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Lightspeed Magazine
Issue 35, April 2013
Table of Contents
Editorial, April 2013
“Bellony”—Nina Allan (ebook-exclusive)
The Red: First Light—Linda Nagata (novel excerpt)
Interview: Jane Yolen
Interview: Brandon Sanderson
Artist Gallery: Armand Baltazar
Artist Spotlight: Armand Baltazar
Deus Ex Arca—Desirina Boskovich (SF)
A Love Supreme—Kathleen Ann Goonan (SF)
Schwartz Between the Galaxies—Robert Silverberg (SF)
Deep Blood Kettle—Hugh Howey (SF)
Smoke City—Christopher Barzak (fantasy)
The Visited—Anaea Lay (fantasy)
A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain—Karin Tidbeck (fantasy)
Dinner in Audoghast—Bruce Sterling (fantasy)
Author Spotlight: Nina Allan (ebook-exclusive)
Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich
Author Spotlight: Anaea Lay
Author Spotlight: Karin Tidbeck
Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey
Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak
Author Spotlight: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
Author Spotlight: Bruce Sterling
Coming Attractions
© 2013, Lightspeed Magazine
Cover Art and artist gallery images by Armand Baltazar.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
www.lightspeedmagazine.com
Editorial, April 2013
John Joseph Adams
Welcome to issue thirty-five of Lightspeed!
Just as we were going to e-press with this issue, we
got the good news that Lightspeed is again a Hugo
Award finalist for best semiprozine, and your humble
editor is again a nominee for best editor, short-form.
We’re extremely honored to be nominated again, so
please allow me to say a big THANK YOU to everyone
who voted for us.
Speaking of awards, in case you missed the news last
month: The Nebula Award nominees for this year have
also been announced, and Lightspeed has two finalists in
the short story category: “Give Her Honey When You
Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley and “The
Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu.
So congrats again to Ken and Maria, and also to all of
the other nominees for both the Hugo and Nebula.
In other news, your humble editor had two new
anthologies come out recently. The first, from Tor, is The
Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, featuring
original stories by Diana Gabaldon, Seanan McGuire,
Austin Grossman, Naomi Novik, and many others. For
more information, visit johnjosephadams.com/madscientists-guide.
Also just out is Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the
Emerald City and Beyond, which I co-edited with former
Realms of Fantasy editor Douglas Cohen. It features all
new stories by Jane Yolen, Seanan McGuire, Tad
Williams, Orson Scott Card, and many more. Plus, the
cover and each individual story is illustrated by
Lightspeed illustrator Galen Dara. To learn more, visit
johnjosephadams.com/oz-reimagined.
With all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap
this month:
We have original science fiction by Desirina
Boskovich (“Deus Ex Arca”) and acclaimed indie
bestseller Hugh Howey (“Deep Blood Kettle”), along
with SF reprints by Kathleen Ann Goonan (“A Love
Supreme”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg
(“Schwartz Between the Galaxies”).
Plus, we have original fantasy by Anaea Lay (“The
Visited”) and Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck (“A Fine
Show on the Abyssal Plain”), and fantasy reprints by
Bruce Sterling (“Dinner in Audoghast”) and Christopher
Barzak (“Smoke City”).
We also have our usual assortment of author and
artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with
bestselling authors Jane Yolen and Brandon Sanderson.
And for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is
“Bellony” by Nina Allan, and our featured novel excerpt
is The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata.
Our issue this month is again sponsored by our
friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Promise of
Blood by Brian McClellan. 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
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Before I go, just one last thing. Remember that
custom-built ebookstore I told you about back in the
February editorial? Well, it’s now finally up and running!
So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d
like to subscribe directly from us, please visit
lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the
Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi
format.
And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options
are still available, of course; this is just one more way you
can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance,
still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at
Weightless Books. Visit
lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all
of our subscription options.
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 The Mad
Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of
Fantasy, 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 fourtime finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is also
the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter
@johnjosephadams.
Bellony
Nina Allan
For Chloe Mavrommatis
It was further than it looked on the map. Even on a
Thursday afternoon, when there was less on the roads
than usual, even in Janet’s new Audi, the drive from
London to Deal took her almost two hours. Terri left the
car in the station car park, which was close enough to the
centre and less expensive than the metered spaces along
the front. It was a hot day. She walked down through the
town, past the pedestrianised shopping area and then
across Beach Street to the promenade and pier entrance.
There were plenty of people about, and Terri guessed that
many of them were on their holidays.
Like so many English seaside resorts, the town was
both charming and drab. There were a number of newer
chain stores in the precinct, but the narrower side streets
were mostly crammed with dismal-looking tourist shops
selling the kind of cheap souvenirs you would never
dream of buying unless you were killing time in a place
like this. The once-resplendent Georgian terraces showed
similar signs of wear and decay, the peeling paintwork
and faded awnings a familiar outward sign of more
general neglect. There was a resigned insularity about
everything. People seemed to be enjoying themselves, but
in a restrained manner that spoke of predictable pleasures,
of aging relatives and wet Sundays, of a cloying
tranquillity whose inevitable end was the claustrophobia
of stasis and the need for escape.
Terri felt both exalted and frightened. New places
excited her; no matter how unpromising they appeared on
the surface, there was always something to be discovered,
a story that could be written. Terri believed that if you
returned from an assignment empty-handed, it was not
the place that had failed but the imagination. It was this
appetite for the seemingly mundane that had produced her
initial successes at the magazine where until a week ago
she had worked as a junior feature writer. It was only
with hindsight that she realised the editor had made use
of her, keeping her in line with vague promises whilst
continuing to fob her off with assignments so
outrageously turgid that no one else was interested in
covering them.
She excelled at such work and even enjoyed it, but she
had come increasingly to resent the implications of being
taken for granted. Now, in this small and faded town on
the east Kent coast, she began to wonder if the editor had
guessed her level all along. The Allis Bennett story was
her first good idea for an assignment since taking the
decision to go freelance. But now that she was here in
Deal, she feared the town and most likely the subject had
exactly the same qualities of dullness and parochialism as
all the jobs that had been foisted on her while she was
working for the magazine.
She did a turn of the pier, then started along the
promenade in the direction of Walmer, the smaller
residential suburb that lay immediately to the south of
Deal. Walmer had its own castle and its own history, but
the building developments of the nineteen-sixties made it
impossible to tell where one town now began and the
other left off.
Walmer had been the home of the children’s writer
Allis Bennett. She had lived there for thirty years, and
then she had disappeared. Nobody had seen or heard of
her since. Terri had told herself there had to be a story in
that, that stories about missing persons always sold. Now
she was starting to think the best thing you could do with
a place like this was go missing from it. The thought
made her smile, and all at once her spirits began to rise.
She was looking for a missing person. Even if she
failed in her search it would make an interesting story.
Perhaps she would go missing herself, at least for a while.
Terri first read a book by Allis when she was ten. The
book was called Bellony, and was about a girl who finds
a doorway to another universe. The girl in the story was
named Vronia. Her sister Annabel had recently died, and
Vronia invented a game with a door in her house as a way
of being with her again. The door itself was ordinary—
just a side door leading to the concrete passageway
between Vronia’s house and the house next door—but the
act of passing through it was not. In Vronia’s
imagination, the world on the other side was always
different from the world from which she emerged.
The book was unlike other books Terri had read,
where children pursued adventures in magical realms full
of vampires and talking animals. The worlds behind
Vronia’s door appeared at first to be the same as the
world she had left. It was only gradually that the
differences became apparent. Usually these differences
were small but they coloured everything—everybody
wore the same clothes, say, or speaking aloud in public
was illegal.
At the climax of the book, Vronia became trapped in a
world where no one recognised her. In this version of
reality, her sister was alive but every time Vronia tried to
speak to her she disappeared.
Terri found the story frightening, but this did not stop
her reading it. The book came into her life shortly after
she went up to senior school. Her closest friend Melinda
had been sent away to a girls’ boarding school in Dorset,
and Terri for a time felt very alone. She came to identify
strongly with Vronia, who wore glasses and had few
friends, and she searched for more books by the same
writer, Allis Bennett. Those that she found, she enjoyed.
She liked the way that inexplicable things could happen
in Allis’s books and not be resolved.
When she was older she discovered that Allis Bennett
had once been Alicja Ganesh and that she had been born
in Poland. She had written ten novels for children
altogether. Her one adult novel was a semiautobiographical work, about a Polish writer who flees to
England to escape the Nazis. The small number of critical
essays that had been written about Allis all suggested that
the darkness and ambiguity in her stories had its source in
her childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, and in the fact
that her parents and sister had died in concentration
camps.
Bellony, the strange-sounding title of the novel Terri
had loved as a child, turned out to be the name of the
street in Warsaw where Allis’s family lived before the
war.
Terri walked on along the promenade, taking note of the
sights she had read about and was trained to look out for:
the castle, the bandstand, the blue Art Deco dome of the
old Regent Cinema. Once she was clear of the town, there
were fewer people. The tide had begun to go out, and the
beach seemed to stretch for miles. Like most of the
beaches on the Kent and Sussex coast, it was notable only
by being featureless, an unvaryingly flat expanse of
shingle. But the landward edge, a strange, tangled
hinterland of tamarisk and valerian, sea kale and exotic
orange flare-ups of kniphofia, was interestingly wild, an
unkempt no-man’s-land between the coastline and the
countryside beyond.
She looked out across the stones to where a small
power boat was drawn up on blocks, surrounded by a
chain of its rusting entrails. Just beyond it was a row of
beach huts, painted alternately in yellow and white. It was
like a scene straight out of A Letter from Sabine, one of
Allis’s novels that had been set on this part of the coast.
A memory came to Terri then of the first time she had
read Sabine and the pleasure and the mystery she had
found in it. She supposed it was no coincidence after all
that she was here. Allis’s writing had first become
important to her during a time of change, and this also
was a time of change. She had resigned from her job and
finally she had found the courage to end her relationship
with Noel, her boyfriend for the past five years. She had
known for eighteen months that Noel wasn’t right for her.
Leaving him had been the right thing but it still wasn’t
easy. She was on her own, as she had been alone before,
when Melinda had been sent off to Broadhurst.
It had been Allis’s stories that had helped her last
time. Now it was Allis herself she felt drawn to. Since
making the decision to write about her, she had
increasingly come to think of her as a friend.
Allis’s house was on Wellington Parade, a little over
a mile from the centre of Deal. The access to the houses
was very narrow, over an unmade strip of raked-over
shingle and sand. Some of the dwellings were new-build,
uninspiring seventies chalets with red-tiled roofs and
plate glass windows. But most of the houses here were
older than that, a disjointed assemblage of post-war
prefabs, colonial-style villas dating from the nineteenthirties and clapboard bungalows with gently rusting cast
iron verandah rails. They formed an intriguing spectacle
and something wholly unexpected. In the mismatched
incongruity of styles there was for Terri something almost
dreamlike, as if each house was a concrete expression of
its owner’s fantasies.
Here at last she began to see what might have
attracted Allis to this place and caused her to stay. She
knew Allis had been attached to the town because she
had set several of her books here, or at least in an
imaginary place that looked exactly like it. It was a kind
of miracle, the way she had transformed this rather tired
seaside town into somewhere special. And yet even as she
was thinking this, it occurred to Terri that what Allis had
done was not after all so different from what Terri was
trying to do here herself. She was looking for the story
behind the story. For Allis Bennett as for Terri, even the
most ordinary things had the potential to become
extraordinary if you described them properly.
It was strange to think that Allis had once walked
where Terri was now walking, maybe even thinking
similar thoughts.
Allis’s house was right near the end, one of a pair of
Victorian semis that had been built as mirror images of
each other. The house on the left had a freshly painted
pink exterior and the flagstones that formed a path to the
door looked recently scrubbed. The house on the right,
Allis’s house, was in a state of decline. The yellow
paintwork had faded to a bleached ochre. Instead of a neat
strip of lawn, there was overgrown grass. The windows,
long unwashed, were spattered with grime. Terri felt
drawn to the house instantly. As she came closer, she saw
that the signboard of a local estate agent had been
hammered into the ground to the right of the gate. The
house was being advertised as “To Let.”
She walked back along the front in a kind of daze.
When finally she reached the car she called the agent,
who confirmed that the house was still available, but on a
short lease only. The long-term tenants had recently
vacated and the owner was thinking of selling.
Terri said that would be fine.
“How soon could I move in?” she said.
“Well,” the agent hesitated. “Normally we would
expect references. And I should warn you it’s a bit run
down. Don’t you want to see inside? I could drive you
round there now if you like.”
“I don’t have time, I’m afraid. But so long as the roof
is watertight, there’s really no problem. It’s the house’s
position I’m interested in. It’s perfect for what I need.”
She told the agent, whose name was Cahill, that she
was prepared to pay three months’ rent up front if it
would hurry the process along. “You’re more than
welcome to check my references, but I’d like to move in
next week if I can.” She gave him the contact details for
the magazine’s finance office and the letting agency that
handled her flat in Camden. She felt tempted to take
Cahill up on his offer of showing her the house, but made
herself hold back. She did not want her initial
impressions of the place muddied by the blandishments of
an estate agent.
On the drive back to London, she made a pretence of
reflecting calmly on the day’s events, but in reality she
was barely able to restrain her excitement. The idea of
living in Allis’s house was like a dream come true. It was
not just that it would bring her closer to Allis in ways she
had never previously imagined; she believed she might
also find the peace and solitude she needed to help her
work out what kind of writer she wanted to be.
She would be getting away from London, and away
from Noel. Everything had happened so quickly it was
hard to take in.
Allis arrived in London soon after the war. She was taken
in by relatives in Highgate, where she met and married an
Englishman, Peter Bennett. Peter Bennett was a keen
weekend sailor, and it was his idea that they should move
out of London. After a couple of months’ searching and
some minor disagreements, they finally agreed to settle on
the house in Walmer. Two years later, Peter Bennett was
drowned in a sailing accident.
Allis stayed on in Walmer, which she said she had
grown used to. By then she had sold her first novel, which
was published to favourable reviews and some small
success. She could perhaps have made more of this, but
her strong dislike of publicity made her a difficult author
for the publisher to promote. She disappeared soon after
her fiftieth birthday. Of those who were interested, most
believed that, like her husband’s, her death had been from
misadventure. Allis liked to walk along the foot of the
cliffs, and it was easy to get caught by the tide unless you
were careful. A small number of people suggested that
she might have walked into the sea deliberately, but in the
end the speculation died down. Allis’s books had been
popular for a time, but she had never been famous. The
quietly abandoned house, with its ordered rooms, left no
hint of violence.
When seven years had passed and she had not
returned, Allis was declared legally dead. The house in
Walmer was sold, and the money divided equally
between the relatives in Highgate.
The new owner was a Turkish businessman based in
London. Like Peter Bennett, he was keen on sailing, and
bought the house as a weekend retreat, but he soon found
that he was too busy to spend much time there. It took
longer to get to Walmer than he had bargained on, and he
spent enough time on the road as it was. He decided the
most sensible thing would be to rent the place out.
Terri moved in on the Wednesday. She had spent the
weekend packing up her flat in Camden. Some of her
stuff went into storage, but most of it she found she was
happier getting rid of. She wanted to make a fresh start.
She arranged to sub-let the flat to Janet, who had been her
best friend on the magazine. Once the six-month tenure
ran out, Janet could either renew it in her own name or let
the flat go. Terri had decided she wouldn’t go back there,
whatever happened. The place would always mean Noel
to her. If she wanted to return to London, she would find
somewhere else.
She travelled down to Kent by train. She had thought
about hiring a car, but in the end had decided not to. Allis
had never learned to drive, and for the next couple of
weeks Terri wanted to put herself in Allis’s shoes.
Knowing she would have to carry everything had made
her selective about the things she brought with her. It was
surprising how much she had been able to fit into a
rucksack and two large holdalls. Walmer station was
closest to the house, but there was the matter of the keys,
which she had arranged to collect directly from the estate
agent. It was only a short walk from Deal station to the
agency office and, even though her luggage was heavy,
Terri managed without too much difficulty, but Alan
Cahill reacted to her arrival on foot with a kind of
incredulous amusement, as if she had just stumbled in
from China.
“If you hold on just a moment, I’ll run you down to
the house,” he said. “You can’t possibly walk.”
He glanced again at the bulging holdalls. He looked
to be in his early fifties. Terri noticed he was wearing
cufflinks, and had the blandly smooth good looks of a
host on a television chat show. Terri could tell that he was
curious about what she was doing there, that for people
like Cahill the very fact of her being alone and without a
car would give cause for suspicion.
She wondered if people in the town had looked at
Allis in that same way when she first arrived. Terri had
managed to find a photograph of her from that time, a
small, nervous-looking woman in a badly fitting plaid
dress, her dark hair tugged back from her face in a
bedraggled bun. Later photographs showed her looking
more acclimatized, her hair clipped in a neat gamine crop,
her figure fuller and her face less gaunt. She seemed
altogether less foreign.
Terri’s first impulse was to tell Cahill she would
prefer to make her own way out to Allis’s. But the
thought of lugging the holdalls was not appealing and so
she gave in. She was thankful it was just a short drive.
She was uncomfortable with the agent, and had no wish
to become more closely acquainted with him. She gazed
determinedly out of the window for the entire journey,
refusing to respond in more than monosyllables to his
hopeful gambits about the weather, the comfort or
otherwise of her train journey, the shortage of available
parking.
“Would you like a hand with your stuff?” Cahill said
as he brought his car to a standstill in front of the house.
Terri did her best to smile, then shook her head. “No
thank you,” she said. “You can drop me here.” She
wished he would just go. She most emphatically did not
want the agent inside the house with her.
“Well, you know where we are.” He handed her the
keys, four of them on a key ring, the house’s number
scrawled in bold indelible pencil on the cardboard fob.
She hauled her luggage out of the boot and on to the
drive. Cahill backed his car and then turned it around,
manoeuvring with difficulty in the narrow access road.
Terri waved to him briefly, waiting until he was out of
sight before approaching the house. Once the car was
gone, it was perfectly quiet. The tide was far out, the
horizon blurred by heat haze. Now that she had returned
here to live, the place felt different, subtly enchanted, as if
it had decided to trust her with some of its secrets.
There was no one at all to be seen. Suddenly she
found it easy to imagine that Allis was close by,
watching. She would be an old lady now, but that was no
reason to presume that she was dead.
The front door would not open at first, and for a
moment Terri thought Cahill had given her the wrong set
of keys. But suddenly the lock gave way and she was
inside. The hallway was stuffy with heat and the air
smelled stale. Dust motes danced in the angle of light
from the open door. There was a pile of junk mail on the
doormat. Terri carried her things inside and shut the door.
There were eight rooms in total, arranged over the two
floors: a sitting room at the front, with two smaller
reception rooms and the kitchen downstairs, three
bedrooms and a bathroom on the storey above. The place
had been hoovered and cleaned, but there was a down-atheel air to everything and she could see at once that the
house was in need of many minor repairs. The furniture
was a depressing mix of nineteen-forties utility and
modern flatpack. Terri went from room to room, feeling
vaguely disappointed and wondering how much of this
junk, if any, had been in the house when Allis was still
living there.
As well as the front door key, there was a key to the
kitchen door at the back, and another, smaller key that
opened the gate to the side access passage where the bins
were stored. There was a fourth key, which seemed not to
fit anything. For the first time since deciding to rent the
house, she asked herself what exactly she had hoped for
in coming here. The house was just a shell, after all; by
itself, it could tell her nothing. She wondered if she had
invested it with too much power, if she had talked herself
into believing it was the key to a mystery in order to give
herself an excuse for running away from London and all
the painful decisions of the last few months.
As if to press home the point, her mobile started
ringing. The room’s sparse furnishings made it sound
aggressively loud.
She flicked it open and glanced at the screen. The
caller was Noel. She felt immediately flustered, at a
disadvantage. In her mind, Noel had already receded into
the past. The idea that he might call her here hadn’t
entered her head. She wished she had thought to block his
number.
As it was, she picked up, knowing that if she didn’t,
he would call again.
“Where are you?” he said. He gave no greeting, not
even a simple hello, but Noel was like that. He said what
was on his mind, regardless of whether you needed or
wanted to hear it.
“It doesn’t matter where I am,” Terri said. “I needed
to get out of London for a couple of weeks.”
“Is it true that you’ve quit your job? I phoned the
office first, but Janet said you left last week.”
“Yes, it’s true. I should have left ages ago.” She
wanted to say it had been him, or more accurately put her
final row with him, that had finally given her the courage
to hand in her notice. The prospect of going freelance had
terrified her and she kept finding excuses not to do it.
Splitting up with Noel had turned out to be easy by
comparison. Once that had been accomplished, she found
she was able to take care of the other business as well.
“You’re not serious?” Noel said. “How on earth are
you going to manage?”
“I’ve got some jobs, pieces to tide me over. And I’m
working on new stuff already. Anyway, I’ll be fine.” She
felt angry at herself for answering his questions, for
feeling she had to justify herself in front of him. She felt
like asking him what the hell it had to do with him, but if
she did there would be a row and as far as she was
concerned that part of her life was over. She hated what
he was doing, trying to make out that nothing had
changed, trying to draw her back into his life by the
simple expedient of ignoring everything she said.
It was what he always did, a kind of inverted
bullying.
“Can I come and see you in your bolt hole?” he said.
“I’m sure it’s very cosy.”
“No, Noel, you can’t,” she said. “Goodbye.”
She broke the connection. Her heart was racing. The
thought that he might find out where she was, was
appalling.
After a couple of seconds, she switched off the phone.
If shaking Noel loose meant she had to cut herself off
from the world for a while, then it was a price worth
paying. It occurred to her that Allis would not have had a
mobile phone, and that if she was serious about trying to
re-enter Allis’s world, then she should give up her mobile
also.
For all her love of the place, as a foreigner and a
writer Allis Bennett must have been isolated here. Had
she welcomed that isolation, or had it been forced upon
her? Did she have any friends in the town at all? One of
the difficulties of writing about Allis was that no one
seemed to have known her very well.
Allis had never remarried and rarely travelled. It was
as if her life had been divided into two acts: there was
before-Walmer, where she had lived in the world and
terrible things had happened to her, and then there was
Walmer, where everything came to a standstill and her
life appeared to enter a cul-de-sac. There had been a third
act also, of course: the event or sequence of events that
had brought about Allis’s disappearance from Walmer
and whatever it was that had happened after that. Action,
reaction, synthesis. Terri found she could hardly imagine
what it must have been like for Allis, to arrive in a foreign
country among a host of strangers who could have had
only the shallowest understanding of what had happened
to her. For most people, the present becomes the past only
gradually, but for Allis there had been this sudden and
irrevocable division, potently symbolized by her final,
one-way crossing of the English Channel.
Had Allis taken to writing as a way of coming to
terms with her life, or had writing been a part of her life
already? Terri had no idea. She hoped that this was
something she would find out in time.
She opened one of her holdalls and took out the small
folder of photographs and newspaper clippings that was
all the material on Allis she had been able to amass so
far. She dug around in it until she found the photograph
of Allis as a new immigrant, the Allis of the plaid dress
and untidy bun. She propped the photo on the mantelpiece
in the smaller of the two back sitting rooms, the room she
had already decided would serve as her office. The room
overlooked the garden, and seemed private from the rest
of the house.
She wondered which room Allis had worked in,
where she had written her novels. Once again, Terri
hoped she could find out.
She spent the next couple of hours unpacking her
things and trying to give the house a feeling of home.
There was a gateleg table in the front sitting room, which
was sturdy enough to be used as a writing desk yet small
enough to be easily moved. She dragged it through to her
new office and set up her laptop, arranging her books and
papers on the melamine shelves that lined the chimney
alcove. Because of the problems of transporting them, she
had been forced to severely ration her choice of books, but
the sight of those she had brought made her feel
immediately uplifted. The room now had a purpose to it.
She could even begin to believe she might succeed, not
only in this assignment but as a freelance writer.
Once everything was unpacked, she ventured outside.
As she deposited her few bits of rubbish in one of the
dustbins, she noticed there was a side door in the access
passage, an alternative entrance to the house that from its
position should have led directly into her office. Terri
knew already that no such doorway existed, at least not
on the inside of the house. The door had a lock, and Terri
tentatively tried it with the last key on her key ring, the
odd fourth key she had been unable to find a use for. The
key fitted but it would not turn. She decided that the door
must have been sealed, the doorway bricked and plastered
over from the inside. Such things were commonplace,
especially in older houses. At least she now knew what
the fourth key had been for.
The discovery pleased her. It was small and it was
meaningless, but it was something about the house she
had found out for herself. At the very least, it felt like a
start.
It was getting towards evening. The sky was a
mottled pink. The back garden was badly overgrown, a
chaotic mass of blackberry thorns and nettles and seeding
grasses. Among the waist-high scrub there were stands of
goldenrod and speedwell and cow parsley, the same
kniphofia she had seen on the beach. Terri smelled the
scents of wild meadows, the dry-grass, pollen-rich aroma
of so many lost summers. She thought of the way she and
Melinda had drifted apart. There had been tears, and there
had been letters, and then there had been the slow, cruel
erosion of time. This gradual dissolution of their
closeness was something Terri still found painful and
shocking, even in retrospect. In it, she could see
everything she needed to know of transience and eventual
mortality.
She remembered an image that often came to her
when she thought about this, the image of two trains
stopped at a station on opposite platforms. There was a
girl looking out of the window of one of the carriages,
catching the eye of a girl looking out of the compartment
opposite. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment,
a moment in which worlds arose and possibilities
extended. Then the trains moved off in opposite directions
and they never saw each other again.
The image was from one of Allis’s books, The Hurdy
Gurdy Man. When Terri had first read it, she cried,
because it seemed to describe exactly what had happened
to herself and Melinda.
She turned to go inside, thinking she should get
herself something to eat. She saw with a start that she had
not been alone, that there was a woman in the next-door
garden, taking washing off a rotary clothesline and
placing it into a yellow plastic basket. The woman
nodded to her briefly and then disappeared indoors.
Terri made supper, then spent the rest of the evening
going through her Allis file, arranging the material she
had in date order, then dividing it between four new files.
Each of the files related to a different aspect of Allis’s
life. She hoped eventually to fill these files with new
material.
At some point she realised she had completely
forgotten about Noel’s phone call. Thinking about him
directly brought him no closer, and she found that to get
any sense of him she had to conjure him up, like a
character in a book she had read some time ago and
mostly forgotten.
She went to bed late, choosing the main bedroom at
the front of the house, which had a wonderful view of the
sea and that she felt certain must have been Allis’s. She
listened to the midnight news, the sound of the waves
through the open window as constant as radio static.
It was a hot night. She tossed and turned for a while
in the unfamiliar bed, then fell soundly asleep.
Arranging and rearranging the facts, Terri came to the
conclusion that Allis’s disappearance had one of three
causes: she had met with sudden death, she had gone off
with a new lover, or something unwelcome had emerged
from her past.
Terri did not believe that Allis had been murdered or
drowned; the former was too bizarre, and in the case of
the latter her body would have been bound to come ashore
eventually. The same was also true of the suicide theory.
It was more likely that Allis had met a new man, but
this still did not explain why she had abandoned her
home and all her possessions. The evidence showed that
Allis had left the house suddenly and without preparation.
There had even been a load of washing still in the
machine.
Aside from a few book signings in London, Allis had
rarely left the town. Her life spoke of order and planning,
not random impulse. It seemed unlikely to Terri that she
would have altered her behaviour so radically, even for a
new lover, unless some crime had been committed.
She entertained brief visions of Allis falling for a
murderer, a bank robber, some man on the run, but then
supposed her imagination was getting away with her.
This left only the past. Terri made a list of the most likely
reasons a person might have for wanting to disappear.
There were many possibilities, but most of these could be
categorized under one of three main headings: love,
money, and fear. She had already discounted the man
theory, and it was also a matter of record that Allis had
not been in debt. It was one of the first things the police
had looked into, and it had been shown that, although
Allis was by no means rich, she was certainly
comfortable. Her books brought her in a reasonable
income, especially since the most popular, The Carousel,
had been adapted for film by the Children’s Film
Foundation. She owned the house in Walmer outright.
Her accounts all stood securely in the black.
The police had kept a track on her bank accounts for
several months after her disappearance, waiting to see if
there were any withdrawals. There were none. Allis’s
money, along with her house, had passed duly into the
hands of the Highgate cousins.
What could have frightened or disturbed Allis Bennett
so badly that she had made herself disappear without a
trace?
It was true that Allis’s past was filled with tragedy,
that she had lost her parents and her sister at a young age.
As she reread Allis’s stories and studied the background
to her life, it became increasingly clear to Terri that the
loss of her sister Hanne had been the defining event of
Allis’s life, and that most if not all of her books were to
some extent attempts to come to terms with it.
She had never spoken much of Hanne directly, but
there was a surviving photograph of her. It was in sepia
tint, and showed a girl of about thirteen wearing a dress
with a round white collar and metallic buttons. The girl’s
hair was cut in a pageboy, the front bangs secured with a
tortoiseshell slide. The image was charmingly old
fashioned, although Terri supposed that at the time
Hanne’s hairstyle would have seemed rather daring and
thoroughly modern. The idea that this girl had been
deliberately killed, swept up by forces beyond her control
and beyond any normal comprehension, that she had been
smashed on the rocks of history, was still dauntingly
horrific. It reminded Terri that Allis had also been a
victim of these crimes. Her past had haunted Allis all her
life, but the worst had already happened and she was not
to blame for any of it.
What more was there to run from? Terri knew there
must be something. The very fact of Allis’s disappearance
was proof of this. She knew also that there would have
been clues. The clues would have most likely been in the
house, because this was the last place that Allis had been
seen. The police had been over the house many times, but
it occurred now to Terri that if they had missed
something, it would not have been through negligence,
but because they hadn’t known what to look for.
They would have been looking for signs of
disturbance, of what was commonly referred to as foul
play.
But what if the clues to what happened had been more
subtle?
They needed someone who had known Allis better.
Or another writer.
She decided she should telephone Alan Cahill. She
knew it would have been more polite to arrange a proper
appointment, to go into the office, but she found she still
felt hostile towards Cahill and didn’t want to see him face
to face. She was aware that Cahill had done nothing to
earn her dislike—if anything, it had been the opposite—
but there were things about him that annoyed and repelled
her. His conventionality, his boring good looks, his
particular brand of masculinity, subtle yet patronizing—in
Terri’s mind Cahill had become symbolic of everything
about the town that was anti-Allis.
It was Cahill’s secretary that answered the phone, but
she put Terri through to Cahill almost at once.
“I’d like to know some more about the house,” she
said to him. “How long have you been the agent?”
“Is something wrong?” said Cahill. “I did warn you it
was in need of attention.”
“The house is fine,” said Terri. “This is just some
research I’m doing. Can you tell me how many people
have lived here since the house has been on your books?”
She could sense him tensing up almost at once, as if
the very idea of research, of anything that could not be
accommodated on a spreadsheet, aroused his suspicion.
“I don’t think I can help you. The information we hold
on our clients is confidential.”
“I’m not talking about your clients. It’s the house I’m
interested in. All I want is a bit of background.” She
wished she could come up with a harmless rationale for
her enquiry, something that would satisfy the agent
without her having to tell him about Allis. She did not
want to talk to Cahill about her project. “I’m writing an
article about the town.”
This at least seemed to make some sense to him.
Cahill told her that he had taken over the business from
his father ten years before, and that the house had been on
their books throughout that period. There had been three
sets of clients during his time as manager. The first, a
family of four, had been there since his father’s time. The
couple after that were Spanish, both teachers at a college
in Dover. The most recent tenant had been a retired
doctor.
“He was only there for a couple of months,” said
Cahill. “He needed somewhere to stay while he looked for
a property to buy in the area. We found him a lovely little
place in the end, just up the road on Prince Charles
Terrace.” He sounded very pleased with this outcome, and
Terri suspected it had been his sale. A mad thought came
to her, that he hoped she would include this information
in her article.
“Do you think the doctor would mind if I had a word
with him?” Terri asked.
“I shouldn’t think so. He’s a nice old chap, very
friendly. But I don’t think he’d be much use to you. As I
said, he’s new to the area. If you really want to know
about the house you should speak to the lady next door to
you. Judy Whitton, her name is. She’s lived there for
years. I know that because we employ her as a cleaner for
our short-let properties. She’s completely reliable.”
“That’s useful to know. Thank you.” She ended the
call. She was beginning to feel guilty about Cahill, who
had been perfectly pleasant to her and more helpful than
he could have realised. She guessed that Judy Whitton
was the woman she had seen in the garden the first
evening she was there, taking down her washing from the
rotary dryer. She tried to remember what she had looked
like, but could recall only the way she walked, the stout
figure oddly graceful in its navy moccasins. Terri
supposed she had been in her sixties, older than Alan
Cahill but younger than Allis.
Terri went outside to the garden, vaguely hoping that
the woman might be there again, but there was no sign of
her or of anyone, not even a new crop of washing on the
rotary dryer. She walked round to the front of the house
and rang the bell. She waited on the doorstep for a couple
of minutes, standing on tiptoe with her face to the glass,
but when it became clear there would be no reply, she
went back inside. She felt disappointed and frustrated, as
if information was being kept from her deliberately,
although she knew that Judy Whitton was probably just
out shopping.
She tidied the kitchen, washing up the plate and mug
she had used for her lunch, then set out for a walk along
the beach. She had grown used to taking a walk every
day. She had developed the habit initially in imitation of
Allis, who had stated more than once that her walks
along the coastal path were essential to her working
routine. But within a couple of days she found herself
looking forward to the walks not only for the exercise but
as a way of channelling her ideas and bringing her
thoughts into order. She liked to think that this was how
it had been for Allis too.
Also, the landscape itself seemed to invite
exploration. The level path, the glittering sea, the cliffs
rising in the distance were for Terri an epitome of
vanished freedoms, of the English summer and the urge
to wander, exactly as they had been in Allis’s stories. She
walked south towards Kingsdown, taking the well-worn
path that would, if she followed it for long enough,
eventually bring her to the ferry terminal at Dover. It
came to Terri that if she were to board one of the ferries, it
would in theory be possible to walk all the way from
Allis’s house in Walmer to the house on Bellony in
Warsaw. The idea was fascinating to her and a little
frightening. It gave the sense that if you walked long
enough and far enough you might travel back in time as
well as distance.
Terri smiled. She was beginning to think like Allis.
She wondered whether Allis’s unconventional cast of
mind, her compulsion to stretch an idea to the very limit
of its credibility was a tendency she had been born with,
or whether the war had permanently altered her view of
things. More than one critic had suggested that it was her
marriage to Peter Bennett and the feeling of safety it
provided that had given Allis the confidence and security
to begin expressing herself in writing, but Terri did not
believe it. Allis might have loved Peter Bennett while he
was alive, but he had produced no lasting impact on her
work. Allis’s first subject was being alone, coming to
terms with solitude and drawing strength from it. With
his mousy hair and his clean shirts and his buttoned-up
Englishness, Peter Bennett had been a brief and incidental
accompaniment.
She thought about the main character in Allis’s novel
Orinoco, a boy called Toby who loved ships and
lighthouses, anything to do with the sea. He had fallen in
love with an angelfish, and drowned. It seemed at least
possible that Toby had been modelled on Peter, but far
more than any superficial similarities with her dead
husband, Toby Chowne resembled Allis herself, or rather
the quintessential Allis character: a shy and lonely child
marooned in some strange aftermath of loss.
Terri was beginning to realise that there was far more
to Allis’s story than could be covered in a single article.
She thought there was at least the possibility that she
could persuade a publisher to commission her to write
Allis’s biography. If this happened, it could be lifechanging. So much for Noel’s sneering doubts about her
ability to make a go of it alone.
She stepped off the path and began walking across the
beach towards the edge of the sea. A narrow white line of
surf flowed back and forth over the pebbles at the tideline,
robbing them of their protective opacity. They emerged
jewel-bright from the water, glistening in the harsh white
sunlight, the pearlescent greys, veined greens, and
polished ambers of Murano glass. The stones tumbled
and slid beneath her feet, their rolling clack and crunch as
smoothly satisfying as the rattle of barley sugars shaken
together in a jar. The sky was a vast blue vault. The
surface of the sea flashed like tinfoil, its undulating
meniscus a snare for the sun. The wind had dropped
completely, and the rising heat of the day had begun to
induce in Terri a mild euphoria. She had foolishly come
out without a hat. She had one back at the house, a tatty
green straw boater she had discovered hanging on a nail
just inside the cupboard under the stairs. She had a
feeling about the hat, that it might be one of the few
things left in the house that had actually belonged to
Allis.
At Hope Point the path divided in two, climbing
straight on towards the head of the Down or turning left
to thread its way along the foot of the cliffs. Terri did not
like the lower path. The sight of the sheer white cliffs
towering above her made her afraid. She came to a
standstill, thinking how easily a person might be caught
by an encroaching tide.
Could this be how Allis had died? She hated to think
so. She could not bear to think of her terror, realising that
she was trapped and there was no way round. She would
have tried to swim, of course, only the sea would have
driven her back into the cliffs. From where Terri stood,
she could just make out the grey slate roofs of the first
cottages on the road to St Margaret’s at Cliffe. The
skyline was blurry with heat haze, and to Terri it seemed
for a moment as if the cottages were floating in thin air.
Their roofs were sharply triangular, rigid as stage sets,
flat as the cardboard façade in a children’s theatre. There
was a toy theatre in Allis’s novel The Carousel. Terri
mopped at her face with the back of her hand. The sweat
was pouring off her, strands of hair were plastered to her
forehead and neck. She turned back the way she had
come, cutting diagonally across the shingle and heading
for the cracked strip of asphalt that ran up from the head
of the beach towards the Kingsdown Road. The road was
shaded by trees, and was much easier to walk on than the
shingle. She was back at the house in a little under half
an hour. She went straight upstairs to the bathroom and
stepped into the shower. She turned the cold tap almost
all the way over, letting the fierce, hard jets bombard her
skin with coolness. She leaned against the wall, her eyes
half closed, listening to the sound of the water striking the
tiles. The feeling of distance that had assaulted her at the
cliff edge gradually receded. It was as if she was
absorbing reality through her skin along with the
moisture.
She dried herself and put on fresh clothes, then made
herself a cup of tea and went to sit in her office. As she
pushed open the door, she had the brief but strong
conviction that someone was inside, waiting for her, but it
was clear as she looked about her that the room was
empty. She shook her head and the room seemed to spin.
She supposed she was still feeling the effects of sun
exposure. She opened the window as far as it would go,
filling the office with the combined scents of bleached
seaweed and exhausted buddleia. The afternoon heat was
gradually beginning to subside. She noticed that the
speedwell and ragwort she had placed in a jug on the
windowsill had all wilted, and she felt a brief flash of
annoyance at herself for being so thoughtless, for leaving
the jug in the full glare of the sun. The jug was ugly, an
Art Deco imitation she had found in one of the kitchen
cabinets, its squat lines mitigated only by the modest
presence of the wildflowers.
She wondered if the house was getting to her, the selfimposed isolation. Apart from Cahill and the girl on the
supermarket checkout, she had not spoken to anyone
since her brief conversation with Noel the day she arrived.
She briefly considered ringing Janet, but decided
against it. Janet would be pleased to hear from her, but
she would also see her call as an opportunity to bring
Terri up to date with magazine gossip. Terri had no wish
to hear it, at least not yet. To be drawn back into that
world so soon after leaving it would only be a distraction.
But neither did she want to talk to Janet about Allis. She
felt proprietorial towards Allis, protective even. She had
the sense that to talk about her to anyone else would be to
betray her in some way, that it might even damage her
ability to write about her.
She had felt that way about her subjects before, but
never so strongly. She decided she would have an early
supper then make an attempt at redrafting the opening of
her article. She straightened the papers that were already
on her desk, separating the photocopied cuttings from the
handwritten notes. As she was doing this, something
slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor.
When Terri bent to pick it up, she saw it was the
photograph of Allis’s sister Hanne. The photograph of the
girl in the white-collared dress was one of the few
surviving images from Allis’s life before the war, and
Terri had made an enlarged copy of it before leaving
London. The picture had been used to illustrate almost
every known article on Allis, and had also appeared as an
inset on the book jacket for her final novel, East Wind,
which had also been her only novel written for adults.
East Wind was a strange book. It was presented as a
novel, as fiction, but seemed to draw so heavily on Allis’s
own experience that it was a memoir in all but name. Yet
there were certain details that had been altered for no
obvious reason, and other things that didn’t sound right,
the way the uncle had joined the Nazi party, for instance.
On the few occasions when she had mentioned them in
public, Allis had invariably portrayed her family as
vehement opponents of everything Hitler stood for.
Terri had studied the photograph of Hanne so often
she would have said she remembered it in every detail.
Hanne in East Wind was characterised as a shy girl, but
hugely intelligent, a mathematical prodigy who had
already won a number of regional chess tournaments.
Somehow this depiction of Hanne had never corresponded
with the impression Terri drew from the photograph. The
Hanne of the picture looked younger and less self-aware,
a child with a Mickey Mouse watch and a tortoiseshell
slide. The watch especially had struck her as odd. She
had researched the detail, and discovered that the first
Mickey Mouse watches had been manufactured by
Ingersoll in 1933. It was therefore possible that Hanne
had owned one, but now, as Terri prepared to return the
picture to the folder where she kept all the other Allis
photographs, something else occurred to her. The online
article she read had informed her that there was not just
one type of Mickey Mouse watch, but many hundreds,
that the prototype had proved so popular that scarcely a
year went by without Ingersoll, and later Timex, who took
over the company, bringing out some new variant or
design. There were enthusiasts who collected Mickey
watches exclusively.
The article had included pictures of several of the
most popular designs, ranging from the original
Steamboat Willie right through to a digital model from
the 1990s. Something about one of them looked familiar,
and although Terri had meant to check it, she never had.
She booted up her laptop and navigated her way back
to the watch site. The photograph of Hanne had lost some
of its sharpness in the process of being enlarged, but the
details were still quite clear, the design of the watch more
easily discernible. With the photograph beside her on the
table, she scrolled through the various images, searching
until she came to the one that had reminded her of the
watch Hanne was wearing in the photograph. She
checked it against the picture, clicking on it to enlarge it
until she was sure.
The watch on the screen was a Mickey Mouse “Mod”
watch, with a white strap and oversized buckle. It was
identical with the watch on Hanne’s wrist.
The caption that went with the picture said that the
Mickey Mouse “Mod” watch first appeared in 1968.
Allis’s sister had died in 1944. Whoever the child in the
photograph was, it couldn’t be Hanne.
Terri felt herself overcome by a feeling of unreality, of
dissociation, reminding her of how she had felt on the
beach in the glare of the sun. None of this made any
sense. She looked at the photograph again, and the idea
came to her that it was Noel, that Noel had found the
photograph and doctored it in some way. It would be easy
to achieve if you knew Photoshop, and Noel did. He could
have altered the photograph to frighten her or ruin her
article. Perhaps he had even discovered where she was,
and was hoping she would run to him for help.
But that didn’t make sense either. Even if by some
awful chance Noel had found out where she was, he knew
nothing about her Allis project. So far as Terri could
remember, the subject of Allis and her books had never
once been mentioned between them.
She needed time to think. She returned the picture to
the file and went to make supper. Afterwards, she sat and
watched television. Normally she judged television to be
a waste of time, but on that evening she found some
comfort in familiarity. The chat shows and sitcoms and
home improvement programmes were inanely repetitive,
but they were proof that the world was still out there, that
she could rejoin it any time she chose.
Terri wondered if that was what Allis had done, after
all: simply rejoined the world, in another place and using
another name, bored with the life she had made for herself
and curious to try out another.
She found it difficult to get to sleep. The house itself
seemed wakeful, as if it too had been disturbed by her
discovery. Terri had not looked at the photograph again
before going to bed, but once she was there it was all she
could seem to think about.
If the child was not Hanne, then who was she? Had
the photograph originally been used by mistake, with all
its subsequent uses a simple repletion of that same
mistake, or was there something more sinister behind it?
Perhaps there was no surviving photo of the real Hanne,
so a picture of a girl who resembled her had been used
instead.
Perhaps there was no Hanne at all.
The thing that disturbed Terri most was the fact that
Allis could not have been in ignorance of what had
happened. Even if she had never read the articles, she
would surely have seen her own book jacket. She would
have known the child in the photograph was not her
sister.
But all the evidence suggested it had been Allis who
supplied the photograph in the first place.
Terri felt certain that, however inadvertently, she had
stumbled upon something important, that the photograph
and Allis’s disappearance were somehow connected.
From the standpoint of the job she had come here to do,
the thought of such a breakthrough was thrilling. And yet
there was something—a darkness—that made her uneasy.
The room was full of shadows. In her perplexed state
of mind, Terri found it was all too easy to start thinking of
them as ghosts. The sea whispered through the open
window, and when she got up to close the curtains, she
saw its surface was dancing with phosphorescence.
In the end, she slept without realising that she slept, her
conscious thoughts entwining themselves with the more
lateral, instinctive thinking of her dreams. When she
woke, it was full day. Her first thoughts were of the
photograph. She wanted above all to see it, to prove to
herself that she had not been mistaken. She pulled on a Tshirt and jeans and went downstairs. When she entered
the office she knew at once that something was different,
but could not work out immediately what it was. Then
she realised it was the hat, the green straw boater. It was
lying on the table next to her laptop.
She reached for it cautiously, picking it up by the
brim. She realised to her dismay that she could not say
with one-hundred percent certainty that she had not put
the hat there herself. She had been thinking about it, after
all.
The idea that she had left the hat on her desk and then
forgotten having done so was after all less worrying than
the alternatives. Which were either that the house was
haunted or that someone had broken in during the night.
She remembered the feeling she had had the evening
before, that she was not alone in the house. She looked
carefully around the room, aware that her palms were
sweating and that her breathing had become more
shallow. When she saw movement outside the window
her heart knocked in her chest and she almost cried out.
Her first thought was that it was Allis, come to pay her
back somehow for trespassing on the past and all the
secrets she had intended to stay hidden. Then she saw it
was the woman from next door, watering the roses in her
back garden.
Terri dashed through to the kitchen, aware that she
had not combed her hair and that she was wearing
yesterday’s clothes but determined she should not let it
matter. She knew she had to speak to Judy Whitton at all
costs. She did not want to let her get away again until she
had at the very least established contact.
“Excuse me,” she called. She stepped out on to the
overgrown lawn. The woman turned at the sound of her
voice. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt
dress and the same navy moccasins that Terri had seen
her wearing the week before. She was stouter than Terri
remembered, the loose skin of her forearms mottled with
liver spots. But her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly styled,
and her lightly made up face looked alert and not
unintelligent. She was as tidy and well kept as her house
and garden.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Terri. “My name’s
Terri Goodall. I’m the new tenant here. I was hoping I
could speak to you for a moment.”
“How can I help you, dear?” said Judy Whitton.
“Everything all right for you, is it? I know the place is in
a bit of a state. The doctor had to get the plumbers in at
one point.” Her voice was clear and firm, with traces of
an East London accent.
“Oh no, thank you, the house is fine.” Terri smiled in
a way she hoped was reassuring. “I’m writing an article
about the woman who used to live here. I spoke to the
letting agent, Alan Cahill? He seems to think you might
remember her.”
“Mrs Bennett, you mean?”
“Yes, Allis Bennett. She was a novelist. She wrote
books for children.” Terri didn’t like to hear Allis spoken
of in this way, as Mrs Bennett, an ordinary housewife,
indistinguishable from Whitton herself. She felt anxious
to establish at once that Allis was different.
“I don’t know too much about that. My kids are all
grown and gone. But I helped Mrs Bennett’s nephew sort
out the house, you know, after she left.”
“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
Terri felt like cheering aloud. Alan Cahill had been right:
Judy Whitton had known Allis, had spoken to her. She
had been living here at the time of Allis’s disappearance.
The fact that she knew nothing of Allis’s writing might
even be an advantage. She would have noticed other
things, details that critical articles never mentioned. Her
insights would be valuable and unique.
“Not a clue. I went through all that with the police at
the time. You’re not from the police, are you? If you are
then I’ve got nothing to say.”
Terri shook her head at once. She knew she had to
calm down, that her rapid fire questioning was making
Judy Whitton feel like a crime suspect. Much more of it
and she was liable to clam up. But she sensed that Judy
Whitton was the breakthrough she needed and it was
difficult to restrain her excitement. “I’m not from the
police. I’m a journalist. I read all Allis’s books as a child.
I’m interested in what might have happened to her.”
“Just bored sick of this place, I reckon. She was never
exactly what you’d call settled.”
“Really? I’ve heard she didn’t like to travel.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean in her mind. She didn’t
join in much. She preferred her own company. Once her
daughter moved up to Nottingham, she got even worse. I
had a feeling she might have gone there, but the police
said not.”
“Her daughter?”
“Yes, Joanne. She married a chap she met at college.
There was some kind of row between her and her mum, I
reckon. Not that Mrs Bennett ever said, but sometimes
you just know these things, don’t you? It’s hard for a kid
though, growing up without a father. There are bound to
be problems.”
Terri couldn’t think what to say. She felt stunned by
what Judy Whitton was telling her. None of the articles
had mentioned children. Terri felt she had been deceived
in some way, although who had done the deceiving she
could not tell. She had no reason to believe that Whitton
was lying. What would be the point?
It was as if the world had divided in two: on the one
hand there was the Allis she had read about, the solitary
writer with the dead sister and the tragic past, on the other
there was Mrs Bennett and her daughter Joanne.
Which of these women was real and why had Allis
lied about her daughter? It came to Terri that both
versions of Allis could be real, or neither of them, that the
real Allis was the sum of the two. And just because Allis
had chosen to remain silent about her daughter did not
mean she had lied about her. Just because she had chosen
to make some aspects of her life public in the form of
novels did not mean that Allis had relinquished her rights
to a private life.
The business of biography was complex, more
complex than Terri had known when she started out. She
had begun with the idea of uncovering a mystery. Now
she was starting to see that the act of unveiling was also
an act of destruction. She had wanted only good things for
Allis. By writing her article she had wanted in some
measure to repay Allis for the pleasure and comfort her
books had brought to her as a child. But what was
happening now was something else. It was like tugging
on a piece of loose wire and bringing the whole house
down.
She supposed she could stop now if she wanted to,
but she knew she would not. If she cared more about the
story than she cared about Allis that was something she
would have to learn to live with.
“Do you think Allis felt isolated here? I’m sure you
know about what happened to her during the war.” Terri
knew that in order to get the most from her, she had to
win Whitton’s confidence. She hoped that by asking
Whitton’s opinion, she might start to open her up. People
liked to say what they thought, much better than they
liked to answer a direct question. That was something
Terri had learned from her very first interview.
“The little Jewish mite, you mean? I knew she was
killed in the Blitz, but Allis was only a child then. Lots of
people were killed in the bombing, and it wasn’t as if the
girl was her real sister or anything. I don’t see how she
could have felt isolated. Her grandparents lived here in
Walmer, you know. Allis stayed with them every summer
before the war.”
“But that’s not possible,” Terri exclaimed. The words
were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Allis
Bennett was born in Warsaw.”
“Not her.” Whitton said. She laughed through her
nose, a kind of snorting chuckle, as if she was trying to
suppress her amusement at something vaguely illicit.
“You must have got your facts mixed up somehow. It was
the little Jewish girl that was from Poland. Allis’s parents
took her in just before the war started. They were running
all kinds of schemes then, trying to help the children who
had been transported. Allis didn’t have any brothers or
sisters of her own and I suppose her mum and dad
thought it would be nice for her, to have someone her own
age to play with. Anyway, you see how it worked out.”
She paused. “If you’re really interested, you should look
in the attic. She left the place just as it was, you see. All
her clothes and furniture and things, no one knew what to
do with it all. We gave most of her clothes to Oxfam and
her nephew sold a lot of the furniture but there was a
whole load of other stuff we just packed into boxes and
stuffed in the loft. I remember there were tons of old
letters. So far as I knew they’re still up there.”
“Thank you so much,” Terri said. “This is just what I
needed.”
“No need to thank me, dear. I doubt you’ll find
anything much. She was just a normal woman, Mrs
Bennett. She wasn’t mad or anything, not like some of
these ones you read about. She just kept herself to
herself.”
“Do you think I could come round and see you? Once
I’ve had a look at the letters, I mean? It’s so helpful,
speaking to someone who actually knew her.”
“That’s fine by me, dear. Just remember I’m out
Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s my WI.”
Terri thanked her again and went back inside. She sat
at the kitchen table, toying with a slice of toast and
waiting for the kettle to boil. She made coffee, then
poured it away after only three sips. If Whitton was
telling the truth, then everything she had heard or read or
believed about Allis Bennett until that morning had been
an invention. Allis had treated her own life as one of her
fictions: She had discarded the truth and fabricated a
whole new past for herself based around the identity of
the refugee child her parents had adopted during the war.
Alicja Ganesh was just another character she had created,
only this time with Allis Bennett’s own face and body.
What Terri did not understand was why she had done
this. Had the truth seemed so dull and inadequate that
Allis had simply exchanged it for a story she liked better,
stretching certain details to the limits of their believability
the same way she did in her stories?
Or had she rewritten her past to make it fit with the
image of herself she liked to present to her readers
through her books?
She could not bring herself to believe she had done it
for money. Terri realised she ought to boot up her
computer and transcribe the conversation with Whitton,
get the details down on paper before they were lost, but
she knew she could not settle to anything until she had
been into the attic. There was a set of steps in the
understairs cupboard, pushed in against the wall behind
the vacuum cleaner and an ancient wooden clothes horse.
Terri dragged them out of the cupboard then carried them
up to the landing and set them up beneath the loft hatch.
She mounted the steps and pushed up the boards. The
hatch was stiff, and made a dry cracking sound as it came
away. Dust and small bits of debris cascaded down. Terri
coughed, fumbling for the light switch on the central joist.
The roof space was hot and smelled stale, reminding
her of the way the house had been when she first entered
it. The thickness of the dust made it obvious that no one
had been up there in years.
There were ten boxes in all, three wooden tea chests,
the rest cardboard cartons from the local supermarket. It
would be impossible to move them without help, the tea
chests especially. Terri brushed dust from her hair and
wondered whether it would be best to pay someone to
help her or try and bring down the boxes’ contents bit by
bit. She opened one of the tea chests at random. The
hardboard lid had been secured with tin tacks but was
easy enough to work free. The chest was full of clothes: a
paisley dress, a woollen overcoat with an Astrakhan
collar, a wedding gown. They smelled strongly of the
mothballs they had been packed in. Terri replaced the lid.
The sight of discarded clothes always made her think of
dead people. The second chest was packed with
ornaments. They were wrapped in pages from the Walmer
Herald, all dating from the summer Allis had been
declared legally dead. Terri unwrapped a china teacup, a
cigarette case, a model horse. The horse was about six
inches high and made of tin. The brightly coloured paint
had worn away down to the metal in several places, and
there was a small dent in one of its flanks. Terri
recognised it at once as the tin horse in Bellony. It had
belonged to Vronia’s dead sister Annabel.
She thought briefly of asking Alan Cahill to help her, then
dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Instead she called a man
from the Yellow Pages, a number picked at random from
the House Clearance section.
“I don’t actually want a house cleared,” she said. “I
just need to get some boxes out of an attic.” The man said
it would cost her twenty pounds.
Two hours later the boxes were out of the loft and
lined up neatly in one of the back bedrooms. Terri spent
most of the next three days going through them. She went
to bed each night feeling physically drained yet so
mentally preoccupied she found it difficult to switch off.
The whole of the upstairs floor was now covered with
piles of oddments and paper and bundles of letters, the
scraps and tag-ends of what had once been the life of
Allis Bennett. Even after she had showered and changed,
Terri felt filthy with dust and newsprint. She barely
stepped outside for the whole three days.
Yet in spite of her exhaustion, she felt triumphant.
She knew she had found what she had been looking for: a
story so remarkable that no one had guessed at it, let
alone written it down. She also felt buoyed up with the
knowledge that this was precisely the kind of writing she
wanted to do. She had thought of the project from the
start as the search for a missing person and at the time
she had meant that literally, but she now knew there was
more than one way of going missing. Uncovering the
truth about Allis was proving to be one of the most
thrilling experiences of her life.
Three of the boxes contained books, many of them
Allis’s own first editions. Terri had purchased paperback
reprints of those novels of Allis’s that were still available,
but seeing the originals aroused in her a depth of emotion
she could not have predicted. It would have been easy to
lose herself in them for hours, but she forced herself to
save them for later. The books and clothes and household
effects were fascinating and they would add colour to her
account, but they could not tell her much. They told her
that Allis collected Victorian paperweights, that she read
Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Bowen, that the spinning
top and the wooden monkey in The Carousel had
material counterparts. They could tell her what Allis had
liked but not what had happened to her. Terri knew she
had to press on.
There were more than two hundred letters from
Joanne, a whole box of them. These ranged from the
postcards Joanne had sent to Allis while on trips with her
school right through to the brief notes posted from
Nottingham after her marriage. These last letters were
few in number and subdued in tone, entirely lacking the
detail and spontaneity of the much longer letters written
while Joanne was at college. The underlying tension was
palpable, although its source was never specified. There
was no mention of Poland or the war, or even of Allis’s
books. The Allis of Joanne’s letters was Mrs Bennett.
In the box with Joanne’s letters was a crumpled white
envelope containing a tortoiseshell hair slide, a Girl
Guide badge, one half of a return train ticket from
Walmer to Tenby and a bunch of loose photographs. One
of the photographs showed a young man with floppy fair
hair cradling an infant. Terri guessed that this must be
Peter Bennett holding his daughter. Another photograph
was clearly the original of the photocopied reproduction
she had in her office downstairs, the picture of the girl
wearing the Mickey Mouse watch. The photograph was
in colour. A caption scrawled on the back identified the
subject as Joanne.
The other photographs were less interesting,
snapshots of Walmer Castle and the bandstand at Deal.
Like the books and ornaments, they told her very little.
Terri had hoped there might be a picture of the Jewish
girl, something that confirmed her existence, but all the
photos had been taken long after the war.
Terri feared she had come to a dead end after all. She
stared at the contents of the last of the boxes with a
mixture of disappointment and perplexity. In contrast
with the others, which had been packed selectively and
with care, this final carton appeared to contain a random
assortment of stationery and other inconsequential bits
and pieces. Terri could not understand what had made
Judy Whitton and Allis’s nephew single out such rubbish
for preservation. It wasn’t until she flipped open one of
the notebooks that she realised that what she was looking
at was the contents of Allis’s desk on the day she
disappeared. Everything was there, right down to the last
paperclip. Terri found it incredible that these things had
remained in the house, that the police had not removed
them long before. She supposed then that the police had
not been much interested. There was no body and no sign
of violence. Allis was an adult and had broken no laws; if
she wanted to disappear, there was nothing to stop her.
The notebook had been dated on the front cover and
contained the draft outline for what was clearly to have
been a new novel. The book was set in London and told
the story of a girl named Linney. Linney’s parents were
unable to have more children of their own, and so decided
to take in a child of the Kindertransport, one of the
thousands of Jewish children sent to England by their
parents to escape the Nazis. Linney resented the
newcomer and did everything to make her life a misery.
In the end the Jewish girl went missing during an air raid.
The story had been left unfinished, but there was enough
for Terri to see that here at last was Allis Bennett’s true
autobiography. Far from loving her adopted sister, she
had disliked her intensely and wanted to be rid of her. It
was only once she was gone that she realised what she
had done. It was impossible to know what had really
happened the night of the bombing, but it was clear that
Allis had blamed herself for the girl’s death and had gone
on doing so. She had blamed herself so much she had
relinquished her own identity. It had taken her thirty years
to confess the truth.
Terri felt she could weep for Allis. The story itself
was sad but understandable; most children feel resentful
of strangers, at least to begin with. It was Allis’s reaction
that was extraordinary. From a private domestic tragedy,
she had constructed a whole new universe, a reality from
which she had been prepared to exclude even her own
daughter. Terri did not like to imagine how lonely she had
been.
Still none of this explained the suddenness of her
disappearance. Her fantasies had evolved over years and
had survived every change in her life up until that time;
she would not have abandoned them without a reason.
Terri continued to sift through Allis’s desk litter, her
phone bills and old library cards, convinced the answer
had to be there somewhere but as uncertain as ever as to
what she was looking for. When she came upon the
airmail letter in its slim blue envelope, she almost
discarded it, half-convinced that she had looked at it
already. The letter was handwritten, in the angular
copperplate script that was familiar to Terri from the
letters of a German girl she had had as a pen friend back
in secondary school. The envelope was addressed to a
Miss A. Clowes. It had been postmarked in Antwerp, just
seven days before Allis went missing. Terri thought at
first that the letter had been delivered to Allis in error,
until she began reading and realised that Clowes had
been Allis’s maiden name.
My dear Miss Alice Clowes,
I hope you will forgive me, but I have been to
considerable trouble to procure your address! My name
is Rosa Steen Ringmark and my sister was Hanne Steen.
I believe that Hanne was legally adopted by your
parents, Arthur and Marie Clowes, in the summer of the
year 1942. Hanne and I were very close as sisters. When
we were told that only one of us was to be sent abroad
with the transport, we were heartbroken. It was not the
idea of war that terrified us but the idea of separation.
Indeed it is still this parting from Hanne at the railway
station that embodies the terror of war for me, more
even than the things that came later.
I did not hear of my sister’s death until some years
after the war. Until that moment, I had always cherished
the hope that we would be reunited. I found it impossible
to accept that we would not be, and in truth, this is why it
has taken me so long to go in search of Hanne’s second
family. However, as I have grown older, I have come to
realise that I will never feel complete until I can hear
Hanne spoken of by another, someone who knew her and
was close to her during those final years when we were
apart. Time is running out for all of us; if it is possible, I
would like to make recompense for my delay before it is
too late.
It is for this reason that I would like to invite you, as
a sister, to spend some time with your second family. I
know this letter will come as a shock to you and that it
will maybe awaken memories of what must rightly be
called the darkest time for all the peoples of Europe. But
I can only hope most sincerely that you can find it in
your heart to accept. Your acceptance would mean
everything to me and might perhaps be useful to you
also.
Please write to me soon, if only to assure me that you
have received this letter.
With heartfelt greetings,
Rosa Steen Ringmark (Mrs)
Terri knew the letter would have horrified Allis. It
was not just her guilt over Hanne, but the thought that the
lie she had made of her life might now be exposed. The
thing Allis cherished most of all was her privacy, the
privacy she needed in order to write. Rosa’s letter spelled
the end of everything. She would have felt she had no
option but to run.
The only mystery that now remained was where she
had gone. Terri had no idea how she could discover this.
She still believed Allis must have left clues, but for the
moment she was out of ideas. She had already searched
the house from top to bottom. She wondered if it was
worth looking in the loft again and went downstairs to
fetch the ladder, wondering why she was bothering when
she knew there was nothing to find.
The attic was as empty as she had known it would be,
the dust already settling over the clear patches on the
floorboards where the boxes had stood. She replaced the
hatch and took the ladder back downstairs. It was then
that she realised she had never searched the cupboard
under the stairs. She leaned the ladder against the wall
and began dragging the cupboard’s contents out into the
hall. The cupboard was stuffed with all the junk such
cupboards usually contained: a vacuum cleaner, a broom,
a mop and bucket, the gargantuan clothes horse. There
was a plastic crate packed with tins of shoe polish and
furniture wax, a food blender still in its box. Terri thought
it highly unlikely that any of these things had belonged to
Allis; rather they had amassed themselves organically in
the wake of each successive batch of new tenants. In
either case, as evidence they were worse than useless.
When the cupboard was finally empty, Terri wedged
open the door with a folded scrap of cardboard and went
inside. It was a large cupboard, larger than normal. It was
difficult to see all the way to the back, even with the aid
of a torch. She took a hurried step backwards, convinced
for a moment that she had seen something move, but it
turned out to be an old skipping rope, twisted about its
handles like a dust-grey snake. Even once she had
established it was not alive, the skipping rope gave her a
peculiar feeling. For some reason she was sure it had
belonged to Hanne Steen. She left it where it lay and
began backing out into the hallway, feeling her way along
the wall with the flat of her hand. A foot or so from the
cupboard entrance, she felt a bump in the plasterwork.
Terri shone the torch where her hand had been and saw
that the paper that had been used to line the cupboard had
started to peel away. The surface beneath looked like
wood. Terri tore at the paper, which came off easily,
peeling away from the wall in an intact mass.
There was a door in the wall, a gloss-painted,
panelled door set flush with the frame. Clearly whoever
had papered over it had done so on purpose. Terri found
the idea fantastic and a little frightening. Why would
anyone hide a door, unless it was to stop someone passing
through it? Terri remembered that Vronia’s father had
done this in the end, with Vronia’s door in Bellony. She
saw that the inside handle had been removed. There was
a square opening just above the keyhole where the shaft
should have fitted. Terri slipped two fingers into the
opening and pulled backwards, but the door would not
budge. She tried again, bracing herself against the floor
and tugging more forcefully, but the door remained
immovable and she realised it must be locked. She
imagined herself trying to cut out the lock with a hacksaw
and wondered what excuses she would make if Alan
Cahill had her in court for criminal damage.
Sorry, your worship, only I was trying to saw my way
through to another universe.
It was thinking of Alan Cahill that made her
remember the keys, the mysterious fourth key on the key
ring for which she had yet to find a discernable purpose.
Cahill had never explained what the key was for.
She fetched the keys from where she kept them in the
kitchen. She tried not to hope too much but she could not
help herself. She was already certain the key would fit the
lock and she was right. The key turned smoothly and with
a satisfying thump. Terri found she could use it as a
handle. She pulled the door open and towards her. Light
flooded in, its sudden and unexpected presence stunning
her eyes and revealing the blacker depths of the cupboard
as a humdrum arrangement of sloping walls and faded
wallpaper, a predictable accumulation of cobwebs and
dust. Directly in front of her Terri saw the two dustbins
and coil of green hosepipe that were in the access passage
to the side of the house. The key had been for the disused
side door after all. For reasons unknown, it appeared that
the door could only be unlocked from the inside.
Old houses were just like that, they had quirks. Terri
emerged into the daylight, feeling foolish and covered in
dust. The day was hot and bright as the days before it but
a cooling breeze was blowing in off the sea and the air
was heady with the scents of tamarisk and bergamot.
Terri knew she should go back inside and tidy away the
junk in the hallway but for the moment she couldn’t be
bothered. She’d had enough of trawling through rubbish.
She needed a break.
She locked up the house and set off along the
promenade. Instead of taking her usual route towards
Kingsdown and St Margaret’s she went in the opposite
direction, towards Walmer Castle and Deal. She walked
along briskly, enjoying the feel of the wind against her
face. The tide was a long way out; children dashed about
on the exposed sand, playing Frisbee or hunting for
shells. The area around the bandstand was packed with
tourists, but once she was past the pier, the path quickly
became less crowded. The coast beyond the town was
completely unpopulated. The cliffs of South Foreland
were more dramatic, but to Terri the featureless
wilderness to the north of Deal was actually more
beautiful. She felt glad to be out in the open. The wide
landscape stretching before her made her realise how
strangely she had been behaving this past week, as if her
own self had been usurped, leaving her mind as a
repository for the fantasies of Allis Bennett. The odd
episode with the door had been like the breaking of an
enchantment. It had literally let in the light. She felt better
than she had done in days. Perhaps it had been a mistake
to isolate herself so completely. She decided she would
call Janet that evening and tell her the whole story. It
would be good to have someone she could bounce ideas
off, and Janet was someone she trusted more than anyone.
She walked as far as the edge of the golf links and
then decided it was time to be heading back. She had
eaten nothing since breakfast and she was starting to feel
faint from lack of food. The tide was on the turn. A man
was approaching along the coast path, walking his dog.
The dog was a pot-bellied beagle with a greying muzzle.
It moved along with its nose to the ground, stopping every
couple of yards to sniff at the grass. The man was elderly
and walked using a cane. Terri thought he looked vaguely
familiar. She supposed she must have seen him in the
town. The man came closer and began to wave to her.
Terri waved back, although it felt strange to be greeting
someone she did not know.
She came to a standstill as he approached her. The
odd feeling of familiarity did not diminish.
“You’re thinking you know me,” the man said. “It’s
written all over your face.” He smiled. His face was
rubicund, weather beaten. Terri guessed he was a
practised walker, in spite of the cane. She laughed, a little
uncertainly, though she sensed no threat from the man.
“I don’t know,” she said, and laughed again. “I can’t
know you really. I know hardly anyone here.”
“I’m Alan’s father. Alan Cahill? We looked even
more alike when we were both in our youth.” He held out
his hand for her to shake it and told her his name was
Michael. Now that he had revealed his identity she could
see the similarities at once. She guessed the father had
been very good looking, his features less conventionally
handsome than the son’s, but with a ruggedness that lent
them extra appeal.
“You’re renting Allis Bennett’s old place, aren’t you?
Alan told me. I hear you’re going to write about Allis.”
Terri nodded and confirmed that this was so. She
could not remember saying anything to Alan Cahill about
her Allis project; indeed, she was sure she had not. She
supposed Judy Whitton had told him. She knew that
small towns were notorious for their gossip. It came to
her that Michael Cahill was the first person she had met
who had talked about Allis without being prompted. A
week ago she would have been eager to question him, but
now suddenly she felt too tired. The questions could wait.
There was no reason to suppose that Michael Cahill was
planning on running away.
“It was nice to meet you,” she said. She turned to go,
but Michael Cahill appeared not to have heard her.
“I remember her when she arrived,” he said. “I was
only just married myself then, but I lost my head a little,
even so. I thought Allis was very beautiful, but it wasn’t
her looks that made me fall for her. She still had a foreign
accent then, which I found attractive, but I’d met Polish
girls during the war so it wasn’t that, either. She had an
atmosphere of tragedy around her. I think I had the idea
that she knew more than other girls, that she would
understand me better. I used to see her on her walks, and
sometimes I would follow her, just so I would get the
chance to say hello to her. We would sit together
sometimes, out on the headland, and a couple of times we
had tea together in St Margaret’s. It was all perfectly
harmless, and I knew from the start it would never go
anywhere. She liked me, and I think she appreciated my
friendship. But she wasn’t interested in me, not in the
way I wanted. I suppose I was lucky things never went
any further. It would have made a terrible mess for
everyone.” He was staring out to sea, shading his eyes
with one hand. The beagle snuffled and pawed at the long
grass at the edge of the golf course. “It was as if she was
really somewhere else. She talked to me about her sister,
more than once. I don’t think she ever got over the fact
that she had survived the war and her sister had not.”
Terri stared at him blankly. Her mind felt paralysed
by shock, a kind of mental concussion. It was as if he was
compelling her to believe that the earth was flat.
“You’ve got it wrong,” she said at last. The words
spilled out all at once, rebounding off the sallow grass
like pellets of gravel.
“Perhaps,” said Michael Cahill. He seemed unaware
of the impact his words were having on her. “I didn’t
really know her all that well. I don’t think anyone knew
her properly, not even her husband. It was tragic that he
died so young.”
“What about her daughter? People say they were
close?”
“Daughter? There was no daughter.” Michael Cahill’s
eyes widened and for the first time he looked surprised.
His eyes were larger than his son’s and very bright, the
colour of amber. “Allis never had any children. After her
husband died she lived alone.”
Terri found herself unable to speak. For a moment it
was as if she could sense the world rotating as it spun on
its axis. It made her feel nauseous, seasick. Her eyes filled
up with tears. She quickly wiped them away with the
back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
She strode off along the path, stumbling in her haste
to get away. She knew her behaviour must have seemed
rude, but it couldn’t be helped. Better for him to think that
she was rude than that she was crazy. It was only when
she came into sight of the town that she began to feel
calmer.
The air was cooler now and the tourists had begun to
disperse in search of food. Terri stopped by the seafront
supermarket and inserted her debit card into the cash
machine there. As it dispensed the ten pound note she had
requested, her bank balance flashed up on the screen. She
had checked it online that morning and the two amounts
tallied to the penny.
Whose world was she in, exactly, and did it matter?
What had happened when she stepped through the door?
Could it be possible that Vronia’s door in Bellony, like
the tin horse and the wooden monkey, had a counterpart
in the world Terri chose to call real?
In Allis’s novel, the worlds that Vronia visited
seemed just like her own, revealing their difficulties and
dangers only with time. Perhaps the same would be true
of this one. Or perhaps Allis’s version of her life really
had been the truth, all along.
Terri knew the first thing she had to do was get
something to eat. Then she would call Janet as planned
and talk things over with her. She did not know yet how
much she would tell her but that didn’t matter. What
mattered most, at least for the moment, was to establish
that Janet existed and still remembered her.
© 2010 by Nina Allan.
Originally published in Blind Swimmer.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Nina Allan’s stories have featured in the anthologies Best Horror of the Year
#2, Year’s Best SF #28, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
2012. Her story cycle The Silver Wind was published in 2011 and was named
as one of that year’s Top Ten book choices by the editors of the British
Science Fiction Association’s critical journal Vector. Her most recent book of
stories, Stardust, will be available in 2013 from PS Publishing. Nina lives and
works by the sea in Hastings, East Sussex.
The Red: First Light
Linda Nagata
LINKED COMBAT SQUAD, EPISODE 1:
DARK PATROL
“There needs to be a war going on somewhere, Sergeant
Vasquez. It’s a fact of life. Without a conflict of decent
size, too many international defense contractors will find
themselves out of business. So if no natural war is
looming, you can count on the D.C.s to get together to
invent one.”
My orientation lecture is not army-standard. I deliver
it in the walled yard of Fort Dassari while my LCS—my
linked combat squad—preps for our nightly patrol. Since
sunset the temperature has dropped to 95-degrees
American, for which we are all grateful, but it’s still
goddamn hot, with the clinging humidity of the rainy
season. Amber lights cast glistening highlights on the
smooth, black, sweat-slick cheeks of Sergeant Jayne
Vasquez, who arrived by helicopter along with a week’s
worth of provisions just four hours ago.
Like the rest of us, Jaynie Vasquez is wearing a
combat uniform, body armor, and the gray titanium bones
of her exoskeleton. Her finely shaped eyebrows are set in
a skeptical arch as she eyes me from beneath the rim of
her brown LCS skullcap. I suspect she’s been warned
about me—the notorious Lieutenant James Shelley,
United States Army—her new commanding officer here
at Fort Dassari.
Not a problem. Knowledge is a good thing.
“So how do the D.C.s go about inventing a war?” I
ask her.
She answers in the practical manner of an experienced
non-com: “Above my paygrade, sir.”
“Worth considering all the same. I imagine it goes
like this: All the big defense contractors, the D.C.s we
love to hate, get together—not physically, but in a virtual
meeting. At first they’re a little cold—that’s the nature of
a defense contractor—but then one of the D.C.s says,
‘Come on, now. We need someone to host the next war.
Any volunteers?’”
“Yes, sir,” Specialist Matthew Ransom says with a
grin as he presents himself to me for a mandatory
equipment check.
“This is serious, Ransom.”
“Sorry, L.T.”
I initiate the check anyway, making an inventory of
his gear and confirming that every cinch on his
exoskeleton is secure while I pick up the thread of my
story:
“‘Any volunteers.’ That’s a joke, see? Because a D.C.
will never allow a war in their own country. Rule one:
Don’t kill off your taxpayers. War is what you inflict on
other people.”
“That’s the truth, sir,” Jaynie says in a bitter
undertone as she initiates an equipment check for Private
First Class Yafiah Yeboah.
Maybe I’m getting through to her.
“Anyway, the joke works, the ice is broken, and ideas
start getting tossed around until one of the D.C.s says,
‘Hey, I’ve got it. Let’s do a war in the Sahel. It’s good,
open terrain. No nasty jungles. It’s not quite desert, and
we’ve already got a figurehead in Ahab Matugo.’ This
sounds pretty good to everybody so they agree: the next
regional war, the one that will keep them in business for
another three or four years, or even a decade if things go
well, is right here in Africa’s Sahel, between the
equatorial rainforest and the Sahara.”
I reach the last point of inspection, crouched in the
mud beside Matt Ransom’s left boot where it’s strapped
into the exoskeleton’s floating footplate. Everything looks
good, so I slap his thigh strut and tell him, “You’re
clear.”
The frame of my own exoskeleton flexes as I stand.
There’s a faint sigh from the joints as the struts alongside
my legs boost me up with no effort on my part, despite the
eighty-pound pack I’m carrying on the rig’s shoulder
bone. The mechanical joints release a faint, sterile scent
of mineral lubricant, barely detectable against the organic
reek of mud and dogs.
I turn back to Jaynie. She pauses in her equipment
check and asks, “So now the defense contractors have to
get the war started, right?”
“First they have to choose up sides, but a coin toss
will do it. China winds up as primary backer of Ahab
Matugo, and an Arab alliance takes the status quo—”
“L.T.,” Ransom interrupts, “you want me to clear
you?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” I run my gloved hand over my
skullcap as he begins tugging on cinches and checking
power levels. I’m remembering the buildup to this war,
watching it happen while I served my first combat tour at
the tail-end of Bolivia. I try hard to keep my voice calm.
“So we Americans . . . we don’t jump in right away. We
have another war to wind up first, so we promise to
intervene when humanitarian issues demand it—but we
don’t discuss what side to come in on because it doesn’t
fucking matter. Everyone knows we don’t understand the
local politics and we don’t give a shit anyway. There’s
nothing in this region we want. The only reason we’re
jumping in is so that our defense contractors can keep
their shareholders happy. The American taxpayers will
listen to their hoo-rah propaganda media outlets and pony
up the money, blaming the libruls for the bad economy,
while brain-draining the underclass into the army because
hey, it’s a job, and even the D.C.s can’t convince
Congress to spend ten-million dollars each on a combat
robot when you can get a fully qualified flesh-and-blood
high-IQ soldier for two-hundred-and-fifty thousand.”
Ransom steps back. “You’re clear, sir.”
I ignore him. “And that, Sergeant, is the reason we
are here at Fort Dassari, squatting in a country where
we’re not wanted and we don’t belong, and it’s why we
get to go on a hike tonight and every night through hostile
terrain, giving other people who also don’t belong here a
chance to kill us. We are not here for glory—there isn’t
any—and there’s nothing at stake. Our goals are to stay
alive, to avoid civilian casualties, and to kill anyone with
an interest in killing us. In nine months, no soldier has
died under my command and I’d like to keep it that way.
Is that understood?”
Jaynie keeps her face carefully neutral. “Yes, sir, that
is understood.” And then, because she’s not about to be
intimidated by a male lieutenant five years her junior and
with a quarter of her combat experience, she adds,
“Guidance described you as a crazy motherfucker, sir—”
Behind Jaynie, Yafiah claps a hand to her mouth,
stifling a snort of laughter.
“—but they promised me, no matter how much of an
asshole you are, they won’t walk us into an ambush.”
I smile pleasantly. “They’ve come close a few times.”
As the most northeastern in a line of remote border
forts, we are more exposed than most. The fort itself is
our shelter, our base of operations. Its fifteen-foot-high
walls enclose the housing unit and a yard just big enough
to park two tanks—not that we have tanks—but we do
have three ATVs stored under an accordion canopy.
Our mission lies outside the walls. We do interdiction
—hunting for insurgents filtering down from the north—
while the insurgents go hunting for us. Guidance doesn’t
always spot them in time, which is one reason we keep a
pack of five dogs. They’re not official army issue, but the
motto of the linked combat squads is Innovation –
Coordination – Inspiration . . . meaning as an LCS we
get leeway to come up with our own strategies.
“One more thing, sir,” Jaynie says as I turn away. “Is
it true you’re cyborged?”
“It’s just an ocular overlay.” I touch my gloved finger
to the corner of my eye. “Like built-in contact lenses, but
they receive and display data.”
The gold line tattooed along the curve of my jaw is an
antenna, and tiny audio buds are embedded in my ears,
but I don’t mention those.
“You’re not linked to the outside world, are you?”
“From a warzone? Not a chance. The only link I’m
allowed is to Guidance.”
“So you’re hooked into Guidance even when you’re
not wearing the helmet?”
“You got it. Everything I see, everything I hear, gets
piped straight upstairs.”
“Why is that, sir?”
Not a discussion I want to get into right now, so I turn
my attention to the last of our little crew. Private First
Class Dubey Lin is standing on the catwalk, nine feet
above the ground, peering through a machine-gun port at
the surrounding trees. Dubey over-relies on organic sight,
but he’s always ready to go on time and he never argues.
Actually, he never says much of anything at all. “Dubey!”
I shout. “Get down here.”
“Yes, sir!”
He jumps nine feet to the ground, letting the shocks of
his exoskeleton take the impact and startling the dogs,
who are so wound up in anticipation of the night’s patrol
that they lunge at each other. Vicious growls erupt as they
spin around in play fights. Ransom gets in on it,
launching a few kung-fu kicks and chops in Dubey’s
direction, flexing his exoskeleton’s leg and arm struts, but
Dubey ignores him, as always.
In the LCS ranks, we’ve nicknamed the exoskeletons
our “dead sisters” because all the parts except the
floating, boot-shaped footplates look a lot like human
bones. Shocked struts with knee articulation run up the
outside of the legs to the hips. Across the back, the rig
takes an hourglass shape to minimize profile, ending in a
shoulder-spanning arch that easily supports both the
weight of a field pack and the leverage that can be
generated by the slender arm struts.
Packets of microprocessors detect a soldier’s
movements, translating them to the rig in customized
motion algorithms. A soldier in an exoskeleton can get
shot dead and never fall down. I saw that in Bolivia. And
if there’s enough power left in the dead sister, it can walk
the body back to a safe zone for recovery. I’ve seen that
too. Sometimes the dead just keep walking, right through
my dreams. Not that I’d ever admit that to Guidance.
Jaynie pushes me a little harder. “So if Guidance is
listening in on everything you say, sir, why do you keep
talking shit?”
“We have to play the game, Sergeant. We don’t have
to like it. Now, helmets on!”
We all disappear behind full-face visors tuned to an
opaque black.
Tiny fans vent cool air across my face as I watch an
array of icons come up on my visor’s display. They assure
me I’m fully linked: to my skullcap, to my M-CL1a
assault rifle, to each one of my soldiers, to my angel,
soaring invisibly high in the night sky, and to my handler
at Guidance. “Delphi, you there?”
Her familiar voice answers, “Gotcha, Shelley.”
They don’t call us a linked combat squad for nothing.
I use my gaze to shuffle through the displays of each
soldier in my LCS, confirming that they’re linked too.
Technically, every linked combat squad should have
nine pairs of boots on the ground, but at Dassari we’ve
never had more than six and, due to personnel transfers,
we were down to four before Jaynie got here. The army
likes to brag that every LCS soldier is an elite soldier,
meeting strict physical and intellectual requirements, with
a demonstrated ability to adapt to new systems and
circumstances. Translated, this means we’re chronically
shorthanded—and no one gets a night off.
“Let’s all stay awake,” I say over gen-com. “It’s been
too quiet these past few nights. We’re due.”
“Yes, sir!” Ransom answers like this is good news.
Yafiah swears softly. Dubey kicks at the ground in
frustration. Only Jaynie doesn’t get it.
“You know something we don’t?” she asks over gencom.
“Just a feeling.”
Ransom says, “Sometimes God whispers in his ear.”
“L.T.,” Yafiah pleads. She knows what’s coming, and
so do I, but I don’t try to rein him in. Ransom is my
favorite redneck of all time. He loves everyone, but he’ll
still kill anybody I tell him to without hesitation. His way
of explaining the world may be non-standard, but his
enthusiasms have kept us both alive.
“Ma’am, this here is King David,” he informs the
sergeant. “Saul don’t dare touch a hair of the man’s head
and Goliath can’t get his bullets to fly straight when the
lieutenant’s around, because James Shelley is beloved of
God. Do what L.T. tells you and you might live long
enough to see Frankfurt one more time.”
Ransom is six-three. He has a hundred pounds of
muscle over Yafiah and a year more experience, but as far
as she’s concerned, he’s the dumb little brother. She turns
the blank black face of her visor toward Jaynie and says,
“Don’t worry none about Ransom, ma’am. He’s kind of
crazy, but he’s good in the field.”
Jaynie sounds honestly puzzled when she asks me,
“How can you be King David, L.T.? Because I would
have sworn that we were Goliath.”
“Goliath,” I murmur, using my gaze to select the
encyclopedia icon from my overlay, because the truth is, I
don’t really know the Bible story.
But before I can listen to the abstract of the Goliath
entry, Dubey surprises us all by actually speaking. “King
David played his own game,” he says, his shy voice
amplified over gen-com. “And he didn’t lose.”
Good enough for me.
I whistle at the dogs. The fort’s gate swings open. We
head out into moonlight, the five of us, Dassari LCS. The
fort will defend itself while we’re away.
We spread out so we can cover more territory, and so one
bomb blast, one rocket, won’t take out all of us. The
primary weapon we carry is the M-CL1a, also known as
the Harkin Integrated Tactical Rifle, yielding an acronym
only a gamer could love. The HITR uses AI sights to fire
both a 7.62mm round, accurate to 500 meters, and
programmable grenades from the underslung launcher.
We’re also armed with a handy assortment of hand
grenades—frag, flashbang, smoke. Subtlety is not our
talent. We’re rigged to hit fast and hard. Powered by the
dead sisters, with photomultiplier-based nightvision to
see where we’re going, we’re able to make a sweep
through the entire district on most nights.
Near the fort the land is flat, and much of it is
cultivated, marked off by tall fences that protect sorghum
fields and tree farms from roving goats and wandering
cattle. But after a couple of kilometers, the farms end.
Then, it’s mostly scattered trees that look a lot like the
mesquite I saw in Texas. We’re well into the rainy
season, so all the trees are leafed-out and where there
used to be bare red ground between them, wild grass is
growing almost head-high. The dogs run through it,
hunting for rogue soldiers.
A light wind sighs past, setting the grass swaying
around me. I know it’s rustling, but my helmet’s audio
pickups are set to filter out white noise, so I can barely
hear it, while more distinct sounds reach me clearly: the
panting of the dogs, the lowing of cattle, a bird’s piping
call.
With the grass so tall I can’t see very far, but I keep a
map overlaid on my visor with the position of each one of
my soldiers marked. The map is constantly updated with
data gathered by my angel—a toy drone with a three-foot
wingspan, piloted by a semiautonomous AI. The angel
watches over us. Everything within range of its camera
eyes is recorded, and the raw video boosted to Guidance.
In offices in Frankfurt, Charleston, and Sacramento, our
handlers scan the raw feed, while Intelligence teams run
analytical programs to pick up any bogeys human eyes
might miss.
There’s always something to see. This is the Old
World. People have made their homes here since the
beginning of time and they’ll probably still be here come
the last day—which might not be as far off as we’d like to
think.
Yeah, apocalyptic thoughts come a little too easily
these days.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter how empty this land looks,
it is inhabited. People live here, raising their children and
their livestock, most of them pretending there isn’t a war
in progress. We don’t want to shoot them.
So with the angel’s help we’ve developed a census.
We know the names of everyone living within twenty-five
kilometers of the fort. We know their facial details, along
with their height, weight, gender, posture, and age. We
know where they live, what they do for a living, and how
they’re related to the people around them. Using the
census, the angel can ID an individual in low light, from
over a kilometer away, with his back turned, and once
we’ve got an ID we go on our way. It’s rare that the
people here even see us, unless we’re on the road.
But if the angel turns up someone who’s not in our
census? Then we move in.
Not every stranger is an enemy. Smugglers pass
through, and so long as they’re not carrying weapons or
proscribed tech, we let them go. Same for the refugees
wandering south out of the Sahara. We talk to them all,
and add them to our records.
But it’s the insurgents we really need to find, before
they find us. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, and the better
the angel gets at spotting people, the better the enemy
gets at looking like nothing at all.
So when I get a sudden premonition of danger—a
heart-pounding, muscle-tensing certainty that something
seriously bad is very near—I visualize a red light. My
skullcap picks up the image and displays it on the visors
of everyone in my squad. They freeze. Jaynie and Dubey
tap into my visual feed right away like they’re supposed
to. Yafiah and Ransom take a little longer, but within a
few seconds we’re all looking ahead toward one of our
district’s rare, rocky outcroppings. It’s an anomaly in the
flat landscape: a wide, irregular formation that rises only
a little higher than the low trees around it. I’m pretty sure
it’s natural, but it looks like it could be the remnant of an
ancient pyramid, reduced to a shapeless lump after
thousands of seasons of rain.
My handler, Delphi, hasn’t said a word since we
linked up at the fort, but the moment I break routine she
speaks, “What have you got, Shelley?”
I focus on the words, A feeling. It’s a phrase I’ve
practiced, so the skullcap picks it up easily and translates
it for Delphi.
She tells me what I already know: “The angel’s got
nothing. I’m bringing it in for a closer look.”
“They’re in the high ground,” I say in the softest of
whispers, letting the helmet mic compensate for lack of
volume.
Delphi doesn’t like my “feelings” because she can’t
explain them, but she’s been with me twice when I’ve
sensed an imminent ambush, so she doesn’t argue.
I tap into the angel’s infrared feed as it soars on silent
wings high above the outcrop. I’m looking for bright
points of heat, but I only see our soldiers and our dogs,
scattered in an arc on the east side of the mound.
One of our dogs, the cream-colored female we call
Pearl, is two meters in front of me. Alerted by my posture,
she’s standing still, testing the air with her nose. I hiss at
her, urging her to move ahead. She trots forward
willingly, but then she freezes just short of the mound.
My helmet audio enhances her low growl.
“Fuck,” Yafiah whispers over gen-com. “I want to
launch a grenade up there.”
So do I, but we can’t do it. If it’s just a farm kid out
on a lark, we could all wind up in prison—and the only
reason I’m in this uniform is because I desperately do not
want to be in prison.
“Easy,” I warn Yafiah.
I wish I could put skullcaps on the dogs. Then I might
be able to get an image of what they’re sensing. But the
defense contractors refuse to outfit strays. They don’t
want to get fined if the equipment gives false results, so
they’ll only cap a dog if it’s specially bred and trained—
and that kind of dog costs twice as much as a soldier. Our
LCS isn’t authorized.
I hiss at Pearl again, but she lowers her head and
looks back at me, refusing to advance any farther.
We’ll have to go in ourselves.
I visualize an approach path: me and Yafiah moving
directly in, Ransom circling around the back, and Dubey
and Jaynie providing cover from opposite sides. Ransom
picks it up and takes off fast, staying well back from the
mound as he circles around it. Yafiah moves in, until we
have only thirty meters between us as we cautiously
advance.
“There it is, Shelley,” Delphi says in her businesslike
voice. She sends me a still image, with a red circle around
a faint heat signature she’s spotted in the rocks at the top
of the mound.
It’s just a gray spot. Its shape doesn’t tell me
anything, but I know it’s human because its temperature
mimics the surrounding rocks: a ghost soldier,
camouflaged from the angel’s infrared sight by a hooded
suit with a thermal coating.
I shift back to angel sight. The heat signature is so
repressed I can barely see it until the AI in the angel
enhances the image. Then I can see it as a cocked arm,
death clutched in its right hand.
“Yafiah!” I shout. “Fall back!”
Powered by her dead sister, she jumps backward four
meters, dropping flat in a dense stand of tall grass. The
dog, Pearl, whirls around and flees past me as I take aim
with my M-CL1a. A glowing, golden point is moving
across the screen of my visor. There’s no way I could see
the grenade on my own, but my system AI, using data
from the angel and from the helmet cams, has plotted its
path for me. An open circle marks my aim. I align the
circle with the point, fire a short burst, and drop flat as a
concussion booms over my head and lightning flashes.
I’m up again as soon as it passes. From the top of the
mound an assault rifle chatters and then, his voice low
and happy, Ransom says over gen-com, “That’s two for
me, L.T.”
We’re not done yet.
Delphi finds another ghost about twelve meters away
from me, near the bottom of the mound. This one’s a
gleaming, shapeless blur, much easier to see—probably
just someone crouched under a worn-out thermal blanket.
I close the distance, using my dead sister to bound in
a crazy zigzag, the joints muttering and my pack creaking
against the frame as I go. My target sees me coming.
Maybe he panics. Maybe he’s just cocky. But he drops
his thermal cover and shows himself. I’m all of twentythree, but in the green glow of nightvision he looks to me
like a skinny teenage kid as he sights down the barrel of
his assault rifle and starts firing.
I’m moving fast. His first bullets don’t get anywhere
near me, but he shifts his aim and closes the gap while I
fire back. I aim from the hip, using the bead in my visor
to get the right line. The trigger drops away from my
finger as my system AI takes over. A single shot, and the
kid flies backward, hitting the slope behind him.
“Slam!” Ransom bellows over gen-com.
“Check it out,” I warn him.
“Don’t worry, L.T., there’s no one left up top.”
“Approaching,” Jaynie says.
I spot her on my map. “Gotcha.”
She walks out of the tall grass, her weapon aimed at
the body of the kid, lying face down, the back of his head
blown out.
“Signs?” I ask.
“No. He’s dead.”
She crouches beside the body and uses her arm hook
to flip it over. There’s a bullet hole right between his eyes.
“Shit, your AI is good.”
I can’t feel it directly, but I know my skullcap is
working, stimulating my brain to produce a soothing little
cocktail, a mix of all-natural brain chemicals that puts an
emotional distance between me and what just happened.
I suck fortified water from a tube hooked to a bladder
in my pack, while Jaynie searches the body. We’re
particularly interested in written orders, and data sticks.
Up above, Ransom searches the two that he killed. I
watch the feed from his helmet cam. Both are kids; only
one has a thermal suit. That’s not a piece of equipment
we want to leave lying around, so I send Dubey to help
collect it, along with the weapons.
Kids like these are not fighting for Ahab Matugo.
He’s a modern, secular leader, and they hate him for it.
They hate us too, of course. And they hate the people of
this district, because those people put up with us. They’ve
been indoctrinated in hate and it wouldn’t surprise me to
learn that some D.C. is behind it, encouraging it,
financing it, to make sure soldiers like us have something
to do. Rumor is, Intelligence broke a similar scheme in
Bolivia, but that investigation was iced to save corporate
reputations.
I call Yafiah. We whistle for the dogs, and together
we make a sweep of the mound, confirming that no one’s
still hiding.
After we distribute the captured weapons between us, we
move out, resuming the night’s assigned route. Just a few
minutes later, the angel picks up a new presence. This
one is riding a moped and isn’t trying to hide, so we get a
quick ID.
“Jalal the gravedigger,” Delphi says.
“Did you call him?”
“Checking . . . No. No notification was made. He’s
come on his own initiative.”
“I don’t like that much initiative.”
Jalal is a local contractor. The army pays him to
handle enemy bodies, but he receives notification of a job
only after we are away from the vicinity.
“Delphi, how does Jalal know we’re not the ones
lying dead on the ground?”
“He knows your rep, Shelley. But you’re authorized to
conduct a field interview.”
With a thought, I switch to gen-com. “Converge on
my location. Leash the dogs on your way in.”
Already I can hear the whine of his moped. Maybe
he’s following the smell of gunpowder, or maybe he just
reasoned from the direction of our gunfire that the mound
was the most likely site of the battle.
We take up positions in the grass, eight meters apart,
crouched to reduce our profiles . . . because I don’t want
to find out too late that Jalal has changed sides. The dogs
lie quiet. They’re loyal to us. They know where their next
meal is coming from.
I watch with angel sight as the moped draws near.
Jalal is driving in the dark. Without using any lights, he’s
weaving around trees and skirting the brush, pushing the
moped at a fast clip. I don’t see any weapons on him, and
the angel doesn’t indicate any, but he has a backpack.
I creep through the trees, putting myself in a position
to intercept him.
The crunch of the tires is louder than the electric
engine. When he’s almost on me, I step into the open. My
HITR targets his face.
He’s so startled he jerks the front tire of the moped.
The bike skids, and almost goes over. “Shelley!
Goddamn!”
Jalal’s eyes are veiled by the narrow, gleaming band
of his farsights. It’s an easy guess that they’re capable of
nightvision, so I’m not surprised he can see me in the
dark—but he can’t see through my visor, so how the hell
does he know it’s me?
Shit. I bet he’s got his own height and weight profiles.
I say, “You got here quick.”
He answers in a local dialect, which my helmet
translates in its usual creative fashion. “I am going to the
city. Leaving before sunrise. Need to do the job soonest.
Right?”
I eye his backpack. It could hold grenades, or
explosives. It’s more likely though, that it holds shrouds.
“You can’t take three bodies on that bike.”
He blinks. Then frowns. “Three?”
“Three.”
“Okay, then. Long night for me.”
“Delphi, send him the map.”
There’s a glimmer in the screen of his farsights as the
data comes in.
“Thank you, Shelley.”
He tries to get the bike going again, but I put the
footplate of my dead sister against his front tire. “Tell me
what’s going on. What have you heard?”
The surface temperature of his cheeks and forehead
jumps a notch. He glances around, trying to figure out
where my soldiers are, but he can’t see them. When he
speaks again, it’s in a whisper, though my helmet
amplifies it, so it’s easy to hear. “Shelley, my uncle, he
called my mama. He said twelve soldiers from the north
likely coming the next night or two. Seen them at a
neighbor farm. Don’t know the name.”
“To the north?”
“Yes. North. I don’t know more.”
Twelve. No wonder Jalal is out here. He’s no fool.
He’ll bag the bodies, bring them in, bury them long
before dawn, bill the army, and then he’ll get the hell out
of here, because if the rumor is true there’s an excellent
chance that when the insurgents come through, they’ll
target him as a collaborator.
“Work fast,” I advise him, taking my foot off the tire
and stepping back, out of the way.
“I will, Shelley. Thank you.”
As he takes off, I imagine Intelligence engaged in a
flurry of activity trying to locate a dozen rogue soldiers
just north of our district.
Until they find something, it’s not my problem.
Delphi says, “Cleared to continue.”
My people reappear. We let the dogs off their leashes
and go on our way. No one else tries to kill us.
We get back to the fort just as the last stars are fading
in a velvety blue sky. The fort detects us, recognizes us,
and opens the gate as we approach. The dogs run to drink
water.
I’m tired. We’re all tired, but no one talks about it.
We clean the dead sisters and our weapons, then plug
them into power racks in the bunkroom. We restock the
bladders in our packs with fortified water, getting them
ready to go again. In the village cemetery, the sun will be
rising over the fresh graves of three kids younger than I
am, by years. I try to feel guilt, remorse, regret . . . but
nothing’s there. Guidance makes sure of that.
If robots were cheaper, we wouldn’t have to be here.
There are only two shower stalls and two toilets. My
house rule is that the less you get paid, the sooner you get
to shower, so Dubey and Yafiah go first. “Five minutes!”
I yell at them from the hallway.
Yafiah yells something back. Her voice is muffled,
but I’m pretty sure it isn’t yes, sir.
I step into the kitchen, pick up five aluminum bowls,
and head outside.
The sun isn’t quite up, so it’s only around ninety in
the yard. When I open the door, the dogs are sprawled
under their canvas canopy, but as soon as they see me,
they’re up and swarming. I pop the tops on five cans of
dog food, fill the bowls, and become god-of-the-pack as I
distribute the day’s rations. It takes them about thirty
seconds to finish eating. I have my dad send us mange
treatments, birth control pills, and pills to knock out their
fleas and parasites; their food I buy from a local supplier.
It’s all worth it.
I take the bowls back in. Jaynie’s in the tactical
operations center, still in her sweat-encrusted t-shirt and
pants. She looks up and nods as I pass by. Command
requires the TOC to be staffed at all times when we’re not
wearing helmets.
Dubey is already done in the shower. He crosses the
hall ahead of me, wearing only shorts and his skullcap,
disappearing into the bunkroom. Ransom has taken over
the empty shower stall, while Yafiah is still running
water. “Hurry it up, sweetheart,” I yell at her.
“I still got thirty seconds, L.T.”
She probably does. She’s pretty obsessive about
things like that.
“When you get out, go relieve the sergeant.”
I wait for her disgruntled “yes, sir,” and then I take
the bowls into the kitchen. By the time I’ve got them
washed, Jaynie is taking a shower, and the second stall is
open.
I pitch my clothes into the steam cleaner on top of
everyone else’s—everything but the skullcap—and I start
the load. I’m still wearing the skullcap when I step into
the shower. A glance over the partition shows me that
Jaynie is still wearing hers too. Good. We’re required to
wear the skullcaps only when we’re rigged, but in a
combat zone we’re allowed to wear them all the time if
that’s what we want to do—and I would not trust an LCS
soldier who didn’t want to.
The skullcap is always working, whether Guidance is
riding us or not. The handbook says the brain stimulation
it provides is non-addictive, but I think the handbook
needs to be revised. The only time my skullcap comes off
is during the ninety seconds in the shower when I have to
wash my scalp with a depilatory.
I let the many-times-recycled hot water run over me
for almost a minute, working up to the moment. Then I
draw a deep breath and slip the skullcap off.
I start counting seconds to distract myself as I rinse it
in the shower stream. It’s made of a silky fabric with an
embedded microwire net, and it’s shaped like an athletic
skullcap, so it covers from the forehead to the nape of the
neck, without covering the ears.
When my count reaches twenty, I hang it on a hook.
I think I psych myself out. It doesn’t make sense that
my mood can spiral so far downward in just a few
seconds . . . but it does anyway. As I grab a shot of
depilatory from the dispenser, a hollow, black panicky
despair is spawning inside my chest.
I rub the depilatory over my head and over my face
where a beard would grow if I let it, focusing on my count
while hot water sluices over my shoulders. I count, so I
don’t have to think. At seventy, I tilt my head back under
the stream, and at ninety, I slip the cap back on, pressing
it close to my freshly hairless scalp.
I’m safe for another twenty-four hours.
I hated wearing the cap during my initial LCS
training—I felt like someone was always looking inside
my head—but I don’t care anymore. I don’t have anything
left to hide.
Jaynie’s getting dressed when I step out of the
shower. I look her over. She’s maybe five-eight, lean,
with small, pretty breasts already hidden under her t-shirt.
Her skin is dark, but not as dark as Yafiah’s. Mine is
brown. Dubey and Ransom are the palefaces around here.
Jaynie notices me watching and laughs. “That’ll go
away soon,” she says as she steps into clean pants.
“Got to enjoy it while I can.”
Lust is brain chemistry, but so is the way you feel
about your sisters and brothers. You might love them, you
might die for them, but unless you’re a twisted fuck, the
last thing you want to do is have sex with your siblings.
That’s incest revulsion, and though I’ve never seen it
mentioned in a manual, every LCS soldier knows that
Guidance has figured out how to mimic the sensation in
our heads. It might take a day or two to kick in, but it
always happens. We don’t live with other men and
women, we live with brothers and sisters. I’m an only
child, but since I’ve been in the linked combat squads
I’ve learned what it’s like to have siblings. We are a
celibate crew.
I’ve been asleep maybe three hours when I hear Jaynie
shouting from the hallway in her best sergeant’s voice:
“Rise and shine, children!” She hammers on my door.
“Command has a new game for us to play. It’s called
patrol-the-road and you’ve got twenty minutes to get
underway, so move!”
Basic training isn’t all that far behind me. I’m on my
feet and halfway into my pants before I remember who’s
in command at our little fort. “What the hell is going on?”
I button up and throw the door open, but Jaynie has
already disappeared from the hallway. I can hear Ransom
and Yafiah cursing in the bunkroom across the hall. Not a
word from Dubey, but I’m sure he’s up and getting
rigged.
The tactical operations center is next to my room.
That’s where I find Jaynie. “What is it?” I ask, leaning in
the door.
She’s standing in front of the desk, watching the big
monitor as she straps into her dead sister. “A contractor’s
convoy—they’re from Vanda-Sheridan—is due on the
western perimeter of our district in ninety minutes or so,
bringing in equipment to assemble a new listening station
east of us. It’s a priority project, and it’s up to us to make
sure the road is clean.”
“Fuck!” I stomp over to the desk to review and
acknowledge the order. “I hate defense contractors.
They’re fucking parasites. And Vanda-Sheridan’s a
fucking beast. When I was in Bolivia, I swear to God
their local agent was selling satellite data to the enemy.
Vanda-Sheridan is a prime example, Sergeant, of a
defense contractor happy to play both sides to prolong a
conflict. And now here they are in Africa! Looking after
the bottom line.”
[End Excerpt]
Copyright © 2013 Linda Nagata.
From The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata.
Published by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved.
For more information about The Red: First Light, or to
buy the book, please visit http://www.mythicisland.com.
Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu.
She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and
worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has
been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a
publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels, including The
Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella
“Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives
with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.
Interview: Jane Yolen
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Jane Yolen (Foiled, Curses! Foiled Again) is the author
of over 300 books, including Owl Moon, The Devil’s
Arithmetic, and How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Her
books and stories have won an assortment of awards—
including two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a
Caldecott Honor, the Golden Kite Award, two
Christopher Medals, and a nomination for the National
Book Award.
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.
One of your new projects is a pair of graphic novels
called Foiled and Curses! Foiled Again. How did those
first come about?
Years and years ago, I was a college fencer, and I had a
fencing foil that, after I graduated from college, I had with
me; you know, I took with me to my apartment in New
York City. And I had a date in Grand Central Station
with someone, carrying my fencing foil, and lost it in
Grand Central Station. Years later, fast forward to a
granddaughter who was taking fencing, and I tell her this
story, and she said, “Oh, can you write a short story about
that?” So I started to write a short story, and the short
story stalled. Meanwhile, my agent had introduced me to
a new, up-and-coming editor of graphic novels, who was
starting the line for The MacMillan Group, and when I
told him the plot of this aborted short story, he said,
“Write up what you have, give me a proposal. I love it.”
That’s how it started.
So what was the creative process? Did you write a
script, were you involved with the artwork at all?
How did that work?
Well, the first thing I did was to contact my friend Neil
Gaiman [laughs] and said, “Send me a manuscript,” so
then I would know what they look like. Because the
process of writing and the look of the manuscript is as
different from a novel manuscript as it would be from a
play or a movie script. And I realized very quickly how
interdisciplinarian it is. You have to work very closely
with the artist. You have to tell the artist what’s in your
head, how you see the finished book. And he [Mike
Cavallaro] was someone who had already done a number
of graphic novel projects and comics. And so, in a sense,
he taught me a lot.
Could you give an example of a specific thing that the
two of you worked out together?
Very often, I wanted a lot of close-ups, so that, at the
beginning of Foiled and the beginning of Curses!, Foiled
Again, we’re sort of close-up with Aliera, and she’s
breaking that Fourth Wall, she’s looking out at the reader
and saying, “This is who I am. This is what I think,” and
he said, “We’ve got to get her moving; we’ve got to get
her doing stuff, not just turning and cocking her head.”
In Foiled, why did you decide to make the character
color-blind?
Just like the old Wizard of Oz, I wanted everything black
and white, and then when she saw the faeries, a burst of
color. As I was going through it the second or third time
for the revisions, it occurred to me that it didn’t make
much sense unless she was color-blind. Otherwise, why
is she, who is really our eyes here, not seeing things in
color, why is everything in black and blues and gray
tones?
Was there any pushback on that? Or did everyone
love the idea?
Nooooo. The editor thought that was great. And she was
tough to please. She had me revise the book seven
separate times. And the seventh time I sent it in, and I
was waiting to hear from her, figuring it was going to be
another seven times before we got there, I came home and
there was a message on my answering machine, and it
said, “Oh, Jane Yolen. Oh, Jane Yolen. You are sooo
good. Sooo good.” And that’s how I knew that she had
accepted the manuscript at last. And I kept the message
for about a month and a half, until my oldest
granddaughter, who was living with me at the time,
dumped the message. [Laughs]
Wow.
I used to listen to it when things weren’t going so well.
I thought Foiled did a really good job of portraying a
contemporary American teenager, and you just
mentioned that your granddaughter had been living
with you: Is the character based on her at all or is it
based on someone else you know?
It’s based somewhat on her younger sister, who is a
fencer. Glendon, who was living with me at that time,
was already out of college, so her younger sister was still
in elementary school but with delusions of teenhood. So
Maddison Jane, who was a fencer, was the one. The first
book is dedicated to her.
In what ways do you think teenagers’ lives have
changed since you first started writing?
Oh gosh, I first started writing in the sixties, so there’s a
lot of change. It’s a lot more open, it’s about all sorts of
things, including sexual matters. Including whatever there
is, especially now that they can fill out everything on the
pages of Facebook or whatever. There is absolutely no
understanding of privacy or any sort of dividing line
between what one thinks and what one says.
Do you think that young adult literature is doing a
good job of keeping up with that reality?
Some of it. Some of it is still mired, like Stephenie Meyer,
is still mired in, I’d say, the 1950s. Harry Potter, maybe
the 1970s. But then there’s a lot of stuff that is really . . .
Holly Black’s books are very definitely “now,” Francesca
Lia Block definitely “now,” David Lubar definitely
“now.” In the 1950s-60s, when I was growing up, in the
first writing for young people, there were hardly any
teenage books. And the ones that were out there were
“sweet sixteen” kind of teenage books, which wasn’t
anything really revelatory or hardhitting, and there
weren’t any people of color who were great heroes in the
books, there weren’t people of different gender choices in
the books, there weren’t girls being the great heroes in the
books. A lot of change has happened since then, which
has also started its own counterchanges. There’s been a
lot of backlash.
You mentioned that there’s been this backlash, and I
saw that one of your books was burned on the front
steps of the Kansas State Board of Education—
Yep, Kansas City, but that was a while ago. That was
twenty years ago.
But what was the situation with that?
Well, it had a gay man in it who was one of the heroes. It
was taken out—I think it was by the Fred Phelps people
—and they took out my book; Magic Johnson’s book on
AIDS; and a book about gay men and women in history,
who had done important things in history, and they
brought along the hibachi, put the hibachi on the steps of
the Board of Education, took the books out of the library,
and burned them.
You mentioned that was twenty years ago; does that
sort of thing still happen?
Oh yeah, I mean we still have—especially with the Tea
Party or the really right wing zealots of one kind or
another who feel that the way that you protest is to not
say, “I don’t want my child to read this,” but “I don’t
want your child to read this either.” And that happens
very often at the school board level where people go in,
and they insist that books get taken out of the school
library, and very often what happens is, they have a town
meeting or they have an educational board meeting where
people can come and vent, and then very often the book is
returned to the shelf. But what happens afterward,
someone from the administration, maybe the principal,
maybe the superintendent of schools, comes to the
teachers, the librarian and says, “Look, we spend a lot of
time, a lot of energy, and a lot of money on this process.
Be a little more careful next time. So, okay, we won the
battle, but don’t use that book again, don’t use books like
that again. We’re not going to fight this battle for you
next time,” is what they’re hearing.
When one of your books is being attacked like that, is
there anything that you as an author can do?
You can write to the teacher or the librarian or the school
in support. You can, if you live close by, go physically
support them. You can write a piece for The Huffington
Post or the New York Times or your local newspaper or
go and get interviewed by their local newspapers. Put it
out on Facebook or Twitter these days. Get other people,
other authors, other illustrators, other readers, other
librarians and teachers to show support. Make sure that
the ALA, the American Library Association, knows about
it, because they’ve got a huge and important committee
on books that have been censored or banned.
I was thinking if someone burned one of my books, I
just might go burn their house down.
[Laughs] Well, I’m enough of a Quaker not to want to do
that. [More laughter] But I’m enough of a snark to want
to go and say a lot.
You mentioned Harry Potter, and on Wikipedia, they
quote a 2005 interview in which you said that Harry
Potter seems somewhat reminiscent of your novel
Wizard’s Hall, and that if J.K. Rowling would cut you
a large check, you would cash it. So I was just
wondering if she ever set you a check.
No, no, I’m pretty sure she never read my book. You
know we were both using tropes, fantasy tropes: the
wizard school, the pictures on the wall that move. I mean,
I happen to have a hero whose name was Henry, not
Harry. He also had a redheaded best friend and a girl who
was also his best friend, though my girl was black, not
white. And there was a wicked wizard who trying to
destroy the school who used to have been a teacher in the
school. But those are all fantasy tropes, and I was making
a joke: It was in context of talking about how we all stand
on the shoulders of giants. How we all borrow from the
best, and we probably have borrowed from the same
places. And I joked, and I said, “If she wants to cut me a
rather large check, I would be absolutely pleased.”
Well, that context is mysteriously absent from the
Wikipedia page, maybe someone should amend that.
Well, you know, never mind. It’s really pretty silly
anyway.
But, I mean, that must just drive you crazy when
people say, “Oh, J.K. Rowling, she was the one to
think of the wizard school idea, and that’s why it was
such a big success.”
There’s even a book that came out way before hers where
children go off to a witch school or a wizard school by
going on a mysterious train that comes in, that no one else
can see except, you know, at a major British [station], I
don’t know if it’s Victoria Station or Kings Cross. These
things are out there. Diana Wynne Jones had a wizard
school, for goodness sake, years before, the Chrestomanci
books. This is not new. And it’s one thing for kids not to
know it—it’s another thing for librarians to go, “Oh! This
is new, oh my gosh, look at those wonderful, wonderful,
funny names for candies.” I mean, have they not read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang? It’s a very British thing to do.
Well, is it just the luck of the draw, do you think? Or
why was Harry Potter so much more high profile than
a lot of these other wizard school books?
You know, if we understood that, we’d all be
gazillionaires. It was a phenomenon, and a phenomenon,
by nature, cannot be expected, cannot be explained, and
cannot be redone. Goodness knows, publicity departments
and publishing companies have tried forever to make it
happen. You can’t make a popular culture thing just
happen.
Speaking of pop culture, Madonna, back in 2004,
wrote a children’s book, and she explained her
motivation as “I’m starting to read to my son, but I
couldn’t believe how vapid and vacant and empty all
the stories were. There’s, like, no lessons, there’s, like,
no books about anything.”
Yes, so she wrote a series of vacuous and vacant books
for children with morals that hit you over the head. Every
star thinks that writing children’s books is easy, and for
them, in some ways, it is, because, one, either they get
someone to write it for them, or they write it themselves
and it’s ghastly; and two, they can have a big sell-through
at the beginning because it’s the star power that does that.
But only a couple of the big-name stars have actually had
books that backlisted well because they were actually
well written. Julie Andrews had a couple. Alan Arkin had
one, and Jamie Lee Cutis has had four or five picture
books, children’s books, she takes quite seriously.
In this article, they quote you as saying, “I’ve been
thinking about getting out my pointy bra and brushing
up on my singing and dancing ’cause there’s no good
pop music out there.”
Yeah, people are really going to pay a lot of good money
to see me do that. [Laughter] Who knows, it could
become an internet sensation. If Gangnam Style can be,
why not me, right?
So I saw on your blog that you were recently in
Minnesota to give a talk about religion in children’s
books. What sort of things did you talk about?
I was asked to talk about religion in books. I was
supposed to do it at a multi . . . church-synagoguemosque kind of thing that they have every year and
basically I was talking about books that I said—not that
promulgated religion, not that sometimes even talked
about religion, but talked about the numinous, talked
about the moral underpinnings of society, books like The
Giver by Lois Lowry. Book like War Horse, books that in
any other context you could call religious, except that
they’re not talking about how to worship in a particular
way.
Well, I mean, one of the things that I really like about
fantasy and science fiction is it seems to me that it
does offer this sense of the numinous and the
transcendent that I think is just—
Absolutely.
—innate, but it doesn’t have the same sort of sectarian
problems, or you know, the values can evolve more
than it can with a traditional religious text.
Sometimes in science fiction, though, science becomes
what religion is in some books, and sometimes there is a
heavy moralistic flavor, especially in the earlier science
fiction and earlier fantasy. I think though we have grown
into wonderful storytelling that just absolutely can’t be
beat these days. I think some of the stuff that’s coming
out under the aegis of young adult fantasy, science fiction,
these days just is stunning stuff.
I don’t know if you saw this: There was a news story
where somebody sent an angry letter to fantasy author
Scott Lynch, and this letter said, “Your characters are
unrealistic stereotypes of political correctness. Real
sea pirates were vicious rapists and murderers, and
I’m sorry to say it was a man’s world, and it is
unrealistic wish fulfillment for you and your readers
to have so many female pirates. And I saw in an
interview that your first book was actually a
nonfiction book about female pirates—Pirates in
Petticoats—so I was wondering what you thought of
that.
Yes, and I’ve written, so far, three and a half books with
female pirates in them. Yeah, they were more of an
anomaly. They were fewer female pirates than there were
male pirates, but the greatest pirate was a female, Madam
Ching, who had, I don’t know, twenty thousand boats, or
maybe it was five thousand boats and twenty thousand
men under her control in the China Seas in the nineteenth
century. There were women pirates—it’s undeniable.
Some of them were actual queens who had navies under
their command; some of them were running pirate
syndicates—Lady Killigrew in England did that; some
came from a pirate family, that would have been Gráinne
O’Malley in Ireland who actually had a sit-down with
Elizabeth I who wanted her to give up her pirate ways.
Why do you think there’s just this general problem
with people not understanding women in all these
different roles throughout history?
Yes, well, because some of their roles were greatly hidden
over the last three or four centuries. So the books that
were written were not written about them, or the stories
that were told were not about them, or people would say,
“Well, this really didn’t happen,” and this person, for
whatever reason, is saying this really didn’t happen. Yes,
the majority of pirates in general were thieves and
cutthroats and people who could not fit into a general
community without causing mayhem. On the other hand,
pirate boats, for the most part, were much more
democratic than the English Navy. Most pirate boats, you
could vote the captain out. You would get shares, large
shares of the proceeds, divided pretty equally. When men
came onto pirate ships, they would find articles that
spelled out exactly what punishment is for, in some—it
was punishment if you hurt any captains, it was
punishment if you sexually abused any captain. This was
all spelled out in the article.
I think speaking of women in unexpected roles like
that, you also have a book called Queen’s Own Fool—
could you just talk about that?
I was wandering around with my husband and, I think,
some friends who had come to visit us in Scotland. We
had gone to Stirling Castle to show them—Stirling Castle
was slowly being tarted up, it had been pretty much a ruin
—and it was slowly being brought back, and so whoever
was the curator had started putting up little signages, and
one said, “Mary Queen of Scots had three female jesters.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know there were female jesters,
much less Mary Queen of Scots had three of them. And it
started me thinking about a novel about Mary Queen of
Scots’ jesters, and I started researching it with a friend.
We didn’t know very much about them. One was called
Jardiniere, I remember, she was French. One was called
La Folle, and one I can’t remember what [editor’s note:
Governance], but they clearly were three different kinds,
more or less, we decided, the three different kinds of fools
that normally a royal personage would have. One would
be the jester: the one who was allowed to say things that
could puncture pomposity and could say things to the
king or queen or the prince or whoever they were serving
without fear of being taken out and having their throats
slit. Other people couldn’t say those things. The second
kind was very often a dwarf. Or somebody badly
handicapped. For some reason, in the Middle Ages they
found this sort of person extremely funny just because of
how they looked and how strangely they acted. And then
the third we decided would be a—because of whatever
the name was and I’ve lost it right now—would be less of
a fool and more of a teacher. Perhaps a tutor of some
kind. But along the way, we discovered that there were a
lot of people who had female fools. Queens especially
would have female fools because they didn’t want to have
males in their entourage.
You referred to the seven gaunt cows that currently
afflict the publishing industry. Do you want to just
talk about what you meant by that?
That’s based on the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt
interpreting the pharaoh’s dream. The pharaoh dreamed
of seven beautiful cows, and then he dreamed that seven
gaunt cows came and devoured the seven beautiful cows,
and Joseph interpreted this to mean that right now we’re
having seven years of plenty, but soon there will be seven
years of famine. If we plan now and put away great stores
of the excess that we have, when those years come, we
will be ready for them. It’s a prophetic dream, he told the
pharaoh, and that’s what they did. The problem for
publishing now is that those seven or ten or twenty or
however many years of enormous growth and enormous
monetary rewards have basically come to an end, much of
it due to really stupid business practices and the rise of
the internet and the ebook and people downloading free
books. And piracy.
Well, I guess I actually have the list that you gave of
the seven gaunt cows here, maybe we can just run
through them quickly.
Please do, because that’s such an old piece I don’t
remember it.
So you said: multinational companies, Barnes &
Noble, Thor Power Tool Amendment, zero dollars to
school libraries, overproduction of books, televisiondriven merchandise, and the super-saturation of slush
piles.
Right. And see, none of that says ebooks, but that’s been
the last—you know, and piracy, that’s the last thing. Do
you want me to go over those one at a time?
Or maybe pick one or two, if you’d like to elaborate
on them.
Well, the multinational companies means more
publishing in fewer hands. This means that they’re
looking for a particular kind of book, one that’s going to
sell very well, so the small, important, literary novel or
the small, important book of poetry is not going to get
published except maybe privately or in smaller and
smaller and smaller and smaller copies with fewer and
fewer outlets because of the big guys, and we’ve just seen
now Random House and Penguin are about to
amalgamate. They don’t allow, within their company—
they don’t allow editors to go to an auction against one
another for a particular new book. If one person in the
company has turned down the book, it’s considered dead
at that company. No one else is allowed to look at it. So
there are fewer and fewer outlets for authors and
illustrators and bookmakers. The slush pile has to do with
the ease with which you can now, with a single tap of
your finger, send out a manuscript to twenty places at the
same time, and so everybody’s doing that. Instead of
having your manuscript go to one place at a time, which
takes about three or four or five months before you hear,
it’s going to a lot of places at the same time. That seems
to be good from the author’s point of view, but what
actually it means for the editors is that they are getting,
since a person can send it to twenty places at the same
time, they’re getting everybody sending them one of the
twenty manuscripts, so their piles of slush, of unsolicited
manuscripts, is higher than ever. Their response to that
has been—and slush means unsolicited, in other words,
not from a known writer or a known agent or somebody’s
mother’s best friend—that has meant that many
publishers refuse to read any unsolicited slush
manuscripts at all.
Given all the problems in publishing, how do you feel
about your kids following you in the business?
My three children all write children’s books. My son
Adam also writes adult books. I wish they’d get real jobs.
[Laughter] Yeah, they all do it, and they all do something
else, too. My daughter, Heidi, is also my PA, she
organizes me. My son Adam is a professional musician, a
web designer, a poker player, and a novelist. And he is
also a composer and writes lyrics. My son Jason is an
award-winning photographer but he also writes, he does
—he illustrates children’s books with his photographs,
but he also is writing magazine articles and is about to
write his first book, along with his brother, sister, and me,
for National Geographic.
Would you say to all the aspiring writers out there
that they should develop a sideline in a more
respectable field, like poker playing?
[Laughs] Yes. Or have rich parents.
You recently became the first woman to ever give the
Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University. Can
you tell us about that?
Well, Andrew Lang was an amazing late nineteenth, early
twentieth century writer. He had written essays, he had
written short stories, he had written poetry, novels. He
even worked on a novel with H. Rider Haggard, who was
a friend of his, but what he’s most famous for, it turned
out, was a series of twelve books that he actually didn’t
write. Those were the Coloured Fairy Books: The Blue
Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy
Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, etc.
The not-so-hidden secret was that it was really his wife
who had done most of the retelling of the stories or the
translation, and so it’s a cadre of other women who did it.
He simply edited it and because he was a very wellknown folklorist, they used his name to front the books.
And he had an attachment with St. Andrews and
Scotland. He’d gone to university there, he had been, I
think, a, like a trustee there for a while, and he lived
there. He lived at St. Andrews in the wintertime,
summered in London, which is a very bizarre way of
doing it actually. London is vastly too hot in the summer,
St. Andrews is vastly too cold in winter. And there’s a
street named after him, he’s buried in St. Andrews, etc.
And after his death in 1912 they started a lecture series in
his name. Each person who gave the lecture had to lecture
on something that Andrew Lang was interested in, and
since he was interested in everything, you know,
historical things, poetic things, literary things, folkloric
things, it was very easy to get people to do the lecture.
And the lectures have been going on since 1927, not
every year—there’ve only been twenty-two lectures—but
they’ve included people like John Buchan who wrote The
39 Steps, a lot of academics, and in 1939, a month after I
was born, the lecture was given by an Oxford don named
J.R.R. Tolkien. He talked on fairy stories. He gave a very
famous essay on fairy stories that was, for me, one of the
iconic pieces that I read when I was first getting
interested in folklore, and lo and behold, last spring they
asked me if I would give the next Andrew Lang Lecture,
and I had just finished doing an introduction for The Folio
Society’s elegant, expensive, illustrated version of The
Olive Fairy Book, and I was thrilled. They brought me
over to give a lecture, and I was told I was the first
woman, since 1927, to give a lecture.
What do you make of that, being the first? Did you
have any thoughts about that?
I had a lot of thoughts about that. Like, do you know who
you missed? Isak Dinesen, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Angela Carter, and, you know, on and on and on, who’ve
died. You also did not ask A.S Byatt or Marina Warner or
Maria Tatar or any of the . . . Katharine Briggs, who died,
great women of British folklore. I mean, it’s astonishing
to me who they didn’t ask. That they asked me was a
great honor, but the honor was all to me. I’m not sure I
brought any honor to them.
It seems especially bizarre that, over the course of
ninety years, they never ended up having a woman—
especially given the fact that, as you said, his wife
actually is the one that had written the books that he’s
most famous for.
I did point this out in my lecture. I did also offer them
some names that they might think of having, including
Terri Windling, and Katherine Langrish, and Elizabeth
Wein, and people like that.
Do you imagine that there’s someone who was just
born who will grow up reading your lecture the way
you grew up reading Tolkien’s?
Well, one could devoutly hope so.
All right, so that pretty much does it for our questions.
So, just to wrap things up, are there any other new or
upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?
Let’s see. I’m hoping that I’ll do a third Foiled book,
probably called En Garde!, but they have not signed up
for it yet. A lot depends on how well the second book
does. I’m working on a Hansel and Gretel as twins in the
Holocaust, it’s called The House of Candy. My son
Adam and I are working on a trilogy for upper middle
grade kids called The Seelie Wars and the first book, The
Hostage Prince, will be out this fall. I have a book called
Trash Mountain, which is a talking animal novel for kids
about the war between the red squirrels and the gray
squirrels, which is pretty brutal, actually. The war, that is.
The gray squirrels can outfight and can have more babies
than the red squirrels. They also carry a virus that doesn’t
affect them, but kills the red squirrels. This is true. This is
all true. This is why the red squirrels are dying out. But
what they don’t know, the actual red—uh, gray squirrels
are that there are black squirrels coming and they are
bigger and feistier and can outfight and are not affected
by the virus, so the grays will probably have their
comeuppance at some point. Anyway, that was the basis
for my writing the book, but it’s not about the actual war.
It’s about talking animals.
Any short stories coming out, maybe in an anthology
in February?
I am going to have a story in Oz Reimagined called
“Blown Away,” which takes place in Kansas, a sort of
reimagined Kansas in which, well, I’m not going to give
it away. But it has circuses and freaks, a couple of people
from a freak show, and not one but two twisters and a
couple of surprises. Especially what happens to Toto.
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 (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of
many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination,
Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, 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
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.
Interview: Brandon Sanderson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Brandon Sanderson has published seven solo novels with
Tor—Elantris, the Mistborn books, Warbreaker, and The
Way of Kings—as well as four books in the middle-grade
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series from
Scholastic. Two novellas came out in 2012: Legion and
The Emperor’s Soul. He was chosen to complete Robert
Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; 2009’s The Gathering
Storm and 2010’s Towers of Midnight were followed by
the final book, A Memory of Light, in January 2013. Tor
Teen will release the YA fantasy The Rithmatist in May
2013, and Delacorte will release the YA post-apocalyptic
Steelheart in September 2013. Currently living in Utah
with his wife and children, Brandon teaches creative
writing at Brigham Young University.
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.
As we’re recording this, the release of A Memory of
Light is just days away. So what will you be doing on
the day that the book comes out?
Well, I’ll probably be sleeping at first, because the night
before I’ll be doing a midnight release party, and those
tend to go pretty late. And then I’ll be flying—I believe
Minneapolis is the first stop. And I’ll be doing a signing
there that evening.
Tell us about the midnight release party.
Well, for quite a while now, my fans have wanted me to
do midnight releases, and so what we do is we pick a
bookstore. It’s been BYU bookstore for a while, since it’s
the only local independent in Provo. And we’ll go there
and I will pre-sign all the books to make it easy on
people, and then we have a party. At midnight we start
selling the book. People can grab their book and take off
with it, or they can come and wait in the extremely long
line to get it personalized by me. We do number the
books at the release party, which is also kind of fun.
And Robert Jordan’s widow will be there, right?
Yes. Harriet’s coming for the first time. She’s going to
come on down and we’re going to have her sign all the
books too. We’ll do a Q&A reading thing beforehand,
and then Harriet is going to go back to the hotel and go to
bed while I sit around and sign books until 5 AM.
Are people camped out on the sidewalks already?
Yes, they are indeed. Someone really wanted book
number one, so he came I think a good two weeks early
and started camping. It’s not particularly pleasant outside
in Utah in December and January, so these are real
troopers.
Have you been over there to bring them hot chocolate
or anything?
I haven’t yet. I usually stop by once or twice during the
lines, but I haven’t stopped by as of yet. I live a lot further
from BYU than I used to.
I think a lot of fantasy and science fiction fans have
grown suspicious about whether and how long-running
series are going to end. And I think a lot of people are
probably wondering, is this really the end of The
Wheel of Time?
The honest truth is, I don’t get to say. It’s Harriet’s story
now, not mine. Harriet and I have talked about it, though,
and both of us feel that this should be the ending. The last
thing Robert Jordan wrote was the last chapter of this
book. I don’t think Robert Jordan would have wanted us
to go further, and I think that if we went on, it would be
too much of me having to take over. For these last books
—that were really just one book in his notes—I’ve been
able to follow his outline fairly closely. And yes, there
were holes and things like that, things I had to do, but I
had an ending in sight, which was the ending he’d
written, and that has guided me all along. That kept it in
the realm of being his story that I’m writing, rather than
my story that I’m taking over.
Do you think people are going to be satisfied that this
pretty much ties up most of the loose ends and there’s
not a huge cliffhanger at the end or anything like that?
Yeah, I felt when I first read it that it was a satisfying
ending. I felt it was the right ending. It’s been my
guidepost for all the work I’ve done on this. There are
going to be some holes. Robert Jordan told fans before he
passed away that he didn’t want everything wrapped up
neatly with a bow. And so there are no major cliffhangers,
but there are some indications of things that happen after
the series, things that continue on. He had planned to
write a sequel trilogy, and people are aware of that. So
naturally there are going to be holes regarding some of the
characters he was planning to put in that trilogy.
What if somebody wants to know how the story ends,
but they don’t want to read all fourteen books? Could
they jump straight into this one?
I would really not suggest that. If people wanted to jump
in, the place that I would suggest jumping in would be
book eleven, which is the last one Robert Jordan wrote,
and which is the one that really starts to take the focus
toward an endgame. If there are Wheel of Time fans out
there that read the first few books and then said, “I’ll
finish it when the series is done” and things like that,
book eleven might be a good place to come back to it.
That one’s called Knife of Dreams.
I heard that one chapter is around 50,000 words long
and contains seventy to eighty viewpoint characters. Is
that true?
It’s actually a bit longer than that, but has fewer
viewpoint characters. I think it’s about 70- or 80,000
words. There are around seventy viewpoint shifts, but
there are a lot of repeated viewpoints. So yes, there’s this
massive chapter. It’s one of the things I planned from the
beginning, and like a lot of things that I tried that are a
little out of the mainstream for the series, I pitched it to
Harriet and said here’s why I think it would work and
why I think it will be a great chapter. And she went ahead
and let me get away with it—as she frequently did in
working on these. So yes, there’s a big, awesome, meaty,
long chapter at the end of the book. It’s not the last
chapter, but it’s one of the last chapters.
I heard you say that this book contains a lot of big
battles, and since you’re not a big military history buff
like Robert Jordan was, you needed some help with
those sections. Who did you consult with and what sort
of details did they give you?
Harriet is friends with Bernard Cornwell, and went to him
for a bunch of advice on this, so we used him as a
military expert. Also, Robert Jordan had two assistants.
One of them is a military historian. He knows the
military; he’s been in the military. Those scenes were very
heavily looked over and edited by him.
I imagine you must have had to endure a lot of people
being like, “Hey, man, you don’t know Rand al’ Thor,
man.” Have you just had to develop a thick skin for
that?
Yes and no. I mean, I was part of Wheel of Time fandom
before I was given this project, so I know Wheel of Time
fandom, if that makes sense. So when the Wheel of Time
fans pick on certain characters—it’s usually Lan or Mat
—they’ll say, “Hey, you don’t know Lan.” Well, I do
know Lan, and my interpretation of Lan differs from
yours. We could spend hours on forums discussing our
different interpretations of characters. Nothing’s changed
from the time that I was just a fan to writing now. We
would have had that same big, massive discussion on that
forum back then as we talked about our different
interpretations. And that’s one of the factors people have
to deal with in me picking up the series as a fan. I am
going to bring my interpretation as a longtime fan of these
characters. In some cases they’re spot on with what most
people think. There haven’t been many complaints about
my Perrin, for instance. And in some cases, there are
complaints and they’re right. My early Mat was off. I
acknowledged this. I looked at what people were saying,
but in other cases, such as Lan, they’re wrong. [Laughs]
What can I say? I’m a fan too, and we will have these
arguments about whether this character would do this or
that character would do that, and you’ll find that in any
community.
On the other hand, I do get complaints, and in some
cases the complaints are legit. I’m not Robert Jordan, and
I can’t do some of the things that he did, simply because I
don’t have his life experience and in many ways I’m not
as good a writer as he was. He was a fantastic writer at
the end of his career, after having grown and progressed
for decades, and I’m a new writer. I’ve only been doing
this for ten or fifteen years or so now, so I’m not as
skilled. In some cases I just have to apologize and say I
can’t do it the way that he would do it. I have to try to do
it the best way I know how to do it. Anyone who has
gripes like that, they’re legit gripes and that’s a good
reason to not like the books, and I’m fine with that. And
if that really bothers you, then hopefully we can get the
original notes released. That will be Harriet’s decision.
After the fact, I would like to release them, so that those
for whom my interpretation was not good, or my failings
ruined the experience for them, they can at least look at
what Robert Jordan had and imagine their own story.
I’ve heard you have 50,000 unread emails in your
inbox. Don’t you worry about all the exciting business
opportunities in Nigeria that you’re missing out on?
Yeah, that’s not even my spam box. I’m bad with email.
I’m so bad with email. Fortunately, I do have people
combing those inboxes, watching for important emails
that come my way, and I try to read a lot of the fan mail.
It’s hard to answer it all, but I try to read it, at least. I love
what social media has done. It creates this great
connection between author and reader, which is
wonderful, but it also means a lot more opportunities to
do things other than writing. And it seems like the last
thing I need in my life are more reasons to not be writing.
People who know me know that sometimes you have to
send a dozen emails to actually get ahold of me. That’s
just part of dealing with a guy who spends most of his
time trying to focus on the storytelling.
I saw that you recently filmed yourself writing the
opening prologue of your new Stormlight novel. You
want to tell us about that?
Sure. I mean, I’ve talked about all of this stuff that goes
on with social media and whatnot, and I like the
interaction that you can get. Some artists that I like,
they’re doing this thing where they’ll film themselves
painting a piece, and you get this awesome thing where
you start with the blank page and then you see in fast
motion them painting the whole thing. Dan Dos Santos
did this for the cover of Warbreaker, one of my novels.
You can find this sped-up video of him painting the
whole thing and it’s awesome. I can’t really do that with
writing. It’s not nearly as engaging to watch someone
typing as it is to watch someone creating this amazing
piece of art out of nothing, but I wanted to try it and see
what it was like. And so I picked a scene—it’s not
actually the prologue. It’s one of the scenes that won’t be
a spoiler. I do these things called “interludes” in the
Stormlight Archive where I basically write short stories in
the world and put them between major sections of the
book. I screen-captured myself typing that out, starting
with my little outline that I did for it, then typing the
whole thing out. Theoretically, I will film myself doing
the revisions. The idea is just to put those things up as
something fun that people might enjoy—probably sped
up a bunch, since it took me six hours to write the scene.
It might be helpful to new writers, I don’t know. It might
be just a curiosity, but it’s something I wanted to try.
Did it make you self-conscious at all knowing that
people were going to be watching your process in
action?
Yeah, it totally makes you self-conscious. Mostly it’s the
spelling. I’ll be typing along and I’ll see that I spelled
some word wrong, and I’ll be like, “Ah man, I should
know how to spell that.” So I’ll just use the Microsoft
Word spellcheck thing. It does actually keep you focused,
though, because every time your instinct is to go check
your email or go check your browser, you’re like, “Oh,
wait a minute, I’m filming. I probably should not do
that.” So that was nice.
In an earlier episode, we were talking about how it
seems like there’s a disproportionately high number
of Mormons who get into writing science fiction. Do
you have any ideas why that might be?
Oh boy, I don’t know. We all have our pet theories, right?
I think it’s probably—if you really looked at it—
something pretty innocent. Such as, I bet you’ll find a
disproportionally high number of Mormons in all writing
fields, just because there’s a high focus on literacy in the
community, so a lot of people end up writing. There’s
probably some confirmation bias going on, if that’s the
right term. You don’t remember if somebody is a Jewish
writer as much as you remember they’re a Mormon
writer. And so you start seeing us pop up all over the
place. But it is something we discuss. Is it real? I don’t
know.
The other thing is that BYU does have a science
fiction/fantasy writing class that was started because of
Orson Scott Card. He didn’t actually end up teaching it
the first time, but it was started because of him, and then
he couldn’t end up teaching, so someone else took it over.
And it’s been going now for over twenty years. And it
could also just be that if you see one successful person
doing it, it makes it that much easier for you to do it. I got
published in part because a writer came and taught that
class while I was at BYU. This writer is Dave Wolverton.
He also writes as David Farland. He taught the class and
he was a real person who wrote, right? And he was
making a living at it. When everyone before had told me
you can’t really make a living as a writer, I saw
somebody really doing it and I said, I could do this too.
Those are lots of theories. Those are the theories from
being on the inside and looking at it. I’m sure people who
are on the outside can come up with lots more tongue-incheek reasons. I’ve read them myself and get a chuckle
out of them.
And you’re actually teaching that writing class now,
right?
I am teaching the writing class now. I took it over from
Dave. After he retired, there was one more teacher for a
couple years and then I took it over. I’ve been doing it for
ten years now.
Do you put that same focus on writing as a career?
Yeah, I do. Because at a university, when you take
creative writing classes, you’re going to get lots of craft
discussion. And I try to do craft discussion, but you’re
going to get very little real-world professional advice. So I
try to give the real-world professional advice, because I’m
the one who can give it. I did actually have a grad student
post all my lectures online last year. It was part of a
project for another class. If you go to
writeaboutdragons.com, he posted all of those as
YouTube videos. So you can see what my lectures are
like.
I understand that BYU actually has its own science
fiction magazine? Have you had any involvement with
that?
Yeah, I was editor of that for a couple of years. It’s a
semiprozine. It was started by the same group who took
that first class twenty years ago or more now. We call
them “the class that wouldn’t die.” They continued on
meeting, started their own writing group, started up The
Leading Edge, which is the magazine. And it’s just
handed down from student to student from them, and they
just kept doing it. It’s a fun magazine. It taught me a lot
about publishing and about writing, actually. Nothing
teaches you about writing faster, I feel, than reading other
people’s horrible work and realizing it’s much like your
own, and you need to be doing stuff better than that.
It seems like most of the writers that I know are
either naturally short story writers or naturally
novelists, and you definitely fall into the latter
category. I was actually wondering, have you written
more published short stories or unpublished novels?
Definitely more unpublished novels, yeah. Because short
stories, if you use the technical definition of short story, I
think I’ve actually only ever written one. Everything I
write goes into at least novelette length. I wrote one for
Charlaine Harris. She wanted a story from me for an
anthology that sounded like a lot of fun, Games People
Play, and so I wrote an actual short story for her. That’s
just how it came out. Everything else I’ve done is
novelette or novella. I really like novellas. I love reading
novellas, I love writing novellas, because they really are
just short novels, right? You do all of the sorts of things
you do for a novel, but you do them in a short form.
Whereas a short story is a completely different art. It’s the
difference between learning to drive down the green and
to putt. You’re using similar tools, but there’s so much
difference there that becoming a good short story writer
takes a lot of work in different ways. I’m very naturally a
novelist, but I can apply a lot of my same skills to the
novella form, and have been very pleased with how some
of my novellas have turned out because of that.
Do you want to tell us a bit about some of the novellas
that you’ve written?
Sure, I’ve had two novellas come out this year. One’s
called Legion. I did that one with Subterranean Press. It
was me trying my hand at some more thriller-esque
modern day things. It’s about a camera that can take
pictures of the past, and it gets stolen. And a very
interesting individual gets hired to track it down. His
name is Stephen Leeds. I came up with this idea for
someone who was a genius and who could read up on a
subject and become an expert at it in a very short amount
of time. But in order to store all this information in his
brain, what he does is he creates this hallucination—
another person—who is actually a repository for that
information, who then follows him around and gives him
advice in those situations. So if he wants to learn a new
language, he can study it, and then this person will appear
next to him who becomes his interpreter in that language.
He runs into people and has to have his hallucinatory
interpreter—his figment, as he calls them—translate for
him so that he can understand, and things like that. It was
just a wacky fun idea. So that’s Legion.
The other one that I have I’m really proud of. If
you’ve never tried any of my work, the thing I would
suggest would probably be this. It’s called The
Emperor’s Soul. It’s the story of a woman who uses
forgery magic, and who is hired to create a forgery of the
emperor’s soul magically, because he’s been wounded in
the head and is brain dead. There’s just a shell left there,
and the people who are keeping him in power want to
have a forged soul placed into him so that no one will
know that he’s been wounded, so they can keep on ruling
the empire.
I understand you’ve also had work in some of the fine
anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams?
I have. In fact, John has two of my shorter works. One is
one of these interludes from the first Way of Kings. And it
stood fairly well on its own—we just named it after the
character Rsyn, and it’s in John’s anthology Epic. And in
fact, the scene that I video recorded is actually a new
interlude with Rsyn for the second volume. So that’s
pretty cool. I also have a story that I co-wrote with a
friend of mine in Armored, the anthology. Again, I don’t
have the military expertise, but I wanted to write this
military science fiction story, and so I went to a friend in
the military—who is also a writer—and we did the story
together.
In addition to writing, you’re also the co-host of the
Writing Excuses podcast. And I understand that Mary
Robinette Kowal actually flies from Chicago to Utah
just to tape the show?
Yeah, the podcast is successful enough—we have an
Audible sponsorship—that we can actually afford airfare
and things like that, which is pretty cool. And so we fly
Mary out. Skype is a wonderful tool, but when it’s a show
that you really need the energy of the hosts together—and
that’s kind of what we focus on—we need to be there in
person, we find. So we do it in person.
What are some recent topics or guests that you’ve
covered?
Right now we’ve got four ways the industry is changing
and how to write a secret history—secret history is kind
of a subset of alternate history. We’ve got one where we
had listeners send us in questions and we answer the
questions. We do things like: What are your embarrassing
early projects? How do you tell if your idea is too big for
the story you’re working on? How do you avoid
discouragement? How do you handle multiple magic
systems in one book? And then we have a few before that
where we brainstorm stories together, and then talk about
how we would outline them, and things like that. There
are all sorts of things on there. We have a lot of editors
and other writers on as guests. We’ve broken down all
kinds of writing topics from outlining, to how to do
characters, and all these different things. So if you’re
interested in writing, go look it up. There’s a ton of
archives. I think we’re starting our eighth season or
something like that.
I saw you’re also starting up a writer’s retreat called
Out of Excuses?
Yeah, Mary suggested this, to do a writer’s retreat. People
have been asking about doing this. I like to try to do one
thing like this every year. In the past, I’ve been doing one
with Kevin J. Anderson, which is called Superstars
Writing Seminars. This year I wanted to try doing
something a little more hands-on with some students.
Mary’s parents have a vacation home next to their actual
home, I think, or they own two houses—I don’t even
know how it works, you’d have to ask Mary. Anyway,
they rent it out for vacationing and things like that, and
we’re going to be renting it and holding a seminar in it.
We will meet with listeners and all write together, and
hopefully record some episodes of Writing Excuses and
help people out.
Can people still apply to that?
No, we sold out in like nine minutes. [Laughs] Maybe in
a future year, but yeah, I think it was actually like nine
minutes. There’s only twenty spaces for it, so it went
really fast.
You’ve also been involved recently with the Waygate
charitable foundation. You want to tell us about that?
Waygate is a foundation run by Wheel of Time fans. A
number of Wheel of Time fan organizations have long
been involved and have a good history with charitable
work. Recently, they decided that if they’re going to be
doing this, and having the amount of money flowing
through and toward charities that they were doing, that
they should make it official, tax-wise. They actually
started a company and made it a nonprofit, did all the
things they needed to do. I’ve been working with them.
They put me on the board. This year we’ve been focusing
on Worldbuilders, Pat Rothfuss’ charity, which is a
fantastic charity for Heifer International, which buys
llamas and things in developing countries and teaches
people how to take care of them so they can sustain
themselves off of livestock they’re given and things like
that. It’s a fantastic charity, so we’ve been working with
that to try to do some good where we can.
And just to wrap things up, are there any other new or
upcoming projects you’d like to mention?
I’m hard at work on the second Stormlight book. That’s
actually been my focus for the last five or six months, ever
since I finished the last Wheel of Time book. It will
continue to be my focus following the tour that I’m doing.
I do also have a couple of projects that I started working
on years ago, before the Wheel of Time came my way,
which I had to put on hold until now. Both are YA books
that I’ve written. One’s called The Rithmatist. It’s coming
out from Tor in the summer. And then in late summer
I’ve got one called Steelheart, which is a really awesome
superhero apocalypse sort of book, that’s coming out from
Random House.
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 (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of
many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination,
Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, 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
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: Armand Baltazar
Artist Spotlight: Armand Baltazar
Galen Dara
Armand Baltazar is an illustrator, animator, fine artist,
and storyteller currently living in California. Starting out
in advertising and editorial illustration, Armand
eventually made his way to Hollywood working as a
concept painter and animator for Dreamworks, Disney,
and Pixar. He currently is turning his storytelling skills to
making an illustrated book, Collidescope Chronicles.
You have taken a pretty interesting path to get where
you are now! Let’s see, you started out in Chicago
training as a fine artist, then worked as an advertising
and editorial illustrator. After some soul searching,
you moved to California to pursue book illustration,
then ended up getting tapped by DreamWorks to
work on Prince of Egypt, which launched you into a
career as a concept artist for all the big animation
studios. Did I get that all correctly? What do you point
to as key moments (or individuals) that helped you
become the artist you are now?
In general that is correct. I’ll clarify a few points. I began
my career in animation as a traditional background
painter on Prince of Egypt. My skill set expanded with
each movie, as color keys, lighting design, and layout
design were added to my toolbox, so to speak. This all
culminated with visual development for the films.
Essentially, visual development and concept art perform
the same function in terms of preproduction design for a
film.
I had many great teachers, experiences, and fortunate
circumstances that helped me on the road to my career.
My passion started as a kid with drawing, comic books,
and movies. In high school I had an inspiring and
encouraging teacher, Paul Gavac, who pushed me. I
attended Art Center College of Design because so many
of my heroes had come from there, artists like Syd Mead,
Ralph McQuarrie, Mark English, etc. There I learned a
lot about painting, drawing, design, and narrative
illustration from many great teachers, but Steve Huston
and Richard Bunkall were very influential to me. My
early years at DreamWorks, I was mentored by a group of
artists from diverse backgrounds: Ron Lukas, a
traditional oil painter trained by Russian Impressionist
Sergei Bongart; Paul Lasaine, a master Matte Painter and
Production Designer; Marcos Mateu-Mestre, a comic
book, animation layout, and concept artist extraordinaire;
and Sam Michlap, a veteran Layout, Visual Development,
and Production Designer were all instrumental in my
formative years in animation.
It sounds like storytelling has always been one of your
driving passions. You went to California (Art Center
College of Design) initially to become a book
illustrator and now have come full circle with this new
illustrated book project of yours, the Collidescape
Chronicles. What can you tell us about this book and
what brought you to this moment?
The book has been a labor of love for the last two years.
I’d tried on at least two failed occasions to write and
illustrate an adventure story like the kinds I’d loved in my
youth: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
Treasure Island, Dune, and of course Star Wars. In both
of those previous outings, I hadn’t created anything that
made me passionate. When I began to write Diego and
the Steam Pirates: Book One in the Collidescape
Chronicles, something important had changed in my life.
I was both a father and I found a story within me that I
was impassioned to tell my son. It was essentially a story
about a father who strove to make a better world for his
son and a son who found the courage and the adventure to
fight for it. Newly ignited, the words and the pictures
began to flow. My schedule allowing, I hope to complete
book one this year!
Working in-studio on animated films seems like such
a collaborative experience, with constant close
association with many other artists and creatives.
What is that like and how do you compare it to
personal projects where it is just you working on your
idea (i.e., Collidescape Chronicles)? Is there a
difference in how you come up with ideas (and
problem-solve) when you are working on one vs. the
other?
The foundation of working on large-scale endeavors like
films and a personal project like my book is the same.
That is to say, designing and creating in service to the
story. In film, I’m serving the vision and story of the
director, but with additional guidance by individuals that
he or she has placed their trust in, namely the production
designer and the art directors. It is uniquely collaborative.
In my own project, I must serve the story and vision I’ve
laid out for the book. In one sense, it’s easier, but in
another, it is more difficult, because all of the
responsibility falls on me. Writing, designing, and
illustrating are demanding disciplines to coordinate
together and I am my own worst critic! I’ve found
working for myself on my own projects to be the most
rewarding and, at times, challenging experience.
Your painting, Death of the King, is featured as our
cover art this month. What an intriguing piece of
visual storytelling it is! The woman in white, the Beast
stabbed in the back. Where did the concept for this
one begin? (And will we be seeing more of the story at
some point?)
It is part of a short story . . . a kind of dark little fairy tale
I’ve been kicking around for a few years. It is a story
about a princess and her two brothers, who venture into
the dark woods where their father the King had
disappeared many years before. There is strife with the
neighboring kingdom, as people there have gone
missing . . . apparently a mysterious creature has made its
home there . . . I’d been reading about how certain
addictions changed people into monsters, making them
unrecognizable to their own families. I used that as the
basis for my dark and tragic little tale. I hope to complete
new art and finish the story after the first Collidescape
book is completed, so stay tuned.
Who are some of the artists that have influenced and
inspired you?
There are many and with great diversity, here are some I
look at all the time. N.C. Wyeth, Sergio Topi, Moebius,
Frank Frazetta, Edward Austin Abbey, John Singer
Sargent, Ilya Repin, Joseph Clement Cole, Frank Booth,
Phil Hale, J.C. Leyendecker, J.W. Waterhouse, Alphonse
Mucha, Gustav Klimt . . . too many to list here!
With your diverse background, what is your advice to
young artists embarking on their education and/or
careers?
Know that if this path has chosen you, it will be one
wrought with challenges and hard work. Though I’ve
been fortunate to have found some success, success is not
the end goal. Creating the art that makes you happy and
fulfilled is! That is what propels you through the
challenges and makes the hard work feel more like play
in hindsight. The truth is, the cliché is absolutely right:
“It’s the journey that counts!”
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on a new animated feature for Pixar and I
am working diligently to finish my first illustrated
adventure that one day I hope to share with you all!
Thank you, Armand! It was a pleasure talking with
you.
Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she
emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch
wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge
Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages,
Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs
for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds.
When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran
Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of
human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.
Deus Ex Arca
Desirina Boskovich
It was a crystalline morning in early June, and the sky
was wide as a saucer.
It was a beautiful day for the arrival of the box.
Ferocious rains had come the night before, leaving the
air fresh with dew. The Greater Springfield Farmers’
Market was swinging into gear outside the mall. At the
far end of the blacktop parking lot, an array of tents and
tables had been erected, staffed by vendors from across
southwest Missouri.
Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto were there, with radishes,
cucumbers, yellow squash, and salad greens. Their
teenage son helped bag the vegetables, and Mrs.
Yamamoto’s mother made change. Jeff Finley, of Finley
Farms, sold grass-fed beef and unpasteurized milk from a
freezer in the back of his Chevy pickup. Miss Amelia
offered hand-poured candles, and herbs in plastic pots. A
Mennonite family sold fresh produce from their sixteenacre farm. Their sons wore suspenders and broadbrimmed hats; their daughters wore ankle-length dresses
and bonnets sewn from stiff white mesh. There were red
potatoes, green tomatoes, fist-sized strawberries, and
fresh baked bread.
Jackson Smith, aged seven, also happened to be at the
farmers’ market that day. He was there with his parents,
and his little sister Emily, aged two. Their father pushed
Emily in the stroller; their mother held Jackson’s hand, as
they wandered from table to table.
Jackson was in the second grade. His bowl-cut hair
was straight and fine, so blond it was almost white. His
eyes were round and blue. There was a gap between his
two front teeth; his parents assumed the gap would
disappear as he grew up, but in fact it never did. He
played Little League and collected rocks. He had a special
bond with the family cat, Scottie—a fat lazy tom who
purred and slobbered when you picked him up.
Jackson waited patiently while his mother talked to
Miss Amelia, who loved to talk about her candles.
Then he saw it: the box.
The box was sitting on the asphalt, just to the left of
Miss Amelia’s folding table.
Jackson couldn’t remember ever seeing a box like this
before. He broke away from his mother’s grasp, and,
wiping his palm on his jeans, he went over to inspect the
box.
It was about the size of a shoebox. It was matte
charcoal in hue, a name-evading shade that hovered
indistinctly between black and gray. Jackson squatted in
front of the box. He poked it, then laid his palm flat on
top. Nothing happened, although his fingers left faintly
visible prints of moisture. These quickly evaporated.
He picked it up. It was heavy, but not unexpectedly
so.
“Mom, look what I found,” he said, and hoisted the
box onto Miss Amelia’s table.
What happened next is hard to describe. Except that,
in the instant it was happening, it felt like the most
natural thing imaginable.
The table, along with all the candles and herbs
carefully arranged upon it, simply disappeared. It didn’t
fade. It didn’t crumble. It just popped out of existence.
Where there had been a table, there was now something
else, and that something else was air.
When the table disappeared, the box sat on the
ground. It didn’t fall to the ground. There was no slam,
no thud, no clunk. The box sat on the ground as if it had
been sitting there all along.
Jackson’s mother screamed. Jackson’s father rushed
over, still pushing Emily, who cackled with glee at the
bumpy ride.
Miss Amelia gazed in shock at where her table had
been. “Well, I never,” she said. She bent over to pick up
the box . . .
. . . and turned into a giant celery stalk.
Where there had been Miss Amelia, there was now
something else, and that something else was a column of
celery, measuring approximately five feet and five inches,
its limpid green fronds rustling gently in the breeze.
The box sat beside it.
The Yamamoto’s teenage son, who’d seen the whole
thing, rushed over. He joined Jackson and Jackson’s
parents, who were staring down at the box. Then, before
anyone could stop him, he nudged the box with his foot.
Nothing happened.
He touched it with the tips of his fingers.
Nothing happened.
Mr. Yamamoto ran over, yelling. He grabbed his
reckless teenage son by the shoulder and hauled him back
toward the safety of their tent, lecturing him in Japanese
about the importance of thinking before one acts.
They were almost there when Mr. Yamamoto simply
disappeared. His son turned into a toaster.
The box didn’t move.
Mrs. Yamamoto and her mother tottered over to the
spot where Mr. Yamamoto and his courageous son had
been standing just a moment before. Mrs. Yamamoto
began to wail. Her mother shouted warningly at everyone
who tried to come near them. The toaster just sat there.
Jackson’s parents backed away a few steps—and then
a few steps further. When Jackson finally noticed, he
backed away, too.
Jeff Finley came over to see if he could lend a hand.
He’d pulled hapless cars out of the mud in his Chevy
pickup and he’d helped countless cows through labor.
And—though no one knew about this but his wife and his
two teenage stepdaughters, certainly not Jackson—he’d
even built a survival shelter in his own backyard and
stocked it with bottled water, canned tuna, and guns. He
was so rightwing he was liberal, and so leftwing he was
conservative. Ever since his first wife and only son had
died in a car accident eleven years ago, he’d considered
himself immune to pain. In short, he assumed he was
prepared to deal with any eventuality.
But he’d never imagined anything like the box.
He picked it up, of course; it was impossible to
believe that the box had anything to do with the things
that were happening at the farmers’ market. In fact, it was
impossible to believe those things were happening at all.
The moment he picked it up, he winked out of
existence. The box remained on the ground, as it always
had.
Jeff appeared a moment later, standing on top of the
mall. According to observer measurement, approximately
1.7 seconds had passed since he’d disappeared from the
parking lot. But according to Jeff’s measurement, he’d
been gone much longer. He’d seen things no human
should ever see, perhaps things no human had ever seen.
He stumbled over to the edge of the roof.
“Look! On the roof!” someone shouted, from down in
the parking lot. Just then, Jeff jumped.
It was not a very big mall. The fall broke his bones,
but didn’t kill him—at least not right away.
Meanwhile, pandemonium ruled the parking lot.
Shoppers rushed around, screaming and crying. A
Mennonite girl sprinted toward the sidewalk, white tennis
shoes flashing beneath her dress. A loose dog ran among
the cars, barking frantically, trailing a useless leash.
Vendors leaped into their cars and sped away, leaving
behind their tables and tents without a second thought.
Already, a major car accident had jammed the nearest
intersection. Something, somewhere, was on fire; smoke
billowed toward the sky. The intertwined wail of sirens
rose and fell in the distance, and a fire truck’s horn blared
like an oncoming train.
Jackson picked up the box and cradled it close to his
chest. His father comforted his mother, and his mother
comforted Emily, who’d begun to cry.
They didn’t run to the car. They walked. Jackson’s
father, holding the stroller. Jackson’s mother, holding
Emily. Jackson, walking five paces behind them, holding
the box.
They climbed into their station wagon, exercising the
utmost calm. Jackson’s father navigated carefully through
the chaos of the parking lot, then out into the traffic jam
of the street. Jackson’s mother sat beside him, reciting a
nursery rhyme that Emily loved. Her breath was jagged,
but her voice was soft.
In the backseat, Emily sat in her car seat and cried.
Jackson sat next to her, the box on his lap. He wore his
seatbelt, even though no one had reminded him. He
watched out the window as telephone poles and brick
buildings and gas stations flew by.
By the time they had returned home and pulled into
their driveway, Jackson’s mother had stopped saying the
nursery rhyme, and Emily had stopped crying.
As they got out of the car, Jackson realized
something.
Neither of his parents had touched the box. And
neither of his parents had touched him.
He walked carefully up the stairs, still holding the
box, and placed it gently beneath the bed.
They came for the box the next day, as Jackson assumed
they would. (He’d seen movies, after all.) A procession of
unmarked black SUVs squealed into the cul-de-sac and
screeched to a halt outside Jackson’s house. Before the
vehicles even stopped, soldiers in black body armor piled
out. They’d been briefed to expect the worst.
Jackson’s mother and father opened the door for the
soldiers, so they wouldn’t have to kick it down. They
stood aside as the soldiers rushed up the stairs.
Jackson stood open-mouthed in the middle of his
bedroom, as the shouting soldiers piled in. He pointed
silently: underneath the bed.
The first soldier got on his knees and reached
underneath. He turned into a bobby pin the size of a
trumpet. The second soldier followed his lead. He turned
into a yellow toy pickup truck. The third soldier
disappeared. The fourth dissolved into a puddle of gray
goo. The fifth also disappeared. The sixth became a tuna
sandwich.
The seventh fished out the box.
He stood, transfixed, holding the box at arm’s length.
His mask obscured his face, making it hard to be sure, but
he seemed shocked.
Jackson sat on the bed and crossed his arms.
The seventh soldier handed the box to an eighth
soldier, who promptly exploded: a fountain of blood, guts,
and brain matter, misting across the room like hairspray.
The seventh soldier let out a strangled scream, and picked
up the box again. He carried the box down the stairs,
flanked by the soldiers who’d survived.
After they left, the house was deadly quiet. In fact, the
entire neighborhood fell into a soundless stupor, a
stillness it hadn’t known in years.
Jackson sat alone in his room and played with the
yellow truck, pushing it across the rug. A few hours
passed. He curled up on the bed and fell into a dreamless
sleep until he woke to the sounds of his family eating
dinner downstairs without him.
He took a bite of the tuna sandwich, but it tasted
bland, and the crust was stale.
He missed the box.
The black SUVs returned a week later. This time, they
were coming for Jackson.
They brought a man with them. The man was reedy
and balding; he wore a pink collared shirt and a turquoise
striped tie. He looked like a math teacher, but he was
actually a psychologist. His job was to explain things to
Jackson’s parents.
In soothing tones, he clarified that this was nothing
less than a matter of national security. The box was
incredibly powerful, with untold applications. The box
could wipe out entire foreign armies, but it was
impossible to control. And so far, Jackson was the only
one who’d been able to reliably interact with the box
without suffering any ill effects.
The phenomenon was astonishing and inexplicable,
but their scientists would get to the bottom of it. In a way,
it was for Jackson’s own good.
Of course, if Jackson’s parents weren’t amenable to
reason, there was always the army.
Jackson’s mother cried hysterically, clawing her face
and dragging her fingers through her hair. But Jackson’s
father appeared surprisingly stoic. He said, “That’s just
the way it is. That’s just the way it has to be.” He said it
again and again.
The man who looked like a math teacher climbed the
stairs to collect Jackson, followed by the soldiers in body
armor. Jackson’s father restrained Jackson’s mother. He
held onto her even when Jackson emerged at the bottom
of the stairs, escorted by his entourage. Jackson’s mother
fought Jackson’s father, biting him and scratching him,
calling him awful names that Jackson had never heard
before, not even on television.
Jackson stood awkwardly to the side, next to the man
who looked like a math teacher, flanked by the soldiers in
body armor.
His mother broke away from his father’s grasp, and
dashed over to Jackson.
“No!” his father shouted.
So Jackson knew for sure what he’d suspected ever
since the day in the station wagon.
His mother threw her arms around him, touched his
face, mussed his hair, kissed his forehead, and rubbed her
snotty tears all over his neck. “I’m sorry for being such a
terrible mommy,” she hiccupped.
The soldiers yanked her away, and the man who
looked like a math teacher pulled Jackson through the
house, toward the front door.
Jackson looked over his shoulder all the way to the
car. They stuffed him into a black SUV that looked like
all the others. As they pulled away from the curb, his
mother stood in the front yard, sobbing. Other than the
hysterical crying, she seemed fine.
Later that week, the man who looked like a math
teacher was transformed into a bottle of hydrogen
peroxide.
They took Jackson to a strange place full of cramped
rooms with stainless steel tables and glaring white walls.
They tried to run tests on the box, but it was dangerous,
so they ran tests on Jackson instead. They pricked his
finger. They took samples from his skin and hair and
stools. They gave him shots, with long glistening needles
thin as thread, liquid glistening at their tips. They
strapped him down so he couldn’t move, and put him
inside an MRI machine for hours at a time. It was terrible
inside the machine; he closed his eyes and imagined that
he was inside a spaceship instead, on his way to a distant
star. They gave him new shots and did it again. They
attached electrodes to his skull; they wrote down number
after number. No one talked to him except the
psychologist. (Not the same one who’d become a bottle of
hydrogen peroxide.) The psychologist interrogated him for
hours, trying to make him recount everything he could
remember since birth.
They watched Jackson from the other side of mirrored
glass and made him touch the box.
He lost weight. He couldn’t sleep. His head hurt all
the time. Sometimes at night, he would lay awake and
cry. He hated this place so much, and he missed his old
house, where the stairs creaked in just the right places,
the closets were cozy and smelled like cedar, and the
wall-mounted gas heater provided the perfect place to curl
up in the winter, especially in the mornings before school,
especially while eating cereal. Most of all, Jackson
missed his mother. He missed his father. He missed
Emily. He missed Scottie, especially the way he used to
jump in bed with Jackson and purr like an engine while
he licked his paws, making sure to get in between the
toes.
He knew the researchers were watching him all the
time. He’d seen movies, after all. But no one ever came
when he cried.
All he had was the box.
He told the box about Emily, who he’d hated at first
because she was a baby and everyone loved her more, but
whom he now loved with all his heart. He was her older
brother, and she depended on him. That’s what their
parents said, anyways. He told the box about his rock
collection, which already embarrassed him; he was ready
to move on to a more exciting collection, like beetles or
bottle caps.
The box never said anything, of course. Jackson
didn’t expect it to. But talking to it still made him feel
better.
In a way, he began to feel like he understood it.
He made the mistake of saying this to the latest
psychologist. (They were on iteration number four by this
time.) She pounced like a hawk. “What do you mean?
When you say you understand the box, are you saying you
feel like you might be able to explain it? Unlock it? What
exactly have you come to understand about the box?”
She brought in others. They crowded around Jackson,
in front of the mirror that he knew was actually a
window. There were more psychologists on the other side,
taking notes. They questioned him every day for weeks.
Jackson was older now, but he still couldn’t find the
words for what he wanted to say. He didn’t understand
what the box did, or how it did it, or why. He didn’t know
how to control it, or how to make it stop. He didn’t even
know how to open it; as far as he could tell, it was
perfectly seamless.
It was more like he understood how the box felt.
They kept Jackson in that place for five years. Then
they let him go.
But they kept the box.
During his years at the research facility, Jackson had
changed. He’d gotten taller, and his hair had grown
darker, and he was becoming strong. But he still had that
gap between his two front teeth.
His family had changed, too. His mother’s strawberry
blonde hair had gone white. His father had gone gray. His
parents rarely spoke to each other, or anyone else. They
spent long minutes staring into space. They fought
strange fights, like chess games played by mail; move and
countermove took hours. The house would be filled with
silent tension, while one of them worked up the energy to
make a cruel remark. Sometime later, the other would
rouse themselves and angrily respond. Their arguments
took days.
Jackson’s sister Emily was seven now, and as pretty
as an angel. She talked constantly and laughed at
everything. She didn’t seem to notice their parents’ fights.
The made-up Emily that Jackson kept in his head while
he was at the facility turned into the actual Emily, and he
loved her even more than he’d loved the pretend one.
She’d forgotten Jackson while he was away, but now she
was crazy about him. She followed him everywhere, up
the stairs, down the stairs, into the kitchen, out to the
backyard, chattering the whole time. She demanded he
carry his bowl of cereal out to the bus stop with her in the
morning, and wait with her until the school bus came; he
waved with his right hand and held his Wheaties with his
left, until the bus disappeared around the corner. Every
night, Emily made him sit next to her bed until she fell
asleep.
Scottie was old now, but he hadn’t changed much,
except that he was fatter than ever.
Jackson didn’t go to school. He was too far behind.
He asked his parents once if he should try to catch up;
they just shrugged. So he stayed at home all day, left to
his own devices.
He decided to build a tree house for Emily in the
backyard. He made his mother drive him to Home Depot
and help him buy the lumber. He asked his father if he
could use power tools; his father said, “Maybe.” That was
good enough. He got to work sawing, sanding and
hammering; Emily helped in the afternoons, and no one
stopped them. The tree house went up in a week. After
that, Jackson lay in the tree house all day, reading dusty
novels and waiting for Emily to get home from school.
One day, the box showed up instead.
Jackson was stretched out on the knotty pine floor of
the tree house, surrounded by old pillows and scratchy
blankets, when he felt: something. A tickle, a shadow, a
foreboding.
It was the box. It sat there as if it had sat there all
along.
Jackson sat up, folded his knees beneath his
interlocked arms, and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
“Hello,” he said experimentally, remembering all
those conversations they’d had—he and the box—back
when he was in that room surrounded by mirrored glass.
Until this moment, those awful years had seemed like a
bad dream.
The box didn’t answer, as it never had.
Jackson tucked the box beneath the crook of his left
arm and climbed down the ladder. He let himself in the
back door without making a sound, and walked past his
mother, who was sitting at the table staring into a cold
cup of coffee. He tiptoed up the stairs and tucked the box
beneath his bed. Then he went back outside, walking past
his mother for the second time. She never looked up.
Back in the tree house, he sat cross-legged and waited
patiently for the groan and fart of Emily’s school bus.
The soldiers came for the box, as he’d expected they
would. They took it away, and he sighed as he watched
them go, not knowing if the feeling in his chest was relief
or dread. His parents never even asked why the special
forces were back. But Emily did.
He told her it was too complicated to explain.
“Mom and Dad told everyone that you were dead,”
she said.
“Maybe I was.”
“I don’t like that,” she said. “Don’t say it.”
“Okay.”
The box returned. This time it popped into being on
his dresser. The soldiers came and retrieved it, but the box
returned again. This time it appeared on top of the
refrigerator. Jackson’s mother had a panic attack, and had
to be sedated; his father dialed a phone number, and the
soldiers came, but the box returned yet again. This time it
materialized on the breakfast table. Emily was sitting
there, eating Nutella on toast. She laughed.
“Don’t ever touch that box,” Jackson told her. He took
both her hands into his own, and gazed into her blue eyes
with all the force he could muster. “Do you understand?
Never touch the box.”
“Jeez, I know,” she said. “I’m not going to touch the
box.”
Then the soldiers came, but the box kept coming. One
time it arrived in the bottom of Jackson’s closet. He didn’t
even know it was there until the black SUVs arrived and
the soldiers rushed up the stairs, the robots bumbling
slowly behind them. (By this time, they’d developed a
mechanized transportation strategy, to minimize carnage.)
One day, Jackson noticed that every other house on
their block was empty. The roofs were caving in, the
windows were broken, the doors were boarded up, and
the grass was knee high. He didn’t know if the people
who lived in those houses had died, or if they’d all just
moved away. It was no longer a very desirable
neighborhood.
Later, he looked more closely and realized that two of
the houses across the street had become the skeletons of
dead dinosaurs. A third was made out of gingerbread. A
fourth hovered two feet above the ground. A fifth was
only there on Wednesdays.
One night, Emily came to Jackson’s room. She was nine
now, and she wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. In fact,
she wasn’t afraid of anything. But tonight, she seemed
worried.
Jackson lay under the comforter, reading a novel.
Emily sat on the bed, her back to the wall, and stretched
her long skinny legs across the blanket, draping them
over Jackson’s legs so he couldn’t move.
The box sat on top of his dresser; it sat there all the
time now. They’d given up on coming back for it. Or
maybe there was no one left to come back.
“Jackson?” Emily said. She was picking her cuticles.
“Yes.”
“Will you always protect me from your box?”
“It’s not my box,” he said. But he glanced guiltily
toward it.
“Then why does it always come back to you?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t belong to me. It just found
me.”
“Then it’s yours.”
“No. More like I’m its.”
“But you can keep me safe.”
“Of course I can,” he said.
“And what about everyone else?”
“What about them?”
“Why didn’t you keep them safe, too?”
“Because I don’t have that power.”
“So what powers do you have?”
Jackson gazed at Emily, wondering if he could ever
know what she really felt about him. Was he a failed
superhero, or a sympathetic villain? Maybe it didn’t
matter. “I don’t know my powers yet, Emily,” he said.
“But I will always keep you safe. I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. She stopped chewing her bottom
lip. She fell asleep on the floor next to his bed. Her whiteblonde hair was turning brown, like his.
The next week, Scottie disappeared. No one saw him go.
Maybe he dematerialized. Maybe he ran away. Maybe
he just crawled under the shed and died of old age.
Emily cried and cried, but Jackson was the saddest;
he didn’t tell Emily that Scottie had always loved him
more, even though it was true.
The next week, part of their mother disappeared.
The other part remained at the kitchen table, where
she’d been sitting for weeks now. This part was
translucent and two-dimensional, and shimmered into
nothing when Jackson and Emily tried to talk to her.
Sometimes she looked almost solid, but she no longer
spoke.
“I’m sorry,” Jackson told the ghost that was part of
his mother. “This is all my fault. I should never have
touched that box.”
For a moment, he thought she was looking at him, but
then she blinked and flickered into nothingness. He
waited for a while, but she didn’t come back.
After that, Jackson and Emily began spending all
their time in the tree house. It felt safer there. They talked
about everything; both felt old beyond their years.
“Time doesn’t really exist,” Jackson said. “I figured
this out when I was in the place. They said I was there for
five years, but I know it wasn’t five years. It might have
been a month, and it might have been twenty years, but I
know it wasn’t five.”
“But I was five years older when you came back.”
“That stuff is just on the outside.”
Another time, Emily asked him: “What do you think
everything is actually made out of?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, none of this is real, right? It’s made out of
something else, like Legos, or a dream.”
“I guess it could be real.” It didn’t seem likely.
Some time after that, they heard their father
screaming. They peeked out the door of the tree house.
Their father was standing in the backyard, and he was
howling. His voice proclaimed a level of anguish that
most people never feel in their lives. His noiseless
syllables spoke of mental agony deeper than he’d ever
imagined possible. Finally unconstrained, he released the
pain in its raging totality.
One of his arms was missing. Blood spurted from the
empty socket. It shot out pressurized, like water from a
fire hose. He ran in frenzied circles, spraying the backyard
with blood. He kept on screaming. Then his other arm
disappeared. Then a leg. He hopped around the backyard
on his one remaining limb, blood spewing from three
orifices, still screaming. Then his head disappeared. A
moment later, the rest followed.
Some time after that, the house went away too.
The box went with it. But it showed up in the tree
house two days later.
It was crowded in the tree house, especially because
Emily took care not to get too close to the box. But at
least they had a place.
Emily didn’t go to school anymore. The school had
become something else.
Mostly they just sat in the tree house and talked.
“Remember when you asked me what everything is
made of?” Jackson said.
“Yeah. Did you figure it out?”
“I think so. Everything is everything. Like, everything
is made out of everything else. So it doesn’t matter what
things are. Because they’re all the same thing.”
“So the things that disappeared are still here, really?”
“Yeah. They just became part of something else.”
Jackson knew that when she said “things,” she didn’t
really mean “things.”
The neighborhood had changed. Everything in it had
turned into something else. But there was a store two
miles away that still worked. It was a long walk, but it
was too dangerous to drive: The streets were full of
strange creatures and oversized objects and vast crevices
where things had disappeared. And the car could always
turn into something else, too. A lot of cars had.
So Jackson set out for supplies on foot, carrying a
backpack. No one used money anymore; it was too weird.
They just asked for things. Sometimes they appeared.
Sometimes they didn’t.
This time, they did. Jackson filled the backpack with
chips and cheese and candy bars, and hiked back home.
Lately he’d been feeling these overwhelming waves of
déjà vu. He felt it now. Which was odd, because he was
sure he had never encountered a three-legged bear that
hopped down the street like a frog, or a box fan the size of
a house.
As he climbed the ladder to the tree house, he called
out: “Hello? I’m back. Emily? I’m back.”
But there was no one in the tree house. Except the
box, of course.
Then he noticed the doll. It lay on the stack of ratty
blankets that Jackson and Emily had made into a
makeshift bed. He picked up the doll. He’d never seen it
before.
The doll had blue eyes and light brown hair. It looked
like Emily.
Jackson flung the doll out of the tree house. It landed
in the backyard with a thud. He climbed down after it and
kicked it across the yard. He ran around in crazed circles,
crying in agony the way his father had done once before.
“I told you not to touch the box!” he screamed. “I told
you not to touch it! You promised!”
He threw his face to the sky and howled. He beat the
trunk of the tree that held the tree house until his knuckles
bled. He screamed all the curse words he could
remember, the way his mother had done when they first
took him away.
But he knew he was being unfair. Maybe Emily
hadn’t touched the box. Maybe touching the box didn’t
really matter; lots of things in the world had never
touched the box, and the box didn’t seem to care.
Maybe she’d just run away.
He waited in the tree house for a long time. It might have
been a month. It might have been five years. It might have
been twenty.
But Emily never came back.
There wasn’t anyone else anymore. And time seemed
to be turning itself inside out.
He antagonized the box, trying to make something
happen. He kicked it. He hit it. He dropped it. He
slammed it against concrete. He rested his palm flat
against the top and meditated for what felt like hours.
Nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
Then one day the tree house became the MRI machine.
Jackson was lying inside it. He was tied down, and he
couldn’t move.
He closed his eyes as tightly as he could, counted to
ten, and opened them again. Still here.
Had he been in the machine the whole time?
They pulled him out.
But they weren’t the same they. They’d transcended
themselves. And so had he, he discovered as he looked
down at what was now himself.
They were un-things in un-time. They existed on the
razor sharp edge of the present, which is just as difficult
as it sounds. But it wasn’t like that, either, really.
They released him. They hovered around him, trapped
in the mirrored glass. The panel of psychologists all over
again, as if like they’d always been.
“We must admit, we’re confused,” they said.
“You’re confused?” (Was Jackson speaking? He was,
but it wasn’t like that either, really.)
“Why didn’t your world like our gift?”
“Because it killed everyone?”
“That’s not our fault. We put the secrets to the
universe in that thing. It was all in there! Everything any
advanced civilization has ever wanted to know. Time
travel. Teleportation. Immortality. Alchemy. ESP. This
was the greatest gift of all time! You always talk about
wanting to meet that guy, God? Well, here we are. And
you don’t just get to meet us. You could be us. All you
had to do was reverse-engineer one little box.”
“Why couldn’t you just tell us about what was in the
box? You know, like, explain it to us in words?”
“We can’t use words,” they said, glaring at him with
pity and scorn.
“You’re using them right now.”
“Not in the least,” they said, and he saw that they
were right. Whatever words they’d used were the ones
he’d given them to tell a story he already knew.
“The box was so simple it transcended language. The
box was as elegant as we could possibly make it. The box
—well, the box was perfect.”
“You ruined my life,” Jackson said. “And the entire
world. But I guess I don’t take that quite as personally.”
They talked amongst their un-selves in their notwords.
“We’re going to try again,” they said. “That last time
really must have been a fluke. We mean, come on! It was
just one little box. Someone on your planet has to be able
to figure it out. Or maybe we just need to test it further.”
“Please, whatever you do, do not test it further.”
“We’ll get it right! We mean, you’ll get it right.”
“Am I dreaming?” he asked. He’d begun to think he
was.
“Of course,” they said. And they gave him a shot,
strapped him down, and put him back into the machine.
He closed his eyes and dreamed he was a box. A box
about the size of a shoebox, with a matte charcoal hue
that hovered indistinctly between black and gray;
perfectly seamless despite the fact that it contained
multitudes.
A tow-headed little boy peered down at him.
It was a crystalline morning in early June, and the sky
was wide as a saucer.
© 2013 Desirina Boskovich.
Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy
Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard
and Last Drink Bird Head. She is an ’07 graduate of the Clarion Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Find her online at
desirinaboskovich.com.
A Love Supreme
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Ellie Santos-Smith grabs a clean white coat as spring
dawn brightens her worn Oriental rug and streaks with
sun her only luxury, a grand piano.
She runs a comb through her jet-black hair, cut short
because she thinks that makes her look older. Her smooth
skin glows with 20-ish health, though she is 47.
Patients distrust young doctors. Nanomed infusions
keep her body young, her mind sharp, and mitigate her
crippling agoraphobia. She has worked hard to be able to
live in a minuscule apartment in The Enclave, a safe, lowpopulation-density bubble in Washington, D.C. In this
small, pure paradise, the incredibly rich claim more cubic
feet than most people in the world can dream of, dine on
rare organic food, and ingest the most finely tuned
infusions.
She hates herself for needing this. But she does. If she
is to help anyone, if she is to put her hard-won training to
use, she does. She can walk to the Longevity Center for
her frequent infusions and, after that, to her job as an
emergency physician at Capital Hospital without being
trapped in a car, a subway, a plane.
Her phone rings. “Dad?” His voice gravelly, odd. Not
that she’s heard from him in a long time.
“Hi, hon.”
She thinks blue for a moment. His eyes, tearshimmered blue beneath a thatch of sun-whitened hair, all
those years ago. He had been abruptly summoned from
his marine biology kingdom the day her mother was
murdered, as Ellie watched, during the First East Coast
Riot. He’d fled back to his undersea haven soon
afterwards, leaving her to Grandma and boarding schools.
“Can we talk later? My infusion is overdue; then I’m
working emergency till seven,” she says. She imagines
him in the teak cabin of his Key West-anchored sloop,
stubbornly aging.
“Never mind.” He hangs up.
Same old game. She should be used to his gruff
elusiveness, but it always hurts. Her father, a celebrated
marine biologist with a worm named after him, quit
academia once she got her college scholarships and spent
decades painting bizarre ocean creatures, gaining a small
international following.
Downstairs, the doorman smiles. She steps out into
her safe haven, a few tree-lined blocks of historic
mansions, townhomes, restaurants, and shops bounded on
one side by Connecticut Avenue and patrolled by security
professionals (thugs, to her mind) for which she pays a
hefty neighborhood fee. They keep out the homeless, the
hungry, the desperate, and the different. Once outside this
discreet, invisible boundary she will have to pass through
a few blocks she calls The Gauntlet, which throbs with
the dense crowds that now fill most of the cities on Earth,
before reaching the hospital where she works. Only her
nanomed infusions keep panic at bay.
In front of her, a lone bicyclist splashes through
puddles, and nearby Don Stapleton descends the broad
stairs of Forever, a 1900-vintage condominium mansion
of 30 wealthy centenarians, some of whom worked hard
to establish The Enclave. He waves. “Doc! Lovely
morning!”
Trapped. She could swear he hacks her schedule.
White dreads halo his dark, handsome face. “Coffee on
the veranda?” She glances over at the broad Victorian
porch, with wicker chairs, hanging ferns, and eight limber
residents sun-saluting as Ella Fitzgerald sings.
Six hundred million centenarians—C’s—the last
recipients of Social Security. It is the lifeline of most C’s
but only slightly augments the wealth the people in
Forever acquired during successful professional lives.
“Thanks, but I’m late.”
“I’ll walk with you. We have a new offer.”
Her throat constricts. “Sorry, but no.” The work, she
knows, would be a nightmare. Perpetually on call for a
household of detail-oriented hypochondriacs; crushed by
constant, whimsical, impossible demands. She walks
faster toward her job in the Hospital Center, where her
patients are poor and in desperate need of her skills. They
are the people to whom she has devoted her training and
her life.
Don persists. “You got Mrs. Diyubski an emergency
infusion. Cut through red tape, saved her life—”
“I’m not a boutique M.D.”
“You are a nanomedicine expert. Fewer patients
might be less stressful for you. That could be a great
change, given your phobia.”
Nosy bastard. He smiles. “Public information. I’m
sending the offer.” The ping in her ear registers its
reception, and Don falls behind.
In a few blocks she is at Dupont Circle. The
implanted microchip that gives her access to The Enclave
now signals with a low beep that she is unprotected. She
takes a deep breath. Masses of children, teenagers,
everyone young. Shanties, ever-milling crowds, food
lines, rank odors, and a constant assault of raised voices,
ugly music, honking horns.
The phone. Her father, calling back. “We need to talk.
I’m dying.”
A break in her stride. “Where are you?”
“Hospice at Sunnyland. Hepatocellular carcinoma.”
The words roll off his educated tongue.
“When were you diagnosed?”
“Three months ago.”
She rages. “Why didn’t you call? It’s not too late.
Regeneration infusions—” Her brain teems with
nanomed therapies. Most out of his financial reach, since
he has stubbornly avoided anything other than mandatory
insurance, and his age—85—precludes expensive lifeextending measures.
“I’m ready to go, Ellie. They give me two, three days.
I just want you, now.”
I wanted you then. All those years. You were gone.
You didn’t love me. “I need to talk to your doctor.”
That gravelly laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I was
diagnosed by a nurse-practitioner after an ambulance ride
foisted on me by a well-meaning neighbor. I’m in the
benevolent hands of the state. Deprived of a death at sea.
No docs at Sunnyland.”
No surprise, that. “I can’t jump on a plane.”
“It’s okay. I reap what I’ve sowed.”
Her urge to get to him, to see him, brings her to
sudden tears, surprising her. But she’d been taken off a
plane in a straitjacket when she was 12. Even first class
didn’t help.
“You don’t understand. It’s not that.” It’s not our
past, our hopeless inability to communicate.
“Hon, you may not think so.” He hangs up again.
She’s always urged her father to live with her. “In that
bubble? No thanks.” A relief, and they both know it. She
can’t live with people. Her short marriage hammered that
home. Her only close companions are dead musicians and
her piano, which she plays long into the night.
Ellie surfaces from their conversation angry, without
her insulating defenses, to endless oncoming faces,
roaring buses, choking exhaust. She’s powerless. He’s
stubborn, and she’s let his stubbornness kill him. You can
control everything else in your life, but you can’t control
your father.
Damned if she can’t.
She recalls recent nanomed updates and rearranges
these components in the work of art that is her own mind.
Heart pounding, she makes it to the door of the Infusion
Center, passing the block-long line of those hoping for an
insurance reprieve, shows her card, and slips inside.
The receptionist is new. Ellie takes a deep breath and
rolls the dice. It’s not like her, but she has no choice.
“Add 17 and 43.”
“That’s not allowed.”
“I’m Code R-1.” Ellie hates exposing herself to pity.
Her expensive infusions are government compensation to
victims of the deadliest riot in U.S. history—the riot in
which Ellie’s mother died, the riot that began a decade of
turmoil around the time the world’s population passed
eight billion.
Few people, not even professionals like Ellie, can
afford what she gets: life extension, nanomed components
updated in real time. Nanomeds could be manufactured
cheaply. Prices are kept high. The official explanation is
the cost of R&D and the experimental nature of
nanomeds. The real truth is overpopulation and a fear of
more C’s.
She lies on a gurney in the infusion room. Designer
nanomeds maintain her phenomenal memory—a doubleedged sword, for those memories trigger panic. After Ellie
witnessed her mother’s murder, her psychiatrist pressured
her father to allow therapeutic memory mediation—
erasure. Her father refused, wanting Ellie to have that
choice when she was older. For that she is thankful.
Those memories make living in her bubble imperative,
but they are her. Her infusions are a balancing act,
holding the possibility of neuronal damage, but she has
the authority to design her own cocktail.
Adding 17 and 43 will radically change the balance,
removing her fear. She will probably be able to leave her
bubble, get on the plane. She is not sure what other
changes might occur. Her carefully constructed life could
fall apart.
“Doc, you know you can’t do this.” John, her regular
nurse.
“You know I can.”
“It’s dangerous. This isn’t like you. The latest bulletin
—”
“I know. Paradoxical effects from these latest
upgrades. I have to fly tonight.”
John sighs. “You want to listen to jazz during the
infusion?”
“Of course.” Slight sting of needle. She closes her
eyes, and memories assail her.
Lavender dusk limned by a horizon of bare brown trees.
Stopped on the Beltway. Ten lanes of static oncoming
lights, the usual soothing interlude between kindergarten
and supper. Ellie strapped in her seat, killing 3-D aliens,
Mom up front chanting “A Love Supreme” with John
Coltrane, head bobbing, still in her white coat after a day
in the hospital. Then she gasps.
Striding down an exit ramp: An army of people flows
among the cars. Ragged clothes, muffled chants. A bat,
smashed windows, her mother sprawled over the seat
screaming, “Don’t hurt my niña!”
Blood spatters her mother’s white coat and Ellie’s
video screen.
Years later, driving while in medical school: A flood
of oncoming lights. The world under construction, always
—cranes, barrels, trucks of supplies to accommodate
people, who keep appearing, appearing, filling every
space in great towers and on vast artificial islands. Ellie
wants to help, like Mother. Driving through fear will
make her strong. Finally, strength fails. She flips; can’t
function. The usual infusions are ineffective. City centers
needing her expertise have become unlivable.
In D.C., after a long, difficult search, she finds her
oasis. The price? She can’t ever leave.
“Doc?” She opens her eyes and wonders—when did I
stop being able to live? She sits up. “I shouldn’t be jittery
right after an infusion”
“You knew you were taking a risk. I’ll take a blood
sample.”
“No time. And John?”
“Doc?”
“Don’t use Coltrane again.”
“I didn’t.”
There is no way she can avoid her shift in the emergency
room; there is no one to take her place. She leaves the
Infusion Center and makes a plane reservation for a flight
after her shift while striding New Hampshire Avenue.
Only a block to the hospital, and now post-infusion,
throngs effuse love, do not seethe with malicious intent,
do not lie in wait to make deadly, unexpected moves.
She arrives at the hospital and is relaxed, surprised to
be breathing easy as she is scanned in and checked for
weapons. She pushes her arms into her white coat and
grabs a chart. It is paradoxically frightening to feel so
utterly good in this whirring hellhole, where daily she
strives, with heartbreakingly limited success, to deprive
death of its staggering bounty.
She slips inside a curtained space. “Mr. Billings?” He
lies on the exam table, unshaven face bruised, a police
officer beside him. “What happened?”
The cop says, “He started a bar fight. Not the first
time.”
“Not true.” Billings glares at the cop.
“He never remembers.”
“She broke my arm.”
“That’s a lie.”
Ellie says to the cop, “You’ll have to step outside.”
“He’s dangerous. He just exploded—”
“Out.” She begins her exam. “Your arm?”
“Hurts like hell.”
Ellie shines a flashlight in Billings’s eyes. “Where’d
you get this scar on your forehead?”
“Incoming. Ten years ago. Everybody else died.”
“Sit up.” She hammers his knee. “Been treated for
PTSD?”
“Borderline. They won’t pay.”
“I’m ordering pain meds and an X-ray of your arm.
I’ll be back in a little while.”
Her next patient needs a kidney update. She sits on
the table, puffy, staring at her knotted hands. Ellie has
become a technician, enjoined from stepping outside
finely drawn boundaries. Care is rationed. HMOs have
made medicine a corporate algorithm, doing the greatest
good for the most people.
Her M.D. gives her the power to override tics in the
system. She knows how far she can push the limits and
which procedures are too expensive, will tip the balance
and get her censured.
The kidney treatment is out of bounds. Ellie hesitates,
approves it. “You’ll feel better soon.”
Tears in the patient’s eyes. “I thought—”
“New protocol.”
Boutique doctors practice as they see fit because the
rich bypass the corporate algorithm. As she leaves the
patient, she can’t help checking Forever’s offer, the one
Don Stapleton keeps pushing. Staggeringly huge. She
couldn’t possibly provide services worth that. The C’s
would devour her. And she would be treating them . . .
forever. The same people. Her emergency skills would
atrophy. A trap.
But one more override and she might be out on her
ass. She knows that her recklessness is because of her
infusion. She just needs to make it to the end of her shift.
After an hour she gets Billings’s results. “Fractured ulna.
This bone,” she tells him, touching it. “I’m ordering a
mending infusion.”
“Hear that?” Billings yells. The cop is startled awake.
Ellie asks Billings, “How would you like to stay out
of bar fights and feel better?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“I only need your consent. You’ll get neuroplasticity
meds and counseling. You have to promise me you’ll go
to counseling or it won’t work.”
“You sure, Doc? I mean—”
“I’m sure.”
Billings reminds her of her father—at the mercy of the
unfeeling algorithm. He’d had choices, though, more
choices than Billings.
She has always avoided thoughts about the tangle of
their lives. Except,she thinks, surprising herself, they
come out through my fingers. Hours and hours and
hours at night. They come out when I improvise, play
jazz. They’re not as far away as I think.
Filled with momentary wonder, she draws back the
curtain, where the eternal next patient sits. Everything
seems so preternaturally sharp, so full of potential for too
much thought that she aches for her shift to end.
On the red-eye, Ellie stares out the window of the plane at
a solid unending glare of light all the way down the East
Coast, imagining all those people, and does not go fetal.
She does not scream.
She has not called her father.
As she steps from the cab at Sunnyland, she feels as
relaxed as if she had run 10 miles on a treadmill. Highrises surround her, receding grids of light blocking any
other view. Twenty thousand elderly live here on 30 acres,
a template reproduced nationally. Those living here did
not watch their pennies. They cannot catch the wave of
technology for a long-term ride.
Ellie will always have a job. The life she worked for
is bright and assured, an enviable personal future. A
future where she will hide from time, emotion, and
change.
Irked at her thoughts, she grabs her bag and enters the
lobby of her father’s building. On the hospice floor,
visitors nap in chairs, maintaining vigil. Outside her
father’s room, a whiff of whiskey as she passes two
chatting, weathered men in fishing caps. Inside, strings of
colored lights, low revelry, and Coltrane’s sax wailing for
the second time in 24 hours, this time no dream. Her
fingers flex in a near-unconscious riff. She spots her
father in a reclining chair.
His face, frighteningly thin, is lit on one side by a
blinking blue light. A faint smile plays across his face; a
beer is in his hand. She flies to him: “Dad!”
He blinks, grins. Flash of overwhelmingly blue eyes,
and she is once again 5. “Ellie! Come to see the old man
off after all, eh?”
“I’m getting you out of here.”
“Good god, Ellie. I’m getting morphine! Don’t mess
with it.”
“It’s not funny. Give me a more detailed diagnosis.”
“Certain and welcome death. Internment in the sea.
Making room for younger people who are happy to be
alive.”
“You can recover.”
Her father says gently, “This is hospice. Four days of
rationed grace. They know how to mete it out fine. No
needles, no tubes, no machines. I skipped that. I probably
got whatever I have long ago when I was torturing rare
marine organisms instead of coming home to see you.
Fair play.”
“Fair play? I missed you, Dad, of course I did. I
needed you. But that has nothing to do with your
choosing to die. What have they done so far?”
He shrugs. “Two infusions last month. Standard
issue. They didn’t work.”
“You didn’t call.”
He speaks slowly, as if to a child, with equal
emphasis on each word. “I just didn’t want to.”
She grasps it all, his terrible stubbornness and hers,
and opens her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling an ambulance.”
“Ellie, Ellie. No one will pay for it. And where do you
think you’ll take me?”
“An infusion clinic. I’ll pay.”
“Not even you have that much money.”
“I have a new job offer. I’ll take care of you. I’ll sell
my apartment—it’s worth a lot. We can live in the
centenarian house—beautiful—interesting people. You’ll
love it—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ll love.”
She sees a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She is a bit
ashamed, but not enough to stop. She shouts, “You’re a
foolish old man!”
He smiles. “I hope so.” He waves. “Keep talking,
everybody, she’s just my daughter.” Chatter resumes. He
says, quietly, “You might think that I don’t know you,
Ellie, but I do. Remember that summer you spent with me
after college, when you were deciding what to do with
your life? Yes, too brief, but I know you like I know
myself.” He pauses for a breath. “You have to do what
moves you, and what moves you is your job. As it is.
Whatever you’re doing, however crazy it looks to me, it
works. Don’t sacrifice that job to help me. I don’t want it.
“Second point—don’t interrupt. I’m getting tired. I’ve
had a great life. Despite our . . . tragedy. I don’t want to
live anywhere but on my boat. If you do anything without
my consent, I will never forgive you. I’m serious. And I
don’t ever again want the kind of pain I’ve had the past
six months.”
“I wouldn’t have let you have that pain!” To her
surprise, Ellie begins to cry. “You hid it from me. You
didn’t want my help. What has my life been about if I
can’t even help my own father? You’d rather die than
have my help.” She drops to the bed, covers her face, and
sobs.
“Ellie, look at me.”
She wipes her face on her sleeve. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I haven’t seen you cry since your mother
died.”
“You haven’t seen me much. Holidays. Birthdays.”
She hears the 10-year-old in her voice, her two annual
summer weeks at sea with her father ending once again.
“Fair shot.” He pauses. “It’s over. The oceans are
polluted beyond repair.”
“You can help restore them! You—”
“This place that seems so awful to you, this is what
it’s like everywhere now. Even worse. I’ve been all
around the world. I’ve done my part. I’m proud that a
worm is named after me.” He draws a deep breath,
coughs, looks at her squarely. “I’m proud of you. Your
mother would be so proud of you.” Another long pause
while she grabs a tissue, blows her nose, wipes her face.
“You can do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Let’s move this party to my boat. I was kidnapped. I
don’t want to die here. Order somebody to bring a piano
to the dock and you can play me out. I haven’t heard you
play in a long, long time. It’s like heaven to me. It always
reminds me of the first time I went diving.”
“But—”
“That’s all I want of you. We can’t get back the years
I wasted. Do this for me, please.”
She waits for the old anger, the old rage, to bubble up
and spew out. Her hand moves toward her phone, then
stops.
You know how to improvise.
Instead of the ambulance call, there is a memory, one
of many she has hugged to herself all these years, refusing
to release it. It’s the new infusion that allows it to surface,
she knows, but that does not make it any less valuable.
A winter day at her grandmother’s. The holidays. She
is playing the piano. She begins with one learned set
piece, Bach.
Then there is a shift. She hears her mother as if she
were music, Coltrane, jazz. She threads new notes to
Bach, adjusts cadence, moves into new space.
Improvises. Loses herself in sound, falling snow, her
father, leaning on the piano as tears roll down his face.
She remembers that she played for hours.
She looks directly at him, seeing him as if for the first
time: a person separate from herself, from her needs, from
her ways of making her own life small and safe.
She nods. “All right, Dad. Let’s go.”
© 2012 by Kathleen Ann Goonan.
Originally published in Discover Magazine.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of seven novels, the most recent being
This Shared Dream (Tor, July 2011). In War Times (Tor, 2007) won the
John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also
the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels
were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You
Dogs, a short story collection, will be published by PS Publishing in 2012.
She is working on her eighth novel, Hemingway’s Hurricane, and is a
Visiting Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at
Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
Robert Silverberg
This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned
—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack
aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above
the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same
Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily
through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the
velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or
maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.
There are no starships. Probably there never will be
any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of
Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except
back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for
the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That
little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for
him; it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he
has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking
refuge aboard that interstellar ship. So what JAL Flight
411 holds is merely his physical self, his shell, occupying
a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-passenger vessel
which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has
sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a
couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua’s
Torres Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima,the
essential Schwartzness of him, soars between the
galaxies.
What a starship it is! How marvelous its myriad
passengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast
gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the
worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris,
Antares, beings both intelligent and articulate, methanebreathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon-breathing, spinyskinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or
altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distinct and
distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these
varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of
anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and
Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their
delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket,
this planet-locked stratosphere needle, one cannot tell the
Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the
Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they
open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.
In his reveries he confers with creatures from the
Fomalhaut system about digital circumcision; he tapes the
melodies of the Achernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the
sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran,
the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL
stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at
him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blueeyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronzeskinned, a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-firstcentury-model mongrel human, perhaps MelanesianSwedish-Turkish-Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-TatarWelsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly
work: All Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have
melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz
wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and
arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any
rate. Her name is Dawn—O sweet neutral nonculturebound cognomen!—and they have played at a flirtation,
he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments
of this short flight. Twinkling, she says softly, “We’re
getting ready for our landing, Dr. Schwartz. Are your
restrictors in polarity?”
“I never unfastened them.”
“Good.” The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. “I
have a layover in Papua tonight,” she says.
“That’s nice.”
“Let’s have a drink while we’re waiting for them to
unload the baggage,” she suggests with cheerful
bluntness. “All right?”
“I suppose,” he says casually. “Why not?” Her
availability bores him: Somehow, he enjoys the obsolete
pleasures of the chase. Once, such easiness in a woman
like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz
is forty years old, tall, square-shouldered, sturdy, a
showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish
mother. His close-cropped black hair is flecked with gray;
many women find that interesting. One rarely sees gray
hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and
Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness,
both within his domestic sixness and without, has
increased with his professional success. He is confident,
sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious
assurance. This month alone, eighty million people have
heard his lectures.
She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. “You
don’t sound eager. Not interested?”
“Hardly that.”
“What’s wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?”
Schwartz shrugs. “Dreadfully sub. Body like dry
bone. Mind like dead ashes.” He smiles, full force
depriving his words of all their weight.
She registers mock anguish. “That sounds bad,” she
says. “That sounds awful!”
“I’m only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to
me. Actually, I feel fine, just a little stale.”
“Too many skyports?”
He nods. “Too much of a sameness wherever I go.”
He thinks of a star-bright, top-deck bubble dome where
three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation
to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. “I’ll be
all right,” he tells her. “It’s a date.”
Her hybrid face flows with relief and anticipation.
“See you in Papua,” she tells him, and winks, and moves
jauntily down the aisle.
Papua. By cocktail time Schwartz will be in Port
Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua;
yesterday it was Montevideo; the day after tomorrow it
will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic
circuit. This is his year: He is very big, suddenly, in
anthropological circles, since the publication of The Mask
Beneath the Skin. From continent to continent he flashes,
sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday
Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo, Thursday—Thursday?
He crossed the international date line this morning, and
he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday
or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday.
Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is
2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of
that.
The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward
plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a
glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to
the gleaming starship making its swift way across the
whirling constellations.
He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck
lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion,
Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid
little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to
choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make
him share this fantasy with such a boor?
“Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s
your girlfriend.”
The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male
had come in.
“Quit it,” Schwartz snapped. “You know there’s no
such thing going on.”
“Haven’t you been chasing her for days?”
“She’s not a ‘her,’” Schwartz said.
Pitkin guffawed. “Such precision! Such scholarship!
She’s not a her, he says!” He gave Schwartz a broad
nudge. “To you she’s a she, friend, and don’t try to kid
me.”
Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to
Pitkin’s vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean—a
slim, yellow-eyed, ebony-skinned upright humanoid,
sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a
seal’s fluid grace—powerfully attractive. Nor could he
help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That attitude
was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he
knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial
sexual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system,
that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of “her” in genders,
“she” could be considered only the negative of male, with
no implication of biological femaleness.
He said patiently, “I’ve told you. The Antarean’s
neither male nor female as we understand those concepts.
If we happen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that’s
the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to
believe that my interest in this being is sexual, go ahead,
but I assure you that it’s purely professional.”
“Sure. You’re only studying her.”
“In a sense I am. And she’s studying me. On her
native world she has the status-frame of ‘watcher-of-life,’
which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of
an anthropologist.”
“How lovely for you both. She’s your first alien and
you’re her first Jew.”
“Stop calling her her,” Schwartz hissed.
“But you’ve been doing it!”
Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me
never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is
muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned
me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called
them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with
five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and
he has to be an economist from Yale.”
“Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.”
“Go away,” Schwartz said. “Stop lousing up my
fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else.
You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their
bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.”
Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a
drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was
approaching them. “Go on,” Schwartz murmured.
“Don’t worry,” Pitkin said. “I wouldn’t want to crowd
you.” He vanished into the motley crowd.
The Antarean said, “The Capellans are dancing,
Schwartz.”
“I’d like to see that. Too damned noisy in here
anyway.” Schwartz stared into the alien’s vertical-slitted
citreous eyes. Cat’s eyes, he thought. Panther’s eyes. The
Antarean’s gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz’s
mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange,
unsettling tremor of desire. Desire for what, though? It
was a sensation of pure need, nonspecific, certainly
nonsexual. “I think I’ll take a look. Will you come with
me?”
The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across
the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the
stewardess in a low, intense tone, “My life was in crisis.
All my values were becoming meaningless. I was
discovering that my chosen profession was empty,
foolish, as useless as—playing chess.”
“How awful,” Dawn whispers gently.
“You can see why. You go all over the world, you see
a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same
everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same
magazines, the same styles of architecture and décor.”
“Yes.”
“International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity.
Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist
in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here
we sit on the island of Papua—you know, headhunters,
animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone
through the nose—and look at the Papuans in their
business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging
stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending
restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no
different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve
transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic
western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the twohour intercontinental rockets, the breakdown of religious
exclusivism and genetic taboo have mongrelized every
culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have
plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen
and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all
just so much interior decoration, and underneath the
carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the same
universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in
the Kalahari or the Amazon rain forest. Do you
comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?”
“It’s such a terrible loss,” she says sadly. She is trying
very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting
for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his
hotel room. He will invite her, but there is no stopping
him once he has launched into his one great theme.
“Cultural diversity is gone from the world,” he says.
“Religion is dead; true poetry is dead; inventiveness is
dead; individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.” In a
high monotone he chants:
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty above and about me I walk
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
He has begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has
created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity;
heads are turning, eyes are squinting. “Navaho,” he says.
“The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell.
Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll
chant for you, yes, for a price, but they don’t know what
the words mean, and chances are the singers are only onefourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to
dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if
any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So
much is gone. Listen.” He chants again, more piercingly
even than before:
The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great
cold.
It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.
The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is—
“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW
UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,” a mighty
mechanical voice cries.
—the great cold.
It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.
“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE…”
The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And—
“People are staring,” Dawn says uncomfortably.
“—ON CONCOURSE FOUR.”
“Let them stare. Do them some good. That’s a Pygmy
chant, from Gabon, in equatorial Africa. Pygmies? There
are no more Pygmies. Everybody’s two meters tall. And
what do we sing? Listen. Listen.” He gestures fiercely at
the cloud of tiny golden loudspeakers floating near the
ceiling. A mush of music comes from them: the current
popular favorite. Savagely he mouths words: “Star . . .
far . . . here . . . near. Playing in every skyport right
now, all over the world.” She smiles thinly. Her hand
reaches toward his, covers it, presses against the
knuckles. He is dizzy. The crowd, the eyes, the music, the
drink. The plastic. Everything shines. Porcelain.
Porcelain. The planet vitrifies. “Tom?” she asks uneasily.
“Is anything the matter?” He laughs, blinks, coughs,
shivers. He hears her calling for help, and then he feels
his soul swooping outward, toward the galactic
blackness.
With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered
through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at
the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling
outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage
had cozy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big
to come on board, and in any case they preferred never to
let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They
traveled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery
whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they
kept within twenty meters of the hull they would be inside
the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept
ship and contents and associated fellow travellers toward
Rigel, or the Lesser Magellanic, or was it one of the
Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine
lights?
He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow
of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green,
and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track
was a flash of golden fire. “They have a dangerous
beauty,” Schwartz whispered. “Do you hear them calling?
I do.”
“What do they say?”
“They say, ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me!’”
“Go to them, then,” said the Antarean simply. “Step
through the hatch.”
“And perish?”
“And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz!
Do you love your present body so?”
“My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m
likely to get another one some day?”
“No?”
“No,” Schwartz said. “This one is all I get. Isn’t it
that way with you?”
“At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing.
That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the
fifth form I have been given to wear.”
“Will the next be as beautiful as this?”
“All forms are beautiful,” the Antarean said. “You
find me attractive?”
“Of course.”
A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport.
“As attractive as those?”
Schwartz laughed. “Yes. In a different way.”
Coquettishly the Antarean said, “If I were out there,
you would walk through the hatch into space?”
“I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me
how to use it.”
“But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right
now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen
minutes. I am there and I say, ‘Come to me, Schwartz,
come to me!’ What do you do?”
“I don’t think I’m all that much self-destructive.”
“To die for love, though! To make a transition for the
sake of beauty.”
“No. Sorry.”
The Antarean pointed toward the undulating
Capellans. “If they asked you, you would go.”
“They are asking me,” he said.
“And you refuse the invitation?”
“So far. So far.”
The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick
silvery snort. “Our voyage will last many weeks more.
One of these days, I think, you will go to them.”
“You were unconscious at least five minutes,” Dawn
says. “You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought
to go through with tonight’s lecture?”
Nodding, Schwartz says, “I’ll be all right. I’m a little
tired, is all. Too many time zones this week.” They stand
on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on,
already, here in late afternoon: It is midwinter in the
Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic
blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have
appeared. He has never really known which star is which.
That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one
Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this?
Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is
it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport, he
has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception
and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has
arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux.
In two hours they will come for him and take him to the
University to speak. Dawn watches him closely. Perhaps
she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only
waiting for him to make his move toward her. There’s
time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk
now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier
thread:
“For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken
place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York
boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the
anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming
of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and
the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and
grammars and folkways and artefacts and all that, until
when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and
started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We
have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants
but no basic divergences—there’s nothing primitive left
on Earth, and there are no other planets.Not inhabited
ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the
natives. What natives? And we can’t reach the stars. All I
have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when
the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had
wasted my life.”
She says, “But surely there was something for you to
study on Earth.”
“One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work
for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an
exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never
have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The
sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of
raw indigestible data. Insight comes later—two, five, ten
generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to
learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures,
studying them completely,and defining ourselves by
measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have
to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself
corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he
comes around with his camera and scanners and starts
asking questions, but we can compensate more or less, for
the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t
compensate when our whole culture collides with another
and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technologicalmechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I
woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah!
Crushing revelation! Schwartz’s occupation is gone!”
“What did you do?”
“For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I
studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all
meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of
vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to
cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings:
I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of
evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but
what do they tell you about the contemporary world and
the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones.
Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this
Ibo—well, basically an Ibo, but she’s got some Israeli in
her and I think Chinese—and we grew very close, she
was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I
told her my troubles. I’m going to give it all up, I said,
because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at
me and said, ‘What right do you have to be upset because
the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape
your life, Tom; you can’t reshape the world.’ I said, ‘But
how?’ And she said, ‘Look inward, find the primitive in
yourself, see what made you what you are, what made
today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams
have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only
merged.’ Which made me think. Which gave me a new
way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward
quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come
to an understanding of what our planet has become, and
only after I accepted the planet—”
It seems to him that he has been talking forever.
Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own
voice. There is only a distant buzz.
“After I accepted—”
A distant buzz.
“What was I saying?” he asks.
“After you accepted the planet—”
“After I accepted the planet,” he says, “that I could
begin—” Buzz. Buzz. “That I could begin to accept
myself.”
He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for
themselves—they were oblique, elliptical characters, selfcontained and self-satisfied, hard to approach—as for the
apparently psychedelic drug they took in some
sacramental way before the beginning of each of their
interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched
them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of
extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting
him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited;
he felt pulled.
There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures
two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical
bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian,
dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands, but their
eyes were weirdly human, large liquid-brown eyes, sad
Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers
transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had
spoken with them several times. They understood English
well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it
would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on
Earth—but the construction of their vocal organs was
such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied
instead on small translating machines hung around their
necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into
amber words pulsing across a screen.
Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with
them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told
him it enabled them to make contact with the central
forces of the universe. He replied that there were such
drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that
they gave him great insight into the workings of the
cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even
intense curiosity: Reading their eyes was difficult and the
tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant
leather-bound drug case from his pouch and showed them
what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and
acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested
an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the
shriveled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred.
Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the
proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them
when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs
away.
Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far
side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as
the Spicans glided off. “What are you up to now?” he
demanded.
“How about minding your own business?” Schwartz
said amiably.
“You’re trading pills with those snakes, aren’t you?”
“Let’s call it field research.”
“Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip
on that orange stuff of theirs?”
“I might,” Schwartz said.
“How do you know what its effects on the human
metabolism might be? You could end up blind or
paralyzed or crazy or—”
“—or illuminated,” Schwartz said. “Those are the
risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who
unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui
accepted those risks, and—”
“But those were drugs that humans were using. You
have no way of telling how—oh, what’s the use,
Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin
sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
The house is a decent one tonight, close to three thousand,
every seat in the University’s great horseshoe-shaped
auditorium taken, and a video relay besides, beaming his
lecture to all Papua and half of Indonesia. Schwartz
stands on the dais like a demigod under a brilliant noglare spotlight. Despite his earlier weariness, he is in
good form now, gestures broad and forceful, eyes
commanding, voice deep and resonant, words flowing
freely. “Only one planet,” he says, “one small and
crowded planet, on which all cultures converge to a drab
and depressing sameness. How sad that is! How tiny we
make ourselves, when we make ourselves to resemble one
another!” He flings his arms upward. “Look to the stars,
the unattainable stars! Imagine, if you can, the millions of
worlds that orbit those blazing suns beyond the night’s
darkness! Speculate with me on other peoples, other
ways, other gods. Beings of every imaginable form, alien
in appearance but not grotesque, not hideous, for all life is
beautiful—beings that breathe gases strange to us, beings
of immense size, beings of many limbs or of none, beings
to whom death is a divine culmination of existence,
beings who never die, beings who bring forth their young
a thousand at a time, beings who do not reproduce—all
the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe!
“Perhaps on each of those worlds it is as it has
become here. One intelligent species, one culture, the
eternal convergence. But the many worlds together offer a
vast spectrum of variety. And now, share this vision with
me! I see a ship voyaging from star to star, a spaceliner of
the future, and aboard that ship is a sampling of many
species, many cultures, a random scoop out of the
galaxy’s fantastic diversity. That ship is like a little
cosmos, a small world, enclosed, sealed. How exciting to
be aboard it, to encounter in that little compass such
richness of cultural variation! Now our own world was
once like that starship, a little cosmos, bearing with it all
the thousands of Earthborn cultures. Hopi and Eskimo
and Aztec and Kwakiutl and Arapesh and Orokolo and
all the rest. In the course of our voyage we have come to
resemble one another too much, and it has impoverished
the lives of all of us, because—” He falters suddenly. He
feels faint, and grasps the sides of the lectern. “Because
—” The spotlight, he thinks. In my eyes. Not supposed to
glare like that, but it’s blinding. Got to have them move
it. “In the course—the course of our voyage—” What’s
happening? Breaking into a sweat, now. Pain in my chest.
My heart? Wait, slow up, catch your breath. That light in
my eyes—
“Tell me,” Schwartz said earnestly, “what it’s like to
know you’ll have ten successive bodies and live more
than a thousand years.”
“First tell me,” said the Antarean, “what it’s like to
know you’ll live ninety years or less and perish forever.”
Somehow he continues. The pain in his chest grows more
intense, he cannot focus his eyes; he believes he will lose
consciousness at any moment and may even have lost it
already at least once, and yet he continues. Clinging to the
lectern, he outlines the program he developed in The
Mask Beneath the Skin.A rebirth of tribalism without a
revival of ugly nationalism. The quest for a renewed sense
of kinship with the past. A sharp reduction in
nonessential travel, especially tourism. Heavy taxation of
exported artefacts, including films and video shows. An
attempt to create independent cultural units on Earth once
again while maintaining present levels of economic and
political interdependence. Relinquishment of materialistic
technological-industrial values. New searches for
fundamental meanings. An ethnic revival, before it is too
late, among those cultures of mankind that have only
recently shed their traditional folkways. (He repeats and
embellishes this point particularly, for the benefit of the
Papuans before him, the great-grandchildren of
cannibals.)
The discomfort and confusion come and go as he
unreels his themes. He builds and builds, crying out
passionately for an end to the homogenization of Earth,
and gradually the physical symptoms leave him, all but a
faint vertigo. But a different malaise seizes him as he
nears his peroration. His voice becomes, to him, a far-off
quacking, meaningless and foolish. He has said all this a
thousand times, always to great ovations, but who listens?
Who listens? Everything seems hollow tonight,
mechanical, absurd. An ethnic revival? Shall these people
before him revert to their loincloths and their pig roasts?
His starship is a fantasy; his dream of a diverse Earth is
mere silliness. What is, will be. And yet he pushes on
toward his conclusion. He takes his audience back to that
starship, he creates a horde of fanciful beings for them.
He completes the metaphor by sketching the structures of
half a dozen vanished “primitive” cultures of Earth, he
chants the chants of the Navaho, the Gabon Pygmies, the
Ashanti, the Mundugumor. It is over. Cascades of
applause engulf him. He holds his place until members of
the sponsoring committee come to him and help him
down: They have perceived his distress. “It’s nothing,” he
gasps. “The lights—too bright—” Dawn is at his side.
She hands him a drink, something cool. Two of the
sponsors begin to speak of a reception for him in the
Green Room. “Fine,” Schwartz says. “Glad to.” Dawn
murmurs a protest. He shakes her off. “My obligation,”
he tells her. “Meet community leaders. Faculty people.
I’m feeling better now. Honestly.” Swaying, trembling, he
lets them lead him away.
“A Jew,” the Antarean said. “You call yourself a Jew, but
what is this exactly? A clan, a sept, a moiety, a tribe, a
nation, what? Can you explain?”
“You understand what a religion is?”
“Of course.”
“Judaism—Jewishness—it’s one of Earth’s major
religions.”
“You are therefore a priest?”
“Not at all. I don’t even practice Judaism. But my
ancestors did, and therefore I consider myself Jewish,
even though—”
“It is an hereditary religion, then,” the Antarean said,
“that does not require its members to observe its rites?”
“In a sense,” said Schwartz desperately. “More an
hereditary cultural subgroup, actually, evolving out of a
common religious outlook no longer relevant.”
“Ah. And the cultural traits of Jewishness that define
it and separate you from the majority of humankind are
—?”
“Well—” Schwartz hesitated. “There’s a complicated
dietary code, a rite of circumcision for newborn males, a
rite of passage for male adolescents, a language of
scripture, a vernacular language that Jews all around the
world more or less understand, and plenty more,
including a certain intangible sense of clannishness and
certain attitudes, such as a peculiar self-deprecating style
of humor—”
“You observe the dietary code? You understand the
language of scripture?”
“Not exactly,” Schwartz admitted. “In fact I don’t do
anything that’s specifically Jewish except think of myself
as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish
personality modes, which however are not uniquely
Jewish any longer—they can be traced among Italians, for
example, and to some extent among Greeks. I’m speaking
of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of
course. Nowadays—” It was all becoming a terrible
muddle. “Nowadays—”
“It would seem,” said the Antarean, “that you are a
Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers
were Jews, and they—”
“No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he
was Jewish only on his father’s side, but even my
grandfather never observed the customs, and—”
“I think this has grown too confusing,” said the
Antarean. “I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak
instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for
example, may be understood as—”
In the Green Room some eighty or a hundred
distinguished Papuans press toward him, offering
congratulations. “Absolutely right,” they say. “A global
catastrophe.” “Our last chance to save our culture.” Their
skins are chocolate-tinted but their faces betray the
genetic mishmash that is their ancestry: perhaps they call
themselves Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Mafulu,
in the way that he calls himself a Jew, but they have been
liberally larded with chromosomes contributed by
Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Africans, everything. They
dress in International Contemporary. They speak slangy,
lively English. Schwartz feels seasick. “You look dazed,”
Dawn whispers. He smiles bravely. Body like dry bone.
Mind like dead ashes. He is introduced to a tribal
chieftain, tall, gray-haired, who looks and speaks like a
professor, a lawyer, a banker. What, will these people
return to the hills for the ceremony of the yam harvest?
Will newborn girl-children be abandoned, cords uncut,
skins unwashed, if their fathers do not need more girls?
Will boys entering manhood submit to the expensive
services of the initiator who scarifies them with the teeth
of crocodiles? The crocodiles are gone. The shamans have
become stockbrokers.
Suddenly he cannot breathe.
“Get me out of here,” Schwartz mutters hoarsely,
choking.
Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for
him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to
his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a
glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed.
Reviving, he reaches for her.
“You don’t have to,” she says. “You’ve had a rough
day.”
He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly,
fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it
ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a
cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest.
“Bring me my drugs,” he says. He wants siddharthin, but
she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him
something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary
to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before
sleep comes.
He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for
Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok—just
like Port Moresby, only more humid—and he delivers his
speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets
flicker about him carrying him to skyport after skyport,
and the Thais blur and become Japanese, who are
transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who
become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become
Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all
look alike, all look alike.
The Spicans hovered above him, weaving, bobbing,
swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm
and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the
flow of their compassion. If they had had the sort of
musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be
smiling tenderly, he knew.
One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating
device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion.
He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he
could on the amber words flashing quickly across the
screen.
“. . . has come. We shall . . .”
“Again, please,” Schwartz said. “I missed some of
what you were saying.”
“The moment . . . has come. We shall . . . make the
exchange of sacraments now.”
“Sacraments?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course.” Schwartz groped in his
pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug
case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it
forth. “Here,” he said. “Siddharthin, learitonin,
psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick.” The Spicans
selected three small blue siddharthins. “Very good,”
Schwartz said. “The most transcendental of all. And now
—”
The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried
orange fungus the size of Schwartz’s thumbnail.
“It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you.”
“Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?”
“Equivalent. It will give you peace.”
Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking
questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the
fungus and reached for a glass of water.
“Wait!” Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. “What are
you—”
“Too late,” Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed
the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.
The nightmares go on and on. He circles the Earth like the
Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to
skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to
nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him
to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are
contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another,
with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose
new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are
consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and
paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are
standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang
of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems
to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less
authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are
true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either
way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens.
Instantly Dawn’s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent
phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing
sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of
breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a
shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed
him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the
wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the
continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No.
There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace,
where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there,
Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. “Is there
anything I can do?”Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his
head. “Take this,” she says, and gives him some sort of
pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world
has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic
coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! “So long,”
Schwartz says.
Outside the ship the Capellans twist and spin in their
ritual dance as, weightless and without mass, they are
swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the
velocity of light. They move with a grace that is
astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A
dazzling light that emanates from the center of the
universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding,
resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into
brilliant streamers of ultra red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All
the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of
music comes out of the remote distance and, growing
closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles
at the beauty of all he perceives.
Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She—
definitely she,no doubt of it, she—plucks at his arm and
whispers, “Will you go to them?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“So will I. Wherever you go.”
“Now,” Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that
opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship
swings open.
The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says
blissfully, “I never told you my name. My name is
Dawn.”
Together they float through the hatch into space.
The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill,
no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is
surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of
pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an
aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the
huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming
cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous
limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same
in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship,
hanging in space close by him like a vast coppery needle,
and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, “Come,
friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!” And they
come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then
all the rest, the infinite multitude of beings, the travelers
from Fomalhaut and Achernar and Acrux and Aldebaran,
from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and
Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures
spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of
them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining
hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a
great ring of light across space, everyone locked in a
cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.
© 1974 by Agberg, Inc.
Originally published in Stellar 1, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the
Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the
author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty
novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies.
Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside,
Nightwings,and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.
Deep Blood Kettle
Hugh Howey
They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we
don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says
that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the
sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while.
When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry.
He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching
us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust
in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as
dinosaurs.
“You boys watch,” he told me and my brother. “That
rock’ll burn up. It’ll be no more than a flash of light. I’ve
seen a million shooting stars if I’ve seen a dozen.” Pa
stopped rubbing his rifle and traced a big arc in the air
with his oil-stained rag. “She’ll hit the sky and light up
like fireworks, and the worst she’ll do is leave a crater
like that one down in Arizona. Then we’ll show them
suckers how we watch over our land.”
Only Pa don’t use the word “suckers.” Pa uses worse
words for the invaders than he ever did for Mrs. Sandy.
He never calls them aliens. Sometimes he says it’s the
Russians or the Chinese or the Koreans. He believes in
aliens about as much as dinosaurs.
Pa spat in the dirt and asked if I was taking a break or
something. I told him “nossir” and went back to oiling
my gun. He and my brother did the same.
Pa says our land is fertile because of the killin’ we soak it
in. That’s why things grow as tall as they do. The little
critters are killed dead and give their life to the soil.
I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new
crops. When I was a boy, before father let me drive the
John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left
behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he
kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d
kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my
fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.
Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead
stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed
tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at
the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like
that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the
way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We
Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack
and the old stalks and we killed everything in the ground.
That was what made the land ready again.
When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on
top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a
happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to
realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and
watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the
great room. When it was still, the worm went into a
furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole
point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn
would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it.
Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took
him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot
out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up
with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left
behind.
Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in
the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the
sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you
knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on
the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming
straight for us. They had a date and time and everything.
One of them said you could know where it would land,
but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people
panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock
would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa
reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.
He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of
people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been
predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the
world outside still looked pretty much the same.
This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what
they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It
was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On
the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the
rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart
people started acting a little crazy.
First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was
still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, I
talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It
made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs.
Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our
planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot
before she left and the substitute took her place. She was
going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even
sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I
eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those
bad things.
But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what
Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the
scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I
chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with
another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.
Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would
make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same
channels on TV that I watched for news showed new
people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and
argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking
about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to
tell him to shut up so I could hear.
The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like.
All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of
all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us
alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists
had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said.
It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we
could have it for our own.
On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued
real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used
words I’d never heard of before, something more than
“trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other
valuable things were, but some were called rare and
sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out
how something that could kill us one day could be worth
so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only
needed a nudge.
When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough
to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing
tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It
was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving,
but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had
to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clutch all
the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as
sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears
growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the
windows down. But I got to where he would send me to
fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he
taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa
was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it
was still scary as hell.
The first time you drive something so big, you wonder
if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that
went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the
cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were
already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was
terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house
through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we
were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor
were spinning the Earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa
would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and
the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel
jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in
my seat.
But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep.
Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back,
twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to
make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me
along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in
the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was
sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass, but twentyfour feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would
disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the
cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the
soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the
side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like
mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.
“Not too much overlap,” Pa would tell me. The price
of gas had gone way up since First Contact, and too much
overlap meant an extra run for no good reason. And so I
bounced along and put death in the soil. I cut the worms
in half and made things ready for planting. Now and then,
a deer would startle across the loose furrows, legs having
a hard time of it, and white rabbits would dash from the
thrush. The rabbits were the dumbest little things. They
would dart back and forth in front of the tractor—they
could see me coming, but they couldn’t make up their
minds. I would yell and yell at them, but they would just
jitter back and forth until the tractor went over them and
then the plow. Turning in my seat, I always expected a
tuft of white to spit out somewhere, but the soil that
kicked up would just turn a little red.
“That’s where the corn would grow the tallest,” Pa
would say when I told him how dumb the rabbits were.
The blood in the soil was a good thing. That’s when you
knew it was ready.
The cliffs behind our house were a source of constant
play, and they had a funny name. Too Close for Comfort,
they were called. I reckoned kids made up that name, but
it was a real thing. Scientists called it that. Men who were
supposedly smart had come up with it.
When I was a boy too young to drive—before I turned
thirteen—they came from the university and dug in the
dirt at the base of the cliffs that rise up behind our land.
They found so many bones beneath the dirt that they
couldn’t take them all. Steve Harkin and I plotted to
sneak in one night and nab a skull or two, but the men in
the shiny city trucks with no 4X4 put a stop to that by
giving us a skull each. It weren’t as fun without the
danger and flashlights, but we got our skulls.
I remember cradling that great hunk of bone as heavy
as stone and asking one of the university men there why
they were digging there.
“This here was a buffalo jump,” the man told me. He
reminded me of Mrs. Sandy, and he had this clipboard
with all kinds of little squares full of numbers and was
the smartest man I ever spoke to ’cept for my Pa.
“The buffalo used to come over this cliff and smash
into the rocks down here,” he told me and Steve Harkin.
“That’s where these bones came from.”
Steve thought that was pretty cool. We gazed up at the
cliffs that I had known all my life, the ones that delayed
the sunrise in the morning, and I saw them different for
the first time. I asked this man from the university why
buffalo were so dumb.
“Oh, buffalo aren’t dumb,” he claimed. I was about to
argue with him, but then he explained. “Indians used to
chase the buffalo to the edge of the cliff in great herds,”
he said. They tumbled off hundreds at a time and
smashed their legs so they couldn’t walk. While they
squealed and snorted and tried to pick themselves up on
busted bones, the Indians would run in with spears and
jab ’em in the neck.
Steve whistled. I asked the man if that was real.
“Very real,” he said. “The people who used to live
here long before us called it pishkun.”
“Pushkin,” Steve Harkin said. “What does that
mean?”
“It means ‘deep blood kettle,’” the man told us. He
pointed to where the men and women were digging in
these funny squares with ropes and stakes marking
everything off. “You can still see the blood in the soil,” he
said.
I didn’t know if that man from the university was
playing with us or not, but I told him we needed to go.
That skull he’d given me was getting heavier and heavier
the longer he talked.
The people on TV with the little flags and the headphones
reminded me of white rabbits in the plow season. You
could watch ’em go back and forth on the screen.
Everyone wanted the gold and the trillions and trillions
and trillions and all the rare Earth stuff. But nobody
wanted to give up their land. And the invaders insisted on
half. They wanted half or they would take it all.
People on the TV argued about why the aliens would
do something like this, why they would let the rock hit us
and kick up the dirt and make things cold, but I knew. I
reckon I knew better than most. Just the year before, I’d
watched a movie about invaders coming down. They’d
made a different kind of contact. There were fights with
lasers and explosions and our side found a way at the end
to lick them for good.
It was a good movie, but those invaders were dumb. I
tried to picture us Samuels taming our plot of land
something like that. Pa and Riley and me would take to
the soil with guns and shoot the worms one by one. And
the worms would fight back with the rabbits, the deer, the
turtles, and the foxes. And I could imagine them
swarming us and licking us good. They were dumb, but
there was an awful lot of them.
Which was why we used the plow. It was why we
throw the dirt up into the air. We make all things die in
the soil so when we put in our own seed, that’s all the life
there is. And where the ground is reddest, that deep blood
kettle, the corn reaches up so high you think it might
leave us behind. And that’s what the rock will do, plow
us under. It weren’t going to be like that movie at all.
Mrs. Sandy used to say before she left town that the
dust would kick up and blot out the sky if the rock fell,
but she didn’t think we would let that happen. Mrs.
Sandy always thought the best of people. She even liked
my Pa, no matter what he called her. Me, I wished she
would come back from wherever she went. I’d like to
have her sit in the John Deere with me and feel it buck
and buck and chase down those rabbits too dumb to
move. I’d take Mrs. Sandy by the hand and lead her to the
cliffs on the edge of our land and show her the piles of
bones and see what the Indians had done.
But Mrs. Sandy was gone, and nobody went to school
no more. And outside, the spot of light in the sky had
grown so bright that it was like a star in the daytime. The
people on the TV moved like rabbits. They were chased
like buffalo. And you didn’t need to know where to look
no more to see that something bad was coming.
© 2013 Hugh Howey.
Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool,
which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series
of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on
Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The
book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print
from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool’s meteoric
success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment
Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline
Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife
Amber and his dog Bella.
Smoke City
Christopher Barzak
One night, I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, as I
did when I was a child. The words were familiar to my
ear, they matched the voice that formed them, but it was
not until I had opened my eyes to the dark of my room
and my husband’s snoring that I remembered the words
were calling me away from my warm bed and the steady
breathing of my children, both asleep in their own rooms
across the hall. “Because I could not stop for death,” my
mother used to tell me, “he kindly stopped for me.” They
were Dickinson’s words, of course, not my mother’s, but
she said them as if they were hers, and because of that,
they were hers, and because of that, they are now mine,
passed down with every other object my mother gave me
before I left for what I hoped would be a better world.
“Here, take this candy dish.” Her hands pushing the red
knobbed glass into my hands. “Here, take this sweater.”
Her hands folding it, a made thing, pulled together by her
hands, so that I could lift it and lay it on the seat as my
car pulled me away. Her hand lifted into the air above her
cloud of white hair behind me. The smoke of that other
city enveloping her, putting it behind me, trying to put it
behind me, until I had the words in my mouth again, like
a bit, and then the way opened up beneath me, a fissure
through which I slipped, down through the bed sheets, no
matter how I grasped at them, down through the mattress,
down through the floorboards, down, down, down,
through the mud and earth and gravel, leaving my snoring
husband and my steadily breathing children above, in that
better place, until I was floating, once more, along the
swiftly flowing current of the Fourth River.
When I rose up, gasping for air, and blinked the water
from my eyes, I saw the familiar cavern lit by lanterns
that lined the walls, orange fires burning behind smoked
glass. And, not far downstream, his shadow stood along
the water’s edge, a lantern held out over the slug and tow
of the current, waiting, as he was always waiting for me,
there, in that place beneath the three rivers, there in the
Fourth River’s tunnel that leads to Smoke City.
It was time again, I understood, to attend to my
obligations.
History always exacts a price from those who have
climbed out to live in the world above. There is never a
way to fully outrun our beginnings. And here was mine,
and he was mine here. I smiled, happy to see him again,
the sharp bones of his face gold-leafed by the light of his
lantern.
He put out his hand to fish me from the river, and
pulled me up to stand beside him. “It is good to see you
again, wife,” he said, and I wrapped my arms around
him.
“It is good to smell you again, husband,” I said, my
face pressed against his thick chest. They are large down
here, the men of Smoke City. Their labor makes them into
giants.
We walked along the Fourth River’s edge, our hands
linked between us, until we came to the mouth of the
tunnel, where the city tipped into sight below, cupped as
it is within the hands of a valley, strung together by the
many bridges crossing the rivers that wind round its
perimeter. The smoke obscured all but the dark mirrored
glass of city towers, which gleamed by the light of the
mill-fired skies down in the financial district, where the
captains sit around long, polished tables throughout the
hours and commit their business.
It did not take the fumes long to find me, the scent of
the mills and the sweaty, grease-faced laborers, so that
when my husband pulled me toward the carriage at the
top of the Incline Passage, a moment passed in which my
heart flickered like the flame climbing the wick of his
lantern. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch my breath.
Already what nostalgia for home I possessed had begun
to evaporate as I began to remember, to piece together
what I had worked so hard to obscure.
I hesitated at the door of the Incline carriage, looking
back at the cavern opening, where the Fourth River
spilled over the edge, down into the valley, but my
husband placed two fingers on my chin and turned my
face back up to his. “We must go now,” he said, and I
nodded at his eyes like chips of coal, his mustached upper
lip, the sweat on his brow, as if he were working, even
now, as in the mill, among the glowing rolls of steel.
The Incline rattled into gear, and soon we were
creaking down the valley wall, rickety-click, the chains
lowering us to the bottom, slowly, slowly. I watched out
the window as the city grew close and the smoke began to
thicken, holding a hand over my mouth and nose. An
Incline car on the track opposite passed us, taking a man
and a woman up to the Fourth River overlook. She, like
me, peered out her window, a hand covering her mouth
and nose as they ascended the tracks. We stared at each
other, but it was she who first broke our gaze to look up
at the opening to the cavern with great expectations,
almost a panicked smile on her face, teeth gritted, willing
herself upward. She was on her return journey, I could
tell. I had worn that face myself. She had spent a long
year here, and was glad to be leaving.
They are long here, the years in Smoke City, even
though they are finished within the passing of a night.
At the bottom, my husband handed me down from the
Incline car, then up again into our carriage, which was
waiting by the curb, the horses nickering and snorting in
the dark. Then off he sent us, jostling down the cobbled
lane, with one flick of his wrist and a strong word.
Down many wide and narrow streets we rode, some
mud, some brick, some stone, passing through the long
rows of narrow workers’ houses, all lined up and lean like
soldiers, until we arrived at our own, in the Lost
Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow, where Eliza,
the furnace, blocks the view of the river with her black
bulk and her belching smoke. They are all female, always.
They have unassuming names like Jeanette, Edith, Carrie.
All night long, every night, they fill the sky with their
fires.
Outside, on the front stoop of our narrow house, my
children from the last time were waiting, arms folded over
their skinny chests or hanging limply at their sides. When
I stepped down from the carriage onto the street, they ran
down the stairs, their arms thrown wide, the word
“Mother!” spilling from their eager mouths.
They had grown since I’d last seen them. They had
grown so much that none of them had retained the names
I’d given them at birth. Shauna, the youngest, had
become Anis. Alexander was Shoeshine. Paul, the oldest,
said to simply call him Ayu. “Quite lovely,” I said to
Anis. “Very good then,” I told Shoeshine. And to Ayu, I
said nothing, only nodded, showing the respect due an
imagination that had turned so particularly into itself
during my absence. He had a glint in his eyes. He
reminded me of myself a little, willing to cast off anything
we’d been told.
When we went through the door, the scent of boiled
cabbage and potatoes filled the front room. They had
cooked dinner for me, and quite proudly Anis and
Shoeshine took hold of either elbow and led me to the
scratched and corner-worn table, where we sat and shared
their offering, not saying anything when our eyes met one
another’s. It was not from shame, our silence, but from an
understanding that to express too much joy at my
homecoming would be absurd. We knew that soon they
would have no names at all, and I would never again see
them.
We sipped our potato soup and finely chewed our
noodles and cabbage.
Later, after the children had gone to bed, my husband
led me up the creaking stairs to our own room, where we
made love, fitting into one another on the gritty, sootstained sheets. Old friends, always. Afterward, his arms
wrapped around my sweaty stomach, holding me to him
from behind, he said, “I die a little more each time you
are away.”
I did not reply immediately, but stared out the grimy
window at the rooftops across the street. A crow had
perched on the sill of the window opposite, casting about
for the glint of something, anything, in the dark streets
below. It cawed at me, as if it had noticed me staring, and
ruffled its feathers. Finally, without turning to my
husband, I said, “We all die,” and closed my eyes to the
night.
The days in the city of my birth are differentiated from the
nights by small degrees of shade and color. The
streetlamps continue burning during the day, since the
sun cannot reach beyond the smoke that moves through
the valley like a storm that will never abate. So it always
appears to be night, and you can only tell it is day by the
sound of shift whistles and church bells ringing the hours,
announcing when it is time to return to work or to kneel
and pray.
No growing things grew in Smoke City, due to the
lack of sunlight. On no stoops or windowsills did a fern
or a flower add their shapes and colors to the square and
rectangular stone backdrops of the workers’ houses. Only
fine dusty coatings of soot, in which children drew
pictures with the tips of their fingers, and upon which
adults would occasionally scrawl strange messages:
Do Not Believe Anything They Tell You.
Your Rewards Await You In Heaven.
It Is Better That Others Possess What I Need But Do
Not Understand.
I walked my children down the road, past these
cryptic depictions of stick men and women on the sides of
houses and words whose meanings I could not fathom,
until we came to the gates of the furnace Eliza, whose
stacks sent thick plumes of smoke into the air. There,
holding the hands of my two youngest, I knelt down in
the street to meet their faces. “You must do what you are
told,” I instructed them, my heart squeezing even as I said
the words. “You must work very hard, and never be of
trouble to anyone, understand?”
The little ones, Anis and Shoeshine, nodded. They
had all been prepared for this day over the short years of
their lives. But Ayu, my oldest, narrowed his eyes to a
squint and folded his arms over his chest, as if he
understood more than I was saying. Those eyes were
mine looking back at me, calling me a liar. “Do you
understand, Ayu?” I asked him directly, to stop him from
making that look. When he refused to answer, I asked,
“Paul, do you understand me?” and he looked down at his
feet, the head of a flower wilting.
I stood again, took up their small hands again, and
lead them to Eliza’s gates, the top of which was decorated
with a flourish of coiled barbed wire. A small, square
window in the door opened as we stood waiting, and a
man’s eye looked out at us. “Are they ready?” he said.
I nodded.
The window snapped shut, then the gate doors began
to separate, widening as they opened. Inside, we could
see many people working, sparks flying, carts of coal
going back and forth, the rumble of the mill distorting the
voices of the workers. The man who had opened the gate
window came from around the corner to greet us. He was
small, stocky, with oily skin and a round face. He smiled,
but I could not manage to be anything but straight-faced
and stoic. He held his hands out to the little ones, who
went to him, giving him their hands as they’d been
instructed, and my heart filled my mouth, suffocating me,
so that I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands.
“Stupid cow,” the gateman said, and as soon as I took
my hands away to look up, I saw Ayu running away, his
feet kicking up dust behind him. “See what you’ve
done?” Do not look back, I told Ayu with my mind,
hoping he could somehow hear me. Do not look back or
you will be detained here forever.
Then the gates shut with a metallic bang, and my
small ones were gone from me, gone to Eliza.
The first month of my year in the city of my birth passed
slowly, painfully, like the after effects of a night of
drunkenness. For a while I had wondered if Ayu would
return to the house at some point, to gather what few
possessions he had made or acquired over his short
lifetime, but he stayed away, smartly. My husband would
have only taken him back to Eliza if he found him. That is
the way, what is proper, and my husband here was
nothing if not proper.
We made love every night, after he returned from the
mill, his arms heavy around my waist, around my
shoulders. But something had occurred on the day I’d
given up the last ones: My womb had withered, and now
refused to take our love and make something from its
materials.
Still, we tried. Or I should say, my husband tried.
Perhaps that was the reason for my body’s reluctance.
Whenever his breath fell against my neck, or his mouth
on my breasts, I would look out the window and see
Eliza’s fires scouring the sky across the mountaintops,
and what children we may have made, the idea of them,
would burn to cinders.
“You do not love me anymore,” my husband said one
night, in my second month in the city; and though I
wanted to, badly, I could not deny this.
I tried to explain. “It is not you, it is not me, it is this
place,” I told him. “Why don’t you come with me, why
don’t we leave here together?”
“You forget so easily,” my husband said, looking
down into his mug of cold coffee.
“What?” I said. “What do I forget?”
“You have people there, in the place you would take
me.”
I looked down into my own mug and did not nod.
“It is what allows you to forget me, to forget our
children, our life,” said my husband.
“What is?” I asked, looking up again. Rarely did my
husband tell me things about myself.
“Your bad memory,” said my husband. “It is your
blessing.”
If my memory were truly as bad as my husband thought, I
would not have been returned to the city of my birth. He
was incorrect in his judgment. What he should have said
was, Your memory is too strong to accomplish what you
desire, for I would not have been able to dismiss that. It
is true, I wanted nothing more than to eradicate, to be
born into a new world without the shackles of longing,
and the guilt that embitters longing fulfilled.
But he had said his truth, flawed as it was, and
because he had spoken this truth we could no longer look
at each other without it hovering between us, a ghost of
every child we had ever had together, every child I had
taken, as a proper wife and mother, to the gates. They
stared at me for him, and I would turn away to cook,
clean, mend, to keep the walls of the house together.
Another month passed in this way, and then another. I
washed my husband’s clothes each day in a tub of
scalding water. The skin on my hands began to redden,
then to peel away. I began to avoid mirrors. My hair had
gone lank and hung about my face like coils of old rope,
no matter how I tried to arrange it. I could no longer see
my own pupils, for there was no white left in the corners.
My eyes had turned dark with coal dust and smoke.
One day a knock at the front door pulled me away
from the dinner I was making for my husband’s return
from another sixteen-hour shift. When I opened the door,
a man from the mill, a manager I vaguely recognized, was
standing on my stoop. He held a hat against his
protruding stomach, as if he had taken it off to recite a
pledge or a piece of poetry. “Excuse me,” he said, “for
interrupting your day. But I come with sad news.”
Before he could finish, I knew what he would say.
Few reasons exist for a mill manager to visit a worker’s
wife.
“Your husband,” he said, and I could not hear the rest
of his words, only saw the images they carried within
them: my husband, a slab of meat on the floor of the mill,
burned by Eliza. My husband, a slab of meat on the floor
of the mill, dragged away to be replaced by another body,
another man, so that Eliza could continue her labors.
“You will need time to rest, of course,” the manager
said. “I’m sure it is quite a shock, but these things
happen.”
I nodded, dumbly, and stood there, waiting for
something.
“We will be in touch, of course,” said the manager as
he stepped off my stoop back onto the cobbled street.
If I would have had any sense left in me, I would have
done what Ayu had done, I would have run away as fast
as possible, I would have done what I had done before, a
long time ago, when I’d left the first time, with my
mother’s hand raised in the air above her cloud of white
hair, waving behind me.
Instead, I sank down into my husband’s chair in the
front room and wept. For him, for our children, wept
selfishly for myself. What would I do without him? I
could feel him all around me, his big body having pressed
its shape into the armchair, holding me in its embrace.
Within a week, a mass of suitors arranged themselves in
a queue outside my door. They knocked. I answered. One
was always waiting to speak to me, big and hulking like
my husband had been, a little younger in some cases, a
little older in others. Used up men and men in the process
of being used. They wanted me to cook, clean, and make
love to them. I turned them away, all of them. “No thank
you,” I said to each knock, glancing over their shoulders
to see if the line of suitors had shortened. It stretched
down the street and around the corner, no matter how
many men I turned away.
There was a shortage of women, one of the suitors
finally informed me, trying to make his case as a rational
man, to explain himself as suitable for someone like me.
There were many men in need of a good wife.
“I am not a good wife,” I told him. “You must go to
another house of mourning,” I told him. “You must find a
different wife.”
The suitors disappeared then. One by one they began
to walk away from the queue they had formed, and for a
while my front stoop was empty. I went back to sitting in
my husband’s chair, grieving.
My memory was bad, he had told me, but he was
wrong. My memory kept him walking the halls and the
staircase, my memory refused to let go of him completely,
as it had refused to let go each time I left. I die a little
more each time you are away, he had said the first night
of my return to the city. Now he was dead, I thought,
there would be no more dying. Upon realizing this, I
stood up from his chair.
Before I could take a step in any direction of my own
choosing, though, a knock arrived at the front door,
pulling me toward it. How quickly we resume routine,
how quickly we do what is expected: A child cries out,
we run to it; something falls in another room, we turn
corners to see what has fallen; a knock lands upon a door,
we answer.
Outside stood three men, all in dark suits with the
gold chains of pocket watches drooping from their
pockets. They wore top hats, and long waxed mustaches.
They wore round spectacles in thin wire frames. I
recognized them for what they were immediately:
captains of industry. But what could they be doing here, I
wondered, on the front stoop of a widow at a forgettable
address in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction
Hollow.
“Forgive us for intruding,” they said. “We do not
mean to startle you.”
They introduced themselves, each one tipping his hat
as he delivered his name: A.W., H.C., R.B. All captains’
names are initials. It is their badge of honor.
“We understand,” they said, “that you have recently
lost your husband.”
I nodded, slow and stupid.
“And we understand that you have turned away all of
the many suitors who have come requesting your hand in
marriage,” they continued.
I nodded again.
“We are here to inquire as to your plans, madame, for
the future,” they said, and took their pocket watches out
to check the time, to see if the future had arrived yet. “Do
you mean to marry again?” they asked. “Do you plan to
provide us with more children?”
I shook my head this time, and opened my mouth to
ask the purpose of their visit. But before I could form one
word, they tapped at my chest with their white-gloved
hands.
“Now, now,” they said, slipping their watches back
into their pockets. “No need for any of that.”
Then they took hold of my arms and pushed me back
into my house, closing the door behind them.
Within the passing of a night I became sick with their
children; within a week, the front of my housedress began
to tighten; and within a month, I gave birth: three in all.
One by one, their children ripped away from me and grew
to the size of the children I had walked to the gates of
Eliza.
I did not need to feed them. They grew from the
nourishment of my tears and rages. They knew how to
walk and talk instinctively, and began to make bargains
with one another, trading clothes and toys and whole
tracts of land.
Soon their fathers returned to claim them. “Thank you
very much,” said the captains, as they presented each
child with a pocket watch, a pair of white gloves, a top
hat. Then they looked at me. “In return for your troubles,
we have built you a library.”
They swept their arms in wide arcs to the opposite
side of the street. Where once a row of houses stood
shoulder to shoulder, now a three-story library parked its
bulk along the sidewalk. “Where are my neighbors?” I
asked. “Where are my friends?”
“We have moved them to another part of the city,”
said the captains. “Do not worry. We are in the midst of
building them their own library at this very moment. We
do not take, you see, without giving back.”
Then they clapped their hands and curled their index
fingers over and over, motioning for their top-hatted,
white-gloved children to follow, checking the time on
their new pocket watches as they walked toward the
financial district.
A dark rumor soon began to circulate throughout the back
rooms in pubs and in the common rooms of the libraries
of Smoke City. The captains’ children were growing
faster than their fathers could manage, it was said. The
captains themselves, it was said, were having difficulties
with their wives, who remained in their stone mansions
on top of the mountains ringing the city, above the strata
of smoke. One wife had committed suicide and another
had snuck out of her mansion in the middle of the night,
grew wings, and flew across the ocean to her home
country, where her captain had found her many years ago
sitting by a river, strumming a stringed instrument and
singing a ballad of lost love. Those of us who lived below
their homes above the point where the wind blew smoke
away from the captains’ houses had never seen these
women, but we knew they were aching with beauty.
I could see it all now, what lay behind that terrible
evening, and the plans the captains’ children had been
making as they’d left with their fathers, opening the backs
of their pocket watches to examine the gears clicking
inside, taking them out to hold up to the non-existent
light.
Indeed, the future spread out before me, a horizon
appearing where the captains’ sons were building
machines out of the gears of their pocket watches, and
more men lumbered away from the mills every day to sit
on porches and frustrate their wives who did not know
how to take care of them while they were in their
presence.
A future will always reveal itself, even in places like
Smoke City.
But smoke nor soot nor the teeth of gears as they
turned what arms once turned, as they ground time to
chafe and splinters, could not provide the future I desired.
I had seen something else—a long time ago, it seemed
now, or a long time to come—and though it came with
the price of unshakable memory, I began the journey that
would return me to it.
Through the streets I trudged to the Incline platform,
where I waited for my car wearing nothing but my worn-
out housedress, my old shoes covered in mud and the
stinking feces of horses. No one looked at me. I was not
unnatural.
When the car arrived, I climbed in. And when the car
began to lift, rickety-click, I breathed a small sigh. This
time, though, as I turned to peer out the back window, my
mother was not there, waving her hand in the air. Only
the city. Only the city and its rooftops spread out behind
me. This time, I was leaving without the cobwebs of the
past clinging to me.
On the way up, a car went by in the opposite
direction, carrying a woman with her man inside it. I
stared at her for a moment, staring at me through her
window, a frightened look on her face, before I broke our
gaze to look up at the mouth of the Fourth River’s cavern,
and the water spilling from it.
When the car reached the top, I exited to wander
through the lantern-lit cavern, the river beside me, until
the walls were bare and no lanterns lit the way any
longer, and the roar of the river was in my ears and the
dark of the cave filled my eyes.
At some point, I felt the chill of rising water surround
me. It trickled over my toes at first, then lifted me off my
feet. I began to swim upward, pulling my arms through
the current, kicking my legs furiously. Up and up and up I
swam, until I opened my eyes to sunlight, blue skies that
hurt to look at, yellow bridges, vast hills of green, and
somewhere on the other side of this city my husband in
this place would be waking up to find I had left him in
the middle of the night again. He would wake the
children next, the children I would never give over, and
together they would walk to the place where I found
myself surfacing. They have come across me here before.
My husband will take my hand, say, “Early riser,” and I
would bring his hand to my lips to kiss it.
I gasped, taking the blue air into my lungs, the light
into my eyes. The city, the city of my refuge, spread out
before me, the rivers on either side of me spangled with
light, a fountain spraying into the air, the towers of
downtown gleaming. The smoke of that other city was
gone now, the fires in that other sky were nowhere on this
horizon. The smoke and the fires were in some other
world, and I found that I could only weep now, selfishly
grateful that it was no longer mine.
© 2011 Christopher Barzak.
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning
novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without
Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction
has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction,
Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New
Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. He grew up in
rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of
Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside
of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His most recent book is Birds
and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories. Forthcoming is
Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. Currently he
teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown
State University.
The Visited
Anaea Lay
“Manuel Black is dead. Long live Manuel Black.”
—Headline of the New York Times obituary
“Are you crazy? You may as well ask me to write a
eulogy for God.”
—Me, when my editor assigned me this article
I was in love with Manuel Black from the moment I first
heard “A Fragment, A Scar” at Penny Carson’s summer
pool party my freshman year of high school and my
devotion never wavered. Now that he’s gone everybody
will say that, but they’re lying. By the end of sophomore
year he’d disappeared, swallowed by a pit of depression
and obscurity. That would have been the last we heard
from him if not for the Visitation. Those were my private
years with Black, the years of “Fragrant Like Stars” and
“Eternity and I, We Miss You.” This is some of his best
work, raw and broken, simple but fierce, and genuine.
The seeds of what would emerge in the post-Visitation
years are all there, but they’re missing the bleak optimism
that suffuses his later work.
Black was born during the hour of the wolf on October
31st, 1987, to Maria Marquez and Robert Black. He was
their first child after years of trying, a painful pregnancy,
and two days of labor. Robert was so overjoyed when he
heard about the birth of his son that he kissed the doctor.
At 4:08AM, Robert held his son for the first time. He
danced around the room, singing so loudly the entire
maternity ward heard him. Reports of what he was
singing conflict, but everybody agrees that he did. Then,
at 4:17AM, baby Manuel still in his arms, Robert
collapsed, dead. He’d always suffered from congenital
heart problems, and the stress of the extended labor on
top of a difficult pregnancy was too much for him.
So it was that Manuel carried a double-legacy from
his first hour of life: a scar above his right eyebrow from
hitting a table edge when Robert dropped him, and the
conviction that by coming into the world, he’d slain his
father.
—The Visited, Tanya Limth
The next time you’re wasting time at work, fire up one of
the videos of Black from the Scarified tour. He was just
twenty, a college drop-out who’d accidentally become
famous when his video for “A Fragment, A Scar” went
viral. He’s visibly uncomfortable on stage, his signature
curls falling into his face, hiding him from the audience.
It’s such a cliché of the stage-frightened musical genius,
yet on Black it communicates a vulnerability that only
grew with his confidence. Scarified Black was lost,
overwhelmed, destined to seize our hearts and fade.
When you’re done with that, plug in “Manuel Black,”
“The Ingress Lounge,” and “Loneliness of Forever” and
start watching videos. They’re from his lost years, the preVisitation Black. It’s still him, but now he’s angry. He
hasn’t found his Morrisonian black leather pants yet, but
he’s not afraid of the audience anymore. Curls fly around
his face as he stares them down, challenging them to
answer the questions he raises with his lyrics, to justify
the world in the face of his seething despair and
melancholy. Critics of the time wrote the music off as
angst-ridden wankery. Audiences found it unpalatably
depressing and turned instead to catchy dance pop. Listen
to it now and you’ll realize his melancholy was a
foreshadowing of the post-Visitation malaise waiting for
all of us, that his anger was founded in an optimistic
belief that things could be different if we’d just bother to
acknowledge they ought to be.
I took a break from college after my sophomore year.
At the time I thought I was dropping out forever. This
was just a few months after the first Visitation, and I had
decided that I needed to do something different. I wasn’t
the only one—people were dropping out, changing jobs
and giving up at alarming rates. My parents were fairly
understanding, even when I told them that my plan was to
tramp across the country following a rock star. Lots of
parents were understanding of lots of things in the months
following the Visitation. The rest were too busy doing
crazy things of their own.
What’s it like to meet somebody you’ve loved from a
distance for years? Somebody you’d loved through
obscurity only to have them break into popularity in the
wake of the biggest communal trauma in the history of
man? It’s nerves and sweating and making an ass of
yourself in shoes you can’t walk in. It’s deciding to chuck
out the shoes and stalk him back stage, then getting
tongue-tied when he looks at you, until you blurt out, “I
know exactly what you mean, in ‘Eternity and I.’” It’s
proudly tweeting “Manuel Black stole my panties,”
before remembering that your mother joined Twitter three
months ago—her post-Visitation act-of-crazy.
We may never understand exactly what the Visitation
was. Reports conflict, and there are as many reports as
people who were alive at the time. What we do know is
that at 10AM, GMT on October 31st, 2013, everybody on
the planet had a vision. Some claim to have seen a man,
others a woman. Most reports claim the figure they saw
was unnaturally beautiful. They also claim to have sensed
an intense longing. This report attempts to outline,
categorize, and analyze the common themes across the
corpus of available reports.
—The Visitation Commission Analysis
I saw them both. They were death, two-faced and
beautiful. They wanted me. Oh god, they wanted me and I
couldn’t bear it. I ran. I don’t even know how but I ran
and they let me go.
I wish they hadn’t.
—The Unpublished Journals of Manuel Black
It was 3AM in L.A., where Black was crashing in a
flophouse, when the Visitation happened. He immediately
bent over his journals. By noon he’d barged into a
friend’s home and commandeered his home studio. “The
Faces, the Mark” was on the internet before the East
Coast was heading home from work. It didn’t just go
viral. Nearly every site hosting it went down under the
traffic. In those few hours, Manuel Black had processed
the trauma of being seized by something terribly,
unfathomably beautiful, and being discarded. Our
longing, our sense of disorientation, loss, our confusion
around all of it, he had it there in a four-minute track. The
technical elements of the song are massively complex,
harmonies playing off each other and building, carrying
the listener from whoever they were, through the
revelation, and into what we were going to be after.
Listening to that song made it feel like the world made
sense, like we knew how to go forward from there. Just as
long as we were listening to it. So we listened. On repeat.
And we nearly brought down the internet.
We were all touched and disturbed by the Visitation,
but none more so than Black. He’d found something of
himself in the experience—and lost something. Never
again would you hear his anger, his disappointed quest to
change things. The world simply was, and he was
powerless to change it. Instead, he explained it, became
its prophet, its guide. The music he released in the weeks
and months following the Visitation charted our course
back to a sense of normalcy, a concept of our place in the
universe. We couldn’t go back—there is no going back
from facing your cosmic irrelevance—and we couldn’t
have gone forward without him. In those weeks we were
all in love with Manuel Black.
Did he love us back?
I stayed with the Visitation tour from its late May
opening night at the Ingress Lounge in L.A. until their
Boston stop in mid-October of the following year. I still
can’t single out individual incidents from that time. I
lived it as one long stretch, from the moment I confessed
my adoration and he didn’t laugh until a shattering phone
call from my dad brought me home. There are no pieces
there. It doesn’t subdivide into anecdotes. That tour
simply was, and it was marvelous and intense and
ecstatic. I’ve talked to other people who traveled with
Black, not just during the Visitation tour, but before as
well. We all had the same experience. Spending time with
Manual Black was living inside the Visitation, dwelling
in 30 seconds that stretch on for eternity, skimming
across months that pass in a moment. If we’d died on tour
with him, the moment we joined would have been the last
of our lives, one long, succulent, final moment. We all
hate the people who were with him in New Orleans a
little bit.
Kitman: You’re an international icon, your concerts sell
out and overflow, people adore you. Is it enough?
Black: Enough what?
Kitman: Enough for you. Do you have everything you
want?
Black: No.
Kitman: What’s left?
Black: You should never get everything you want.
Not until your very last moment. Then, right as you’re
leaving, then it’s okay. But if you have it before then, why
would you ever go on? You’re just going to lose it.
Kitman: What is it that you still want?
Black: Something I ran from.
—Interview with Beth Kitman, Interior Examiner
From Boston, the Visitation tour veered South, landing in
New Orleans. Black insisted on playing venues small
enough to feel intimate, which meant that there were
never enough tickets for his performances. That was why
he started the live streams of his concerts, and the New
Orleans gig was the biggest stream of the tour. We all
waited while the opening bands fell behind schedule,
delaying Black’s entrance more and more as the evening
wore on. By the time the lights went up on Black at
midnight, nearly a third of the adult populations of the
U.S. was watching the stream. In the two days since his
death, the video of the concert has been viewed over 100
million times. “Black’s New Orleans gig” is the Star
Wars of our generation: Everybody saw it; some people
watched it on repeat, letting it imprint itself on their
bones.
Where were you when the stream cut out?
The second Visitation came at 8AM GMT, October
31st, 2015, two hours shy of the two-year anniversary of
the first Visitation. There’s been lots of analysis to figure
out why the people who saw it the second time did, what
they had in common. Scientists and analysts and
government cranks have spent millions combing through
the data, and their explanation isn’t any better than the
one we all knew instinctively right when it happened: It
was after Manuel Black.
I was watching the stream on my cell phone while
sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a soul-crushing
hospital room, waiting for my mother to die of pancreatic
cancer and an unwillingness to do anything about it. It
was so different to see the show but not be there, to hear
the music over a small, tinny speaker instead of feeling it
in my sternum and the bottoms of my feet. I was crying
before the stream cut out, lonely and alone, desperate to
let Manuel Black carry me through this transition and into
anything else.
The photos from when the authorities first arrived on
the scene weren’t released for two years, so the staged
photos of the event have become our canon. We know
that Manuel Black stood on the stage, shirtless in his
leather pants, his curls blowing in an ethereal breeze
while his hands were turned up in supplication and he
stared down the Visitation with mournful, hungry eyes.
We know he was bathed in hard shadows and that his
scar stood out more than it ever had before, that a black
pendant glowed on his bare chest. We know he was
gorgeous and impervious and innocent.
The sole survivor was a Hispanic male of approximately
thirty years, 5’10”, black medium length hair. We found
the subject prone on the stage in a state of extreme
distress. He was naked except for a black pendant on a
silver chain worn around his neck. Subject clutched the
pendant and muttered unintelligibly. When officers
attempted to engage subject, he withdrew. “You don’t
understand,” he screamed. “I love them. I should have
gone the first time.” Then he collapsed. At that point,
paramedics on the scene took charge of the subject. At no
point did he indicate awareness of the bodies in the room.
—Police Report from Investigation of the “New
Orleans Gig”
We waited for Black to release a new track, to carry us
through this new iteration of the crisis. But nothing came.
Nobody heard from him for two months. “The Faces, The
Mark” surged back to popularity, but it wasn’t the same.
The second Visitation didn’t hurt us the way the first had.
Or it hurt us differently.
I didn’t see anything. Had I been rejected? I couldn’t
be sure and the doubt niggled at me. Did the people who
had seen something feel like they’d failed somehow, too?
I never asked anybody. None of us ever asked. We
muddled our way through our post-Visitation lives
without Black’s guidance.
That was as it should be.
Black never toured again, and only made one more
public appearance, but he released tracks, and photos, and
videos. He kept interpreting the world for us, kept telling
us how to cope, kept paving our way through each day.
My favorite track from this period is “The Sacred
Knight.” It’s a ballad—the instrumentation much simpler
than in his more popular work—and a sublime
interpretation of Lancelot as a hero torn between his
devotion to a world shaped by chivalry, and his love, not
just for Guinevere, but Arthur as well. The royal couple
are the center around which Lancelot’s world rotates, so
his devotion to one feeds his dedication to the other. He’s
reflecting on that while debating whether he should go
into the bedchamber and declare his affection, or continue
to—honorably—stand guard outside. He tries to draw
strength and guidance from a token Guinevere gave him
the last time he struggled, but it tortures him with silence.
The song ends before he makes a decision, leaving us
with a bitter ambiguity. We know how the story ends, yet
the song is so compelling we genuinely wonder. What
does one do, torn between love of a thing and worship of
the world it enables?
After four years of living alone in his Colorado ranch,
Black made his last appearance two weeks ago by
showing up in New York and giving an impromptu
concert in Central Park. He hadn’t filed for permits or
hired security—it was a public safety disaster waiting to
happen. Given that everybody who attended his last
public concert died during it, you’d think people would
have stayed away. But they didn’t. The internet is full of
videos showing police joining the crowd, hanging out and
enjoying the music with everybody else when they should
have shut it down.
And videos of Black? Maybe this is nostalgia, or
wishful thinking, but he looks happy. He’s almost the
twenty-year-old Black again, youthful and stunned to be
popular, except that the confidence he learned over time is
still there—and the leather pants. He’s having fun, the
audience is having fun, and for two weeks we thought
that maybe we’d turned a page, that we’d get to see Black
again.
Manuel Black was found dead in his home early in
the morning of October 31st, 2019. He was slumped over
his journal, presumably because he’d been writing in it
when he died. His estate released what he wrote. “It’s
time to sit still, time to surrender, time to accept. This is
the moment, and I refuse to lose anything. My loves,
they’re coming again, and I am ready.”
I stretched out to forever
Hoping to find a trickle
A trace
A fragment of you
You tore a rent in the world
A scar, a mar, a wound
Waiting
Maybe you’ll hear me
Return to us, lover
We miss you
—Excerpted with Permission from “Eternity and I,
We Miss You.”
Lyrics by Manuel Black.
© 2013 Anaea Lay.
Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she sells real estate under a
different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, and plots to
take over the world. The rumors that she never sleeps are not true. She has
no comment on the rumors about the disconcerting noises emanating from
her basement. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Apex,
Strange Horizons, Penumbra,and Shock Totem. Find her online at
anaealay.com.
A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain
Karin Tidbeck
On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man
is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up
the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious,
counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket:
one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing
a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea
is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she
arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps.
Eventually the footsteps arrive at the top, and stop.
The man who has appeared on the roof is dressed in
khakis and worn boots. Dark locks tumble down the left
side of his face, which is beautiful in that ruddy way that
belongs to adolescence.
Vivi looks up, startled. “Who are you?”
“I should ask you the same.” The man’s barely
winded. “You’re trespassing. We’ve claimed this place.”
“I don’t understand,” says Vivi. “Who are you? And
who are ‘we’?”
“Exploratory actors, of course.” He makes a mock
bow. “We’re the Documentary Theatre Troupe. And you,
as I said, are trespassing on our territory. I must ask you
to come with me.”
Vivi follows him down the stairs, down the beach,
and into a lush forest where the Documentary Theatre
Troupe have made camp and eagerly greet their new
audience.
The play is called The Tragedy of King
Vallonius.Contrary to the title’s promise, the story is
about a girl named Rosella, famed for her beauty and
especially her lovely head of hair, so striking that she
must wear a headscarf outside lest she attract unwanted
attention. One day Rosella forgets to put her scarf on and
goes for a walk with her head uncovered. A pedestrian
passing by on the other side of the street sees her bright
red hair and runs into a lamppost. The shopping bag he
was carrying spills its contents in the street: vegetables, a
bottle of milk, and a packet of soft butter. A man riding
by on his bicycle slips in the patch of butter and falls
over, cracking his head open on the stones. And this is
where the Tragedy of King Vallonius comes in. The man
on the bicycle was in fact the beloved monarch who liked
to disguise himself as a commoner to see how his
subjects were faring. Now that the king is dead, the
country is plunged into a war with its neighboring nation.
Rosella, in terror, shaves her head and never leaves her
home again.
When the play is done, the troupe lines up and bows
for applause. They look bewildered when Vivi doesn’t
clap her hands.
“What did we do wrong?” says the Pedestrian.
“Nothing,” says Vivi. “I just don’t like it. Maybe the
setting is wrong.”
“How about winter?” says Rosella, pulling off her
skin-coloured rubber cap, letting her luxurious hair spill
out.
Vivi wrinkles her nose. “I don’t like winter. And I
don’t like Rosella. Also this would never happen in real
life.”
“It would,” says the dead king from the floor, twirling
his thick grey moustache. “This is based on real events.
King Vallonius I died just this way, and that is how the
kingdom of Pavalona fell to the Fedrans. We only enact
stories that are true.”
“Absolutely, one hundred percent true,” Rosella
agrees.
“There was never a king named Vallonius,” says
Vivi.
“Of course there was,” replies the Pedestrian. “But
not in your world.”
Apprentice hates playing Vivi, the sniveling girl from a
boring dayworld that “encounters” strangeness and
through that strangeness tells the story of a “documentary
theatre troupe.” There are too many meta levels, too much
self-referencing. Why would you set up a play about
setting up a play? And the casting is always the same.
Apprentice never gets to play the actor who does Rosella,
or King Vallonius, or the Pedestrian; she has to be boring
old Vivi, and Vivi’s grey tedium is sinking into her
bones.
“You have to feel her to play her,” says Director, the
third time she interrupts the play to correct Vivi. “Let her
emotions bleed into yours.”
“She doesn’t have any,” Apprentice replies. “She’s a
protagonist. She’s an empty vessel waiting to be filled by
the audience.”
“That,” Director replies, “is what you read in some
book. Now go back to your seat, be Vivi, watch the play.
Do whatever Vivi would do.”
“She’d do exactly what I’m doing,” says Apprentice.
“She’d be yawning and not liking it.”
“But only in the beginning,” says Director, “and you
know it. She’ll become dazzled and intrigued by the
strangeness of it all.”
“All right, all right. But I want to play someone else
after this.”
“We’ll see,” says Director, and steps onto the stage,
slipping back into the actor who plays Rosella.
Apprentice returns to her seat and to Vivi. It’s such a
tedious, washed-out mind.
Vivi claps, mesmerized. The actors take her up onto the
stage and put a red wig on her, almost as red as the one
the other actress wears.
“You are now Rosella,” the old Rosella intones, “and
this is what happened inside the Pedestrian’s head.”
The Pedestrian steps forward and touches Vivi’s—no,
Rosella’s—breast. Rosella is less experienced than Vivi;
Vivi frowns at her terror of this other man grasping at her
body, but she must play along. Rosella’s fear and disgust
bleeds into her, mingling with the unbearable excitement
that comes from weeks of no sex, no touching. Vivi wants
it. Rosella does not. Rosella screams, a short, highpitched yelp as the Pedestrian starts tearing at her clothes.
It is what he must do, as the Pedestrian, and Rosella must
squeal and weep and eventually succumb to the desire his
rough hands awaken in her, because deep down every
woman hides a dream of being ravished by strange men.
King Vallonius, still dead in a pool of his own blood
and brains, leers from the cobblestones. They chant in
unison as Rosella passes through the stages of fear, terror,
despair, surrender, and ecstasy. She rises up, naked and
bleeding, a complete woman. The others clap their hands
and cheer.
Vivi takes her wig off and thanks the Pedestrian, who
is now just the actor shyly hunched over his own naked
form.
“Now that was a good play,” says Vivi. “Well done! I
feel refreshed.” She puts her pajamas back on.
“Excellent,” says the King, and sits up. “Let us have
lunch and then push our stage out of Pavalona and to
another place.”
“The Arctic?” asks the Pedestrian hopefully.
“I was rather hoping the Cyclades,” says Rosella.
“You think too small.” The King rips off his
moustache. “But do let’s have lunch first.”
Everyone laughs. The Pedestrian claps his hands, and
they all fall silent. As one, they turn outward, take each
others’ hands, and make a slow bow. The trees respond
with a compact silence.
“You have been watching Vivi and the Documentary
Theatre Troupe!” Rosella bellows at the trees. “I present
to you, in order of appearance: Apprentice, as Vivi!”
Apprentice takes a step forward and curtseys,
pinching her pajama legs as if they were a skirt.
“Journeyman, as The Mysterious Guide and the
Pedestrian!”
Journeyman—who, unlike the actor in the play, is
unbothered by his nudity—makes an elegant court bow.
“The Eccentric Owner and the King, played by our
beloved Nestor!”
Nestor hops forward, grace belying his aged face.
“And finally,” Rosella steps forward, “Nameless
Actress and Rosella, played by myself. I am Director, and
I hope you have enjoyed our show this evening, whoever
you are and wherever you may be.”
They bow again. The trees whisper.
Apprentice goes to bed with a stomachache. Vivi’s
character clings to her like grime. All Vivi wants is
another rough fuck from that Pedestrian. She’s such a
nasty cluster of control fantasies and boredom.
“Is anyone even watching?” Apprentice asks as they
lie in their sleeping bags.
“Of course,” says Nestor. He scratches his upper lip
with a dry noise. The King’s moustache gives him a rash.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, I hear them sometimes, rustling their
confectionery bags.”
Apprentice peers out into the darkness, the trees, the
pinprick stars between their branches.
The next day, they are at the bottom of the sea. Director
has decided on a straightforward play: The Prince and the
Abyssal Queen. Journeyman is the Prince of Yr, and
Director the Queen of the Abyssal Plain; Apprentice is
The Sly Fish and Nestor the God of the Abyss.
The play begins as the fish has lured the fair Prince
into an enchanted boat, which dives down into the ocean
depths, the Sly Fish gleefully pulling it along on a string.
The Prince is distraught, of course: He’s been abducted,
he’s afraid of water and the dark. Three little anglerfish
keep pace with the boat, lighting it with their lanterns.
One of the smaller anglerfish tries to attach itself to the
biggest one. It must be mating season.
The Prince reaches the bottom, treads onto the
Abyssal Plain, and becomes the Queen’s consort. He’s
snared by her spells and stays there for a year before the
spell is broken. He begs the Sly Fish to help him flee to
the surface; the fish agrees, in exchange for the Prince’s
promise of the first living thing he loves. In a very
striking scene, the Queen appeals to the God of the Abyss
for aid, and he grants her the Harp of the Deep. The
Queen sits on her throne, playing her harp to lure the
Prince back.
Of course, there are twists. Quickly rising to the
surface, the Prince’s ears are so damaged by the pressure
changes that he is rendered deaf. He returns to the
kingdom of Yr, where he enters into an arranged and
unhappy marriage, but has a son he loves dearly. Over the
years, he forgets about his promise to the Sly Fish, and
one day brings his family to the beach. When the boy
takes his first steps into the ocean, the Sly Fish pulls him
under. But as soon as the boy’s head comes under the
surface, the Harp of the Deep claims him; it’s in his blood
to return to the Abyssal Plain. Thus the Sly Fish loses as
it always must, and the Queen receives something but not
what she asked for, and the Prince of Yr pays for his
idiocy in blood.
They make camp under the boat, which is much more
roomy when turned upside down. Two of the anglerfish
have disappeared off to somewhere, leaving the third one
to float alone under the ceiling. Director and Journeyman
embrace in the fore, both moved to tears by the story’s
unbearably sad conclusion. Nestor is sound asleep at the
aft, chin reduced to a rashy mess from the ocean god’s
beard. Apprentice lies in the middle, still in her fish
costume, listlessly flopping her ventral fins. The Sly
Fish’s dreams of love, just a little love, insist on crowding
her thoughts. It’s the loneliest creature in the ocean. She
eventually falls asleep, lulled by the sound of blood
rushing in her ears and the rhythmic rasp of the
anglerfish’s lantern scraping the hull.
Apprentice wakes with flailing arms. Her hand hits
something soft, and Nestor mutters irritably in his sleep.
Disturbed by the motion, silt tickles her arms. It’s crept
up on her while she slept. In the pale light of the
anglerfish’s lantern, everyone else seems to be asleep.
Apprentice is wide awake. She gently catches the
anglerfish in her hand and crawls out from under the
upended boat.
The water outside is crushingly cold, pressing down
with the weight of the world. Outside of the tiny sphere of
light the weakly struggling anglerfish gives off, darkness
is absolute. Apprentice slowly steps out onto the abyssal
plain, back bent under kilometers of sea. She can just
about see her own feet shuffling through the silt,
sometimes disturbing the odd object: a Roman coin, a
blackened silver fork. Blind and transparent fish appear in
the gloom. Some of them follow, the wanderers between
the depths, those who still have eyes; they flash arcane
patterns at her in fluorescent blue and green. In the utter
silence, Apprentice thinks she hears the sound of flutes
far away, a discordant piping.
Eventually something winks in the distance, like a
star, or another swinging lantern. Apprentice strides
toward it.
It’s a bathyscaphe, round like a fruit, with a porthole out
of which spills a warm yellow light. The winking light
comes from a small headlight at the top. There’s a face in
the porthole that doesn’t belong to anyone in the
company. It’s a stranger. A woman. She motions for
Apprentice to walk around to the other side of the
bathyscaphe, to where a little airlock protrudes from the
sphere. Apprentice turns the wheel, stops inside, closes
the door and watches the water drain out. The inner door
opens, releasing a puff of warm air.
The woman is in her fifties. She’s dressed in
dungarees and a knitted sweater, one of those sweaters
with a pattern that stops at the waist, because the rest is
for tucking inside the dungarees. She’s barefoot.
Apprentice wonders if the pattern belongs to a particular
family.
“Hello,” says the woman and peers at Apprentice. Her
eyes are a little glassy and unfocused.
“Hello,” says Apprentice.
They look at each other in silence.
“You’re dressed like a fish,” the woman remarks.
“I play the Sly Fish.” Apprentice flaps a ventral fin.
The woman nods slowly. “All right. I’m Ada.” She
extends a hand.
Apprentice shakes it. “Apprentice. Are you the
audience?”
“Apprentice what?”
“Just Apprentice.”
“I see. And what are you doing here? It’s the bottom
of the ocean.” Ada tilts her head. “I expect you’re a
hallucination. I must be suffocating already.”
“You’re very pink,” says Apprentice. “People who
suffocate are blue. Anyway I’m here with the troupe. Are
you the audience?”
“Troupe?”
“Yes, the troupe! We’re here!”
Ada shakes her head. “What do you do exactly?”
“We . . .” Apprentice falters. “It’s we who play the
stories.”
“Never heard of you.”
“So you’re not here to watch?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place.” She
extends a hand to caress a cluster of tubes running down
the inside of the wall. “This is the Laika. I thought it was
a fitting name. Small, round, and lonely, you know?” Ada
chuckles to herself. “Anyway, I was taking her for a test
drive. Checking the systems and such. We were going
into the Mariana Trench, eventually. Not the Challenger
Deep, mind. Not yet. Anyway, I knew there was a risk.
Should have known better than to christen her Laika. I’m
Laika, really.”
“Uh,” says Apprentice. “Who’s Laika?”
“She was a dog that . . . oh never mind. The point is,
the cable snapped and so did the oxygen line.” Ada
pauses. “Actually I’m not sure. I think maybe something
chewed on it. It’s gone, anyway. I’m done for.”
“Oh,” says Apprentice absently. She swallows at the
knot that’s suddenly formed in her throat.
“I’m just waiting for the oxygen to run out.” Ada
sighs. “Didn’t expect to meet anyone down here, though.
Nothing like you. So I’m probably hallucinating already. I
should be grateful, I suppose.”
Wet warmth spills down Apprentice’s face.
“Oh, come on,” says Ada. “You don’t have to feel
sorry for me.”
Apprentice wipes her face with her fin, her stupid fish
fin. “I . . .” The word drowns in a sob. She tries again. “I
thought you were here to watch.” She pulls snot back into
her nose. “I keep telling Nestor, what if there’s no one
who’s watching, and he says of course they are, but I was
always unsure, and now that you were here I thought . . .
but you’re not. You’re just here to die.”
Ada’s expression goes from surprise to faint disgust
to a sad smile. She pats Apprentice on the shoulder.
“You know, I’d love to watch a play.”
Apprentice returns to the boat, waking the rest of the
troupe up with her shouts: “We have an audience! We
have an audience! A real one!”
“We always have an audience,” mumbles Nestor.
“Not like this. I promise.”
They walk the boat over to Ada’s bathyscaphe, and
there’s Ada in the window, smiling and waving. Under
the cover of the boat, Director slips into the Queen’s
regalia, Nestor fastens his beard and Journeyman combs
his long hair.
In variation number two of The Prince and the
Abyssal Queen, the Prince regrets his return to the
surface. Deafened from his journey upward, he can hear
nothing but the whisper of the ocean, which fills him with
longing. The daylight is too bright, the air too dry, the
servants too clumsy. One moonlit night, he wades out into
the sea where the Sly Fish comes to fetch him.
“Where is my present?” says the Sly Fish in the silent
language spoken on the ocean floor. “You must keep your
part of our agreement.”
“You will have it soon,” says the Prince.
Of course he has no present for the Fish; he has not
yet fallen in love, but he is trying to buy time, so that the
Fish will at least deliver him to the Abyssal Plain.
The moment his feet touch the silt, the Queen appears.
“I miss the sea,” says the Prince, “but I will not be
your slave. I will stay here as your courtier.”
“Very well,” says the Queen. “I have treated you
unfairly. As compensation, you may stay in my court for a
year.”
As the Prince takes the Queen’s pale hand and looks
into her transparent eyes, he finally realizes the truth. “I
love you,” he says. “You need no spell but your own
self.”
The Sly Fish collapses in horror. Of all the living
things the Prince loved first, it had to be the Queen. And
as the Queen created the Sly Fish out of her own flesh, it
would be like promising the Fish to itself, which is
impossible. The bargain is null and void, and the Fish
once again thwarted. Apprentice lives out the Sly Fish’s
misery in an exquisite dance.
Ada watches through her porthole the whole time. As
the ensemble take their bows, she claps her hands
soundlessly. She is beginning to look a little tired, but
nods with a smile when Director mimes her an offer of
another variation.
When the God of the Abyss has deus ex machinaed, and
the Sly Fish’s devilish attempt at toppling the Queen has
been averted, and the Queen and the Prince live happily
ever after, Ada has slumped forward with her forehead
against the glass. Her broken eyes stare blindly into the
ocean gloom. The Company takes one last bow.
“We had a spectator,” says Apprentice.
“We always have spectators,” says Nestor. “But this
time we had a spectator up close.”
“Can we do it again?” says Journeyman.
Director nods.
They perform all the varieties of the Abyssal Plain stories,
including some where the Sly Fish also gets to live
happily ever after, until they have no more and
Journeyman is so suffused with the Prince’s feelings he
cannot speak his lines and Director must hold him while
he cries. By then most of the anglerfish have left.
“I think it’s time to move on,” states Director.
They bring the bathyscaphe, Apprentice tugging it
along on a string. Ada is such a good and appreciative
audience, and they have many more plays for her to enjoy.
Transporting the bathyscape on land will be a problem for
later.
© 2013 Karin Tidbeck.
Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes in Swedish and English.
Her stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Shimmer, Unstuck Annual, and
the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution. She has published a story
collection and a novel in Swedish; a collection in English, Jagannath, came
out in November 2012. She blogs at karintidbeck.com.
Dinner in Audoghast
Bruce Sterling
“Then one arrives at Audoghast, a large and very
populous city built in a sandy plain. . . . The inhabitants
live in ease and possess great riches. The market is
always crowded; the mob is so huge and the chattering so
loud that you can scarcely hear your own words. . . . The
city contains beautiful buildings and very elegant homes.”
Description of Northern Africa, Abu Ubayd al-Bakri
(1040-1094 A.D.)
Delightful Audoghast! Renowned through the civilized
world, from Cordova to Baghdad, the city spread in
splendor beneath a twilit Saharan sky. The setting sun
threw pink and amber across adobe domes, masonry
mansions, tall, mud-brick mosques, and open plazas thick
with bristling date-palms. The melodious calls of market
vendors mixed with the remote and amiable chuckling of
Saharan hyenas.
Four gentlemen sat on carpets in a tiled and
whitewashed portico, sipping coffee in the evening
breeze. The host was the genial and accomplished slavedealer, Manimenesh. His three guests were Ibn Watunan,
the caravan master; Khayali, the poet and musician; and
Bagayoko, a physician and court assassin.
The home of Manimenesh stood upon the hillside in
the aristocratic quarter, where it gazed down on an open
marketplace and the mud-brick homes of the lowly. The
prevailing breeze swept away the city reek, and brought
from within the mansion the palate-sharpening aromas of
lamb in tarragon and roast partridge in lemons and
eggplant. The four men lounged comfortably around a
low inlaid table, sipping spiced coffee from Chinese cups,
and watching the ebb and flow of market life.
The scene below them encouraged a lofty
philosophical detachment. Manimenesh, who owned no
less than fifteen books, was a well-known patron of
learning. Jewels gleamed on his dark, plump hands,
which lay cozily folded over his paunch. He wore a long
tunic of crushed red velvet, and a gold-threaded skullcap.
Khayali, the young poet, had studied architecture and
verse in the schools of Timbuktu. He lived in the
household of Manimenesh as his poet and praisemaker,
and his sonnets, ghazals, and odes were recited
throughout the city. He propped one elbow against the full
belly of his two-string guimbri guitar of inlaid ebony,
strung with leopard gut.
Ibn Watunan had an eagle’s hooded gaze and hands
calloused by camel reins. He wore an indigo turban and a
long striped djellaba. In thirty years as a sailor and
caravaneer, he had bought and sold Zanzibar ivory,
Sumatran pepper, Ferghana silk, and Cordovan leather.
Now a taste for refined gold had brought him to
Audoghast, for Audoghast’s African bullion was known
throughout Islam as the standard of quality.
Doctor Bagayoko’s ebony skin was ridged with an
initiate’s scars, and his long, clay-smeared hair was
festooned with knobs of chiselled bone. He wore a tunic
of white Egyptian cotton, hung with gris-gris necklaces,
and his baggy sleeves bulged with herbs and charms. He
was a native Audoghastian of the animist persuasion, the
personal physician of the city’s Prince.
Bagayoko’s skill with powders, potions, and unguents
made him an intimate of Death. He often undertook
diplomatic missions to the neighboring Empire of Ghana.
During his last visit there, the anti-Audoghast faction had
conveniently suffered a lethal outbreak of pox.
Between the four men was the air of camaraderie
common to gentlemen and scholars.
They finished the coffee and a slave took the empty
pot away. A second slave, a girl from the kitchen staff,
arrived with a wicker tray loaded with olives, goatcheese, and hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion. At
that moment, a muezzin yodeled the evening call to
prayer.
“Ah,” said Ibn Watunan, hesitating. “Just as we were
getting started.”
“Never mind,” said Manimenesh, helping himself to a
handful of olives. “We’ll pray twice next time.”
“Why was there no noon prayer today?” said
Watunan.
“Our muezzin forgot,” the poet said.
Watunan lifted his shaggy brows. “That seems rather
lax.”
Doctor Bagayoko said, “This is a new muezzin. The
last was more punctual, but, well, he fell ill.” Bagayoko
smiled urbanely and nibbled his cheese.
“We Audoghastians like our new muezzin better,”
said the poet, Khayali. “He’s one of our own, not like that
other fellow, who was from Fez. Our muezzin is sleeping
with a Christian’s wife. It’s very entertaining.”
“You have Christians here?” Watunan said.
“A clan of Ethiopian Copts,” said Manimenesh. “And
a couple of Nestorians.”
“Oh,” said Watunan, relaxing. “For a moment I
thought you meant real feringhee Christians, from
Europe.”
“From where?” Manimenesh was puzzled.
“Very far away,” said Ibn Watunan, smiling. “Ugly
little countries, with no profit.”
“There were empires in Europe once,” said Khayali
knowledgeably. “The Empire of Rome was almost as big
as the modern civilized world.”
Watunan nodded. “I have seen the New Rome, called
Byzantium. They have armored horsemen, like your
neighbors in Ghana. Savage fighters.”
Bagayoko nodded, salting an egg. “Christians eat
children.”
Watunan smiled. “I can assure you that the
Byzantines do no such thing.”
“Really?” said Bagayoko. “Well, our Christians do.”
“That’s just the doctor’s little joke,” said
Manimenesh. “Sometimes strange rumors spread about
us, because we raid our slaves from the Nyam-Nyam
cannibal tribes on the coast. But we watch their diet
closely, I assure you.”
Watunan smiled uncomfortably. “There is always
something new out of Africa. One hears the oddest
stories. Hairy men, for instance.”
“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “You mean gorillas, from
the jungles to the south. I’m sorry to spoil the story for
you, but they are nothing better than beasts.”
“I see,” said Watunan. “That’s a pity.”
“My grandfather owned a gorilla once,” Manimenesh
said. “Even after ten years, it could barely speak Arabic.”
They finished the appetizers. Slaves cleared the table
and brought in a platter of fattened partridges, stuffed
with lemons and eggplants, on a bed of mint and lettuce.
The four diners leaned in closer and dexterously ripped
off legs and wings.
Watunan sucked meat from a drumstick and belched
politely. “Audoghast is famous for its cooks,” he said.
“I’m pleased to see that this legend, at least, is
confirmed.”
“We Audoghastians pride ourselves on the pleasures
of table and bed,” said Manimenesh, pleased. “I have
asked Elfelilet, one of our premiere courtesans, to honor
us with a visit tonight. She will bring her troupe of
dancers.”
Watunan smiled. “That would be splendid. One tires
of boys on the trail. Your women are remarkable. I’ve
noticed that they go without the veil.”
Khayali lifted his voice in song. “When a woman of
Audoghast appears/The girls of Fez bite their lips,/The
dames of Tripoli hide in closets,/And Ghana’s women
hang themselves.”
“We take pride in the exalted status of our women,”
said Manimenesh. “It’s not for nothing that they
command a premium market price!”
In the marketplace, downhill, vendors lit tiny oil
lamps, which cast a flickering glow across the walls of
tents and the watering troughs. A troop of the Prince’s
men, with iron spears, shields, and chainmail, marched
across the plaza to take the night watch at the Eastern
Gate. Slaves with heavy water-jars gossiped beside the
well.
“There’s quite a crowd around one of the stalls,” said
Bagayoko.
“So I see,” said Watunan. “What is it? Some news
that might affect the market?”
Bagayoko sopped up gravy with a wad of mint and
lettuce. “Rumor says there’s a new fortune-teller in town.
New prophets always go through a vogue.”
“Ah yes,” said Khayali, sitting up. “They call him
‘the Sufferer.’ He is said to tell the most outlandish and
entertaining fortunes.”
“I wouldn’t trust any fortune-teller’s market tips,”
said Manimenesh. “If you want to know the market, you
have to know the hearts of the people, and for that you
need a good poet.”
Khayali bowed his head. “Sir,” he said, “live forever.”
It was growing dark. Household slaves arrived with
pottery lamps of sesame oil, which they hung from the
rafters of the portico. Others took the bones of the
partridges and brought in a haunch and head of lamb with
a side-dish of cinnamon tripes.
As a gesture of esteem, the host offered Watunan the
eyeballs, and after three ritual refusals the caravan-master
dug in with relish. “I put great stock in fortune-tellers,
myself,” he said, munching. “They are often privy to
strange secrets. Not the occult kind, but the blabbing of
the superstitious. Slave-girls anxious about some
household scandal, or minor officials worried over
premonitions—inside news from those who consult them.
It can be useful.”
“If that’s the case,” said Manimenesh, “perhaps we
should call him up here.”
“They say he is grotesquely ugly,” said Khayali. “He
is called ‘the Sufferer’ because he is outlandishly afflicted
by disease.”
Bagayoko wiped his chin elegantly on his sleeve.
“Now you begin to interest me!”
“It’s settled, then.” Manimenesh clapped his hands.
“Bring young Sidi, my errand runner!”
Sidi arrived at once, dusting flour from his hands. He
was the cook’s teenage son, a tall young black in a dyed
woollen djellaba. His cheeks were stylishly scarred and
he had bits of brass wire interwoven with his dense black
locks. Manimenesh gave him his orders; Sidi leaped from
the portico, ran downhill through the garden, and
vanished through the gates.
The slave-dealer sighed. “This is one of the problems
of my business. When I bought my cook she was a slim
and lithesome wench, and I enjoyed her freely. Now years
of dedication to her craft have increased her market value
by twenty times, and also made her as fat as a
hippopotamus, though that is beside the point. She has
always claimed that Sidi is my child, and since I don’t
wish to sell her, I must make allowance. I have made him
a freeman; I have spoiled him, I’m afraid. On my death,
my legitimate sons will deal with him cruelly.”
The caravan-master, having caught the implications
of this speech, smiled politely. “Can he ride? Can he
bargain? Can he do sums?”
“Oh,” said Manimenesh with false nonchalance, “he
can manage that newfangled stuff with the zeroes well
enough.”
“You know I am bound for China,” said Watunan. “It
is a hard road that brings either riches or death.”
“He runs the risk in any case,” the slave-dealer said
philosophically. “The riches are Allah’s decision.”
“This is truth,” said the caravan-master. He made a
secret gesture, beneath the table, where the others could
not see. His host returned it, and Sidi was proposed, and
accepted, for the Brotherhood.
With the night’s business over, Manimenesh relaxed,
and broke open the lamb’s steamed skull with a silver
mallet. They spooned out the brains, then attacked the
tripes, which were stuffed with onion, cabbage,
cinnamon, rue, coriander, cloves, ginger, pepper, and
lightly dusted with ambergris. They ran out of mustard
dip and called for more, eating a bit more slowly now, for
they were approaching the limits of human capacity.
They then sat back, pushing away platters of
congealing grease, and enjoying a profound satisfaction
with the state of the world. Down in the marketplace, bats
from an abandoned mosque chased moths around the
vendors’ lanterns.
The poet belched suavely and picked up his twostringed guitar. “Dear God,” he said, “this is a splendid
place. See, caravan-master, how the stars smile down on
our beloved Southwest.” He drew a singing note from the
leopard-gut strings. “I feel at one with Eternity.”
Watunan smiled. “When I find a man like that, I have
to bury him.”
“There speaks the man of business,” the doctor said.
He unobtrusively dusted a tiny pinch of venom on the last
chunk of tripe, and ate it. He accustomed himself to
poison. It was a professional precaution.
From the street beyond the wall, they heard the
approaching jingle of brass rings. The guard at the gate
called out. “The Lady Elfelilet and her escorts, lord!”
“Make them welcome,” said Manimenesh. Slaves
took the platters away, and brought a velvet couch onto
the spacious portico. The diners extended their hands;
slaves scrubbed and towelled them clean.
Elfelilet’s party came forward through the figclustered garden: two escorts with gold-tipped staffs
heavy with jingling brass rings; three dancing-girls,
apprentice courtesans in blue woolen cloaks over gauzy
cotton trousers and embroidered blouses; and four
palanquin bearers, beefy male slaves with oiled torsos
and calloused shoulders. The bearers set the palanquin
down with stifled grunts of relief and opened the cloth-ofgold hangings.
Elfelilet emerged, a tawny-skinned woman, her eyes
dusted in kohl and collyrium, her hennaed hair threaded
with gold wire. Her palms and nails were stained pink;
she wore an embroidered blue cloak over an intricate,
sleeveless vest and ankle-tied silk trousers starched and
polished with myrobolan lacquer. A light freckling of
smallpox scars along one cheek delightfully accented her
broad, moonlike face.
“Elfelilet, my dear,” said Manimenesh, “you are just
in time for dessert.”
Elfelilet stepped gracefully across the tiled floor and
reclined face-first along the velvet couch, where the wellknown loveliness of her posterior could be displayed to its
best advantage. “I thank my friend and patron, the noble
Manimenesh. Live forever! Learned doctor Bagayoko, I
am your servant. Hello, poet.”
“Hello, darling,” said Khayali, smiling with the
natural camaraderie of poets and courtesans. “You are the
moon and your troupe of lovelies are comets across our
vision.”
The host said, “This is our esteemed guest, the
caravan master, Abou Bekr Ahmed Ibn Watunan.”
Watunan, who had been gaping in enraptured
amazement, came to himself with a start. “I am a simple
desert man,” he said. “I haven’t a poet’s gift of words.
But I am your ladyship’s servant.”
Elfelilet smiled and tossed her head; her distended
earlobes clattered with heavy chunks of gold filigree.
“Welcome to Audoghast.”
Dessert arrived. “Well,” said Manimenesh. “Our
earlier dishes were rough and simple fare, but this is
where we shine. Let me tempt you with these djouzinkat
nutcakes. And do sample our honey macaroons—I
believe there’s enough for everyone.”
Everyone, except of course for the slaves, enjoyed the
light and flaky cataif macaroons, liberally dusted with
Kairwan sugar. The nutcakes were simply beyond
compare: painstakingly milled from hand-watered wheat,
lovingly buttered and sugared, and artistically studded
with raisins, dates, and almonds.
“We eat djouzinkat nutcakes during droughts,” the
poet said, “because the angels weep with envy when we
taste them.”
Manimenesh belched heroically and readjusted his
skullcap. “Now,” he said, “we will enjoy a little bit of
grape wine. Just a small tot, mind you, so that the sin of
drinking is a minor one, and we can do penance with the
minimum of alms. After that, our friend the poet will
recite an ode he has composed for the occasion.”
Khayali began to tune his two-string guitar. “I will
also, on demand, extemporize twelve-line ghazals in the
lyric mode, upon suggested topics.”
“And after our digestion has been soothed with
epigrams,” said their host, “we will enjoy the justly
famed dancing of her ladyship’s troupe. After that we will
retire within the mansion and enjoy their other, equally
lauded skills.”
The gate-guard shouted, “Your errand-runner, Lord!
He awaits your pleasure, with the fortune-teller!”
“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “I had forgotten.”
“No matter, sir,” said Watunan, whose imagination
had been fired by the night’s agenda.
Bagayoko spoke up. “Let’s have a look at him. His
ugliness, by contrast, will heighten the beauty of these
women.”
“Which would otherwise be impossible,” said the
poet.
“Very well,” said Manimenesh. “Bring him forward.”
Sidi, the errand boy, came through the garden,
followed with ghastly slowness by the crutch-wielding
fortune-teller.
The man inched into the lamplight like a crippled
insect. His voluminous, dust-gray cloak was stained with
sweat and nameless exudations. His pink eyes were
shrouded with cataracts, and he had lost a foot, and
several fingers, to leprosy. One shoulder was much lower
than the other, suggesting a hunchback, and the stub of
his shin was scarred by the gnawing of canal-worms.
“Prophet’s beard!” said the poet. “He is truly of
surpassing ghastliness!”
Elfelilet wrinkled her nose. “He reeks of pestilence!”
Sidi spoke up. “We came as fast as we could, Lord!”
“Go inside, boy,” said Manimenesh, “soak ten sticks
of cinnamon in a bucket of water, then come back and
throw it over him.”
Sidi left at once.
Watunan stared at the hideous man, who stood,
quivering on one leg, at the edge of the light. “How is it,
man, that you still live?”
“I have turned my sight from this world,” said the
Sufferer. “I turned my sight to God, and He poured
knowledge copiously upon me. I have inherited a
knowledge which no mortal body can support.”
“But God is merciful,” said Watunan. “How can you
claim this to be His doing?”
“If you do not fear God,” said the fortune-teller, “fear
Him after seeing me.” The hideous albino lowered
himself, with arthritic, aching slowness, to the dirt
outside the portico. He spoke again. “You are right,
caravan-master, to think that death would be a mercy to
me. But death comes in its own time, as it will to all of
you.”
Manimenesh cleared his throat. “Can you see our
destinies, then?”
“I see the world,” said the Sufferer. “To see the fate of
one man is to follow a single ant in a hill.”
Sidi reemerged and poured the scented water over the
cripple. The fortune-teller cupped his maimed hands and
drank. “Thank you, boy,” he said. He turned his clouded
eyes on the youth. “Your children will be yellow.”
Sidi laughed, startled. “Yellow? Why?”
“Your wives will be yellow.”
The dancing-girls, who had moved to the far side of
the table, giggled in unison. Bagayoko pulled a gold coin
from within his sleeve. “I will give you this gold dirham
if you will show me your body.”
Elfelilet frowned prettily and blinked her kohlsmeared lashes. “Oh, learned doctor, please spare us.”
“You will see my body, sir, if you have patience,”
said the Sufferer. “As yet, the people of Audoghast laugh
at my prophecies. I am doomed to tell the truth, which is
harsh and cruel, and therefore absurd. As my fame grows,
however, it will reach the ears of your Prince, who will
then order you to remove me as a threat to public order.
You will then sprinkle your favorite poison, powdered asp
venom, into a bowl of chickpea soup I will receive from a
customer. I bear you no grudge for this, as it will be your
civic duty, and will relieve me of pain.”
“What an odd notion,” said Bagayoko, frowning. “I
see no need for the Prince to call on my services. One of
his spearmen could puncture you like a water-skin.”
“By then,” the prophet said, “my occult powers will
have roused so much uneasiness that it will seem best to
take extreme measures.”
“Well,” said Bagayoko, “that’s convenient, if
exceedingly grotesque.”
“Unlike other prophets,” said the Sufferer, “I see the
future not as one might wish it to be, but in all it’s
cataclysmic and blind futility. That is why I have come
here, to your delightful city. My numerous and totally
accurate prophecies will vanish when this city does. This
will spare the world of troublesome conflicts of
predestination and free will.”
“He is a theologian!” the poet said. “A leper
theologian—it’s a shame my professors in Timbuktu
aren’t here to debate him!”
“You prophesy doom for our city?” said Manimenesh.
“Yes. I will be specific. This is the year 406 of the
Prophet’s Hejira, and one thousand and fourteen years
since the birth of Christ. In forty years, a puritan and
fanatical cult of Moslems will arise, known as the
Almoravids. At that time, Audoghast will be an ally of
the Ghana Empire, who are idol-worshippers. Ibn Yasin,
the warrior saint of the Almoravids, will condemn
Audoghast as a nest of pagans. He will set his horde of
desert marauders against the city; they will be enflamed
by righteousness and greed. They will slaughter the men,
and rape and enslave the women. Audoghast will be
sacked, the wells will be poisoned, and cropland will
wither and blow away. In a hundred years, sand dunes
will bury the ruins. In five hundred years, Audoghast will
survive only as a few dozen lines of narrative in the travel
books of Arab scholars.”
Khayali shifted his guitar. “But the libraries of
Timbuktu are full of books on Audoghast, including, if I
may say so, our immortal tradition of poetry.”
“I have not yet mentioned Timbuktu,” said the
prophet, “which will be sacked by Moorish invaders led
by a blond Spanish eunuch. They will feed the books to
goats.”
The company burst into incredulous laughter.
Unperturbed, the prophet said, “The ruin will be so
general, so thorough, and so all-encompassing, that in
future centuries it will be stated, and believed, that West
Africa was always a land of savages.”
“Who in the world could make such a slander?” said
the poet.
“They will be Europeans, who will emerge from their
current squalid decline, and arm themselves with mighty
sciences.”
“What happens then?” said Bagayoko, smiling.
“I can look at those future ages,” said the prophet,
“but I prefer not to do so, as it makes my head hurt.”
“You prophesy, then,” said Manimenesh, “that our
far-famed metropolis, with its towering mosques and
armed militia, will be reduced to utter desolation.”
“Such is the truth, regrettable as it may be. You, and
all you love, will leave no trace in this world, except a few
lines in the writing of strangers.”
“And our city will fall to savage tribesmen?”
The Sufferer said, “No one here will witness the
disaster to come. You will live out your lives, year after
year, enjoying ease and luxury, not because you deserve
it, but simply because of blind fate. In time you will forget
this night; you will forget all I have said, just as the world
will forget you and your city. When Audoghast falls, this
boy Sidi, this son of a slave, will be the only survivor of
this night’s gathering. By then he too will have forgotten
Audoghast, which he has no cause to love. He will be a
rich old merchant in Ch’ang-an, which is a Chinese city
of such fantastic wealth that it could buy ten Audoghasts,
and which will not be sacked and annihilated until a
considerably later date.”
“This is madness,” said Watunan.
Bagayoko twirled a crusted lock of mud-smeared hair
in his supple fingers. “Your gate guard is a husky lad,
friend Manimenesh. What say we have him bash this
storm-crow’s head in, and haul him out to be hyena
food?”
“For that, doctor,” said the Sufferer, “I will tell you
the manner of your death. You will be killed by the
Ghanian royal guard, while attempting to kill the crown
prince by blowing a subtle poison into his anus with a
hollow reed.”
Bagayoko started. “You idiot, there is no crown
prince.”
“He was conceived yesterday.”
Bagayoko turned impatiently to the host. “Let us rid
ourselves of this prodigy!”
Manimenesh nodded sternly. “Sufferer, you have
insulted my guests and my city. You are lucky to leave
my home alive.”
The Sufferer hauled himself with agonizing slowness
to his single foot. “Your boy spoke to me of your
generosity.”
“What! Not one copper for your driveling.”
“Give me one of the gold dirhams from your purse.
Otherwise I shall be forced to continue prophesying, and
in a more intimate vein.”
Manimenesh considered this. “Perhaps it’s best.” He
threw Sidi a coin. “Give this to the madman and escort
him back to his raving-booth.”
They waited in tormented patience as the fortune-
teller creaked and crutched, with painful slowness, into
the darkness.
Manimenesh, brusquely, threw out his red velvet
sleeves and clapped for wine. “Give us a song, Khayali.”
The poet pulled the cowl of his cloak over his head.
“My head rings with an awful silence,” he said. “I see all
waymarks effaced, the joyous pleasances converted into
barren wilderness. Jackals resort here, ghosts frolic, and
demons sport; the gracious halls, and rich boudoirs, that
once shone like the sun, now, overwhelmed by desolation,
seem like the gaping moths of savage beasts!” He looked
at the dancing-girls, his eyes brimming with tears. “I
picture these maidens, lying beneath the dust, or
dispersed to distant parts and far regions, scattered by the
hand of exile, torn to pieces by the fingers of
expatriation.”
Manimenesh smiled on him kindly. “My boy,” he
said, “if others cannot hear your songs, or embrace these
women, or drink this wine, the loss is not ours, but theirs.
Let us, then, enjoy all three, and let those unborn do the
regretting.”
“Your patron is wise,” said Ibn Watunan, patting the
poet on the shoulder. “You see him here, favored by Allah
with every luxury; and you saw that filthy madman,
bedeviled by plague. That lunatic, who pretends to great
wisdom, only croaks of ruin; while our industrious friend
makes the world a better place, by fostering nobility and
learning. Could God forsake a city like this, with all its
charms, to bring about that fool’s disgusting prophecies?”
He lifted his cup to Elfelilet, and drank deeply.
“But delightful Audoghast,” said the poet, weeping.
“All our loveliness, lost to the sands.”
“The world is wide,” said Bagayoko, “and the years
are long. It is not for us to claim immortality, not even if
we are poets. But take comfort, my friend. Even if these
walls and buildings crumble, there will always be a place
like Audoghast, as long as men love profit! The mines are
inexhaustible, and elephants thick as fleas. Mother Africa
will always give us gold and ivory.”
“Always?” said the poet hopefully, dabbing at his
eyes.
“Well, surely there are always slaves,” said
Manimenesh, and smiled, and winked. The others
laughed with him, and there was joy again.
© 1985 by Bruce Sterling.
Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net,
Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids,
and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three
Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the
Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk
anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in
magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies:
The Best of Bruce Sterling.
Author Spotlight: Nina Allan
Moshe Siegel
In your novella, “Bellony,” freelance journalist Terri
Goodall greets the resort town of Deal, noting at once
the complacency permeating the residents and the
inevitable “claustrophobia of stasis” that would
eventually drive them elsewhere. Terri is herself
familiar with this concept, having just quit her job and
boyfriend, both. The reader is given a few details—
displeasure with the scope of her position, in each case
—yet not much more about the “why” of her abrupt
and complete relocation. What do you think was the
ultimate deciding factor behind Terri reshaping her
life in such a bold (and risky) way?
That insidious knowledge that “this”—whatever “this” is
—was not what she wanted, not what she set out for.
Terri has the sense that she has allowed others to shape
her life for her, rather than the other way around. She
feels trapped between two rather dominating people—her
boyfriend and her boss—who both think they know
what’s best for her and are willing to see her forthright
intelligence and creative talent only insofar as they can
use it to enhance their own standing, or as it impacts
directly upon themselves.
It’s a risk and a brave thing to take a leap from the
known into the unknown—but Terri knows it has to be,
and it has to be now, and that the only solution to her
personal problems lies in herself, in her ability to act
according to her own desires, not out of her perceived
idea of what others want, need, or expect from her.
Allis Bennett’s (former) home plays a central role in
this story, to the point of anthropomorphization: It
shares secrets with Terri (feeling “subtly enchanted”
once she becomes less a visitor, more a tenant) and is
moved to restlessness along with Terri as the
journalist uncovers revelations about the missing Allis
Bennett. Is this sense unique to the particulars of
“Bellony,” or do you, as one may suspect from reading
this novella, have an abiding interest in mysterious old
houses?
Abiding interest certainly—in fact I think it would be
better described as a lifelong obsession! I love houses,
both individually and as a concept. I have a particular
passion for the architecture of the English terraced house,
perhaps because it’s the ultimate micro-unit of British
history. The landscape of this country is a patchwork of
forward progress and temporal endurance. I always see
my birth city of London as the supreme example of this,
where a fourteenth century coaching inn can stand
directly in the shadow of Europe’s tallest building, the
Shard—and it can be okay. Somehow it all fits together;
London is the most accommodating of cities and it can
take anything. In the face of whatever befalls it, it retains
its character.
But on a micro-level, the domestic residence, the
house, is also a living, breathing example of this layering
of history. Many millions of British homes—and I’m
talking about ordinary homes lived in by ordinary
families, not grand mansions—will have been
consecutively lived in by tens of generations. There are
bound to be ghosts! I honestly don’t know what I think
about ghosts—I’m an agnostic on the subject—but I
definitely have many times seemed to sense that
mysterious residue of organic life a house carries within
itself, the idea that houses tend to harbour the
“vibrations,” if you like, of their past occupancies. I’ve
“felt” both good houses and bad houses in my time, and I
think such experiences are common to most people.
Almost anyone you talk to will have a story to tell about a
house they felt was watching them, or otherwise
“haunted.” Every house has its mysteries; every house
literally is a story in its own right.
There is a feeling of ambiguity in this story, blurring
the lines between past/present, dreams/reality,
truth/deception, and even in a physical context, the
’tween place of the coastline, neither entirely solid nor
wholly unstable. Did this theme naturally arise from
Terri’s mental state, unanchored from her normal life
and adrift in Allis’s, or did you intentionally play with
the concept of being caught between two states?
Definitely both! Terri’s changing personal circumstances
naturally affect the way her story plays out—she’s just
broken up with a partner and quit her job, so she’s able
and willing to take advantage of these disruptions and
head out into the unknown. Rather than be daunted by
change, she’s determined to use it. But this brings with it
the twin effect of becoming unanchored, as you put it, and
when one is unanchored, one can sometimes drift a long
way further out to sea than one intended.
Just as importantly, though, I am drawn naturally to
narratives of this kind, and to characters who don’t use
“normal life” or societal convention as an excuse for not
doing what they want to do, for not pursuing their desires.
Both Terri and Allis are ruthless in their own way—they
both go for what they want, and I admire that.
Terri comes to think that the emotional burden of
having made it out of WWII alive while her sister
(blood relative, or no) did not is the underlying reason
behind Allis Bennett’s solitary yet many-layered life.
What drew you to explore the theme of survivor’s
guilt?
I think anyone with any degree of empathy can suffer
from survivor’s guilt at some time in their lives, and I
don’t think you need to have been involved in a traumatic
or world-defining event, either—you can feel survivor’s
guilt simply by seeing a report of a car crash or a house
fire on the news, and it doesn’t matter if the people who
died or were harmed are related or even known to you or
not. It’s simply a heightened awareness of another’s
suffering, that instinctive human ability to ask “what if?”
Sometimes empathy can be so strong though it’s a
destructive force, ruining and warping the life of the
person who feels too much of it, and who ends up
blaming themselves, almost, for the whole weight of
sorrow on the world. It’s a kind of opposite force to the
crippling lack of empathy that results in the amorality that
we see in serial killers, for example, or other sociopaths.
Either of these extreme qualities can make an interesting
subject for a story.
I chose the World War Two theme for “Bellony”
because it gives a shape and texture to the events that is
immediately recognisable, immediately important—it
gets people thinking and asking questions. What if?
WW2 is still an immensely powerful collective memory
within the European consciousness, it’s still talked about,
has films made about it, it’s still emotionally very
resonant. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you’re a writer,
you’re going to write about it, in some form, at some
time. I’ve touched on WW2 several times before—in a
story called “Feet of Clay,” which is directly about a
Holocaust survivor and the effect her experiences have on
her modern day family. There’s also a long novella called
“The Gateway,” forthcoming in my new book Stardust,
which is partly about the experiences of ordinary civilians
in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.
These subjects are very serious and sensitive, and I
always feel a measure of caution when approaching them.
Any writer has a duty, when writing about a subject she
does not “own,” to listen to the voices of other people and
writers who experienced these things at first hand.
Presumably the side door was papered-over after
Allis Bennett’s disappearance. Do you have any
speculation as to whether subsequent tenants had
realized that, when using that door, the facts of their
reality . . . shifted . . . and that the door had to be
barred because of its enchantment? Or was it just the
annoyingly-stuck outer lock that led to the door’s
disuse? Were Allis and Terri special, in some way—
or in need, even—for the door to give them a fresh
start in a new reality?
I think the word “need” is crucial here, actually. In my
own mind the door would only work for the right person
—someone already alive to the necessity of change and
the possibility of enchantment. Terri and Allis are
spiritual twins in this way. For anyone without this kind
of active imagination, I think the door might just be a
door. I think there are some people who are naturally
willing—naturally eager—to look into the spaces
between what is commonly recognised as “reality” and
that other, rather more slippery commodity, possibility. It
is this eagerness, this yearning for possibility that
characterises many, if not all, of my stories.
Do you have any other projects upcoming or in the
works that you would like to share with us?
At this moment I’m working on the final draft of my first
novel, What Happened to Maree. It has a science
fictional feel to it, but like “Bellony,” it’s very much
caught up in the idea of overlapping realities.
I have a collection out later this year with PS
Publishing called Stardust, which explores the life and
identity of a fictional horror movie actor named Ruby
Castle. The book is in the form of six “episodes,” which
take place at different times in Ruby’s past or future and
across the whole spectrum of science fiction, fantasy and
horror. Each of the episodes works individually as its own
self-contained story, but I wrote each very much in the
knowledge or foreknowledge of the others, and I think
they gain a great deal from being read as a continuing
narrative. They’re like the stories in my collection The
Silver Wind in this way, although Stardust is very
different in tone, its colours are darker.
I’m very much in love with this idea of using different
stories to tell a story, and one of the most inspiring things
about speculative fiction is the way it invites a writer to
play games with narrative form as well as overturning
quotidian reality.
Moshe Siegel works as a slusher, proofreader, and interviewer at Lightspeed,
interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, freelance edits
hither and yon, and is a Publisher’s Assistant at Codhill Press. His overladen
bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in
upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow
tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.
Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich
Kevin McNeil
Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process
and what inspired “Deus Ex Arca?”
The idea for “Deus Ex Arca” popped into my head one
afternoon when I was reading space opera. I started
thinking . . . it’s a common narrative assumption that
humans will one day obtain alien technology, either by
discovering it in space, or capturing it in a war. Then,
we’ll find a way to deploy that technology to our
advantage, possibly with unforeseen consequences.
But such an idea seems awfully presumptuous. It
assumes that aliens are so nearly like us, and so close to
us in their arc of technological development, that their
tools would represent only a small intuitive leap.
In reality, if alien civilizations do exist, their
conceptual framework would most likely be utterly
inscrutable to us; and if they have the technological
prowess to reach earth in one piece, their technology is
exponentially more advanced than ours. They would be
working with different goals, different metaphors,
different ergonomics. Their technology would seem like
magic, and understanding it would require a total
rewiring of the way we view the world. Their technology
would most likely not even look like technology to us.
Just imagine a twelfth century farmer, who through
some quirk in the space-time continuum, stumbles upon a
working iPhone. How long might it take him to crack the
password, fire up Safari, and start researching soil
fertility? And just remember, the farmer actually has an
edge in this situation, because he’s got a lot more in
common with the iPhone’s creator: basic brain hardware,
spatial reasoning skills, and number of fingers. A human
who stumbles upon alien technology would not be
assured these advantages.
So, I wanted to write a story that reflects the essential
absurdity of humans interacting with alien technology,
and illustrates the immense gap of consciousness between
ourselves and an alien Other. With that idea came the
image of the box: an artifact completely lacking in any
kind of distinguishing physical characteristics. I wanted
the box to defy rational or logical expectations; I wanted
the box to be immune to the scientific method. Our
impulse, naturally, would be to experiment with the box,
trying to determine cause and effect. But the box breaks
that concept. It resists and refuses any attempt at
understanding.
(I should add the caveat here: none of this is meant as
a criticism of stories where humans do successfully
deploy alien technology. I love a good story, especially a
good story set in space, and I don’t think realism should
ever get in the way of telling one. I just wanted to try
something different.)
I enjoyed the tone of this story, which ranged from the
absurd (a soldier turning into a tuna sandwich) to the
horrific (Jackson eating the tuna sandwich). Was this
story particularly challenging to write? If so, how?
Actually, it was extremely easy. This was one of those
stories that just happened. The first scene and the last
scene were embedded in my initial idea for the story,
unfolding in my mind in a very cinematic way. With the
beginning and the ending in mind, I sketched out how to
get from point A to point B, noting all the major events of
the story, which at the time just seemed obvious. Then I
sat at my desk and wrote the entire first draft in one
sitting, probably six or seven hours, with a few breaks for
snacks or tea. I wish writing could always be like that.
But regarding the range from the absurd to the
horrific, I suppose one challenging aspect was continually
resisting my own impulse to make the box act according
to certain rules. Unconsciously, my writer brain kept
attempting to create a pattern, to decipher the meaning
behind certain destructive incidents, and to fit the effects
of the box into a coherent logical narrative. And I kept
consciously pushing back against that instinct.
Likewise, as the coherent structure of the world is
eroded by disintegration and decay, I wanted that effect to
be mirrored in the text. Jackson experiences a gradual
unraveling of meaning, and I wanted the reader to
experience that, too. So as the story progresses, the
characters become disoriented, the narration becomes
fragmented, and the narrative becomes more illogical. But
I did run into the limits of this technique in the final
scene; perhaps language is not the best medium for
representing beings that are beyond language.
This is the second story I’ve read of yours with a child
as the main character (“Celadon,” Clarkesworld,
January 2009). You’ve got a talent for creating
innocent and believable adolescent characters. I found
myself rooting for Jackson throughout the story, but
one question I kept asking myself as I read your story
was: Why did the box choose Jackson?
I have several answers to this question. On one level, the
box chooses Jackson because he is the first to touch it;
perhaps there is some kind of immediate pair bonding
that becomes impossible to undo. On another level, the
box chooses Jackson because the box is Jackson, and it is
only returning to him, as it has done so many times
before. On an entirely different level, the box only chooses
Jackson in this iteration, or version, or worldline; perhaps
there is a box for every human on earth.
I think I chose Jackson because he represents for me a
kind of primal innocence. When the story begins, he is in
that raw early stage of identity formation, where likes and
dislikes are simple and unquestioned, actions are
impulsive, and the ego is immaterial. Perhaps because of
this he’s better equipped to deal with something so
irrational. But he’s also completely vulnerable.
The ending to this story comes full circle, which left
me satisfied, but with questions about the next “test.”
Do you think humanity will ever figure out how to
reverse engineer the box?
No. It’s impossible. The box is absolutely antithetical to
the current human conception of the universe; it will
always be an inappropriate technology.
We might have gotten there on our own—but the
massive disruption caused by a clash in metaphors
precludes that possibility.
Does your work tend to explore particular themes?
Yes, I think so. At its heart, “Deus Ex Arca” is a story
about alienation. Jackson’s alienation from his family and
everyone else; even when he’s in daily contact with
psychologists who hang on his every thought, he is
overwhelmingly lonely. And the alienation we experience
as humans on earth, being so very alone in the universe;
we long for any kind of connection with the stars, with
“something out there,” but that connection will most
likely never be found.
For me, that incredible, unbearable isolation is the
story’s emotional anchor. It’s part of why I chose to set
the story in a place where I spent two years feeling
extremely lonely and alienated myself. But isolation is a
theme I return to in my work a lot.
I also write a lot about the relationships between
siblings. I’m fascinated by that bond; it’s incredibly deep
and unique, but not without unease, as our brothers and
sisters are typically aware of our deepest vulnerabilities
and darkest memories, and can trigger those moments
without even trying. I write about siblings because for me
that relationship is an access point to the most intense and
authentic emotions I know.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about this
piece? What’s next for you?
I’ve got a few exciting projects underway at the moment
—but nothing I can talk about just yet.
But since you mentioned my story “Celadon,” let me
point your attention to two upcoming anthologies.
Clarkesworld: Year Three is available now, and Aliens:
Recent Encounters will be available in June. Both include
“Celadon.” The second volume in particular might be
especially interesting to anyone who enjoyed “Deus Ex
Arca,” as it deals exclusively with innovative takes on the
alien contact story. I’m quite excited to read it myself.
Kevin McNeil reads slush at Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial
assistant at Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic,
and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the
Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science
Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a
New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter
@kevinmcneil.
Author Spotlight: Anaea Lay
Earnie Sotirokos
What inspired you to write “The Visited”?
I was participating in the Halloween contest for a writer’s
forum I participate in and planned to write a creepy story
about a creature that interfered with people’s dreams by
sticking fingers in their ears and doing something . . .
creepy. It was vague. When I sat down to write the story,
my brain informed me that I was instead going to
impersonate Cat Valente and prove to the world that good
things come of watching too much VH1 when you’re in
high school. My brain is very opinionated and very
hostile, so I don’t usually argue with it.
Where would you be when the stream cut out?
On the couch in my den. I’d be conducting stealth warfare
to lure the cat onto my lap and losing to my roommates,
who cheat by cuddling on the cat’s favorite chair with her
favorite blanket. Further details are hard to determine, but
I will definitely be teasing the indie music snob roomie
for deigning to watch the live stream of somebody who is
not only mainstream and famous, but not even
endearingly foreign. And I’ll probably bore everybody by
repeating stories from the time I went to New Orleans by
train with little more than a guidebook and two days’
notice. Hopefully the stories will be new to somebody in
the room.
Do you think global mega-hits like the ones Manuel
Black put out are possible today, considering how
fragmented current music tastes have become?
Not quite like Manuel Black, since he had a supernatural
assist that made him universally popular, but global mega
hits are a thing that still happens. I was in Argentina last
November and there were posters for a Lady Gaga “Born
this Way” ball all over Buenos Aires. And I was in
Iceland when I finally connected the name “Katy Perry”
with an actual song, because the cab driver mentioned
how much he liked her when she came on the radio. I
don’t think the mega-super-star is going anywhere, and
that means mega-hits.
Portraying music in fiction can be tricky. Can you
share any tips that may help aspiring writers hear the
tune between their ears?
Not really—I’m tone deaf and arrhythmic, so I don’t hear
the tune between my ears. For this story, I stuck to song
titles as much as I could, which are much, much easier
than lyrics but make it feel like there’s an actual body of
music being referenced. For the lyrics I did include, I put
them at the end of the story so that I would, hopefully,
already have the reader rolling with the atmosphere and
ready to give me some credit. For extra cover, the lyrics
are from the years most people thought he wasn’t any
good. I have no idea whether those lyrics even can be set
to a tune. So I guess my tip is this: Don’t let lack of talent
thwart you—lie and trick the reader into thinking you did
something you didn’t.
What can we expect from you in the future?
A benevolent dictatorship and fudge. Failing that, I’ve got
some other short stories coming up from Strange
Horizons, Apex, and Nightmare in the next few months.
They reflect on the virtues of cannibalism as a problem
solving technique, the likelihood that we’re delusional
about our own sentience, and the capacity for teenagers to
think repeating their parents’ mistakes will solve
problems. Not all in the same story. And you can reliably
expect that on future Mondays I’ll be posting the Strange
Horizons podcast, which is full of fantastic stories and
poems.
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: Karin Tidbeck
Andrew Liptak
Hi Karin, thanks for speaking with us! First off, how
did your story, “A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain”
come into existence?
How did it come into existence? It’s one of those rare
stories that knows what it wants to be right from the start.
I was visiting a friend who’s also a writer. She had to
take an hour to work on her current novel. I didn’t have
anything else to do, so I wrote some random stuff in
longhand without really thinking about it. When my
friend came back out of her office, I had the first draft
almost ready.
Your story follows a rather strange troupe, which
begs the question: Much like a tree falling in the
woods, if a play is held without an audience, is there
anyone to appreciate it?
Apprentice is afraid they might be performing for empty
seats, while Nestor is convinced that they’re out there,
just invisible to the troupe. The question I would ask is, if
the troupe has no audience, are they actually performing?
I suppose it depends on whether you have an audience in
mind or not. The troupe seems to be formed with the
express purpose of performing for an audience, but
opinions are divided on what or who that audience is. On
the other hand, the troupe also believe they have the
function of upholding the order of the universe. That kind
of ritual needs no audience except creation itself. The
actors may also be their own audience—a sort of everongoing roleplay. Honestly? I don’t want to supply any
ready answers. That’s up to the reader to decide.
There’s a real meta feel to this story, as Apprentice
finds an audience caught in a situation very similar to
the play that they’re playing. How much of real life is
informed by stories, and vice versa?
I believe reality is a continuous narrative that we tell each
other and ourselves; what we recognize as stories are just
one of the shapes that narrative takes. I don’t think you
can separate real life, or the human mind, from story. It’s
a basic bodily function, like breathing.
You don’t always write in English; a number of your
stories are in Swedish. What challenges do you face
when writing a story in another language, and how are
they different from a story in your native language?
Storywise, not so different. Language-wise, the two allow
for different styles—the sounds and cultural baggage
differ. When writing in a language not my own, it’s a
question of being careful about over- and undertones,
keeping track of what’s current usage and what’s
outdated (because the Oxford English Dictionary won’t
tell you), what’s British English and what’s American
English. In short, it keeps you on your toes. I try not to
worry too much, though. I can’t do the same job of it as
someone who’s a native English speaker, and I don’t
think I want to. Coming in from another language gives
some leeway to play around with it, in a different way
than natives get.
What do you have coming up that we should look
forward to?
I have some stories coming up in Strange Horizons,
Shadows & Tall Trees, and at Tor.com during the first
half of 2013. I’ve written an entry for the upcoming
anthology The Starry Wisdom Library, which should be
out sometime in late fall. Also, “Reindeer Mountain,” one
of the stories from Jagannath, is in Jonathan Strahan’s
next Year’s Best antho.
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has
written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF
Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at
@AndrewLiptak on Twitter.
Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey
Robyn Lupo
The issues that arise in “Deep Blood Kettle” remind
me of Stephen Hawking saying in 2010 that humans
should fear aliens, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the
outcome would be much as when Christopher
Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn
out very well for the Native Americans.” Can you tell
us more about what got you writing this story? Are
the aliens in the story how you see our first contact
working out?
I find myself in agreement with Stephen Hawking, which
I suppose is a sign that I got lucky in my thinking. In the
story, the war between an alien race and humans is
likened to the war worms might put up against a farmer.
Farmers don’t even see the life in the dirt, it’s so far
beneath them. They just plow it under. But what I really
had in mind while writing the story was the fiscal cliff in
the news at the time. I created a scenario of perfect doom,
and told the story of bickering politicians unable to reach
the compromise that might save us all.
The father in the story is quite well-defined; believing
in what he can see, learning things a hard way first,
and so on. If it were up to him, what do you think Pa
would choose with regard to the invaders?
He and his son’s teacher are the two polar opposites in
the story, with the main character torn between the two.
The father wouldn’t give an inch to the aliens, I don’t
think. Let the rock land; we’ll make do. Come try to take
my farm; I’m cleaning my gun. There is staunch
obstinance on the one side and naiveté on the other. I
think another of his traits is that he believes what he
wants to believe, rather than what he can see.
Can you tell us why you chose this boy to be the focal
character? How do you think his realization about the
invaders will change him later on? (Assuming, of
course, he survives.)
I wanted the point of view to come from someone young
enough not to have made up their mind about the world.
The boy is the decision, bouncing back and forth between
two positions. Also, there are observations young people
make—ways of seeing events from an unusual angle—
that allow them to have insights others might not. There’s
also the fact that I grew up the son of a farmer. :)
What’s next for you?
I’m just wrapping up the launch of Wool here in the
States, and the sequel, Shift, should be hitting bookstores
in the UK. I’m currently pouring my energies into Dust,
which will wrap up the trilogy. After that, I have to
choose between one of a half dozen stories begging to get
out!
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: Christopher Barzak
Robyn Lupo
How did you come up with Smoke City?
I was reading a book called The Point of Pittsburgh,
which chronicles the life of that city from its geological
formation, through its years as a vied-for settlement
among colonial powers, until the present day. I read the
book, about 450 pages, in two evenings, fascinated by the
years when Pittsburgh became an industrial power, and
then an industrial wasteland when the steel industry
moved its work to developing nations. I was struck by the
absolutely miserable conditions of life for the working
class that made men like Carnegie wealthy, and how he
attempted to assuage his guilt from taking advantage of
the labor of others by providing public institutions like
libraries and social clubs for the underprivileged. I was
also trying to compare this aspect of the city’s past with
its present day position as a city that has devoted itself to
education, medicine, and green industries—the exact
opposite of what it used to be. I knew I wanted to write a
story that explored those differences, and wanted to write
a story, too, that would have a character bound up with
both the wreckage of the city’s past and the more
privileged life of the present day.
Loss and sacrifice for the community runs rampant in
this story—can you tell us more about this theme and
how you see it working in this story?
I think for cities with a working class history like
Pittsburgh—where the majority of its citizens were
manual laborers for a great duration of the city’s existence
—community and sacrifice for one’s community plays a
big role. I grew up in a town in Ohio that grew out of
Pittsburgh’s and Cleveland’s manufacturing industries,
which has suffered a lot of economic losses (as those two
cities have) as the manufacturing industry has left the
U.S. Sacrifice is something people do when times are
rough and the table of plenty has gone empty. Sharing,
taking on more responsibility than usual. It’s also this
self-sacrifice that leads many people from working class
backgrounds to be easily taken advantage of in their
dealings with others. They often take less pay than their
employers can afford; they provide more labor than
they’re compensated for; and they tend to be taken
advantage of even in dealings with institutions like banks
because they aren’t always as financially literate as
people from white collar backgrounds. You can see an
example of this in the recent past, with the predatory
lending schemes many banks participated in. The
majority of people who lost their homes were what
politicians like to call “ordinary Americans,” which really
translates into the lower middle class, the working class,
and the working poor. Many of those working class
families have had to arrange for very old-fashioned living
arrangements in the wake of that debacle, multiple
families living together, or people in their thirties having
to live with their parents for longer periods of time, etc.
Loss and sacrifice seem to be the essence of working
people in America in general.
What’s a standard day of writing like for you?
I don’t have a standard writing day any longer, since I’ve
started teaching full-time at Youngstown State
University. My job makes it difficult to keep a regular
schedule, so the best I can do is try to make use of my free
time as much as possible. I tend to try to squeeze in a
couple of hours each night, after classes have finished.
Sometimes this consists of doing revision to works in
progress, sometimes it’s generating new material to work
on. If I can write a page or two a day, I’m happy. On days
when I’ve not got an enormous amount of work to do for
the day job, I like to write for four or five hours and really
sink into that zone where everything else drops away from
you except the page in front of you.
Can you tell us more about the Emily Dickinson quote
and its connection to Smoke City?
The Dickinson quote worked its way into the story
because of its theme, and because my grandmother, who
was at varying times a factory worker or a farmer, liked
Dickinson’s poetry, that poem in particular (“Because I
could not stop for Death”). It’s a line that sort of functions
as a reminder to the narrator of “Smoke City” that her
obligations to the past—her past, as an inhabitant of
Smoke City who has escaped into the future through a
timeslip hidden in the Fourth River (a mythological river
in Pittsburgh, which in the literal world is really an
aquifer, or underground river, that flows beneath the city).
I treated that river as a literal one for the purposes of the
story and the mythic qualities I was developing within the
world of the story. The Dickinson quote speaks to
inevitability and obligation, too, I thought. Though we
would not like to stop for Death, he will kindly stop for us
when the time comes. The narrator, when she is returned
periodically to Smoke City, is to some extent being
returned to hell, Persephone-style, to live in the
underworld and serve her time, as that myth functions.
How does the narrator leave Smoke City? Is it a
natural ability of hers alone, or do others have it?
I think I alluded to this a bit in my previous answer. In
the story, there’s a kind of timeslip hidden in the mythic
Fourth River of Pittsburgh, which some of the inhabitants
of Smoke City have found and use to escape, if they can
find the strength to leave behind family and friends, their
obligations and responsibilities. It’s not only my narrator
who has done this, but some others. In the story, there’s
mention of others coming and going from the mouth of
the river’s cave entrance like she does. In this way, I’m
sure the story feels a bit dystopic, which it should.
What’s next for you?
My first full-length collection of short fiction is being
released in late March, 2013. It’s called Before and
Afterlives,and a lot of the stories in it have won awards or
been finalists for awards like the Nebula Award, the
Spectrum Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. It’s a
mixed-genre collection—ghost stories, contemporary
fantasy, and some science fiction—but it’s predominantly
concerned with the supernatural more than any other
mode.
I’m also working on my next novel, (tentatively titled
Wonders of the Invisible World), which will be finished
any year now! Also, my first novel, One for Sorrow, is
being made into a movie under the title Jamie Marks is
Dead by director Carter Smith (The Ruins) and producer
Alex Orlovosky (Blue Valentine), with plans to release in
2014.
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: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Robyn Lupo
Can you tell us how “A Love Supreme” happened for
you? How did the inclusion of a major disability fit in
with what you want to say in this work?
Ellen Datlow, a well-known editor in the fields of science
fiction, fantasy, and horror, contacted me and asked if I
was interested in writing a story related to overpopulation
for Discover Magazine. I responded with three short
proposals, and this is the idea that worked.
Ellie’s father chose not to have Ellie’s traumatic
memories erased, and it appears Ellie appreciated
this choice. What’s your position on memory erasure
as a treatment for conditions like PTSD, since it is
looking like procedures like this will be live options
for us in a few years?
Because PTSD following combat, a violent crime, an
automobile accident, or other life-shattering events can
powerfully and negatively impact relationships and
reactions to daily life, the ability to mitigate the intensity
of certain memories will become an increasingly-used and
very helpful option. I think that the key to responsible use
of such medications or procedures will be individual
choice.
Can you tell us more about the Coltrane connection in
this story? Jazz appears to inform much of your work
—can you tell us a bit more about that?
When I write, I usually proceed with a general plan and
let the scenes play out in rough draft as I become involved
with the process. “A Love Supreme,” one of Coltrane’s
most famous pieces, surfaced in the first draft when I
wrote the scene in which Ellie’s mother died, and as the
story unfolded it assumed more power. In the end, it
seems an apt description of how Ellie finds the grace and
courage to deal with her father’s choice.
Jazz was my soundtrack since birth. In the late
thirties, forties, and early fifties, my father saw most of
the well-known Jazz luminaries, in person, and passed on
to me his passion for Jazz. Like everyone else in the
sixties, I became involved with the music of the day, but
eventually my musical compass returned to Jazz. Music is
become the deep ground of most of my novels. Queen
City Jazz, a New York Times Notable Book, is infused
with the music, the rhythms, of Scott Joplin. Mississippi
Blues, which examines the bizarre history of our country
(institutionalized slavery in the country that celebrates
“Liberty and Justice for All”) has twelve sections to echo
a 12-bar blues. Crescent City Rhapsody, a Nebula Award
finalist, references Duke Ellington’s Rhapsodies in
structure and in theme. In the afterword of my Campbell
Award-winning In War Times I write: “I have likened the
evolution of Modern Jazz, later dubbed Bebop, to the
creative ferment in science which has led to our evergrowing understanding of the world, nature, and
ourselves. Like the development of the atomic bomb, it
remained a well-kept secret until after the war. Unlike the
development of the bomb, which can now be known, we
can never revisit the original luminous thoughts of
Charlie Parker as he and Dizzy Gillespie birthed a new
art form. In reality, the physicists, chemists, and
biologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries birthed
Modernity and its reflection and interpretation in
literature, art, and music. Our art and our science are
inextricably linked.”
What do you think allowed Ellie to see her father
appropriately [during] their last meeting?
That’s a very good question. She attributes it to her
infusion, but I think that although the infusion perhaps
laid the groundwork for her acceptance of his choice, this
acceptance could only have come about from the deepest
and most vital part of her being, a part that has been
clouded by fear and the memory of her trauma.
What’s next for you?
I’m finishing up “Where Do We Come From? What Are
We? Where Are We Going?”, a novelette or novella,
depending on how long it gets, for Tor.com. “Bootstrap”
will appear in Tech Review Science Fiction, MIT
Technology Review’s annual science fiction issue, and
“Sport” will be published in the forthcoming issue of Arc
Magazine. I’m beginning work on two new novels. I am
a Professor of the Practice at Georgia Institute of
Technology, where I teach Creative Writing and other
classes every fall, so I am happily engaged in all the
things I love to do.
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: Robert Silverberg
Kevin McNeil
It’s been almost forty years since this story’s
publication. With the rise of social sites like Facebook
and Twitter, the world has never felt closer. Your
story poses the question: Will globalization result in a
homogenization of human culture? I know how
Schwartz would feel about it, but do you think this is a
negative thing? Are the gains we make worth the
cultural diversity we give up?
I don’t think having a Starbucks on every corner would be
a big step forward for humanity. On the other hand,
modern sanitation in what are now third-world countries
would be a boon. Call it a draw.
Ultimately, Schwartz chooses to remain in his fantasy
world and exits the starship. Is mortality a theme you
explore often in your work? Are there certain themes
you find you return to?
There certainly are, and mortality is one of them. Didn’t
someone say that love and death are the only important
themes for fiction?
You’ve published more than eighty novels and
hundreds of shorts stories. Do you have a preference
for working with novels or short fiction? Outside of
the fact that novels require more time, do you take a
different approach to writing novels as opposed to
short stories?
Short stories don’t give you any room for making errors.
A novel can go off the tracks for three or four chapters in
a row and a lot of people won’t notice. When I’m writing
a short story, I feel uneasy about the need to make every
word count. Writing novels makes big demands on the
stamina. And so throughout my career I’ve switched from
one to the other for a change of pace.
Your career has been so impressive and your writing
has been incredibly prolific. What’s a typical writing
day like for you? How have you maintained the
discipline to remain so consistent for so long?
I don’t know any other way to do things. I go to the office,
boot up, start writing, keep going until I’m too tired to
continue, and stop. Been that way for almost sixty years.
You’ve written in a variety of genres, are an SFWA
Grand Master, and a multiple Hugo and Nebula
award winner. What’s the best advice you have for
aspiring speculative fiction writers?
Read a lot. Think about what you’ve read. And write a
lot. Also travel to far-off places, try new things.
What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects?
Not at the moment. I’m giving myself an extended
sabbatical after what has been a very long and busy
career.
Kevin McNeil reads slush at Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial
assistant at Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic,
and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the
Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science
Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a
New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter
@kevinmcneil.
Author Spotlight: Bruce Sterling
Earnie Sotirokos
“Dinner in Audoghast” takes a look at an almost
forgotten oasis city in Africa. Why did you choose to
explore this speck of history?
I found Audoghast while reading a book about Moslem
travellers and explorers. By the way, Audoghast really is
“forgotten”—Audoghast was a wealthy, good-sized
metropolis once, but nobody’s ever yet found any trace of
its ruins. In these days of GPS and aerial photography,
that’s pretty odd.
What effect did the few sentences of source material
have on shaping your narrative?
I threw that quote in there so that the reader would realize
that the city was historically existent—it’s not an Edgar
Rice Burroughs fantastic lost city of Africa; Audoghast
was a real place with real inhabitants. I also decided early
on that the story wouldn’t have any Tarzan figures in it—
no Europeans, no Christians, no lost English noblemen
raised by apes. These remote strangers never had any role
in the urban life of Audoghast.
Do you think fiction can serve a role in preserving
cultures that are nearly lost to time?
Well, yeah, certainly, if that fiction was actually written
by people from the lost culture, as with the Iliad or the
Epic of Gilgamesh. In those cases, fiction truly is a
precious relic, it’s of huge cultural value. If somebody
from the actual Audoghast read this modern story of
mine, they’d consider it a distorted fairy-tale, more like
weird satire than an act of “preservation.”
On the other hand, they might like the story better
than I think. Literate people in early Islam were rather
keen on melancholy stories of fatalistic ruin. When you
grow up in the ruins of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile,
there are plenty of dead civilizations underfoot.
Is there a piece of advice you would like to share with
new writers who are thinking about tackling a secret
history story?
Yeah. Try not to be a self-important hick. Above all,
don’t write any secret histories where the subtext is all
about how smart you are, and how dumb they were.
What can we expect from you in the future?
How much future do you want? In a thousand years we
will all be creatures of fantastic obscurity.
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.
Coming Attractions
Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .
We’ll have original science fiction by Maria Dahvana
Headley (“The Traditional”) and M. Bennardo (“Water
Finds Its Level”), along with SF reprints by Maureen F.
McHugh (“Interview: On Any Given Day”) and Sean
Williams (“The Missing Metatarsals”).
Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Damien Walters
Grintalis (“Always, They Whisper”) and Dennis Danvers
(“Leaving the Dead”), and fantasy reprints by Holly
Black (“The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue”) and
Richard Parks (“The Man Who Carved Skulls”).
For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella
will be “The Garden” by Eleanor Arnason, and of course
we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist
spotlights, along with feature interviews with Gregory
Maguire and Karen Russell.
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!