortunately, the time-traveling version of me telling
us this blinked out and another future version of my wife
blinked in, holding a glittery crystal gun on me and
telling the current version of herself that she shouldn’t
listen to him because he was “in on it” and “as dangerous
as the rest of them.”
Then multiple future versions of myself and multiple
future versions of my wife all shimmered into existence
and charged each other with an array of weaponry that
included energy weapons, electrified whips, and
scimitars.
This is just the kind of thing that happens multiple
times a day, since my wife and I found out that one of us
would someday invent time travel.
We learned that there was only one way to get a few
moments of peace whenever the chaos of being the future
inventors of time travel got too apocalyptic or
complicated, and that was to concentrate real hard and
promise ourselves that if we ever did invent time travel,
we would pledge our first journey into the past to going
back to that moment and talking ourselves out of it. Just
the threat of that was always enough to erase all the future
timelines these versions of ourselves came from and make
them shimmer away to nonexistence. It wasn’t a
permanent solution, ever, because even if that moment of
sublime invention was erased it just meant that one or the
other of us would still experience the same brainstorm an
hour or a day or a week later, starting the age of time
travel all over again. Sometimes the two of us cleared the
room with the “I’m going to erase any timeline where I
create time travel” bomb, only to have another unwanted
drop-in show up a few seconds later and say, “Don’t
worry, I’m not staying; I just wanted to let you know that
you did the right thing, because those guys were out of
control.”
Being the future inventors of time travel wasn’t all
bad, of course. It was great to know that we’d never lose
anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a
stinker, never buy a book we wouldn’t want to finish,
never go out to a restaurant where the service was lousy,
and never get stuck in a traffic jam, because we’d always
be warned away, beforehand. It was terrific to have some
future version of myself pop in just as I was about to
irritate my wife with some inconsiderate comment and
tell me, “It would be a really bad idea to say that.” It was
convenient to have some shimmery future-me pop in and
say, “Move that coffee cup away from the edge of the
table, if you don’t want it to spill.” It was helpful, though
annoying, to have some future version of myself pop in
and grab the TV remote from my hands with a
contemptuous, “I’ve seen that already, and it sucks.”
No, where it really got annoying, and what drove both
of us to shouted declarations that we wouldn’t invent time
travel ever, were the is-now-the-right-time-to-have-sex
debates. We’d lie in bed at night, drawing close in what
might or might not have developed into lovemaking, only
to hear the telltale pop of displaced air and see the
dazzling glow of arriving time travelers, and have some
future version of my wife say, “No, not tonight, trust us,
tonight’s a bad idea,” while some future version of myself
contributed, “Don’t listen to her, she’s lying.” Then some
future version of my wife would pop in, with wild eyes
and fried just-stuck-her-finger-in-a-light bulb-socket hair,
and shout, “No, you have to! I come from a ruined world!
You have to fuck right now!” Then a version of myself
with half his face replaced with a gleaming silver mask
and one eye turned into some kind of targeting laser
would pop in behind her and start chanting “Annihilate,
Annihilate.” And they would all start shouting to be
heard over one another, and my wife and I would both
shout at them to get the hell out of our bedroom, and they
would all say that the stakes here were critical and we
would say that as far as we were both concerned there
would never be any such thing as time travel and that was
final, and they would all vanish into nothingness, and
there’d be a moment or two of abashed silence before the
shimmering resumed and a version of my wife dressed in
diaphanous silk and sporting a head as bald as a melon
would pop into existence to inform us that the futures
we’d just been warned about had all been narrowly
averted by our swift action, but that we should both, now,
not eat any radishes. And then she’d disappear and an
aged version of me, wearing coke-bottle eyeglasses,
would appear in her place to assure us that it was now
perfectly safe for my wife and I to touch one another, at
least for the next twenty minutes, though there’d be some
problems with the economy of Peru if we allowed
ourselves to become at all frisky afterward. By which
point, seriously, who could still be in the mood?
Sometimes we try to avoid them. We once had a lot of
cash on hand thanks to a six-week run of grand prizes on
Powerball, so every couple of weeks we packed up
enough for a week’s trip and hit the road. But our future
selves always remembered every trip we’d ever taken, and
were always certain we’d still need their help bringing
about the destinies they preferred. We’d find ourselves in
traffic jams that were entirely made up of cars from
possible futures, ranging from gleaming hovercraft to
heavily-weaponed monstrosities cobbled together out of
post-nuclear wreckage. The road was overpopulated with
versions of ourselves, shouting at us through portholes.
And it wasn’t just cars: We encountered caveman selves
in leopard skins, riding bareback on tamed Apatosauri,
zombie selves lurching toward the horizon in search of
human flesh, and impossibly-mutated selves who were
nothing but giant heads riding about on floating disks.
Every five miles we’d have to yell, “That’s it! We’re not
going to invent time travel!” just to clear the road so we
could make a few miles before they started to multiply
again. Eventually, we turned around and went home,
because the possibility of us actually ever getting
anywhere on this trip had descended to just about nil.
Once, and only once, we got as far as a bed and
breakfast nestled against a mirrored lake, far from any
city noise or temporal paradoxes: there was no phone, no
internet, and no other guests, the atmosphere as close to
perfection as any we’d ever known. We strolled along the
shoreline, holding hands and saying nothing, pausing as
the sun dipped below the trees and the smooth unrippled
surface of the water cast a sheen of golden light over the
world. No time traveler interceded. Daring to hope, we
returned to the room, built a fire, and nestled together
with flutes of champagne, talking about how wonderful it
was to have finally found a spot where we could be alone.
We kissed, and nuzzled, and nature took its course, and
as we made love for the first time in weeks I was not
deterred, but rather pleasantly slowed, by the lingering
fear that every moment’s uninterrupted perfection would
be the last. It was impossible to completely avoid the
suspicion that just as we approached the big moment the
telltale pops of air displacement would erupt on all sides
of us and we would find ourselves inundated by shouted
advice from future selves intent on informing us that we
should do this and not that. But the time travelers left us
alone even as we shuddered together and giggled in
mutual appreciation. And then my wife went off to the
bathroom, and slipped on the bath mat, and came down
hard on the rim of the tub, breaking her femur.
We couldn’t get rid of the time travelers after that.
The emergency room filled with them. They took all the
chairs, lined up ten-deep in the hallways, and hung from
the walls using suction cups. Tinier ones, from some
future capable of human miniaturization, jostled for space
on our armrests, or clustered together on our scalps,
imitating the sensation of lice. According to them,
permitting my wife’s accident had been the chronometer’s
equivalent of tough love. “See?” they told us. “See what
kind of trouble you can get into if we don’t interfere? See
how you can get hurt? See how our superior knowledge is
missed the moment it’s not available to you?” I cursed
them and vowed again and again to never invent time
travel, a threat that has always kept them down to
manageable numbers but never solved the problem. My
wife looked at me and said words she had uttered a
thousand times before, and would a thousand times
again: “I hate time travel. I hate it. Hate hate hate hate
hate it.”
That night I walked out of the hospital and stood
under the stars and addressed the infinite number of
future selves who were no doubt listening, from their
bunkers or their pods or habitats. I said, “You know, for
once, I don’t care what the rewards are. I don’t care what
disasters await. I don’t care what information I need to
impart to my past self. I don’t care if telling you people to
go away has never worked before. This time I mean it
more than I ever meant anything before, even more than I
meant telling my wife I loved her or asking her to marry
me or anything like that. This is still the life that I chose
and the very point of life is living it, day by day,
encountering every new chapter as it’s written. If that
means some terrible catastrophe takes me by surprise,
tomorrow, so be it; if that means we miss yet another
lottery win or fail to move away from the East Coast just
before the big tsunami then so be it; then so be that.
You’re making life not worth living. If you have any
respect for us, which is another way of saying any respect
for yourselves, then for God’s sake please, please, please,
either don’t invent time travel or go visit Shakespeare or
play golf with trilobites or watch the Earth fall into the
Sun and leave us the fuck alone.”
Even as I spoke the words I really didn’t expect that
to be the end of it, but a cold empty wind blew across the
parking lot and I found myself looking up, in awe and
terror, at a universe folding in on itself. I had read a story
once—not a time travel story—that ended with the stars
blinking out even as the narrator watched, and this was
like that, except worse; it wasn’t just the stars going out
but the very idea of the stars going out, not just the actual
physical entities being reduced to nothing but the physics
that rendered them possible as well. I looked down at my
hand and it had become like a two-dimensional drawing
of a hand from some anatomy textbook, the crosshatching that gave it the illusion of depth disappearing
even as I watched. Distant buildings became block
drawings and the horizon became a straight line, its ends
contracting as they raced toward a single point in the
middle. I further felt the flattening process taking place
inside me and knew that either my wife or I inventing
time travel was in some way centrally important to the
existence of the universe as a whole, perhaps because one
of our future travels would be to the moment of creation
itself, perhaps enabling it to happen. I knew that if I did
not rescind my words I would be damning all of existence
to oblivion. And I must confess that, for a few seconds, as
the universe packed itself away like an unwanted toy, I
considered all the problems this would solve and was
sorely tempted to let it happen. But then sanity prevailed
and I sighed and said, “Oh, all right. Invent time travel
for all I care. And until we do invent it, feel free to visit us
anytime you want. I welcome your input.”
The result was as dramatic as it might have been if I’d
said, “Let there be light.” The universe unfolded itself
again, with an audible boing and several additional
colors. You only think “orange” has been around all your
life. It hasn’t been. Why would there be a color that
doesn’t rhyme with anything? There wasn’t. There just is,
now. Australia’s new, too; I don’t know what my wife
and I might have done at some point in prehistory to
make Australia happen, but it has, and now we all have
to live with it.
Right now my wife has gone out on an errand, the
same errand she has been stopped from carrying out for
five days, by various dire warnings from future epochs. I
stand on the roof and follow the progress of her journey
across town from the various mutations I detect in the
skyline: the two-story buildings that suddenly expand by
fifty stories, the skyscrapers that suddenly become
smoking craters, the mushroom clouds that threaten to
blow the entire city away but that disappear only to be
replaced by gleaming metallic spires. My wife is out
there, somewhere, in all of that, her appearance changing
constantly as time traveling versions of herself alter her
past decisions to make her blonde, brunette, purplehaired, tattooed, tanned to lizard texture, anorexic, obese,
hooded, naked, paraplegic, gymnastic, sumo, thin-lipped,
botoxed, dressed in rags, dressed in furs, happy, sad,
angry, fed-up, borderline insane, followed by a thousand
cats, or attended by her own robot butler; everything
about her changing at every moment and everything about
her staying the same as she cries the words that have
become her mantra: “I hate time travel!” I know she
wants to be the one to invent it because she also wants to
be the one who’s clever, but I also know that part of her
has always secretly blamed me, because it’s such an
annoying invention and anything that inconveniences her
to such a degree cannot possibly be only hers. I also know
it may have been a terrible mistake to let her go alone,
because without me being there to track every single
change she undergoes between now and then, or her
being at my side to witness every single matching change
I undergo at the same time, there’s no guarantee that
we’ll recognize each other when she returns.
I only know this, and perhaps, at long last, this is the
point. In all her incarnations, my wife hates time travel; in
most of her incarnations, she loves me; in all of my
incarnations, I love her. I didn’t need the threat of
nonexistence for all of space-time to know that she was at
the center of it all, because I knew it from the day we met.
Even if we were only blessed with one timeline and no
ability to change it and no guarantee of a far stranger
future, she would still be capable of surprising me, still
capable of dazzling me with her infinite variety. She is the
one who carries me from one day to the next, and
provides both with a point.
I would never have the nerve to speak these words to
her out loud, because she hates time travel so much and
would not appreciate the comparison, but: She is my time
machine, the vehicle which has carried me from bland
and empty past to rich and delightful future. I cannot take
credit for inventing her. But I bless the mysterious forces
that have.
© 2012 Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro’s books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of
the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which
feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort.
His latest books are a series of middle-school novels about the adventures of
a strange young boy called Gustav Gloom, the first of which is Gustav
Gloom and the People Taker, which came out from Grossett and Dunlap in
August 2012. His short fiction has been nominated for six Nebulas, two
Hugos, and three Stokers. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen
between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that
was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife
Judi (who really does hate time travel) and a population of insane cats that
includes Harley Quinn, Uma Furman, and Meow Farrow.
The Streets of Ashkelon
Harry Harrison
Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of
Wesker’s World, a thunder rumbled and grew. Trader
Garth stopped suddenly when he heard it, his boots
sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his good ear to
catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick
atmosphere, growing louder.
“That noise is the same as the noise of your sky-ship,”
Itin said, with stolid Wesker logicality, slowly pulverizing
the idea in his mind and turning over the bits one by one
for closer examination. “But your ship is still sitting
where you landed it. It must be, even though we cannot
see it, because you are the only one who can operate it.
And even if anyone else could operate it we would have
heard it rising into the sky. Since we did not, and if this
sound is a sky-ship sound, then it must mean—”
“Yes, another ship,” Garth said, too absorbed in his
own thoughts to wait for the laborious Weskerian chains
of logic to clank their way through to the end. Of course it
was another spacer, it had been only a matter of time
before one appeared, and undoubtedly this one was
homing on the S.S radar reflector as he had done. His
own ship would show up clearly on the newcomer’s
screen and they would probably set down as close to it as
they could.
“You better go ahead, Itin,” he said. “Use the water
so you can get to the village quickly. Tell everyone to get
back into the swamps, well clear of the hard ground. That
ship is landing on instruments and anyone underneath at
touchdown is going to be cooked.”
This immediate threat was clear enough to the little
Wesker am​phibian. Before Garth had finished speaking
Itin’s ribbed ears had folded like a bat’s wings and he
slipped silently into the nearby ca​nal. Garth squelched on
through the mud, making as good time as he could over
the clinging surface. He had just reached the fringes of the
village clearing when the rumbling grew to a headsplitting roar and the spacer broke through the lowhanging layer of clouds above. Garth shielded his eyes
from the down-reaching tongue of flame and examined
the growing form of the gray-black ship with mixed
feelings.
After almost a standard year on Wesker’s World he
had to fight down a longing for human companionship of
any kind. While this buried fragment of herd-spirit
chattered for the rest of the monkey tribe, his trader’s
mind was busily drawing a line under a column of figures
and adding up the total. This could very well be another
trader’s ship, and if it was his monopoly of the Wesker’s
trade was at an end. Then again, this might not be a
trader at all, which was the reason he stayed in the shelter
of the giant fern and loosened his gun in its holster. The
ship baked dry a hundred square meters of mud, the
roaring blast died, and the landing feet crunched down
through the crackling crust. Metal creaked and settled
into place while the cloud of smoke and steam slowly
drifted lower in the humid air.
“Garth—you native-cheating extortionist—where are
you?” the ship’s speaker boomed. The lines of the spacer
had looked only slightly familiar, but there was no
mistaking the rasping tones of that voice. Garth had a
twisted smile when he stepped out into the open and
whistled shrilly through two fingers. A directional
microphone ground out of its casing on the ship’s fin and
turned in his direction.
“What are you doing here, Singh?” he shouted
towards the mike. “Too crooked to find a planet of your
own and have to come here to steal an honest trader’s
profits?”
“Honest!” the amplified voice roared. “This from the
man who has been in more jails than cathouses—and that
a goodly number in itself, I do declare. Sorry, friend of my
youth, but I cannot join you in ex​ploiting this aboriginal
pesthole. I am on course to a more fairly at​mosphered
world where a fortune is waiting to be made. I only
stopped here since an opportunity presented, to turn an
honest credit by running a taxi service. I bring you
friendship, the perfect compan​ionship, a man in a
different line of business who might help you in yours. I’d
come out and say hello myself, except I would have to
decon for biologicals. I’m cycling the passenger through
the lock so I hope you won’t mind helping with his
luggage.”
At least there would be no other trader on the planet
now, that worry was gone. But Garth still wondered what
sort of passenger would be taking one-way passage to an
undeveloped world. And what was behind that concealed
hint of merriment in Singh’s voice? He walked around to
the far side of the spacer where the ramp had dropped,
and looked up at the man in the cargo lock who was
wres​tling ineffectually with a large crate. The man turned
towards him and Garth saw the clerical dog-collar and
knew just what it was Singh had been chuckling about.
“What are you doing here?” Garth asked, and in spite
of his at​tempt at self-control he snapped the words. If the
man noticed this he ignored it, because he was still
smiling and putting out his hand as he came down the
ramp.
“Father Mark,” he said, “of the Missionary Society of
Brothers. I’m very pleased to meet—”
“I said what are you doing here.” Garth’s voice was
under control now, quiet and cold. He knew what had to
be done, and it must be done quickly or not at all.
“That should be obvious,” Father Mark said, his good
nature still unruffled. “Our missionary society has raised
funds to send spiritual emissaries to alien worlds for the
first time. I was lucky enough—”
“Take your luggage and get back into the ship. You’re
not wanted here—and have no permission to land. You’ll
be a liability and there is no one on Wesker’s World to
take care of you. Get back into the ship.”
“I don’t know who you are sir, or why you are lying to
me,” the priest said. He was still calm but the smile was
gone. “But I have studied galactic law and the history of
this planet very well. There are no diseases or beasts here
that I should have any particular fear of. It is also an open
planet, and until the Space Survey changes that status I
have as much right to be here as you do.”
The man was of course right, but Garth couldn’t let
him know that. He had been bluffing, hoping the priest
didn’t know his rights. But he did. There was only one
distasteful course left for him, and he had better do it
while there was still time.
“Get back in that ship,” he shouted, not hiding his
anger now. With a smooth motion his gun was out of the
holster and the pitted black muzzle only inches from the
priest’s stomach. The man’s face turned white, but he did
not move.
“What the hell are you doing, Garth?!” Singh’s
shocked voice grated from the speaker. “The guy paid his
fare and you have no rights at all to throw him off the
planet.”
“I have this right,” Garth said, raising his gun and
sighting between the priest’s eyes. “I give him thirty
seconds to get back aboard the ship or I pull the trigger.”
“Well, I think you are either off your head or playing a
joke,” Singh’s exasperated voice rasped down at them. “If
it is a joke, it is in bad taste. But either way you’re not
getting away with it. Two can play at that game—only I
can play it better.”
There was the rumble of heavy bearings and the
remote-controlled four-gun turret on the ship’s side
rotated and pointed at Garth. “Now—down gun and give
Father Mark a hand with the luggage,” the speaker
commanded, a trace of humor back in the voice now. “As
much as I would like to help, Old Friend, I cannot. I feel
it is time you had a chance to talk to the father; after all, I
have had the op​portunity of speaking with him all the
way from Earth.”
Garth jammed the gun back into the holster with an
acute feeling of loss. Father Mark stepped forward, the
winning smile back now and a Bible, taken from a pocket
of his robe, in his raised hand. “My son—” he said.
“I’m not your son,” was all Garth could choke out as
the bitterness and defeat welled up within him. His fist
drew back as the anger rose, and the best he could do was
open the fist so he struck only with the flat of his hand.
Still the blow sent the priest crashing to the ground and
hurled the white pages of the book splattering into the
thick mud.
Itin and the other Weskers had watched everything
with seemingly emotionless interest. Garth made no
attempt to answer their unspo​ken questions. He started
towards his house, but turned back when he saw they
were still unmoving.
“A new man has come,” he told them. “He will need
help with the things he has brought. If he doesn’t have
any place for them, you can put them in the big
warehouse until he has a place of his own.”
He watched them waddle across the clearing towards
the ship, then went inside and gained a certain
satisfaction from slamming the door hard enough to crack
one of the panes. There was an equal amount of painful
pleasure in breaking out one of the remaining bottles of
Irish whiskey that he had been saving for a special
occasion. Well this was special enough, though not really
what he had had in mind. The whiskey was good and
burned away some of the bad taste in his mouth, but not
all of it. If his tactics had worked, success would have
justified everything. But he had failed and in addition to
the pain of failure there was the acute feeling that he had
made a horse’s ass out of himself. Singh had blasted off
without any goodbyes. There was no telling what sense he
had made of the whole matter, though he would surely
carry some strange stories back to the trader’s lodge.
Well, that could be worried about the next time Garth
signed in. Right now he had to go about setting things
right with the mission​ary. Squinting out through the rain
he saw the man struggling to erect a collapsible tent while
the entire population of the village stood in ordered ranks
and watched. Naturally none of them offered to help.
By the time the tent was up and the crates and boxes
stowed inside it the rain had stopped. The level of fluid in
the bottle was a good bit lower and Garth felt more like
facing up to the unavoidable meeting. In truth, he was
looking forward to talking to the man. This whole nasty
business aside, after an entire solitary year any human
com​panionship looked good. Will you join me now for
dinner? John Garth, he wrote on the back of an old
invoice. But maybe the guy was too frightened to come?
Which was no way to start any kind of relationship.
Rummaging under the bunk, he found a box that was big
enough and put his pistol inside. Itin was of course
waiting out​side the door when he opened it, since this
was his tour as Knowledge Collector. He handed him the
note and box.
“Would you take these to the new man,” he said.
“Is the new man’s name New Man?” Itin asked.
“No, it’s not!” Garth snapped. “His name is Mark.
But I’m only asking you to deliver this, not get involved
in conversation.”
As always when he lost his temper, the literal-minded
Weskers won the round. “You are not asking for
conversation,” Itin said slowly, “but Mark may ask for
conversation. And others will ask me his name; if I do not
know his na—”
The voice cut off as Garth slammed the door. This
didn’t work in the long run either because next time he
saw Itin—a day, a week, or even a month later—the
monologue would be picked up on the very word it had
ended and the thought rambled out to its last frayed end.
Garth cursed under his breath and poured water over a
pair of the tastier concentrates that he had left.
“Come in,” he said when there was a quiet knock on
the door. The priest entered and held out the box with the
gun.
“Thank you for the loan, Mr. Garth, I appreciate the
spirit that made you send it. I have no idea of what caused
the unhappy affair when I landed, but I think it would be
best forgotten if we are going to be on this planet together
for any length of time.”
“Drink?” Garth asked, taking the box and pointing to
the bottle on the table. He poured two glasses full and
handed one to the priest. “That’s about what I had in
mind, but I still owe you an explanation of what
happened out there.” He scowled into his glass for a
second, then raised it to the other man. “It’s a big
universe and I guess we have to make out as best we can.
Here’s to Sanity.”
“God be with you,” Father Mark said, and raised his
glass as well. “Not with me or with this planet,” Garth
said firmly. “And that’s the crux of the matter.” He halfdrained the glass and sighed.
“Do you say that to shock me?” the priest asked with
a smile. “I assure you that it doesn’t.”
“Not intended to shock. I meant it quite literally. I
suppose I’m what you would call an atheist, so revealed
religion is no concern of mine. While these natives,
simple and unlettered Stone Age types that they are, have
managed to come this far with no superstitions or traces
of deism whatsoever. I had hoped that they might
continue that way.”
“What are you saying?” The priest frowned. “Do you
mean they have no gods, no belief in the hereafter? They
must die . . . ?”
“Die they do, and to dust returneth. Like the rest of
the animals. They have thunder, trees, and water without
having thunder-gods, tree sprites, or water nymphs. They
have no ugly little gods, taboos, or spells to hag-ride and
limit their lives. They are the only primitive people I have
ever encountered that are completely free of supersti​tion
and appear to be much happier and sane because of it. I
just wanted to keep them that way.”
“You wanted to keep them from God—from
salvation?” The priest’s eyes widened and he recoiled
slightly.
“No,” Garth said. “I wanted to keep them from
superstition until they knew more and could think about it
realistically without being absorbed and perhaps
destroyed by it.”
“You’re being insulting to the Church, sir, to equate it
with su​perstition . . .”
“Please,” Garth said, raising his hand. “No
theological arguments. I don’t think your society footed
the bill for this trip just to attempt to convert me. Just
accept the fact that my beliefs have been arrived at
through careful thought over a period of years, and no
amount of undergraduate metaphysics will change them.
I’ll promise not to try and convert you—if you will do the
same for me.”
“Agreed, Mr. Garth. As you have reminded me, my
mission here is to save these souls, and that is what I
must do. But why should my work disturb you so much
that you try and keep me from landing? Even threaten me
with your gun, and—” The priest broke off and looked
into his glass.
“And even slug you?” Garth asked, suddenly
frowning. “There was no excuse for that, and I would like
to say that I’m sorry. Plain bad manners and an even
worse temper. Live alone long enough and you find
yourself doing that kind of thing.” He brooded down at
his big hands where they lay on the table, reading
memories into the scars and calluses patterned there.
“Let’s just call it frustration, for lack of a better word. In
your business you must have had a lot of chances to peep
into the darker places in men’s minds and you should
know a bit about motives and happiness. I have had too
busy a life to ever consider settling down and raising a
family, and right up until re​cently I never missed it.
Maybe leakage radiation is softening up my brain, but I
had begun to think of these furry and fishy Weskers as
being a little like my own children, that I was somehow
responsible to them.”
“We are all His children,” Father Mark said quietly.
“Well, here are some of His children that can’t even
imagine His existence,” Garth said, suddenly angry at
himself for allowing gentler emotions to show through.
Yet he forgot himself at once, leaning forward with the
intensity of his feelings. “Can’t you realize the
im​portance of this? Live with these Weskers a while and
you will dis​cover a simple and happy life that matches the
state of grace you people are always talking about. They
get pleasure from their lives—and cause no one pain. By
circumstances they have evolved on an almost barren
world, so have never had a chance to grow out of a
physical Stone Age culture. But mentally they are our
match—or per​haps better. They have all learned my
language so I can easily explain the many things they
want to know. Knowledge and the gaining of knowledge
gives them real satisfaction. They tend to be exasperating
at times because every new fact must be related to the
structure of all other things, but the more they learn the
faster this process be​comes. Someday they are going to be
man’s equal in every way, per​haps surpass us. If—would
you do me a favor?”
“Whatever I can.”
“Leave them alone. Or teach them if you must—
history and sci​ence, philosophy, law, anything that will
help them face the realities of the greater universe they
never even knew existed before. But don’t confuse them
with your hatreds and pain, guilt, sin, and punishment.
Who knows the harm—”
“You are being insulting, sir!” the priest said,
jumping to his feet. The top of his grey head barely came
to the massive spaceman’s chin, yet he showed no fear in
defending what he believed. Garth, standing now himself,
was no longer the penitent. They faced each other in
anger, as men have always stood, unbending in the
defense of that which they think right.
“Yours is the insult,” Garth shouted. “The incredible
egotism to feel that your derivative little mythology,
differing only slightly from the thousands of others that
still burden men, can do anything but confuse their still
fresh minds. Don’t you realize that they believe in truth—
and have never heard of such a thing as a lie? They have
not been trained yet to understand that other kinds of
minds can think differently from theirs. Will you spare
them this . . . ?”
“I will do my duty which is His will, Mr. Garth.
These are God’s creatures here, and they have souls. I
cannot shirk my duty, which is to bring them His word so
that they may be saved and enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven.”
When the priest opened the door the wind caught it
and blew it wide. He vanished into the storm-swept
darkness and the door swung back and forth and a
splatter of raindrops blew in. Garth’s boots left muddy
footprints when he closed the door, shutting out the sight
of Itin sitting patiently and uncomplaining in the storm,
hoping only that Garth might stop for a moment and leave
with him some of the wonderful knowledge of which he
had so much.
By unspoken consent that first night was never
mentioned again. After a few days of loneliness, made
worse because each knew of the other’s proximity, they
found themselves talking on carefully neutral grounds.
Garth slowly packed and stowed away his stock and
never admitted that his work was finished and he could
leave at any time. He had a fair amount of interesting
drugs and botanicals that would fetch a good price. And
the Wesker artifacts were sure to create a sensation in the
sophisticated galactic market. Crafts on the planet here
had been limited before his arrival, mostly pieces of
carving painfully chipped into the hard wood with
fragments of stone. He had supplied tools and a stock of
raw metal from his own supplies, noth​ing more than that.
In a few months the Weskers had not only learned to
work with the new materials, but had translated their own
designs and forms into the most alien—but most beautiful
—artifacts that he had ever seen. All he had to do was
release these on the market to create a primary demand,
then return for a new supply. The Weskers wanted only
books and tools and knowledge in return, and through
their own efforts he knew they would pull themselves into
the ga​lactic union.
This is what Garth had hoped. But a wind of change
was blowing through the settlement that had grown up
around his ship. No longer was he the center of attention
and focal point of the village life. He had to grin when he
thought of his fall from power; yet there was very little
humor in the smile. Serious and attentive Weskers still
took turns of duty as Knowledge Collectors, but their
recording of dry facts was in sharp contrast to the
intellectual hurricane that sur​rounded the priest.
Where Garth had made them work for each book and
machine, the priest gave freely. Garth had tried to be
progressive in his supply of knowledge, treating them as
bright but unlettered children. He had wanted them to
walk before they could run, to master one step before
going on to the next.
Father Mark simply brought them the benefits of
Christianity. The only physical work he required was the
construction of a church, a place of worship and learning.
More Weskers had appeared out of the limitless planetary
swamps and within days the roof was up, sup​ported on a
framework of poles. Each morning the congregation
worked a little while on the walls, then hurried inside to
learn the all-promising, all-encompassing, all-important
facts about the uni​verse.
Garth never told the Weskers what he thought about
their new interest, and this was mainly because they had
never asked him. Pride or honor stood in the way of his
grabbing a willing listener and pour​ing out his
grievances. Perhaps it would have been different if Itin
was on Collecting duty, he was the brightest of the lot,
but Itin had been rotated the day after the priest had
arrived and Garth had not talked to him since.
It was a surprise then when after seventeen of the
trebly-long Wes​ker days, he found a delegation at his
doorstep when he emerged after breakfast. Itin was their
spokesman, and his mouth was open slightly. Many of
the other Weskers had their mouths open as well, one
even appearing to be yawning, clearly revealing the
double row of sharp teeth and the purple-black throat. The
mouths impressed Garth as to the seriousness of the
meeting: this was the one Wesker expression he had
learned to recognize. An open mouth indicated some
strong emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, he could never
be really sure which. The Weskers were normally placid
and he had never seen enough open mouths to tell what
was causing them. But he was sur​rounded by them now.
“Will you help us, Garth?” Itin said. “We have a
question.”
“I’ll answer any questions you ask,” Garth said, with
more than a hint of misgiving. “What is it?”
“Is there a God?”
“What do you mean by ‘God’?” Garth asked in turn.
What should he tell them? What had been going on in
their minds that they should come to him with this
question?
“God is our Father in Heaven, who made us all and
protects us. Whom we pray to for aid, and if we are Saved
will find a place—”
“That’s enough,” Garth said. “There is no God.”
All of them had their mouths open now, even Itin, as
they looked at Garth and thought about his answer. The
rows of pink teeth would have been frightening if he
hadn’t known these creatures so well. For one instant he
wondered if perhaps they had been already indoctri​nated
and looked upon him as a heretic, but he brushed the
thought away.
“Thank you,” Itin said, and they turned and left.
Though the morning was still cool, Garth noticed that
he was sweating and wondered why.
The reaction was not long in coming. Itin returned
that same af​ternoon. “Will you come to the church?” he
asked. “Many of the things that we study are difficult to
learn, but none as difficult as this. We need your help
because we must hear you and Father Mark talk together.
This is because he says one thing is true and you say
another is true and both cannot be true at the same time.
We must find out what is true.”
“I’ll come, of course,” Garth said, trying to hide the
sudden feel​ing of elation. He had done nothing, but the
Weskers had come to him anyway. There could still be
grounds for hope that they might yet be free.
It was hot inside the church, and Garth was surprised
at the num​ber of Weskers who were there, more than he
had seen gathered at any one time before. There were
many open mouths. Father Mark sat at a table covered
with books. He looked unhappy but didn’t say any​thing
when Garth came in. Garth spoke first.
“I hope you realize this is their idea—that they came
to me of their own free will and asked me to come here?”
“I know that,” the priest said resignedly. “At times
they can be very difficult. But they are learning and want
to believe, and that is what is important.”
“Father Mark, Trader Garth, we need your help,” Itin
said. “You both know many things that we do not know.
You must help us come to religion, which is not an easy
thing to do.” Garth started to say something, then
changed his mind. Itin went on. “We have read the bibles
and all the books that Father Mark gave us, and one thing
is clear. We have discussed this and we are all agreed.
These books are very different from the ones that Trader
Garth gave us. In Trader Garth’s books there is the
universe which we have not seen, and it goes on without
God, for He is mentioned nowhere, we have searched very
carefully. In Father Mark’s books He is everywhere and
nothing can go without Him. One of these must be right
and the other must be wrong. We do not know how this
can be, but after we find out which is right then perhaps
we will know. If God does not exist . . .”
“Of course He exists, my children,” Father Mark said
in a voice of heartfelt intensity. “He is our Father in
Heaven who has created us all . . .”
“Who created God?” Itin asked and the murmur
ceased and every one of the Weskers watched Father
Mark intensely. He recoiled a bit under the impact of their
eyes, then smiled.
“Nothing created God, since He is the Creator. He
always was—”
“If He always was in existence—why cannot the
universe have always been in existence? Without having
had a creator?” Itin broke in with a rush of words. The
importance of the question was obvious. The priest
answered slowly, with infinite patience.
“Would that the answers were that simple, my
children. But even the scientists do not agree about the
creation of the universe. While they doubt—we who have
seen the light know. We can see the mir​acle of creation all
about us. And how can there be a creation without a
Creator? That is He, our Father, our God in Heaven. I
know you have doubts and that is because you have souls
and free will. Still the answer is simple. Have faith, that is
all you need. Just believe.”
“How can we believe without proof?”
“If you cannot see that this world itself is proof of His
existence, then I say to you that belief needs no proof—if
you have faith!”
A babble of voices arose in the room and more of the
Wesker mouths were open now as they tried to force their
thoughts through the tangled skein of words and separate
the thread of truth.
“Can you tell us, Garth?” Itin asked, and the sound of
his voice quieted the hubbub.
“I can tell you to use the scientific method which can
examine all things—including itself—and give you
answers that can prove the truth or falsity of any
statement.”
“That is what we must do,” Itin said. “We had
reached the same conclusion.” He held a thick book
before him and a ripple of nods ran across the watchers.
“We have been studying the Bible as Father Mark told us
to do, and we have found the answer. God will make a
miracle for us, thereby proving that He is watching us.
And by this sign we will know Him and go to Him.”
“This is a sign of false pride,” Father Mark said.
“God needs no miracles to prove His existence.”
“But we need a miracle!” Itin shouted, and though he
wasn’t hu​man there was still the cry of need in his voice.
“We have read here of many smaller miracles, loaves,
fishes, wine, snakes—many of them, for much smaller
reasons. Now all He need do is make a mir​acle and He
will bring us all to Him—the wonder of an entire new
world worshiping at His throne, as you have told us,
Father Mark. And you have told us how important this is.
We have discussed this and find that there is only one
miracle that is best for this kind of thing.”
His boredom and amused interest in the incessant
theological wrangling drained from Garth in an instant.
He had not been really thinking or he would have realized
where all this was leading. By turning slightly he could
see the illustration in the Bible where Itin held it open,
and knew in advance what picture it was. He rose slowly
from his chair, as if stretching, and turned to the priest
behind him.
“Get ready!” he whispered. “Get out the back and get
to the ship, I’ll keep them busy here. I don’t think they’ll
harm—”
“What do you mean . . . ?” Father Mark asked,
blinking in surprise.
“Get out, you fool!” Garth hissed. “What miracle do
you think they mean? What miracle is supposed to have
converted the world to Christianity?”
“No!” Father Mark said. “It cannot be. It just cannot
—”
“GET MOVING!” Garth shouted, dragging the priest
from the chair and hurling him towards the rear wall.
Father Mark stumbled to a halt, turned back. Garth
leaped for him, but it was already too late. The
amphibians were small, but there were so many of them.
Garth lashed out and his fist struck Itin, hurling him back
into the crowd. The others came on as he fought his way
towards the priest. He beat at them but it was like
struggling against the waves. The furry, musky bodies
washed over and engulfed him. He struggled un​til they
tied him, and he still struggled until they beat on his head
until he stopped. Then they pulled him outside, where he
could only lie in the rain and curse and watch.
Of course the Weskers were marvelous craftsmen,
and everything had been constructed down to the last
detail, following the illustra​tion in the Bible. There was
the cross, planted firmly on the top of a small hill, the
gleaming metal spikes, the hammer. Father Mark was
stripped and draped in a carefully pleated loincloth. They
led him out of the church and at the sight of the cross he
almost fainted. After that he held his head high and
determined to die as he had lived, with faith.
Yet this was hard. It was unbearable even for Garth,
who only watched. It is one thing to talk of crucifixion
and look at the gentle carved bodies in the dim light of
prayer. It is another to see a man naked, ropes cutting into
his skin where he hangs from a bar of wood. And to see
the needle-tipped spike raised and placed against the soft
flesh of his palm, to see the hammer come back with the
calm delib​eration of an artisan’s measured stroke. To hear
the thick sound of metal penetrating flesh.
Then to hear the screams.
Few are born to be martyrs and Father Mark was not
one of them. With the first blows, the blood ran from his
lips where his clenched teeth met. Then his mouth was
wide and his head strained back and the awful guttural
horror of his screams sliced through the susurra​tion of the
falling rain. It resounded as a silent echo from the masses
of watching Weskers, for whatever emotion opened their
mouths was now tearing at their bodies with all its force,
and row after row of gaping jaws reflected the crucified
priest’s agony.
Mercifully he fainted as the last nail was driven home.
Blood ran from the raw wounds, mixing with the rain to
drip faintly pink from his feet as the life ran out of him.
At this time, somewhere at this time, sobbing and tearing
at his own bonds, numbed from the blows on the head,
Garth lost consciousness.
He awoke in his own warehouse and it was dark.
Someone was cutting away the woven ropes they had
bound him with. The rain still dripped and splashed
outside.
“Itin,” he said. It could be no one else.
“Yes,” the alien voice whispered back. “The others
are all talking in the church. Lin died after you struck his
head, and Inon is very sick. There are some that say you
should be crucified too, and I think that is what will
happen. Or perhaps killed by stoning on the head. They
have found in the Bible where it says—”
“I know.” With infinite weariness. “An eye for an eye.
You’ll find lots of things like that once you start looking.”
“You must go, you can get to your ship without
anyone seeing you. There has been enough killing.” Itin
as well spoke with a new​found weariness.
Garth experimented, pulling himself to his feet. He
pressed his head to the rough wall until the nausea
stopped.
“He’s dead.” He said it as a statement, not a question.
“Yes, some time ago. Or I could not have come away
to see you.”
“And buried of course, or they wouldn’t be thinking
about starting on me next.”
“And buried!” There was almost a ring of emotion in
the alien’s voice, an echo of the dead priest’s. “He is
buried and he will rise on High. It is written and that is
the way it will happen. Father Mark will be so happy that
it has happened like this.” The voice ended in a sound
like a human sob, but of course it couldn’t have been that
since Itin was alien, and not human at all. Garth painfully
worked his way towards the door, leaning against the
wall so he wouldn’t fall.
“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” Itin asked. There
was no an​swer. “He will rise up, Garth, won’t he rise?”
Garth was at the door and enough light came from the
brightly lit church to show his torn and bloody hands
clutching at the frame. Itin’s face swam into sight close to
his, and Garth felt the delicate, many-fingered hands with
the sharp nails catch at his clothes.
“He will rise, won’t he, Garth?”
“No,” Garth said, “he is going to stay buried right
where you put him. Nothing is going to happen, because
he is dead and he is going to stay dead.”
The rain runneled through Itin’s fur and his mouth
was opened so wide that he seemed to be screaming into
the night. Only with effort could he talk, squeezing out
the alien thoughts in an alien language.
“Then we will not be saved? We will not become
pure?”
“You were pure,” Garth said, in a voice somewhere
between a sob and a laugh. “That’s the horrible ugly dirty
part of it. You were pure. Now you are—”
“Murderers,” Itin said, and the water ran down from
his lowered head and streamed away into the darkness.
© 1962 Harry Harrison.
Originally published in New Worlds.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Harry Harrison began writing science fiction in the 1950s and is currently
one of the top-selling SF authors around the world. Best known as the creator
of the cosmic thief the Stainless Steel Rat, and for his Deathworld and West
of Eden series, he is also the author of Make Room! Make Room!, which was
turned into the movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Edward
G. Robinson. His novels have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list
and in 2009 he was awarded the Damon Knight SF Grand Master Award by
the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Boojum
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew
called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could
tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes
curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted
her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she
ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member
with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to
walk and work and live by.
The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space
swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high
tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring
still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over
eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something
like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her
sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her
vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green
so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it;
her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.
Where there was light, she could make oxygen.
Where there was oxygen, she could make water.
She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was
a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the
engineering section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only
human and no kind of law at all, loved her.
Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the
Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the
captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes
and said, “So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I
don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back
to Venus the cold way.” But it was probably that—and
the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of a
space freighter with a ray gun—that had gotten her
assigned to Engineering, where ethics were less of a
problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going
anywhere.
Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley
spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran
through the decks of the ship. It was an odd sensation, a
tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were
underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well
toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering—
which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the
theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers
didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were
doing—flickered bright and live.
Everybody looked up, and Demijack shouted, “There!
There!” He was right: The blot that might only have been
a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked,
revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and
hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.
We could use some of them, thought Black Alice.
Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life
was not all imported delicacies and fawning slaves.
Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits
went directly back to the Lavinia Whateley, to keep her
healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were
stories about the Marie Curie, too.
The captain’s voice over fiber optic cable—strung
beside the Lavinia Whateley’s nerve bundles—was as
clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s
elbow. “Battle stations,” Captain Song said, and the crew
leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song
keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the
ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and
frozen scream.
Black Alice manned her station, and stared at the
screen. She saw the freighter’s name—the Josephine
Baker—gold on black across the stern, the Venusian flag
for its port of registry wired stiff from a mast on its hull. It
was a steelship, not a Boojum, and they had every
advantage. For a moment she thought the freighter would
run.
And then it turned, and brought its guns to bear.
No sense of movement, of acceleration, of
disorientation. No pop, no whump of displaced air. The
view on the screens just flickered to a different one, as
Vinnie skipped—apported—to a new position just aft and
above the Josephine Baker, crushing the flag mast with
her hull.
Black Alice felt that, a grinding shiver. And had just
time to grab her console before the Lavinia Whateley
grappled the freighter, long vanes not curling in affection
now.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dogcollar, the
closest thing the Lavinia Whateley had to a chaplain,
cross himself, and she heard him mutter, like he always
did, Ave, Grandaevissimi, morituri vos salutant. It was
the best he’d be able to do until it was all over, and even
then he wouldn’t have the chance to do much. Captain
Song didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so
long as they didn’t do it on her time.
The captain’s voice was calling orders, assigning
people to boarding parties port and starboard. Down in
Engineering, all they had to do was monitor the Lavinia
Whateley’s hull and prepare to repel boarders, assuming
the freighter’s crew had the gumption to send any. Vinnie
would take care of the rest—until the time came to
persuade her not to eat her prey before they’d gotten all
the valuables off it. That was a ticklish job, only entrusted
to the chief engineers, but Black Alice watched and
listened, and although she didn’t expect she’d ever get the
chance, she thought she could do it herself.
It was a small ambition, and one she never talked
about. But it would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To
be somebody a Boojum would listen to?
She gave her attention to the dull screens in her
sectors, and tried not to crane her neck to catch a glimpse
of the ones with the actual fighting on them. Dogcollar
was making the rounds with sidearms from the weapons
locker, just in case. Once the Josephine Baker was
subdued, it was the junior engineers and others who
would board her to take inventory.
Sometimes there were crew members left in hiding on
captured ships. Sometimes, unwary pirates got shot.
There was no way to judge the progress of the battle
from Engineering. Wasabi put a stopwatch up on one of
the secondary screens, as usual, and everybody glanced at
it periodically. Fifteen minutes ongoing meant the
boarding parties hadn’t hit any nasty surprises. Black
Alice had met a man once who’d been on the Margaret
Mead when she grappled a freighter that turned out to be
carrying a division’s-worth of Marines out to the Jovian
moons. Thirty minutes ongoing was normal. Forty-five
minutes. Upward of an hour ongoing, and people started
double-checking their weapons. The longest battle Black
Alice had ever personally been part of was six hours,
forty-three minutes, and fifty-two seconds. That had been
the last time the Lavinia Whateley worked with a partner,
and the double-cross by the Henry Ford was the only
reason any of Vinnie’s crew needed. Captain Song still
had Captain Edwards’ head in a jar on the bridge, and
Vinnie had an ugly ring of scars where the Henry Ford
had bitten her.
This time, the clock stopped at fifty minutes, thirteen
seconds. The Josephine Baker surrendered.
Dogcollar slapped Black Alice’s arm. “With me,” he
said, and she didn’t argue. He had only six weeks
seniority over her, but he was as tough as he was devout,
and not stupid either. She checked the Velcro on her
holster and followed him up the ladder, reaching through
the rungs once to scratch Vinnie’s bulkhead as she
passed. The ship paid her no notice. She wasn’t the
captain, and she wasn’t one of the four chief engineers.
Quartermaster mostly respected crew’s own partner
choices, and as Black Alice and Dogcollar suited up—it
wouldn’t be the first time, if the Josephine Baker’s crew
decided to blow her open to space rather than be taken
captive—he came by and issued them both tag guns and
x-ray pads, taking a retina scan in return. All sorts of
valuable things got hidden inside of bulkheads, and once
Vinnie was done with the steelship there wouldn’t be
much chance of coming back to look for what they’d
missed.
Wet pirates used to scuttle their captures. The
Boojums were more efficient.
Black Alice clipped everything to her belt and
checked Dogcollar’s seals.
And then they were swinging down lines from the
Lavinia Whateley’s belly to the chewed-open airlock. A
lot of crew didn’t like to look at the ship’s face, but Black
Alice loved it. All those teeth, the diamond edges worn to
a glitter, and a few of the ship’s dozens of bright sapphire
eyes blinking back at her.
She waved, unselfconsciously, and flattered herself
that the ripple of closing eyes was Vinnie winking in
return.
She followed Dogcollar inside the prize.
They unsealed when they had checked atmosphere—
no sense in wasting your own air when you might need it
later—and the first thing she noticed was the smell.
The Lavinia Whateley had her own smell, ozone and
nutmeg, and other ships never smelled as good, but this
was . . . this was . . .
“What did they kill and why didn’t they space it?”
Dogcollar wheezed, and Black Alice swallowed hard
against her gag reflex and said, “One will get you twenty
we’re the lucky bastards that find it.”
“No takers,” Dogcollar said.
They worked together to crank open the hatches they
came to. Twice they found crew members, messily dead.
Once they found crew members alive.
“Gillies,” said Black Alice.
“Still don’t explain the smell,” said Dogcollar and, to
the gillies: “Look, you can join our crew, or our ship can
eat you. Makes no never mind to us.”
The gillies blinked their big wet eyes and made
fingersigns at each other, and then nodded. Hard.
Dogcollar slapped a tag on the bulkhead. “Someone
will come get you. You go wandering, we’ll assume you
changed your mind.”
The gillies shook their heads, hard, and folded down
onto the deck to wait.
Dogcollar tagged searched holds—green for clean,
purple for goods, red for anything Vinnie might like to eat
that couldn’t be fenced for a profit—and Black Alice
mapped. The corridors in the steelship were winding,
twisty, hard to track. She was glad she chalked the walls,
because she didn’t think her map was quite right,
somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone
wrong. Still, they had a beacon, and Vinnie could always
chew them out if she had to.
Black Alice loved her ship.
She was thinking about that, how, okay, it wasn’t so
bad, the pirate game, and it sure beat working in the
sunstone mines on Venus, when she found a locked cargo
hold. “Hey, Dogcollar,” she said to her comm, and while
he was turning to cover her, she pulled her sidearm and
blasted the lock.
The door peeled back, and Black Alice found herself
staring at rank upon rank of silver cylinders, each less
than a meter tall and perhaps half a meter wide, smooth
and featureless except for what looked like an assortment
of sockets and plugs on the surface of each. The smell
was strongest here.
“Shit,” she said.
Dogcollar, more practical, slapped the first safety
orange tag of the expedition beside the door and said
only, “Captain’ll want to see this.”
“Yeah,” said Black Alice, cold chills chasing
themselves up and down her spine. “C’mon, let’s move.”
But of course it turned out that she and Dogcollar
were on the retrieval detail, too, and the captain wasn’t
leaving the canisters for Vinnie.
Which, okay, fair. Black Alice didn’t want the
Lavinia Whateley eating those things, either, but why did
they have to bring them back?
She said as much to Dogcollar, under her breath, and
had a horrifying thought: “She knows what they are,
right?”
“She’s the captain,” said Dogcollar.
“Yeah, but—I ain’t arguing, man, but if she doesn’t
know . . .” She lowered her voice even farther, so she
could barely hear herself: “What if somebody opens
one?”
Dogcollar gave her a pained look. “Nobody’s going to
go opening anything. But if you’re really worried, go talk
to the captain about it.”
He was calling her bluff. Black Alice called his right
back. “Come with me?”
He was stuck. He stared at her, and then he grunted
and pulled his gloves off, the left and then the right.
“Fuck,” he said. “I guess we oughta.”
For the crew members who had been in the boarding
action, the party had already started. Dogcollar and Black
Alice finally tracked the captain down in the rec room,
where her marines were slurping stolen wine from
broken-necked bottles. As much of it splashed on the
gravity plates epoxied to the Lavinia Whateley’s flattest
interior surface as went into the marines, but Black Alice
imagined there was plenty more where that came from.
And the faster the crew went through it, the less long
they’d be drunk.
The captain herself was naked in a great extruded tub,
up to her collarbones in steaming water dyed pink and
heavily scented by the bath bombs sizzling here and there.
Black Alice stared; she hadn’t seen a tub bath in seven
years. She still dreamed of them sometimes.
“Captain,” she said, because Dogcollar wasn’t going
to say anything. “We think you should know we found
some dangerous cargo on the prize.”
Captain Song raised one eyebrow. “And you imagine
I don’t know already, cherie?”
Oh shit. But Black Alice stood her ground. “We
thought we should be sure.”
The captain raised one long leg out of the water to
shove a pair of necking pirates off the rim of her tub. They
rolled onto the floor, grappling and clawing, both fighting
to be on top. But they didn’t break the kiss. “You wish to
be sure,” said the captain. Her dark eyes had never left
Black Alice’s sweating face. “Very well. Tell me. And
then you will know that I know, and you can be sure.”
Dogcollar made a grumbling noise deep in his throat,
easily interpreted: I told you so.
Just as she had when she took Captain Song’s oath
and slit her thumb with a razorblade and dripped her
blood on the Lavinia Whateley’s decking so the ship
might know her, Black Alice—metaphorically speaking
—took a breath and jumped. “They’re brains,” she said.
“Human brains. Stolen. Black-market. The Fungi—”
“Mi-Go,” Dogcollar hissed, and the captain grinned
at him, showing extraordinarily white strong teeth. He
ducked, submissively, but didn’t step back, for which
Black Alice felt a completely ridiculous gratitude.
“Mi-Go,” Black Alice said. Mi-Go, Fungi, what did it
matter? They came from the outer rim of the Solar
System, the black cold hurtling rocks of the Öpik-Oort
Cloud. Like the Boojums, they could swim between the
stars. “They collect them. There’s a black market. Nobody
knows what they use them for. It’s illegal, of course. But
they’re . . . alive in there. They go mad, supposedly.”
And that was it. That was all Black Alice could
manage. She stopped, and had to remind herself to shut
her mouth.
“So I’ve heard,” the captain said, dabbling at the
steaming water. She stretched luxuriously in her tub.
Someone thrust a glass of white wine at her, condensation
dewing the outside. The captain did not drink from
shattered plastic bottles. “The Mi-Go will pay for this
cargo, won’t they? They mine rare minerals all over the
system. They’re said to be very wealthy.”
“Yes, Captain,” Dogcollar said, when it became
obvious that Black Alice couldn’t.
“Good,” the captain said. Under Black Alice’s feet,
the decking shuddered, a grinding sound as Vinnie began
to dine. Her rows of teeth would make short work of the
Josephine Baker’s steel hide. Black Alice could see two
of the gillies—the same two? She never could tell them
apart unless they had scars—flinch and tug at their
chains. “Then they might as well pay us as someone else,
wouldn’t you say?”
Black Alice knew she should stop thinking about the
canisters. Captain’s word was law. But she couldn’t help
it, like scratching at a scab. They were down there, in the
third subhold, the one even sniffers couldn’t find, cold
and sweating and with that stench that was like a living
thing.
And she kept wondering. Were they empty? Or were
there brains in there, people’s brains, going mad?
The idea was driving her crazy, and finally, her fourth
off-shift after the capture of the Josephine Baker, she had
to go look.
“This is stupid, Black Alice,” she muttered to herself
as she climbed down the companionway, the beads in her
hair clicking against her earrings. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid.” Vinnie bioluminesced, a traveling spotlight,
placidly unconcerned whether Black Alice was being an
idiot or not.
Half-Hand Sally had pulled duty in the main hold.
She nodded at Black Alice and Black Alice nodded back.
Black Alice ran errands a lot, for Engineering and
sometimes for other departments, because she didn’t
smoke hash and she didn’t cheat at cards. She was
reliable.
Down through the subholds, and she really didn’t
want to be doing this, but she was here and the smell of
the third subhold was already making her sick, and
maybe if she just knew one way or the other, she’d be
able to quit thinking about it.
She opened the third subhold, and the stench rushed
out.
The canisters were just metal, sealed, seemingly
airtight. There shouldn’t be any way for the aroma of the
contents to escape. But it permeated the air nonetheless,
bad enough that Black Alice wished she had brought a
rebreather.
No, that would have been suspicious. So it was really
best for everyone concerned that she hadn’t, but oh, gods
and little fishes, the stench. Even breathing through her
mouth was no help; she could taste it, like oil from a
fryer, saturating the air, oozing up her sinuses, coating the
interior spaces of her body.
As silently as possible, she stepped across the
threshold and into the space beyond. The Lavinia
Whateley obligingly lit the space as she entered, dazzling
her at first as the overhead lights—not just
bioluminescent, here, but LEDs chosen to approximate
natural daylight, for when they shipped plants and
animals—reflected off rank upon rank of canisters. When
Black Alice went among them, they did not reach her
waist.
She was just going to walk through, she told herself.
Hesitantly, she touched the closest cylinder. The air in
this hold was so dry there was no condensation—the
whole ship ran to lip-cracking, nosebleed dryness in the
long weeks between prizes—but the cylinder was cold. It
felt somehow grimy to the touch, gritty and oily like
machine grease. She pulled her hand back.
It wouldn’t do to open the closest one to the door—
and she realized with that thought that she was planning
on opening one. There must be a way to do it, a concealed
catch or a code pad. She was an engineer, after all.
She stopped three ranks in, lightheaded with the
smell, to examine the problem.
It was remarkably simple, once you looked for it.
There were three depressions on either side of the rim, a
little smaller than human fingertips but spaced
appropriately. She laid the pads of her fingers over them
and pressed hard, making the flesh deform into the
catches.
The lid sprang up with a pressurized hiss. Black Alice
was grateful that even open, it couldn’t smell much
worse. She leaned forward to peer within. There was a
clear membrane over the surface, and gelatin or thick
fluid underneath. Vinnie’s lights illuminated it well.
It was not empty. And as the light struck the grayish
surface of the lump of tissue floating within, Black Alice
would have sworn she saw the pathetic unbodied thing
flinch.
She scrambled to close the canister again, nearly
pinching her fingertips when it clanked shut. “Sorry,” she
whispered, although dear sweet Jesus, surely the thing
couldn’t hear her. “Sorry, sorry.” And then she turned and
ran, catching her hip a bruising blow against the
doorway, slapping the controls to make it fucking close
already. And then she staggered sideways, lurching to her
knees, and vomited until blackness was spinning in front
of her eyes and she couldn’t smell or taste anything but
bile.
Vinnie would absorb the former contents of Black
Alice’s stomach, just as she absorbed, filtered, recycled,
and excreted all her crew’s wastes. Shaking, Black Alice
braced herself back upright and began the long climb out
of the holds.
In the first subhold, she had to stop, her shoulder
against the smooth, velvet slickness of Vinnie’s skin, her
mouth hanging open while her lungs worked. And she
knew Vinnie wasn’t going to hear her, because she
wasn’t the captain or a chief engineer or anyone
important, but she had to try anyway, croaking, “Vinnie,
water, please.”
And no one could have been more surprised than
Black Alice Bradley when Vinnie extruded a basin and a
thin cool trickle of water began to flow into it.
Well, now she knew. And there was still nothing she
could do about it. She wasn’t the captain, and if she said
anything more than she already had, people were going to
start looking at her funny. Mutiny kind of funny. And
what Black Alice did not need was any more of Captain
Song’s attention and especially not for rumors like that.
She kept her head down and did her job and didn’t
discuss her nightmares with anyone.
And she had nightmares, all right. Hot and cold
running, enough, she fancied, that she could have filled
up the captain’s huge tub with them.
She could live with that. But over the next double
dozen of shifts, she became aware of something else
wrong, and this was worse, because it was something
wrong with the Lavinia Whateley.
The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and
going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black
Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was . . . she
didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything
like it before. She would have said balky, but that
couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. But she was more and more
sure that Vinnie was less responsive somehow, that when
she obeyed the captain’s orders, it was with a delay. If she
were human, Vinnie would have been dragging her feet.
You couldn’t keelhaul a ship for not obeying fast
enough.
And then, because she was paying attention so hard
she was making her own head hurt, Black Alice noticed
something else. Captain Song had them cruising the gas
giants’ orbits—Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune—not going in as
far as the asteroid belt, not going out as far as Uranus.
Nobody Black Alice talked to knew why, exactly, but she
and Dogcollar figured it was because the captain wanted
to talk to the Mi-Go without actually getting near the
nasty cold rock of their planet. And what Black Alice
noticed was that Vinnie was less balky, less unhappy,
when she was headed out, and more and more resistant
the closer they got to the asteroid belt.
Vinnie, she remembered, had been born over Uranus.
“Do you want to go home, Vinnie?” Black Alice
asked her one late-night shift when there was nobody
around to care that she was talking to the ship. “Is that
what’s wrong?”
She put her hand flat on the wall, and although she
was probably imagining it, she thought she felt a shiver
ripple across Vinnie’s vast side.
Black Alice knew how little she knew, and didn’t
even contemplate sharing her theory with the chief
engineers. They probably knew exactly what was wrong
and exactly what to do to keep the Lavinia Whateley from
going core meltdown like the Marie Curie had. That was
a whispered story, not the sort of thing anybody talked
about except in their hammocks after lights out.
The Marie Curie had eaten her own crew.
So when Wasabi said, four shifts later, “Black Alice,
I’ve got a job for you,” Black Alice said, “Yessir,” and
hoped it would be something that would help the Lavinia
Whateley be happy again.
It was a suit job, he said, replace and repair. Black
Alice was going because she was reliable and smart and
stayed quiet, and it was time she took on more
responsibilities. The way he said it made her first fret
because that meant the captain might be reminded of her
existence, and then fret because she realized the captain
already had been.
But she took the equipment he issued, and she
listened to the instructions and read schematics and
committed them both to memory and her implants. It was
a ticklish job, a neural override repair. She’d done some
fiber optic bundle splicing, but this was going to be a
doozy. And she was going to have to do it in stiff,
pressurized gloves.
Her heart hammered as she sealed her helmet, and not
because she was worried about the EVA. This was a
chance. An opportunity. A step closer to chief engineer.
Maybe she had impressed the captain with her
discretion, after all.
She cycled the airlock, snapped her safety harness,
and stepped out onto the Lavinia Whateley’s hide.
That deep blue-green, like azurite, like the teeming
seas of Venus under their swampy eternal clouds, was
invisible. They were too far from Sol—it was a yellow
stylus-dot, and you had to know where to look for it.
Vinnie’s hide was just black under Black Alice’s suit
floods. As the airlock cycled shut, though, the Boojum’s
own bioluminescence shimmered up her vanes and along
the ridges of her sides—crimson and electric green and
acid blue. Vinnie must have noticed Black Alice picking
her way carefully up her spine with barbed boots. They
wouldn’t hurt Vinnie—nothing short of a space rock
could manage that—but they certainly stuck in there
good.
The thing Black Alice was supposed to repair was at
the principal nexus of Vinnie’s central nervous system.
The ship didn’t have anything like what a human or a
gilly would consider a brain; there were nodules spread
all through her vast body. Too slow, otherwise. And
Black Alice had heard Boojums weren’t supposed to be
all that smart—trainable, sure, maybe like an Earth
monkey.
Which is what made it creepy as hell that, as she
picked her way up Vinnie’s flank—though up was a
courtesy, under these circumstances—talking to her all
the way, she would have sworn Vinnie was talking back.
Not just tracking her with the lights, as she would always
do, but bending some of her barbels and vanes around as
if craning her neck to get a look at Black Alice.
Black Alice carefully circumnavigated an eye—she
didn’t think her boots would hurt it, but it seemed
discourteous to stomp across somebody’s field of vision
—and wondered, only half-idly, if she had been sent out
on this task not because she was being considered for
promotion, but because she was expendable.
She was just rolling her eyes and dismissing that as
borrowing trouble when she came over a bump on
Vinnie’s back, spotted her goal—and all the ship’s lights
went out.
She tongued on the comm. “Wasabi?”
“I got you, Blackie. You just keep doing what you’re
doing.”
“Yessir.”
But it seemed like her feet stayed stuck in Vinnie’s
hide a little longer than was good. At least fifteen seconds
before she managed a couple of deep breaths—too deep
for her limited oxygen supply, so she went briefly dizzy—
and continued up Vinnie’s side.
Black Alice had no idea what inflammation looked
like in a Boojum, but she would guess this was it. All
around the interface she was meant to repair, Vinnie’s
flesh looked scraped and puffy. Black Alice walked
tenderly, wincing, muttering apologies under her breath.
And with every step, the tendrils coiled a little closer.
Black Alice crouched beside the box, and began
examining connections. The console was about three
meters by four, half a meter tall, and fixed firmly to
Vinnie’s hide. It looked like the thing was still functional,
but something—a bit of space debris, maybe—had dented
it pretty good.
Cautiously, Black Alice dropped a hand on it. She
found the access panel, and flipped it open: more red
lights than green. A tongue-click, and she began
withdrawing her tethered tools from their holding
pouches and arranging them so that they would float
conveniently around.
She didn’t hear a thing, of course, but the hide under
her boots vibrated suddenly, sharply. She jerked her head
around, just in time to see one of Vinnie’s feelers slap her
own side, five or ten meters away. And then the whole
Boojum shuddered, contracting, curved into a hard
crescent of pain the same way she had when the Henry
Ford had taken that chunk out of her hide. And the lights
in the access panel lit up all at once—red, red, yellow,
red.
Black Alice tongued off the send function on her
headset microphone, so Wasabi wouldn’t hear her. She
touched the bruised hull, and she touched the dented edge
of the console. “Vinnie,” she said, “does this hurt?”
Not that Vinnie could answer her. But it was obvious.
She was in pain. And maybe that dent didn’t have
anything to do with space debris. Maybe—Black Alice
straightened, looked around, and couldn’t convince
herself that it was an accident that this box was planted
right where Vinnie couldn’t . . . quite . . . reach it.
“So what does it do?” she muttered. “Why am I out
here repairing something that fucking hurts?” She
crouched down again and took another long look at the
interface.
As an engineer, Black Alice was mostly self-taught;
her implants were second-hand, black market, scavenged,
the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station. She’d
learned the technical vocabulary from Gogglehead Kim
before he bought it in a stupid little fight with a ship
named the V. I. Ulyanov, but what she relied on were her
instincts, the things she knew without being able to say.
So she looked at that box wired into Vinnie’s spine and
all its red and yellow lights, and then she tongued the
comm back on and said, “Wasabi, this thing don’t look
so good.”
“Whaddya mean, don’t look so good?” Wasabi
sounded distracted, and that was just fine.
Black Alice made a noise, the auditory equivalent of a
shrug. “I think the node’s inflamed. Can we pull it and
lock it in somewhere else?”
“No!” said Wasabi.
“It’s looking pretty ugly out here.”
“Look, Blackie, unless you want us to all go sailing
out into the Big Empty, we are not pulling that governor.
Just fix the fucking thing, would you?”
“Yessir,” said Black Alice, thinking hard. The first
thing was that Wasabi knew what was going on—knew
what the box did and knew that the Lavinia Whateley
didn’t like it. That wasn’t comforting. The second thing
was that whatever was going on, it involved the Big
Empty, the cold vastness between the stars. So it wasn’t
that Vinnie wanted to go home. She wanted to go out.
It made sense, from what Black Alice knew about
Boojums. Their infants lived in the tumult of the gas
giants’ atmosphere, but as they aged, they pushed higher
and higher, until they reached the edge of the envelope.
And then—following instinct or maybe the calls of their
fellows, nobody knew for sure—they learned to skip,
throwing themselves out into the vacuum like Earth birds
leaving the nest. And what if, for a Boojum, the solar
system was just another nest?
Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a
Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although
you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what
was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life
cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn’t
letting her go.
Jesus and the cold fishy gods, Black Alice thought. Is
this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they
wouldn’t let her go?
She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float
them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep
with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her
headset spoke again. “Blackie, can you hurry it up out
there? Captain says we’re going to have company.”
Company? She never got to say it. Because when she
looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight,
and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.
There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her
skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and
Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but
they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones
Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many
legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated
heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be
sprouted writhing tentacles
And some of them carried silver shining cylinders,
like the canisters in Vinnie’s subhold.
Black Alice wasn’t certain if they saw her, crouched
on the Boojum’s hide with only a thin laminate between
her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of
something else. If they did, they did not care.
They disappeared below the curve of the ship, toward
the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way
along the ship’s side. They could be a trade delegation,
come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.
Black Alice didn’t think even the Mi-Go came in the
battalions to talk trade.
She meant to wait until the last of them had passed,
but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn’t answering her
hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled
with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket
whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn’t
see much; everything was misty. It took her several
seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she
was crying.
Patch cables. Where were the fucking patch cables?
She found a two-meter length of fiber optic with the right
plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel.
The other snapped into her suit comm.
“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a
connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots
pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she
drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open
the case on the console that Wasabi had called the
governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying.
Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and . . . well, not dead. If they
were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the
Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the
Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood
of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question.
She had it open now, and she could see that was what it
did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her,
and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet
speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a
minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden
lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you,
though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m
sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from . . .” She
had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke.
Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to
disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous
system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and
buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.”
And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain
Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started
counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the
number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a
really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly
miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadowdouble. But the thing that flashed up against her own
view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
<?>
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark
again.
<?>
“Holy shit, Vinnie! . . . Never mind, never mind.
They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like
the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept
working.
Her heads-up pinged again: <ALICE> A pause. <?>
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me,
too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go
around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while
Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened
bolts.
<WANT> said the Lavinia Whateley. <?>
“Want? Do I want . . . ?” Her laughter sounded bad.
“Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m
not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary,
they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re
mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of
the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went
sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the
processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s
hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the
fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
<HELP>
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said
through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia
Whateley said, <HELP>
And then, <ALICE>
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said, <HELP
ALICE>
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure
there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like
the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it
that way.”
<EAT ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley.
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her
own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s
um . . . well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a
jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went
cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see
what she could have missed. As communications went,
EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
<HELP ALICE> the Lavinia Whateley insisted.
Black Alice leaned in close, unsplicing the last of the
governor’s circuits from the Boojum’s nervous system.
<SAVE ALICE>
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things
you eat, and it’s not . . .” She bit her tongue. Because she
did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley
ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie . . . are you
saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be
sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s
teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”
<ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley, and then the
last fiber optic cable parted, and Black Alice, her hands
shaking, detached her patch cable and flung the whole
mess of it as hard as she could straight up. Maybe it
would find a planet with atmosphere and be some little
alien kid’s shooting star.
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk
back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the MiGo believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia
Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in
surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the
shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any
choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what
Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end
up was dead, and that was light-years better than what
the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the
Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her
courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path.
Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to
them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she
reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of
teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and
walked into her leviathan’s maw.
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth,
Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the
ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit.
Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you
were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just
polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on
Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the
feeling Vinnie was holding her . . . breath. Or what
passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making
herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice
clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and
the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside
her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her
space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed
her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage.
One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated,
too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it
properly.
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She
was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulder
blades felt like a very mild radiation burn.
alice.
A voice she thought she should know. She tried to
speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.
alice. talk here.
She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.
Talk . . . here?
The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was . . .
drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her
skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked,
and things were shattered.
There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.
alice talk here.
Where am I?
eat alice.
Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the
heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with
emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.
You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the
numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of
her body erased and redrawn.
!
Agreement. Relief.
I’m . . . in you, Vinnie?
=/=
Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does
not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the
warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her.
She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of
its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed
them faster and faster away.
I am you.
!
Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed
with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just,
transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she
embraced in return.
Vinnie. Where are we going?
out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read
the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching
faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the
first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar
darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.
Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve.
Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a
brain in a jar.
And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the
brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her,
that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia
Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.
© 2008 Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette.
Originally published in Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann & Jeff
VanderMeer.
Reprinted by permission of the authors.
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret
cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 105-year-old house in the
Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one
husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen.
She has published more than forty short stories and has two short story
collections out: The Bone Key (Prime Books, 2007—with a shiny second
edition in 2011) and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (Prime Books, 2011).
She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007; The
Tempering of Men, Tor Books, 2011) and three short stories with Elizabeth
Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu,
The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her next novel, The Goblin
Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit
her online at www.sarahmonette.com.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but
in a different year. She is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred
short stories, the most recent of which is Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy of
a central Asia that never was. She is a Sturgeon, Campbell, and multiple
Hugo Award winner, a rock climber, and a very bad guitarist. She divides her
time between central Massachusetts, where her Giant Ridiculous Dog lives,
and western Wisconsin, where her partner, fantasist Scott Lynch, lives.
Sun Dogs
Brooke Bolander
Floating through endless night in a tiny silver ball,
surrounded by noise and confusion and the overpowering
scents of metal and her own push-stink, the dog Laika
dreams.
Snow crunches under the pads of her feet, biting at
them with tiny unseen fangs. She is running with a pack
of others through the cold and the city-smell, claws
skittering on slippery hard water. They are all shaggy and
long-toothed and their breath makes little clouds in the
air. Frost grows a fur coat over Brother’s whiskers and
nose, like a pup’s first layer of down. The cat they are
pursuing is just strides ahead, a leap and a shake away
from being warm meat between Laika’s jaws, when
people appear at the mouth of the alleyway holding
nooses and sticks.
In the real world, the catch-men had taken everything.
In dreams, they are fooled as easily as rabbits. Laika is a
smart dog. She grows brown-and-white wings, like a
pigeon or a seagull. The other members of her pack
follow—Brother’s feathers are as black and tangled as the
rest of him—and together they fly away, leaving the
catch-men empty-handed far below. The cool air lifts
Laika up and up. She can smell garbage and fish-gutting
places and the sting of salty water, all the wonderful reeks
of home. Cat water-stink. The less pleasant odors of tarcoated poles and burning dead things, harsh enough to
dull the best nose. They all go to a park with grass and
trees and lots of cat push-stink to roll in. The puddles here
aren’t hard. Laika drinks until her stomach sloshes and
water dribbles from the corners of her mouth.
She wakes from the dream needing to make waterstink herself and whines softly when she realizes where
she is. The padded ball is her den now, and everything
inside her whispers that making stink in one’s den is not
a thing smart dogs do. But eventually she has to. Nothing
else remains. The world through the window is black and
empty, marked with tiny faraway gleams that might be
the eyes of unknown animals. All the trees and grasses
and even the whitecoats have long since vanished in a
blur of heat and tumbling, fearful movement.
There’s a rubber bag strapped to her hind end, a net of
harnesses holding her tightly in place, and a feeling of
floating that never disappears no matter how many times
she scrabbles at the floor for purchase. It makes her dizzy
and sick. Beneath the straps her skin itches, so warm and
close it feels like it might split open. She cannot turn
around or even circle to make a proper bed.
Laika re-adjusts herself as best she can, closes her
eyes, and wishes for brown-and-white wings.
There is no trusting the ball and no understanding it, no
more than one can understand the intentions of a
whitecoat. Like them, it is neither good nor bad. It emits a
constant howl, dispenses food slime, and shakes so
terrifyingly that Laika trembles and makes water-stink
without thinking. She would curl into a tiny invisible ball
if she could, but the chains and the harness hold her in
place. All she can do is bark to let the panic out, over and
over until her throat hurts and the metal walls echo like
she is many.
Her coat reeks of the whiteplace-smells they rubbed
her down with before fastening her in the metal ball,
painful and numbing to sensitive nostrils. Little bits of
plastic are taped here and there, attached to long tails of
rubber that hum quietly with strange energy. They make
her nervous. Everything makes her nervous; she’s been
scared and panic-bitten almost since the day the catchmen put the noose around her neck. There’s always some
new terror crouched just beyond her reckoning, waiting to
spring in an unseen way.
It had begun with shining crates, slippery and cold-
smelling. The whitecoats spoke kindly to her, far gentler
than the rough-handed catch-men, and Laika wagged her
tail politely, resisting the urge to snap and bite at their
hands even when they shaved her fur and poked the bare
spots with stinging needles. The loss of Brother gnawed
all the fight from Laika. She let them drag her from cage
to progressively smaller cage without resistance, and they
patted her head and gave her a name and called her good
dog. She ignored the other crate-dwellers, even when they
screamed and wailed and flew at the bars as she was
tugged past, and the whitecoats said she was steady,
ignoring the way her limbs shivered and twitched.
Cages and spinning, noise and noise and noise. The
whirl-crate had been the worst, like being picked up by
the scruff and twirled around by a giant unseen hand. Old
food and stinks flew from both of her ends. The
whitecoats would pull her out, wash her off, scrabble
scratches onto their ever-present papers, and push her
back inside the thing to go again. It happened forever, for
what seemed like many forevers. The streets and breezes
and Brother vanished into the foggy places inside Laika’s
head, shadowlands where she couldn’t smell them to
follow.
She does not miss the whitecoats, the whirl-crate, or
the noises. She misses the blue blanket from her first
cage. She misses chasing pigeons with Brother, the
feeling of meat and bone crunching gristle-thick between
her teeth.
She dreams about the week one of the whitecoats took her
home to stay with his family, grass and blue sky and not a
cage in sight. The children scratched her ears and threw
sticks for her to bring back—it took her a while to
understand what they wanted—and at night she slept on a
towel in the kitchen-place beside the stove, breathing in
the smells of vegetables and stew. Laika knew it wouldn’t
last—she had snuffled the treachery before it even
rounded the corner—but a part of her yearned for it to go
on for as many forevers as it could. Like a puppy she
pretended it actually might, right up until they loaded her
back into the truck and drove to the waiting metal ball.
In her dreaming, the week never ends. On and on it
goes, and Brother is there too, to share the sticks and the
stew and the warm fingers scratching just so behind a
cocked ear.
The sun is bright against her face. The light chews the
tether of her sleep apart and then she’s suddenly awake
again. Realization creeps in like a mouse stealing kibble,
a slow prickling that moves in a wave from the tip of her
snout to her rising hackles. Confused as her senses are in
this place, Laika understands the feeling. It’s a familiar
one, an old packmate from her days at the whiteplace.
She is being watched.
The inside of the ball is filled with Laika and the
things that hold her down. If so much as a flea was hiding
within the tangle of wires and chains she would smell it,
sense the movement and the hunger and the tiny pulsing
life. When she left the world, nothing rode with her. Now
there is a definite something. A faint scent of burning that
does not come from the ball. Invisible eyes resting on her
head, taking in every sneeze and pant. Laika cannot see
whatever it is, but she has no need to. It’s there, waiting
in the shadows, content for now to merely observe.
Laika and Brother had occasionally come across
human-shapes with no smell, usually in abandoned
buildings or other forgotten corners of the city. Dogs, too.
Like echoes they were nothing but memories of memory,
old thoughts drifting smoke-thin through the damp
hallways and streets until a gust of wind blew them away.
Taking one’s scent seemed a cruel thing, for how could
one truly be without it? This is much the same, but not. It
has a smell. She can feel its thoughts bouncing through
the walls, plink-plink-plink, like the chirps of fluttering
bats.
The sensation grows. It gets bigger, and bigger, until
Laika’s head is pulsing with confusing ideas that are not
her own. Pictures of flame and white-hot light flash
behind her blinking eyelids. They drive everything else
out: Brother, the fear, all her memories of streets and
cages and needles and whitecoat-men shoving her
roughly into a tiny silver ball. Nothing remains but fire,
licking tongues of fire lapping at the darkness like thirsty
dogs. It consumes all that Laika is. She throws back her
head and lets out a howl, but to her ears it sounds like the
crackle and roar of a great blaze. The world is heat and
orange glow. Long-legged, four-legged shadows dance
and gallop through it, snapping and growling.
All at once, it pulls away. Laika is Laika again, alone
in the nothing. Her howl drops to a whimper. The feeling
withdraws, leaving her bewildered and mournful and
somehow even lonelier than before. She raises her muzzle
for a final cry, calling out to a pack that does not exist. It
comes from the very bottom of her, the she that resides in
her stomach and scent glands.
And from somewhere outside, there is an answer, and
a blossoming of white fire in the dark.
Light streams through the bubble-window. Laika
finally sees the watcher.
It’s a ball of dog-sized, dog-shaped flame and
headlamp-glare. Heat ripple crawls along its coat. Rays of
light jut ear-and-snout fashion from the place where a
head might be. Shadow-rimmed legs stretch down and
down into the nothing sky, paddling at the emptiness. It
flicks its fiery tail and swims closer to the box, so bright
Laika has to squint against the shine. The hairs on her
shoulders and neck bristle again, and a challenge-bark
tickles the back of her throat. Is it a predator? Some new
whitecoat-trick?
Who are you? Her bark asks. What pack do you run
with? Friend or foe? Come closer and I will bite you!
Even the stupidest puppy knows that snapping at fire is
foolish, but it’s the only defense Laika has. Speak! Speak
speak! Why are you here?
There’s a flash that leaves little dots of darkness
skimming across her eyes. When they clear, the dog-thing
has fled. The air smells like a fire, crackling somewhere
out of sight.
It’s almost too hot to breathe. The air burns Laika’s
insides and dries out her nose. She pants constantly, even
in her sleep. No summer she has ever known has been
this warm.
Her dreams mix with the awake-time. Noiseless,
scentless shapes appear and vanish, looking like great
leaping rats or fluttering birds or drifting blue lights.
Sometimes the walls of the ball fall away and she’s back
in the whitecoat’s kitchen with a dish of water that fades
to fog just as she bends her head to lap. Brother comes to
see her once—she knows it’s not really Brother, this
hollow-eyed, smell-less shadow, but she wants so much
to believe—and after that a whitecoat with the head of a
dead dog, flies buzzing around its dried gums. She
crouches and curls her lip and rattles a warning deep in
her throat until it goes again. Knowing the thing is a notcreature makes it no less terrifying. If anything, that
simply makes it more wrong.
When green fire blossoms across the ceiling and
walls, panic finally overwhelms sense, and Laika
screams. The harness pinches clumps of hair from her
shoulders. Tubes rip free and float around her like weeds
in a river. The flames roll into balls that skitter and spark
across her coat, bouncing without scorching, crawling all
over her in that same horrible way. She thrashes, froths at
the mouth, shrieks and howls and claws at her restraints,
a cloud of spittle and loose fur forming around her head.
Laika’s energy is blazing now, the urge to live tugging at
her muscles. Death is a lean and tireless wolf. If she stops
for a second it will catch her and tear the meat from her
flanks and belly.
Laika fights. She is braver than the whitecoats could
have ever guessed.
Two of the sun dogs now, peering through the window at
her with whitecoat curiosity. Laika can no longer focus.
Her brain is full of heat and humming insects, chewing
and scraping and buzz buzz buzzing. Thoughts drift by
like soap bubbles, impossible to hold onto. Each breath
flutters stale and shallow beneath her ribs. Lifting her lip
for a snarl would use more strength than she has left.
They are so bright, full of flickering life that ebbs and
flows and throbs. The warmth burning beneath her skin is
nothing compared to their glow. An idea cuts through her
fever: If she can touch them, reach them, communicate
with them somehow, maybe they will pull the heat away,
like a big fire pulling a little one within. Slowly,
painfully, against the crying out of her energy-sapped
body, Laika raises her head. She stretches her muzzle and
touches the glass with her nose.
And the brightness sucks her up, sight and hearing
and smell, and Laika knows nothing at all.
Everything she has grown accustomed to has vanished.
The wires and bags, the harnesses, even the silver ball
itself. All have gone in the nervous flick of a tongue.
Laika floats in a world of liquid fire, the heart of a great
orange sun. Her thoughts are clear now. The fear that
buried itself in her skin and fur like a fat burrowing tick is
dried up and dead, fallen off somewhere with the rest of
the whitecoat things.
She can smell heat, and burning, but it’s like paddling
through warm water, not uncomfortable at all. A lowpitched sound like many throats singing to the moon
hums just within reach of her hearing, endless variations
on a harmonious theme. It vibrates deep inside her bones
and makes her want to sing along. She wonders what sort
of pack lives here to create such songs.
The sun dogs appear in flashes of white and yellow to
either side of her. Laika barely has time to yelp before
images flood over her, playing through her head like
awake-dreams. Suns with pointed muzzles howling a
joyful welcome, spewing great flames into the dark.
Fields of glowing lights, singing songs of the beginning
of the world. The sound she hears is the sun itself baying,
accompanied by its many brothers and sisters.
The two are speaking to her, not in the muttered
groans of humans, but in the language of her own kind,
pictures and thoughts and bits of sense-memory. They
send polite images of sniffing and tail-wagging, simple
things she can understand. Laika hesitantly returns the
gesture and the sun dogs act pleased, jumping about and
play-bowing like sunbeams on a wall.
A mystery: How, one asks, did Laika arrive where
they found her, drifting alone in a silver ball no bigger
than a rock? Was there some purpose to it, some motive
she had in mind when first starting out into the nothing?
Can they help her reach the place she was going? The
worlds the sun dog shows her are confusing jumbles that
make no sense to her. The colors and sounds are all
wrong, the creatures that live on them fearful and strange
beyond smell or any other sensation Laika knows. She
shrinks away and the pictures stop. The sun dogs pause
courteously, waiting for her to gather the strewn bits of
her own memory into something she can exchange.
Laika answers as best she can. City streets: wet, gray,
bursting with smells and the noises of gulls and pigeons
and people. Brother: shaggy black warmth and the gleam
of long white fangs, big and solid and curled around her
like a mother protecting a pup. The whiteplace: clean
reek, fear reek, cold reek, as close to a nothing-smell as
the whitecoats could manage. The whitecoats themselves,
difficult to understand as any other world the sun dog
showed her.
Tiny, cramped spaces. Shaking and roaring, pressure
building in her ears until she cried out in pain and panic.
No more grass, no more sun, no more blue sky. If there is
a why to any of this, Laika cannot understand it. She
gives the sun dogs everything she knows and waits to see
if they have answers.
Long moments pad by. Reading the body language of
the strangers is difficult, but their sudden silence and
stillness make Laika afraid she has offended them
somehow. Is something wrong? Will they open their
bright teeth and toss her like she’s shaken so many rats?
She tries to send apologetic pictures of bared bellies and
tucked tails. They quickly reassure her that it is not her
own actions that bother them, but the ones who sent her
there in the first place. Their thoughts now are black and
red bursts of confusion and anger, smoldering like coals.
Something like a conversation passes between the two,
and a decision is made.
The sun dogs present Laika with something she has
not had in many forevers. They offer her choice.
If revenge is what she wishes, they will punish the
whitecoats for their misdeeds. They will take everything
from the humans—sight, hearing, even their smell—and
leave them stumbling alone in darkness, scentless
nothings not even a sharp-nosed hound could track. The
marrow they gnaw from bones will taste like fog. The
chirping of birds and mice and the trickle of clear water
will go unheard. If they roll in carrion, the smell will drift
right off their hairless skins. All Laika has to do is ask.
They can give her freedom, too. She will sing the
forever-songs alongside them, endless and happy, bright
as the sun that once hung in the sky. Her old body will
burst into cinders like a log exploding in a blaze, all
flame-crackle and burn smell, and the new one that
emerges will be fiery, with great flaming wings to carry
her wherever she pleases. Laika will have a pack. Brother
is lost to her, but she need never be lonely again. There
are new trails to follow, new sights to see and sniff and
chase, new worlds she needn’t be afraid of. All she has to
do is wish it so and it will be, as sudden as weeds
burning.
Or they could simply send her home. Alone, of
course, but back in her world, some place the whitecoats
will never find her. Dirt between her toes, frost on her
whiskers, and all of this nothing more than a terrible
nightmare. All Laika has to do is think the thought.
She considers each in its turn, rolling them over inside
her head like a crow with a nut. She gnaws at the marrow
of them. But what Laika finally chooses is none of these
things. Instead, she sends back an old dream: green grass,
a warm kitchen smelling of stew and root vegetables, and
Brother stretched out beside her, happy and safe on a
battered blue blanket.
© 2012 Brooke Bolander
Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate
employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest
regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from
2004 to 2007, studying History and Archaeology, and is a graduate of the
2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty
scotch, drawings that move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might
happen to have on hand. Her short fiction has previously appeared in
Reflection’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed.
The Last Supper
By Scott Edelman
Walter’s mind was at one time rich with emotions other
than hunger, but those feelings had long since fallen
away. They’d dropped from his being like the flesh, now
absent, which had once kept the wind from whistling
through his cheeks. He remembered those inner tides but
vaguely, for he lived in the eternal present, with barely a
shred of memory left in which to contain them.
Gone was happiness. Gone greed. Gone anger and
love and joy.
Elusive traces of those emotions flickered across the
playground of his mind, flitting like small children ripe to
be plucked and eaten. Whenever he reached for one of
them, tried to grasp it firmly, the sensation escaped,
wriggling to nothingness like a dream forgotten upon
waking. They all escaped, each fleeing in turn, until only
one emotion remained.
Not fear. Not passion. Not jealousy.
Now there was but hunger, and hunger only.
As Walter, his joints as stiff as his brain, staggered
through the deserted streets of what had just recently been
one of the most heavily populated cities in the world,
hunger burned through him until it became his entire
reason for being.
At first, hunger had not been an issue for him, or for
any of the others. During the early weeks of his rebirth,
there had been enough food for all. The streets had
teemed with meat. The survivors hadn’t all evacuated at
once, and so there were always plenty of the foolish
lingering, which meant that he had little competition for
the hunt. Those first weeks of his renewed time on Earth
had been about as easy as that of a bear smacking salmon
skyward from a boiling river during spawning season.
Those days were gone. Now there was not even a faint
whiff of food left to tease him from a distance. The streets
were filled with an army of the hungry and no others,
devourers who no longer had objects of desire upon
which to fulfill their single purpose.
His undead brothers and sisters were for the most part
invisible to him as he stumbled along streets devoid of
life. His senses tingled as he moved, his bloodlust
hopeful, waiting to be tickled by even the most subtle clue
of life. But none came. For weeks, or maybe months, or
perhaps even years—for his sense of time had been
burned away along with most of his sense of self—
walking the streets was akin to wandering through a
maze of mirrors and seeing reflected back nothing more
than duplicates of who he was, of what he had become—
a bag of soiled clothing and shredded flesh, animated by a
dead, dead soul. His empty vessel was multiplied there
almost beyond counting.
Staggering through a deserted square that lay in the
former heart of the city, stumbling by shattered storefronts
and overturned buses, he sought out flesh with a hunger
grown so strong that it was less a conscious thought than
a tropism born out of whatever affliction had brought him
and the rest of the human race to this state. His senses,
torn and ragged though they were, radiated out in search
of fresh meat, as they had every day since he had been
reborn.
Nothing.
No scent filled his sunken nose, no sound his
remaining ear. If he’d still had a consciousness capable of
depression, he would have long ago sunk into despair, but
he had already sunk as far as any former human should be
allowed to go. So instead, he kept surging forward,
sweeping the city, borne out of a hunger beyond thought.
Until this day, when what was left of his tongue began to
salivate.
Blood. Somewhere out there was blood. Something
with a pulse still radiated life nearby.
Whatever called to him was barely alive itself, and
hidden, and quiet, but from its refuge its essence called
out to him like a shout. Drawn by the vibrations of its life
force, he turned from the square onto a broad avenue and
then onto a narrow side street, knocking aside any
barriers blocking the path to his blood—his blood now.
He righted an overturned trashcan (but his promised meal
was not hidden there), kicked up soot as he walked
through the remnants of an ancient bonfire (but no,
nothing there, either), and kept moving forward like that
until he arrived at a large black car flipped over on one
side against a light pole, its roof split open.
He pushed his way through the carpet of broken glass
and peered down into what remained of the driver’s side
door. He touched the steering wheel and a charge of
energizing bloodlust coursed through him. Though the
wheel’s leather skin had long ago been peeled away, he
could feel the blood that had blossomed there right after
impact, still feel the throbbing of its vanished presence.
But he knew, if he could be said to know anything, that
ghostly blood could not alone have been the call that he
had heard, for after all the carnal scavenging that had
occurred, any remnants of the accident could not possibly
exist by now, even on a subatomic level. It had to be more
than that. Something was here, waiting for him. Or hiding
from him.
In the back of the tilted car, something rustled under
shredded remnants of seat stuffing. From beneath the
mound of makeshift bedding, confused eyes peered out at
him. Walter filled with a surge of lust, and dropped atop
the creature. A dog yelped—only a dog, and not a man, a
man whose scream would strengthen him—and exploded
into frantic wriggling, but there was no way the animal
could get away from the steel cage of Walter’s hands.
Seeing the nature of his victim’s species, the lust was
gone. There was no longer anything appealing about this
prey.
But his hunger remained.
The dog whimpered as Walter shifted his fingers to
surround its neck and cradle its head in his hands. Its
bright eyes pleaded and teased, but Walter had learned
that the promise of satiation there was pointless. He
slowly tightened his grip anyway, and the animal split in
two, its head popping off to drop at his feet. He held the
oozing neck up to his lips, and drank.
The blood was warm. The blood was salty.
The blood was useless.
His hunger still raged, his needs unsatisfied. What he
required could only be provided by the blood of human,
and not animal, intelligence. He let the dog fall, where it
was immediately forgotten. There had to be something
more still left on the face of the Earth. He moved on,
clumsy but determined, his hunger once more an allconsuming creature. It wasn’t that he needed that flesh to
live. Its presence in his leaky stomach was never what
powered him. The strength of his desire was unrelated to
any practical end.
He hungered, and so he needed to hunt. That was
what he did. That was what he was.
He returned to endless days and nights spent walking
the length and breadth of his island, but his prowling
proved useless. Though he sniffed out the useless life of
other dogs, and rats, and the last few surviving animals
that had somehow not yet starved to death unfed at the
zoo, nothing human called to him. The city was empty.
There were no humans left.
One day, much later, he paused in the harbor, and
looked west towards the rest of his country, a nation that
he had never seen in life. He listened for the call of
something faint and distant, waited as the evidence of his
senses washed over him. In an earlier time, he would
have closed his eyes to focus, but his eyes no longer had
lids to close.
The static of the city’s life, quivering nearby, no
longer rose up to distract him. There was no longer a
close cacophony muffling him from the rest of the
continent, just a few remaining notes vibrating out from
points west. He began to walk towards them, pulled by
the memory of flesh.
He dragged his creaking body along the shoreline
until he came to a bridge, and then he crossed it, picking
his way past snapped cables, overturned cars, and rifts
through which could be seen the raging river below. He
had no map, and needed none, any more than a baby
needed a map to her mother’s breast, or a flower needed a
map to the sun.
Concrete canyons gave way to ones born of rock, and
time passed, light and dark dancing to change places as
they had since the beginning of time, though he did not
number the days they marked. The count did not matter.
What mattered was that the sounds he heard, the stray
pulsings in the distance, increased in volume.
His trek was not an easy one. He was used to concrete
jungles, not the forest primeval, and yet that is where he
was forced to travel, for life, if it wanted to stay alive,
stayed far from highways as well. As he slipped on wet
leaves and tumbled over fallen logs, he could feel an
occasional beacon of information snuffed out, as another
life was silenced, another slab of meat digested. Walter
was not the only one on the prowl, and somehow he knew
that if he did not hurry, the hunt would soon be over for
him forever. As weeks passed, he could hear what had
once been a constant chorus diminish into a plaintive
solo. As Walter could pick out no other competing
chorus, perhaps it was the final solo.
Its pull grew stronger and stronger, and the flames of
its sensations flickered higher, rubbing his desire raw, he
moved even more quickly, stumbling lamely through a
hilly forest.
Until one stumble became more than just a stumble.
His ankle caught on an exposed root, and he then felt
himself falling. He fell against what appeared to be a
carpet of leaves, which exploded and scattered when he
hit them, allowing him to fall some more.
From the bottom of a well twice his height, he looked
up to a small patch of sky, and saw the first face in an
eternity that was, amazingly, not like looking in a mirror.
The flesh of the man’s face was pink and red, and puffs of
steam came from his lips as he breathed.
Then those lips, surrounded by a beard, moved, and a
rough voice, grown unused to forming the sounds of
human speech, said wearily, “Hello.”
Walter had not heard another’s voice in a long while,
and that last time it had been molded in a scream.
Seeing the man up there, looking smug and seeming
to feel himself safe, filled Walter with rage—the first time
in ages anything but pure hunger filled him. He slammed
his fists wildly against the muddy walls of his hole,
unconsciously seeking a handhold that could bring him to
the waiting feast above, but there was nothing he could
grasp. As he struggled to beat out grips with which to
climb, his flesh grew flayed against sharp stones and
splintered roots, yet he did not tire. He would have gone
on forever like that, a furious engine of need, had not the
man above begun dropping further words to him down
below. They were not frightened words or angry words or
begging words, the only sort that Walter was lately used
to hearing, so their tone confused him. He wasn’t sure
what kind of words they were, and so he paused in his
fury to listen.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the man, his head
and shoulders taunting Walter in the slice of sky above.
“We have a lot to talk about, you and I. Well . . .
actually . . . I have a lot to talk about. All you have to do
is listen. Which is good, because I have learned from
others of your kind that all you are capable of doing is
listening, and barely that.”
The man extended his arm over the hole. He rolled up
his left sleeve, and then used his right hand to remove a
large knife from a scabbard strapped to one thigh.
“This should help you to listen,” he said.
Walter could understand none of the words. But even
he understood what happened next. The blade sliced the
flesh of the man’s inner forearm, and bright blood flowed
across his skin, spilled into the crook of his elbow, and
then dripped in free fall. At the bottom of the pit, Walter
tilted his head back like a man celebrating a spring rain,
the stiff muscles in his neck creaking from the effort. He
caught the short stream of drops on the back of his
shredded throat.
“That’s all I can spare you for now,” the man said,
pressing gauze against his voluntary wound and rolling
back down his sleeve. “But then, you don’t like to hear
that, do you?”
Walter had no idea what he liked or didn’t like to
hear. All he knew was the hunger. That brief taste had
caused it to surge, multiplying the pain and power of his
desire. He roared, flailing wildly at the walls of his
prison.
“If you can only shut up,” said the man, “you’ll get
more. We need to come to an agreement, and then, only
then, there’ll be more. Can you understand that?”
Walter responded by throwing himself against the
earthen walls of his narrow prison, but his response
gained him nothing. As he battered his fists against the
side of the pit, three of his fingers snapped off and
dropped to the uneven floor. As he struggled more
franticly, his body parts were ground beneath his feet like
fat worms.
“This isn’t going to work,” muttered the man above,
who began to weep. “I must have gone mad.”
He crumpled back out of Walter’s field of vision.
Though he could still sense the brimming bag of meat
above, its disappearance from his line of sight lowered
Walter’s rage, and he subsided slightly. His hunger still
overwhelmed him, but he was no longer overwhelmed by
the mindless urge to flail. He howled without ceasing at
the changing clouds above, at the sun, and at the moon,
until his captor reappeared, suddenly to him, and sat on
the lip of the hole. The man let his feet dangle over the
edge. Walter leapt as high as his dusty muscles would let
him, and tried to snatch the man’s heels, but he could not
reach them. He tried once again, still falling short. The
man snorted. Or laughed. Or cried. Walter couldn’t quite
tell which.
“You can’t kill me,” the man said, peering down
through his knees. “Well, you can, but you shouldn’t.
Because once you kill me, it might be all over. Can you
understand that? It’s been years since I saw another
human being. Do you realize that? I may be it.”
Walter growled in response, and continued to batter
himself against the sides of his prison.
“Damn,” cried the man. “What do I have to do to get
your attention?”
Walter saw him bring out the knife again. The man
looked at the line on his arm that had now become a long,
thin scab, and then to down below, where Walter’s shed
fingers were getting crushed. The man shook his head,
and then pulled his upper body back so that all Walter
could see were dangling feet.
“This time,” the man said, “I’ve got to do whatever it
takes.”
Then Walter heard a dull thud, one accompanied by a
sharp intake of breath and a visible jerking of the man’s
legs. When the man leaned forward again, a handkerchief
was wrapped around one hand. He used his good hand to
dangle a bloody finger out over the pit.
“Listen to me now,” the man said. Walter stared at
the digit, frozen. “I may be your last meal for the rest of
your eternal life. I may be the last human left on earth.
Try to get that through your undead head.”
Then the man let the finger drop.
Walter leapt and caught it in midair. He had it in his
mouth before his feet hit the ground. He chewed so
fiercely that he ate his lips away, and many of his teeth
popped from their sockets. If the man were continuing to
speak, Walter would never have known it, as the sounds
of his feasting as he attacked his small snack echoed
deafeningly. Silence did not return until after the digit
was devoured, and only then did Walter look skyward
again.
“I want to live,” said the man. “I don’t want this to be
the end of the human race. We have to make some sort of
peace, you and I. We have to reach some sort of an
agreement. That’s why I moved out here and filled these
hills with pits like this one. I knew that your kind would
eventually sweep out from the cities and find me even
here in the middle of nowhere, and I wanted to be ready
for you.
“You have to tell the others. You have to let them
know. Know that I’m the last. That if you just pluck me
off the face of the earth, there will be nothing left, only
eternal hunger. Is that something you can understand? Is
that something you can communicate to the others? If so,
that way they’ll let me live. They’ll let the human race
live.”
What the man said was meaningless, for Walter was
for the most part beyond words. He knew the word
hunger, though, plucking it from the forest of words that
were being dropped on him. But that was about it. He
could not perceive the man’s message, could not possibly
pass it on to others, for as far as his consciousness
allowed, even if it were capable of containing such a
message, there were no others. There was only Walter,
Walter below and his food above—and the food was not
getting any closer.
The man pulled his legs up from the hole, and for a
moment it looked to Walter as if he was leaving, but
instead, there was another sudden thud. Then the man
poked his head over the lip, even closer this time, for
instead of sitting on the lip, the man was laying on his
stomach peering down. Then the man brought his hands
around to show another dangling finger to Walter. Walter
leapt, fruitlessly, as he waited for the flesh to be dropped.
“I can see that this is the only thing you will
understand. Do you see now? If you eat me, then it will
all be over. Eternal hunger, with nothing more ever
waiting at the other end to quench it. But if we can make
a deal, I can help you feed for a long, long time. I can give
you blood for a long, long while, and even some flesh
from time to time.”
The man dropped his finger, and this time, Walter
caught it directly in his mouth. His teeth began crunching
on it immediately, but unlike before, he did not take his
eyes off his captor. Walter looked up at the blood soaking
through the handkerchief in the man’s other hand. The
man noticed Walter’s gaze, and loosened the cloth. He
dangled his damaged hand down into the pit, and shook
it. The handkerchief unwrapped slowly and dropped
softly down. Walter caught it and tossed it into his mouth.
He sucked on the blooming stain, the corners of the
handkerchief hanging out of his mouth and down his
chin.
“Do we have a deal?” asked the man. His eyes were
wide, and he was so caught up in his hope that he did not
immediately pull back his extended hand. Filled with lust
at the sight of the wet wounds inflicted there, Walter ran
to the wall and leapt up towards them, wedging his feet in
the wet mud of the pit wall before the man could yank
himself back. Walter’s remaining fingers locked around
the man’s remaining finger, and with his dead weight,
Walter started pulling the man, sliding him forward so
that more of his body hung over the edge.
“No!” shouted the man. “I’m the last man on Earth!
You can’t do this! Without me, you’ll have nothing!
Don’t you understand?”
But Walter did not understand, not really, and his
screaming and scrambling did little to slow his descent
into the hole. Walter pulled him down mercilessly—for
he had no mercy, only hunger—and at last, after far too
long, the hunger was allowed to run free. Walter began
with the man’s lips, silencing the urgent pleas, and then
he gnawed his way deep into the man’s chest, cracking
his ribs and burrowing into his heart. Walter’s face grew
slick with blood as he gorged himself. It had been far too
long since he had fed this well, and even though he
remained trapped at the bottom of a pit, he had no space
for tomorrow, no thought of saving anything aside for a
future day. He savored the flesh and sucked the bones,
and then . . . then it was all gone much too soon.
Momentarily sated, Walter looked up at clouds,
sniffing out the universe. He listened for the pulse of the
planet, and discovered in that instant that his jailor had
been correct, though as he had not understood the
meaning of what the man had been babbling to him, he
did not in fact realize that was what he was doing. But
indeed, there was no other movement of blood in the
world. No others were left.
All that existed for Walter now was a few square feet
of ground, his dirt wall, and the sky above. Time passed.
Walter could not say whether it passed quickly or slowly,
as he had no true conception of time, just the fact that the
opening above regularly darkened and lightened again.
During the days, his view was occasionally altered by a
bird flitting by, and at night there was the occasional flash
of a falling star. Hunger returned and was his constant
companion, but there was no longer any point in raging.
Mud and leaves and the detritus of time slowly filled
the spot where he stood. As he paced from side to side, he
rose a little each day, so gradual as to be almost
imperceptible. He did not realize what was happening
until enough time had passed that he was finally high
enough to peer over the lip. He pulled himself up to the
surface and stood seeing the whole world again for the
first time in ages, rather than just a tunnel-vision picture
of the sky . . . and the difference didn’t really matter to
him. For whether he was trapped in a hole or free on land
again, nothing had changed. His only companion for now
and forever more was his hunger, and since he could no
longer smell anything out there with which to quench it,
since the world was now a dead beast inhabited only by
others of his kind, it mattered little where he spent the rest
of eternity.
Strangely, the sky seemed filled with falling stars.
And yet, they did not behave the way such things were
meant to behave. Instead of vanishing out quickly as had
the living human race, the bright spots criss-crossed the
sky like embers that refused to die. During the day, the
stars still shone, another anomaly he no longer had the
brain power to consider. Walter moved on without a
destination.
He wandered the world aimlessly, but only until he
noticed that the stars themselves were no longer moving
aimlessly. The stars were on the move in a purposeful
manner, and as he gazed into the sky, he knew where they
were heading. With the memory of the last man on Earth
forever branded on his lips, he followed the path they
made, moving back east across a country that was
continuing to crumble, that was transforming from
civilization into debris.
The bridge into the city, when he saw it again after
what had been hundreds of years, had collapsed into the
river. He had to pick his way over floating rubble, still
bound together by cables, to move from shore to shore. He
walked the city streets once more, continuing to watch the
sky. When so many stars filled the sky that it seemed
impossible to fit any more, their trajectories shifted. When
night fell this time, Walter could make out more clearly
that they were carving concentric circles in the sky. He
walked beneath the heart of them, his hunger positioning
him there. Others of his kind joined him.
As he watched, a single star began to drop, pulling
itself away from the carefully choreographed dance in the
sky, becoming more than just a speck, gaining dimension
as it fell. By the time it reached the buckled pavement on
which Walter stood, it had grown into a globe several
stories high. The fact that it floated there, sprouting legs
on which it came to rest, had no effect on Walter. He
sensed only dead machinery, and felt nothing, not even
curiosity. When the outlines of a door appeared and then
opened, that all changed. As a walkway eased its way out
from the opening to touch the ground, Walter could feel
again that old familiar tingling which had been missing
for so long.
A tall, attenuated creature walked down the ramp, its
two arms and two legs garbed in a soft silver, and stepped
into what for it was a new world.
“Hello,” it said, in a voice unused to forming the
sounds of human speech. “We have traveled a long way
in search of our ancient cousins.”
It removed a helmet from its head, revealing a face
which, though off in its proportions, contained all the
right elements—eyes, nose, mouth and so on—that
signified humanity. It held a slender hand out toward the
crowd in a gesture of peace. Walter, enticed by those thin,
outstretched fingers, rushed forward. He would have
laughed had he still been capable of laughter.
The human race that we know may have ended.
Centuries may have passed.
But flesh—the yearning for flesh, the flavor of flesh,
the incomparable power of flesh—that was eternal.
© 2003 by Scott Edelman.
Originally published in The Book of Final Flesh, edited by James Lowder.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Scott Edelman has published more than 75 short stories in magazines such
as The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, Science Fiction Review and
Fantasy Book, and in anthologies such as The Solaris Book of New Science
Fiction, Crossroads, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars
Probes, Forbidden Planets. His many zombie stories have been collected in
What Will Come After, while his science fiction can be found in What We
Still Talk About. He has been a Stoker Award finalist five times, in the
categories of both Short Story and Long Fiction. Additionally, Edelman
currently works for the Syfy Channel as the Editor of Blastr. He was the
founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire
eight-year run. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.
His next short story after this one will be published in the anthology The
Monkey's Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead from
NonStop Press.
The Seven Samovars
Peter Sursi
“The first samovar, the silver one at the end with the little
bird perched atop the key, is filled to the top with Life,”
she says, “freshly brewed each morning at sunrise
exactly. A few drops will perk up most customers on a
Monday morning, to be sure. And most of them need it,
don’t you think?”
This is what she tells me—the owner of The Seven
Samovars—when I arrive at work the first morning. I
gape at her. Something like that is way more than a girl
can take this early in the morning.
“Just a few drops, mind. A full cup . . . well, a full
cup can convince the weary soul ready to close the door
and lie down that final time that perhaps there’s a little
something left to discover. You will not need so much
very often. The last time I served a full cup was nearly . . .
two years ago, now, it must be. David: small coffee,
black, every morning with his wife, Judith: large
chamomile tea with a spoon of raspberry jam. That’s the
Russian way to take tea: a spoonful of jam in the tea
instead of sugar.
“Every morning for three years they come in. Every
morning but the Sabbath, of course. Very proper. We say
hello and they sit and read the paper. Together, always
together. They came here to live with their son, Paul:
large latte, extra cream with a shot of hazelnut syrup.
They survived the war, you know. He was a watchmaker,
and they got out of Europe in time, but most of their
family was long gone. Anyway, three years, nearly every
morning, always together. And then one day, two days,
three days, nothing. The fourth day, David’s here by
himself. What happened, I ask? It’s a stroke, he says.
Doctor’s not sure if she’ll wake or if she does, how much
of her will be left.
“He stands there, then. The line is out the door, but
he’s so lost. Small coffee, black. Every day for three
years, but he can’t remember. She always ordered first,
you see. So I give him a cup. Full. And you’d have done
the same, I’m sure. You can just tell who needs it. I made
him drink it right there, never mind the rest of the line.
“And he finished his cup and handed it back to me.
He stood a little taller, and got his regular. Small coffee,
black. And he asked for one more of those “fancy drinks”
I’d just given him. He was going to take it to the hospital
for his wife, and see if the smell might not just bring her
around.
“A solid recovery. That’s what the doctor said, David
told me, ‘a solid recovery,’ which made us both laugh.
‘What do doctors know anyway,’ he said. Within a week,
they were back to the same old routine, and two years
more she lived. They died on the same day, then, in
Paul’s house.
“So, you see, you will not need a full cup of life very
often, but you will know when it is time.”
It must be the early morning hour because I say
nothing. What on Earth can I say? I met Erzebet—“Call
me Betty, dear”—yesterday when I came in for a coffee
and saw the Help Wanted sign sitting next to the
shortbread. I look askance at her as she’s tying her apron
on, as if the words coming out of her mouth were normal
everyday things and not the words of a crazy person. And
there’s no way I’m calling her “Betty.”
Now we’re standing in front of the eponymous
samovars, which sit on the long counter behind the
register alongside the modern espresso machine. I’d only
even seen the antique water boilers in museums before.
Each has an elaborate urn that sits atop a small stand
with just enough room to place a cup beneath the spigot.
Two are silver, three are brass, one is white and blue
porcelain, and the one in the center is enameled, painted
black with red and pink flowers. I’m pleasantly surprised
the samovars are in use, though they don’t look electric.
When I walked in yesterday I’d thought they were only
decorative.
And now I find out she thinks . . . I don’t know what
to think about what she just said. I look back at the front
door. No. Leaving now would be a record even for me—
gone before the store even opened. And the morning
started out so well. I was familiar with the burr grinder
and the espresso machine from my previous place of
employment, so I’d been on auto-pilot for the first few
minutes, her gentle patter nearly lulling me back to sleep
with its coffee shop familiarity.
“Cream, milk, and soy here. There’s a rush at 2:45
every day as the high school across the street lets out and
another at 4:30 as the lawyers get ready for their late
nights. Let me show you how to ring up a sale. The baker,
my brother, Sandor . . .” She gestures to the tall man with
the brush mustache, setting kolaches and blueberry
scones on the wooden boards inside the display case, and
lowers her voice to continue. “He comes in at three every
morning to begin baking the pastries. He also lays them
out in the counter.” She rolls her eyes. “Let him do it.
He’s an artist and very particular.”
I look over at her brother. He obviously heard her, but
says nothing. He’s putting pain au chocolat on a tiered
stand, and looks at the display for a few seconds before
deliberately placing each subsequent pastry.
All normal. And then, wham. The waters of life or
whatever she thinks is inside the samovar. For sale with
your morning muffin.
Erzebet moves further down the counter. I gather my
wits and try to pay attention. Watching her dive headfirst
into crazy will at least make for a few good stories later at
the bar.
“The second one, right here, contains the waters of
Lethe.” This samovar is brass and shaped like a fat little
barrel on its side, standing on a small base worked to
look like a chicken’s foot. The spigot and key are a
golden beak and cock’s comb. She turns to me with a
concerned and questioning look on her face. “You know
that one, yes?”
I realize with some surprise that I do. “Um . . . the
River of Forgetfulness, right?” Thanks Edith Hamilton,
wherever you are.
She beams and pats me on the arm. “It’s nice to meet
a girl who has her classics down. A lot of use you’ll get
from that later.” She turns back to the samovar. “I get a
gallon delivered every two weeks—I’m too old now to be
traipsing down there and back again that often—but I do
doctor it up a little. Very dangerous in excess, as you
might imagine, but just the thing for the wounded soul
who needs a little distance.”
She gestures to the set of mismatched teacups and
saucers that cluster around the samovar’s foot. “To be
served in bone china for utmost potency, but . . .” and
here she points at me with a sharp look. “They must be
triple rinsed after or there’s hell to pay.
“The previous girl, Antigone—five shots of vanilla
syrup in a small coffee with extra whipped cream—I
should have known right then that it would never work
out. She forgot and only ran them through the sterilizer
twice, even though I had been very specific. And that
afternoon, we had the ladies of the Scarlet Hat Society for
their monthly tea.
“They want the whole proper set up. Scones with sour
cherry jam and clotted cream. I get Sandor to do them
some sandwiches—which he complains about, doesn’t
he, every month, but they keep getting fancier, as if I can’t
see. Last month, it was salmon mousse piped onto
pumpernickel squares with a dill crème fraîche.” She
pauses for a second to peek over at her brother, still
fussing with the display. “Dill crème fraîche, I tell you.”
She shakes her head. “And then in the middle of the tea,
Dorcas Littlefield, normally a tall, nonfat latte with
soymilk—but Lapsang Souchong with lemon that day—
drops her cup with a clatter, jumps up and whirls around,
staring at the group.
“‘What am I doing here? Where’s Charlie?’ she asks.
That was her husband—coffee with a little milk only, if I
recall, which I’m sure I do, though nearly twenty years
now he’s been dead. And then she pulls the hat off her
head and looks down at herself in that—I’ll say it—rather
unflattering purple dress that was cut too low for her and
she should have known it; she looks at herself and shouts
out—and please excuse my language dear, but the story
requires it—she shouts out ‘And what the fuck am I
wearing?’ and throws that scarlet tragedy of a hat onto the
floor.
“Well . . . you can imagine, I’m sure, what happened
then. Tears and shouting, gasps of horror. You’ve seen
the sort. The sandwiches ended up on the floor and I lost
three teacups and a saucer. The other ladies calmed her
down and called her daughter, but done was done. The
last twenty years, nearly all gone. Her children, her
husband’s death, the birth of her first grandson. A terrible
tragedy, really, and all because that fool girl couldn’t be
bothered to hit ‘Sani-Rinse’ one more time.”
I stop moving after her and stand frozen at the corner
of the counter and Loony Bin Lane. Holy shit, this woman
is nuts. Her brother is back in the kitchen, but he must
hear the sound of my jaw hitting the floor because he
sticks his head through the door. “Erzebet, enough.” She
looks at him and frowns, annoyed.
“Yes, yes, Sandor. I know.” She reaches out and takes
a clear glass mug from the open shelf nearby, and fills it
from the third samovar, the porcelain one, white with
large blue flowers painted on. The liquid is thick like
kefir as it flows from the small golden faucet. When she
hands it to me, I hesitate. I briefly consider that she might
be poisoning me, but, then again, The Seven Samovars
had been packed yesterday when I came in and poisoning
customers (and staff) was surely bad for business.
Erzebet waits, patiently, until, at last, I bring it to my
mouth and take a tentative sip. It’s pale gold, cool and
delicious, redolent of apples and something else.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It makes people tell the truth,” she says, suddenly
serious. “It is the most terrible of my offerings.” She takes
the cup out of my hands before I can take another sip.
“That’s enough, then. How do you feel?”
I think about it. “Weirdly calm,” I say, and realize it
is, in fact, the truth. She hands me a poppy seed kolache
and I eat it in two bites.
“And what are you thinking of me right now?”
My mouth opens before I can think. “That you must
be crazy, with all this talk of Life and Lethe and
whatever’s in those other ones, but your brother makes
great pastries, and I really need this job because I got
fired from my temp job yesterday. It smells really good in
here, and I think I’m starting to believe that whatever that
is I drank really does make people tell the truth, since I
never talk like this and it makes me wonder what’s in the
other ones and if this whole thing is for real.”
I take a deep breath and feel like I’ve finished a short
sprint. Huh. Maybe not so crazy after all.
Erzebet nods and puts the cup under the counter in a
dishpan bound for the kitchen. “That’s about what I
expected.” She smiles. “I told Sandor you’d do fine. I
knew as soon as you ordered yesterday. Large coffee, one
sugar, with a small splash of milk. A sensible drink for a
sensible mind. A little rich, a little sweet, but not trying to
hide that solid bitterness underneath. Perfect for what I
had in mind.”
What did she have in mind? But again, she’s talking
before I can ask my question.
“Well, let’s continue. We have a bit more to cover
before the shop opens.”
We’re now at the center of the counter and the black
samovar sits low and squat, like it’s somehow guarding
the others and being guarded by them at the same time.
Hand-painted with peonies and chrysanthemums in
shocking shades of pink and red, they draw the eye into
swirls of petals and ruffled edges. It sits on little brass
feet inside a matching tray with an ornate bowl worked
like a large leaf set beneath the tap.
“It looks Russian,” I say, since I have to tell the truth.
But the truth, I realize at this point, is that I have no idea
why I’m still here listening to all this. But I am, and I
don’t seem to be going anywhere. What has my life come
to that I am considering staying here?
Erzebet laughs. I have surprised her. “Yes, it is
Russian. Very good. It belonged to Maria Feodorovna,
mother of the last Tsar. A distant relative by marriage to a
cousin of mine.” She makes a small expression of
distaste, but I can’t tell if it’s for the Tsarina or her
cousin.
“Starlight goes in this one. You must collect it only on
cold, clear nights. It is to be boiled down for seven hours,
seven minutes, and seven seconds exactly. Drinking it
produces dreams and visions for when a person needs that
sort of thing.
“We have a group of Moroccans who come in every
other Thursday to argue about the Qur’an and poetry and
drink hot mint tea. They tell me that my mint tea is the
best outside Rabat, and ask how I do it, which I never tell
them, but the secret is two sprigs of lemon verbena and
one of basil mixed in with the mint. I grow all three in
golden pots sitting in my kitchen window; facing east, of
course.
“Adil Ali Boulami—espresso with five sugars when
it’s not mint tea—he is the main instigator of their
arguments. I give him the starlight quite often. His
grandfather was a Sufi mystic and Adil Ali has a power
of his own. His poetry demands the starlight, even if the
others don’t believe me when I tell them what I’m
pouring into his glass. People don’t always get what they
want in their dreams—I’m sure you understand—but
poets . . . they are always pulling out their dreams to
capture on paper, so they are not afraid.
“But . . .” She holds up a finger in warning. “You
must never serve it during the dark of the moon, even to
the poets.” She shudders. “Some doors must stay closed.”
Something about the way she says this freaks the hell
out of me and I find myself promising not to before we
move on.
“I keep Death in the fifth samovar,” she says,
gesturing to the other silver one, the tallest and most
complicated of them all. It takes me a few seconds to
absorb her words and I must have made a sound without
realizing it because she nods and continues.
“Yes, dear, Death. Poison, really.” She sighs. “No
matter what the spy novels say, it’s nearly impossible to
create something colorless, odorless, tasteless, and
untraceable, yet completely lethal, but I keep trying. At
the moment, ours tastes like pink lemonade. I place an
almond on the plate beneath the tap to remind myself not
to give it out to children at tea.”
Holy crap. Wrong turn. Poison? Can she be serious?
“You can’t be . . .” I trail off at the look on her face.
“Oh, I’m very serious, dear. Some come here for my
Death specifically. I’m well known for it. Gentle and
sure, Erzebet’s Death is; that’s what they all say.
Sometimes that’s the way you want it, though you’re
probably too young to have such thoughts. Wait until
you’re my age.”
She brightens. “But Death is the most useful to mix
with the others. A few drops with Love to let someone go.
Or one full shot mixed with the Truth to believe your own
lies.
“I’ve only had to kill a dream once, though, in all this
time. Death and Starlight make a bitter drink, and I wept
alongside her as she drank the cup dry.” She sighs. “A
sad day.” Then she smiles. “Not like today. New
apprentices always make me happy.”
Wait. What? “What do you mean ‘apprentice’? I’m
your new barista.”
Erzebet laughs. “Are you sure? The sign on the
counter appears to the right person, you know. After that
disaster with the last girl, I tweaked the spell. A sensible
girl. A practical girl. I told you. I knew as soon as you
ordered.
“And anyone else would have run out of the shop long
before now.”
Before I can respond, she gestures to the last two,
brass, on the counter, the ones closest to the register. “The
sixth is for Love, and what do you think it tastes like?”
“I’m here to make espresso, not serve Love to the
heartsick,” I say, half to myself. But I’m inhaling deeply
before I can stop myself. “Cherries?”
“Oh, cherries?” A huge grin breaks out on her face. “I
haven’t had someone with cherries in the longest time.
Not since my late cousin Elek met his future bride,
Magdolna, on the street out front. Goodness, what a
wedding. Seven children and all of them full of color and
ideas and . . .” She winks at me. “You could have an
interesting time ahead of you, I’m sure, if you want to try
a sip.” I blush, but think about coming back to it later.
Maybe.
“Love tastes different for everyone; I can tell from the
smell, usually, but not always. Vanilla with cinnamon is
quite common, but then again, most loves are, don’t you
think? Everyday things that keep their feet moving
forward, but nothing special. But my Love will thaw the
coldest heart, I guarantee it. Only my mother made better.
“We have a writer, Annika—normally Darjeeling
with milk and honey—who comes in for a cup of Love on
the last Friday of the month before she meets her lover. I
can tell because her Love smells of oranges and fennel
and honey—a wild love—but you would not know for
looking at her. A girl should never go out without
lipstick, I always say, but obviously her lover doesn’t
seem to mind.
“And whatever your Love tastes like, it always goes
well with chocolate.” She shows me a small basket of
chocolate bars wrapped in pink foil on the front counter
by the register. “It’s the one thing I won’t let Sandor do. I
grind the chocolate with chiles and almonds and turmeric;
it inflames the tongue and prepares the heart.”
Life. Death. Love. Dreams. Witch. Apprentice. What
did I get myself into?
And clearly, at this point, I’m staying. Why? Do I . . .
want this? Do I acknowledge to myself that I felt right
from the minute I walked in yesterday? That I knew I was
going to apply to work here even before I ordered my
drink? I don’t know what to think.
“And what’s in the last one?” I ask before I can help
it. What else could there be?
“The seventh . . . ?” She’s surprised, as if it weren’t
obvious. “The seventh one contains coffee. What else?
Strong-brewed with cinnamon and vanilla.” And just to
prove it, she puts a cup beneath the little brass faucet,
turns the key and pulls a full mug. The spicy scent of the
coffee, already sharp in the air from the espresso machine,
takes on new overtones. She sits the cup in front of me,
and I realize I need it.
“This is for when the real work needs to be done,
when decisions must be made. Love and Death and
Starlight will only take a person so far, you know. Living
requires hard work no matter what the drink, and
sometimes there’s nothing to do but sit down, have a cup
of coffee and talk about it.
“Besides, crafting the rest of them requires long hours
and I need the coffee to get going in the morning.”
I take a deep drink. It’s so hot it scalds my tongue and
the roof of my mouth, but I like how it makes me feel.
Sharp and present. Like I’m right here. Ready for
anything. And I realize that with my coffee, I have
decided. I’ll stay and see how it goes.
And now we’re at the register. To my right, Sandor
has finally finished and the wooden boards are regally
piled with almond horns and small quiches and rugelach.
He makes one last adjustment to a pile of molasses-brown
spice cookies and is satisfied at last. Erzebet touches his
arm in thanks as he passes by, and he nods at us both
before he goes back to the kitchen.
“Double sweet green tea; a gentle drink for someone
so particular, really . . .” She turns back to me.
“Customers coming in for a latte or a cup of chamomile
on a bad day will ask you about the samovars. Most think
as you did, that they are just for decoration. You just tell
them that when they need what the samovars hold, it will
be waiting for them.
“You have it clear, then? Yes?”
I nod. What the hell. When she first mentioned “other
duties, as assigned,” I assumed she meant cleaning the
bathrooms and running deliveries. Instead . . . let’s give
this a try.
Erzebet smiles and in her expression, I see my entire
conversation with myself writ large.
“Perfect. I just know this is going to work. A sensible
drink tells true, I always say. Now open the door and let
us see who must be taken care of today. My samovars are
full, and the water is boiling.”
© 2012 Peter Sursi
Peter Sursi was born on All Saint’s Day, which he likes to point out to
people. His parents said he was almost a trick, but he reminds them of his
“treat” potential. He lives with his long-suffering wife and completely
ridiculous children outside of Washington, D.C. When he’s not writing, he
does lots of boring stuff for the federal government.
Heartless
Holly Black
O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life.
—John Keats, from Endymion
Across the landscape of the battlefield, men stared
sight​lessly into the sky, their armor black with blood,
their steam​ing intestines spread over the ground. Swarms
of crows covered them in a jumping, fluttering carpet.
Camp women scavenged among the corpses, cutting the
throats of the dying and looting the bodies for anything of
worth.
Ada bent close to one man, his mouth already
darkened like a bruise on his pallid face. For a dizzying
moment her sight narrowed until all she could see was a
gore-clotted eyelash, a stitch of livery, the twist of a pale
worm. She gagged, but a second quick breath steadied
her. Ada was surprised the stench could still make her
choke. It reminded her that she hadn’t always been a
camp follower; her hair hadn’t always hung in knots and
the hem of her dress hadn’t always been stiff with filth. It
reminded her of things better forgotten.
The army’s food had already been cooked and
distributed—boiled horseflesh, cabbages, onions, and
what dried stores the Baron’s men had managed to
frighten out of the local churls. The camp women had a
few hours before they must return to the fire pits, to scour
the pots and begin planning for tomorrow. Ada had to
move quickly if she wanted her share of what was left on
the field.
The dead man had a good set of spurs, new-looking,
with bronze details. She stripped them off his sabatons
and tied them up in her skirts.
The next man she squatted near was still breathing.
His brow was sweaty, and his eyes moved feverishly
under closed lids. She held her knife near his throat. She
had been warned never to leave a man alive while you
robbed him: he might wake at any time, and even a
wounded soldier was dangerous. Still, she hesitated. No
matter how many times she told herself that it was like
killing a sow, it still wasn’t. Maybe it was the memory of
compassion that nagged at her, the remembrance of what
she had been before she’d bespelled her heart into her
finger bone.
“Help me.” The soldier’s mouth began to move before
his eyes opened. He spoke in a dreamy monotone.
Ada jumped back, the blade just nicking the flesh of
his throat.
“Help me,” he repeated. He didn’t seem to notice that
he’d been cut.
“No,” Ada said. She’d had enough of knights and
their commands. She had to feed them, to bind their
wounds and be bothered by them when she sought only
sleep. Just because she hadn’t killed him quickly didn’t
mean she owed him anything.
“I am Lord Julian Vrueldegost.”
She wondered whether or not he had been one of the
men who had burned her village. At one time, that would
have mattered to her.
“I’ll die,” he said. “Please.”
Ada sighed. “And if I help you, what? You’ll go back
to your hawks and greyhounds, your hunts and feasts,
your feather beds and spiced wines. And what will I go
back to?”
He looked confused. “The Count, my father—he
would double the size of your land. Please. My side feels
as if it is on fire.”
“What land?” She wished that he would just go ahead
and die so that she could get back to robbing him, but
instead she dipped her finger into a nearby pool of blood
and smeared it across his neck. She brought her face close
to his. “Play dead, your lordship, and hope none of the
other women find you. They are even less kind than I.”
The part of her that would have been pleased by his
plead​ing and his fear was long gone, and with it the part
that might have pitied him. She reached for the grubby
string around her neck and felt the smooth bone hanging
there. Her mother had cut off the end of her finger once
the spell was complete, but Ada could never bring herself
to get rid of it. Her heart.
The wind picked up, whipping at her as she walked
back to the encampment. She thought little of it until she
noticed that the leaves on the nearby trees remained still.
Then some​thing tore at her skirts, ripping them enough so
that the spurs dropped onto a carpet of oak leaves and
acorns. A cawing started overhead as a mass of black
birds circled and began to land around her.
“Stop it!” she called. Her knowledge of magic was
poorer than her mother’s, but even she could see this was
the work of some spirit. “What are you? What do you
want?”
Invisible hands grabbed hers, pulling her in the
direction of the battlefield.
“Show yourself,” she demanded, sitting down on the
cold ground and ignoring the crows. “I’ll not stir from
this place.”
A shape leaped down from the branches above her. It
had the head of a raven, but its body had the thin limbs of
a boy, dusted here and there with feathers. She had never
seen a manes up so close. It must belong to Lord Julian.
Only a nobleman could afford the conjuring that trapped
an ances​tor into the shifting flesh of a spirit. Manes drank
blood from their charges, she knew that much. She had
heard that great ladies would sit at tournaments with their
manes suckling voluptuously at their wrists.
“Hedge-witch,” it said, coming closer on all fours and
re​garding her with unblinking eyes.
“Hedge-witch no more,” Ada said. Without her heart,
she couldn’t cast even the simplest of spells. There were
other, darker enchantments that required a bespelled
heart, but she didn’t know any of those.
The manes pointed to the bone around her neck. “I
know what that is. You should hide it. One snap and your
life is undone.”
Ada touched the string reflexively. “I don’t want to
lose it,” she said.
It turned its head quizzically and regarded her with
black eyes. “Help my master and I will tell you a place
you can hide it where it will be safe always.”
When dealing with spirits, her mother had told her, it
was usually easier to acquiesce. Ada picked up the spurs
and began to tie them up in the remains of her dress. She
made a mental list of what she would need for Julian: a
blanket, some water, bindings for his legs, honey to
slather over his wounds. Those things were easy to come
by, especially with so many men dead.
When Ada returned to the battlefield laden with
sup​plies, she found a crone hunched over Lord Julian,
stripping off his gauntlets with knobbed fingers.
The woman looked up and Ada recognized her from
the camp—Clarisse. People said she’d once been very
beautiful. Despite the fact that she was bent with age, she
still tied filthy ribbons in her hair and tinted her cheeks
with the juice of berries, or sometimes with blood.
“What is this here? A lovely turquoise ring.”
Ada narrowed her eyes. “That’s a signet. If anyone
sees you with it, they’ll know it was stolen.”
“Perhaps they’ll mistake me for a duchess.” Clarisse
cackled. Then she suddenly clutched her wrist and
dropped the ring.
Puzzled, Ada bent closer. Long red marks had
appeared on the old woman’s forearm.
“You did it! You summoned spirits to attack me!”
Clarisse pulled a crude knife from her belt.
“What?” Ada stepped back. Her own knife was close
to hand, but she didn’t want to drop the things she was
carry​ing to get to it. She considered explaining about the
manes and then decided that would make Clarisse more
suspicious rather than less. “If I could summon spirits, I
would put them to better use than scratching old women,”
Ada said finally.
Clarisse clapped her hand to her cheek as if she’d
been struck. “You wretch! I’m not old.”She stood up and
then looked around her, at the field of the dead and dying,
as if she didn’t know how she’d come to be in such a
place. “Take him if you want him so much. My other
suitors give me plenty of gifts.” She began to stagger off,
rubbing her arm.
Ada knelt beside Julian and watched Clarisse go. She
was so stunned that she almost forgot about the ring in
the dirt. It was the blue of the stone that drew her eye.
Gingerly, she picked it up. The gold was heavy in her
hand. She smeared away mud to reveal a coat of arms
with three ravens on it.
“I’m just holding on to it for him,” she said aloud as
she tucked it into the folds of the sash at her waist. Then
she started stripping off his gilt-inlaid armor. The leatherand-cloth padding underneath was stained with sweat and
blood. He moaned as Ada tugged him onto the blanket.
Pulling his body over the field made her muscles ache. By
the time they reached the burned village, she was
exhausted. He had barely stirred.
Even in the dying light, Ada easily found the way to
her mother’s old house. She tugged at the blackened
hatch to the root cellar. It opened in a great gust of soot.
“That’s the best I can do,” she said. “I can’t carry him
down the stairs, and you don’t want me throwing him
down.”
A sudden gust of air made cinders whirl across the
floor. The manes appeared and scuttled closer, pressing
its beak so close to the wound that she wondered if its
tongue would snake out for a taste.
“Julian’s people will come,” it said. “The crows have
brought my message. Just get him down there. You only
need help a little while longer.”
“As you say.” Ada pressed lightly on the skin just to
one side of Julian’s injury, but it was enough to make him
awaken with a gasp. The manes cawed loudly, and she
wondered what would happen to it if Julian died.
The knight looked up at her, disoriented and afraid.
“Your creature wants me to hide you. Can you stand?” He
reached up and touched a stray lock of her hair, running it
between his fingers as if he were spinning it into thread.
“I don’t know your name.”
She narrowed her eyes, confused. “Ada,” she said
finally. “Ada,” he repeated. “You have hair like my
sister’s. Jeanne. She will be twelve soon.”
“I’m fifteen,” Ada said. “Now get up.”
He managed a thin smile. She could see his hands
trem​ble as he rose. Pressing her shoulder under his arm,
she led him down the stairs. He moved slowly, like a
sleepwalker. The earthen room still stank of fire, but
otherwise it was un​changed from her memory of it. By the
dim moonlight, she could see well enough to wash his
wound with the water she brought and to smear it with
honey. He tried to hold still, but sometimes he shuddered
convulsively, or gasped.
“The gash doesn’t stink yet,” she said. “That’s a good
sign.” Julian moaned again, flushed with fever, moving
rest​lessly into something like sleep.
“Maybe it would be better to be dead,” Ada said to no
one in particular.
It was fully dark when she stumbled back to the
campsite. Most of the men were sleeping on their pallets
of rushes, but a few still argued over dice beside dying
fires. As Ada ap​proached her own blankets, she saw that
one of the Baron’s men was waiting for her. Her eye was
drawn to where his red beard was split by a scar that ran
from his chin to his ear.
“You’ve cheated us out of a prisoner, is that correct?”
“No,” Ada lied automatically. She’d seen a girl
hanged for stealing a silver cup and did not want to join
her.
He snorted. Without warning, he seized her sash and
ripped it. Her knife tumbled out, along with a few copper
coins and the knight’s signet ring.
The man leaned down and picked up the ring from the
dirt.
“I found it,” she said hurriedly.
“That old hag said different.” He shrugged. “Where is
the owner of this ring?”
“Dead. Clarisse found it on him, but I scratched her
and took it. She means to repay me with trouble.”
He grabbed hold of her hair and pulled her close to
him. She could smell the onions on his breath and the rot
of his teeth. “His body isn’t on the field. Do you know
who this be​longs to, slattern? You’ve hidden the Count’s
son. The Baron wants a corpse by dawn.”
She had known as much, but somehow had failed to
comprehend the import of it. After all, what would it
matter if Julian were the King himself when even a
common man-at-arms was so far above her?
“He’s in a root cellar in the village.” She was pleased,
just then, that she didn’t have a heart to trouble her.
The man let go of Ada’s hair, and she fell to her
knees. He rested the heel of his boot against her throat.
She felt her pendant of bone pressing against her skin and
knew that it could crack along with her neck. She would
die. But still she could not really be afraid.
“He’s alone?” the man demanded.
“Yes,” she gasped.
He removed his foot and she gulped breaths of air.
“Get up,” he said. “You’ll be taking me to him.”
Ada pushed herself to her feet and allowed him to
lead her to his horse. The dappled gray courser was
chewing on the rope that secured it to a post. She noticed
that it had al​ready been saddled and that the man had
strapped a sword and a crossbow to the leather belts
across its rump. It did not lift its white muzzle as she
fitted her wooden shoe into one stirrup and hauled herself
onto its back.
The man laughed as he untied the horse and then
swung up behind her, pushing his body against her back
lewdly. “Through the battlefield,” she said.
“Very well, then.” One of his hands held the reins,
but the other snaked around to cup her breast. She knew
that should disturb her, but the voice that told her why
seemed so distant.
“What did he promise you?” the man asked. “Gold?
Riches? A tumble?”
“Nothing,” she said, with a shake of her head.
“You’re a cold one,” he said. His fingers dug
painfully into her breast, kneading it. She winced. “Or a
bit simple.
“Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe you’re one of the
Count’s women, a spy. What do you think I would make
of that?”
She shook her head again, as though she were simple
and didn’t understand him. She considered what would
happen when Julian was dead and she was alone in the
house with the man-at-arms. Would he kill her? She
imagined him heat​ing up her mother’s old fire-tongs to
find out for himself if she was a spy. She imagined other
things. And still she was numb to dread.
Did she really care for nothing, not even herself?
Ada noticed the lack of a heart in a way she had not
before. She pushed around her thoughts like a child
pushing her tongue into the sore space left by a missing
tooth.
“I know a cure for your silence,” he said as they
picked their way over the field of rotting bodies.
She looked down at the field of corpses, their faces
turned to burnished silver in the moonlight. They were
be​yond caring too. Dead.
Ada remembered how, long before the war, she had
cried over the death of a cat that had ranged around their
corn​cribs. Yet with the finger bone dangling around her
neck, she had buried her mother without a single tear. She
could not even remember where she’d dug the grave.
Surely it was better not to feel. What was the purpose
in courting pain?
But then she thought of all the different sorts of pain,
all the ones she hadn’t been able to avoid.
She imagined taking the finger bone off her neck and
snapping it in two. Even though that would kill her, she
could not bring herself to care. That troubled her. She
knew she should care. She shouldn’t stand by and allow
her own death. She didn’t want to be dead.
Her heart was still missing, so she wasn’t afraid when
she broke the string around her neck with a sharp tug.
The method for undoing the spell was simple. She didn’t
even flinch as she swallowed the bone whole.
Pain stabbed her chest, a thousand sharp needles, as
in a foot kept too long in one position. She pressed her
hands between her breasts and felt a steady drumming.
Tears burned in her eyes.
Then, abruptly, she was overwhelmed by fear, fear
that bit through her flesh to bury itself in her marrow
This was a mistake, she thought. I can’t do this. She
started to shake.
The man-at-arms tightened his grip on her and
laughed. She thought of Julian, of the way that he had
touched her hair. She didn’t want him to die. She didn’t
want anyone to die anymore.
“You know where we’re going, don’t you? You
haven’t lost your way?”
They had come to the edge of the village without her
noticing. Looking out at the remains of the houses, black
and indistinguishable, she knew what she had to do.
“He’s in there,” she said. Pointing to where a
neighbor had once brewed ale and kept chickens, she
found that she could hardly breathe. It was harder to lie
now, when she was afraid.
“Is he armed?” The man-at-arms shifted on the
saddle. She shook her head. “He’s badly hurt.
Defenseless.”
“Dismount,” he ordered.
She climbed off the horse. He drew his sword and
jumped down after her. Trailing him to the house, Ada
hoped he would go in first, hoped he would give her a
moment to get away from him.
He signaled with his chin for her to go through the
door. Once inside, he would see that she had lied. She
hesitated. “Get in there,” he whispered.
She had hoped for more of an advantage, but there
was no more time. Ducking away from his arm, she ran
back to the horse and pulled the crossbow from the
horse’s rump. The bow was drawn tight, but she fumbled
getting the bolt in place.
A loud shout came from the doorway. The manes had
appeared, cawing and capering, surprising the man-atarms into giving her another few moments of time. She
slammed the bolt into the notch and pointed it in his
direction.
His eyes went wide and his mouth curled into a sneer.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I want to live,” she said, and shot him.
The bolt hit him just below the throat. His scream
stut​tered as blood stained the front of his leather doublet.
He reached up a hand and staggered toward her. Then he
fell heavily onto the dirt.
Tears burned her eyes, streaking her cheeks with lines
of salt.
She didn’t know how long she had been there when
she noticed Lord Julian stood behind her. His fingers
touched her shoulder as she turned. He still looked pale,
but his fever seemed to have broken. She noticed for the
first time that he was young and that he needed a haircut.
“Thank you,” he said softly. She nodded. She wanted to
say something—to tell him that she hadn’t done it for
him, to ask about his sister, or to say that she was glad
that he was awake—but she didn’t know how to say all of
those things at once, so she was silent. The manes settled
near the man-at-arms and began to tear at his wound with
its beak.
“It’s hard to see so much death.” Lord Julian looked
off into the deep shadows. “Was he the first man you’ve
killed?”
“No,” she said. “He was the last.”
Julian paused at that. After a moment, he spoke
again. “Do you recall when I offered to double your
land?”
“You said your father would double it.”
He smiled. “But you refused me. Let me make you
an​other offer. Anything. A position in the castle? A
commis​sion? Tell me what it is that you want.”
She wanted her mother to be alive again, for the war
to end, for everything to be as it had once been. She
wanted to scream, to weep, to shout.
Ada laughed out loud even as tears stung her eyes.
“Yes, that’s it,” she said, leaning back to look up at the
stars. “That’s exactly it. I want.”
© 2005 by Holly Black.
Originally published in Young Warriors: Stories of Strength, edited by
Tamora Pierce & Josepha Sherman.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids
and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony
DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic
novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which
includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the
Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the
Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband,
Theo, in a house with a secret door.
Monsters, Finders, Shifters
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My father’s family had produced monster-finders for
several generations. More monsters were being born than
ever; our village didn’t have enough finder power to track
them all, or shaper power to abort or fix those the finders
found, so many people had to offer their offspring to the
Shadows.
My parents had seven children, in hopes that all of us
would be monster-finders. None of us were monsters—
my parents’ and the village’s good fortune. Three older
brothers and a sister had passed threshold age without a
flicker of finder talent. I, Bertram, was the fifth of my
parents’ children.
I woke one morning in my twelfth year feeling
strange, shaky, and confused. Instead of fighting my
siblings at the dining table to snatch a piece of Ma’s
breakfast bread, I snuck out the dog door in the back of
the house.
Outside, the air was cool and damp, and smelled of
earth and wood smoke. Spring had pushed green fingers
up through winter’s dead leaves. Birdcalls mixed with the
rush of water chuckling past the stepping stones in the
stream. The creek willows had already leafed out in
curved green scimitars.
I crossed the creek to our neighbor Kalinda’s house, a
rounded hardclay building at the edge of a meadow. I had
watched many storms under the overhang of its curved
clay porch. Kalinda’s one luxury—an oriole-nest swing—
hung from that roof. Her husband had bought it for her
from wandering traders. Somewhere, birds larger than
people wove nests made of supple, wiry black withes, big
enough to hide in, tight enough to block the wind.
Pa said people made the nests, and pretended birds
had done it. He hadn’t been inside the nest, hadn’t
touched the downy feathers carpeting the bottom, each as
big as a hand.
Maybe monsters made nests like this, my older sister
Ari whispered to me after all the lights had been blown
out and our brothers and sisters were breathing slow in
sleep. The monsters lived with the Shadows, far off in the
forest to the northwest, a direction we called Not There.
When the wind was right, sometimes we smelled faraway
smoke from Not There, or heard music made by
instruments none of us knew.
The nest was my favorite thinking place. That
morning when I woke feeling strange, I slipped in
through its narrow circle opening and huddled inside
among the feathers to consider my state.
Kalinda took care of us when Ma was at the village
bakery and Pa was monster-finding. Kalinda was nice to
me, especially when my brothers Ethan, Dark, and Clay
beat me up. Her wound salve was so cold it took the sting
out of bruises and scrapes. She talked me out of feeling
bad when my big sister Ari said cutting things to me.
Kalinda let me sit in her nest swing anytime I liked; it
was the only place I could hear myself think some days,
there was so much racket at home.
Kalinda came out of her front door while I was curled
up in the nest. “Hey, Bert. I just baked. Want some?” She
held a plate of sundrop cookies in front of the round
opening of the nest.
The shivers and shakes inside me ran like melted
metal from my toes and fingers into my stomach,
collecting into a hot, simmering ball. I looked at Kalinda.
My eyes burned, and then I saw a strange shape curled
inside her belly. Not a baby, exactly, but something, with
head, torso, arms, and legs. Its tail wrapped around it like
a spear-pointed rope, and soft spikes lay flat along its
head.
I laid my hand on Kalinda’s stomach. I hadn’t even
known she was pregnant.
“What are you doing, Bert?” She stepped back so my
hand fell away.
It was too late. I knew my neighbor had a monster in
her.
When monster-finders found monsters, they were
supposed to notify the wifewatchers, who lived in a house
on the central square, near the headwoman’s house.
Wifewatchers did tests to find out how much monster was
in the embryo, and then the village council decided what
to do next: whether to let the baby be born the way it was,
or try to shift it so it was human and then let it be born, or
whether there was not enough human in it to save.
A monster-finder located the monsters. Not all
monster-finders had shaping powers to shift them.
If I told the wifewatchers I’d found a monster,
Kalinda would have to stay in the Consideration House
and be tested. The whole town would know.
Kalinda had carried two monsters before, and they
had been stopped before they were born, too far from
human to let live. Her husband had left her after the
second one, searching for someone who could give him a
live child.
No woman was allowed to stay pregnant if she had
quickened three monsters. This was Kalinda’s last
chance.
“No, Bert,” she whispered.
The longer she kept the baby, the worse it would be
for her when she lost it.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Kalinda said.
“Everybody will know you’re pregnant soon.” The
baby had a shape to her. She must have been inside
Kalinda awhile to grow so real.
Kalinda took both my hands and laid them on her
stomach. “How bad is it?”
I sensed, making sure what I had felt at first was
right. “She has a tail. And head spikes.”
She started crying. “Jat was the only one who would
sleep with me, after I lost my first two. I thought this one
would be different.” She pressed her hands on top of
mine. “Can you shift her, Bert? Don’t let the watchers
take her from me.”
I felt the baby’s shape in the palms of my hands, and I
could see it, too. I had seen others shape monsters into
humans. I wasn’t sure how they did it. Pa hadn’t trained
me in the skills of monster-shaping, not knowing I’d get
the talent.
“Please,” said Kalinda. “Save her.”
“I don’t know how,” I whispered.
She held my hands against her stomach. Tears ran
down her face. She smelled like sundrop cookies fresh
from the oven, and safety, and jasmine soap.
Blistering heat rose from my center. My hands sizzled
with purpose. I thought, Warmth, go into Kalinda’s baby
and make it human.
Heat flowed out of my hands and into Kalinda’s belly.
She gasped and shuddered, but I sent the heat into her
anyway. It flowed into the baby, flushed through her
systems.
What is human? something in me asked, but I didn’t
know. A torso, neck, and head. Two arms, with one
shoulder, elbow, and wrist each, two hands, each with
four fingers and a thumb. Two legs, hips, knees, feet with
five toes each. No tail. Hair on the head instead of spikes.
Shrink, tail, and put your pieces to work in the body
so it will look human. Be human. Energy moved from me
into Kalinda, until I was so tired I faded.
I woke in the nest, feathers and their slightly musty
smell pressed against my cheek, a blanket over me. I had
slept there before, so I wasn’t surprised. I rubbed my eyes
and peeked out the circle door toward the sky, dark, with
scatterings of stars. I was so thirsty I wanted to drink a
river, and my stomach had tied knots in itself clenching
on things that weren’t there.
I tried to get out of the nest, but it swayed wildly and
made me queasy. I was so weak. It was so cold. I
managed to eel over the nest’s edge and fall on the porch,
but then I lay there, too tired to get to my feet. I wondered
whether I’d freeze before morning.
“Bert?” said a hoarse voice in the darkness.
I rolled my face toward the porch chairs. Kalinda’s
silhouette rose, knelt beside me. Her warm hand felt my
forehead. She gathered me to her and carried me into her
darkened house, laid me on the couch. Embers still
glowed on the hearth. She fed the fire small sticks and
draped a blanket over me.
“Are you all right?” I whispered when she came to me
with a brown pottery mug whose contents steamed.
“I don’t know.” She propped me up with pillows and
held the mug to my mouth. I sipped. Vegetable broth
flavored with garlic. When I’d finished it, she set the mug
on a table. She crossed her hands over her belly. “I feel
strange and sick and different. What’s inside me now?”
I took a couple breaths and tried to wake my new
power. I touched her stomach. I didn’t feel anything. “I
don’t know,” I said. I pulled the blanket up over my head.
“Your ma was calling for you around supper time,”
Kalinda said presently. “I told her you’d come over here
sick, and I’d take care of you.”
“Thanks.”
She rose, stood with her back to me. “Get some
sleep.” She went away.
I watched the flames until they died.
The scent of fresh breakfast bread woke me. I felt
ravenous. I sat up. A fire burned again in the round clay
fireplace, chasing the spring chill from the room. The
warm orange and red rug on the floor reminded me I was
at Kalinda’s. I remembered the rest of yesterday, and felt
sick again.
Kalinda came in and set a plate of buttered breakfast
bread on the table next to me.
My fingers and toes tingled. Heat gathered in my
belly.
“How are you?” Kalinda asked, her voice remote, her
eyes not quite looking at me.
I put my hand on her belly and felt a baby there. No
head spikes. No tail. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “She’s
human.”
She sat beside me on the couch and wept.
We didn’t find out until later that I’d hurt the inside of the
baby’s head. By then, she was a couple months old, hard
set in who she was, beyond fixing, so they said. By then, I
was training with Pa and other monster-finders and
shapers to get my talents under control.
Once my older brothers found out I got the talent, they hit
me more than ever. They were all training to be clay
masons, and Ethan, especially, was an artist with clay;
the flamelizards who cured the clay liked him well and
did his bidding. Pa had been proud of him. Now I was
Pa’s favorite, and that drove all three brothers crazy. Also,
I went to special school and got to skip a lot of the
learning we all hated.
It took me months to figure out how to use my shifter
talent on my oldest brother Dark so he’d stop hurting me.
I had to use it again to stop him from telling the
wifewatchers I was misusing my talent.
Nobody was supposed to be able to shift someone
much beyond birth. That was what everybody said,
anyway, and my teachers acted as though they believed it.
But I figured out how to quiet Dark’s voice, how to lock
his hands against his thighs, how to shift his toes enough
to make him trip every time he took a step.
The first time I did it was after he blacked my eye and
made my nose bleed all over my favorite shirt. When he
raised his hand to hit me again, shifter power rose in me
and lashed out at him, and he fell to the floor, tears
coming from his eyes, but no sound from his mouth. He
clawed at his throat.
At first I was terrified. Power had gone out of me into
my brother and done something I hadn’t planned. This
was nothing like the lessons I was learning at school.
I knelt beside Dark. I searched him with finder power
and found that he was not dying.
Once I was sure he could breathe, I let Dark suffer
until my nose stopped bleeding. We were alone. If Ma or
Pa had been near, Dark wouldn’t have hurt me so badly.
Usually he hit me so the bruises were under my clothes,
then taunted me into keeping them secret.
Finally Dark turned to me and clutched my arms. His
eyes were wild. His mouth moved, and nothing came out.
He gripped me so hard it hurt, and I pushed him away.
My eye still stung, and blood was drying on my shirt.
He knelt in front of me and touched his forehead to
the floor, and then I was frightened. I wasn’t sure I could
shift him back. It crashed down on me then, that this was
the second time I’d sent out power without knowing how
or what, and last time hadn’t worked out so well. Plus, as
old as he was, Dark was supposed to be unshiftable.
At last I laid my hands on his shoulders and tried to
feel what was different about him. Then I sensed the
tracks my power had left, a small, tight net across
something in his throat. We hadn’t had that body part in
anatomy yet. I let shifter power reach out and pull the net
away.
Dark gasped and fell back. “What did you do?” he
demanded.
Siti, Kalinda’s daughter, didn’t speak. She made noises—
moans, mostly, sometimes soft questioning sounds. She
cried a lot. She grew like a normal child, walking at
twelve months, pulling things down from tables, putting
everything in her mouth. She seemed to hear and see all
right, but she didn’t learn or remember. If she ate a berry
one day that made her sick, she was just as likely to eat it
again the next day. It made caring for her a chore. I took
care of her when Kalinda needed rest.
One afternoon I had her with me in the think room,
where I was studying a particular shift for babies who
might be born with extra toes or fingers. The think room
was a room we’d added to the house after my youngest
sister was born. It was supposed to be a place where
everybody could do things quietly, alone or together.
Ethan designed it—rounded inside and out, the walls
rough, warm, sandy clay, windows across from each other
that could be opened or shut to train the breeze through or
let in light, the outside black in winter to summon sun’s
heat, white in summer to reflect sun’s glare, the floor a
mash of soft seed cotton we changed every couple
months. Ethan was too young to build it by himself, but
he had his guild come and make it.
I had a pregnant dog and special permission to work
her. Siti liked the dog. I had to keep Siti behind me while
I worked so she didn’t get mixed up in the shifts I was
making inside the dog’s belly.
Siti was curled up against my back when Dark came
in. Most of the others stayed outside while I did my
homework, but Dark didn’t.
Dark said, “Why do you spend so much time with
that idiot child?”
The dog had four puppies inside, very young yet, their
paws just starting to bud fingers and toes. I sensed and
traced the connections. I gave one of the puppies an extra
toe on each front foot. The plasm was easy to shift in its
current state. I waited, sensing all the systems inside the
mother dog as they responded to my shift. Her breathing
remained calm. The fluid in her stayed stable. I had
shifted the puppy without hurting it, the mother, or the
others.
I finally looked at Dark. Now that he knew I could
hurt him and he couldn’t stop me, our relationship had
changed. Sometimes he was the only one I could talk to.
“She’s company,” I said.
“Kalinda should put her out in the forest with the
other monsters.”
“She is not a monster,” I said. I lifted one hand
toward him, bent my fingers as though summoning my
talent.
“All right, all right.” He waved a hand to stop me.
“Just wondering. You have to admit she isn’t much good
to anyone.”
I stroked the air above the dog to loose her from the
still state I had put her in. She sighed and lay quiet. I
wondered if my shifting inside her felt good. She never
ran from me the way practice animals ran from the other
shifter students.
Siti tugged on my tunic. “Uh, uh, uh.”
I turned, helped her stand. She was almost two now,
and ran everywhere if I didn’t slow her down. She often
fell without someone’s hand to hold. Ignoring Dark, I
took Siti to the kitchen and got her a piece of dessert
bread, soft and sweet from Ma’s baking that morning.
She put the whole thing in her mouth. Most fell out again.
I had forgotten to break it into small pieces, and that
started the familiar voice in my head: I was smarter than
Siti. I should remember how to care for her. I had no
business shifting anyone. All I did was destroy people.
No one should trust me . . .
I cleaned up after her. While I knelt on the floor with
a wet rag, giving myself a mental beating, she ran
outside. I dropped the rag and ran after her. She wasn’t
anywhere I could see.
She was hiding. My first fear was always the stream.
Siti could barely stay on her feet; I was afraid to let her
near the water. I ran to the water and looked in the
deepest pool, near the stepping stones across to her
mother’s house.
She was not in the pool, nor in the fast part of the
stream where it rushed past small rocks. I quieted my
panic and looked at the yard. The herb and vegetable
garden was full of small green plants struggling up
through the chill, empty of Siti.
I stood by the stream and reached for my skills. Siti
was not a monster, but I should be able to sense her the
way I could sense other humans.
I found her, crouched amid bushes in a little thicket of
trees beside the house. When I picked her up, she clung to
me. Her breathing was noisy, her face smeared with dusty
tears.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I took her to the kitchen and
washed her face. We went back to the think room, where
I let her play with the dog. Dark had gone.
That day I held Siti’s head in my hands and tried to
sense my way into her brain. I did it almost every time I
was with her. My dream was that I would figure out how
to fix her brain. My teachers had all told me that one
couldn’t shift people after they were born, but I had
proved them wrong with Dark. I was not going to work
on Siti until I was sure of my ground, though.
I knew what Siti’s brain looked like, if it was
anything like the dead brains we studied in shifter
anatomy classes. Between my hands it did not feel like
that. I cupped a bowl of liquid light, with shafts of
darkness and small storm systems moving through. The
colors of light changed. When Siti was happy, the light
was golden and warm. If she was upset, it got cold and
blue. Other colors were harder for me to decode. Just
now, with my hands holding her head, and her hands
tangled in the dog’s fur, her mind was alight with orangeyellow-gold glow. Three small dark lightning-spitting
storms swept into the sky.
Could I still them? I thought quiet at the storms, and
the clouds disintegrated a piece at a time, fading and
lightening until they melted into the general gold of her
mind.
I blinked out of shifter senses and looked down. Siti
stared up into my face, her wide blue eyes blank of
thought and response.
I wondered if she liked the storms. Maybe I should
have left them alone.
I dropped back into the tranquil bowl of her mind and
said, “Siti? Can you hear me?” Each word troubled the
water with ripples of blue and green, melting into each
other and interweaving.
Just then Ethan and Clay breezed into the think room,
talking and tossing a small leather sand-sack back and
forth. They saw us and stilled, and then Clay said, “What
are you doing with that girl?”
These words shot through Siti’s mind like blazing
embers. She curled her arms and legs closer to her body.
“Is that what interests you, Bertram, a girl who can’t
resist you?” Ethan asked. His words were dark purple in
Siti’s mindscape. “She the only one who’ll let you get
close?”
An answering rage rose up. There was a girl my age
in shifter class. Her name was Lane, and I liked her, but
she never looked at me. She wouldn’t partner with me,
even though there were only five in our class. Sometimes
I knew why she wouldn’t look my way. I had made
terrible mistakes. I’d never told anyone, and I was sure
Kalinda hadn’t either, but I thought finders ought to be
able to tell about past mistakes just by looking at people.
Sometimes I watched Lane chase after Rush, the oldest
and most accomplished in our class, and knew she longed
for one who didn’t want her, the same way I longed for
her.
I let go of Siti’s head and pulled her into my lap,
where I hugged her. She was hard-edged and awkward,
one elbow against my stomach and the other in the soft
flesh of my upper arm. She kicked me where it hurt, and I
opened my arms.
“Brother, what have you done to her?” asked Ethan,
and now he sounded truly alarmed.
“Nothing.”
Siti ran to the chest where we kept toys for visiting
children. She threw open the lid, pulled toys out, and
crawled inside, closing the lid.
Ethan punched me in the arm. “What did you do to
her?”
“I didn’t do anything! You’re the ones who upset
her!”
“How could we? She’s an idiot, isn’t she?”
“She doesn’t like the sound of your voices.”
“There’s something unnatural in your fascination with
that child,” Ethan said, but Clay punched his shoulder
and said, “Leave it! Who cares?” He stooped to pick up
the toss-toy. “Let’s go outside.”
After they had left, I went to the toy chest and sat
beside it, reached for Siti’s thoughts. The storms fought
each other, then slowed as time passed. Finally quiet
weather was there again, but the sky had settled to pale
blue instead of the yellow I interpreted as contentment or
happiness.
“I’m going to open the lid now,” I said. My words
didn’t disrupt her sky. So I lifted the lid.
She looked up at me, and her eyes were empty.
Golden light filled her sky, though. She let me lift her and
carry her home.
In shifter class the next day, the dead embryo-monster my
teacher had given me sat in front of me unchanged while
the rest of the class shifted their tiny corpses to look more
human.
“Bertram!” said Neala, my teacher. I hadn’t even
noticed her approach. “What is wrong with you?”
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I muttered. I cupped
my hands near the tiny corpse before me and thought its
feathered hands human. I could shift Dark: fingers, toes,
voice, face, all those things could be shifted for a little
while, as I liked, because they knew how they were
supposed to go, and when I gave them permission to shift
back, they returned to their original shapes. I knew my
shifts were stretching them sideways, away from natural.
I couldn’t do that to Siti’s brain. It didn’t know any
other natural way than the way it already was. I had
shifted it before it got set.
I turned the monster baby’s four-toed, taloned bird
feet into human feet. Things were much easier to shift
after they were dead. The systems inside them didn’t
cling to familiar ways. Whatever animated them was
gone.
“Good,” said Neala. “Have you been practicing?
You’re so swift.”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Work on the head.”
My dead baby had head spikes and a bird’s tail. It
reminded me of Siti—before. I soothed the spikes from its
head, but then I had to go and be sick.
“What’s the matter with you?” Neala asked. She had
followed me to the outhouse, opened the door while I was
still retching.
“Teacher,” I said. I left the outhouse and went to the
bowl and pitcher by the back door of shifter school. I
dipped water to rinse my mouth, poured some over my
hands and soaped them.
“What kind of sickness have you brought to school?”
Neala asked.
“It’s in my head, not in my belly.”
“What’s wrong with your head?”
I looked toward the creek willows. “Do you know
shifts for thoughts?” I asked.
Neala’s voice had sharpened, and she gripped my
upper arm so tightly it hurt. “Who have you been talking
to?”
“No one! I have thoughts I wish I could shift. Is it
possible?”
“It is forbidden.” She loosened her hand. “What are
your bad thoughts? What’s troubling you, Bertram? How
can one as young as you be so unhappy?”
I wished I could tell her. If the village elders knew
what I had done to Siti before her birth, though, it would
probably mean exile for Siti, and for me. Siti they might
offer to the Shadows; I couldn’t let her walk there alone.
Before that happened I would take her and run. But
where?
The nearest village was Yahara, two days’ walk over
the mountains, and I had heard people there were even
stricter than they were here in Intil. They had no shifters.
They let their monsters be born, and then disposed of
them.
Beyond that, the nearest town was the city Pishtil, five
days’ walk, in the lowlands. All rumors of valley towns
said they were people without gods or morals. I never
wished to go there, though I knew Ethan and Dark pined
to go to a trading fair in Rayal. They wanted to see more
people in one day than we had seen in our lifetimes.
Neala put her hand on my shoulder and stared into me
the way only a monster-finder could, looking for hidden
structures and abnormalities. Her gaze probed through me
like a spoon stirring through cooking noodles.
Was there a way to shift thoughts? Neala had asked
me who I had talked to. Therefore, there must be someone
I could talk to about it, if I only knew who.
“Come back to class,” she said.
I rinsed my mouth and spat water on a weed, then
followed her into the school, back to my dead child.
“Shift its skin color,” she said.
The baby’s skin was dead and gray. I reached for its
ability to shift at my urging, and found only a few colors
it could be. I nudged it toward the brownish pink of living
skin. For that to happen, it needed to be breathing and
have blood running through it. I asked for these things to
happen.
“Bert!” my teacher cried, shaking my shoulder.
The embryo had been preserved in pickling juice after
the mother gave it up. Elements and liquids were there;
all they needed were persuasion and power to shift into
something else. I summoned and persuaded. Shifts moved
over and through the small dead thing until its systems
restructured themselves, rekindled and reknit,
remembered how they had worked before it died. There
were missing connections because of the way I had
already shifted the baby away from its nature. Its skin
shifted to pink. Its heart beat. Breath moved in and out of
it with a horrible rasping, gurgling in the nose.
I reached to see if its mind had come back, and caught
a glimpse of black water, untroubled by current, before
Neala slapped me and I fell to the floor, gasping.
“What did you do?” she screamed.
I stared at her and realized I was trembling and tired.
I let my head drop, let darkness take me.
I woke in a room in the Consideration House. I had
visited a cousin there once, before they took her child.
The room was made to comfort pregnant women.
Every hard surface in it was covered with something soft.
The blanket I lay under was finest lambswool, pale
yellow. Orange mossweave carpeted the floor, and pale
green and blue tapestries, threaded here and there with
silver, draped the walls. The only windows were narrow
slits near the ceiling, too high to show anything but sky.
A round door in the far wall had no knob on it. Against
the wall, a chamber pot.
A bowl of washwater, a mug of drinking water, and a
loaf of bread waited on a table beside the bed. I sat up,
washed, ate, drank.
I waited.
I examined the walls, lifted hangings to find bare clay
behind them. I looked under the carpet: more clay. The
door was wooden. I leaned against the door and searched
it with shifter sense: thick wood, with a bolt of iron, its
tongue in a piece of iron bolted to the wall with more
iron. I sought lifesparks nearby and found no one.
I went back to the bed and lay with the blanket
covering me. Dark would talk to them now, when I was
locked up and couldn’t stop him. They would cast me out
or kill me.
Light moved across the floor into afternoon. Finally,
when the sky was darkening, someone opened the door. I
folded the blanket away from my face. The visitor was
Alitala, the village listener. “We’re ready to consider your
case now,” she said.
I got up and washed my face again, straightened my
tunic, and followed her to the council chamber, a large
round room whose roof opened to the sky when desired.
Twilight sent fading light into the room, and fire bubbles
clung to the walls. Five village elders, including Galowa,
the headwoman, and seven deciders sat behind a table
facing me. My family and Kalinda, four-year-old Siti by
her side, stood against the back wall. Some other people
were there as well.
“Who advocates for Bertram?” asked one of the
elders.
Kalinda stepped forward, Siti clinging to her skirts. “I
will,” she said.
“Those who testify against him, step forward.”
Neala, my teacher, came away from the back wall.
“State your case where Bertram can hear,” said
Galowa. She wore a white robe like the clothing in which
we buried corpses. She was old and very wrinkled, but
her black eyes were bright. “Bertram, you understand, we
have heard and considered all charges before we brought
you here.”
I nodded. It sounded like the wifewatcher decision
process.
“I charge that Bertram has rogue shifter power and
can do more than he should be able to,” Neala said. “I
classify him a monster.”
Kalinda said, “Bert has power and the will to do
good. He is an asset to the village.”
Neala turned on her. “Do you deny that Bert used his
power unsupervised on your own child?”
Kalinda put her hand on Siti’s head. “I do not deny it.
I asked for Bert’s help before he had been trained. He did
the best he could.”
Someone gasped. I didn’t know who. I felt an
unwinding inside me, the release, finally, of a secret
clutched too close.
“Bertram made your daughter wrong-headed,” said
one of the elders.
“Bertram made my daughter human,” Kalinda
countered. “Before that, she was a monster.” She picked
Siti up and held her. Siti stared at the council, her eyes
wide and blue. “I contend that Bert can do great things for
us.”
“Other charges have been placed. Step forward, Ethan
Clayman.”
Ethan walked in front of me, stood with his legs
spread, his hands gripping the sides of his trousers.
“You have told this council of transgressions Bertram
committed against family. Repeat them in his presence.”
“What if he does something to me?” Ethan said. He
glanced back at me with narrow eyes.
“We have the village’s six most powerful shifters in
the room to restrain him,” said an elder.
I turned and looked at the people against the back
wall, saw that some of them were shifters I had studied
with, others shifters I admired.
“You will be protected,” said the elder.
Ethan faced front again, so that I looked at the back of
his tunic, his hunched shoulders, the untidy upstanding
shock of hair at his crown. “He has done things to our
brother Dark.”
“Why does Dark not testify on his own behalf?”
“I don’t know,” said Ethan.
“Dark, step forward.”
Dark unglued himself from the wall and walked up
beside Ethan.
“Are you afraid of Bertram?” asked an elder.
“No,” said Dark.
“Is it true he has used power on you against your
will?”
“Sure, he used to,” Dark said, and shrugged. “Not for
a long time.”
“What did he do?” asked one of the deciders.
“Made me listen.”
Someone laughed, maybe Pa. Strange, drifty hope
woke in me. I couldn’t understand why Dark wasn’t
raging against me.
“That is not a proper answer,” said the elder. “We
need to know specifics. That he shifted someone your age
is already an abomination. Tell us what he can do.”
“I don’t choose to,” said Dark.
“Do you fear him?”
“Why should I? He’s my brother.”
“Give us the information we need to make a
decision.”
“Ask Bert. Ask this tattletale Ethan if you like. Leave
Bert alone,” Dark said. “He could hurt people bad if he
wanted to, but he hasn’t.”
“Bertram Monster-Finder, step forward.”
I went to stand beside Dark. He looped an arm over
my shoulders. Strangeness moved through me.
“Bertram, what did you do to your brother?” asked the
eldest.
“I stilled his voice,” I said. “I shifted his hands and
feet so he couldn’t use them against me. I restored him
when he promised to leave me alone.”
“Could you do such things to any one of us?” she
asked.
“I suppose I could,” I said.
“Show us.”
Dark unhooked his arm and held it out in front of
him. “Change my hand,” he said.
I couldn’t believe he was so relaxed about this, that he
would invite me to act on his body, after our history. Best,
though, if I changed him, and not the eldest or anyone
else.
I used shifter sense to understand everything about
Dark’s hand. He was right, I realized: I hadn’t shifted
anything about him in a year or more, and he had changed
since then. He was stocky and solid now, and he hadn’t
teased me in a long time. His hand was larger, more
muscled in different ways because of all the claywork
he’d been doing. I learned its systems and structures, and
then shifted. I gave him an extra finger, using material
from all the rest of his hand so no one thing suffered
much change. I had been practicing this shift on my
unborn puppies, so it was easy, even connecting its
control to his brain.
Dark turned his hand over, closed and opened his
fingers. The new one worked in concert with the others.
He curled it separately. “Nice,” he said.
His original form agitated, wanting to reject the shift,
but I quieted it. My brother held up his hand to show the
council. No one spoke, until at last the eldest said, “Who
knows when this has happened before?”
The listener stepped forward, and said, “Histories tell
of one who could do this more than two hundred years
ago, but that was before the age of monsters. She was
considered a healer.”
“Bertram, you may speak in your own defense,” said
the eldest.
“I’m trying to find a way to help Siti,” I said. “I regret
that I didn’t know what I was doing when I shifted her.”
“Would you take direction from this council and cease
your explorations in late shifts?” she asked.
I looked at Siti. She came out from her mother’s skirts
and peered up at me. I knelt and she came to me. I
touched her head. The lake was there, still and
untroubled. Could I promise never to look for a way to
help her? I couldn’t.
I looked at the council members and shook my head.
“Go back to your room and await our decision,” said
the eldest.
After dinner at home that night, I asked Dark if he wanted
to lose the extra finger. He said he liked it, and asked me
to give him one on his other hand as well.
“What if they think it makes you a monster?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They won’t. They’ll know where
it came from.”
“I won’t be here to change you back,” I muttered.
He gripped my shoulder with his extra-fingered hand
and shook me a little. “They’ve made a stupid choice,” he
whispered. Then he hugged my head against his chest. He
smelled of smoke and earth and sweat and garlic. He
smelled of home, and his heartbeat drummed slow and
steady in my ear.
Then he held out his other hand, and I gripped it,
studied it, and changed it.
“You’re sure?” I asked when I had finished the
intricate work of change.
He curled his fingers, uncurled them, and nodded.
I did the final settling of change, convincing his self
that this was its own way, not something put on him by
an outside force. He sighed, pressed his hands palm to
palm, then gave me a one-armed hug and left.
Ma put together a pack for me, three mornings’ worth of
breakfast bread layered with chewing leaves, and lots of
packets of the flat airless bread she baked for travelers.
She added dried fruit and jerked meat, two tunics Ethan
had outgrown, and a blanket from my own bed bay. All
my books and one of my old toys. Ari gave me three
sheets of blank paper. Ethan gave me a cookpot he had
fired extra hard so it wouldn’t break, and my younger
sisters gave me a gourd water flask they had made in
practical crafts class. Pa gave me a copy of a shifter’s
textbook I hadn’t studied yet. Dark gave me a walking
stick. Clay gave me an apple and a shrug.
My whole family went with me to the edge of Not
There. The direction was my choice. The council had said
I could go anywhere so long as it was away.
Ma took me to a rock at the edge of the clearing that
was as far as any villager ever went in the direction of
Not There. “This is a message place,” she whispered.
“Leave us notes here. If you need anything, ask, and we’ll
leave it here the next night.”
Three curled pieces of paper lay in a narrow hole in
the rock. Ma hid them in her apron pocket. “Someone
comes every day,” she whispered. “When you get there,
ask for Sordi. He’ll look out for you.”
A wisp of smoke from Not There drifted into the
clearing. It smelled like roasting meat. My mother kissed
my forehead and sent me away with a push between my
shoulder blades.
I walked slowly at first, on ground no one I knew had
walked, between trees that looked much like those in our
part of the forest. A faint track led the way.
Presently I heard music: drums, flutes, and fiddles,
faint and wild, a tune that made my feet want to dance. I
walked faster.
© 2012 Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA
novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the
World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour
awards. Her first novel, The Thread that Binds the Bones, won a Stoker
Award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award. Nina’s
middle-school novel Thresholds, the first in the Magic Next Door series, was
published by Viking in August, 2010. Its sequel, Meeting, was published in
August, 2011. Fairwood Press will publish Permeable Borders, a collection
of Nina’s short stories, in 2012. Nina does production work for the Magazine
of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches a short story writing class through
her local community college, and she works with teen writers. She lives in
Eugene, Oregon.
Author Spotlight: Walter Jon Williams
Moshe Siegel
The future you envision is nebulous, with blurred lines
between humans and animals (nanoassembly),
humans and plant-life (the Green Leopard Plague),
and technology and nature (an exotic island-cumoutdoor laboratory). Is this homogenization of society
and nature—ironically brought about by mucking
around in the gene-pool, the most unnatural of
technologies—the outcome you predict, once humanity
gets into the business of genetic manipulation?
Freeman Dyson wrote enthusiastically about the
biodiversity that would result when genehacking kits get
into the hands of “housewives and schoolchildren” (his
phrasing, not mine). It's nice that he credits housewives
with creativity, though he seems to have decided to ignore
the example of what happened when teenagers started
getting ahold of powerful computational tools.
Dyson aside, though, I think if genetic engineering is
combined with inexpensive methods of rebuilding human,
animal, and vegetable bodies, you're going to see it used
for reasons both profound and trivial. You'll be improving
biodiversity, targeting disease, rebuilding extinct species,
and engineering people free of genetic defects—and at the
same time you'll be giving cool animal bodies to
teenagers to help them stay in fashion.
Wouldn't most people get a different body if the
opportunity were available? My suspicion is that this
would result in a devaluation of beauty—physical beauty
won't matter so much once everyone can be beautiful.
Style and originality would be far more valuable than
mere attractiveness.
Michelle’s parents restrict their daughter to her
original body until she reaches adulthood, despite the
latest fads; Terzian’s martial muscle-memory—the
lingering benefit of neglected Kenpo training—saves
his life in a confrontation with Transnistrian assassins.
If you, a martial artist in your own right, lived in
Michelle the Mermaid’s customizable future, would
you argue in favor of discipline and physical training,
versus “cheating” via gene-splicing and
nanoassembly, as the most worthwhile means of selfimprovement?
I think I'm in favor of whatever leads to actual human
achievement. If you spend many years dedicating yourself
to martial arts mastery, you'll have developed actual skill
and wisdom of which you can be rightly proud. If you
stick a martial arts chip in your brain and download the
skill, you may gain some abilities but you'll have missed
the point. There's no actual achievement. It's the
difference between climbing a mountain and playing a
video game of mountain climbing.
But if you equip yourself with artificially-acquired
skills in order to accomplish something genuinely your
own, it's not cheating, it's enabling.
Michelle may have rebuilt herself as a mermaid, but
she's not just sitting on the beach and posing, she's doing
actual research and actual marine biology. Whatever her
flaws might be, she isn't interested in merely being
decorative.
The reality of death, be it realdeath or the temporary
inconvenience of starting over in a new body, informs
the motives of nearly everyone we meet in this novella.
Rage, it seems, is the primary reaction to death, as
displayed by Terzian and Stephanie, whereas for
Michelle, death (murder!) itself becomes a soothing
balm for the painful demise of her relationship with
Darton. Indeed, even grief-stricken Terzian makes
the argument that starvation, newly threatened by the
papiloma which may end world hunger, is a required
facet of the global socio-economic balance, and that
crashing the food market would crash all of society.
Does this reinforce the idea that death is a natural
part of organic life, and that any human effort to
thwart death would likely end in far greater disaster
for the species as a whole?
Rage is a natural reaction to death, for all that the rage is
pretty much futile. Death doesn't really care if we have a
snit.
True, death is a part of the human condition, but then
so is smallpox. I'm in favor of getting rid of both.
Just because ending death—along with, say, war and
hunger—would result in massive change doesn't mean we
shouldn't try to achieve these goals. There will be
disruptions, but nothing as disruptive as, for example,
bubonic plague.
The Four Horsemen have had the run of our planet
long enough. And I, for one, have every hope of living
forever.
Michelle witnesses the gradual heat-death of love as
her “deathless” society grows ever more ancient. Yet
Michelle’s passions run hotter, she being a younger
mind, and outrage regarding Darton’s betrayal fuels
her romantic reading of Terzian’s historical
relationship with Stephanie—as well as inspiring
repeated acts of homicide. Michelle musters an
emotional reaction not common in her elders: Is the
implication that without the risk of “realdeath” (what
you and I would just call death), life eventually loses
much of its point? Will Michelle, too, inevitably lose
the fire of passion over the ages?
I'm considerably older than Michelle is in the story, but
I'd like to think I've not lost my passion or my lust for life.
Passion doesn't have to die; but if you're lucky, it gets
tempered with wisdom.
One of the aspects of Michelle's background is that
realdeath has become so remote that she can view it as a
sort of game. Death has become something she plays
with, as I (fortunate enough never to have been in an
actual war) might play a wargame on my Xbox.
Terzian’s professionally inconvenient mingling of
disciplines—economics, science, philosophy—leaves
him in a unique position to refine and perfect the
arguably narrow approach that Stephanie and her
cohorts take towards solving global problems. In the
end, Terzian uses his ability to see big-picture, longterm context to form the foundation of a new world
order. Are you frustrated by contemporary society’s
approach to hunger, the environment, and economics?
Do we need to diversify and mingle specialties,
perhaps with more philosophic consideration, to
advance the human agenda of prolific survival?
I'm a synthesist myself: my own knowledge and skills are
all over the map. Many of my stories come about when
ideas from different spheres collide with each other.
Government and academe rarely offer niches for
synthesists. The problem is not so much that specialists
aren't useful, but that they spend their time talking only to
each other.
And it has to be said that most solutions to large-scale
problems generally lack creativity. Feeding the hungry is
admirable; but making hunger impossible requires
imagination.
It should also be said that most of the problems
besetting humanity are, in fact, solvable. And if
imagination is, unfortunately, not a part of the solution,
plodding along from one point to the next will probably
get us there eventually.
To what degree can you be found in your characters?
We’ve already covered the Terzian/Kenpo connection,
but what about Stephanie’s morally-ambiguous
philanthropic impulse, and Michelle’s instinct and
eagerness for historical research, as related to your
own historical writing (and presumed research
methods)?
I tend to view my characters more as bugs under a
microscope than as extensions of myself. If I equip a
character with skill and knowledge that I might possess
in real life, it's for the sake of convenience—it saves me
the effort of researching something I don't know.
And while I have on rare occasions identified strongly
with one of my characters, it would be a mistake to
consider this as autobiography.
Wishful thinking, perhaps.
And for the obligatory soapbox question: Are there
any past/present/future projects you’d care to mention
while we have you?
I should mention that “The Green Leopard Plague” and
two stories set in the same College of Mystery sequence,
“Pinocchio” and “Lethe,” are available in my new
collection, conveniently titled The Green Leopard Plague
and Other Stories.
I also have a hefty novella arriving this autumn. “The
Boolean Gate” is the secret history of an actual friendship,
between Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla, and will be
available in Subterranean Magazine as well as appearing
in chapbook form, conveniently appearing just in time for
the holidays! Be considerate of your friends, and send
them Twain and Tesla as a gift!
Moshe Siegel works as a slusher and proofreader at Lightspeed, interns at
the pleasure of a Random House-published author, is a Publisher’s Assistant
at Codhill Press, and freelance edits hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf
and smug e-reader glare at each other across his upstate New York home
office, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of
varying relevance @moshesiegel.
Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro
Caleb Jordan Schulz
In your story, “My Wife Hates Time Travel,” the
husband and his wife discover how inconvenient it can
be to know that something will happen in the future,
but they may or may not be able to prevent it. This
opens the gate to the debate over fate and
predestination, but also choice. Do you believe that it
would be better to know your future or to be
surprised?
I think a little uncertainty goes a long way, and would
appreciate a little reassurance that everything’s going to
be all right, but having your hands held every step of the
way takes the joy out of everything.
Throughout the story, you don’t give names to the
main characters, but instead simply refer to them as
husband and wife. Why did you decide to give them
this anonymity?
Who says I decided? Every once in a while a story
dictates its own form. This one takes the form of an
extended complaint about an impossible situation, and I
felt no moment where the introduction of names felt
natural or needed.
As the husband and wife are warned ahead of time of
movies to avoid, books to skip, restaurants to pass on,
I couldn’t help but be reminded of how much our
“choices” are becoming more and more tailored to us
—Amazon recommendations, Google Ads, TV
programming, etc. If this continues, do you see this as
something to embrace or be wary of?
I do wish people paid less attention to the latest list of
blockbusters—which is often by design that which
offends the tastes of the smallest number of people—and
devoted more effort to authors, movies, and music less
targeted at the vast monolithic public. There’s really a lot
of great stuff out there, and if you complain, for instance,
that the latest megabudget Hollywood bomb insulted your
intelligence, but won’t cross the street to see a smaller but
potentially more interesting indie, then you only have
yourself to blame. Seek out that which isn’t aggressively
sold, and you will find yourself frequently surprised. So,
yeah, I’m wary of mass marketing . . . while
simultaneously being an author who depends on it.
Disguised beneath this cautionary tale is, at its core, a
love letter. Was this intended from the beginning or
did it evolve as the story unfolded?
It was always a love letter, on some level. My wife is the
wife of the title. She’s as big a science fiction fan as I am,
but has always been driven to distraction by time-travel
stories, and complains bitterly about paradoxes in
particular. (This despite a special love for Doctor Who:
she is large, and contains multitudes.) I began writing the
story when she told me one too many times that she hated
time travel. She meant the sub-genre. I wondered what it
would be like if the same complaint was directed at the
actuality.
Of course there is the Elephant In The Room
Question: If you somehow learned that you would be
the inventor of time travel (if you took the path to lead
to it) would you want that responsibility?
If I could ensure that I was the only one with access to the
tech, sure. I’d zip all over the place. I’d custard-pie Hitler,
and all that fun stuff. But never in a million years would I
want it to be technology that people, as a group, could
have. It’s doomsday weaponry.
Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to
announce?
Oh, absolutely. Folks, go over to the children’s section of
your local bookstores and check out Gustav Gloom and
the People Taker, first in an extended series of middlegrade novels about the uncanny adventures of a very
strange young boy raised by a society of sentient
shadows. Four books in the series are already written, and
more are coming; they are epically funny, world-spanning
spookiness complete with dire mysteries, uncanny
revelations, vicious bad guys, surreal locations, hairsbreadth escapes, ravenous monsters, shadows out of time,
and bottomless pits. The first book will be out by the time
you read these words . . . and the second, Gustav Gloom
and the Nightmare Vault, will be out early next year.
Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding
himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion,
Scape, the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and
Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a
freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.
Author Spotlight: Harry Harrison
Robyn Lupo
Harry Harrison wasn’t always an author. This is probably
unsurprising for those who have read Harrison’s work; he
was trained and worked as an illustrator, comic artist and
an art director. This likely accounts for the lively visuals
in his prose.
He didn’t exactly start in fiction, either. As he told
Paul Tomlinson for Octocon in 2009, “I’d moved into
packaging comics, and I ended up writing a lot for them,
and moved on to writing whatever editors wanted.
Westerns and men’s adventures, which paid a lot, and
true confessions—I had a lot of experience writing and
selling before I wrote my first science fiction story. And I
was illustrating science fiction magazines for a year or
two before I submitted a story.”
His first story was serendipitous; after getting the flu,
he wrote a short story called “I Walk Through Rocks.”
Not knowing what to do with it, he asked Damon Knight,
who had commissioned Harrison to illustrate the
magazine Worlds Beyond. “I typed a story out and asked
Damon what to do with it, and he bought it for $100. My
agent then was Fred Pohl, and Fred anthologized it, and I
got another $100. So I did very well with my first story: I
haven’t done that well with a single story since, I’ll tell
you!” The story appeared as “Rock Diver” in the February
1951 issue of Worlds Beyond.
The progression from artist to writer—though he
would continue with both in his future—was slower than
his initial success would suggest. Harrison would
package pulp magazines, edit the same, and even write to
fill rather peculiar needs for the magazines, like adventure
stories and true confessions. “‘I climbed Kilimanjaro with
my Fingernails,’ ‘I Went Down with My Ship,’ things
like that. I did a lot of confession stories as well: ‘My Iron
Lung Baby,’ ‘He Threw Acid in My Face,’ ‘I Ate a
Pigmy,’ interesting stuff like that!”
“The Streets of Ashkelon” is now Harrison’s most
anthologized story, appearing in over fourteen languages.
Regarding the story, he told Alyce Wilson, editor of Wild
Violet, “With one of my stories, ‘The Streets of
Ashkelon,’ the hero’s an atheist. My agent said, ‘You
can’t sell it.’ He happened to be right.
“But the world has changed, and now it’s been
anthologized forty or fifty times. It’s been anthologized in
the Jesuit monthly. That’s pretty good.”
“The Streets of Ashkelon” was originally written for
an anthology edited by Judith Merrill, who wanted the
contributors to ignore the current taboos in force in the SF
world. Unfortunately, the anthology didn’t go to print. It
was more than a year before Harrison sold the story, and
six years before it saw print in the United States.
Sadly, shortly before this issue went to press, Harrison
died; he was 87.
Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her
graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video
games. She is personal assistant to three cats.
Author Spotlight: Sarah Monette & Elizabeth
Bear
Erin Stocks
Your short story “Boojum” happens to be one of my
favorite science fiction stories written in the last few
years, and I’m delighted we’re reprinting it in this
issue. Some of our readers might recognize a
“Boojum” as a dangerous kind of snark, a fictional
animal species invented by Lewis Carroll, or maybe
the intercontinental supersonic cruise missile dreamed
up in the 1940s (and never completed) for the U.S. Air
Force. Was the creation of the Lavinia Whateley
influenced by either one of those?
We got the word from Lewis Carroll. The second story set
in this universe, “Mongoose,” features monsters called
toves, raths, and bandersnatches.
(Sarah: I don’t remember how we thought of crossing
Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft, but since “The
Hunting of the Snark” is one of my favorite poems, in
retrospect it seems utterly inevitable. Bear: True story:
Sarah and I once drove around Madison after a rainstorm
looking at an enormous triple rainbow and reciting “The
Jabberwock” to one another from memory. The
intersection of Lovecraft, Carroll, whimsy, and horror
seems inevitable once you’ve hit upon it.)
How did you go about writing this story? Any
particular challenges you faced, or was it one of those
stories that seemed to write itself down on the page?
This one was remarkably easy—once we’d figured out
what they found in the hold of the Josephine Baker (and
for two writers deeply familiar with Lovecraft, it wasn’t
hard), the rest of the story just rolled itself out like a
carpet. It took us a little while to find the right ending, but
once we’d hashed that out, it fell into place beautifully.
You’ve co-authored several Norse fantasy books
together in addition to this story. Does your co-writing
process change at all depending on the genre, or have
you found a rhythm now that works no matter what?
Our process is the same: One of us writes until she gets
stuck or bored or whomped with another commitment,
and then she sends it to the other—who writes until she
gets stuck or bored or whomped with another
commitment, and sends it back. We try not to go too long
on either side without giving it back. As a process, it
seems to be very robust.
Any chance one or both of you will return to this world
of the Lavinia Whateley again?
We already have! The second story in what we call the
Boojum’verse, “Mongoose,” was published in Ellen
Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology, and we’re
working on a third story called “The Wreck of the
Charles Dexter Ward.”
Do you have any advice to give out regarding what
you’ve learned in writing together?
We apparently co-author the same way Henry Kuttner and
C. L. Moore did, only they did it with a typewriter in their
shared study and we do it via email. (Sarah: I’d love to try
the typewriter version sometime, but it’s hard when one
of us lives in Wisconsin and the other in Massachusetts
and I don’t think either of us owns a typewriter. Bear: I
think that would be awesome.) But it is not the way
everybody co-authors, so as usual, the best advice we can
offer is the old chestnut: Do whatever works for you.
Are you working on any other joint projects right
now?
We’re working on “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter
Ward,” but that will probably be produced by Drabblecast
before this interview runs. (Hint: go to Drabblecast &
listen!) We’re also working on the third Iskryne novel, An
Apprentice to Elves, the sequel to A Companion to
Wolves and The Tempering of Men. And more projects
are likely to sprout.
Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur
de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley
Rille anthology Destination: Future, The Colored Lens, and Polluto
Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.
Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolander
Theodore Quester
In your story, “Sun Dogs,” you start from historical
fact. What drew you to this subject, and how did you
research it?
I believe at some point during my stint at the Clarion
Writers’ Workshop I stumbled across an old film strip
with actual footage of Laika, and to see this happy,
healthy, unassuming dog—a very charismatic one, too;
she looked a lot like a Jack Russell—and to know how
her story ended was sort of heart-rending. I started
reading about her and learning things (I never knew she
was a random stray, for example) and the story went from
there.
Is this your first story to take such an unusual point of
view? What challenges did it pose? Do you feel a lot of
empathy for animals?
The first one published, anyway. Early on I tried writing
from a dog POV once or twice, but it’s very difficult to
strike a balance between thought and instinct and not
have it come out either horribly saccharine or confusing to
the point of unreadability. Animals, especially the smarter
ones, are essentially aliens living among us. They don’t
think like us, they don’t see the world in the same way;
they are coming from a completely different place. And
yet they are thinking. That enormous chasm between
their world and ours is what makes how much we do
understand one another so amazing. Anyone who has ever
watched a sheepdog trial or an agility competition is in
essence watching a human and an alien intelligence work
together to solve a problem. That is just incredible to me.
The best fiction about animals takes this otherness
into consideration. Dogs aren’t tiny humans wearing fur
coats. They are what they are, and on a certain level it’s
just as mysterious as anything from Mars.
You give your main character a choice in this story,
the possibility of a happy ending, when its real life
counterpoint had neither. Was this a conscious
decision? Do you believe in choices, in happy endings?
She deserved it, didn’t she? In real life none of us are
assured happy endings. We have choice and free will, but
that also means we’re free to make terrible, wrongheaded
decisions. That’s just part of being alive. If anyone is
helpless at the hands of fate, it’s a dog, which is part of
what makes the Laika story so heart-wrenching. It’s not
like she got into a bad relationship, dropped out of
college, and had to sign up with the space program to
make ends meet. She was a Moscow stray that humans
plucked off the street and shot into the stars. We’re such
mercurial gods. It’s a wonder dogs don’t stay terrified
24/7.
Was this a difficult story to write?
It was a Clarion story, so maybe difficult in some ways
and quite easy in others. My method during those six
weeks—and I would not recommend it to any aspiring
workshop students, let me throw that disclaimer out there
first—was to get an idea, ruminate over it until the
evening before my turn-in day, then spend the entire night
writing in a delirious, caffeine-wired fugue state.
“Vixens,” “Tornado’s Siren,” and “Sun Dogs” were all
finished that way. Deadlines and large doses of
stimulants are a girl’s best friend, apparently.
What else do you have coming down the pipeline?
I’ve got a flash piece coming up in Superficial Flesh at
some point in the next few months, and the griffin novel I
mentioned last time continues to percolate in the busted
drip coffee machine that is my brain. Will something
delicious pour out, or a charred, tarry mess? Stay tuned.
Theodore Quester spent three years after college in Europe and now speaks
seven languages; he spends his days teaching two of them to high school
students. He is obsessed with all things coffee—roasting, grinding, pulling
espresso—and with food, especially organic and locally grown. He earned his
geek street credentials decades ago, publishing an article in 2600 Magazine as
a young teenager, then writing reviews for SF Eye and interning at Omni
Magazine. In his spare time, he swims, bikes, runs, and reads a little bit of
everything; when inspired, he writes fiction, mostly for children and young
adults.
Author Spotlight: Scott Edelman
Andrew Liptak
What can you tell us about the origins of your story,
“The Last Supper?”
My mind is often drawn to the extremes, and when it
comes to a given fantasy trope or science-fictional conceit,
I often think of the first or last person to experience such a
situation. Those thought experiments don’t always
become stories, but sometimes they do—as with my short
story “The Last Man On the Moon,” written for Peter
Crowther’s anthology Moon Shots. Rather than focus on
the first man on the Moon, I thought—what must it be
like for the last man to have visited the Moon, once that
visit is over? And since I’ve written so many zombie
stories, it was inevitable I’d write about a zombie at the
end of things. That is—what happens after the last human
is gone, and all that remains in the world for the undead
is hunger?
We see the story from the point of view from the
zombie, Walter, and I’m reminded a little of
Lovecraft’s famous story, “The Outsider.” Was this
story an influence, or were there other influences?
I’m honored that anything I’ve written would remind
anyone of Lovecraft, but alas, no, “The Outsider” wasn’t
in the back of my mind as I wrote “The Last Supper.”
However, since I first encountered Lovecraft in my teens,
and had probably devoured everything the man had
written by my mid-’20s, his work was added early to the
compost heap from which all of my stories come. So if
you say touches of this story are there, who’s to say that
it’s not present somehow, without me even being
conscious of it?
Zombie fiction often doubles as a form of social
commentary. In this story, we follow Walter, who is
driven to eat, even at the cost of his existence; do you
see parallels in the way we live our everyday lives?
I did not consciously intend social commentary. What I
wanted to do was convey to the reader as truthfully as
possible what it would feel like to live through the events
of my story. I intended things to be taken for what they
are, and not as metaphors. As Freud (perhaps
apocryphally) said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and
sometimes a zombie is just a zombie. But as with your
feeling that Lovecraft is hiding beneath the surface of my
tale, if you choose to see a high moral purpose hidden
here, I won’t stop you.
What do you have in your zombie survival kit? Any
plans in case the dead rise up again?
Now that I’m living in the wilds of West Virginia, my
arsenal contains a couple of tools I never thought I’d own
back when I was growing up in an apartment building on
Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn—a chainsaw and a 12-gauge
shotgun. And since my neighbors are either similarly or
better armed, in the event of a zombie uprising, I’m
staying right here!
Lastly, what do you have coming up that we should be
looking forward to?
My next short story—a sequel of sorts to Saki’s “The
Open Window”—will appear in the anthology The
Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread
and the Dead, edited by Luis Ortiz, followed quickly by a
tale in Pete Crowther’s magazine Postscripts.
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has
written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus and
Armchair General and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com
and at @AndrewLiptak on twitter.
Author Spotlight: Peter Sursi
Earnie Sotirokos
“The Seven Samovars” combines alchemy and a local
coffee shop. Did you come up with the idea for this
story while sipping a hot beverage brewed by your
local barista?
Actually, the phrase “the seven samovars” popped into
my head while I was taking a walk. Then I had to figure
out where there would be seven samovars in one place,
and a witchy coffee shop seemed just right.
Part of the background of each patron is told with
their specific drink order. What do you think you can
learn from a person based on the type of food and
drink they enjoy?
A lot, actually. The idea of referring to people by their
drinks came from my sister, who worked as a barista for a
while. She said it was a weird dynamic, since you saw
these same people, morning after morning, and you did
get to know them—but only by their regular orders, never
their names. I liked the idea that a modern-day witch
would use a drink order as the key to get to know the
inner life of her patrons.
Besides, you know you judge that person in line next
to you as you listen to them order. What led her to the
conclusion that fifteen shots of caramel syrup was the
right number in that venti soy latte she is about to
consume? Is fourteen really not sweet enough? Do you
even actually like coffee at that point?
Using Death as a mixer to modify the effects of the
other components produced some interesting results.
After a few weeks on the job do you think the
apprentice would start experimenting with the
contents of the samovars?
Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. If you’ve already
said yes to the idea of being there in the first place, then
you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. Okay, maybe you
save Death for a few more weeks, but a little Dream or
Life surely couldn’t hurt. Much.
Food and servingware pairings were also a key part to
getting each order just right. Why did you choose to
include these non-liquid parts of the ritual?
Everyone’s coffee ritual is very specific—the same time of
day, in that specific cup, with a banana or an oatmeal
scone. Everything just fell into place when I started
telling the mini-stories within the larger story. And, as I
wrote more and more of her, Erzebet’s personality seemed
to call for a mix of casual disregard for some things (like
Death being the same color as lemonade) and very precise
instructions (like the method for brewing Dreams).
You decided to feature regular old coffee just as much
as the other fantastical ingredients. Do you think that
a good cup of joe would have as much of an impact on
your day as a love potion or truth serum?
Well I’m not sure that regular coffee would be as
inadvertently hilarious as a little Love in the office
coffeemaker, but as a facilitator of great conversations,
it’s the best. And the right conversation at the right time
will change your life; that’s how I ended up married.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m currently working on some short stories and am
halfway through the first draft of a novel. I hope you’ll see
a lot more of me in the future.
Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next
Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games.
When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning
fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.
Author Spotlight: Holly Black
Robyn Lupo
“Heartless” begins with the aftermath of a battle.
How hard was this story to write? What was the idea
that got you started on this story?
This story was incredibly difficult for me to write. For a
long time, I wrote the beginnings of stories and couldn’t
write the endings. It wasn’t until after I finished my first
novel, Tithe, that I understood enough about structure to
finish short stories. This was the second one I completed.
The thing I wanted to write about was being so cut off
from one’s emotions that they’d become inaccessible.
And I’ve always been fascinated with the story of the
wizard who put his soul into his own finger, so that he
couldn’t be killed. I thought that if I changed “soul” to
“heart” then I could do something new with the tale.
The desolation in the story, the “adultness” of the
world, makes Ada’s age all the more striking. What
prompted this choice?
I think I’d first thought of this as a kind of plague story
and did a lot of medieval plague research, but I settled on
a battlefield instead. It allowed for a lot of mythic and
fairy tale elements—crows, knights, the young heroine in
Ada, etc.—along with the gritty and horrific descriptions
that I hoped would create tension in that they promised a
potentially darker ending.
The timing was interesting for Ada to break the spell
on herself. Why do you think she chose to do so right
then?
Well, the spell is metaphoric as much as anything else.
The moment she chose to break it was the moment that
her humanity was starting to wake up again and the
numbness was starting to recede. She was ready to feel
again.
You’re wildly successful in the writing world. Do you
have any advice for the newbies?
Thank you! My best advice is to write to please your
reader-self rather than your writer-self. The stuff that
thrills you as a reader will most likely be the exact same
stuff that thrills other readers.
Do you have any writer’s rituals, i.e. a tea before
settling in to work?
Coffee, definitely. Other than that, putting on headphones
and listening to music while I’m working helps me focus.
I try to turn off the internet for stretches of time;
sometimes I am more disciplined about that than I am at
other times.
I try really hard not to have too much of a ritual,
because I think it’s important to be able to write in lots of
different places under a variety of circumstances.
Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her
graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video
games. She is personal assistant to three cats.
Author Spotlight: Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Jennifer Konieczny
What inspired your story “Monsters, Finders,
Shifters?”
I worked on it a while ago, and can’t now remember
where the original idea came from. The story was waiting
to be the first chapter of a book, but I had other projects I
had to do, so that hasn’t happened yet. Finally I took
another look and thought it could stand on its own.
Bertram has to answer “What is human?” at a young
age. How would you answer that question at Bert’s
age? Would you give the same answer now?
When I was twelve, I’m pretty sure I thought people and
human meant the same thing. Bert grew up in a culture
where the dividing line between human and monster is
clearly defined, and in his world, the chances of being
born with “monster” traits are much higher, so I think he
has a more difficult time with this question than I did.
These days, I think “human” defines our species, and
“people” has a much wider meaning. We share the planet
with all kinds of beings. We have differing senses,
intelligences, body structures, cognition, desires, and
fears. All of these things interest me.
Bert trades security and family for the potential to
learn and develop. Given the same choice, which
would you take?
I think this is the choice I did make. I moved out of my
mother’s house and went away to college; I live at a
distance from my siblings, although we communicate by
email and visit each other. I don’t think it’s an “either/or”
choice for me, or for Bert, just a shift in priorities.
Bert has many siblings whom he doesn’t always get
along with, but he has their support by the end.
You’ve said that you were competitive with your own
siblings growing up. Are you close now?
I love my brothers and sister and enjoy seeing them when
I can. We have a good time together. We had a reunion in
May, 2012, which was fun. It had been a while since we
saw each other before that.
What’s next for you?
More short stories! I’m also working on a young adult
novel called Ghost Attachment Disorder for Sharyn
November at Viking. Beyond that, the choices are wide
open.
Jennifer Konieczny studied English and History at Villanova University and
Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She currently resides in
Philadelphia and enjoys volunteering as a slush reader, author interviewer,
and editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine, and inflicting her medievalstudies self on her students.
Coming Attractions
Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .
We’ll have original fantasy by L. B. Gale (“Spindles”)
and Megan Arkenberg (“The Suicide's Guide to the
Absinthe of Perdition”), and fantasy reprints by David
Barr Kirtley (“The Black Bird”) and Brian Ruckley
(“Beyond the Reach of His Gods”).
Plus, we’ll have original science fiction by Robert
Reed (“Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment”) and
Benjamin Parzybok (“Bear and Shifty”), along with SF
reprints by Pat Cadigan (“Nearly Departed”) and Nancy
Kress (“Art of War”).
For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella
will be “Dragonfly” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and of course
we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist
spotlights, along with feature interviews with Ursula K.
Le Guin and David Brin.
It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And
while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks
for reading!