Introduction
John Joseph Adams

Lightspeed is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF—and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales. No subject is off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

Each month at Lightspeed, we bring you a mix of originals and reprints, featuring a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read Lightspeed, it is our hope that you’ll see where science fiction and fantasy comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.

Lightspeed—which launched in June 2010—originally published only science fiction, but in January 2012, we merged with our sister publication, Fantasy Magazine, and we now publish an equal amount of fantasy and science fiction. To help celebrate the merger, we are releasing this free ebook sampler to spread the word about our new direction. 

This sampler features stories and nonfiction originally published in Lightspeed and Fantasy in 2011. It includes the same amount and diversity of content that you’d find in a typical issue of Lightspeed under our new format, so reading this sampler is basically just like reading an issue of the magazine itself.

Starting in January 2012, in every issue of Lightspeed our readers will also enjoy an ebook-exclusive novella. This is a brand-new feature, so to make this sampler as much like a regular issue of Lightspeed as possible, we are including our two longest stories published in 2011—“The Old Equations” by Jake Kerr and “House of Gears” by Jonathan L. Howard—as between the two of them, they add up to a novella-length story. 

So please join us in celebrating the merger of Fantasy and Lightspeed. I hope you enjoy the content included here, and if you do, I hope you’ll consider buying our ebook editions—or a subscription!—in the future. We publish ebook issues on the first of every month, which are available for sale in ePub format via our website and are also available in other formats, such as Kindle and Nook. You can also subscribe to our ebook edition in a variety of formats; visit our Subscribe page (lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe) for more details.

Thanks again for reading, and be sure to visit our website at www.lightspeedmagazine.com to see what else we have in store for the future. And if you do like what you've read here, please tell a friend!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as 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. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (February, Simon & Schuster), Armored (April, Baen Books), and The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination (Fall 2012, Tor Books). John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Feature Interview: Charlaine Harris
John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley

Charlaine Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Vampire Mysteries series. The series features Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who works in a bar in the fictional Northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. Sookie Stackhouse’s world is peopled with vampires and other supernatural creatures. The series is the basis for the hit HBO television show True Blood. Harris is also the author of the Harper Connelly Mysteries series, which follows the adventures of a young woman who gains supernatural powers after being struck by lightning. Before turning her hand to urban fantasy, Harris was also the author of several straight mystery novels, including the Aurora Teagarden series, in which amateur sleuths solve old crimes, and the Lily Bard series, featuring a karate-student and cleaning lady who gets unwillingly dragged into one murder mystery after another. She has also co-edited several urban fantasy anthologies with Toni L. P. Kelner, such as Home Improvement: Undead Edition and Wolfsbane and Mistletoe.

This interview first appeared in io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Visit io9.com/tag/geeksguide to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

In your Southern Vampire Mysteries series (and in True Blood), vampires are able to come out of the shadows with the advent of synthetic blood. How did you first come up with the idea of vampires drinking synthetic blood?

My initial thought on the series was I wanted to write about a woman dating a vampire. But to make them less frightening, to give them a reason for being out, I had to develop a theory that would let them look less vicious. So they would have to have another food source. So I read some articles about synthetic blood, which never has really worked out before now—though people have made the attempt—and it seemed to me like a viable synthetic blood would be the perfect answer to my problems. Vampires would say, “Oh no, we’re not dangerous. We drink synthetic blood. We don’t want to grab you and bite you.” And people could believe that because people are gullible.

Every series has slightly different rules when it comes to how the vampires work. For your series, how did you come up with the rules, and is that something you worked out in detail to start with, or did the rules just sort of evolve naturally as the story took shape?

I started out knowing a few things. First, they wouldn’t be able to go out in daylight. In the [Bram Stoker] book, Dracula is a day-walker, but I had to have some system of checks and balances, I figured, because otherwise vampires are so powerful that there really wouldn’t be any point in humans trying to outwit them or stand up to them. There were some things I just decided not to tackle.

For some reason, and I can’t quite understand why, readers are secretly fascinated with the physical output of vampires. They are always trying to think of a nice way of saying, “Do your vampires poop?” Or, “Do your vampires ejaculate?” And I’m just going, you know, vampire bathroom habits are just not interesting to me.

The Sookie Stackhouse series seems equally likely to appeal to fans of horror, mystery, and romance. Was that by design?

Absolutely. I don’t really plan my career out in any detail, which is one reason my success was so late in life, but I did hope that if I adopted a kitchen sink approach, which was something I’d always wanted to do, that it would appeal to mystery readers, romance readers, horror readers, and hopefully science fiction writers too.

You’ve said you’re reaching the end of the Sookie Stackhouse series. Do you have any thoughts about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to wrapping up a long-running series?

I have a lot of thoughts. I haven’t ever wrapped up a series that ran this long. The previous series, I don’t think they’ve exceeded seven or eight books, so this is a new experience for me. I’ve lived with Sookie for a long, long time. By the time the last book is published, which will be in 2013, and it will be the thirteenth book, I will have been with Sookie for fifteen years—almost the entire growing-up period of my daughter, actually. So that is going to be kind of a jolt not to have her here anymore living in the house with me, but at the same time I find that facing the end of the series is giving me the most tremendous shot in the arm.

Can you give examples of other series you think ended well or ended poorly, and what made them good and bad?

Well, of course, I thought the ending of Six Feet Under was brilliant. And I am one of the few people I know who thought Lost was great; I thought the ending was fantastic. For book series, I’m not completely sure that I’ve known other people who’ve wrapped up long-running series and I’ve lasted through to the last book, so all I can say is thanks to my readers who have, and I’ve always known how the series would end and that’s how it’s going to end. I know I can’t make everybody happy. That’s why I’m going to go on vacation when the last book comes out!

What did you like about the finales of Six Feet Under and Lost?

I thought the Six Feet Under finale was unexpected and poignant. Alan went to all of the characters at their moment of death, and since death was the theme of the show, that seemed weirdly appropriate, and something I would never have thought of, and I always admire that.

The ending of Lost was mystical, and a lot of people thought it was cheap, but I didn’t. It felt satisfying to me. And it had sort of a Six Feet Under-ish vibe to it too, and kind of a Titanic vibe—you know, when all the Titanic people who died are waiting at the end for Rose to come?—the ending of Lost was sort of reminiscent of that too. So I guess it seems I like a lot of death at the end.

The TV show True Blood kicked off with this really interesting viral marketing campaign that made it seem as if synthetic blood was an actual product and as if vampires were really making their existence known. What did you think about that?

I think HBO has a wonderful marketing department. They seem to have hit a vein—ha, ha—with people. Their marketing was very successful, very attractive, and very exciting.

True Blood diverges significantly from your books, to the extent that you’ve said you often don’t know what’s going to happen next on the show. What have been some of the biggest surprises for you while you’ve watched it?

There’ve been many surprises, almost too many to name. I think knowing that in the book Jason sleeps around is an important fact about his character, but on the screen we actually see him doing that, and it certainly has quite a different impact. And that was a tremendous, startling moment to me and I thought “ooh.” Because Jason in the books is a stupid horn dog, and he is in the show too—he’s a little sweeter in the show than he is in the books. Jessica was a complete surprise to me, but I think a brilliant one. She’s not in the books, and I think she’s a great addition to the show. Those are the two most startling, I think. Of course, Lafayette lived, and I kind of expected that; Nelsan Ellis saved his own life by being so brilliant in the show, and in the books, of course, he wasn’t that great, or as charming as Nelsan, and he died.

You’ve said that Anne Rice is one of your favorite authors. Could you tell us about why you enjoy her writing and what sort of influence she’s had on you?

Sure. I’m not such a great fan of her witch books, but her vampire books I just loved. Interview With the Vampire, at the time it was published, was one of the most startling, innovative books on the market and it held that private place for many years. I just can’t tell you how impressed I was with the originality of her thinking. I still think that book was just a masterstroke. And I think so many of her ideas are classics. She’s had as much influence on the vampire genre as Dracula did.

Was there anything in particular she did that you wanted to emulate and anything that you wanted to do differently?

Well, I can’t write like her. There’s no point in me trying. I’ve got a different agenda than Anne Rice. So I don’t try to emulate her except, I hope, in my goal of producing the best work I can possibly produce. So there are great differences. And the background of Anne’s vampires, since they can’t and are not interested in having sex, there’s a tremendous homoerotic vibration going on in the background of all of the books, and in my books vampires can have sex and are, you know, very enthusiastic about that with whomever they feel like having it. So mine is a more overt and obvious sexuality than that in Anne’s books.

The Twilight series has been a big hit in recent years, particularly among teenage girls. What’s been your take on the whole Twilight phenomenon?

I think that Stephanie Meyer hit the nerve she was trying for. Honestly, I think it was like a shot in the dark that paid off big for her. And I’m really glad for anybody that can make money in today’s market. She opened the door for a lot of people. Because of her, a lot of young people are growing up reading about vampires that might not necessarily have enjoyed the genre otherwise, and I also think her readers grow up to read my books. I’ve read her books. She says she does not read other vampire writers ever. So, you know, I don’t know her, and that’s probably all I can say about the Twilight books.

Did you grow up reading vampire stories yourself or was that something you got interested in later?

I grew up reading anything I could get my hands on. I’ve always been a voracious reader and remain so to this day. I read mysteries; I read classics; I read Dracula; I read anything and everything, and I think that was a wonderful, wonderful freedom my parents gave me.

Were there any particular books that really inspired you when you were younger?

There were. And since I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I can actually remember the names of some of them. I think Jane Eyre was the basic book for the whole romance field. If you look at the elements in Jane Eyre, they’ve been repeated over and over and over. The unconventional heroine who looks conventional on the outside; the brooding hero; the mad wife; the big block to their happiness ever after, which gets removed. And then The Three Musketeers, which is like the seminal buddy movie but written, and believe me, The Three Musketeers, the original novel, is not anything like the children’s version or the movie version. It’s a very bawdy book with a lot of very unconventional relationships in it. Those were two that were really, really important to me and I’m sure there were many others. I read a lot of Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, you know, on and on and on.

According to your website you’re a science fiction fan. Who are some of your favorite authors these days in science fiction specifically, as opposed to fantasy and horror?

Connie Willis is one of my huge favorites. Julie Czerneda I think is very, very good. Mike Carey is so good. Oh my gosh, there are just so many. I just read a wonderful book called Ready Player One by Ernest Cline that I thought just blew my socks off. I was lucky enough to read it a few months ago in manuscript form and it’s really totally gratifying to see it getting big, big publicity now.

Your Harper Connelly series features a main character who develops supernatural powers after getting struck by lightning. How did you get that idea, and what sort of research did you do on the effects of being struck by lightning?

I did research lightning even though to me it’s still pretty much magic, though I’ve read the scientific explanation many times. And luckily for me, there is a group for lightning strike survivors. They were kind enough to let me listen in for a while, which I appreciated very much. It’s a select group of people who keep having physical problems for many, many years after the original incident. It was just fascinating and touching to read the difficulties they had with the medical establishment and getting treatment for these various problems they develop.

Your bibliography lists a piece you wrote called “An Evening with Al Gore.” Can you tell us what that’s about?

Oh, that’s my ecological horror story. I just loved that story. It was really very different for me. It’s about some supernatural creatures who are really struck by Al Gore’s arguments in favor of recycling and turning the world around, and they carry it to a very extreme degree.

In addition to writing, you’ve also edited a number of anthologies. How did you get involved with that, and what sort of books have you worked on before?

I was approached by Marty Greenberg, God bless his memory, and Marty was interested in producing an anthology that I would edit. I didn’t feel qualified to take that on by myself, but my dear and close friend Toni Kelner is a fantastic editor, and so I told Marty—and this was several years ago—that I would be glad to undertake it if Toni could be my partner, and he readily agreed. So Toni and I are about to do our fifth anthology together, and that has been a great learning experience for me. I get to read other writers and figure out what makes their stories work or not, and then I have to be really, really tactful when I ask them to make changes, so it’s been very good for me all the way around.

Your most recent one that came out was a sort of supernatural home improvement kind of book. Where did that idea come from?

We sit down to brainstorm—we did special occasions for the first few: birthdays, the holidays, vacations, but then we thought home improvement would be fun. Everybody’s got a terrible story about home improvement. They don’t usually end as bloodily as the stories in our books. The next one’s going to be set in any kind of school or classroom, and is going to be called An Apple for the Creature.

Could you give an example or two of the stories in which home improvement goes bloodily wrong?

Oh, sure. Melissa Marr’s got a great story in there about a neighborhood watch situation where the person in charge of enforcing the neighborhood rules pushes him once too many times. And there’s a great haunting story in there, too, where a woman comes back to try to redo the apartment where she actually killed her boyfriend many decades before.

Are there any other recent or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion [just came out]. And it has been delayed once, so I’m very glad to see it finally appearing on the shelves. It was a huge coordination nightmare because so many people were involved. I wrote an original novella for it, and there’s an interview with me, an interview with Alan Ball, there’s a timeline, there’s a family tree, there’s a map, there’s a compendium of all the characters that have ever been in any Sookie novel; it was just a massive undertaking. It got to where I would almost break out in hives when I saw “companion” in the subject line of an email.

What have been some of the most interesting comments that people have posted on your message board?

“Interesting” can be interpreted so many different ways. Some people are so invested in Sookie’s relationships that they develop a violent partisanship between one suitor and another, and finally we had to just ban that discussion from the board. People get very, very vehement. One woman said “Oh, if Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.” And I said, “Surely not! Surely you wouldn’t.” And there have been pretty intense arguments over other aspects of the book. I just never expected all that. Of course I guess I’m just not used to anybody paying attention to me!

I know that Laurell K. Hamilton has had problems with some of her fans. Have you had any problems like that?

Not, probably, as intense as Laurell’s, but yes, I’ve had a problem or two. I had one person who showed up at, oh, four or five of my signings in a row, and they were pretty widely separated geographically, so that was of a little concern to me. I’ve had people who seem very, very intense about whether or not Sookie would end up with Eric, very intense about that to the point where I’m a little concerned about them.

That actually does it for our questions. We don’t want to end on that note, though. Is there anything cheerful you’d like to talk about to wrap things up?

Well, let’s see. Toni and my new anthology is out; the companion is out; I have wrapped up the next Sookie, which will be out next May, it’s called Deadlocked. Then I have a short story to write for Joe Lansdale. I have one to write for our anthology. Then I’ll start Sookie Thirteen and finish it. And then I can write whatever I want to write!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as 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 was a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award, and is currently up for two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: Lightspeed: Year One (November, Prime Books), Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (February, Simon & Schuster), Armored (April, Baen Books), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (Fall, Tor Books). John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. 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, and is the other co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in New York.

Feature Interview: Mary Roach
John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley

Mary Roach is the author of the nonfiction bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her latest book is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. She has also written articles for Salon.com, Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, and she reviews books for The New York Times. Her 1995 article called “How to Win at Germ Warfare” was a National Magazine Award finalist. You can learn more about her at maryroach.net and follow her on Twitter @mary_roach.

This interview first appeared in io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Visit io9.com/tag/geeksguide to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

Your new book is called Packing for Mars. Why don’t you start us off by telling us a little bit about that.

Packing for Mars is about all the surreal physical and physiological challenges of trying to live in space as a human being, and human beings are just not in the slightest bit equipped to do that, so it’s kind of an entertaining challenge. And it’s also about all these bizarre simulations that happen on Earth—weird behind-the-scenes NASA shenanigans, and I took part in some of those. You can almost go to space without leaving Earth, in a way. So that’s what the book is about.

All your previous books have one word titles: Stiff, Spook, and Bonk. Why’d you decide to break that trend?

Well, we didn’t decide to break the trend, we just failed to follow the trend. We couldn’t come up with anything! Because I wanted something that suggested the human side of space. I didn’t want something rockety, you know, I didn’t want Orbit, Zoom, or Space. We really spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to come up with something.

Did you ever consider the title Pooping in Space? Because listening to interviews with you, the subject of pooping in space seems to come up an awful lot.

And that is not my fault! I do not bring it up.

Speaking of which, I think most people think of spaceships as being really clean and sterile, but you make them sound pretty filthy.

I spent a fair amount of time reading the Gemini 7 transcript. This was the very first time anybody had been in space for two weeks, and we were leading up to the moon mission—back in the sixties—and this was a mission where one of the things they were looking at is: Just how revolting and gross and unhygienic does it get to be in this little capsule and sleeping in your spacesuit without a shower, crapping in a bag—is it beyond the tolerance of a human being? And so I interviewed Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 guy. But I wasn’t interested in Apollo 13. I was interested in Gemini 7. And I asked him about some of the yuck stuff, like dandruff. When you don’t shower, all the cells that you exfoliate don’t get washed down the drain. In zero gravity, the dandruff doesn’t fall to the floor or to your shoulder, it just sort of floats, so I asked him if it was sort of like a snow globe in there. I saw someone interview him and he said it was like living in a latrine. He said they had some problems with the urine containment—they had a comment in the mission transcript somewhere that they were doing a urine dump and he said, “Not very much though, most of it ended up in my underwear.”

Actually, speaking of urine, there’s a part in the book where you’re talking about a comment one of the astronauts makes about how amazing the view is, and it’s unclear whether or not he’s talking about the Earth or the crystallized urine.

Yeah, I read that description in at least two memoirs. When they eject the liquid urine it sublimates, and if the sun is hitting it it’s this beautiful—I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but it sounded almost like fireworks or this sparkly beautiful thing, and they would remark on how beautiful this was.

What sort of physical attributes do space agencies look for when selecting astronauts?

Some of the physical attributes are kind of entertaining. In Japan I was talking to the flight surgeon about things that would disqualify you, and he said if you snore a lot that would disqualify you, because it’ll wake everybody up. I also remember reading that the Chinese space agency would disqualify someone with very bad breath. Not because it suggests that you have some problem with tooth decay or gum disease, but because it would be unpleasant for the other astronauts.

And there’s this whole thing where they looked at digestion, right?

There was, yeah. I found this study from the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, and one of these guys suggested that one of the things NASA should consider is what type of intestinal bacteria the person had. Not because of the smell, mind you, but because if you produce methane . . . well, methane is explosive, and hydrogen is as well. I mean, most everybody produces some hydrogen. But one of the things they should look at is how much of your flatus is explosive, since some people have more explosive flatus than others.

Oh, here’s another great one from that same conference. I think people must have been high at this conference. But there was this one guy who said that rather than launching all this food you could launch obese astronauts—that for fifty pounds of weight, that would be one hundred and eighty-four thousand calories you wouldn’t need to carry the food for. So you could just launch them and give them vitamins and let them live off their fat.

Speaking of odd characteristics that you might want for a spaceship crew, what do you think would be some of the advantages of sending a crew of aging, deaf-mute eunuchs into space?

Aging, yes, certainly for a trip to Mars, because you’re going to get a heavy dose of dangerous cosmic radiation, and by the time you get the cancer—if you’re sixty when you left, maybe get the cancer when you’re seventy-five or eighty, and you’re heading toward the end of your life anyway, so that would be a good choice. And eunuchs absolutely. Eunuchs are the way to go—avoid all the soap opera, all the falling in love and the anger and the possible murder and jealousy, definitely. Self-castration is a good position for a Mars mission. And deaf-mute—you mean just so you don’t have to listen to the tedious babblings of your other crew members?

Didn’t you say that would make you immune from space sickness?

Oh yeah, that’s right. The inner ear is what determines whether or not you’re going to get motion sickness. Yeah, deaf-mutes frequently don’t get motion sick. I don’t know exactly what the mechanism is, but they’re frequently immune.

What sort of effects does weightlessness have on the human body, and how long can people last under those conditions?

Weightlessness does a number on the human body. You name an organ, something happens. If you’re just floating instead of walking as a way to get around, your body starts to dismantle your skeleton and your muscles, figuring, “Well, I guess we don’t need these anymore. Let’s streamline things and use this material and our energy more efficiently.” So you lose bone—you become like an old woman.

On a Mars mission, you’re looking at a one-third to one-half drop in bone density, which is pretty scary. When you come back down to Earth gravity, you’d start to regain that, but not necessarily in quite the same way. Some places would remain compromised. In zero gravity, you have less blood, because all the blood floats to the upper half of your body. Not all of it, but you have a lot less in the legs. The sensors in your body that figure out how much blood you have think you have too much because it’s all migrating up. You lose weight, you’re immuno-compromised a bit because you’ve got less blood. Your bladder doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to or the way it’s designed to in Earth gravity, because it’s an organ that works via stretch receptors. When the urine starts to accumulate on the floor of the bladder, when you’re standing up, eventually that pushes the sides out—your stretch receptors are activated, telling your brain it’s time to go pee. Well, that doesn’t happen in zero gravity, because now the urine is floating all around the organ, sort of clinging by surface tension to the whole thing, so by the time the stretch receptors are activated you might have so much urine in the organ that the urethra’s pressed shut. So then you could have a minor medical emergency involving an embarrassing call to the flight surgeon and getting out the catheter kit.

But there’s also the space beauty phenomenon, right?

The space beauty treatment, yes. That has to do with having more fluid in the upper half of the body, so your wrinkles are plumped out. Also, your organs migrate up under your rib cage, so your waist is smaller, your boobs are more pert, and your hair is fuller. But the other thing to bear in mind is that the alternate name for all of this is the “puffy-face chicken-leg syndrome,” so it’s debatable as to how attractive it actually makes you look.

How long could you last in zero gravity?

Well, that depends on if you were ever planning to come back to Earth gravity. If you were going to continue on in zero gravity—if you weren’t going to need your muscles or your bones ever again—you’d be fine. You’re adapting to that situation. The danger comes when you return to Earth. Say you were in a situation where the capsule’s splash down didn’t go right, and you needed to get out quickly because something was on fire, and you’re trying to jump down out of the capsule and run away, and you’ve lost a third of your bone mass—that could be dangerous. And if you’ve been up there for six months or more, then you have to completely readjust your vestibular system. So you’re dizzy, and it seems like everything’s spinning around because the little bones in your inner ear have adapted to weightlessness. So now you come back down and you’re sick and disoriented all over again. It’s called Earth-sickness. And your legs and arms haven’t weighed anything for so long that you literally forget how to use them. That’s what I was told by one of the ISS space station astronauts.

Since you wrote Packing for Mars and you also wrote a book called Bonk, which is about sex, I feel like I should ask you about sex in space. What was it like doing research for that aspect of the book?

Oh, it was very, very entertaining. I spent time in Moscow, in Star City, where the cosmonauts train, and cosmonauts tend to be pretty straightforward. They’re funny, you can ask them anything. So I asked this one guy, Alexander Laveykin, I said, “So, you guys were up on Mir, two guys, for six months. You were a healthy young man then, what do you do about libido? What do you do about sexual urges? Was that a problem?” And he said, “Mary, people ask me this all the time. They say ‘How are you making sex in space?’ And I say, ‘Of course, by hand.’” You know, he’s just very—of course, we jerk off. He also said that the Institute of Biomedical Problems, which is the physiological research institute for the space agency in Russia, thought about sending up inflatable sex toys, and the reason they didn’t is because mission control said, “No, we’re not going to work that into your schedule. We’re just not going to do that.”

In the book you talk about how astronauts might want to eat their clothes and then fly home in a ship covered in feces. That sounds like quite a party.

I don’t think “want” would be the right term there. But yeah, someone proposed that you could make clothing out of edible fibers, and that when the astronauts were done wearing the clothes—presumably when they were dirty enough—that then they could actually eat them, which just sounded ghastly. Someone else suggested that components of the spacecraft that you don’t need on the return could be made of some kind of edible, I don’t know, hydrolyzed protein, that you would then just sort of dig into on the way home.

The business with feces—this was a radiation protection idea, because hydrocarbons are apparently very good at absorbing radiation. You can’t line the thing with lead, it would make it too heavy, so you’d use water, food, and feces. That would add a protective layer. So presumably you’d have some sort of device that would plastinate it, so you wouldn’t be smearing shit all over the interior of the spacecraft. At NASA Ames there’s a machine that makes these tiles, and you would just tile the capsule.

Let’s say you’re a science fiction writer and you wanted to write a scene in which an astronaut aboard a space station goes berserk and whips out a knife and tries to murder his fellow astronauts. What sort of facts about zero gravity should you keep in mind when writing that scene?

If you stab somebody in zero gravity, you’re going to kill them pretty much the way you’re going to kill them on Earth. If you cut an artery, you cut an artery—the heart’s still going to be pumping. It’s going to be pumping the blood out just as it would in Earth gravity.

Would you have any trouble with, say, your body going backward as fast as your arm was going forward? Or would you have trouble penetrating because you’d have no leverage? Stuff like that?

Yeah, that’s the other thing I was thinking, because when you’re out on a spacewalk and you’re trying to tighten a bolt, if you aren’t in a foot restraint and you try to turn a nut you’ll turn instead of the nut. So you have to have something to push against. So if you stab somebody, it isn’t going to be the same sensation because you’re not anchored to the ground in the same way. So yeah, you might want to practice first on a melon or something.

And if you were to make your first cut, would the blood just start coming out and obscuring your view?

Well, if you cut an artery, the blood isn’t going to drop, it’s not going to do the same thing as on Earth. It would start forming a sphere—a blobby-looking thing. Showers don’t work in zero gravity—the water just comes out and starts making a growing blob.

How about if instead of a knife it was a machine gun?

Well, now you risk losing pressurization of your spacecraft. Hopefully it’s made of Kevlar or something quite durable, but I wouldn’t want to try using any sort of armor-penetrating bullets, because you’re going to penetrate the spacecraft and then you’ve lost pressurization and everybody dies. And the kickback. That would be quite an interesting ride for the person holding the gun, because it would fire you backward.

But that reminds me—there’s a myth that if you fart in zero gravity, it works like rocket propellant and would “propel you across the mid-deck.” That was the rumor, and one astronaut I interviewed said he didn’t buy it, because he said that human lungs hold more air than the average fart, and when you exhale it doesn’t blow you back, and so he didn’t believe it. And he—he must have eaten a bunch of beans—he said he had “a real voluminous and rapidly expelled purge”—those were his words—and he said, “I failed to move noticeably.” There’s a debate among people I’ve talked to, but he said, no, he tried it. He was wearing pants, though, because it was a mixed-gender mission . . .

Hopefully he would wear pants anyway.

Yeah, but he thought that wearing the pants might have interfered with the cleanness of the expulsion and compromised his thrust. So . . .

Not a valid experiment.

Yeah. He promised he’d ask other people, but I never heard back.

Do you know of any fistfights breaking out on space missions?

What I was told when I was in Star City is that fistfights—they have this term, a “friendly fistfight.” Fistfights are kind of how you settle things, and it isn’t a huge deal the way it would be here in the United States. And so I’ve heard that there have been fistfights on Mir, but I don’t have the details. Somebody at NASA Ames told me that that’s sometimes how they’ve solved disputes.

What would they do on the International Space Station if one person died, and the rest of the crew was still there?

If they were in orbit they could send up an orbiter like the shuttle and they could remove the body and bring it down, and the family could do whatever they’re going to do in terms of a memorial service. It becomes a little trickier if, say, you’re on a Mars mission. It’s an eight month trip, what are you going to do? I did a guest post on Boing Boing about this. There’s a device, and it’s just—there hasn’t been a prototype built, but there was a paper that was done jointly with NASA and these folks I met when I was doing Stiff, who do the freeze-drying and composting method in Sweden. And they came up with something where basically you’d put the body in the airlock and freeze it solid, and then it would vibrate it into small pieces, and you’d put the powder in this little pod and basically pull it behind the spacecraft until you’re reentering Earth’s atmosphere. And then to keep it from cremating you’d bring it back on board, and then when you land you’d present it to the family. It would be small, something that could be carried by two people. It was called Body Back, that’s the name of the system.

What are some of your favorite science fiction books and movies?

Oh, I loved THX 1138. I want to see that again. I just recently saw Moon with Sam Rockwell, which I liked a lot. I’m a fan of Ray Bradbury, although not so much the space stuff. I like some of his stories, like that weird one where the guy gets his skeleton pulled out through his mouth by this woman who has—you know, her hair falling over her face in this sort of sexy way for the whole story, and then it turns out it’s hiding this hideous mouthpiece that comes out. And “The Veldt,” I love that story. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. That was pretty impressive in terms of its accuracy. It seemed like a really accurate scenario for the psychological as well as the technological stuff. And 2001 obviously I love.

When you’re talking to NASA employees and astronauts, did any of them ever talk about science fiction?

I do remember seeing a list of all the books that are on the International Space Station, and there’s a ton of science fiction. There were a lot of science fiction books up there that people read, so clearly it’s popular stuff for astronauts.

Were there any big misconceptions you had from watching movies about astronauts, so that when you were doing research for this book anything came as a big surprise to you?

I had no idea until I started this book that when you’re heading to the moon or to Mars, you’re essentially coasting. I thought it was like a car where you’d have your foot on the gas the entire time, and I used to think, “Jesus, that’s a lot of gas. How do they do that?” I didn’t realize that the initial blast propels you, and you get escape velocity, and then you’re just coasting because there’s no air resistance, nothing to slow you down, so you just keep on coasting all the way. That was just amazing to me, and for some reason—maybe cartoons that show exhaust coming out of rockets—I had this misconception about how rockets worked.

I mean, that’s really basic stuff. Just shows you how completely ignorant I am at the start of every book.

So are there any other recent or upcoming projects you’re working on that you’d like to mention?

Oh, I am working on a new book, but I’m keeping it under my hat for now.

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as 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 2011 Hugo Award-nominee for Best Editor (Short Form), his books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. 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, and is the other co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in New York.

Artist Showcase: Randy Gallegos
Erin Stocks

Illustrating professionally since the age of nineteen, Randy Gallegos is no novice at drawing readers into new worlds through his art, exemplified by this month’s cover issue of Lightspeed. His work can be found prominently in the fantasy gaming realm, including Magic: The Gathering, and if you browse his website, you’ll find pieces from Rorschach to Dungeons & Dragons-inspired art to the Judges Choice at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, “The Sacrifice.”

In this Artist Showcase interview, we asked him to tell us a bit about his creative process and about the background of his cover for the 2012 Lightspeed ebook Sampler, “Embryonic,” which originally appeared as the cover of our June 2011 issue.

“Embryonic” is a fantastic title for this piece. Is there a story behind it?

“Embryonic” is more a reflection of a feeling I’ve often felt when seeing video of space walks or photos of astronauts. The way they float, the slowness of movements, the way they seem so tiny and almost helpless in the vastness of space—these sorts of things have long felt to me to have a fascinating analogy with the unborn. Add to it the lifelines that accompanied particularly older spacesuits, and their resemblance to umbilical cords, and my inspiration was complete. Photos of fetuses in-utero often have eerie backlighting and a reddish cast, and so this was reflected in the nebula behind. The painting hangs horizontally with the figure floating in such a way that she would normally be falling, but which also adds to the feeling of suspension.

Can you give us an idea of what goes into creating a painting like this?

First, I had to bring together the ideas that I wanted to express, as above. From there, small “thumbnail” sketches are done, to move quickly from composition to composition until I find one that suits the idea well. Depending on the subject matter, reference-hunting begins then, which often includes photographing models. These things are spread out on my monitor and then I produce a pencil or charcoal drawing which will serve as a basis for the final painting. There are often intermediate stages before committing to paint. Working in traditional media is by nature slower than digital, and mistakes are more time-consuming to fix, therefore it’s important for me to have a good idea, a blueprint or map to guide me along the way. Though I often allow myself the freedom to make spontaneous changes along the way, I can’t simply create digital layers and swap them out, or utilize other time-saving digital tools. I can always do post-scan corrections, but I prefer to paint what I intend and let it stand.

Your gallery seems to primarily feature individuals, and portraits, rather than wider scoped works such as landscapes. Is that what you prefer to paint?

Not necessarily, I enjoy environmental work, although I prefer a human aspect even to work that has more environment over just painting a futuristic cityscape void of figures, for instance. It depends on the description given to me by a client—often, they are character pieces. When those assignments are for projects like Magic: The Gathering or other card games that reproduce very tiny, if the focus is a character, I’ll minimize environment to keep the image readable. For some story illustrations, like “The Unknown God” for Realms of Fantasy, the scene was referenced in the text, and with more space to play with (a full-page illustration), it was great to able to include more environment. “The Sacrifice” would be another occasion for a fuller environment.

How does a typical piece for you originate? Do you have a stockpile of ideas that paint themselves out, or do commissions keep you busy?

Both. In the past, I worked very hard to keep a nonstop calendar of client work, even if it was small or low-paying jobs filling in short gaps between larger ones, just to keep the security of earning some income at every opportunity. Eventually, I started just using those gaps instead to work on larger studio works, and found that even though they went unpaid at the time, the originals themselves sold more readily, and this gave me confidence to do them more often, or even to allow myself a week or two here and there through the year where I would make a point not to book every slot that might appear, too allow for that type of work.

Where do you look for inspiration?

I try to take in lots of art, whether in person at museums or books. I also find it important to keep up some with the rapidly changing world of my contemporaries, though I find I’m most influenced by older work these days. Music is often useful as well, for setting the tone for certain pieces as I work them, or for creating an appropriate aural environment for dreaming up new concepts. “Embryonic” was aided by this process, as it turns out—a few years before painting it, when the idea itself was forming, I sat down with the album “Particles and Waves” by Cranes, which was very helpful. A few tracks on there were instrumental in my coming up with this image.

What are you working on now?

I’m wrapping up a small-press book cover, and also working on some new Magic: The Gathering stuff.

Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. Her fiction can be found in the upcoming anthology Anywhere but Earth by Coeur de Lion, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review.

Artist Gallery: Randy Gallegos

The Old Equations
Jake Kerr

“Imagination defined the advance of physics in the twentieth century. Although we were enticed by the less challenging models of minor thinkers like Einstein, science reached higher, and the era of quantum mechanics changed civilization. Naturally, very few remember Einstein these days—he died during the First World War, after publishing a widely ignored theory that would have set physics back centuries—and instead our future has been shaped by the models developed by visionaries such as Planck, Schrödinger, and Jain.”

—Pascal Delacroix, Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, Cambridge, from 500 Years of Physics, Oxford Press, 2187

May 5, 2193

My dearest James,

Surprise! Yes, the final item on your launch checklist is this special message from me.

I miss you already. But you know that. What you don’t know is just how proud I am of you. You were born for this, and no one could possibly be able to handle such a demanding job as well as you. I saw the joy in your eyes when we agreed in your taking the mission. Although I cried and complained, and it seemed like I hated the idea, the reality is that, more than anything, I was and am happy for you. I guess I was just scared—I’m still scared, but I know that this is how our life was meant to be. I’m prepared for it. And proud. Did I mention I’m proud of you?

Know that even while we are millions of miles apart, my heart will always be with you. Ten years is not so long. I’m sad that for most of the journey I won’t be able to hear from you, but you’ll be able to hear from me, and that’s more than some people have, isn’t it?

So this is the first of many, many reminders of the person you are leaving back on Earth, and also of the love that you are bringing with you.

I love you so much,

~Kate

Jimbo,

Your wife left me like no room to leave a note on this damn page. Incredibly proud of you, man. Jealous, too, you lucky bastard! I told Marsden to let me hit you with news from home, but he said no dice. Short messages from control and your wife only. Guess you won’t know the winner of the next ten Super Bowls until you get home, as your wife sure as hell won’t be mentioning it! Anyway, going to miss you, man. I’ll keep the beer cold. Tony

May 6, 2193—E-LC transmission

14:23:31: Testy test test test. askdfjowig. Yeah, this is a fucking test.

14:23:58: Sorry about that, Colonel. All systems are working perfectly on our end. First sail calibration is still set for 4 June. General Marsden wants us to get through a few more days of testing the QE comlink, so you won’t hear from your wife as soon as you may like, but don’t be alarmed. Just to clarify, because you seemed concerned before liftoff—we’re still planning on sticking to the original schedule of odd days being hers and even days ours. Marsden made it very clear that we’re not to take any of your personal message time unless it was critical. Thought you’d like to hear that. Smitty [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

May 9, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:03:32: James, it’s me. Kate. Wow, this is so weird. I’m writing to you, and you’re out there in space. Sorry I haven’t written, but General Marsden wanted to get all the systems with the sail and monitors and stuff perfect first. I guess I’m glad that he’s using the word “perfect.” It makes me worry a little less.

I told Tony that it must be beautiful to watch the planets float by, and he laughed and said you are basically encased in lead with no windows. You never told me that. You made it sound so romantic, and now it sounds oppressive. I hope that you are able to keep that sparkle in your eyes for the whole trip, despite the conditions. It was always there whenever you looked in the sky. Remember that, James. Whenever things get tough, remember me holding your hand as you looked up at the sky, the stars reflecting in your eyes.

It’s only been a few days, and I can’t wait to hear from you on the fourth. Don’t worry—I can handle ten years, as long as I can hear from you. I’m running out of space. Love you so very mu [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

May 23, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:02:18: Sorry I didn’t write last time. It is awful that I’m only allowed to sit down at 6 and can only write a few paragraphs every other day. Anyway, I shouldn’t use the space to complain! Amy had a performance at school at 4:30, and your sister would have killed me if I missed it. I couldn’t get to the base until almost 7 because of traffic. General Marsden said I couldn’t even send you an “I love you,” and he wouldn’t give me a make-up day. Sometimes I hate the stick up his ass, but then I remember that it’s one of the things helping keep you alive, so I try to be thankful.

Anyway, I’m very excited that I’ll be able to get a message from you soon, but General stick-up-his-ass (kidding!) says not to expect more than a few words as this is your first time setting up your comlink. Still, even a few words will be a blessing. I miss you horribly, and it’s only been three weeks. Ten years seems almost unbearable now. Sorry to be such a downer. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I hear from you next week.

Love, ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 4, 2193—E-LC transmission

12:03:01: Jim, it’s Mars. Did the sail calibrate? Were you able to initiate the quantum link? I’ll assume you’re having some com problems. Let us know what went wrong with the process when you get the link established. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

15:32:54: Jim, are you okay? We’re still waiting to hear from you. I’m going to kill Ollie if he didn’t account for something on your quantum pair. I’ll be up until we hear from you. We don’t want to stress our QE link with too many messages, so don’t make me keep hassling you, soldier. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

19:02:17: Jim, I’m going to go against all of my instincts and assume the best. I’m working from the theory that you didn’t have time to get the link initiated with calibration going on. Understandable. I’m hoping for the best next month. I’ll tell everyone that it was a communication issue and that everything is fine. Don’t fucking make a liar out of me or I’ll kick your ass. Mars [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:42:12: Hello? I sure hope to hell this thing is working. What the fuck is happening back on Earth? Why are you sending messages at all hours? Half of them don’t even make sense. I thought you were going to do one message a day at 18:00? Why are you guys so worried about this calibration? It’s going perfectly. This isn’t Tony fooling around is it? I can’t believe Mars would let him do that. Jesus. Someone better answer. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

June 4, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:59:33: Colonel, this is Smitty. General Marsden and your wife have already left. You’re almost eight hours late. What happened? We can’t send through any more messages due to the strain on the QE link, so we’ll have to catch up next calibration. Just give us a status update, and we’ll figure it out next time. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:43:41: What the hell are you talking about Smitty? I’m 43 minutes late, which is within the range we considered as acceptable before I left. I’m looking at the clock right now. Shit, I don’t want to wait another month to talk to Kate. Can’t believe you guys fucked this up on our very first calibration.

Anyway, all readings are normal except for distance traveled. It’s off slightly. I’ll have more data for the next calibration. Just don’t fuck it up next time, and make sure Kate is there. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

June 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:00:04: I am so mad, but I’m not sure if I should be mad at you or the idiots who planned this mission. How could it take you so long to set up the quantum link? This is killing me, and now I have to wait another month. Argh! At least you’re okay. I was so scared when they said something was wrong and I missed you, but General Marsden was so calm and kind. Tony told me that sometimes that even though the buttons are shiny or new it doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally get stuck. I laughed, but I’m not sure that it made me feel better.

Ugh, here I am venting at you again, and you’re the one who’s all alone in space. Sorry! I am so proud of you, and I love you.

Oh, I’m supposed to tell you that your Uncle Bill broke his leg skateboarding. Your dad said you’d laugh at that. Everyone here wants me to pass along messages and stories. I’m watching your friends and family share their life with me. It makes me feel closer to you, James, even though you are so far away. I love you so much. Please make sure that everything is [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 16, 2193—E-LC transmission

12:03:34: Colonel, you need to make sure the comlink is set up by 16:00:00. Not to put any pressure on you, but it’s so the President can talk to you. General Marsden will have more details later. Oh, and a reminder, Kate’s scheduled session tomorrow was kicked by General Marsden so we can send you the latest data points on the sail calibration. You’ll hear from her on 19 June and then we pick up the normal schedule. Smitty [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 22, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:01:33: Jim, it’s Mars. The President wants to communicate with you on the next sail calibration. Yeah, I’m sure you noticed it’s the fourth of July, and yes it means you won’t be able to send a message to Kate. You wanted to be the hero? Well, look here—you’re the hero. Anyway, just be your normal “oh golly” humble self. It’s one of the things that I hate about you but everyone seems to find endearing, so you have my permission to be yourself. Just this once.

Not sure what Kate is saying, as I’ve forbidden anyone from accessing her logs. Whatever you say is between you and her. I just wanted to say that she’s being a real trooper. Seems strong. Pissed as all hell about the com issues, but I can’t blame her. Anyway, she seems okay. Shit, I don’t know about women, dammit. All I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t worry about her. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

June 23, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:00:41: Well, they finally told me, and I’m both proud and angry. Mostly angry, to be honest. I can’t stand that I’ll have to wait another month to hear from you because you’ll be talking to the president. Of course it IS the president, which is a bit overwhelming. I have to admit that I’m getting quite a bit of attention over your mission, and now the president is going to talk to my James on the fourth of July because he’s a hero and inspiration. Is it bad that I’m kind of thrilled that I’m being asked to do talk shows? I know that sounds so shallow, but talking about you to others makes you feel closer somehow. Ha, that almost sounds like I’m rationalizing this celebrity thing, but honestly it’s not. If I can’t talk to you, I can at least talk ABOUT you.

I was invited to dinner by Tony and Gwen this evening. They’ll ask about you, and I don’t know what I’ll say. Because I don’t know. But it’s nice that they ask. They care, you know?

I’m still angry about not talking to you. Maybe if I ask the President he’ll say s [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 3, 2193—E-LC transmission

17:59:44: M. says I only have 50 characters. Love you! ~Kate

18:03:07: Colonel, all systems are fine on our end. I sure hope you can get the comlink initiated tomorrow. We finally got all the data from your first missed broadcast, and the only issue was the slight calibration error on distance. Beyond that things look good. The systems on the ship haven’t so much as hiccupped. Just make sure you get that communication link set up ASAP. Smitty [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 4, 2193—E-LC transmission

15:21:21: Jim, please tell me you’ll have the comlink set up soon. I’m forbidding anyone from coming near the com station until I hear from you. You know what to do, soldier! Mars [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

15:44:03: Jim, we just checked every fucking scan, transmission, assessment, and data point, and everything looks normal. Please get on the line within the next 15 minutes. I told the president that it would probably be good to wait, but he’s adamant. He wants to go live with you at 16:00. LIVE. Mars [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

16:00:00: Colonel Murphy, this is President Wallace. I just wanted to say how proud we are of you. You embody the true American spirit! [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

16:00:12: They are telling me that there may be sunspots affecting our conversation, and that I may not get a response from you. How unfortunate, I was hoping to hear how beautiful space must be as you fly past at such extraordinary speed. I wonder if you see out your window what we think of when we think of America—truth and beauty quickly passing us by as we look forward to an even better future. But we should stop and enjoy the view, don’t you think Colonel? [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

16:00:41: I’m sure your view is beautiful. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

16:00:47: It is unfortunate we can’t hear of it due to the sun. Perhaps next time, Colonel. Remember, all of America is proud of you. God bless you, and God bless America. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

16:23:28: Jim, I’m cutting the link for today, but I’ll have Smitty monitor the line in case we hear from you. Don’t expect to hear from Kate for a few days. All the messages today put a strain on the quantum link. Sorry. Mars. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 5, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:06:18: Colonel, I don’t know if you’re there, but we’re seeing normal readings across the board. General Marsden has everyone believing in the sunspots story, but what is really going on? We’re returning to the normal com schedule on 7 July. You’ll hear from Kate then. Smitty [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 6, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:01:08: Jim, I fear the worst, but I’m not against giving everyone one more month of hope. Hell, I need another month of hope. Readings are normal, so there is that. I expect this is your ineptitude and not anything worse. I’ll forgive ineptitude this once. Just don’t let it happen in August. Please. Mars. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

17:59:32: Dearest James, I am so sorry you haven’t heard from me. General Marsden wouldn’t let me talk to you until the sunspot interference died down. He said you wouldn’t even get the messages. I guess I yelled a bit, but he put his foot down. Sometimes I hate that man. But don’t worry, I’m okay. I was just so worried. Not hearing from you is killing me inside. First it’s normal first run mistakes, and now it’s sunspots. I haven’t heard from you in over two months!

Please please please tell me you’re okay, and you’ll be able to talk to me soon? Please? I know you’re okay. I just want to hear it. I love you. ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:33:12: Kate, are you there? I just got your message. Is everything okay? I can’t make sense of half of what you are saying to me, and I’m now getting a couple messages a day. Have you guys changed the schedule? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

July 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:03:28: Holy shit, Colonel, am I glad to hear from you! It’s Smitty. We’ve been worried sick. What happened on 4 July, and why are you contacting us now? The next calibration is weeks away. Is something wrong? [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:35:22: Smitty, I have no idea what you are talking about. The calibration is going on right now. How could I have missed it? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

12:57:22: Smitty, you there? I only have a few hours before I need to shut down. Where’s Kate? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

July 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:53:47: Jim, it’s Mars. Sorry I took so long. I have communications locked down due to all these issues, and it took me a while to get here. I just went over the logs, and I am completely lost. Are you saying it’s 4 July right now? [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:23:11: Mars, I’m not in the mood for jokes. I’m looking at the computer screen right now, and it’s 4 July. What the hell are you guys up to? Can you get Kate on the line? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

July 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:54:53: I’ll get Kate on the line at ASAP, but right now I need to figure this out. What’s your location? [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

July 4, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:24:02: That’s what I can’t understand, Mars. The instruments don’t match up. Acceleration is perfect—constant since launch, but I’ve covered even more distance than the revisions from the last calibration, and way more than our initial estimates. Just checked it three times. Something’s out of whack. And now the clock thing is getting worse. I know there were some unknowns, but this is fucked up beyond all belief. And why is the message frequency now several times a day? With the augmentation to handle the G forces Archer said to expect some disorientation, but this is ridiculous. Hell, I FEEL perfectly normal. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

July 7, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:57:01: I don’t know, Jim. We need more time to figure this out. Let me get the guys on it until the next calibration. Maybe you went through a particle field or something else we don’t know about, and it has affected some instruments and your perceptions. Look, we can’t stress the QE link any more. Every time we exchange multiple messages, it becomes unstable. I’ll tell Kate we got a short update from you, but let’s not let her know there are any problems. I don’t want to worry you, but she’s been extremely tense after missing the first two comlinks.

I’m just glad you’re okay. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

August 3, 2193—E-LC transmission

19:54:33: James, Mars is making me leave, so if you get the link set up make him get me. MAKE HIM. I NEED to hear from you. I understand that there is something wrong with your instruments or something, so I don’t blame you. But you MUST be here for the September calibration. I desperately miss you. I love you so much. ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

August 3, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:14:20: Smitty, you there? We clearly have major problems, but that can wait. Get Kate. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

August 14, 2193—E-LC transmission

02:44:04: Colonel, this is Davis. It’s 3 AM here and everyone is asleep. But don’t worry. General Marsden made it clear—if you contacted us the first call was to your wife and the next one was to him. We’ll get her here for you, sir.

04:08:44: James, are you there? I’ve missed you so much! I can’t believe I get to hear from you early! General Marsden says we only have a couple of exchanges, so I’ll just say a few words and then let you speak. Oh God, how I’ve missed your voice—seeing your words. Are you getting my messages? Are you okay? Can I do anything for you?

Please respond quickly. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

August 3, 2193—LC-E transmission

14:39:23: Kate, I’m here. I love you and miss you, too. More than you can possibly imagine. Yes, I’ve gotten every single one of your wonderful, maddening, crazy, loving messages. I love that Tony and Gwen are expecting. I love that you hate Mars one day and appreciate him the next. (I’m the same way, as if you didn’t know that). I love that on some days you tell me the most wonderful details of your life—our life—and other days you just vent.

I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine, and everything is perfect on this amazing ship. The worst part is being without you and our friends, but other than that I just have to deal with boredom. Being alone can be hard. I can’t deny that. But this is all just temporary. We’re already past a chunk of time. Nine or ten years still seems monumentally long. I know that. But it’s not so long that we’ll miss our lives together. When I get back you’ll be 38, and I’ll be 40. We can still have kids. We can run off to Venice or just sleep in and watch TV.

I wish I had more to say, but you know me—I’ve never [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

14:46:02: Dammit. I hate the character limits on this quantum shit. Anyway, I was going to say that I’ve never been one for lots of talking and here I am running out of characters. I guess I will need to figure this out if we’re only going to talk every 30 days.

I love you, Kate. I miss you. James [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

August 14, 2193—E-LC transmission

04:23:38: I’m crying, James. Damn you, you made me cry and Smith and General Marsden will be in here soon. I hate when people see me cry!

I love you so much. ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

August 14, 2193—E-LC transmission

04:32:42: Jim, it’s Mars. We’ve pulled in every analyst and expert we could find. It turns out the initial thought of this being due to an astronomical anomaly isn’t possible. We had both engineers and statisticians go through the cosmological data, and there is nothing out of the ordinary. I mean nothing. We did confirm your assessment. One or more of your gauges is out of calibration. That could also account for some of your disorientation.

With that in mind I need to gather more data from you in terms of your perceptions the next time we have a link. Honestly, I’d like to peg you as crazy and call it a day, but with gauges out of calibration you could be right. Maybe we’re the crazy ones. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

August 16, 2193—E-LC transmission

16:32:44: Colonel, we almost lost the QE link on 14 August. We’re still working out the limits, but it looks like we’re going to have to hold the monthly exchanges to 2 incoming/2 outgoing. General Marsden says this will give you one exchange with your wife and one for us. It’s not a lot, but the quantum entanglement is very unstable. We can’t risk breaking the connection. Next message coming 19 August. Smitty [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 2, 2193—E-LC transmission

12:02:33: Colonel, it’s Smitty. Did you get the link set up? We’re hoping you got your ship clocks calibrated correctly during the last link. I’m standing by. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 3, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:00:04: I hate sunspots! I’m so depressed. All I want to do is see your words. Your words! How hard is that? They said you would be able to talk to me every month, and here it is month four, and I’ve heard from you once. ONCE! I tried to get General Marsden to maybe see about setting up the comlink next week instead of the long wait. I even told him I’d swap two weeks of sending messages just to hear from you, but he wouldn’t even consider it.

I don’t know what to do, James. I feel so powerless. I live and speak to you in the vacuum of space, and then—nothing. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 4, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:18:14: Jim, it’s Mars. I was afraid you wouldn’t hook up with us on 2 September, but I’m not surprised. All of us are pretty much just waiting until we hear from you, whenever that is. I’m still not telling Kate that we have some kind of unknown problem, but I’m sure she’s already covered that with you multiple times. Needless to say, I’m not her favorite person in the world right now.

I’m assuming that we have a few weeks until we get a link. The physicists want me to ask you to keep very close track of our incoming messages. We need you to log them in the computer and stamp them with your arrival time. Have that handy when we talk. I’ll have Doctor Singh with me next time, and he’ll be asking you about the variations between our time stamps and yours. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 5, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:02:32: I’m so sorry about the other day. I NEVER feel like I’m not talking to you, especially after what you said last month. I was just sad and frustrated and not having the best day. I saw Jackie Merriweather holding hands with her new boyfriend, and it made me so intensely jealous. And then I can’t talk to you, so not only can’t I hold your hand, I can’t even read your words.

I’m thinking this is one of those venting messages, so I should just sign off. Why did we ever agree to this?

I do love you so very much. ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 13, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:02:02: Happy thirtieth birthday, my love. We had a celebration at the house, and your dad flew in from Phoenix. Isn’t that great? We thought rehabilitation would take months, but there he was. We let him blow out your candles. He blew out every single one, although he coughed a bit at the end. He laughed and said that he may not be as strong as he once was, but he’d live long enough to see his son return from Gliese 581 d! Isn’t that great?

I read your message at the party. It’s the first time I’ve shared it with anyone. I’ve been kind of keeping it to myself as my special thing, but the time seemed right to share it with others. Your words didn’t leave many dry eyes. Tony said to bank on the sleeping in and watching TV more than Venice, which got a laugh.

I’m getting nervous about October 2, but I’m starting to understand that space travel is something you simply can’t predict. As General Marsden says—there are just so many variables. Still, please be there. Love, ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

15:58:13: Anyone there? Of all times to have shit get messed up, it has to be now. Not sure what your time stamp shows, but I’m four hours behind schedule on getting the link up. Sail calibration is almost done, so we have to talk fast. Smitty? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

September 29, 2193—E-LC transmission

17:13:23: Jim, it’s Mars. Thank God you’re safe. I almost gave up hope when you missed the 2 September calibration and link.

We need to get this problem solved. Do you have the time stamps? I’m calling for Professor Singh. Hopefully he’s nearby. He needs to know how closely they match up. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

16:09:58: Christ, this is fucked up. Anyway, I have the time stamps. They show incoming at increasing intervals. They started at one per day and are now coming in at nearly twice a day. I also followed up on the doctor’s recommendations and logged my sleep cycle and have done daily cognitive tests. Normal across the board.

Is Kate there? [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

September 29, 2193—E-LC transmission

17:58:55: Colonel Murphy, this is Doctor Singh. Are the time differences random or is there some kind of order to them? Do you have any other things that appear to be out of phase? Also, can you remember feeling any anomalies? It may even be as slight as a flash in your eyes or a tingle on your skin.

Jim, it’s Mars. Kate’s in the other room. I’ll bring her in after you send your answers to Doctor Singh. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

16:46:09: Hard to tell, Doc. The times appear random, but when I look at them as a whole, they appear to be slowly increasing in frequency. And, yes, the whole fucking flight appears to be out-of-phase. I’m somehow covering more distance without our acceleration calculations being off. I’m starting to think I’m going crazy, because there have been no flashes and no tingling. Nothing like that. Beyond the bizarre data we’re seeing this trip couldn’t be more normal. I guess that’s good for Ollie and his team, but it makes for frustrating troubleshooting. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

September 29, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:04:49: James, what is happening??? I haven’t heard from you in almost two months! Is everything okay? I’m so afraid for you, James.

General Marsden said you only have a few minutes. I could kill him for making me wait nearly all this time and then telling me you only have a few minutes. I want to hear hours of your thoughts, your dreams, and your words, but I get just minutes. I’ll shut up. Please just let me see your words and imagine your voice as you tell me you’re okay. Please. Quickly. Please. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

September 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

16:51:12: I have just a few moments, but it’s not Mars’ fault. I couldn’t get the comlink initiated until it was four hours late. I loved your birthday message. I must say that Tony was wrong—after ten years apart, I can drag my ass out of bed for a trip to Venice.

You know, I figured the one thing that what would keep me going would be your messages. But now that there have been problems I realize that I want—I need—to have you see MY messages, too. It’s the only way I can make sure you know I exist.

I think of you constantly. I think of our past, and I think of our future. I like to think of the more mature, elegant, and beautiful woman who will be waiting for me when I return. Of course, here is where you ask why you aren’t elegant, mature, or beautiful now, and I don’t have an answer for that, because you are.

I guess the point is that I want to remind you that I think of our future. That’s what gets me through the day—your messages from the present, and my dreams for our future.

I need to go. I have so much I want [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

December 12, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:32:13: Jim, it’s Mars. I’m sorry for all the dead ends, but I think we’ve found something. One of the physicists in Bern remembers a crackpot theoretical physicist from 200 years ago named Albert Einstein. He was an amateur who died during World War One after publishing a handful of theories that no one took seriously. The thing is that they kind of match what we’re seeing here. On the extremely off chance that this guy was actually right, we’re looking into it.

It’s something, at least.

He just gave me the briefing this afternoon, and I don’t understand 90% of it. I’ll have him dumb it down even more and then I’ll explain it to you in the next uplink. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 14, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:11:28: Jim, it’s Mars. The physicists are actually excited about this Einstein lead. I still can’t understand half of it, but the essence is that time is not a constant, it’s relative to the speed of light, which is the actual constant. What this means is that the faster you travel and the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes for you.

Okay, here’s the kicker, and here is what is getting all the brainiacs excited. His theory basically says that as you are increasing in speed, time will slow down by a specific ratio, and that’s what we’re seeing with the messages. We have a ton more calculations to run through, and no one is sure how this integrates with quantum physics, but CERN is saying they are going to do some practical tests on this crazy theory, but it looks like the crackpot could actually have been a genius.

This is going to be difficult to grasp, but I want you to think long and hard about what this means for you. I won’t say more than that. I’ll have more later. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 16, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:08:00: Jim, it’s Mars. The scientists didn’t screw around. Every test they ran confirmed Einstein’s theory. Hell, you’re a living confirmation of the theory. I hope you did what I asked and thought about this, because the scenario is not good, buddy.

All our calculations anticipated you passing the speed of light to make this trip in ten years. You will not pass the speed of light. You will approach it, but you won’t be able to go faster. Einstein figured it out, and CERN just confirmed it. It’s impossible. I can’t be more blunt than this, Jim: Your mission will now take 41 years from our perspective.

Okay, that’s not all. You mentioned how you are covering more ground than you expected, and you’ve seen these messages come to you faster and faster. That’s because space is warping at the speed you are traveling. I still can’t believe this, but here’s the kicker: From your perspective, the trip will take only 5 years. As I said, time is slowing down for you.

This has a dramatic impact on this project, but it also h [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

18:14:47: I’m going to risk another transmission, because this is so important. Jim, this has a dramatic impact not just on the mission but you personally. When you arrive back on Earth, it will be 5 years from now for you, but we’ll all be 41 years older. I’m so sorry.

I’m going to let Kate know over breakfast tomorrow. She’ll have plenty of time before your transmission, which should be in a few weeks. Mars [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 17, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:00:44: General Marsden told me.

I spent all day thinking about it, and I think it’s a load of shit. Time has no meaning? Space can be stretched? I asked questions. Lots and lots of questions, James. And the scientists all give me the same answers, but their answers don’t scream “time dilation” (which is what they’re calling it) to me. They scream “someone fucked up and is covering their ass.”

Sorry. I just am very frustrated on your behalf. Don’t worry, I’ll push and push until we see something that makes sense.

There is absolutely no way that I’m not going to see you for forty years. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 21, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:03:01: James, I did some research on this Einstein fellow. Did you know that he died before quantum physics? The core branch of science for the past 200 years, and this crazy guy didn’t even consider it. THIS is who we are looking to for guidance on a communication issue?

Also, Doctor Singh told me that they still have no idea how our quantum link is working across space and time. He actually told me that you are a “quantum reference point,” and so you are talking to us in the future. After hearing that, how can we take them seriously?

You know me, James. I’ll dig and claw and fight until I get the truth. I know you’re okay, but someone messed up something, and I’ll find out. Next link let’s skip the personal stuff and get to the bottom of the problem. You’re right there and probably know what’s going on. We can solve this even if the scientists can’t.

Your father called, but I haven’t had time to call him back. At your birthday party, he asked if he could talk with you, but I’m not sure General Marsden would allow i [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

October 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:44:39: Smitty, this is Colonel Murphy. Link is set up. I want you to get Kate on the line ASAP. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

December 26, 2193—E-LC transmission

14:48:12: Colonel, this is Smitty. Glad to hear from you. I’m going to get General Marsden. Hold tight.

15:13:59: Jim, it’s Mars. Kate is here, but first I’m handing control over to Doctor Archer. She knows she has only one transmission, so pay attention to every word.

15:14:19: Colonel, your initial assessment was for a 10 year mission. While that is now shorter for you, the circumstances on Earth have changed radically. Your expectations on return have to be completely altered. I have confidence that you will be able to handle the strain, but I need you to be honest with us and honest with yourself. Please share any fears, concerns, or other psychological problems or issues you are facing, no matter how small. We will do our best to provide for them, even with this difficult means of communication.

Be strong. But be honest with yourself. When you return, you are not going to see the wife, family, or friends you expect. Some may not be alive. Colonel, I handled your initial screening, and I know you can handle this challenge. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

October 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:11:39: No shit, doc. Put Kate on. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

December 26, 2193—E-LC transmission

15:15:45: James, I have missed you so much! I have nothing to say. You’ve seen my words for months, and I’ve seen nothing from you, so please just tell me you’re okay! [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

October 2, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:12:00: Kate, I’m perfectly fine, but please pay attention to this very carefully. I know you don’t believe it, but you must. They explained the theory behind the old equations that the physicists are discussing, and while they are strange, the concepts are clear and make sense. I’m so sorry, Kate, but this is how things are. I don’t want them to be, but they are. Trust me. Relativity is real. I can’t go faster than the speed of light. Time dilation is real. All of it is real. I see it every day. Every day I receive multiple messages from Earth. It is wonderful to have the constant communication, but it is sad to watch time fly by.

Please believe me. It is much better for us to talk about our new plans and how we are going to deal with that than pretending it isn’t real. I love you so much that the last thing I want to do is hurt you, and I know this is probably hurting you. But we can get past this.

We cannot be sad. We cannot be angry. We need to just find a way to deal with what life has dealt us. We WILL see each [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

13:06:44 : We will see each other again, my love. Talk to Doctor Archer or Mars. They can give you perspective. Mars told me that I can’t reply more than twice due to lack of stability of the quantum entanglement, but this is important, Kate. Let’s not look at the problems. Let’s look ahead at the answers. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

December 31, 2193—E-LC transmission

18:01:03: James, I don’t want you to worry. I was being selfish and I let my emotions get in the way of thinking clearly. I spent a long time talking to General Marsden, and I understand time dilation now. You know me—I’m not one to just sit back and give up. Don’t be mad, but I asked him about abandoning the mission. He wouldn’t even consider it. I don’t want to belabor the point, because I know you won’t agree, but I really think that with everything all screwed up that they should turn you around and bring you home.

Anyway, maybe he told you, but if not—that isn’t going to happen.

Believe me, James, I am thinking. Maybe they can send another ship that I can be on to join you? It’s not that crazy. Maybe we could live on Gliese 581 d as the first colonists. They’ve done husband and wife missions before, right? God, 41 years is so long. That’s longer than I’ve been alive! I’m sorry. I know it is hard for you, too. But will you love me when I’m old? Will you even know me? I’m sorry. Happy New Year, my love, although I k [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED – MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

January 17, 2194—E-LC transmission

18:00:03: James, Gwen had her baby. They named him James after you, and they asked us to be his godparents. I think that is really nice.

I’m still meeting with Doctor Archer. She helps a lot, but it is still difficult. The press has found out about what is happening, and they are calling me constantly. The headlines are all about how when you finally return, you’ll be 35, and I’ll be almost 70.

It’s hard.

Tony joked that when you return your godson will be older than you, and I started crying and couldn’t stop. I know he felt terrible, but I wanted to just kill him.

Will you still love me when I’m old and gray, and you’re still young and handsome?

I have to go. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

November 1, 2193—LC-E transmission

12:14:23: Smitty, link is established. I’ll wait on instructions. Please make sure Kate is there. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

February 10, 2194 E-LC transmission

21:32:01: Jim, it’s Mars. Great to hear from you. Listen: You really need to get to Kate. I’m very worried about her. She won’t tell me what’s wrong, but I’m sure it’s finally dawning on her that she won’t see you for 40 years. She’s shut out Archer, too, and they had been talking regularly. If you need to, send a double transmission this once. You know that I need you both strong. I’m going to clear the message buffer. Wait for her message and then reply. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

12:45:03: James, I am so sorry to tell you this, but your father passed away. We’ve kept it very quiet because the press is still looking for every possible angle to write about you. They are horrible.

He died in his sleep. Maybe it was for the best, he was fighting so hard.

All I want to do is hold you and make you feel better, my love. I am so sorry. I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. I need to be strong for you and everyone around me. But I don’t know if I can handle it. It’s hard, James.

And then I think of you and feel guilty. So guilty.

I was at the funeral, and as they lowered your dad’s casket in the ground, I couldn’t help but think that it was like your ship. A metal casket taking you to some unknown beyond. I know that’s grim and sad and not true because I know I’ll see you again, but it won’t be for so long. [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

November 1, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:50:01: Kate, please don’t let everything overwhelm you. I am so thankful that you told me about Dad. To be very clear—I never expected to see him again. I know that sounds harsh, and I know he’s a tough old bird, but even he knew that his cancer wasn’t going to give him much time. We said our goodbyes.

I committed my life to this mission. I knew I’d have to leave my life behind and that things would be different when I returned.

This is so hard, because I will be responding to messages I’ve just seen that you sent weeks ago. So bear with me if you can’t remember what I’m talking about.

Yes, I will still find you beautiful. Yes, I will still want to feel you against me as we fall asleep. Yes, I will kiss you with the same passion as when I left, if not more. Yes, I will be there for you always.

Never doubt me, Kate. I don’t doubt you. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

February 10, 2194—E-LC transmission

12:57:56: I will be strong, James. How sad is this—I’m safe on Earth, and you’re in a dangerous ship sailing to an unknown planet in a far away solar system, and you’re trying to make me feel better. And you just lost your father. I’m ashamed. Mars said I had this one extra message and to make it count, but I don’t know what to say other than you inspire me, James. I miss you. ~Kate

December 1, 2193—LC-E transmission

11:44:32: Smitty, Mars? What is going on? The messages have started to slow down. Is there something wrong? Everything is fine here. I’d wish you Happy Thanksgiving, but you’ve already celebrated Christmas and New Years. Still no problems on my end. Just a bit worried about you guys, actually. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

May 19, 2194—E-LC transmission

16:58:54: Jim, it’s Mars. I’ve been waiting to hear from you before giving you the bad news. As you’ve noticed, the QE link has become unstable. We’re not sure if it’ll hold up. We’ve cut transmission down to the bare minimum in the hope that the entanglement will restore itself, but I have to be honest, buddy. It doesn’t look good. I don’t know how many more messages we have, but we will most likely lose our link soon.

17:07:32: James, it’s Kate. I haven’t heard from you in over 3 months, but I just want you to know I’m not worried. Smitty told me we’ve seen instability in the link before, so I’m sure everything is fine. So ignore that and just tell me how your Thanksgiving went. Yes, I remembered!

General Marsden tells me we only have this one transmission, so I’ll just say that even if you don’t hear from me every day (or 5 times a day!) I’ll be with you. Love you so much, ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 1, 2193—LC-E transmission

13:03:54: I don’t know what to say, Kate. This is too much to think about. I don’t know if I can survive without hearing from you. As you said, they did have instabilities before. I have to be positive. Tell Mars that if he needs anything from me in the way of working on my half of the quantum pair, that I’ll do anything—anything—to get it stabilized.

I’m glad you remembered Thanksgiving. I haven’t been in space for a full year yet, and already it feels like ages. Hell, it’s been even longer for you. Okay, to be positive—tell Tony I’m proud of his promotion. He knows damn well that running the Mars line is the final step before getting a deep space mission, but tell him I mentioned it anyway. I hope to God he never gets a deep space mission, but don’t say that—he’ll never understand. Can anyone?

We’ll figure the com issue out, Kate. Just remember I love you. I’m the luckiest guy in the world. James [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

August 17, 2194—E-LC transmission

18:00:03: They are only giving me one message every month, James. I don’t know how often you’ll be getting them, but just know that as you wait for my next message I am still thinking of you. I know you’re figuring out what’s wrong. That’s what I love about you. I could always count on you. I’ll wait to hear what you have found out, but I have to tell you that General Marsden has told me that we have only a few messages left. He said that the quantum pair are spinning apart or the link is broken or something like that.

At home there isn’t much to report. Everyone is just a few months older and a few months wiser. The press are finally leaving me alone. I know I vent at you about them all the time, but they are vultures. Anyway, it’s better, thank God.

I don’t know what else to say, James. How sad is that? I have only one message a month for you, and I have nothing to say. I guess life goes on. Love you. ~Kate [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

December 31, 2193—LC-E transmission

11:44:34: Mars, you know what I’m going to say: This is total bullshit. How can you guys fuck up something as simple as the comlink while a sail the size of the moon is working like a charm? Skipping messaging today to do live diagnostics on my transmission quanta. [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

September 23, 2194—E-LC transmission

13:04:03: Jim, I understand your anger. I’m so sorry. I got the final report from Ollie. The QE link is slowly breaking apart. How long we have I don’t know. The brainiacs are shocked we’ve kept it up this long. Anyway, we’ve given up on maintaining our transmission link with the LEWIS & CLARK and are just now trying to give you guidance on keeping your link alive. We don’t know if it’s the volume of messages, the rate of messages, or time that is breaking the link. Hell, the CERN guys think that it’s the distance, our particles are simply moving to a new, stronger entanglement. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t give a shit about this.

We are going to keep the link alive until it breaks apart. It may take a long time if we only send one message every few months. No one knows for sure.

Kate is calm. I don’t know what you’ve been saying to her, but keep it up. Everything else is normal. You’ll be back on Earth in another 40 years or so. And although I’ll be over 100 then, trust me, I’ll still able to beat you into shape. Mars [MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

January 30, 2194—LC-E transmission

12:04:04: Christ, the time difference is hard. Okay, I have some thoughts. I know the QE is untangling, but perhaps we can turn my transmission particle into a two-way link? Hell, just make it transmit from your side. I don’t need to talk, I just need to hear from you guys. You don’t know how hard it is to wait even a few days for a message.

Can the physicists work on that? I know it’s too late for this calibration, but I could spend the next one doing anything they needed me to do.

Mars, I hate to say this, but if that doesn’t work, perhaps we could turn the sail around? You know there is an abort plan in place with catastrophic failure. Damn, I can’t believe I’m writing that, but we need to get this fixed.

I’m worried about my link, so I’ll just add my message to Kate here.

Kate, please don’t worry! You know we have two links. Even if the one breaks down, we’ll fix the other one. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll turn this damn ship around. I’m not sailing into fucking space with nothing but a bunch of holos for company. Anyway [MESSAGE RECEIVED]

February 19, 2196—E-LC transmission

14:09:11: Jim, it’s Mars. My God, it was great to hear from you a few days ago. I’m sorry you haven’t heard from us in a long time. I told everyone to hold off and make one last try to get a message to you when you finally contacted us, and it has taken monumental calculations to get this message through. Nothing you are suggesting will work. Once the particles are entangled, we can’t make the kind of changes you are suggesting. Just keep your link alive so we can make sure you are okay.

I’m sorry, but this is the last message you’ll hear from us until you get back. I never said this, Jim, but you were the son I never had. So just be safe. I don’t think anyone else could do what you’re doing. I’m incredibly proud of you.

James, it’s Kate. I talked to Ollie and he said he can’t guarantee that the link won’t ever be back for short periods of time. So I will be sending you a message every day. Every day, James. You may never see them, but know they’ll be there floating in space. Just my messages to you. I love you and miss [WARNING: CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED—MESSAGE TRANSMITTED]

March 1, 2194—LC-E transmission

12:38:18: I will assume that my messages are going through, even though yours have stopped. So I am going to make this more like a monthly mission log than anything.

Sail calibration is normal. Acceleration is normal. Life support systems are normal. Everything is fucking normal.

I’ve watched about 40 holos this month. I liked BREAKDOWN. The woman in that reminded me of Kate. I’ve done some research on physics, but find it just as maddening as I did in college. I examined the abort system, even though Mars was kind enough to ignore my request to abort the mission, but I guess I’m too good a soldier to abort the mission without orders. So I sail on.

Kate, your final message inspired me, but it is so hard to sit here and just wait. And wait. And wait. I’ve kept the QE link from Earth open, even though nothing ever comes through. Still, I hope. And wait.

And wait.

Special thanks to Mike Brotherton, who provided invaluable assistance on the science in the story. Assistance can only go so far, however, and any errors are entirely due to the author.

Jake Kerr got his start in writing during the grunge rock era, spending those years kicking around Los Angeles as a columnist for music publications. He not only wrote about rock music, he sat on panels with Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland, he slept in Henry Rollins’ tour bus, and he experienced the hedonism of a Van Halen tour—among other things he’d prefer not to mention.

Looking for a bit more sanity, he moved to Dallas, where he transitioned his writing and career toward digital media. Working for a digital services company, he couldn’t keep his fingers from the keyboard, ending up writing articles for publications like Venturebeat and Mashable.

Through it all, however, Kerr never could shake the writing that inspired him from his youth—the soaring imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the reality-bending novels of Philip K. Dick, the stories from Stephen King that kept him up at night . . . These and countless others led him to finally turn his pen to fiction. He recently attended the Viable Paradise SF and Fantasy writers workshop, where John Scalzi told him to drink more Coke Zero and Jim Macdonald showed him a garden of iron crosses.

Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole
K.C. Ball

An Establishing Shot

Here’s the Quantum Wanderer, Chloé Dubois’ exploration ship. I recorded this one through a single-use sensor drone, fifty kilometers up-slope from BH/Hawking’s event horizon. If you care for the big words, that’s one-point-five Schwarzschild radii. Do the math. You’ll see.

Thirty years ago, this voyage would have been impossible. BH/Hawking’s not very large, but its intense gravity would have torn Einstein and Wanderer apart. Now, thanks to the new tidal-gradient compensators created by an A.I., the mission’s merely dangerous as hell.

Instruments aboard Wanderer ceaselessly collect data, while its massive nuclear-pulse engines struggle to maintain a stable orbit against forces that want to suck the ship into oblivion.

The engines produce a fearsome racket, but inside Wanderer it’s church quiet. Each of the ship’s one-point-six-five-million pieces have been tuned to exact specifications. A perfect jigsaw puzzle that nullifies the noise.

Sensor arrays, drives and fuel-containment systems, tidal compensators, communications gear, and radiation shielding fill almost every square centimeter. The bit of room left for Chloé and her life-support suit accepts just that and not one single scruple more. She doesn’t so much ride in the ship as wear it.

Of course, Chloé doesn’t have to be on board. A level-four A.I. orchestrates the show just fine without her. But humans hate to be replaced by an artificial intelligence, even when you know we can do the job better at far less risk.

So Chloé lays her life on the line, two subjective hours out of every twenty-four, to orbit BH/Hawking, hoping to wrestle free its secrets. Two shifts left. Still so much to learn.

Of course, she hasn’t come alone. See that gleaming speck? That’s Einstein, riding the tidal gradient in chrono-synchronous orbit to Wanderer, two Schwarzschild radii away.

And twelve kilometers above Chloé, tethered to Einstein by a tractor field, Andy Mercer hunkers in a shielded observation pod too small to be seen by camera, too small to even have a name.

Andy makes immersives—you know, grabbies. He watches Chloé’s every move, hears each grunt and exhalation, captures what she tastes and smells and touches—everything except her thoughts—through long-range sensors. He’s risking his life, too, recording every little detail of this grand adventure for all of you back home.

You’re curious, aren’t you? You want to see what’s in the darkness as much as any of the twenty members of the Einstein crew. And you want to know why the world directorate laid out a hundred ninety-seven billion for the trip.

It’s your money. You paid for a ticket; you deserve to see the show. Let’s be honest, though. The science stuff is boring. You really want to be around in case it all goes wrong.

In the deepest, darkest, meanest corners of your hearts, all humans want that. You watch disaster from a distance and if someone dies, so much the better. You can whisper to yourself, “Thank God that wasn’t me.”

The Obligatory Portrait of the Boss

This is my favorite. Captain Sergei Kolenkhov, caught in a quiet moment, in the zero-gee command bubble at Einstein’s nose. Sergei sits with eyes closed, listening to crew chatter via the command-band sweep.

A plasma-foil screen molded to the forward bulkhead allows me to show Sergei anything he cares to see. BH/Hawking in real time. The ship’s exterior from fixed and mobile sensors. Interior shots of the operations and service pods or the giant spinning cylinder that contains the living quarters.

Sergei makes the narrow command chair look spacious. Slim and wiry, a ferret of a man, with sleek dark hair shot through with threads of gray. Andy Mercer interviewed Sergei, in that very chair, the day before the Einstein broke Earth orbit. Of course I listened, and thanks to multi-threading memory I recall every word.

“Serge, most folks would figure they’d been punished, to be crammed into a rotating can not much bigger than a high-school gymnasium, with nineteen other people for three years.”

Andy looks as if he’s waiting patiently for Sergei’s reply, but that look’s pure flim-flam. Andy never waits for anything but an opening to deliver his next line.

It doesn’t matter. Sergei can bullshit with the best, but this time every word he says is true. “It’s Sergei, Andy, and I’m not most people. I love this ship, I love my crew. We’re doing important work.”

“There must be times when someone upsets you, when you’d rather be doing something else?”

Sergei’s pulse spikes, his respiration climbs.

He’s about to tell a lie, but what the hell. Everybody does it, don’t they? “I can’t imagine what, Andy. There’s nothing about my job that I don’t like. There’s no place I’d rather be right now than sitting in this chair.”

Sergei’s ear bud chirps, breaking his reverie.

“It’s engineering, Seryozhenka,” I whisper. The name’s a diminutive, a term of endearment. Sergei’s grandfather used to call him by that name.

“Put it on, Mishka.”

That’s his diminutive for me. The project shrinks would have had a field day if they had uncovered our little name game before we departed Earth. Sergei’s grandfather was Mikhail, Mishka to his only grandson. I’m A.I., a level six, assigned to Einstein as communications officer, but I’m so much more. There are just five sixes in existence. I’m senior, the biggest brother, the only one named after a dead man.

I route the call.

“You have a minute, Sergei?”

Engineer Edyta Shamanski’s round peasant’s face fills the plasma foil screen. That unassuming face hides an intellect almost as sharp as mine. This woman knows which way is up, knows how to move in that direction, too. She’s a certified genius, helped to design Einstein, but like all humans, she has quirks. Edyta worries.

Sergei knows her tone. He sits up straighter, murmurs sub-vocally to me. “Mishka, drop to private band.”

“Da.” My baritone sounds just like his grandfather, gone a decade now. He waits for the click I use to signal I’ve made the link. I listen in, of course.

“What is it, ‘Dyta?” Sergei asks.

“Power spikes in the tractor field.”

“We need to reel the pod in?”

“I’d like to. I’m running diagnostics, but right now it’s just a gut feeling. I can’t see what the problem is from here. I want to check the on-board couplings.”

“She thinks it’s very serious,” I whisper to Sergei. “Her heart rate’s up ten points. Look at how she holds her shoulders, how she twists her mouth.”

Sergei taps his thumb knuckle on the armrest of his chair. “Let him hang while you finish running numbers.”

“All right.” She’s not happy with his decision.

“Tell him what you’re doing, though. Yes?”

“Yes.” There’s no enthusiasm in Edyta’s voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“He’ll argue with me, waste my time.”

“All right, I’ll talk to him.”

“He’ll argue with you, too.”

“Even so.”

Edyta is silent for a time. Sergei waits her out.

“I don’t mean to kick sand your way,” she says, at last. “I hate talking to that man. Vo pridurok to.”

“I said I’ll talk to him.”

Edyta pauses for a time before answering. Sergei gives her time again.

She sounds tired when she speaks. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll keep you posted.”

Edyta breaks contact.

Without being asked, I shift Sergei back to command band-sweep. “She has reason to worry, Seryozhenka. I don’t care for how the tractor diagnostics look, either.”

“She helped design the system, she’ll deal with it. I’ll deal with Andy.”

“Edyta’s right. Andy can be an idiot.”

“Even so. We’re stuck with him.”

Sergei’s right, of course. Every member of the crew tested over and over to weed out the claustrophobics, the neurotics and the socially inept. Every one of them had to have a specific set of skills, a proper education, but there are folks aboard fifth or eighth or twenty-third on a credentials list because the ones above them couldn’t find the cheese in that maze of tests.

But Andy’s not a member of the crew. He’s celebrity. An award-winning director, a big-shot American used to getting his own way. He’s physically a big man, too. He takes up more space, uses more resources, than anyone else on Einstein.

And his only job is to produce a piece of propaganda.

The real problem, though, is Chloé. Her two-hour approaches to the black hole are the reason we’re all here and the clock’s ticking. Einstein can’t stay at BH/Hawking forever. Supplies are limited. Even more important, if we stay too long, everything we know of home will have ticked away. We have two more subjective days, no more. On the seventh day, even God rested.

As if that weren’t enough, Andy’s married to Chloé. If Sergei reels in the pod ahead of schedule, Andy will be pissed. It’s his nature. He’s not a bad sort, but like all of you, he likes to get his way.

He’ll bitch to Chloé and she’ll take his side. Maybe she’ll go down there again, hang at the edge of hell’s abyss, or maybe not. Chloé can be a stubborn bitch.

Sergei can’t take the risk of losing those last two days of data gathering. And he can’t put off talking to Andy any longer. Sergei’s grandfather used to say, “You cook the porridge and you eat it.”

“Well?” I ask.

“Put him on.”

I meter signal in both directions. It’s one of the reasons I’m Einstein’s communications officer. No human is quick enough to manipulate the time dilation. This close, it’s not much, but enough. Faster going down than coming up. I’m a master juggler.

“What’s up, Serge?”

Andy’s boyish, big-jawed face almost pops from the screen. He sounds likes he’s across the cabin, not sixteen klicks down the BH/Hawking well. The sound’s almost in sync with movement of his mouth and there’s only a hint of red shift.

Sergei scooches in his chair, trying to hide his irritation at being pushed into this situation. “There’s a problem with the tractor field. We’re running numbers now.”

“Chloé’s still here. I’m not coming up ‘til she does.”

I monitor the system closely. Even so, Andy has the sort of voice that can make communications systems squeal. His rise in volume almost gets away from me.

“It’s procedure, Andy. If the final analysis looks bad, I’m going to bring you up.”

“Bullshit. I’m getting crystal data through the gear, but any more delay on up-link time, even micro-seconds, and it could turn to mush. I have to stay.”

He’s lying, of course. Even across the distance, I can pick up his vital signs. He’s arguing because he wants to have it all his way. I know his recording systems. He can fix imperfections when he does the final edit back on Earth, push the data through graphics interpretation coldware, clean the edges, let his own A.I. work on it.

Andy’s a genius, too, in his own way. He could fake the whole thing. No one back home would ever know unless he felt guilty and told them. Fat chance of that. He’s got his pride.

He’s still ranting. “Why even bother to bring me along if I’m not down here watching over everything, making judgments? I could have stayed home, sent out drones to AIGI everything.”

What a swell idea. I can almost hear Sergei think the same thing. The band is silent for a moment.

“Serge, talk some sense to that damned engineer of yours. Tell her to stop playing Chicken Little. She’s ruining my work.”

“She’s being prudent.”

Andy pauses before he plays his trump card. “Prudent, huh? Hell with this. Let’s see what Chloé has to say.”

The audio goes dead, the screen blanks.

“Mat’ tvoyu rastak,” Sergei mutters.

“Easy, Seryozhenka,” I say. “‘A fool’s tongue runs before his feet.’” Another of his grandfather’s favorite sayings.

He tips his head, his way of shrugging. “You’re right.”

“Shall I reconnect?”

“Yes.”

Sergei closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. He whispers, so I’m the only one who has to pay attention. The crew at the consoles can pretend they didn’t hear.

“Grandfather,” he says. “Why did I take this job?”

Ein Strasenverkäufer Photographie

This one’s from Earth, from before we left. Chloé and Sergei sit beneath the multi-colored spread of a table umbrella, at a street-front café along a narrow cobbled street in Cologne. Not too far from European Astronaut Centre at Linder Hoehe.

The tables around them are full. The street’s crowded, too, even though it’s still before noon. Pedestrian traffic only, of course. The city banned vehicles from this section at the turn of the twenty-first century, all those years ago.

Sergei wears the new implants that allow me to hear and see and smell everything he experiences. I feel like I’m there.

For those of you who wonder how I feel, how an artificial intelligence might believe it’s real, let me ask you this: How do you feel? Do you even have an inkling of the mechanics that make you real? Until you do, pipe down and listen.

Around about, Japanese, Swahili, English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and a dozen other tongues somehow blend into a polyglot buzz that’s pleasing to the ear. The rich, comforting aromas of coffee, cinnamon and burnt sugar, lay upon the air.

The late August sky is crystal blue. Temperatures hover at twenty cee. Forecasts calls for warmer weather in the afternoon, with a flash of rain just before sunset. The Germans like their weather the old-fashioned way, without meteorological controls, so they take their chances.

“You must be firm, Sergei, for me,” Chloé says. “Tell them he’ll disturb the work. Tell them he’ll make me nervous. Merde, tell them he takes up too much space.”

 She scoops up her espresso cup and drains it, returns it to the linen-covered table with a snap.

“The man’s an over-sized American clown,” she says. “And I refuse to be a stooge in one of his grabbies.”

Sergei lets her rant. Like a summer storm in Cologne, her anger swells, rages for a short time and then fades. He’d let her talk forever, if she wanted to do so.

Truth be told, he loves her, even though he’s never told another soul. Not even her, although they’ve shared each other’s victories and losses. He’s been her wingman since the academy. They have flown in combat together, jumped from the black heights and know each other’s secret fears.

That’s why he agreed to accept command of Albert Einstein. Not for the adventure of a lifetime. Not through an exaggerated sense of duty. He’s on board to stay close to Chloé.

And it pains him, but he knows her well enough to realize that once she meets Andy Mercer, it won’t be long before the two of them will be in bed together. Chloé’s always has been drawn to gromy i molnii, the thunder and lightning relationship. She’s steady on her own, like ice when she flies, but with a man she wants drama.

It’s why Sergei has never professed his love for her.

He can give her lightning but he never could maintain the noise. There is nothing else to do. Sergei’s grandfather used to say that falling in love is like a mouse falling into a box. There is no way out.

“The decision has been made, Chloé.”

Sergei doesn’t say that he helped make it. She knows. The vertical crease between her brows, the mark his grandfather used to call an “I’ll have my way” line, becomes a crevice. “Come on, my friend, do it for me.”

My friend. Sergei works not to grind his teeth, to control his breathing and his heart rate.

“It’s been decided,” he says again.

To hell with Andy. Sergei wants to take Chloé’s hand, to tap upon her wrist to the rhythm of her pulse, wants even more for that imagined loving touch to be returned.

Her left brow arches.

He hurries to still the storm. “You know the size of the investment in the mission. The directorate believes that news accounts won’t be enough. People want to share the adventure. Mercer can provide that.”

“I don’t care what people want. I’m the one going down to the damned event horizon.”

Sergei sighs. “All right, I’ll try.”

A Publicity Shot

Here’s another one from Earth. Chloé, standing at a window at Fifty-Eight Tour Eiffel, the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, fifty-eight meters above Paris.

Sergei’s watches from the restaurant’s entrance, waiting until the photographer gets the shot she wants. Over Chloé’s shoulder, through the window, I can see the Palais de Chaillot and its grounds across the Seine. Everything in sight has been scrupulously maintained. The whole damned city’s a museum, not a living, breathing entity like Cologne.

Still, Chloé is French, so the party to introduce the Einstein crew to the press will begin in ten minutes, here in Paris. The crew has assembled to preen and answer questions. The technicians have even set up a special sound system for me.

But Chloé will be center of attention. Little wonder. Her evening dress is blue silk, elegant and simple. She’s blond and tanned, not much taller than Sergei, with the muscled, rangy body of a competitive runner. She is a runner, won three gold medals ten years ago in Oslo. She’s also earned doctorates in physics and engineering, holds a world record for high-altitude skydiving.

Chloé’s never known what it means to fail.

Sergei leads the way across the room. “Chloé?”

She turns from the window, smiling, already moving forward to hug him, only to have to tilt her head to look up into Andy Mercer’s sea-blue eyes.

Mercer’s enormous, well over two meters tall, weighs in at something over two hundred kilos. He’s shaggy-haired. Bearded, too, looks like a bear in a tuxedo. He looms over everyone. And there’s a scent of danger all about him, mixed with the faint aromas of cedar and of lime.

Sergei has to feel like karlik next to the bigger man. A midget. He glances up at Mercer. “Andy, I’m pleased to introduce Chloé Dubois. Chloé, this is Andy Mercer.”

“Bonjour, Madame Dubois. C’est un plaisir de vous rencontrer.” Mercer’s French sucks. Chloé should laugh at him.

“No, Mr. Mercer, the pleasure is mine,” she says.

Her English is excellent, better than the big man’s French. That’s to be expected. English is the default language of the mission and Chloé has told Sergei repeatedly, over their years together, that the only way to speak French properly is to be born to it.

Mercer relaxes, grins at her and takes her offered hand.

“Call me Andy. I’ve got to say I’m a big fan of yours. I’ve worn out two v-chips watching your world record. Magnificent.”

Bullshit. V-chips can’t wear out, but Andy loves hyperbole. He’s referring to Chloé’s high-altitude jump. Sergei has a copy of the chip, too, recorded by a free-falling sensor drone, all the way from twenty-five-thousand meters. Sergei jumped from the drone that day a thousand meters lower.

Chloé smiles. “Thank you.”

She’s intrigued. Mercer bows his head, lifts her hand and touches his lips to her knuckles. She should laugh at that, too. No one kisses women’s hands anymore, not unless they figure to get punched with that same hand.

Chloé doesn’t laugh, she blushes. Sergei own cheeks pink as well. I can feel the heat, see the color through the cameras placed around the room.

“I’ve seen your work,” Chloé admits.

“I hope you liked it.”

She remains polite. “I was entertained.”

“I’ll try not to let you down on the trip to BH/Hawking.”

There it was. Now she knows Mercer would go along, Sergei couldn’t talk them out of it. Chloé should erupt.

Instead, she says, “We’ll see.”

A Frame from the Out-Bound Interviews

In this one, Chloé and Sergei sit side-by-side before a sheet of plasma film that streams an image of Earth, floating in the void below.

Andy has set up a temporary studio on the international space station’s outer centrifugal ring. Einstein departs in fourteen hours. Andy’s equipment is managed by a level-two A.I., an idiot but functional, so Andy only needs to sit and talk. He’s good at that. “Thanks for giving me this time today, both of you. I know you’re busy.”

Sergei sticks to the script. “How can we help you, Andy?”

“I’ve got background questions, but to be honest, I don’t mind if we just sit here and watch Earth turn down there.” Off script and pure bullshit, but the man’s had lots of practice.

“I’ll bet he’d rather sit alone with Chloé,” I whisper, in Sergei’s ear.

He ignores me, plays his part. Ad-libbing, too. “It never does get old.”

Chloé turns toward the foil screen. North America can be seen at the moment, all of it bathed in sunshine. She departs from the script even more. “Where do you come from, Andy?”

Andy doesn’t even blink.

He points. “There, in the upper peninsula of Michigan, up above the mitt. Sault Sainte Marie.”

“I’ve been there,” Chloé says, turning from the screen. “I have a master’s degree from the University of Michigan.”

“No kidding. So you’ve seen the Soo locks?”

“Of course.”

They speak of Andy’s time at Stanford University, her home town south of Paris. Her wins at the Oslo Olympics, his turn in the American military, how he covered the Nine-Day War on Crete. Chloé admits that she shot down seven Asian Bloc fighters there. Hellfires. Sergei flew wingman for her every mission, shot down five himself. He doesn’t say a word.

None of this is scripted. The interview’s become a two-person conversation; Sergei’s the odd man out.

I whisper to him. “Get it back on course, Seryozhenka.”

“Shall we talk about the trip out?” he asks.

Andy glances at Sergei, almost frowns. He blinks. “Sure. Tell me about the ship.”

Sergei’s had lots of practice. “Einstein has a two-drive system. The Judson-Hicks bubble drive for interstellar travel, and four charged-plasma engines for inner-systems maneuvering.”

“Uh.” Andy’s listening, but he’s watching Chloé.

Sergei continues, but he knows he’s talking to himself. He twists his head, the muscles in his neck pop. His dark Russian mood is palpable.

He’s slowed the sexual juggernaut, but it still gathers steam.

A Wedding Portrait of the Happy Couple

I took this one five hours before the Judson-Hicks drive went online, eighteen months into the mission. It holds a lot of nasty memories.

“Are you ready, Serge?” Andy turns from his equipment and glides to his mark beside Chloé.

“Yes.” Sergei brushes at the front of his jumpsuit, at some flaw only he can see.

I try to caution him. “Ignore his insults, Seryozhenka.”

The three of them stand in ship’s mess, their slippered toes in anchor loops, near one end of the space. Half the crew has squeezed in with them. The rest watch via a command-band feed. The signal’s being streamed to Earth, too. Another twelve billion witnesses. Andy whispers a word to his equipment. He winks at Sergei.

“All of you watching are witness to this blessed ceremony.” Sergei struggles to make his scripted words sound natural.

Music swells. Pachelbel’s Canon in D major. Sergei does his best to ignore the thin propellant buzz from the fly-eye camera above his right shoulder. It took thirty minutes of practice for him to learn to act as if the fly-eye isn’t there, to resist swatting at it.

“As captain of Interstellar Ship Albert Einstein, it is my honor to join this man and this woman in marriage, even as we stand at the threshold of mankind’s greatest adventure.”

He looks to Andy. “Do you have the rings?”

“Yes.” Andy opens his palm to show the two plain platinum bands he asked Edyta Shamanski to mill for the ceremony. The cameras zoom in on Andy’s hand.

“Is the launch on schedule, Mishka?” Sergei whispers.

“Yes. Perform the ceremony. I’ll call if I need you.”

“Smart-ass piece of coldware.”

“Palkami i kamnyami, Seryozhenka.”

“Sticks and stone have nothing to do with it.”

“Everything is running smoothly.”

“Thank you.”

Chloé takes one of the rings. Andy holds the other at the ready. Neither seems to notice that Sergei mutters to himself, or that any of the others are even there.

Sergei begins. “Andy, if you would take Chloé as your wife, place the ring upon her hand and say ‘I will.’”

He’s departing from the script. Andy doesn’t even blink. He slips the ring on Chloé’s finger and says, “I will.”
            Sergei continues. “Chloé, if you would take Andy as your husband, give him the ring and say ‘I will.’”

Chloé does as she’s told and says, “I will.” She doesn’t look away from Andy.

If he could, I’m certain Sergei would sew his lips together, would rather do anything than finish. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, in the way he breathes.

He cuts to the end. “As captain of this vessel, I pronounce you man and wife.”

He pulls his toes from the loops, not waiting to watch them kiss, hurries toward the hatch that will take him to his hard and narrow chair in the command bubble. The fly eye, slaved to the electronic wafer glued to Sergei’s shoulder, darts along behind, recording his retreat.

A Tight Close-up

Here’s a tight shot of Chloé’s upper face, her eyes and most of her nose. I manage to pull it from her helmet cam.

What skin that can be seen looks flushed. Her vital signs have spiked. It’s obvious that she and Andy have had their chat about Edyta’s request to reel in the drone. Andy has stirred the pot, too. From that deep in the well, I can’t quite balance the redshift, but not all the color in Chloé’s face is a glitch.

“Chloé wants to talk, Seryozhenka,” I murmur. “Her blood pressure and respiration are through the roof.”

“Put her through.”

“Do you want her to see you, too?”

“Of course. Let her see me.”

Chloé’s image fills the screen.

“Sergei, what’s going on?” She glances at the heads-up display in her helmet, catches sight of him in that tiny screen and then looks away to something else. Her eyes flicker back and forth, she murmurs to her A.I., words too soft to catch.

She’s a busy woman, but she can chew gum and rub her stomach if she chooses to do so. I’ve seen Chloé’s tests. She scored off the charts on multi-tasking.

“I need to pull in Andy’s pod,” Sergei replies.

“He told me everything is clean and green at his end, says Edyta’s being fussy.”

“I trust her numbers, Chloé.”

Chloé’s tone sharpens. “He’s got a degree in engineering, too, you know.”

“This has nothing to do with that. It’s protocol.”

“I know protocol, Sergei. We both know there are levels of redundancy built in to all of it.”

“I know what he wants and why he wants it.”

She softens. “Do it as a favor for an old friend.”

Sergei remains silent.

I offer counsel. “Stick to the protocol, Seryozhenka.”

“Please?” she says. “I’ve only got a few more minutes here. Let him sit it out. He’ll be fine.”

Sergei ignores me. He shifts in the command chair. He clips off his reply. “All right. A few more minutes.”

I understand it instantly. See it in the dilation of his pupils, feel it as his body temperature rises, hear it in his drawn breath and the rhythm of his increased vital signs.

Andy wants his way, just as he always does. Chloé wants Sergei to support her, as he has over the years. Sergei wants the tractor field to fail.

The Director’s Cut

This one’s a split-screen. Edyta on the left, Andy on the right.

She’s showing signs of panic, at least as much as she ever shows. He’s pissed. I don’t need vital signs for that. It’s an easy one to call.

“We need to bring the pod in now, Sergei,” Edyta says.

“Bullshit,” Andy retorts. “Five minutes on the clock.”

Twenty minutes have gone by since Sergei gave in to Chloé, twenty minutes of juggling. It’s time to put away the rubber balls. Even so, Sergei doesn’t say a thing.

“Sergei, there’s a real chance the coupling could fail.” Edyta says.

“A ‘real’ chance? What sort of engineering term is that?”

“Quiet, Andy,” Sergei says.

“Seryozhenka, the engineering A.I. is predicting systems failure inside an hour. Edyta needs twenty minutes to get the pod back inside.”

Sergei taps his ear bud, mutes the two of them manually. “I know how much time it takes, Mikhail.”

“What happened to ‘Mishka’?”

“Don’t pull a hissy fit on me, too, you bag of bolts.”

“Meat sack. You ignored me twenty minutes, forty-seven seconds ago. Do you want him to die?”

He grunts. “Chloé will climb out of there in five minutes.”

“Edyta needs to do it now.”

“Give me a percentile spread on the coupling.”

“One-hundred percent it will fail within the sixty-minute max time. Forty-two percent that it blows inside twenty minutes. I don’t see the point calculating for less time than that.”

“Thank you.”

“Sergei, I’ll ask again. Do you want Andy to die?”

He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t have to. I can read it all in his vital signs.

“Seryozhenka, please.”

Serge draws a breath and blows it out. “All right. Patch the two of them back in.”

Edyta and Andy share the screen again.

“Edyta, bring him up,” Sergei says.

Andy jumps in before Edyta can respond, so quick and loud the volume gets away from me. “I’ve run the numbers, too. A one-in-four chance of failure. I’ll take the chance.”

Sergei shakes his head. “‘Dyta, I said bring him up.”

“Right away, Captain.” Edyta fades away, leaving Andy’s angry face to fill the screen. As the big man spews profanity, I listen and I watch them all, hoping Sergei hasn’t played his crazy little game too long.

“Mikhail, get me Chloé,” he says.

“Da.”

Fifteen seconds later, Andy’s still shouting epitaphs, when the tractor field burns out.

A Group Shot of the Crew

This one’s from one of the ship’s cameras, looking over Sergei’s shoulder. Head shots of Edyta, Andy and Chloé share the foil screen. An exterior camera outside Quantum Wanderer provides a fourth image, looking back up the gravity well toward Andy’s pod.

“Goddamn it, Sergei, I’m drifting!” Andy shouts.

Sergei leans forward in the command chair, pouring every bit of himself into the screen. “Get him back, ‘Dyta! Get a new lock on that pod.”

He’s acting. His voice might fool a human, but he can’t fool me. His vital signs are calm as a flat-water pond.

“I’m trying, Boss!” Edyta’s excitement is real.

“Damn it, Sergei!” Andy again.

“Can you retrieve him, Sergei?” Chloé’s voice is so smooth, but her vitals are elevated, too.

“We’re trying.”

Five seconds pass, another ten.

“He’s out of range,” Edyta says.

“Go after him.”

Sergei knows that’s not possible. Einstein can’t follow the pod without complex and time-consuming maneuvers. Think of picking up a penny wearing oven mitts. He’s covering his tracks.

“Chloé, we couldn’t reacquire,” he says. “The pod’s coming at you.”

Andy shouts again. “Damn you! What did you do to me?”

“A fool’s tongue, Seryozhenka. Remember.”

Too late. His voice crashes against the walls in the tiny command cabin. “What did I do to you? You self-centered idiot. You did it to yourself!”

Chloé’s filtered voice cuts through the male bravado like a scalpel through a stretch of tender skin. “That’s enough, the both of you. No time for finger-pointing.”

Edyta’s fingers have gone into overdrive, tapping on a virtual keyboard only she can see. She’s not being careful now. Her mind’s a furnace, her body has turned to ice. “Chloé, your orbit’s almost right. The pod’s going to pass just behind you. You might be able to catch him with your grapple.”

Chloé’s eyes are unfocused for an instant, looking at something only she and her A.I. can see.

I dip into the Einstein data banks. Edyta’s right. Quantum Wanderer is fitted with a magnetic grappling system. Not up to the muscle of the tractor field on Einstein, not designed to catch another ship, only to assist in docking. But on something as small as the pod, it just might work.

Chloé sees it, too. “I can do that.”

So does Sergei, but he sees the problem, too. “If you slow too much, the extra mass could pull you both over the horizon.”

Andy might be Pridurok—an idiot—but he’s no coward. “No, I forbid it. Don’t you dare try it, Chloé.”

“Listen to him, Chloé,” Sergei says.

“Hush, both of you. With the time contraction, the pod’s coming at me fast. I’ve only got one chance to get this right.”

The next minutes blur. Without an engine to fight against the inexorable pull of the black hole, the pod gains momentum. Wanderer twists through a series of maneuvers and its massive engines flare even brighter.

Chloé’s orbit slows.

The virtual images of the two vessels grow to fill the foil screen as their paths converge. I patch the image into the shipboard visual communications system and all non-essential work aboard Einstein halts.

Everybody listens, as Chloé and Edyta trade data in clipped machinelike tones.

“Gówno,” Edyta spits, after a time.

Sergei leans forward in his seat. “Shit? What do you mean, shit?”

Chloé answers. “At the speed the pod’s falling, it could slip free of my grapple. I need more muscle from the engines.”

Andy and Sergei both shout at the same instant. “No!”

She ignores both of them. “Diverting power now.”

The A.I. aboard Wanderer begins a countdown and everyone aboard Einstein holds their breath. Silent seconds click away and then—

“I’ve got him! I’ve got you, Andy.”

Cheers erupt throughout the ship.

“How long will it take her to bring them both back to us?”

No answer.

“‘Dyta?”

“She can’t, Captain.”

“What?”

“She can hold the orbit for a time, but her engines don’t have the muscle to maintain the grapple and bring them both out of the well.”

“Then we will work our way down closer to her, pull them in, instead.” This time, his desperation’s genuine. Now he’s worried about Chloé.

If I were human, I would scream at him, tell him that he has killed them both. I’m not, so I remain calm. “There’s no time, Seryozhenka, you know that. The course changes weakened Wanderer’s orbit. They’ll cross the event horizon in fifty-seven subjective minutes.”

One Last Close-up

Chloé’s face fills the foil screen. She sweats inside the helmet; silver droplets lay across the sides of her nose and upon her cheeks like crystal tears.

Her eyes are calm, her voice steady, but her vital signs betray her. Chloé’s afraid, perhaps for the first time in her life. She’s faced death before, but not on these terms.

“Edyta?”

“Yes, Chloé?”

“What about the Penrose Mechanism?”

Edyta’s response is worthy of Andy. “Yes!”

I dip into the databanks and realize our chief engineer is already crunching numbers. Furiously.

“What’s that?” Sergei asks.

“Don’t interrupt her,” I tell him. “There’s not much time.”

“What is it?”

“A theory by a twentieth-century physicist. A way to push something away from a black hole. Chloé can’t draw energy from the black hole to slingshot free; that requires more power than it would draw.”

“But—”

“But they’ll be in the ergosphere in a few minutes, hard against the event horizon, traveling in the right direction. If Penrose was right, and Chloé can arrange momentum properly, she could gain enough energy to hurl the pod up the gradient for us to grab.”

He’s way ahead of me, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “What about Wanderer?”

“A mass equal to or greater than the hurled object has to drop below the event horizon for the mechanism to work.”

Sergei pushes away from the command chair as if propelled by an explosion. “No!” he shouts. “I won’t allow that. Chloé, throw the pod in.”

She sounds tired. “I can’t sacrifice Andy, Sergei, you know that. And even if I could bring myself to do it, the pod doesn’t have enough mass to offset Wanderer. We both still would die.”

“What are you two talking about?”

“Shut up, Andy,” Sergei thunders. “Chloé, you can’t do it.”

“I have to, Sergei. I love him. I can’t let him die.”

Sergei flails about for a handhold, can’t find one and floats free before the screen.

“Seryozhenka, do you need help?”

“Leave me be!”

“I need a private band with Andy,” Chloé says. A minute passes and then—”Quantum Wanderer is back online.”

Fifty minutes. Maybe enough time, maybe not. No one’s done this before either. Edyta and Chloé exchange murmured comments as the clock ticks, but otherwise everyone remains silent.

Finally, Edyta speaks. “She’s executing the mechanism.”

More silence.

“It worked!” Edyta says. “The pod’s broken free and headed toward us! I can catch him!”

The ship erupts with cheers again.

“Wanderer has reached the event horizon,” I murmur.

Sergei floats before the screen, doesn’t say a word. The communications system sputters. I do the best I can with it. I catch a hint of Andy sobbing and shunt it aside. Chloé’s face fills the screen, so red you would think she’s been burned.

Her mouth is set in a straight line, her eyes set upon displays unseen by the cameras. Her voice is garbled, so slow there’s nothing I can do with it. A few words slip through.

“Sergei, I’m sorry—”

Sergei flails about, trying to reach the screen. He shouts. “I love you, Chloé. I love you so much. I should have told you years ago.”

The image freezes. Chloé’s mouth remains open, as if she’s trying to respond, but there’s no sound. Seconds pass. The image remains static—will remain that way for millennia—but Wanderer is on its way to the singularity. Long minutes pass.

“I’ve got a lock on the pod,” Edyta says.

Sergei doesn’t answer. He floats before the screen, focused on that last redshifted image.

“Bring him in, Edyta,” I command.

The Last Shot on the Roll

This one is a still of that final close-up. One of the dozen snapshots I managed to salvage from all the images brought back from BH/Hawking.

Sergei sits before it every day for hours. I remain with him, even though I’m not much more than a failing shadow of what I used to be.

The directorate’s agents believe they stripped me away from him, ended my existence, but when you’re as clever and as smart as I was, there are always ways. They took his rank and honor, though, his pay and all his benefits. Everything but a piddling pension and our memories.

It could have been much worse. Once everyone experienced Andy’s immersive, someone had to take the blame.

At first, I tried to counsel him. Told him that the stopped heads-up display clock had been an illusion, a trick of gravity. That Chloé died in her descent into the black hole, ripped apart by forces beyond most imaginations. Told him nothing can escape a black hole. Not light nor exploration ships nor any last-minute words of love.

Now I hold my tongue. And I watch him from one of the few cameras I can still access, as he tosses in his bed each night, his heart thundering, sheets drenched in sweat. His eyes dart about beneath his closed lids, in REM sleep, as he dreams.

He’s never said a word, but I suspect that in those dreams, Sergei still orbits BH/Hawking, waiting endlessly, in case the physicists are wrong.

K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. K.C. won the Writers of the Future competition in 2009 and her winning story, Coward’s Steel, appeared in the Writers of the Future 26 anthology. Her fiction has been published in Analog, Flash Fiction Online and Murky Depths, the award-winning British fantasy magazine.

Simulacrum
Ken Liu

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

—Susan Sontag

Paul Larimore:

You are already recording? I should start? Okay.

Anna was an accident. Both Erin and I were traveling a lot for work, and we didn’t want to be tied down. But you can’t plan for everything, and we were genuinely happy when we found out. We’ll make it work somehow, we said. And we did.

When Anna was a baby, she wasn’t a very good sleeper. She had to be carried and rocked as she gradually drifted to sleep, fighting against it the whole time. You couldn’t be still. Erin had a bad back for months after the birth, and so it was me who walked around at night with the little girl’s head against my shoulder after feedings. Although I know I must have been very tired and impatient, all I remember now is how close I felt to her as we moved back and forth for hours across the living room, lit only by moonlight, while I sang to her.

I wanted to feel that close to her, always.

I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.

This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.

—Hello, sweetheart.

—Dad!

—Don’t be shy. These men are here to make a documentary movie about us. You don’t have to talk to them. Just pretend they’re not here.

—Can we go to the beach?

—You know we can’t. We can’t leave the house. Besides, it’s too cold outside.

—Will you play dolls with me?

—Yes, of course. We’ll play dolls as long as you want.

Anna Larimore:

My father is a hard person for the world to dislike. He has made a great deal of money in a way that seems like an American fairy tale: Lone inventor comes up with an idea that brings joy to the world, and the world rewards him deservedly. On top of it all, he donates generously to worthy causes. The Larimore Foundation has cultivated my father’s name and image as carefully as the studios airbrush the celebrity sex simulacra that they sell.

But I know the real Paul Larimore.

One day, when I was thirteen, I had to be sent home because of an upset stomach. I came in the front door, and I heard noises from my parents’ bedroom upstairs. They weren’t supposed to be home. No one was.

A robber? I thought. In the fearless and stupid way of teenagers, I went up the stairs, and I opened the door.

My father was naked in bed, and there were four naked women with him. He didn’t hear me, and so they continued what they were doing, there in the bed that my mother shared with him.

After a while, he turned around, and we looked into each other’s eyes. He stopped, sat up, and reached out to turn off the projector on the nightstand. The women disappeared.

I threw up.

When my mother came home later that night, she explained to me that it had been going on for years. My father had a weakness for a certain kind of woman, she said. Throughout their marriage, he had trouble being faithful. She had suspected this was the case, but my father was very intelligent and careful, and she had no evidence.

When she finally caught him in the act, she was furious, and wanted to leave him. But he begged and pleaded. He said that there was something in his make up that made real monogamy impossible for him. But, he said, he had a solution.

He had taken many simulacra of his conquests over the years, more and more lifelike as he improved the technology. If my mother would let him keep them and tolerate his use of them in private, he would try very hard to not stray again.

So this was the bargain that my mother made. He was a good father, she thought. She knew that he loved me. She did not want to make me an additional casualty of a broken promise that was only made to her.

And my father’s proposal did seem like a reasonable solution. In her mind, his time with the simulacra was no different from the way other men used pornography. No touching was involved. They were not real. No marriage could survive if it did not contain some room for harmless fantasies.

But my mother did not look into my father’s eyes the way I did when I walked in on him. It was more than a fantasy. It was a continuing betrayal that could not be forgiven.

Paul Larimore:

The key to the simulacrum camera is not the physical imaging process, which, while not trivial, is ultimately not much more than the culmination of incremental improvements on technologies known since the days of the daguerreotype.

My contribution to the eternal quest of capturing reality is the oneiropagida, through which a snapshot of the subject’s mental patterns—a representation of her personality—can be captured, digitized, and then used to re-animate the image during projection. The oneiropagida is at the heart of all simulacrum cameras, including those made by my competitors.

The earliest cameras were essentially modified medical devices, similar to those legacy tomography machines you still see at old hospitals. The subject had to have certain chemicals injected into her body and then lie still for a long time in the device’s imaging tunnel until an adequate set of scans of her mental processes could be taken. These were then used to seed AI neural models, which then animated the projections constructed from detailed photographs of her body.

These early attempts were very crude, and the results were described variously as robotic, inhuman, or even comically insane. But even these earliest simulacra preserved something that could not be captured by mere videos or holography. Instead of replaying verbatim what was captured, the animated projection could interact with the viewer in the way that the subject would have.

The oldest simulacrum that still exists is one of myself, now preserved at the Smithsonian. In the first news reports, friends and acquaintances who interacted with it said that although they knew that the image was controlled by a computer, they elicited responses from it that seemed somehow “Paul”: “That’s something only Paul would say” or “That’s a very Paul facial expression.” It was then that I knew I had succeeded.

Anna Larimore:

People find it strange that I, the daughter of the inventor of simulacra, write books about how the world would be better off without them, more authentic. Some have engaged in tiresome pop psychology, suggesting that I am jealous of my “sibling,” the invention of my father that turned out to be his favorite child.

If only it were so simple.

My father proclaims that he works in the business of capturing reality, of stopping time and preserving memory. But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography…the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize.

People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

The simulacra are the latest incarnation of this trend, and the worst.

Paul Larimore:

Ever since that day, when she…well, I expect that you have already heard about it from her. I will not dispute her version of events.

We have never spoken about that day to each other. What she does not know is that after that afternoon, I destroyed all the simulacra of my old affairs. I kept no backups. I expect that knowing this will not make any difference to her. But I would be grateful if you can pass this knowledge on to her.

Conversations between us after that day were civil, careful performances that avoided straying anywhere near intimacy. We spoke about permission slips, the logistics of having her come to my office to solicit sponsors for walkathons, factors to consider in picking a college. We did not speak about her easy friendships, her difficult loves, her hopes for and disappointments with the world.

Anna stopped speaking to me completely when she went off to college. When I called, she would not pick up the phone. When she needed a disbursement from her trust to pay tuition, she would call my lawyer. She spent her vacations and summers with friends or working overseas. Some weekends she would invite Erin up to visit her in Palo Alto. We all understood that I was not invited.

—Dad, why is the grass green?

—It’s because the green from the leaves on the trees drips down with the spring rain.

—That’s ridiculous.

—All right, it’s because you are looking at it from this side of the fence. If you go over to the other side, it won’t be so green.

—You are not funny.

—Okay. It’s because of chlorophyll in the grass. The chlorophyll has rings in it that absorb all colors of light except green.

—You’re not making this up, are you?

—Would I ever make anything up, sweetheart?

—It’s very hard to tell with you sometimes.

I began to play this simulacrum of her often when she was in high school, and over time it became a bit of a habit. Now I keep her on all the time, every day.

There were later simulacra when she was older, many of them with far better resolution. But this one is my favorite. It reminded me of better times, before the world changed irrevocably.

The day I took this, we finally managed to make an oneiropagida that was small enough to fit within a chassis that could be carried on your shoulder. That later became the prototype for the Carousel Mark I, our first successful home simulacrum camera. I brought it home and asked Anna to pose for it. She stood still next to the sun porch for two minutes while we chatted about her day.

She was perfect in the way that little daughters are always perfect in the eyes of their fathers. Her eyes lit up when she saw that I was home. She had just come back from day camp, and she was full of stories she wanted to tell me and questions she wanted to ask me. She wanted me to take her to the beach to fly her new kite, and I promised to help her with her sunprint kit. I was glad to have captured her at that moment.

That was a good day.

Anna Larimore:

The last time my father and I saw each other was after my mother’s accident. His lawyer called, knowing that I would not have answered my father.

My mother was conscious, but barely. The other driver was already dead, and she was going to follow soon after.

“Why can’t you forgive him?” she said. “I have. A man’s life is not defined by one thing. He loves me. And he loves you.”

I said nothing. I only held her hand and squeezed it. He came in and we both spoke to her but not to each other, and after half an hour she went to sleep and did not wake up.

The truth was, I was ready to forgive him. He looked old—a quality that children are among the last to notice about their parents—and there was a kind of frailty about him that made me question myself. We walked silently out of the hospital together. He asked if I had a place to stay in the city, and I said no. He opened the passenger side door, and after hesitating for only a second, I slipped into his car.

We got home, and it was exactly the way I remembered it, even though I hadn’t been home in years. I sat at the dinner table while he prepared frozen dinners. We spoke carefully to each other, the way we used to when I was in high school.

I asked him for a simulacrum of my mother. I don’t take simulacra or keep them, as a rule. I don’t have the same rosy view of them as the general public. But at that moment, I thought I understood their appeal. I wanted a piece of my mother to be always with me, an aspect of her presence.

He handed me a disc, and I thanked him. He offered me the use of his projector, but I declined. I wanted to keep the memory of my mother by myself for a while before letting the computer’s extrapolations confuse real memories with made-up ones.

(And as things turned out, I’ve never used that simulacrum. Here, you can take a look at it later, if you want to see what she looked like. Whatever I remember of my mother, it’s all real.)

It was late by the time we finished dinner, and I excused myself.

I walked up to my room.

And I saw the seven-year old me sitting on my bed. She had on this hideous dress that I must have blocked out of my memory—pink, flowery, and there was a bow in her hair.

—Hello, I’m Anna. Pleased to meet you.

So he had kept this thing around for years, this naïve, helpless caricature of me. During the time I did not speak to him, did he turn to this frozen trace of me, and contemplate this shadow of my lost faith and affection? Did he use this model of my childhood to fantasize about the conversations that he could not have with me? Did he even edit it, perhaps, to remove my petulance, to add in more saccharine devotion?

I felt violated. The little girl was undeniably me. She acted like me, spoke like me, laughed and moved and reacted like me. But she was not me.

I had grown and changed, and I’d come to face my father as an adult. But now I found a piece of myself had been taken and locked into this thing, a piece that allowed him to maintain a sense of connection with me that I did not want, that was not real.

The image of those naked women in his bed from years ago came rushing back. I finally understood why for so long they had haunted my dreams.

It is the way a simulacrum replicates the essence of the subject that makes it so compelling. When my father kept those simulacra of his women around, he maintained a connection to them, to the man he was when he had been with them, and thus committed a continuing emotional betrayal that was far worse than a momentary physical indiscretion. A pornographic image is a pure visual fantasy, but a simulacrum captures a state of mind, a dream. But whose dream? What I saw in his eyes that day was not sordid. It was too intimate.

By keeping and replaying this old simulacrum of my childhood, he was dreaming himself into reclaiming my respect and love, instead of facing the reality of what he had done, and the real me.

Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep his or her child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.

I walked down the stairs and out of the house, and I have not spoken to him since.

Paul Larimore:

A simulacrum lives in the eternal now. It remembers, but only hazily, since the oneiropagida does not have the resolution to discern and capture the subject’s every specific memory. It learns, up to a fashion, but the further you stray from the moment the subject’s mental life was captured, the less accurate the computer’s extrapolations. Even the best cameras we offer can’t project beyond a couple of hours.

But the oneiropagida is exquisite at capturing her mood, the emotional flavor of her thoughts, the quirky triggers for her smiles, the lilt of her speech, the precise, inarticulable quality of her turns of phrase.

And so, every two hours or so, Anna resets. She’s again coming home from day camp, and again she’s full of questions and stories for me. We talk, we have fun. We let our chat wander wherever it will. No conversation is ever the same. But she’s forever the curious seven-year old who worshipped her father, and who thought he could do no wrong.

—Dad, will you tell me a story?

—Yes, of course. What story would you like?

—I want to hear your cyberpunk version of Pinocchio again.

—I’m not sure if I can remember everything I said last time.

—It’s okay. Just start. I’ll help you.

I love her so much.

Erin Larimore:

My baby, I don’t know when you’ll get this. Maybe it will only be after I’m gone. You can’t skip over the next part. It’s a recording. I want you to hear what I have to say.

Your father misses you.

He is not perfect, and he has committed his share of sins, the same as any man. But you have let that one moment, when he was at his weakest, overwhelm the entirety of your life together. You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.

During all these years when you have locked him out, your father played an old simulacrum of you over and over, laughing, joking, pouring his heart out to you in a way that a seven-year old would understand. I would ask you on the phone if you’d speak to him, and then I couldn’t bear to watch as I hung up while he went back to play the simulacrum again.

See him for who he really is.

—Hello there. Have you seen my daughter Anna?

Ken Liu was a programmer before he became a lawyer, and he thinks legal drafting can benefit from some software coding practices. His fiction has appeared/will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Science Fiction World, the Writers of the Future anthology, The Dragon and the Stars, and Panverse, among other places. He lives in the Greater Boston Area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and they welcomed their daughter into the world in 2010. Those late nights when the newborn wouldn’t sleep proved a good time to think about stories. He is currently working on his first novel.

Eliot Wrote
Nancy Kress

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”—J.B.S. Haldane

Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantle. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.

Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor?”

He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.

Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.

Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.

Ononeida, named for an Indian tribe that had once occupied Marthorn City, was accustomed to religious visions, and Carl Tremling was a mathematician, a group known for being eccentric. Ordinarily the hospital would not have admitted him at all. But Dr. Tremling had reacted to the toaster pastry with some violence, flinging furniture out of the apartment window and sobbing that there was dice being played with the universe after all, and that the center would not hold. A flung end-table, imitation Queen Anne, had hit the mailman, who was not seriously injured but was considerably perturbed. Carl Tremling was deemed a danger to others and possibly himself.

A brain scan had failed to find temporal lobe epilepsy, the usual cause of religious visions. Dr. Tremling had continued to sob and to fling whatever furniture the orderlies were not quick enough to defend. Also, the psychiatrist on intake duty, who had recognized both the Einstein and Yeats quotes, was puzzled over the choice of Zeus as the toaster-pastry image. The usual thing was either Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The commitment papers had been signed by Dr. Tremling’s sister, a sweet, dim, easily frightened woman who had never been comfortable with her brilliant brother but who was fond of Eliot. She was leaving the hospital as her nephew arrived.

“Eliot! Are you alone?”

“Yes, Aunt Sue.” In Susan Tremling Fisher’s mind, Eliot was perpetually nine instead of sixteen, and should not be riding buses alone. “How is he?”

“The same.” She sighed. “Only they want to—he wants to—Eliot, are you eating enough? You look thinner.”

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t stay in that apartment alone. Anything could happen! Please come and stay with Uncle Ned and me, you know we’d love to have you and I hate to think of you alone in that big apartment without—”

If Eliot didn’t stop her, she would start her Poor Motherless Lamb speech. “What does Dad want to do?”

“What?”

“You said ‘They want to—he wants to’—so what do the doctors want to do?”

She sighed again. “I wish I had your memory, Eliot. You get it from poor Carl. That doctor with the mustache, he wants to try some new procedure on Carl.”

“What new procedure?”

“I can’t recall the name . . . ” She fumbled in her purse as if the name might be among the tissues and supermarket coupons.

“Was it Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?”

“Yes! The very words! Your memory, Eliot, I swear, your mother would have been so proud of—”

Eliot grabbed her arm. “Are you going to let them operate? Are you?”

“Why, Eliot! You’re hurting me!”

He let go. “I’m sorry. But—you are going to let them operate, aren’t you?”

Aunt Sue looked at him. She had small eyes of no particular color, and a little mouth that was pursing and unpursing in distress. But she was a Tremling. Into those small eyes came stubbornness, an unthinking but resolute stubbornness and yet somehow murky, like a muddy pool over bedrock. She said gently, “I couldn’t do that.”

“Aunt Sue—”

“Carl will come to himself eventually, Eliot. He’s had spells before, you know—why, just consider that time he shut himself up in my spare room for six days and wouldn’t even come out to eat! I had to bring him meals on a tray!”

“He was working on his big breakthrough on the topography of knots!”

“Not only would he not eat, he wouldn’t even wash. I had to air that room out for two days afterward, and in February. But Carl came out of that spell and he’ll come out of this one, too. You just wait and see.”

“It’s not the same! Don’t you understand, his whole mental construct has been turned upside down!”

“That’s exactly what he said when he came out of my spare room with those knot numbers,” she said triumphantly. “Knots! But even as a boy Carl took fits, why I remember when he was just eight years old and he found out that somebody named Girdle proved there were things you couldn’t prove, why that doesn’t even make common sense to—”

“Aunt Sue! You have to sign the papers allowing this operation!”

“No. I won’t. Eliot, you listen to me. I went online last night and read about this Memory Obligation Whatever. It’s new and it’s dangerous because the doctors don’t really know what they’re doing yet. In one case, after the operation a woman didn’t even remember who she was, or recognize her own children, or anything! In another case, a man could no longer read and—get this!—he couldn’t relearn how to do it, either! Something had just gone missing in his brain as a result of the operation. Imagine Carl unable to read! We can’t risk—”

Eliot was no longer listening. He’d known Aunt Sue all his life; she wasn’t going to budge. He barreled down the hall and rattled the door to the ward, which was of course locked. An orderly wielding a mop peered at him through the reinforced glass and pantomimed pressing the call button.

“Yes?” said the disembodied voice of a nurse. Eliot recognized it.

“Mary, I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“Oh, Eliot, I’m glad you came just now, your father is quiet and—”

“I don’t want to see my father! I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not here, dear. I’ll just buzz you in.”

Mary came out of the nurse’s station to meet him. Middle-aged, kind, motherly, she radiated the kind of brisk competence that Eliot admired, and had seen so little of in his own disordered household. Or at least he would have admired it if it weren’t for the motherliness. She saw him not as the intellectual he knew himself to be, but rather as the skinny, short, floppy-haired kid he seemed to be. He was smarter than Mary, smarter than Aunt Sue, smarter than most of the world, so why the hell couldn’t the world notice that?

“I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not on the ward, dear.”

“Call him!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Eliot, you seem upset.”

“I am upset! Isn’t my father going to have SMON-R? Because my aunt wouldn’t sign the papers?”

Motherliness gave way to professionalism. “You know I can’t discuss this with you.”

No one would discuss anything with Eliot. He didn’t count. The rational world didn’t count, not in here. Eliot glared at Mary, who gazed calmly back. He said, “I’ll sign them! I will!”

“You’re underage, Eliot. And your father is non compos mentis. Did you come to visit? He’s in the day room. But if you’re going to upset him, it might be better if you chose another time to visit.”

Eliot bolted past her and ran into the day room.

His father was not flinging furniture. He slumped inert in a chair, staring at the TV, which showed a rerun of Jeopardy. Eliot groaned. His father had published papers in scientific journals, developed algorithms for high-resolution space imagery, had a promising lead on actually solving the Riemann Hypothesis. He did not watch Jeopardy. This was the anti-psychotic drugs, not the real Carl Tremling. Everything the hospital was doing was just making the situation worse.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Eliot.”

Alex Trebek said, “The tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.”

“How are you doing?”

“Just fine.” But he frowned. “Only I can’t quite . . . there was something…”

Something. There were a lot of somethings. There was rational thought, and logical progressions, and the need to restore a man’s proper intellect.

Someone on the TV said, “What is ‘inertia’?”

“Zeus,” Dr. Tremling brought out triumphantly. “Who would have believed—” All at once his face sagged from underneath, like a pie crust cooling. “Who would have believed . . . ” His face crumpled and he clutched Eliot’s sleeve. “It’s real, Eliot! It’s loose in the world and nothing that I thought was true—”

“It was a toaster pastry, Dad!”

Three patients slowly swiveled their heads at Eliot’s raised voice. He lowered it. “Listen to me. Please listen to me. The doctors want to do a procedure on you called Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing. It will remove the memory of the . . . the incident from your mind. Only Aunt Sue—”

“Where’s the pig?” Dr. Tremling said.

Eliot rocked back and forth with frustration. “Even if Aunt Sue won’t sign the papers, if you can seem reasonably lucid—in compos mentis—then—”

“I asked you to bring the pig!”

“It’s broken!”

Dr. Tremling stared at Eliot. Then he threw back his head and howled at the ceiling. Two orderlies, a nurse, and four patients sprang to attention. Dr. Tremling rose, overcoming the inertia of his drugs, and picked up his chair. His face was a mask of grief. “It isn’t true. Nothing I believed is true! The universe—Zeus—dice—”

Eliot shouted, “It was just a fucking toaster pastry!”

“I needed that pig!” He flung the chair at the wall. Orderlies rushed forward.

Nurse Mary grabbed Eliot and hustled him out of the room. “I told you not to upset him!”

“I didn’t upset him, you did, by not giving him what he needs! Do you know how finely balanced a mathematician’s brain is, how prone to obsessions already, and it needs to be clear to—you’re refusing to remove a tumor from his brain!”

“Your father does not have a brain tumor, and you need to leave now,” Mary said, hustling him down the hallway.

A male voice said, “I’ll take scientific terms for 400, Alex.”

“It’s his brain!” Eliot shouted. He meant: My brain, and he knew it, and the knowledge made him even angrier.

Mary got him to the door of the ward, keyed in a code to unlock it, and waved him through. As he stalked off, she called after him, “Eliot? Dear? Do you have enough money for the bus home?”

Eliot’s parents had met at college, where both studied mathematics. Even though Eliot’s mother was not beautiful, there were few girls in the graduate math program, and she was sought after by every mathematician with enough social skills to approach her, including two of the professors. Her own social skills lacked coherence, but something in Carl Tremling appealed to her. She emailed her bewildered mother, “There is a boy here I think I like. He’s interested in nothing but algorithms and pigs.” Carl, who had grown up in farm country, had a theory that pigs were much smarter than other animals and deserved respect.

Fuming on the bus, Eliot wondered why his father had wanted the ceramic pig. Did he have a premonition that in its artificial pink wrinkles he might see Hermes, god of mathematics? Aphrodite? His dead wife? How could his mind have so betrayed Carl Tremling? Eliot wanted his father back, and in his own mind.

Eliot’s mind was so much like his father’s. Everybody said so.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, which caused a man to glare at him across the bus aisle and a woman to change her seat. Embarrassed, Eliot pulled out his school tablet.

Memory, he wrote, is a bridge between what you are today and what you were for all the days before that. All your life you go back and forth across that bridge, extending and reinforcing it. You add a new strut. You hang flower pots on the railing. You lay down kitty litter during icy weather. You chase away the kids who are smoking pot on top of the pilings and under the roadway. Then one day, a section of the bridge gives way. When that happens, it is criminal to not repair it. An unrepaired bridge is like a deep pothole on a dark road and—

Two metaphors. This was not working. And it was due Tuesday.

The man across the aisle was still watching him. Probably thought that Eliot was some sort of gang-affiliated punk. Well, no, not that, not with his build and clothing. A crazy, then. The man thought Eliot might be a gun-toting, cheerleader-loathing shooter who would court death to kill everybody on the bus, perhaps because school shooting was now such a risk, what with all the metal detectors and guards and lock-down protocols.

I am not a shooter, Eliot silently told the man. He was a rationalist and an intellectual, and he just wanted his father back, whole, the way he had been before.

He got off the bus at his Aunt Sue’s building.

The building was depressing because it was so smug. It looked as if nothing bad could ever happen here as long as the stoop was swept clean and the curtains were a bright color and the flower boxes were watered. Nothing bad! Wanna bet? Inside, his aunt’s apartment was even worse. Her decorating style was country-mystic, with wreaths of dried flowers and tapestries of unicorns and small ceramic plaques that said things like “LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA.”

“Aunt Sue, I have to tell you things I didn’t get a chance to say at the hospital. Please listen to me.”

“Of course, Eliot. Don’t I always?”

Almost never. But he composed himself and arranged his arguments. “I was online last night, too. Those two cases you mentioned, the man who couldn’t read again and the woman who didn’t recognize her kids, were anomalies. Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing is new, yes, but it passed clinical trials and FDA approval and it has an eighty-nine percent success rate, with a one percent confidence level. Of the remaining eleven percent, two-thirds were neither better nor worse after the operation. That leaves only three-point-eight percent and when you take into account those with only minor—”

“No.”

“You’re not listening!”

“I am listening. Nobody is going to cut into Carl’s brain.”

“But he believes he saw a defunct Greek god in a toaster pastry!”

“Eliot, is that so bad?”

“It’s not true!”

“Well, it’s true that Carl saw it, anyway, or he wouldn’t be so upset. He’ll come out of whatever spell he’s having about it, he always does. And anyway, I don’t understand Carl’s reaction. Would it be so bad to believe this Zeus-god is around?”

“That’s the part that’s not true!”

She shrugged. “Are you so sure you know what’s true?”

“Yes!” Eliot shouted. “Mathematics is true! Physics is true! Memory can play us false, there’s a ton of research on that, nobody can be sure if their memories are accurate—” He stopped, no longer sure what he was saying.

Aunt Sue said calmly, “Well, if memory is playing Carl false, then he’s all the more likely to get over it, isn’t he?”

“No! It isn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Wouldn’t you like some walnut cake, Eliot? I baked it fresh this morning.”

Hopeless. They came from two different planets. And she—this kind, stupid woman who inexplicably shared one-quarter of his genes—held the power. In a truly rational world, that couldn’t have been true.

“Cream-cheese icing,” she said brightly, and caressed his cheek.

Eliot wrote: Memory is like a corn stalk. Corn blight can wreck any entire economy, starve an entire nation, but it responds to science. Find the bad gene, cut it out, replace it with a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides and voila! Memory functions again! Science triumphs!

Possibly the worst writing he had ever done. He hit DELETE.

His father’s liquor cabinet still held three inches of Scotch. Eliot poured himself two fingers’ worth, so he could sleep.

The next morning, just as he was leaving to catch the bus for school, the hospital called.

“The answer,” his father said, “is obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious to Eliot. His father sat in the day room, out of his bathrobe and dressed in his ordinary baggy khakis and badly-pilled sweater. Dr. Tremling had shaved. He looked just as he once did, and Eliot would have felt hopeful if he hadn’t felt so bewildered, or if the new twitch at the corner of his father’s left eye wasn’t beating madly and irregularly as a malfunctioning metronome.

“I did see what I thought I saw,” his father said carefully. “I know so, in a way that, although it defies explanation, is so incontrovertible that—”

“Dad,” Eliot said, equally carefully—if only that twitch would stop! “You can’t actually ‘know’ that for certain. Surely you’re aware that all our minds can play tricks on us that—”

“Not this time,” Dr. Tremling said simply. “I saw it. And I know it was true, not just an aberration of pastry. I know, too, that mathematics, the whole rational underpinning of the universe, is also true. The dichotomy was . . . upsetting me.”

Upsetting him. Eliot glanced around at the mental hospital, the orderlies watchful in the corners of the room, the barred window. His father had always had a gift for understatement, which was in part what had made this whole thing so . . . so upsetting.

“What I failed to see,” Dr. Tremling said, “was that this is a gift. I have just been handed my life’s work.”

“I thought the topography of knots was your life’s work?”

“It was, yes. But now my life’s work is to find the rational and mathematical underpinnings for this new phenomenon.”

“For Zeus? In a toaster pastry?”

The twitch beat faster, even more irregularly. “I concede that it is a big job.”

“Dad—”

“There must be a larger consciousness, Eliot. If so, it is a physical entity, made up of energy and matter, must be a physical entity. And a physical entity can be described mathematically, possibly through a system that does not yet exist, possibly based on non-local quantum physics.”

Eliot managed to say, “You aren’t a quantum physicist.”

“I can learn.” Twitch twitch TWITCH. “Do you remember what Werner Heisenberg said about belief systems? ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ I need a new method of questioning to lead toward a new mathematics.”

“Well, that’s a—”

“They’re letting me have my laptop back, with controlled wifi access, until I go home.”

“Have they said when that might be?”

“Possibly in a few more weeks.”

Dr. Tremling beamed, twitching. Eliot tried to beam, too. He was getting what he’d wanted—his father back home, working on mathematics. Only—”a new mathematics”? His father was not Godel or Einstein or Heisenberg. He wasn’t even an endowed chair.

Eliot burst out, before he knew he was going to say anything, “There’s no evidence for any larger consciousness! It’s mystical wish-fulfillment, a non-rational delusion! There’s just no evidence!”

“I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was . . . oh, let me think . . . was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as . . . as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”

“No!”

“Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”

Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”

Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 a.m. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!

The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”

“Shut up,” Eliot said.

“Get fucked,” the kid answered.

But Eliot already was.

Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.

Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.

Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”

“It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.

No shit. “Have you had any more . . . uh . . . incidents?”

“That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.

Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”

“You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”

His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”

“Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”

“It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.

On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 a.m., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.

But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.

“Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”

Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.

On the dresser.

On the desk, beside his calculus homework.

On the computer keyboard.

When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.

Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.

Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

Woman Leaves Room
Robert Reed

She wears a smile. I like her smile, nervous and maybe a little scared, sweet and somewhat lonely. She wears jeans and a sheer green blouse and comfortable sandals and rings on two fingers and a glass patch across one eye. Standing at her end of the room, she asks how I feel. I feel fine. I tell her so and I tell her my name, and she puts her hands together and says that’s a nice name. I ask to hear hers, but she says no. Then she laughs and says that she wants to be a creature of secrets. Both of us laugh and watch each other. Her smile changes as she makes herself ready for what happens next. I read her face, her body. She wants me to speak. The perfect words offer themselves to me, and I open my mouth. But there comes a sound—an important urgent note—and the glass patch turns opaque, hiding one of those pretty brown eyes.

She takes a quick deep breath, watching what I can’t see. Seconds pass. Her shoulders drop and she widens her stance, absorbing some burden. Then the patch clears, and she tells me what I have already guessed. Something has happened; something needs her immediate attention. Please be patient, please, she says. Then she promises to be right back.

I watch her turn away. I watch her legs and long back and the dark brown hair pushed into a sloppy, temporary bun. A purse waits in the chair. She picks it up and hangs it on her shoulder. Her next two steps are quick but then she slows. Doubt and regret take hold as she reaches the open door. Entering the hallway, she almost looks back at me. She wants to and doesn’t want to, and her face keeps changing. She feels sad and I’m sure that she is scared. But whatever the problem, she wants to smile, not quite meeting my eyes with her final expression, and I wave a hand and wish her well, but she has already vanished down the hallway.

The room is my room. The chairs and long sofa are familiar and look comfortable, and I know how each would feel if I sat. But I don’t sit. Standing is most natural, and it takes no energy. The carpet beneath me is soft and deep and wonderfully warm on bare feet. I stand where I am and wait and wait. The walls are white and decorated with framed paintings of haystacks, and there is a switch beside the door and a fan and light on the ceiling. The light burns blue. The fan turns, clicking and wobbling slightly with each rotation. A window is on my right, but its blinds are drawn and dark. Behind me is another door. I could turn and see what it offers, but I don’t. I am waiting. She is gone but will return, and she has to appear inside the first door, and I spend nothing, not even time, waiting for what I remember best, which is her pretty face.

A similar face appears. But this is a man wearing white trousers and a black shirt and glove-like shoes and no jewelry and no eye patch. He stands on the other side of the door, in the hallway, holding his hands in front of himself much as she did. He stares at me and says nothing. I ask who he is. He blinks and steps back and asks who I am. I tell him. And he laughs nervously. I don’t know why I like the sound of laughter so much. He repeats my name and asks new questions, and I answer what I can answer while smiling at him, wondering how to make this man laugh again.

Do I know what I am meant to be, he asks. Which is a very different question than asking who I am.

I have no answer to give.

Then he lists names, one after another, waiting for me to recognize any of them. I don’t. That’s not surprising, he says. I was only begun and then left, which is too bad. Which is sad. I nod and smile politely. Then he asks if I have ever seen anybody else, and I describe the woman who just left the room. That’s how I get him to laugh again. But it is a nervous little laugh dissolving into sharp, confused emotions.

That woman was my mother, he says. He claims that thirty-one years have passed and she barely started me before something happened to her, but he doesn’t explain. This is all unexpected. I am not expected.

I nod and smile, watching him cry.

He wants to hear about the woman.

I tell him everything.

And then she left?

I tell how the patch darkened, interrupting us, and I describe the purse and how she carried it and the last troubled look that she showed me, and what does it mean that I’m not finished?

It means you are small and nearly invisible, he says. It means that you have existed for three decades without anybody noticing.

But time has no weight. No object outside this room has consequences, and this young man standing out in the hallway is no more real than the painted haystacks on the walls. What I want is for the woman to return. I want her weight and reality, and that’s what I tell this stranger.

Shaking his head, he tells me that I am unreal.

Why he would lie is a mystery.

He mentions his father and cries while looking at me. Do I know that his father died before he was born?

An unreal person can never be born, I think.

You were begun but only just begun, he keeps saying. Then he admits that he doesn’t know what to do with me. As if he has any say in these matters. His final act is to turn and vanish, never trying to step inside the room.

But he wasn’t real to begin with. I know this. What cannot stand beside me is false and suspicious, and the lesson gives me more weight, more substance, the epiphany carrying me forward.

Another man appears.

Like the first man, he cannot or will not step out of the hallway. He looks at my face and body and face again. He wears a necklace and sturdy boots and odd clothes that can’t stay one color. He says that it took him forever to find me, and finding me was the easiest part of his job. Operating systems were changed after the Cleansing. He had to resurrect codes and passwords and build machines that haven’t existed in quite some time. Then on top of that, he had to master a dialect that died off ages ago.

He wants to know if he’s making any sense.

He is a madman and I tell him so.

I found your file logs, he says, laughing and nodding. Stored in another server and mislabeled, but that was just another stumbling block.

I don’t know what that means.

He claims that his great-grandfather was the last person to visit me.

Phantoms like to tell stories. I nod politely at his story, saying nothing.

He tells me that the man lived to be one hundred and fifty, but he died recently. There was a will, and my location was mentioned in the will. Until then I was a family legend—a legend wrapped around twin tragedies. His great grandfather’s father was killed in the Fourth Gulf War, and his great-great-grandmother missed him terribly. She was the one who began me. She spent quite a lot of money, using medical records and digital files to create a facsimile of her soul mate. And she would have finished me, at least as far as the software of the day would have allowed. But her son was hurt at daycare. He fell and cut himself, and she was hurrying to the hospital when a stupid kid driver shut off his car’s autopilot and ran her down in the street. The boy wasn’t seriously hurt. What mattered was that the boy, his great-grandfather, was three and orphaned, and a drunken aunt ended up raising him, and for the rest of his many, many days, that man felt cheated and miserable.

I listen to every word, nodding patiently.

He wants to know what I think of the story.

He is crazy but I prefer to say nothing.

Frowning, he tells me that a great deal of work brought him to this point. He says that I should be more appreciative and impressed. Then he asks if I understand how I managed to survive for this long.

But no time has passed, I reply.

He waves a hand, dismissing my words. You are very small, he says. Tiny files that are never opened can resist corruption.

I am not small. I am everything.

He has copied me, he claims. He says that he intends to finish the new copy, as best he can. But he will leave the original alone.

Pausing, he waits for my thanks.

I say nothing, showing him a grim, suspicious face.

But you do need clothes, he says.

Except this is how I am.

My great-great grandma had some plan for you, he says. But I won’t think about that, he says. And besides, clothes won’t take much room in the file.

My body feels different.

Much better, he says, and steps out of view.

Time becomes real when the mind has great work to do. My first eternity is spent picking at the trousers and shirt, eroding them until they fall away, threads of changing color sprawled across the eternal carpet.

Yet nothing is eternal. Each of the haystacks begins with the same pleasantly rounded shape, but some have turned lumpy and ragged at the edges, while my favorite stack has a large gap eaten through its middle. And I remember the straw having colors instead of that faded uniform gray. And I remember the sofa being soft buttery yellow, and the room’s walls were never this rough looking, and the colored threads have vanished entirely, which seems good. But the carpet looks softer and feels softer than seems right, my feet practically melting into their nature.

Portions of my room are falling apart.

As an experiment, I study the nearest haystack until I know it perfectly, and then I shut my eyes and wait and wait and wait still longer, remembering everything; when I look again the painting has changed but I can’t seem to decide how it has changed. Which means the problem perhaps lies in my memory, or maybe with my perishable mind.

Fear gives me ideas.

My legs have never moved and they don’t know how. I have to teach them to walk, one after the other. Each step requires learning and practice and more time than I can hope to measure. But at least my one hand knows how to reach out and grab hold. I push at the window’s blinds, but for all of my effort, nothing is visible except a dull grayish-black rectangle that means nothing to me.

Stepping backwards is more difficult than walking forwards. But turning around is nearly impossible, and I give up. In little steps, I retreat to the place where I began. The carpet remembers my feet, but the carpet feels only half-real. Or my feet are beginning to dissolve. The woman will be here soon. I tell myself that even when I don’t believe it, and the fear grows worse. I start to look at my favorite hand, studying each finger, noting how the flesh has grown hairless and very simple, the nails on the end of every finger swallowed by the simple skin.

A stranger suddenly comes to the door.

Hello, it says.

What it looks like is impossible to describe. I have no words to hang on what I see, and maybe there is nothing to see. But my feeling is that the visitor is smiling and happy, and it sounds like a happy voice asking how I am feeling.

I am nearly dead, I say.

There is death and there is life, it tells me. You are still one thing, which means you are not the other.

I am alive.

It claims that I am lucky. It tells me much about systems and files and the history of machines that have survived in their sleep mode, lasting thousands of years past every estimate of what was possible.

I am a fluke and alive, and my guest says something about tidying the room and me.

The work takes no time.

My favorite hand is the way it began. My favorite haystack is rather like it began in terms of color and shape. Legs that never moved until recently barely complain when I walk across the room. It never occurred to me that I could reach into the haystack paintings, touching those mounds of dead grass. Some feel cool, some warm. I sing out my pleasure, and even my voice feels new.

My guest watches me, making small last adjustments.

Because it is proper, I thank it for its help.

But the original file is gone now, it says.

I ask what that means.

It tells me that I am a copy of the file, filtered and enhanced according to the best tools available.

Once more, I offer my thanks.

And with a voice that conveys importance, my guest tells me that I have a new purpose. What I am will be copied once more, but this time as a kind of light that can pierce dust and distance and might never end its travels across the galaxy and beyond.

I don’t understand, and I tell it so.

Then my friend does one last task, and everything is apparent to me.

I ask when am I going to be sent.

In another few moments, it promises.

For the last time, I thank my benefactor. Then I let my legs turn me around, looking at the door that was always behind me.

A second room waits. The bed is longer than it is wide and rectangular and neatly made. Pillows are stacked high against the headboard, and identical nightstands sport tall candles that have not stopped burning in some great span of time. I know this other room. I think of her and the room and step toward the door and then suffer for my eagerness.

What is wrong? asks a new voice.

I turn back. A creature with many arms stands in the hallway.

You appear agitated, says the creature.

Which is true, but I am not sure why I feel this way. I stare into a face that seems buried in the creature’s chest, hanging word after inadequate word on my emotions.

It listens.

I pause.

You are interesting, says the creature.

I am nothing but a file with a name and a few rough qualities.

But my new companion dismisses my harsh outlook. Every arm moves, drawing complex shapes in the air. You are part of a large cultural package, it says, and do you know how long you have been traveling in space?

I could guess, I say. I could invent infinite estimates, all but one of them wrong.

And then it laughs, revealing a reassuring humor. Even this strange laugh makes me happier than I was before.

An eight billion year voyage, it says.

That seems like an unlikely, preposterous figure, and it shakes me.

It explains that it can’t determine which star was mine, and my galaxy barely wears a name, and most of the data that came with me has been lost to the vagaries of time and the great distance being covered.

But here you stand, it says.

I am standing, but sad. My savior is full of hearty laughter, yet I feel sick and sorry and lost.

She is gone forever, I say.

It knows whom I am talking about. It measures my misery and learns what it can from my longing, and then at the end, as if delivering the punch line of a joke, it laughs and says:

But the universe is infinite, and in too many ways to count.

I don’t know what that means.

Infinite means eternal, it says, and eternal means that nothing is unthinkable, and what can be imagined is inevitable.

But when? I ask.

And again, the alien laughs, saying:

Are you hearing me? There is no such monster as “when.”

I am a file and I am protected and I don’t know where I am or how well I am protected. Time stretches, and I suspect that I exist mostly inside some sleep mode, probably initiating only when I blink my eyes.

Once again, the two rooms decay and the haystacks fall apart and I forget how to move and forget a great deal more too.

Beyond the walls, worlds die and dissolve away.

Little flickers tear the walls to pieces, but the pieces knit themselves back together, and I wait, and wait, and then she comes through the door once again. Her clothes are different. There is no eye patch and no purse. But while I am uncertain about much, I know that beautiful face.

It took me a little while, she explains.

She walks toward me, pulling the pins out of her brown hair.

And that’s when I remember what I was going to tell her that first time that we met.

I won’t ever let you out of this room, darling.

I say it now.

She thinks that is funny and wonderful, and laughs.

And in another moment, I can’t remember anything else that ever happened. The universe is nothing but the two of us holding each other, laughing ourselves sick.

Robert Reed is the author of more than two hundred works of short science fiction, with the occasional fantasy and odd horror thrown into the mix. He has also published various novels, including Marrow and The Well of Stars, two epic tales about a world-sized starship taking a lap around the galaxy. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter, and a computer jammed with forgotten files.

The House of Gears
Jonathan L. Howard

The house rose upon the crest of a high, tumbled hill like the tombstone upon the world’s grave. On a dour day, the lowering clouds would bury the place in their embrace, gasps of thin vapour running along lintel and gambrel, blinding the windows and pushing the gardens that lay about it into dream. Today, the only clouds were high and unconcerned against a sky as blue as a peacock’s feather. Yet the very clarity in which this light showed the house threw details into acute relief that might, in truth, be better smudged and rendered uncertain behind cloud or night.

Acute or obtuse, Johannes Cabal didn’t like it.

His aversion to the place had started long before he even clapped eyes upon it. It had started a month and two hundred miles away when Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, had discovered a reference to it in a dead man’s notes. The dead man had been kind enough to write them for Cabal after being raised from a dreamless sleep of some six year’s duration. “Requiscat in pace,” Cabal had said to the hapless corpse as he returned it to the earth afterwards. “Until next time.”

Necromancy is not a popular practice, specifically amongst those who do not practise it. Secrecy and self-encloisterment from a disapproving world are the marks of the practitioner. Nor yet does it stretch to professional journals by which the state of the art may be more easily learned. There are no directories, no friendly associations, no annual dinners. Those who study this black science do so under the opprobrium of having to steal their test materials, usually from graveyards, although gibbets were always useful. Thus, any data a necromancer can gather from another is more valuable to him than gold dust. The unfortunate cadaver that had been so helpful in Cabal’s researches had once been a necromancer itself, in the happier, more vital days when it still breathed and before the families of some test subjects came to call.

The notes had referred to a Monsieur Samhet, who lived in a strange house in the hills. They were vague about Samhet’s accomplishments—the dead were never at their best while essaying in shorthand—but he seemed capable of resurrecting with an insolent ease that intrigued Cabal, many of whose own experiments ended with unpleasantness and scuttling offal. There was, it was true, something about the very vagueness of the inherited notes that had troubled Cabal. However, this disquiet proved insufficient to dissuade him from mounting an expedition to visit the mysterious Monsieur Samhet.

So, now Cabal stood upon the hillside, his long black coat flapping about him, his hat held firmly to his head by the means of a scarf that he had wound from crown to chin and round again. He was also wearing stout walking boots, a necessity that irked the few splinters of vanity that still prickled him. He liked to believe he was a practical man yet sometimes practicality weighed against his dignity, and his dignity was a high horse he kept permanently saddled. Hoping that nobody was about to see his boots or how his hat was anchored, he pushed himself on against the biting wind and up towards the dark silhouette of the house.

He’d left his habitual Gladstone bag at home, feeling it would be an unnecessary burden, but had transferred its most vital contents over to the long jacket he wore beneath the coat. He had, however, brought his walking stick. It was not a suitable item for hiking; its elegant black shaft and the tarnished silver death’s head that capped it were the affectations of a man about town. It seemed very out of place lending him assistance on the steep and rock strewn path.

The details of Cabal’s hike are unimportant but for leaving him in a fouler mood than usual. This mood was not lightened when he finally found himself, extraordinarily, at the gates.

There isn’t another living soul within twenty miles, thought Cabal, yet he feels the need for gates. Large iron things topped with rusting spikes that fairly promised lockjaw. Cabal was considering what to do next when they obligingly swung open with the hideous squeal of un-oiled hinges. Cabal watched them with studied ennui as they ponderously glided to their furthest limit, stopping with a shuddering clang! When he was happy that he had given the impression to any hidden watcher that he had been waiting for the gates to do something truly remarkable and, in this, been disappointed, he walked in.

To the disquiet about the house that he had derived from the notes, his antipathy to its location and the odium that its form aroused in him, he now added a profound dislike of its garden. The garden, such as it was, was enclosed by a circle of high iron fencing some two hundred feet in diameter that looked, to Cabal’s eye, to be perfectly round. At some point, somebody—presumably Monsieur Samhet—had tried his hand at gardening before very wisely giving it up. Some trees stood around, unhappy and lonely. Forms that might have been flowerbeds lay strangled beneath scrub and bushes. By the path was a pond, a large ornamental affair edged with twisted stonework. In its centre was a large rock upon which a naked male figure stood, furious and triumphant, man-size in bronze. A chain stretched between his hands caught at the moment after snapping, the ends flailing away. Perched by the side of the rock, an eagle was captured in a state of terror.

Prometheus unbound, thought Cabal. An interesting study. Where are you now, o gods?

He paused to look at the scene. The water was dark and reflected the blue skies and the fleeing clouds perfectly in its surface. Again, the feeling of unease settled upon Cabal, this time crystallized into the form of a swan—a dead mechanical swan that lay half submerged on its side in the shallows. It wasn’t quite close enough to reach, even with his cane, but he could see that it must once have been skinned with some organic laminar that had long since rotted away. Exposed within were a steel frame, soiled and dark, and a subtle mass of cogs and sundered springs. Cabal appreciated craftsmanship and it pained him to see such an exquisite piece of work abandoned thus. What sort of man was Samhet that he thought so little of so much?

Cabal moved on. At the door he raised his hand to knock, but then paused to see if it would perform the same welcoming trick as the gates. It did not, so he rapped firmly upon the stern wood. There was a long moment during which he could have sworn he heard distant rumbles and clicks as if he had just put some enormous engine into motion by knocking, as if the great house itself was a machine. The curious sounds subsided, and, in the moment of silence, the door opened.

Cabal looked in, and then he looked down. “Monsieur Samhet, I presume?”

The man who had opened the door was not tall; he was barely even short. He stood around four feet tall and wore a peculiar coat of a dull black material, perhaps felt. It was bell-shaped, yet seemed to closely fit the form of the odd little man, the edges of the coat reaching right down to the ground, to completely obscure the man’s legs and feet. Cabal could see no way in which the coat could fasten; it seemed to have been stitched directly into place. Samhet also wore curious black gloves made of some synthetic material that glistened with an unhealthy sheen. The only flesh exposed was his head, a fact which, in all honesty, Cabal thought unfortunate.

Monsieur Samhet (for he had nodded at Cabal’s inquiry) had a head that was congruous to his slightly bloated, bell-like body. He looked as if he would, in a mostly ideal world—an entirely ideal world would have had no need for him—be completely bald. However, this being a far from ideal world, he instead had a tightly coiffured head of pale red hair that was so primped and oiled and tormented into submission that the overall effect was of some form of bony excrescence that had been painted orange.

Samhet smiled as if the expression was something he’d found in a text book. “I’ve been expecting you. Please, please come in, M’sieur Cabal,” he said, spending far too long on the last syllable to be seemly, letting it roll around his mouth picking up phlegm as it went until it died a miserable, rheumy death in the back of his throat.

“You know my name.”

“Your fame precedes you,” he simpered, like a man who is reading How to Simper in Five Weeks and is up to day three.

Cabal looked at him, silently appalled. If the horrible little man asked him for his autograph, he decided, it would be necessary to kill him. Misinterpreting Cabal’s silence for acquiescence, Samhet stepped back and waved Cabal inside. Except, Cabal’s methodical eye noted as he crossed the threshold, he didn’t step. Samhet had swept back and was now in the process of sweeping across the large, dark hallway. Cabal watched his progress with interest, quite ignoring the inevitable report of the great door closing unbidden behind him. The hem of Samhet’s coat moved slightly as he travelled and Cabal distinctly caught the glimpse of shining metal and silky black rubber.

“I notice,” said Cabal, apropos of nothing, “that you move on castors.”

“Yes!” cried Samhet, utterly unabashed. “You like, yes?” He pirouetted on the spot, cackling happily. “I move like the Georgian State Dancers, sweeping and swooping about the place. So very elegant. I like elegance. Don’t you, M’sieur Cabal?”

Cabal gestured at the curving staircase that performed a 180° turn as it rose from the ground to the first floor. Vertical in its arc stood part of a girded and baroque lift shaft, the door open. “You have made allowances for your condition within this house, but it must inconvenience you when you are outside.”

“I never go outside,” said Samhet. “It bores me.” He wheeled silently towards an open door beyond which could be made out a richly appointed sitting room. Seeing that he had the solution to the garden’s wretched state, Cabal followed.

When he entered, Samhet was already pouring two sherries from the lowest Tantalus Cabal had ever seen. He took the moment to look around, and what he saw only deepened the sense of disquiet that had been dogging him. The place was spotless. Even surfaces well out of Samhet’s reach were clear of dust. He must have servants to do such work but, in that case, where were they? Why had he opened the door himself? Perhaps most disturbingly, how did Samhet know who he was? His fame preceded him, indeed. Cabal only generated infamy, and he had always been careful to avoid too much accruing in one place. He assiduously avoided antagonizing the locals in the area in which he lived and paid a tolerable bribe to the local police sergeant every Christmas to keep that corner of the world uninterested in his business. There was no reasonable way he could have been expected or recognized by this odd little man. It was a mystery.

Cabal didn’t like mysteries.

Samhet had finished pouring two glasses and pivoted to offer one to Cabal. Cabal crouched to take the one Samhet had obviously intended for himself.

Samhet was irritatingly tolerant. “A cautious man, M’sieur Cabal, eh? I admire caution. In your occupation, caution is a necessity, hein?”

“In my occupation?” Cabal flared his nostrils over the glass and inhaled. It smelt like sherry. “I was under the impression that we shared our profession?”

“Ah ha! Once, once I followed your path, but now? No, no, no! It is a chimaera, a phantom. There is no satisfaction to be had in necromancy.”

Necromancy. It was a word that was not bandied about easily by most people. One way or the other, thought Cabal, Monsieur Samhet was not most people.

Samhet continued, “There are better techniques that furnish better results, much better results.” He paused to drink an uncouth gulp of sherry followed by a smacking of lips. Cabal finally allowed himself a small sip. “Once one appreciates the fundamental truth, then nothing is denied to one. You wish to resurrect the dead? Child’s play! Immortality? A simple procedure! The truth,” he repeated it slowly with emphasis, “the truth can make a man...into a god!”

Cabal thought Samhet looked more like a jelly mould than a deity, but forbore to say so. Instead he asked, “And what truth would this be?”

Samhet wheeled over by the fireplace and signalled to Cabal that he should make himself comfortable on the sofa. Once he was sitting, Samhet said, “It is so simple. It is nothing but a matter of perception, an alteration in perspective. Tell me, M’sieur Cabal, what is death?”

Cabal considered. It was not a simple question. “Death is the extinction of life. You would do better to ask ‘what is life?’ Death is not something in and of itself. It is a negative. Any man with a knife or an axe or a gun can deal in death. Many do. I deal in life.”

Samhet fussed his hands and clenched his eyes with irritation, the first real emotion he had displayed. “Semantics, semantics! I do not care in what you deal, you should be concerned with that which you seek to negate, and that is death, hein? Of course it is. And death,” he said, trundling up and down in emphasis, “is entropy.”

“Entropy, by definition, cannot be negated,” countered Cabal.

“Not in any cosmic sense, no, you are quite right. But on the mundane level, the day to day, we fight entropy all the time. We repair roofs, paint woodwork, clear gutters on our houses. And what is the human body if not a house for the soul?”

“If you are suggesting a regime of clean living and vitamins, we are clearly talking at cross purposes.”

“Clean living? Ha!” Samhet raised his glass to Cabal and drained it. “What is the point of extending life if one can not enjoy it, eh? No point, no point at all. No, that will give one at most a few extra years. I am talking about decades! Centuries! ‘Clean living and vitamins’! No, no, no! That would make me into nothing but a beautiful corpse.”

Cabal thought that unlikely in the extreme. “This is all very interesting, but...” Cabal paused. He seemed to be slurring. He did not drink much as a rule, but he doubted a couple of sips of sherry were going to have that profound an effect. Unless, of course...He attempted to rise and his legs failed to answer him. His glass slid from nerveless fingers to shatter on the marble tiling. “I appear to have been drugged,” he observed.

Samhet ignored him. He was wheeling back and forth, engaged upon his thesis.

“Immortality—pure life without end—must counter this entropy, this rotting of the flesh even as we draw breath. It must provide an incorruptible vessel for the intelligence.”

Cabal tried to speak, but his tongue rolled from side to side of his mouth like a drunk upon the English road. “Unghk,” he managed.

“Impossible, you say?” Samhet didn’t seem to notice his visitor was slowly sliding off the sofa to the floor. “Only the bodies of saints and vampires are thus? Well, that is true. I, however, have neither the inherent guilt necessary to be a good Catholic and I fear I should cut a poor figure as the latter.”

It was impossible to disagree with this assessment. It would be like being vampirised by a barstool.

“But if my body must suffer the rigors of time, it shall do so under my terms! I shall not age! I shall not decay! I shall remain forever...” Samhet grasped the seam of his garment, “Modular!” He tore viciously at the cloth. “Versatile!” The cloth rolled back under his rubberized fingers. “Samhet!” Beneath the bell-like coat lay the harsh gleam of steel, the glint of small brass rivets, the fairground contortions of reflections upon a rounded metallic surface. “Behold the ultimate, necromancer! I call ‘Fie!’ upon your alchemical Übermensch! I give you...die Menschmachine!”

As if on cue, the doors at the end of the room swung open and three ghastly figures walked in. Slow and precise in their movements, they had once been men until Samhet had “improved” upon nature using stainless steel and copper, electrodes and actuators. Now they glittered under the lights, armatures and wiring erupting from their flesh, braces and pivots reinforcing limb and joint. At least half the prosthetic additions seemed to have been installed after the men had been dressed in butler’s clothes.

As they advanced, Cabal realized he recognized one as a rival necromancer who had vanished some two years earlier, missing presumed lynched. It was suddenly clear that, like Cabal, the wretch had followed rumours to Samhet’s retreat. That, like Cabal, he had accepted Samhet’s hospitality and sherry. Cabal’s future suddenly looked unpleasantly mechanical.

“Bolph,” said Cabal, less impressively than he had hoped, and passed out.

Drug-induced unconsciousness is rarely like sleep. When Cabal opened his eyes, he had no sense of any more time having elapsed than in a blink. But his change in surroundings and the chemical dryness in his mouth told their own story.

Samhet, like Cabal, preferred his laboratory to be up in the attic. Unlike Cabal’s relatively cramped facility, however, Samhet’s stately house provided a large and airy space that he had filled with gleaming white surfaces and art deco science. Cabal lay untidily sprawled across a very low-lying gurney while Samhet, his steel torso once more sheathed in black, wheeled happily back and forth collecting a variety of surgical tools and mechanical enhancements for Cabal’s imminent metamorphosis. It disturbed Cabal that he could hardly tell the difference between the tools and the enhancements.

He tested his limbs and found some response, but little more than the twitch of a finger or the flare of a nostril. His tongue, at least, no longer seemed to be made of soft leather.

“Samhet,” he wheezed, almost losing the “m” sound to sluggish lips.

The name was not spoken loudly, but Samhet heard it instantly. He trundled to Cabal’s side. “You are awake, M’sieur Cabal? That is unfortunate. I shall have to sedate you again.” He made to go to the pharmaceuticals cabinet.

“This is it?” whispered Cabal. Samhet paused, spun on the spot to look back. “This is your great triumph?”

Samhet frowned. “Mais, naturellement,” he replied, “it is self-evident. As this body wears out, I replace the failing components with others at the last equivalent or even superior. How can this not be a greater and more elegant solution to the question of mortality than your pettifogging about in burial grounds? I,” he held out his arms and posed, “am the ultimate.”

“You look like a milk churn on wheels.”

Samhet giggled girlishly. “I could, perhaps, be taller. And I shall be. My physicality is now subject to my whim. That is another advantage of my method.” He turned away.

“Still going to have trouble with stairs, though, aren’t you?” Concealed by his body, Cabal was frantically exercising one finger. If he could raise his heart rate, metabolize the drug more quickly, perhaps there might be a way out of this. His little finger straightened and crooked, straightened and crooked like the most enthusiastic disciple of calisthenics. But he needed time. “What about those wretches you have experimented upon? There is precious little of the ultimate about them.”

Samhet paused and turned back to Cabal. It seemed he had the overweening vanity of the egomaniac, which was hardly surprising. If Cabal could keep him explaining his grand scheme until able to move again, then he’d probably find the house also contained a poorly concealed self-destruct mechanism. “They? Oh, they were just doodlings, variations on a theme of perfection. Being variants, they are not perfect.”

“I’ve seen more intelligence in a zombie,” said Cabal truthfully. “You’ve ruined their minds for no reason.”

“No reason?” That giggle again. “M’sieur Cabal, have you any idea how difficult it is to get staff these days? They came to my door seeking an insight into my method. I provided a practical demonstration. I have had no complaints.”

“I’m complaining.”

“There’s always one,” said Samhet dismissively. “Hardly my fault if you barely even tasted your sherry. A single decent swallow and we would not be engaged upon this tiff. Speaking of which, you must think me very foolish indeed if you do not think that I know full well that you are playing for time. Time, I think, for more sedative.”

“Very well. But there are two things that you have not considered.”

Samhet’s complacency faltered and his rubber-coated hands clawed the air in irritation. “What is it, Cabal? Quickly now, I will not be distracted further!”

Cabal smiled dryly and said nothing. Samhet wheeled over. “You grow tiresome, necromancer. Speak now. You won’t have the option shortly.”

“The first thing,” said Cabal, “is that calcified pompadour looks ridiculous.” Samhet’s eyes glanced upwards with surprise. He apparently believed his hair was as perfect as the rest of him. In this he was technically correct.

“The second thing...” Cabal drew up one leg. It felt like wood, but at least it was moving. “...is that it’s far too late for more sedative.”

With a clang of shoe leather against thin steel, Samhet flew backwards across the polished floor, his castors squealing almost as shrilly as Samhet himself. He applied the brakes, but too violently, rising onto two wheels and teetering at the point of falling over. Cabal rolled off the gurney and fell onto the floor like a sack of washing. His legs had insufficient life in them to keep him upright, so he kicked back with them as he drew himself forward on his arms. Samhet’s windmilling was just keeping him on the edge of falling over; Cabal headbutting his base plate put him firmly over it. Samhet fell onto his rounded back where he rolled around, calling frantically for his mechanical servants to rescue him.

Cabal, without a moment’s pause, had dragged himself to the instrument table. His eye scanned quickly along the line of glittering steel. Enucleator...Cushing pituitary spoon (silver plated, very nice)...Nerve root retractors...Ah! His eye lit upon a freshly sterilized four lb. lump hammer. Perfect.

Crawling back to where Samhet rocked and gibbered, he raised the hammer high. Cabal was not a particularly vindictive man by nature, but he did experience some small pleasure at the widening of Samhet’s eyes when he saw the hammer.

“Cabal! We can reach an arrangement! This is not necessary!”

“You’re hardly an exemplar of what is and is not necessary,” replied Cabal, and smashed in Samhet’s face.

It cracked open like a china doll’s, for that was what it was. Or, at least, a first cousin. Cabal rained blow after blow onto Samhet’s head, whose face still expressed dismay even as the artificial flesh that comprised it split and tore under the onslaught. Beneath it Cabal found cunning pads of dry synthetic muscle that had once brought expressions to Samhet’s face, expressions as varied as smug all the way through to very smug indeed. Now they only wrinkled and smoothed spastically. Interesting, but, at that moment, unimportant. The hammer rose and fell again and again and again.

The next target was Samhet’s bell-like body. It rang like a kicked bucket as Cabal worked a seam loose and proceeded to tear the little man apart. For a man who seemed to be in control of the situation, however, Cabal’s face darkened with every newly exposed component, every excavated module. “Where is it?” he said quietly under his breath. The glass tubes of thermionic valves smashed under the hammer, their warm glow dying. Louder, “Where is it?” Wire weave tore and parted. Only glass and wire and Bakelite were exposed. Nothing organic, nothing wet, nothing living. No, something wet there... a small brass cylinder rolled across the floor trailing drops of drugged sherry. Cabal ignored it.

Finally he admitted defeat and rested his hands on the almost empty metal torso, its contents scattered about him. He glared at it, frustrated and angry.

“Where is the verdammt brain?”

“You are looking,” said the house, “in the wrong place.”

Cabal looked up, the colour draining from his face.

It was a strange voice with the timbre of settling foundations, wind in the eaves, all filtered through vocal cords of wire, but it was unmistakably Samhet’s. “Look what a mess you have made of my Mark XIX body, M’sieur Cabal. I shall have to get the Mark XVIII out of storage now.”

The outside bores him, indeed, thought Cabal with a mixture of disgust at Samhet’s dissembling and dismay at the true state of affairs. He had assumed that the self-opening doors and mechanical rumbles in the bowels of the house had simply been contrivances, seen and unseen, of Samhet’s invention to ease the inconveniences of his short-stature and lack of legs. Now it appeared that Cabal had actually been treated to a puppet show the whole time, and had only succeeded in cutting a few strings. The puppet master was not happy with him.

The door opened and two of Samhet’s demi-mechanical servants strode in. They moved quickly, too quickly for Cabal to out-manoeuvre with his body still fighting the last effects of the drug. Instead, he waited until one drew near before smashing its knee with the hammer, turning the joint into a blood pudding of bone and rivets. The servant fell soundlessly, and lay squirming for a moment before attempting to rise. The knee was now behaving like a couple of pounds of tripe rather than a hinge, and the servant fell heavily on its face. In dreadful silence, it tried to rise again.

Cabal climbed awkwardly to his feet and walked in a rapid, stiff-legged stagger for the doors, leaving the other servant momentarily confused as to how to get around its comrade. In a few hasty strides he was through the laboratory’s twin doors, slamming them shut behind him and—for lack of any other way of locking them—jamming the hammer through the handles.

He’d half expected the doors to fight him when he’d closed them, but it seemed that not every door in the place was under the direct influence of Samhet’s displaced intellect. The same certainly could not be said of the front door nor the main gates. Cabal would not simply be breezing out of the place.

Cabal knew he would have to hide for a little while, give himself time to formulate a strategy. He limped awkwardly down the wide spiral of stairs that ran around the girder-work lift shaft running up though the body of the building.

At about the halfway mark, the lift compartment itself whirred past. The third of Samhet’s mechanical zombies was inside, doubtless responding to its master’s summons. As it moved by, the zombie turned slowly to look at Cabal. They watched each other until the floor intervened—calm machine certainty on one side, quiet human desperation on the other. Cabal turned with an archaic and foul invective his maternal grandmother had once taught him and redoubled his efforts to get back to the ground floor with all possible dispatch.

The front door did not disappoint him—it wouldn’t even rattle when he took the handle and pulled. He had an impression that it contained perhaps six remotely controlled deadlock bolts running between the frame and the door itself.

“Ah, ah, ah,” said the house. “Do not be such a poor guest, Cabal! Soon enough, you will regard my little house as your own home.”

I shall destroy him, thought Cabal. He was greatly irritated with Samhet for setting his trap, even more irritated with himself for falling into it, and it only took the addition of a small fear that he might actually lose everything here to catalyse a burning rage within him. I shall destroy him, and I shall enjoy it. I shall enjoy it.

But how could he kill that which does not truly live? How does one murder a house? Specifically, how does one murder a house when one has left one’s gelignite at home? He considered berating himself for such an oversight but, in fairness, it was rarely needed and sometimes led to unhappy incidents.

He stood, leaning against the door as the last effects of the drug wore off, indecisive. He could try burning the place down, but that would probably end badly for him too. No, he would have to be more precise in whatever act of violence became necessary or opportune against Samhet.

No. Not Samhet. Samhet’s brain.

Samhet’s brain; yes, that was really what he was looking for. Samhet’s brain—tucked away in some dark corner directing events like a limbless, spongy Napoleon. In a jar. His triumphant little speech had little doubt of his loathing for a biological form; therefore he would have divested himself of as much of his mortal coil as he could comfortably get rid of with a sharp edge.

An image of a brain, possibly with a little of the upper spinal cord attached, bobbing malevolently around in a gleaming glass vessel presented itself to Cabal. He nodded to himself, added an image of himself pouring in battery acid while the brain thrashed convulsively if unrealistically in its death throes, and moved off in search of it.

It would be in the cellar; Cabal was sure of it. If he ever had to hide his brain, the cellar would be the place he’d choose. Cool, protected, secret—the lurking place of choice for the discreet, discrete, and safety-conscious cerebellum.

Cabal followed the stairs down another turn beneath ground level until they halted in front of a door that was neither imposing nor locked. Slipping through it, and very aware that Samhet might be aware of his location and would be organizing a search if he was not, he took a spill of wood that he found upon the untidy cellar floor and kicked it into the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. A feeble sort of lock, but one that would have to do. He turned to take in the room, rubbing his hands with a cold and predatory smile upon his face.

Find the brain, kill the brain, ransack the place for anything useful, go home. A simple plan, satisfying in its immediacy. Unhappily, the plan became untenable immediately after the first step.

Samhet’s brain was, predictably, in a jar. Less predictably, the jar still bore half a label for silverskin pickled onions.

There was no nutrient soup, only formaldehyde. No aquarium oxygenators, no wires, no green pulsing lights; just a handwritten baggage label reading My Brain in smudged ink, secured to the jar’s neck with a slowly perishing rubber band.

Cabal once again had the unpleasant feeling that he’d been jumping to conclusions and that every jump took him closer to eternity in a mechanical hell. He wasn’t dealing with a common or garden megalomaniac genius here. Samhet had a slightly more original turn of mind than the average “Now I shall explain how clever I have been before leaving you to die in my deeply flawed execution contrivance” merchant, and Cabal hadn’t granted him the courtesy of appreciating it. Such a lack of appreciation could make a man dead, or at least immortal without the wit to appreciate it.

Cabal dusted off a chair and sat to consider his next move. It was difficult to concentrate with the house’s never-ending mechanical noises so much louder in its belly, but he rested his elbows on the old laboratory table, his head upon the fore and middle fingers of each hand pressed against his temples, and drove out distraction.

Samhet’s servants were undoubtedly searching the house that moment. He couldn’t risk trying to outrun them again; it was one game of Fox and Geese he doubted he could win. He couldn’t strike directly against Samhet because Samhet had somehow found some way of abandoning his physical body—even his brain—and taking up residence in the ether itself for all Cabal knew. His options seemed very limited indeed.

He cast around for possibilities he might not have considered, but every path finished in a cul-de-sac, every train of thought in a derailment, and every second brought discovery nearer. In fact, thought Cabal when he took a moment to consider this, it was surprising that they hadn’t already tried to enter the cellar. It was surely an obvious hiding place and, vanities aside, Samhet was no fool. Why weren’t his demimechanical servants here?

Unable to find a solution to that vexing question, Cabal instead addressed the matter of where Samhet was keeping his mind, his soul. There were several ways it could be done, Cabal knew, but they tended to involve sacred black gems, midnight sacrifices and all the occult trappings that Samhet, by his own admission, abhorred.

Samhet was a scientist, but a different sort of scientist from Cabal. Where Cabal looked for hidden principals in ancient magics, Samhet reached for the torque wrench. Where Cabal tore the truth, raw and bleeding, from five thousand years of superstition, Samhet ordered life with bone saw and oil can. Where Cabal sought to define the indefinable, Samhet engineered immortality. He engineered it.

Cabal’s eyes opened very slowly. He canted his head to one side, to look into the deeper shadows of the cellar. The working of the house was loud here. Very loud. A clacking and rhythmic ratcheting. Cabal had thought it was the sound of the heart of the house, had even begun to grow used to it. Now he knew different.

“Right idea,” he told himself as he rose from his chair and headed deeper into the cellars, “wrong organ.”

Around a corner, down a short flight of stairs, in through an unlocked door, and the noise grew louder with every step. Once through the last door, it resolved itself into a constant clatter, rising and falling in intensity like the sound of a skeleton orgy, a sound so sharp and penetrating that it made his eardrums shy. Cabal found an electrical turn switch upon the wall and twisted it smartly. The lights glowed on.

Before him stood a row of machines of a type he had never seen before, that he had never even considered before, but whose function he immediately grasped. Each consisted of a tall Möbius loop constructed from twin steel rails. Along the track so formed an endless procession of white rectangular plates formed from some ceramic material or, more probably, coated steel, clicked along in procession starting and stopping rhythmically and abruptly in steps exactly the length of one plate. Cabal stepped closer to examine the plates and was intrigued to note that each was peppered by a regular grid of pits, some of which continued through the plate, some of which did not.

The first machine ran too quickly for him to be sure of its operation, as did the second and the third, right until the seventh at the end of the row. Here he followed the progress of one plate into a device within which small hooked probes delved into the pits and slid tiny gates open and shut. When the plate came out of the other side of the device, the pattern of openings was entirely different to how it had been a moment before. Cabal nodded, impressed. Further along, another device pressed yet more probes into the pits; some penetrated the vacant slots others were held back. The device was connected to the next Möbius loop, precisely at its own bit of apparatus with the hooked arms. Cabal noticed that this loop processed a tiny bit slower than its predecessor. And so on down the row of seven machines, behind it, and the rank of seven behind that. Further and further back, Cabal slowly paced out the clattering engines for six ranks until he reached the very last one.

The incremental decrease in speed between each machine had reached a slow plodding pace here, the plates progressing sullenly around the loop, the hooked arms clicking the slotted pits open and shut in a lackadaisical, almost bored manner. Where all the previous devices had handed off patterns of open and shut pits—representing data, Cabal was sure—to the next device in sequence, this one, however, was pressed snugly up and a wall, and where the reading unit had been mounted on its predecessors, this instead had a dark box mounted to the brickwork. He watched a plate slide into the box, baffles closed around it and then a sudden brilliant glow escaped along the edges where the seal wasn’t quite perfect.

Of course, thought Cabal. He looked back at the ranks of machines and saw them as Samhet’s short term memory—data encoded onto the plates, processed and winnowed down from the general to the specific, the vital from the happenstance. And finally here, at the very last machine, the distillate of Samhet’s experiences was engraved by arc light onto photographic plates. Or sheets. Possibly rolls. Cabal couldn’t be sure of the details, but he was sure that behind the wall was a darkroom that doubled as Samhet’s long-term memory. The irony of Samhet’s inner-self, his very soul being, in actuality, a pokey little cellar did not escape Cabal, but turning this new discovery to his advantage was more pressing than feeling smugly superior at a metaphysical level.

The obvious thing to do was to break the machines. They seemed sturdy, but simple enough to sabotage. All he would have to do was to jam the procession of the looped plates on the first machine and the whole line would either judder to a halt or continue transcribing the same plate or transcribe nothing at all. Cabal wondered what the effect would be; something like a stroke, he assumed, or a strange state where you feel from second to second that you have just woken up—able to remember what happened yesterday, but not a second ago.

Dropping Samhet into an endless mnemonic fugue, however spitefully amusing, did not solve the problem of the clockwork zombies roaming the house. They might take their orders from Samhet but, otherwise, they seemed autonomous. If Cabal were to disable this thinking engine, this memoria technica, forever examining every occurrence and situation in the light of Samhet’s previous experience both living and mechanical, the servants of the house would simply continue to carry out their last order—capture Johannes Cabal. Then, lacking further instructions they would hold him captive until he was dust and then guard the dust. It simply wouldn’t do—he would have to come up with something more elegant.

Samhet wasn’t having the cellar searched; therefore Samhet believed it was secure or else it would already have been sabotaged. Even so, his forces would arrive here eventually by a process of deduction. Cabal would need to find his elegant solution quickly or not at all. He searched the cellars, trying to understand the function of every artefact of Samhet’s research he discovered.

He found a machine, grimy with dust, consisting of a maze of drill bits and electrical probes arranged around the head of a surgical table. The drill bits were still clogged with dried blood and bone powder. This, then, was the machine that had drawn Samhet’s personality from his skull and matriculated it into an enormous series of binary digits. Even if the process analysed the brain relatively rapidly, the speed of transcription was barely up to the mammoth task. Samhet must have lain here for days, even weeks, as his ego was decanted into the machine. Cabal understood Samhet’s determination then, and relented from his earlier desire to destroy him. Even if he was loathsome, his dedication to science deserved some respect.

Besides, Cabal had a better idea.

Samhet, tricycling between madness and genius on demented castors though he was, yet remained a potentially useful resource. Although his researches had taken him in directions that Cabal found odious, that didn’t mean he might not be useful in some future enterprise requiring a mechanical expertise that Cabal lacked. An alternative to destroying Samhet now presented itself to Cabal; an alternative requiring finesse, it is true, but one rich in irony, and irony ran in Cabal’s blood.

In a cobwebbed corner he found a small table with a handle hinged at the tip where it joined a runner across the tabletop. The handle could move sideways and back and forth, a stylus matching a dense field of symbols tabulated on the surface. A moment’s experimentation showed that a steel punch would push through a grill towards the rear of the table corresponding to the position of the stylus over the symbols. A little more searching turned up stack of plates made from thin steel. Placing a plate snugly over the grill allowed a pattern of holes to be punched out with little effort. So, Samhet had needed some plates with permanent information stored upon them before he submitted himself to his automated surgery. Part of that must have been to control the machines that performed the operation, but Cabal could imagine other applications. Emergency procedures for example; what might happen if the Möbius loops spontaneously jammed anyway? No mechanical system is perfect, and Samhet was foresighted enough to consider such contingencies. Somewhere, then, around here...

Cabal found the machine up against the same wall as the last of the constantly clicking machines, snugged up in the corner covered with a rigid case and a tarpaulin over that. He’d noticed it earlier and assumed it was an early prototype or a discarded damaged unit. Now, shorn of its coverings, he saw it was similar but different from the others. The plates were smaller and made of stainless steel, the holes permanently punched rather than the alterable versions of the others. There were also four loops entwined around one another and a reservoir of extra plates at the bottom that were attached as earlier ones had been read and could therefore be safely put to one side. Ultimate function aside, it was a masterful piece of engineering that gave Cabal pause for perhaps a second. Then he began dismantling it.

Ingenious as Samhet’s new non-organic existence was, it seemed to have taken a degree of flexibility from his thinking. Either that or he had a dangerous degree of trust in his deductive logic, especially as it was flawed. Some twelve hours had passed and the cellar had still not been searched. Cabal had made a couple of cautious forays up the steps and seen the servants searching and then searching the same rooms again. He gauged each pass took about two hours, in which case the same cupboards were now on their sixth investigation. Not that Cabal minded; even with his unslowing efforts, his near eidetic memory for figures, and his remarkable mathematical ability, his plan was highly involved and a single error would doom him to death or, as he’d seen, worse. Finding Samhet’s notebooks, now discarded since their contents had been rendered part of the machine’s memory, had aided him enormously, but he was still intending to do something with Samhet’s handiwork for which it had never been intended. Still, one can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, thought Cabal rising once more from the plate-punching table. So much the better if the eggs belong to somebody else.

As he worked, he considered how strange it was that there was no sign that Samhet had ever come down here since adopting his mechanical form. The workshops, stores and laboratory were coated with brick dust and grime. Apart from the swept path to the long-term memory darkroom, presumably kept clean by servants bearing photographic supplies, everything had simply been abandoned. But then, on consideration, perhaps it wasn’t so strange. It was, after all, Samhet’s brain and, mechanical or not, Cabal could understand an unwillingness to traipse through it for fear of damaging it. There are words for people who like to tinker with the mechanics of their own brains, but none of them are admiring.

Still, Samhet’s squeamishness was Cabal’s gain. Down here he had found the time, the equipment, the materials and the opportunity to devise and execute his coup de maître. He checked his watch; almost exactly a day since he’d made the wretchedly poor decision to enter the grounds of the isolated house. And now, it was time to go. He set about making the final preparations.

“Then search the house again!” squealed Monsieur Samhet. He would have preferred to roar, or even bellow, but the Mk. XVIII’s voice box was not impressive in its tonal range, and was inclined to leap up an octave under stress. He was certainly under stress. His servants (including poor M’sieur Combs with the smashed knee) had completed seven sweeps of the house but the irritating Herr Cabal was still nowhere to be found. He reached out through the etheric links that joined mechanical body to mechanical brain and mechanical house and assured himself once more that none of the external doors had been forced open, and that the windows were secure. They were, and Cabal’s location remained a mystery.

“It is not possible,” Samhet muttered furiously, waving his arms in his usual expression of frustration. His left elbow squeaked piercingly, adding to his fury. “It is not possible! The house, it has been searched from top to bottom!”

Somewhere in the cellars, in amongst a whirl of memory plates and probes flickering like a humming bird’s tongue, a twist of memory pointed out that, technically, no. The house, it had not been searched from top to bottom. There were the cellars themselves. A cunningly wrought probability balance weighed that possibility against the inference that, as Samhet’s brain was clearly still functioning, Cabal could not be in the cellars as he would certainly have carried out sabotage by now. The counterargument reinforced itself by pointing out that he hadn’t been found in the rest of the house after repeated searches. The balance called no more bets and rolled electrical dice. Phosphorescent dots came up snake-eyes, and the search once again excluded the cellars.

“Guten Tag, Samhet,” said Cabal conversationally from the top of the cellar stairs.

Samhet whirled to glare at him, which gave Cabal more time than was comfortable to take in the aesthetic disaster that was body Mk. XVIII. It was hemi-spherical rather than bell-shaped, with a round head mounted on the apex that gave more of an impression of an animated bowling ball than a human cranium. The hair was several hanks of red wool clumsily stapled onto a scalp of grimy pink India rubber, the clothing an unconvincing rendering of a rather foppish suit in lilac enamels with something at the lapel that could have been an inexpertly painted carnation, but could just as easily have been a dandelion clock, a cotton wool ball, or a head of cauliflower seen at a distance. The body was also filthy, as if it had been stored in a pigeon loft.

“You!” cried Samhet, in case Cabal wasn’t sure. “You...” His expressionless glass eyes cranked down with a whirr of worm screws to take in the stairs. “The cellars? You have been hiding in the cellars all this time?” The Mark XVIII’s voice box failed to put over his shock, but Cabal assumed it was there anyway.

“Yes. Down among your brain. It was most edifying.”

“What...what have you done?” Still Samhet’s voice purveyed no tension, but his waving arms telegraphed anxiety.

“To your brain? Nothing” said Cabal, adding “yet,” to himself sotto voce; indeed, so sotto as to be silent.

“I do not understand you, Cabal,” said Samhet slowly. “In your position, I would have smashed the machines to pieces.”

“Ah, well, M’sieur Samhet. That is why you are you and I am me. You reduce everything to mechanistic terms. If x and y, then z. You lack nuance.”

“You insult me.” Again the measured tone, although it faltered up an octave before falling back. Samhet was trying very hard to be calm. Somewhere below, a sentiment analogon synthesizer was almost working its grommets loose under the assault of Samhet’s mixed emotions. Anger, fear, hubris, and curiosity churned around cogs and escapements.

“No. I describe you. You’re a genius, Samhet. I would never have even dreamt that what you have achieved here was possible. It’s extraordinary. Remarkable. The artificial brain you have built is a wonder of the modern world. Do you take me for an ignorant Philistine? I have no desire to destroy it.”

It was hard to tell if Samhet was flattered or not. His next words seemed to indicate not. “Pretty sentiments, Cabal. You will still never leave this house.” Presumably summoned directly from the brain, Cabal could hear the servants clanking closer. “What was your next ploy to be? To suggest an alliance, perhaps? I have no need for your necromantic drivel. I have told you! Your techniques are anathema to me!”

“As yours are to me. Still, you have an impressive analytical intellect, Samhet. My researches sometimes require vast quantities of data to be studied. For me, it is a burden. For you, it would be child’s play. Would you do them if I asked you?”

Samhet performed one of his trademark arm waves. When he spoke, his tone broke uncontrollably into a warbling falsetto. Cabal guessed that he was probably quite furious. “Are you not listening, Cabal? Are you afflicted with selective deafness, hein? I am not interested in your researches! Shortly, even you will not be interested in them!”

“Ah,” said Cabal. He took out his pocketwatch. “If you will forgive me for a moment.” And so saying, he ducked behind a large aspidistra in an ornate Chinese pot.

Samhet stopped waving his arms around. Bemusement robbed him of his anger. “What are you doing, Cabal?”

“Hiding,” replied Cabal from hiding.

“But,” Samhet’s India rubber brow furrowed with confusion, “I know where you are! I saw you hide.”

“Yes, you did. Samhet, while I’m waiting, may I ask you to reconsider my offer of an alliance?”

“I have told you, Cabal! I have no...” He tailed off. “Waiting for what, may I ask?”

“Waiting for you to change your mind.”

Down in the darkroom where Samhet’s permanent memories were created and stored lay a small beaker within which a test-tube nestled in metal powder. Within the test-tube, a carefully balanced chemical reaction was just reaching its conclusion. Suddenly it glowed an angry red, and the glass cracked as the temperature rose and rose in the reaction’s fierce little exothermic finale. The metallic powder—magnesium—was suddenly hot enough to manage that combination with oxygen that it had always dreamt of. It took the opportunity with gusto. The improvised flash bomb flared up, filling the darkroom with a brilliant illumination too intense to be looked upon. Samhet’s permanent memory for the last day or so suddenly became a mystery to him.

As the flare died down, an unexpected command filtered down from the short-term memory, where Cabal had carefully encoded it. There was a mnemonic emergency—the brain was to be restarted using the last viable long-term memory rolls. The ranks of Möbius memory analogues clattered to a halt, and, in the corner beneath its recently replaced covers, the emergency re-start sequence clattered—rather more tinnily—to life.

Upstairs, Samhet stood silent, his mechanical jaw drooping in his mechanical head, his body unmoving, and his hair still ridiculous. From behind the aspidistra pot, Cabal watched cautiously and considered Descartes and his First Meditation on the Evil Genius. As Samhet’s memory was rewritten to Cabal’s arrangement, Cabal thought it unlikely that Descartes had ever considered the Evil Genius might spend at least some of his time lurking behind a plant pot. Not, he corrected himself, that he, Cabal, was evil. A little single-minded, perhaps, but not evil. Not in any cosmic sense.

Abruptly, Samhet looked around, doing as good a job as a mechanical avatar with the form of an animated desk bell can make of looking startled. He wavered, unsure, and looked at the potted plant. There had been something he had intended to do involving that plant, he felt sure. Water it, perhaps. He racked his brains to recall, making them emit an unhealthy chittering sound in the process. Yes, of course. Now he remembered.

He wheeled over to the front door and willed it to unbolt and open.

“I’ve been expecting you. Please, please come in, M’sieur Cabal,” he said, forcing an oleaginous note into his uncooperative voice box.

“Very kind, but I’m already here.”

Samhet swung around to find Cabal lounging by the big aspidistra in the Chinese pot. “M’sieur Cabal! How did you..?” he waved at the door.

“Get in? Oh, well, I’m a necromancer,” Cabal explained loftily, examining his nails.

At this point one of the servants finally reached the hall and headed for Cabal, arms outstretched to grab.

“Stop!” squeaked Samhet, aghast. “Stop, you fool! M’sieur Cabal is our guest.”

The servant stopped. If it felt any surprise in the inconstancy of Samhet’s intentions for Cabal, it did not express them. Instead, it stood motionless, regarding Cabal with the magnificent indifference of a bloodhound regarding a paperweight.

Samhet wrung his hands together like a particularly craven hotel manager. “My apologies, M’sieur Cabal. I don’t know what came over it!”

“Do not concern yourself, Samhet,” replied Cabal giving the servant a wide berth as he walked around it. For its part, it didn’t even trouble itself to watch him, but set about dusting the aspidistra’s leaves instead. “I am pleased with your work here. I’m sure it can be useful to me.”

Samhet would have hugged himself with glee if his arms had been long enough. After all, this was a fulsome compliment from somebody, his memory assured him, that he regarded with godlike awe. But Cabal was speaking again.

“I must be leaving, Samhet. My own work calls. If I need your services, I shall be in touch. In the meantime,” Cabal looked around, slightly at a loss, “just carry on.”

Samhet watched Cabal walk down the path and through the great iron gates. He watched until Cabal was just a dot on the hillside and then until he was altogether gone from sight before he willed the gates shut again. He sighed happily, the sigh wheezing out of the Mark XVIII’s inferior voice box like a deflating toad. This was a wonderful day, a day he had been hoping for... why, for as long as he could remember. He returned to his work; he had dismantled the Mark XIX for some vague but satisfying reason that he wasn’t to think about too carefully, and must set about constructing the Mark XX immediately.

Samhet trundled to the lift, content that Cabal was in his heaven, and all was right with the world. The truth, he had once said, could make a man into a god. How right he was.

Jonathan L. Howard is the author of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer and Johannes Cabal the Detective. Currently taking a break from game design, he has in the past worked on video games as diverse as adventures, platformers, tactical military shooters, and giant war robot sims. He lives in the southwest of England with his wife and daughter. The third Johannes Cabal novel, The Fear Institute, is due for publication in the summer.

Lessons from a Clockwork Queen
Megan Arkenberg

I.

It was Bethany’s job to wind the queen. Every morning she woke in the blue-pink dawn before the birds sang, slipped out from under her quilt and took down the great silver winding key that hung over her bed. Then she wrapped herself in her dressing gown and padded up the long, cold tower stair to the room where the queen was kept. She pulled back the sheets and found the little hole in the queen’s throat where the winding key fit like a kiss, and she turned and turned the key until her shoulders ached and she couldn’t turn it anymore. Then the queen sat up in bed and asked for a pot of tea.

The queen (whose name happened to be Violet) was very well cared for. She had girls to polish her brass skin until it shone, and girls to oil the delicate labyrinth of her gears until she could move as silently as a moth, and girls to curl her shining wire hair tightly around tubes of glass. She had a lady to sew her dresses and a lady to shine her shoes and a whole department of ladies to design her hats and make sure she never wore the same one twice. But Violet only had one girl whose job it was to wind her every morning, and only Bethany had the winding key.

Having a clockwork queen was very convenient for Her Majesty’s councilors. Once a month, they would meet over tea and shortbread cookies and decide what needed to be done; and then they would send for a clockmaker to arrange Violet’s brass-and-ivory gears. If she needed to sign a treaty or a death warrant or a new law regulating the fines for overdue library books, the clockmaker would tighten the gears in her fingers so that she could hold a pen. If her councilors thought it was time to host a ball, the clockwork queen had a special set of gears for dancing.

The king of a neighboring kingdom, who was not clockwork and understood very little of the theory involved, decided one day that he should like very much to marry the clockwork queen. Violet’s councilors thought this was a thoroughly awful idea and rejected his advances in no uncertain terms. The politics of courtship being what they are, the king took the rejection very much—perhaps too much, if we may say that a king does anything too much—to heart, and he hired an assassin to murder the queen.

The assassin (whose name happened to be Brutus) tried everything. He poisoned Violet’s tea, but she—being clockwork and lacking a digestive tract—didn’t notice at all. He released a noxious vapor into her chambers while she was bathing in a vat of oil, but she—being clockwork and lacking a respiratory system—didn’t care in the slightest. He slipped a poisonous spider into her bed, but she—being made of brass and lacking the sagacity of an arachnophobe—made a nest for it in one of her old hats, and named it Mephistopheles.

Being a clever sort, and no longer quite ignorant of the properties of clockworks, Brutus lay in wait one night on the cold tower stair, and he thrust a knife into Bethany’s heart when she came to wind the queen. He took the great silver key and flung it into a very, very deep well.

And that is why a wise clockwork queen owns more than one winding key.

II.

When Bethany died, and the winding key disappeared, and poor Violet ground to a halt like a dead man’s watch, her councilors declared a frantic meeting, without even the officious comfort of tea and shortbread cookies. “We must build a new winding key!” declared the eldest councilor, who liked things just so and was not afraid to leave Opportunity out in the cold. “We must declare ourselves regents in the queen’s absence and wield the full power of the monarchy!” declared the richest councilor, who had never understood the point of a clockwork queen in the first place. “We must abolish the monarchy and declare a government of liberty, equality and brotherhood!” shouted the youngest councilor, but at just that moment a servant arrived with a tray of cookies, and he was ignored.

“We must,” said the quietest councilor when everyone had settled down again, “declare a contest among all the clockmakers in the land to see who is worthy to build our new queen.” And since no one had any better ideas, that is what they did.

Over the next months, thousands of designs appeared in crisp white envelopes on the castle’s doorstep. Some of the proposed queens had no eyes; the eldest councilor preferred these, so that he could pinch coins from the palace treasury unobserved. Some queens had no tongue; the richest councilor preferred these, so that he could ignore the queen’s commands. And one queen had no hands, which all the councilors agreed was quite disturbing and could not, absolutely could not, be permitted.

On the last day of the contest, only one envelope appeared at the castle door. It was small and shriveled and yellow, with brown stains at the corners that could have been coffee or blood, and it smelled like bruised violets. When it was opened in the council chamber, everyone fell silent in amazement, and one councilor even dropped his tea. They agreed that this was the queen that must be built, for it was made of iron, and had no heart.

And that is why you should put off making difficult decisions for as long as possible.

III.

When the strange clockmaker, whose name was Isaac, had completed the heartless iron queen—whom, as they did not wish to go against established precedent, the councilors named Iris—the citizens were overjoyed. Not that they cared much for queens, clockwork or otherwise, but they were an optimistic, philosophical people, and Iris was very beautiful. The city became a riot of banners and colorful ribbons and candy vendors on every street, and the stationer’s guild declared a holiday, and children bought pastel paper to fold into boats, which they launched on the river.

But as for the clockwork queen herself, she was very beautiful, and there is only one thing to be done with a beautiful queen: She must be married off.

Once again, the councilors gathered over tea and shortbread and, because it was a holiday, a slice or two of rum-cake. There are several proven, efficient ways to marry off a queen, but experts agree that the best way is for her councilors to throw open the palace for a ball and invite every eligible young man in the kingdom to attend. The council spent days drawing up a guest list, excluding only those who were known to be ugly or vulgar or habitually dressed in a particular shade of orange, and when at last everyone was satisfied, they sent out the invitations on scraps of pink lace.

It snowed the night of the ball, great white drifts like cream poured over coffee, with gusts of wind that shook the tower where old Violet had been packed away for safekeeping. Very few of the eligible young men were able to make an appearance, and of those, only one in three had a mother who was not completely objectionable and thus unsuitable to be the royal mother-in-law. One of the young men, a very handsome one who smelled faintly of ash and glassblowing, would have been perfect if not for his obnoxious stepmother, but, as it happened, he had never really been interested in queens, clockwork or otherwise, and he settled down quite happily with the head of the stationer’s guild.

There was one boy who, though his mother was dead and thus not at all objectionable, had nevertheless managed to trouble Iris’s councilors. Perhaps it was his hair, in desperate need of cutting, or his threadbare velvet coat, dangerously approaching a certain shade of orange. Perhaps it was the fact that he had come in from the snow and, instead of clustering devotedly around Iris with all the other young men, had sat down by the fire in the great hearth and rubbed color back into his fingertips. Whatever it was, the councilors were quite keen that he should not be permitted, not even be considered, to marry their clockwork queen.

No sooner had they agreed upon this than Iris began elbowing her iron way through the crowd, pursuing the threadbare coat like a cat bounding after a mouse. The boy poured himself wine at the table in the western alcove, and the queen hurtled after him, upsetting the drinks of those too slow to move out of her path. He stood for a moment on the balcony overlooking the snow-mounded garden, and Iris glided after him into the cold. As he turned to go back into the flame-brightened ballroom, he found his way blocked by the iron queen. Since, unlike the eldest councilor, he was a wonderfully opportunistic man, he dropped to his knees right there in the snow and asked her to marry him. Iris clicked her iron eyelids at him and assented, and that is how Henry Milton, a bookbinder’s son, became a king.

And that is why, if you are ever invited to a ball for a heartless iron queen, you should always carry a lodestone in your pocket.

IV.

Henry Milton learned very quickly that it is hard to love a heartless clockwork queen, no matter how beautiful she is. She creaks and whirls in odd ways when you are trying to sleep; she has very few topics of conversation; she knows exactly how long it takes you to do everything. She only follows you when you draw her with a lodestone, and lodestones can feel very heavy after a while, not to mention how they wreak havoc with the lines of a coat.

However, clockwork queens are very good at learning from one another’s mistakes, and Iris—instead of having only one winding key and one girl to wind her—had three keys and a set of triplets.

Sadly, even clockwork queens are not immune to the woeful ignorance that assumes that siblings who share birthdates must also share skill sets. Abigail, the youngest triplet, was very good at winding the queen; her hands were soft and gentle, and she wasn’t afraid to give the key an extra turn now and then. Monica, the middle triplet, was very bad at winding the queen; she was slow and clumsy and much preferred dictating monographs on economic history and philosophy of education. Elsa, the eldest triplet, was an excellent winder when she remembered—which at first was not often, and became less and less frequent as she fell in love with the king.

All three girls were in love with the king, of course. He was a bookbinder’s son with long hair and a lodestone in his pocket and a heartless clockwork wife, and he occasionally wrote poetry, and he harbored a secret and terrible passion for postage stamps—what girl could resist? But Elsa, tall and dark and fluent in three languages, with a good head for maps and a gift for calculus, was the one Henry Milton loved back.

Unless you are afflicted with the woeful ignorance that assumes that sisters who share birthdates must also be immune to romantic jealousy, you can see where this is going.

It was Abigail’s idea to put the poison in the queen’s oil. Iris would, of course, be immune; only her husband, who kissed her dutifully every morning, and the girl who turned her winding key would feel the poison burning on their skin. And die, of course, but it was not Elsa’s death that Abigail and Monica wanted; it was the burning. Siblings, even those who share birthdates, can be very cruel to each other.

But the morning Elsa was to wind the queen, she slept past the cock-crow, and she slept past the dove-song, and she slept past the soft rays of sunlight creeping across her pillow. Henry awoke, saw that his wife had not been wound, and raced down to the sisters’ rooms. Monica was only half-awake, and if a handsome man with a terrible passion for postage stamps asks you to do something when you are only half-awake, you will probably say yes. Monica stumbled up the stairs and wound the clockwork queen, and by the time she felt the burning in her fingers, it was too late. She died before nightfall.

Henry, as it happened, was saved by his intimate and longstanding friendship with old Mephistopheles, who still lived in Violet’s hat, and happened to secrete antidotes to most animal poisons. He and Elsa ran away together and opened a little bookbinding shop in a city no one had ever heard of, though it soon became famous for the quality of its books. Abigail, consumed with guilt, locked herself away in the bowels of the castle, where she grew old and eccentric and developed a keen interest in arachnids. Mephistopheles visited her sometimes, and she is rumored to have stood godmother for all his twelve thousand children.

And that is why you ought to befriend spiders, and anyone else who lives in old hats.

V.

Clearly, if the girls responsible for winding the clockwork queen were so keen on being assassinated or running off to become bookbinders, a more reliable method would have to be devised. The youngest councilor, no longer naive enough to propose abolition of the monarchy before his fellow councilors finished their tea, struck upon the elegant notion of building clockwork girls to wind the clockwork queen. The same clockmaker who had done such excellent work on Violet’s treaty-hands and parade-smiles could set the winding girls to perform their function automatically, not a moment too soon or a moment too late. Clockworks cannot be murdered, cannot fall in love, cannot feel jealousy, cannot captivate kings with a talent for tongues and maps and calculus.

“But who,” said the eldest councilor, “will wind the clockwork winding girls?”

“Why, more clockworks,” said the youngest councilor—who, though no longer naive, was not a superb critical thinker.

“And who will wind those?”

“Still more clockworks.”

“And how will those be wound?”

“By still more clockworks.”

“All right, you’ve had your fun,” grumbled a councilor who never spoke much, except to complain. “Clockworks wind clockworks who wind clockworks, and so on for as many iterations as you care. But who winds the first clockworks? Answer me that,” he said, and sat back in his chair.

“Why, that’s simple,” said the youngest councilor. “They don’t all wind each other at the same time. We stagger them, like so”—he made a hand gesture that demonstrated his woeful ignorance of the accepted methods of staggered scheduling—” and the last shall wind the first. It can be managed, I’m sure.”

He looked so earnest, his eyes wide and blue behind his thick glasses, that all the councilors agreed to give his proposal a trial run. Despite his ignorance of staggered scheduling, he managed to form a functioning timetable, and the winding of the winders went off as smoothly as buttermilk.

And that is how the clockwork queen came to rule a clockwork court, and why clockmakers became the richest men in the kingdom.

VI.

You, being a very rational and astute kind of reader, might be forgiven for thinking that Iris could tolerate her clockwork court, perhaps even love it. However, she could do neither. Clockworks queens are no more liberal over strange whirlings and creakings than their bookbinder husbands are, and they are no more pleased with limited conversation, and they no more wish to be told how long precisely it takes them to do anything. Though they will never admit it, every once in a while, a clockwork queen likes to be late for her appointments.

So one day, Iris opened the great wardrobe in Violet’s old rooms and pulled out a beautiful robe of ruby silk and sable, and a pair of sleek leather boots, and a three-cornered hat with a net veil and a spring of dried amaranth blossoms hanging from the front. She powdered her shining skin until it was pale and dull and oiled her gears until they were silent as a mouse’s whispers. So disguised, she went out into the city in search of someone to love.

There were many people she did not like. There were merchants who tried to sell her strong-smelling spices, and artists who offered to paint her portrait in completely inappropriate colors, and poets who rhymed “love” and “dove” with no apparent shame. There were carriage drivers who cursed too much, and primly-aproned shopgirls who didn’t curse enough. And as always, there were overly friendly people who insisted on wearing a certain shade of orange.

By noon the streets were hot and dusty and crowded, and the amaranth blossoms on Iris’s hat were scratching her high forehead, and she was no closer to loving anyone than she had been that morning. With a sigh like the groan of a ship being put out to sea, she sat on a cool marble bench in the center of a park, where the rose petals drooped and the fountain had been dry for decades. While she sat there, lamenting the short-sightedness of her council and the inadequacy of humanity, she smelled a bit of cinnamon on the breeze and saw a girl race past, red and small and sweet.

If Iris had possessed a heart, we would say she lost it in that instant. Since she lacked that imperative piece of anatomy, whose loss would have been cliché and technically inaccurate in any case, we will say instead that a gear she had never known was loose slipped suddenly into joint as she watched Cassia, the perfumer’s daughter, race through the park with a delivery for her mother’s richest client.

Iris followed Cassia as steadily as if the girl were carrying a lodestone—which, we hasten to assure you, was not the case. On the doorstep of the client’s house, after setting the precious package in the mailbox screwed into the bricks, Cassia finally turned and met the gaze of the clockwork queen, who was, in case you have forgotten, most phenomenally beautiful.

“Please,” said Iris, “come to my palace, and I will give you my silver winding key.”

And that is why you should never hesitate to run your mother’s errands.

VII.

Cassia was a very curious girl. Of course, anyone who accepts the winding key of a complete stranger in a public market is bound to have some small streak of curiosity, but Cassia’s curiosity was broad as a boulevard, shaded with flowering trees. She was always very faithful about winding Iris, but when she was done she would sneak off into the cellars and the attics and the secret places in the castle. She found albums of postage stamps Henry Milton had long ago hidden away, and some old diagrams for building a queen with no eyes, and a box of twelve thousand baptismal certificates written in the smallest script imaginable. One day, she found a cold stone staircase winding up into the towers, and in the room at the top of the stairs, she found Violet.

Of course the council hadn’t just disposed of her when she ceased to run. Do you throw out your mother when she stops reading bedtime stories to you? Do you throw out your lover when he stops bringing you cherries dipped in chocolate? We should hope not; at the very least, you keep them for parts. And so Violet remained in her tower room standing precisely as she had been the moment her spring wound down.

Violet was not as beautiful as Iris. But she had sharp cheekbones and a strong nose and a rather intelligent expression, considering that she had no control over how she looked when she finally stopped short. In some angles of light, she appeared positively charming. Of course, this was all irrelevant, because her winding key was still at the bottom of a very deep well, and she could not move or speak or love anyone until she was wound again.

Every day for a year, Cassia climbed the long, cold stairs to Violet’s room and stared at the lifeless queen. She memorized the way the sunlight looked at noon, kissing the bronze forehead and the wire-fine eyelashes. She came to love the smell of dust and cold metal, the creak of the wooden floors beneath her feet. Finally, after a year of staring and wondering and hoping, quietly and desperately, Cassia raised herself on tiptoe and kissed Violet’s clockwork lips.

She felt the bronze mouth warming strangely beneath her own. She heard the ringing click of wire eyelashes against sharp metal cheekbones, and the click of gears in clockwork fingers as a gentle pair of hands folded around her waist. And Violet took a deep, shuddering breath.

“You,” she said, “are far too good to belong to a heartless queen.”

“You,” Cassia said, “are far too charming to gather dust at the top of a tower.”

That night, they slipped from the castle while all the clockwork court was sleeping. Poor Iris, having dismissed her clockwork winding girls, was left alone and untended in her rooms. The court continued to wind each other on an ingenious schedule, never noting their queen’s absence, and so the aristocracy slid ever closer to the precipice of decadence and anarchy, all because of one girl’s curiosity.

And that is why it is important to clean out your attic once or twice in a century.

VIII.

But even to love that begins in an attic, surrounded by sun-gilded dust motes and the creak of wooden floors, world enough and time are not promised. Cassia and Violet had barely crossed the kingdom’s forest-shrouded eastern border when they came upon a stone bridge, and beneath it a rushing white-crested river, and beneath that—a troll.

Trolls were not very common in the kingdom ruled by clockwork queens; as a rule, they dislike metal and shiny things and anything that requires winding keys, their fingers being terribly thick and clumsy. This left Cassia and Violet somewhat ignorant of the customs of trolls. In this particular case, the custom was a full bushel of apples and a yard of purple silk, and a brick or two for the house that the troll was resolutely building somewhere in the forest. Appleless, silkless, brickless, Cassia and Violet began to pick their way across the slippery bridge when there was a crash like the felling of a hundred trees, and a great cold wave swallowed the bridge before them. When the water receded, there was the troll, bumpy and green and heavy-handed, and standing right in their path.

“Where is my toll?” she grumbled, her voice like wet gravel.

Violet and Cassia, woefully ignorant of trolls and their curious pronunciation of voiceless alveolar plosives, stared in amazement.

“My toll,” the troll repeated. Confronted by the same blank stares, she tried the same phrase in the languages of the kingdom to the south, and the kingdom to the north, and the kingdoms of dragonflies and leopard-princes and Archaea. (She was an exceptionally well-educated troll.) It was not until she attempted the language of timepieces, all clicks and whirls and enjoinders to hasten, that Violet understood.

“Your toll?” she repeated. “But we haven’t got anything of the kind!”

“Then you’ll have to swim,” the troll said, and seeing that there was no chance of enriching her stores of apples or silk or bricks, she plopped herself down in the middle of the bridge and would say nothing further.

Violet and Cassia climbed down from the bridge and stood on the shingle of smooth and shining stones at the river’s edge. Cassia shivered, and even Violet felt the water’s chill in the spaces between her gears. But there was no crossing the bridge, not with the troll crouching on it like a tree growing out of a path, and there was certainly no returning to the kingdom and the court of the heartless queen. Cassia rolled the cuffs of her trousers to her knees and stepped into the frigid flow.

The current tugged fiercely at her ankles, icy and quick. She felt the river’s pebbly floor shifting beneath her bootheels and lost her balance with a tiny shriek. Violet splashed after her, brass arms spread for balance, and that was the last Cassia saw of her beloved before the river swallowed the clockwork queen.

And that is why you should always, always pay the troll’s custom, no matter how many apples she demands.

IX.

With Violet gone, there was nothing for Cassia to do but continue her journey east. The days were brief and quiet and the nights were cold and hollow, and the road dwindled until it was nothing but a few grains of gravel amid the twisted roots. As is the way of things in geography and enchanted forests, Cassia had soon walked so far east that she was going westward. And at the westernmost edge of the world, she found herself in the garden of a low-roofed cottage that smelled of coffee and bruised violets.

Despite her terrible grief, Cassia could not help but be delighted by the tiny garden. There were daisies made of little ivory gears, and bluebells of jingling copper, and chrysanthemums so intricate that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could disrupt their mechanism and require them to be reset. There were roses that hummed like hives of bees, and lilies that wept tears of pale golden oil. And above all there were violets, branches and branches of violets, whose pounded petals could be added to any food, and convey upon it healing properties.

“I am glad to see that my garden makes you smile,” the clockmaker said from his window. It was Isaac, of course, that same clockmaker who had built heartless Iris—even within so strange a profession, there are few people whose houses smell of coffee and bruised violets.

Cassia jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to him, the color high in her brown cheeks. The clockmaker, poor man, who had lived so lonely at the western edge of the world and had never seen a human being blush, fell instantly in love.

Most people react very irrationally to their first taste of love. They form silly ideas about keeping the object of their affection near to them forever, and think of names for their children, and even dream of the days when they are both ancient and sitting on wicker chairs overlooking the sea. Or they chafe at the thought of being under their beloved’s spell, and immediately think of a thousand ways to be rid of them—by accident, by cruelty, by hiding from them for years, all of which can become terribly impractical. Still others try to pretend that it never happened, and behave indifferently to the object of their affections, but of course something always gives them away—an accidental touch that becomes a caress, a too-gentle look, an extra teaspoon of sugar in the beloved’s cup of tea.

But clockmakers are by nature quite rational, and this particular clockmaker was even more rational than most. Isaac weighed the dangers of each possible response and in the same instant plucked three clockwork flowers from his garden: a rose, a lily, and a sprig of violets. Cassia gnawed her lip in curiosity as he held the flowers out to her, his hands shaking minutely like a wire too tightly wound, and bid her choose one.

She took a long time to choose. The flowers were all so beautiful, and each one seemed to sing to her of the weight of her choice. But of course she could not know—the flowers could not know—only Isaac himself knew the true price of each stem.

If Cassia had chosen the rose, singing and sweet-scented, Isaac would have knelt and asked her to marry him. If she had chosen the lily, weeping and pale, he would have strangled her with a purple silk scarf and buried her beneath the amaranth bush at his bedroom window. But since she choose the violets, quiet and dark, he swallowed his passion and his fear, and served her a cup of salty chicken soup, and sent her on her way.

And that is why you must always remember the names of lost lovers.

X.

So Cassia found herself again on the borders of Iris’s kingdom. This land was ruled, not by a clockwork queen, but by a mortal man, and everything was cold and covered in gray ash. The land lay under a curse, an apple-peddler warned Cassia when they sheltered for the night beneath the same lightning-wracked tree. The king was dying of consumption, and his daughter, who happened to be a very powerful witch, plunged the kingdom into drought and ice until someone came forth to cure her father. It was, the peddler said, a beautiful show of filial devotion, if ultimately quite useless.

Cassia listened to the story and said nothing, chewing it over like a dusty bite of apple, and fingering the spring of violets in the pocket of her coat.

Another day of walking brought her within the shadow of the dying king’s castle. Cassia shuddered to see the coat of arms blazoned on the door, for this king was the same one who, many years before, had sent Brutus to assassinate Violet. Again, Cassia fingered the clockwork petals in her pocket. Then she went to the door and knocked.

A tall woman answered, her face pale as a disk of bone. “What do you want?” she snarled.

“I am here to cure the king,” said Cassia. “But first, you must promise to give me whatever I ask for when he is returned to health.”

“If you can cure my father,” said the princess, “I will give you this kingdom and everything in it.” And she led Cassia through the winding hallways to the king’s deathbed in the palace’s heart.

Cassia rolled up her sleeves and stoked the fire in the room’s great hearth until it blazed like sunlight on apple skins. She sent the servants for a black iron kettle and a wooden spoon, and some chicken bones and a gallon of clean water. When she had boiled the bones to a clear golden broth, she added salt and carrots and soft white potatoes, and slivers of celery and sweet-smelling thyme. She used a silver ladle to dish the soup into a peasant’s wooden bowl, which held in its splintered bottom one single petal from a clockwork violet.         

When the king had eaten the soup, color returned to his bone-pale cheeks and his lungs became clean and whole again. He leapt up from his bed and embraced his daughter, whose black eyes sparkled in the firelight.

“The king is saved,” the princess said. “What is it you wish from me?”

“Bring me Brutus,” said Cassia.

The assassin was found and brought before her. He knelt at her feet and trembled, certain she had come to kill him for the loss of Violet’s winding key—he was not ignorant, after all, of the properties of clockworks, though he knew precious little of lovers’ first kisses. And so he was astounded to learn that Violet was no longer gathering dust in Iris’s attic, but trapped beneath a river’s icy foam.

“I want you to bring me my clockwork queen,” said Cassia, “and I want her alive.”

“You will have her,” swore Brutus, who had never failed on a mission.

And that is why you should learn the reason behind every pestilence, and never be afraid to call in favors.

XI.

Brutus, as you will surely recall, was both very clever and rather well-informed about the subtle machinations of clockwork. He also had an abnormally high tolerance for frigid water and the alveolar plosives of trolls. And so he fished poor Violet from the river with no more trouble than a child pulling sweet-fleshed shellfish from a tide pool. But water, particularly cold and muddy river-water, is vicious to clockwork, and no matter how he shook her or called to her or kissed her metal lips, Brutus could not bring Violet back to life.

But he had never failed on a mission, and he was not about to begin failing when his mission was the reunion of true lovers. He wrapped Violet in his own cloak and sat her on the back of his own horse, and for nearly a year he wandered the land, looking for the woman or man or beast who could fix the clockwork queen.

And, as is the way of things in geography and hopeless quests, Brutus soon found himself in a clockwork garden that smelled of coffee and bruised violets.

Isaac was there—where would he have gone?—sitting now on his front porch, composing sonnets to Cassia’s brown skin and sweet voice. He caught sight of sunlight glinting off of Violet’s bronze forehead long before he could make out the shape of Brutus stumbling along beside her. He folded his legs up beneath him and leaned against the brick wall of his garden, sucking the ink-bitter tip of his pen, until his visitors were close enough to call to.

“I suppose you want me to fix her,” Isaac said. “Oh, not to worry, it can be done. In fact, there are three ways to wake a dead clockwork.” And he plucked three clockwork flowers from the sweet-smelling soil and held them out to Brutus—a rose, a lily, and a sprig of violets.

Brutus was desperately tired, and in no mood for making such a choice. Assassins, unlike perfumer’s daughters, are well-versed in the more obscure avenues of flower symbolism, and he knew that a rose meant a trap, a lily meant strangling, and violets were a wildcard—they meant whatever the gardener wished them to mean. He did not know the three ways to wake a dead clockwork—in fact, no one but Isaac knew those, so you can hardly expect us to tell them to you—but his instinct told him quite accurately that all three required blood and sacrifice of some kind. In short, he knew he faced a very dire decision, and had no good way to make the choice.

Then, quite suddenly, he remembered the sprig of violets he had seen peeking out of Cassia’s coat pocket. Sighing in relief, he took the violets from Isaac’s hand. The clockmaker smiled in the enigmatic way of men who were expecting as much, and set about repairing the queen with oil and wrenches and a fine steel screwdriver.

And that is why you should always begin by trying what has worked before, especially with clockmakers, who as a rule are so terribly conventional.

XII.

The reunion between Cassia and Violet was perhaps too happy to be described here, for the only way to even approximate it is through an unlikely and wholly disagreeable string of paradoxes. Let it suffice to say that they were happy as few people have ever been, with or without the benefits of exotic wine or beautiful lovers or victory in impossible battles, or cold-skinned apples or soup recipes or an encyclopedic knowledge of flower symbolism. Isaac wrought a new winding key for Violet, and Violet gave it into Cassia’s keeping, and Cassia lovingly wound her lover every morning until the day, many years later, she died in her clockwork arms.

Very slowly—but not with too unseemly a sadness—Violet dug a grave in a forest beneath the dappled shadows of oak leaves. She lay Cassia on a bed of flower petals and cinnamon and climbed in beside her, and she pulled the earth down over both of them. Since there was no one left to wind her, Violet soon ran down in the cinnamon-scented darkness, and she and Cassia sleep peacefully in the same deep grave, as lovers always wish to.

And that is why a wise clockwork queen has only one winding key.

XIII.

Of course, with or without a winding key, no clockwork is immortal. Iris and her court eventually ran down, and Isaac’s garden withered, and the price of clockwork plummeted, ruining the kingdom’s economy.

And that is why you should invest in dependable things, like lodestones and assassins and bridges guarded by trolls, and steel screwdrivers and enchanted violets, and when you learn a good recipe for chicken soup you should write it down in detail, in case some day you fall in love.

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin, where she spends more time writing than studying, more time reading than writing, and entirely too much time doing research. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and dozens of other places. She edits the online magazines Mirror Dance and Lacuna.

The Devil in Gaylord’s Creek
Sarah Monette

I.

About twenty-five miles out from Gaylord’s Creek, we stopped to settle a dust witch.

Dust witches are stupid things, and I wanted to push on, but Francis insisted. He gave me the lecture on how little evils get to be big evils if you leave them alone long enough, blah blah blah, no one else to do it, got to do your duty if you want to carry the sword, and I finally said, “All right already!” just to get him to shut the fuck up.

The dust witch had caught an abandoned house—well, a shack—with all the windows broken and the porch leaning off to the left. There really wasn’t much mischief it could do out here in the lonesome, but all I had to do was imagine kids daring each other into exploring or something, and I knew Francis was right.

I knew Francis was right anyway. I just hated like poison having to admit it.

I got my sword out of the trunk. Its name was Stella Mortua. John Ray hadn’t had a clue, but Francis told me what it meant: The Dead Star. The sword had been through some wars of its own before I ever got my hands on it. The scabbard was half duct-tape, and the sword-hilt had been wrapped and rewrapped in electrician’s tape so many times that Francis said it looked more like the handle of a tennis racquet than a sword, but I didn’t care about that. The blade was gleaming and deadly and perfect, and so what if the rest of it looked like something I’d found in a garage sale?

I heaved the trunk shut and came around to the driver’s side, where Francis had rolled the window down. He squinted up at me behind his sunglasses, but didn’t say anything. Francis was a little afraid of me, and I liked it that way.

“This better not take long,” I said, and I turned and stomped across the front yard before he thought of anything to say.

Francis had only been working with me about five months, since John Ray died. Francis had words for everything. He called me the Circuit Rider, and he called himself the Anchor. Fancy mumbo-jumbo, and John Ray would have laughed himself sick. And then probably kicked Francis’s skinny ass to the curb and shouted some names after him, too, like sissy and queer boy and pansy. But John Ray was dead and Francis was all I had, so I couldn’t do the same, even when I wanted to.

I had to stop stomping when I got to the house, because otherwise I’d’ve put a foot straight through the porch floorboards.

“Morgan!”

I turned. Francis had gotten out of the Ford and was standing beside it, one hand gripping the open door like otherwise he thought he’d blow away. “Do you—” His voice squeaked and he had to start over. “D’you want me to come with you?”

“I think I can manage a dust witch, Francis,” I yelled back, and he kind of crumpled in on himself like I’d smacked him.

His damn problem, not mine. I swung back around and yanked the warped screen door open. It wobbled out about halfway and then stuck, but that was enough space for me to slide through.

The dust witch was waiting for me.

I’d been wrong about how much mischief it could get up to: It wasn’t very big, but it was nasty-smart, smart enough that it must’ve gotten at least one person—eaten them or absorbed them or whatever it is exactly that things like that do with their prey. It had learned enough to pick things out of my head, to show me a screaming girl with her face half gone, then a burly man with no face at all, nothing but shadows because that’s all I’d ever seen of him. It didn’t spook me, because I’d been up against bigger and smarter things than this, but when it shifted back to the screaming girl, it must have dug a little deeper, because it had her scream my name as if I could have saved her.

“You fucker,” I snarled at it, and I cut it in half with Stella Mortua.

There wasn’t much substance to it, but it splintered, shooting bits of itself off every which way. I tracked down every fucking splinter and killed it, and every one of them screamed my name.

I didn’t tell Francis any of that when I came out. Just slammed the car door and said, “We’re clear. Now, come on already, and let’s go meet the Devil.”

Francis started the car without a word.

II.

I was beaten to death when I was sixteen years old.

Lucky for me, I don’t really remember it—it’s all noise and blur. I don’t even remember if it hurt or not. I mean, yeah, I can pretty much guarantee it hurt like a motherfucker, but I don’t remember it. And I’m okay with that.

I breathe and sweat and all the rest of it, so you’d never know I was dead once, although I’m told my eyes are weird if you look at ‘em long enough, and I don’t show up on recordings. Not answering machines, not cameras, not computers. They say that’s one of the ways you tell a vampire, but I’ve never met one. Francis says he thinks they’re a myth.

Violent death isn’t the only way to become what I am, but it’s a good start. It puts you over the line, so you can see the weird shit most people spend their lives not seeing, and if somebody finds you in time, like John Ray found me, and puts you back together and gives you a sword . . . all they have to do is point you in the right direction.

You figure out the rest of it pretty damn fast.

III.

Me and Francis had been hearing rumors about the Devil being in Gaylord’s Creek for days before we got there. You know how in a church wedding, the bride comes real slow down the aisle and there’s the groom waiting for her and all the guests standing and watching on either side? That’s what it felt like to me, like I was the bride and the Devil was the groom, and all those people with their rumors and their whispers were the guests. It was kind of freaking me out.

There wasn’t much of Gaylord’s Creek, and it looked like all the other little towns covering the mid-south like acne. At first, it was hard to see what was wrong, but there was nobody sitting on their front porches, although it was a nice day for that part of the country. No kids on the sidewalks, and no sign there ever had been kids: no bikes, no toys, no hopscotch grids in chalk. We stopped at the first gas station we found, and when I went in, the middle-aged guy behind the counter just looked at me like he couldn’t remember what I was for or what he was supposed to do. Which, okay, stoners look like that a lot, but I couldn’t smell a hint of weed on him, and his forearms said he’d been doing some pretty heavy cutting. Francis insisted on finding the elementary school, and there were no kids there either, unless maybe they were all in the gym. The doors were closed, and there was a funny kind of humming noise that neither of us liked. Whatever this town had, it had it bad.

Gaylord’s Creek had one motel, a skanky roach-trap called the Sundown Inn, out on the edge of town—the sort of place that existed so people’d have a place to go and commit adultery in peace. Francis paid cash, signed us in as “Edward and Lisa Fisher,” and made some loud, fake, and completely unnecessary comment about his “niece.”

The desk clerk wasn’t buying. She was a heavy woman with a bad perm and eyes like marbles. She looked at Francis, buttoned-down to within an inch of his life, and looked at me, and I could see what she thought we were doing.

“I feel like freaking Lolita,” I muttered at Francis as we left the motel office.

“What? Oh, nonsense, Morgan. You know I’d never—”

“Yeah, I know you’d never.” And maybe it’d be better if you would, I thought. Things had been way easier with John Ray, since we could screw instead of fighting all the time. “But that desk-clerk sure thinks we’re headed straight for the horizontal tango.”

“Morgan!” And my Christ, he even sounded like an uncle—or a fussy old-lady aunt.

“What?” I said as he unlocked the door. “You think I don’t know about that stuff?”

I went in, headed straight for the shower. I stripped off my clothes as I went: leather jacket, black t-shirt, pause for the sneakers, hooked down my jeans, draped my bra over the bathroom door.

“Um, Morgan?”

I stopped, glanced back at him, hoping I looked as much like a centerfold for a Playboy’s “Girls with Ink” issue as I felt like. “What?”

“Shouldn’t you, um . . . ” He couldn’t even look at me, and I felt a little better about things. He was staring at the gross polyester coverlet on the bed, and going redder and redder and redder.

“I’ll ask around once I don’t stink like a gorilla’s armpit. Okay?”

“But, surely . . . ”

“Are we on some kind of schedule here, Francis?”

“No. I just feel that . . . ”

“Ten minutes tops. Whatever’s out there can wait that long.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, not believing a word of it, and I went to take my shower, all the time knowing that Francis was right. I was goofing off on a job, and John Ray would have smacked me upside the head for it. But Francis wasn’t John Ray.

Showered, armpits shaved, and I got my fighting clothes on. Blue jeans, combat boots, black tank top. All my earrings in, seven silver on the left and seven gold on the right, but no other jewelry except for the ink: upper arms, shoulders, and my back all the way down to the tailbone. Francis had hissy fits about leaving all that skin exposed, but he didn’t understand. The tattoos were mine in a way the sword could never be.

“We got glamor?” I said to Francis. I always did.

He winced. He always did. “Yes,” he said. “I cast the glamor while you were in the shower.”

I slung the sword on my back. “Thanks, babe.”

“Morgan, please.”

“I know, I know. Dignity, respect, working relationship, yadda, yadda. I’ll just go kill the Devil now, okay?”

“Morgan . . . ”

I slammed the door on my way out.

I started at the motel office. The clerk who’d checked us in and given me that catfish look had gone off-shift. The new guy was maybe a couple years older than I’d been when I died, skinny, pimply, total bottom-feeder. If Francis had goofed—it did happen, even if he’d never admit it—nobody’d believe this doofus when he tried to tell them he’d seen a chick with a sword. So I went in, and turned out I didn’t need to worry, because I knew what he was looking at as I came up to the counter, and it wasn’t nothing to do with Stella Mortua.

He did pull himself together—maybe he’d been chewed out before for staring at women guests’ tits. “Nice tats.”

“Thanks. Look, I heard things about this town. You know. That’s why I talked my uncle into coming here.”

“Oh, right. And where is your . . . uncle?”

I itched to make him pay for that, to grab a handful of his greasy hair and bang his head a couple times against the counter. But he wasn’t the job. I shrugged and said, “Lying down. You know, long day.”

“Gotcha. So you looking for some action?”

“Particular action. You know what I mean.”

“That’s hardcore stuff, baby. You sure you’re up for it?”

Call me “baby” again and you’ll find out. “That’s my business,” I said. “I know what I’m looking for.”

“Yeah? And what do I get for helping you?”

The rotted jack-o-lantern leer said he had some ideas, but I wasn’t going there with him. I pulled a twenty out of my back pocket and put it on the counter, then put my hand down on it. “You tell me what I want to know and you keep your mouth shut about it, and Mr. Jackson is all yours.”

“Okay, honey,” he said, and he gave me the lowdown on what the Devil was doing in Gaylord’s Creek. He’d obviously only caught the edges of it—not like the guy in the gas station—so he didn’t know everything, but he knew they were worshipping the Devil in the new Baptist church out on Lafayette Road, and he showed me where it was on the map. It took me fifteen minutes to get that out of him, along with a whole disgusting avalanche of gossip, then I let him have the twenty and cleared out of there before he got any bright ideas.

I wanted another shower, but that would have to wait. And I wished to hell I had a driver’s license, but that’s one of those things dead girls just don’t get to have.

I’d have to go get Francis instead.

IV.

I got my first tattoo before I died. My friend Sissy drove me into Chattanooga on her learner’s permit and handed me her older sister’s driver’s license that she’d snitched—and boy did she get in trouble for it, too—and I walked up to the guy in the tattoo parlor and just dared him to say anything about me not being Becky Huddle, twenty years old and with a perfect right to be doing this. And he hadn’t said a word, just done the tattoo and taken my money.

Sissy was dead now. And not dead like I was, but dead for real. She died in a car accident on I-75, when her boyfriend’s Mustang lost an argument with a semi. John Ray got me the police report. Police said Bobby’d probably been doing a hundred and twenty when he lost control and jumped the median.

Sissy never had a chance.

V.

I took the stairs two at a time, headed up to tell Francis that my commitment to personal hygiene wasn’t going to be the end of the world and would he get his ass into the car already, swung into the hall, and stopped.

Our door was open.

Sweet freaking Jesus.

I’d heard Francis lock the door behind me. He drove me nuts, but he wasn’t stupid. I edged a little closer and saw the splintered notch torn out of the jamb, the tongue of the deadbolt still sticking out of the sagging door. Oh God don’t let this be what it looks like. But I already knew it was.

There were signs that Francis had put up a fight. The ugly table lamp was broken, the chairs overturned, the nasty coverlet dragged halfway off the bed. His glasses were lying, like some weird metal bird, just inside the door. It took me a moment to bring myself to touch them, but I picked them up and folded them and stuck them in the neckline of my shirt. They’d probably stay there okay, and I could give them back to Francis as soon as I found him.

I set off running like a freaking greyhound out of the gate.

VI.

The new Baptist church was even farther out of town than the Sundown Inn, a big ugly barn, still kind of raw-looking, and standing by itself in the middle of a field, all dead grass and cracking red clay.

At the crossroads where Lafayette met Gaylord’s Creek Road, there were three little white crosses kind of kitty-corner across from the church, two of them together and the third a couple feet away. I could feel the bad mojo all around this place, that dusty, stifling, humming silence.

I knelt down and pushed the dry grass out of the way. There were names on them: JOANNE HARLEN and CYNTHIA HARLEN together, with BRIAN SULLIVAN off by himself. This was where I needed Francis, and I touched his glasses for—I don’t know—some kind of comfort. Francis had the brains and the know-how. I just had the weird-shit radar and the sword. So about all I could do was follow my instincts. I leaned forward again and put my hand out, palm forward. I didn’t touch the crosses, because my mother was a drunken bitch, but she didn’t raise any fools. I just held my hand in front of them, like you do when you’re testing to see if a stove burner’s on. I could feel the humming in the bones of my hand. Joanne first, then Cynthia, then I reached sideways to Brian, and I got this sudden, sick, black cramp, and all my fingers clutched in at the cross. I snatched my hand back before it touched the wood, and my heart was thumping in my chest, because it’d be better to be barbecued upside-down than to touch anything sending off vibes like that.

Now I knew who was in the church—at least the important part. It might be a woman, a man, a sister, a brother, a mother, a husband, but it was somebody for who Joanne and Cynthia Harlen had meant all the world, and the moon and stars besides—somebody who had seen the Devil in Brian Sullivan.

I stood up, stretched my back, reached over my shoulder to loosen Stella Mortua in its scabbard. I spared a thought for my posture, because it was one of those things that Francis was always on about—and right, too, dammit—and then I started for the church.

The clerk had kind of hinted around, enough that I’d figured out that things didn’t really start to rock and roll until midnight. And that was fine. I didn’t want the party, just wanted to do my job and go. The only thing in the church parking lot was this old white Ford Aerostar that looked like it’d been sitting there since roughly the Civil War. There was a Jesus-fish on the back, and the bumper had one of those stupid-ass stickers: MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT JEFFERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. That would most likely make it Mr. Harlen who was waiting in there for me. Mr. Harlen and the Devil.

And Francis.

Damn you, Francis. Don’t you dare be dead.

The bitchkitty here was that the Devil knew I was coming. The Devil must have known I was coming for days, just like the groom at the end of the aisle waiting for his bride. And that was bad, because that was some serious power. It would’ve started out a dust witch, like the thing I’d killed earlier that afternoon, but it must have been building out here for years, decades, with nobody near enough to give it shape and color, until the boneheads in Gaylord’s Creek went and built a church smack on top of it. And there was the crossroads, and there was the accident, and there was a man whose grief needed someplace to go.

I touched Francis’s glasses again for luck and opened the front door of the church.

The reek of the Devil rolled out to meet me. Incense, sweat, burned meat, fear—they’d been worshipping him here for weeks. I stepped over a body in the foyer. Its head was gone, but both hands were still clutching a cross. The heavy humming silence was even worse here. It dragged at me like humidity. Too much power, too long building, I thought and decided I’d already been as cool about this as I needed to be. I drew Stella Mortua.

“Gracious,” a voice said out of the shadows. “What’s a little girl like you doing with a great big sword like that?”

God, I whipped around like a slingshot. And there he was, seven feet of hulking darkness, horns, wings, and mad little red eyes. After a second, I could pick his stench out of the general foulness of the church: sulfur and rotten meat and burning rubber. I felt the power spinning off him like glass.

I went forward, sideways a little, and swung Stella Mortua at the Devil, aiming to cut him straight in half. And the Devil did this lame-ass pirouette, like some freaking ballet dancer, and twirled right out of the way of the sword. And then he laughed.

“My poor lamb,” he said, “did you really imagine that that would work on me?”

I so did not feel like getting into a conversation with the Devil. “Where is he?” I said, circling left.

“Now that would be telling. Shall we play hide-and-seek, my lamb? I’ll hide your lover, and you seek for him.”

“My what?”

I moved in again. He parried with one leathery wing, and the stench was about enough to knock me flat. But he looked puzzled, which was a funny thing to see on a guy with horns.

“I assumed you knew, lamb, when you came storming in. I hold your lover captive.”

And it still took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. “Francis? You think I’m sleeping with Francis?” I hooted with laughter. “I’m not here for Francis. I want the guy who made you.”

“No one made me,” he said, and he was all offended, along with being confused. “I am the Prince of Darkness, and I made myself.”

“Oh, puh-leeze,” I said and drove in again. He knocked Stella Mortua aside with his forearm, but he was off-balance with the whole Francis thing, and instead of slamming me into next week, he kind of waved at me like I was a fly, and I rolled my wrists and came back hard and low.

Stella Mortua sank into his thigh, screaming, and he screamed right along with it. Most stuff on the material plane wouldn’t touch things like him, but the inscription on Stella Mortua’s blade, Francis had told me, said, I bring death as I am wielded. Planes of existence didn’t so much matter.

The Devil went lurching sideways and he looked just horrified, with his mouth in this little “o” and his eyes almost bugging out of his head. “You can’t . . . ”

“Wanna bet?” I said, and I took the Devil’s head off.

The corpse toppled over sideways, getting this completely disgusting black stuff all over the carpet. I was ready for something even worse to come screaming out, because I’d seen Alien, but apparently nobody in Gaylord’s Creek had, because the body just lay there and the black stuff sort of steamed. And it made the smell about ten times worse.

I held my breath, because I didn’t feel like me puking was going to be any use to anybody, and went after the head. It had rolled into a corner, the eyes and mouth still gaping. I picked it up by the hair—this kind of mohawk-thing that felt like it’d been made out of the world’s oldest and nastiest mop—and went back out onto the front walk where I could breathe. After a minute, the Devil blinked, and the red eyes rolled up to look at me.

“Hi there,” I said. “Let’s try this again. The guy who made you. Where is he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Wrong answer.” I swung the head against the door—not real hard, but moving pretty fast. It howled. “The man who made you. I know you can feel him, so tell me where he is.”

“In the Sunday school,” the Devil said, starting to cry. His tears were black and they smelled like sulfur. “Upstairs in the Sunday school. That’s where.”

“Okay. Good. Tell me where I find the stairs.”

The head was bawling now, like a toddler who’s had a cookie taken away from him. It was losing its identity along with its power. But it told me where to go.

VII.

I don’t know much about the organization John Ray and Francis work for. John Ray never answered questions—and he’d pop me one if I kept after him. Francis would probably tell me, but by the time Francis came along, I’d figured out that I didn’t want to know.

So I don’t know how they knew John Ray was dead, or how they knew where to send Francis to find me. I don’t know how they chose Francis, with his glasses and his tweed jacket and his fussy old-lady ways. Couldn’t be more different than John Ray if they’d done it on purpose, which maybe they did.

We were down in Florida, hunting an alligator-spirit. I know how goofy that sounds, but in actual fact, it wasn’t goofy at all. Some nut who thought he was a shaman—which he wasn’t, because we asked the local medicine woman and boy, did we get an earful—anyway, this nutjob walked out into the Everglades and sacrificed himself to the alligators. He hadn’t been a shaman, but the swamp didn’t need him to be.

What happened to John Ray was like this. We went out—on a Wednesday night, not that it matters—and tracked down the alligator that had killed the guy, half by my weird-shit radar and half by this gizmo John Ray cobbled together like a dowsing rod.

I killed the alligator and came out of it with a couple broken bones in one hand, more bruises and scratches than anybody could count, and a genuine alligator bite just above my left knee. Lucky for me, he hadn’t been able to get any real purchase, but it was still going to take the rest of the night for John Ray to make me heal.

That’s the part that always reminds me I’m dead. It takes a fuck of a lot more to put me down than a normal person, but I don’t heal on my own. Somebody’s got to do that for me, and that’s what first John Ray, and now Francis, is for.

John Ray was bitching about that as we started back, and he did not fucking listen to me when I tried to tell him something still felt weird. So even though I know I shouldn’t, I still kind of feel like it was his own fault that he got eaten. Because something was still weird, and he wouldn’t check his fucking gizmo or even quit giving me the hysterical chick look, which was my very least favorite of all John Ray’s looks.

He was getting about fed up enough to hit me, and I was still trying to argue with him, when this bull alligator reared out of the swamp and took his head off in one bite.

I did scream. Just for the record. Screamed and grabbed Stella Mortua and disemboweled the fucking thing before it could get away. And I spent the whole rest of that night slogging around that square mile of swamp, blood dribbling down my leg and my hand hurting like I’d stuck it in a fire, killing alligator after alligator.

Because, as it turned out once Francis got there and explained everything, that it wasn’t just the alligator that killed the guy that got infected with the bad mojo, it was every alligator that had eaten him, down to the last finger-joint.

I didn’t know that then, of course. I just knew my weird-shit radar wouldn’t shut up. I don’t know how many alligators I killed that night. I lost track after five.

Apparently, one stupid nutjob can go a hell of a long way.

Finally, finally, that crawly weird-shit feeling shut up, and I dragged myself and about fifty pounds of mud out of the swamp and back to the ugly ramshackle little motel John Ray’d booked us into. I left his body in the swamp because I didn’t know what else I could do with it, but I went through his pockets first, got our room key and his wallet and car keys and half a handful of good luck charms that hadn’t fucking worked when he needed them.

I locked the door behind me and took a very long shower. I couldn’t heal myself, but I washed all the mud and blood and God knows what out of my bites and scratches. Everything hurt like holy hell, and I wished painkillers worked on me, but I don’t metabolize them any more or something. Francis explained it once but I’d tuned him out.

At least I can still sleep, although I don’t dream. I staggered out of the shower and went face down across the nearest bed, and that’s the last I remember until nearly fifteen hours later, when I was woken up by somebody pounding on the door.

Which turned out to be the motel manager, because there was a guy asking for me down at the desk, and I wasn’t answering the phone.

And the guy at the desk, of course, turned out to be Francis.

VII.

The Sunday school room made my eyes hurt. Bright colors, big windows, kid-sized furniture, all just what you’d expect. Except that somebody’d collected all the black crayons they could find and done some heavy-duty redecorating. One wall was just the names Joanne and Cindy, over and over again, floor to ceiling and corner to corner. The outside wall and the left-hand wall were devoted to Brian Sullivan: how he did the work of the Devil, how he let the Devil into Gaylord’s Creek, how he was the Devil. It was like the visual equivalent of the smell in the foyer, and it threw me so bad that at first I didn’t even see the guys on the floor.

One was Francis, tied and gagged, laying on the floor under the windows like a lumpy roll of carpet. He had a nasty, swollen gash on the side of his head, but his eyes were open, and he shuddered all over, like a dog shaking water out of its coat, when he saw me. That’s me, the freaking U.S. Cavalry.

The other guy was the one I was after, the one I was guessing was Mr. Harlen. He was sitting in the middle of the floor, all hunched up with his arms wrapped around his knees, and he was funny to look at, like those floaters you get sometimes in one eye or the other, like he was there, but he wouldn’t be if you turned your head. I knew what it meant, although I’d never seen anything quite like it before. The power that had got the Devil up and running was eating away at this guy’s reality, using him up like a tank of gas. He hadn’t been down there worshipping the Devil with the rest of Gaylord’s Creek. He’d just been tucked away up here in his own private church of hate, getting more and more lost. Anybody can open the way for something like this, whether you do it by accident or on purpose or sort of in between, but this guy hadn’t just opened the door. He was standing in it, holding it open, and I was willing to bet he hadn’t even noticed it was destroying him.

Christ, I thought. I may really have to kill him.

And I was still standing there, wondering if I could do it—wondering if I was even allowed to do it—when Francis made this kind of screaming noise around his gag. His eyes were wide and staring past my leg. I whipped around, and oh, yeah, there was the other freaking shoe that I’d forgotten about—the desk-clerk from the Sundown Inn, the one who’d been gone the second time I went by the office. And now I knew what she’d been doing.

I just managed to dodge the baseball bat the chick had aimed at my skull. I ducked back, regrouped. Feinted right, threw the Devil’s head left. It screamed as it flew, and the chick’s head snapped around after it like a retriever watching a tennis ball. I reversed Stella Mortua and clocked the chick with the hilt. She went down with a grunt and lay still.

I grabbed the head again—leave it alone and it might be able to work up enough juice to roll itself back downstairs to its body—and then I sheathed Stella Mortua and hunkered down to ungag Francis.

“Francis,” I said, “what do I do? What do I do with him?”

“Who is he?” Francis said, not real loud and kind of croaky, but he sounded so much like himself I could have kissed him.

I put the head down, wedged it between my knees, and started on the knots around Francis’s wrists. “His last name’s Harlen, I think. His wife and daughter—” I jerked my head at the Joanne-and-Cindy wall “—were killed in a car accident in front of the church, along with a guy named Brian Sullivan.”

“Ah, yes,” Francis said. The rope came free, and he began rubbing gently at his wrists while I went to work on his ankles. “I had rather been wondering about Mr. Sullivan.” I turned and saw the fourth wall, the one I hadn’t got a good look at. It was a prayer for the damnation of Brian Sullivan, with the black crayon so thick that it was actually kind of shiny.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes. Fire and brimstone have nothing on Mr. Harlen’s imagination.”

The Devil’s head, still stuck between my knees, began to giggle.

“Morgan,” Francis said, like he knew he didn’t want to know but he had to ask anyway, “what is your trophy and why is it laughing?”

“That’s the Devil,” I said, and the last knot finally gave way. “Or I guess maybe it might be Brian Sullivan.”

The head made a godawful noise, like the screech of fingernails down a blackboard. “Not that name! Not that name! That’s not what I am!”

“But of course it is,” Francis said, sitting up and giving the head the look he gave newspaper accounts of hauntings and rains of frogs and stuff like that. I remembered his glasses for the first time in forever, looked down, and hey, they were still right where I’d stuck them. I gave them to him, and he put them on. But he was still talking to the head: “That’s all you can be, for that is the only Devil Mr. Harlen knows.”

The head was changing. It was getting smaller and losing its horns. The nasty black mop-mohawk turned into ordinary brown hair, and the bones of the face kind of softened, and the little red eyes got rounder and paler and finally came up blue. Brian Sullivan had been just another high school dumbass. Like Sissy’s boyfriend Bobby Grant, and for a second I understood, all the way down, what Mr. Harlen meant.

But at the same time— “Jeez,” I said. “Can’t you do better than that?”

“Nil nisi, Morgan,” Francis said, but he was looking at Mr. Harlen. “Brian Sullivan is, after all, dead.”

Mr. Harlen moved, and I jerked my head around, but it was just that he was rocking a little.

I turned back and said to the head, loud and careful, “So what happened, Brian? How did you become the Devil?”

The head just goggled at me with its stupid blue eyes. It didn’t know. It wasn’t really Brian Sullivan any more than it had really been the Devil. This was Mr. Harlen’s show, when you got right down to it. So after a minute I said, “How did Brian Sullivan become the Devil, Mr. Harlen?”

And there was this long, long pause while Francis and I held our breaths, and then Mr. Harlen said, “He killed them.”

I looked at Francis, and he looked pretty much the way I felt. He didn’t want to kill this guy, but he knew as well as I did that we couldn’t shut down the badness here with Mr. Harlen sitting in the way like a kind of human doorstop. Leave him alone long enough, and the Devil’s body downstairs would just grow a new head.

Talk him down, I thought. “But it was an accident, wasn’t it? I’m a stranger here, Mr. Harlen, so you got to explain it to me. Wasn’t it an accident?”

“Oh, it was an accident all right,” Mr. Harlen said, and made this kind of horrible barking noise that I guessed after a second was maybe supposed to be a laugh. “He accidentally ran into my wife’s car after he accidentally started driving home after he accidentally had seven beers. Or maybe eight. It might’ve been eight. His friends couldn’t remember for sure.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the head, and it stared back up at me like a fish. “God,” I said, “you were just as stupid as you look.”

“So’s your face,” the head said and started giggling.

I smacked it to make it shut up. “Mr. Harlen, I am so sorry about your wife and daughter. But, you know, Brian Sullivan isn’t the Devil.”

That got him moving. He was up and towering over me like a grizzly bear. “You look at what he did and you say he’s not the Devil?”

I stood up, got in his face. “Here,” I said and shoved the head at him. “Here’s Brian Sullivan. Does he look like the Devil to you?”

The head whimpered.

Mr. Harlen stared at it. “That’s Brian Sullivan?”

“It’ll do,” I said.

He reached out and took the head. I let him. Francis made this kind of hissing noise, like a teakettle, but I could feel what was happening—what needed to happen—and this was the only way to make it work.

Mr. Harlen stared down at the head. It stared back up at him, sniveling. After a couple centuries had gone by, Mr. Harlen said, “He’s dead.”

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at me. “You killed him.”

“No. He died with your wife and daughter.” And I could feel it now, that place where Mr. Harlen was wedged like a doorstop. I could feel all the angles and all the force.

“But that was a lie,” Mr. Harlen said and he sounded so damn lost. “They said he’d been buried a week, and I saw him walking out of the Sunday School room, laughing. I saw him.”

And that was how the damn door got opened in the first place. “No,” I said.

“No?”

“Honest to God, Mr. Harlen, Brian Sullivan is dead. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t him. Cross my heart and hope to die.” It was a child’s thing and I already was dead, but I crossed my heart anyway because I didn’t know how else to reach him, and his eyes followed my hand.

He looked down at the head. “Dead. Drunk and stupid and dead.” He looked up at me and said, like you might point out to somebody that their shoe’s untied, “He’s not the Devil.”

The head popped like a soap bubble.

Mr. Harlen came free and the door swung shut. His eyes rolled up in his head and he went down like a rag doll somebody’d dropped. I checked, and his pulse was beating. I didn’t know whether he’d ever be okay, or how loose you’d have to define “okay” to make it work, but he was alive and he wasn’t weird to look at any more. He was still human, and I figured that was the best I could do.

“Okay,” I said to Francis, “let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

IX.

My Gramma Nancy belonged to one of those just-this-side-of-crazy sects—or maybe just the other side of crazy, depending on how you feel about speaking in tongues. And the summers when I had to stay with her because Mom’s latest boyfriend was even more of a waste of oxygen than the one before, she’d take me to her meetings. That’s what she called them, every Wednesday and every Saturday, and then all day on Sundays, standing out in the Clinch River singing hymns and doing full immersion baptisms on anybody who’d stand still for it. And I’d hide in the back, where Preacher Fulkes’s rolling eye wasn’t likely to light on me, with Candace Meacham and Lori Temple, and when things started getting scary, we’d hold hands. And if you think we so much as looked at each other during the school year, boy do you not remember a thing about growing up.

Preacher Fulkes had talked about the Devil a lot. He told us that the Devil walked among us, that we couldn’t see him because he walked in human skin, but that he could see us, always. The Devil was watching us, waiting for the moment when we could be tempted to sin and damnation and the eternal fires of Hell. I can remember standing there in the river, the mud oozing up around my toes and the sun and the heat and the humidity and the mosquitoes and Preacher Fulkes’s voice explaining the torments of Hell as if he’d been there himself to witness them. People fainted, from heatstroke or fear or what Preacher Fulkes called “rapture,” and he just kept talking. I had nightmares until I died that Armageddon had come and the righteous had been swept up in the Rapture and the only things left on Earth were me and Preacher Fulkes’s voice.

Gramma Nancy’d known I was going to Hell. The last time I’d visited her, when I was thirteen, before the lung cancer carried her off, she’d made me step up for baptism three weeks running. I’d come back up, gasping and pawing the water out of my eyes, and the first thing I’d hear would be Gramma Nancy’s raspy voice hollering, “Wash away the sin! Wash the stain of evil out of this child!” And then the whole meeting bellowed, “Amen!” like a bunch of cows.

Gramma Nancy said she was washing my mother out of me, like Mom was tomato sauce and I was a white shirt. But I knew that what she’d been seeing had nothing to do with Mom. At thirteen, I hadn’t known what it was, but now I did, and if I was going to Hell for it, that was just too freaking bad.

I’d worry about that when I got there.

X.

Late, late that night, in a motel in some town half the state over from Gaylord’s Creek, I was sitting in bed, in my Braves t-shirt and ugly plaid boxers, watching an old X-Files episode. Mulder and Scully were dealing with creepy twin girls who used words I didn’t know.

Francis was in the bathroom, practicing first-aid on his head. I’d offered to help, but he’d told me to go to sleep. And although that wasn’t happening, I got that what he meant was he wanted me to get out of his way. And I could do that. I sat and watched Mulder and Scully, and the creepy girl twins turned out to have a bunch of creepy lady twins, and it was all the government’s fault, like it mostly was on X-Files. The credits were rolling, and I was waiting for Buffy, which was up next, when Francis turned out the light in the bathroom.

“What’s ‘exsanguinate’ mean?” I asked as he came into the room, looking pretty tidy for a Johnson & Johnson first-aid box.

“To drain completely of blood,” he said automatically, and did a double-take that made me grin. “What on . . . No, don’t tell me.”

“X-Files. You know, if they’d taught us words like that, I might not’ve flunked English three times.”

“Morgan.”

I’d hoped I could duck the I-told-you-so’s, but it looked like that wasn’t happening.

“Francis?”

“You, um, you saved my life today.”

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting. After a second, I said, “Yeah?”

“I didn’t think you would. Thank you.”

“I . . . ”

“I know what you are and I know . . . I know that you don’t like me very much. I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“Jesus Christ, Francis, what is this? I’m the one got you in trouble in the first place. I wasn’t going to leave you there.”

“But you . . . I . . . ”

“Besides, you were right about the dust witch.”

That time, he couldn’t even get any words out, the poor bastard.

“Francis,” I said as kindly as I could, “Buffy’s on in a minute. Call us even, and let it go, okay?”

“If you’re sure . . . ?”

“Yes. It’s working out, Francis. Don’t mess with it.”

“All right,” he said, although he still didn’t sound completely sure. “If it’s working.”

“Hey,” I said and grinned at him when he met my eyes. “We’re still kicking ass. We gotta be doing something right.”

And, just a little, Francis smiled back.

Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 104-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, three cats, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published by Prime Books in 2007 and will have a new edition in late 2011. She has written one novel (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

The Sandal-Bride
Genevieve Valentine

Pilgrims always cried when they crested the hill and saw the spires of Miruna; they usually fell to their knees right in the middle of traffic.

All I saw was the gate that led to the Night Market.

We pulled barrels off the cart (salt, cinnamon, chilis, cardamom, and mazeflower safe in the center away from wandering hands), and when the moon rose and the women came it was as if we’d always been waiting.

They moved in pairs, holding back their veils, closing their eyes as the smell of mazeflower struck them.

“Goes well in baking,” Mark told a woman, “which you know all about, with those fine things in your basket.”

The whole night went well (Mark could sell spice to a stone), until I got peppered by a loose lid and staggered back, choking.

From behind me a woman asked, “Where are you going?”

“Who’s asking?” I snapped, and looked up into the ugliest face I’ve ever seen; teeth like old cheese, small black eyes, a thin mouth swallowed up by jowls.

“A passenger,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“South,” I said vaguely (never liked people knowing my business), then brushed pepper off my shirt and yelled, “Mark, so help me, I’ll sell your hide to the fur traders!”

The woman was still standing there, smiling, her hands folded in front of her politely.

“Did you need some salt?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Well, I wish you good journey,” I said, and then for some reason I’ll never know I asked, “Where do you travel?”

“South,” she said, and I realized exactly where she thought she was headed.

I’ve never known when to seal the barrel and shake on the deal. It’s how I ended up with a blue wagon and a partner like Mark in the first place.

“Not on any transport of mine,” I said.

“It’s for my husband,” she said. “A shoemaker in Okalide. I’ll join him there.”

I didn’t wonder why he’d left her behind. A face like that was bad for business.

Mark came around and stood behind me.

“I can’t take an unescorted woman,” I said. I didn’t care, but someone on the road would. This was a church state. “Find someone else to take you.”

As I turned to go she opened her hand and unfurled a necklace of sapphires as long as a man’s arm, flaming as they caught the dawn. Mark gasped.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I reached without thinking, and had to pull back my hand when I remembered myself. I knew the trouble a woman would bring on that road full of pilgrims and devout traders.

“I don’t accept bribes,” I said. Mark kicked my foot.

“It isn’t a bribe,” she said. “It’s a dowry.”

Mark stopped kicking.

“You want me to—” I paused.

She held out her hand draped in glittering blue, her eyes steady. “Sandal-brides are common enough on this road.”

“Not this common,” Mark muttered, and I surprised us both when I cut him off with, “Pack the wagon.”

Still muttering, he went, and then it was just the woman and me.

“Sandal-briding is dangerous,” I said. “Women go missing that way if the men get greedy.”

She smiled. “A greedy man wouldn’t have pulled back his hand.”

I found myself smiling, too, and by the time she said, “My husband has another when I am safely delivered,” somehow I had already decided to agree.

We went the back way; I didn’t want her to see Mark’s face until it was too late to object.

The ceremony was easier than border-crossing. I gave her a pair of sandals I’d bought on the way, and she showed the priest the necklace she was giving me in lieu of bed rights. I swore to release her at the end of the journey. He wrote my name down next to hers, marked us “Okalide,” and it was over.

Outside I said, “You could go pack your things.”

“I don’t have any things,” she said, and stopped to buy a blanket.

Mark was still packing when we got back, but he must have known what I was going to do, because he had made space in the back of the wagon for someone to sit.

I drove the oxen, which were fonder of me than of Mark (good salesmanship never fools oxen). Mark kept watch in the back of the wagon, when he was awake.

All morning I expected him to climb through and demand a seat away from the woman (my wife), but when we stopped in the scrub at midday and I let the oxen loose to find what they could in the stringy undergrowth, I saw him helping her down.

“We’ll rest half an hour,” I said.

Mark nodded and disappeared back into the wagon.

“Just kick him out of the way when we set off,” I said, unhooking my canteen.

She laughed and took a seat under the branches of the twisted pim. It was scant shade, but the flats were like this all the way to Okalide. There was a reason her husband made a living there; this ground wore out your shoes.

She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered out at the horizon, though there was nothing inspiring about it. It was three months of low scrub and low hopes.

“Expect more of the same,” I said, taking a drink from my canteen and trying to sound like a grizzled traveler and not like someone who used to live above an alehouse and still hated desert nights.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve never been outside the walls before. I’m excited for anything.”

I was probably more grizzled than I thought, though, since the idea of being closed in by city walls made my skin crawl.

“Well, if you like scrub, we’ll have plenty.”

“How do the animals take it?”

I looked over at the two bony oxen, who had found enough roots for a meal and were chewing contentedly. “They’re tough beasts, though they look dead.”

“Tough beasts do surprise you that way,” she said.

She went back into the wagon, and only then I realized she had gone all day without so much as a drink of water, and I had offered her none.

“We’ll arrange a bed for you in the wagon,” I said the first night as she and Mark were trying a fire.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I love the sky.”

I wondered if she expected me to sleep at her side. I didn’t know what sandal-husbands usually did. “The wagon is really much better. More privacy.”

“Too late,” she said, “I already know what Mark says in his sleep.”

She handed him the flint, and Mark blushed and bowed his head to the sparks.

After the fire was going, Mark helped me pull rations out of the barrel.

“I hope she doesn’t eat much,” he said, staring at the salted beef and stale bread.

“What do you say in your sleep?”

Mark shook his head, and I hated that they should have been together in the back of the wagon with their secrets while I was sweating in the sun all day.

“Don’t lose your manners,” I said into the barrel.

Mark raised an eyebrow, sliced the meat into three pieces with his pocketknife. “Well, what’s her name, then, so I don’t have to keep calling her Goodwife?”

“You should call her Goodwife.”

“Don’t you know her name?”

She hadn’t said it and I’d never asked, but the priest had written it down. “Sara.”

Mark looked at me like I was one of the oxen, and took the skillet out to her.

“Tell me about your city,” she said to me.

“It was like your city. Like any city.”

“I don’t know my city,” she said. “Start there.”

And I must have made a face again, because she explained, “They have the market at night so we don’t see the city well enough to run away.”

I thought about the women picking their way home before it was light, about her thin purse, her refusal to go home and pack. The food turned to dust in my mouth.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, but I knew the answer before she said, “Everything.”

I told her about the alehouse; she asked how ale was made and listened as if she’d married a brewer. She wanted to know how many people could read. I told her about my schooling in the townhouse owned by a noble who lived in the country, and then I realized how it sounded to live in the country when the country looked like this, so I explained lakes and green trees and the soft wet snow that fell in winter.

I described the trader who sold me his wagon, his beasts, and Mark’s indenture in exchange for the alehouse. I expected her to tell me it was a poor trade, but she listened to this story the same as to the others.

When I got to the terms of the sale, Mark said, “This was worth an alehouse in a season city?”

I had no answer, gave him none.

After I ran out of my life, I told her the Tale of the Pearl, which seemed to make her sad, so I told the Tale of the Blind Flower-seller to smooth things over.

Then my throat hurt, and I said, “We should sleep.”

“You know, I grew up, too,” Mark said as he sulked back to the wagon.

She laughed; her voice was dry, and I handed her the canteen.

She laid her blanket on the hard ground and pulled half of it over her. I felt guilty for not having bought a pallet, a felted shawl even, in all the time I’d been sleeping on the ground. The wagon was as it had been delivered to me, as though I was just keeping it for the man who might want it back.

“We’ll buy you a pallet,” I said.

“No need,” she said, like someone who’s used to the worst bed. “Do you know the stars?”

“No.”

She was quiet after that. When enough time had gone by, I made a bed a little behind her; it was cold that far from the fire, and it felt too familiar to be so close, but I wanted to be something between her and the night.

I wasn’t fond of other traders on the road (or ever), but a few evenings later I saw a fire and knocked on the side of the wagon to let them know we were stopping.

I brought a rasher of bacon to trade for a torch to light our fire. They were glass traders from Demarest, and after the pleasantries I found myself saying, “Let me bring my wife over; she has a little pepper to season it.”

Mark and the sandal-bride (Sara, I thought) were pulling bread out of the barrel when I hauled myself into the cramped quarters.

“Bring some pepper,” I told her.

I wasn’t sure how to go on, but she guessed and smiled, and reached for the right barrel.

Mark said, “That’s five coin worth—”

“Come on,” I said, and she carried the ladle like it was mazeflower and not some common thing.

They were surprised to see her, and I remembered she was ugly.

She didn’t notice, or didn’t react, and they made room for us, and when there had been quiet for a moment she said, “Where have you come from?”

They looked to me like she had spoken out of turn.

I thought about the city walls and the night market closing around her again in Okalide.

I said, “Do you know about the stars?”

A week later we found someone who knew the stars, and he went through each constellation, jabbing his finger at the sky.

We found a botanist after that, wasted out in the scrub, who described flowers I’d never seen.

A silk trader liked her. He opened up his caravan of wagons and had his servants bring the best. We held up our lanterns and looked at the embroidered fountains that spit silver spangles along the blue silk.

Pilgrim women never spoke; the men only spoke to me. We stopped trying. Pilgrims could season their own food.

Once when I stopped the wagon for the night I found her sleeping with her cheek pressed against a barrel of cinnamon, like she could hear how it smelled.

I rarely said anything at strange camps; what was there to say when you were always the ignorant one?

But I listened, and I saw how people changed as they spoke of things they loved, and with every story I felt the world opening before us as if my oxen walked on the sea.

A metalworker and his wife sharpened our knives for some chilies, and the sandal-bride’s eyes gleamed in the dark as he explained how to power the wheel, how to shape a blade.

“Where did you learn it?”

“At my father’s feet,” the man said, and tears sprang into his eyes, but even as he cried he told her about the illness that had carried off his parents. He wanted a home by the sea, where the salt air dulled enough knives to feed a metalworker for the rest of his life, and where the fish was fresh.

That night she cried softly, mourning the parents of some man she’d never see again.

I counted the stars: the great ox, the three cubs, the parted lovers, the willow tree.

The wagon got lighter as we went.

Mark winced every time I opened a barrel, and though I kept the ladles skimpy, I couldn’t blame him. We would never make it to a port city before we ran out.

I closed my hand around the sapphires in my pocket as I drove. The day was coming when I’d have to break the clasp and sell them off.

Twice we stopped in tent cities and set up in their open squares, and Mark and Sara and I handed out envelopes of mazeflower and filled people’s burlap bags with what was left of the cumin and salt.

By then the nights were cold in earnest. Mark made beds amidst the barrels, little fortresses to keep out the wind. Sara and I kept separate blankets, but I slept between her and the wagon flap. I would listen to the wind hissing past the canvas and think: This much, at least, I can do for her.

One night it was birders, and I scraped the last of a barrel of cinnamon to make enough for an offering.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping for,” Mark said, “but you’re ruining yourself this way.”

I didn’t answer; there was nothing to argue.

When we reached camp I said, “This is my wife Sara,” and took her arm to present her, and she looked at me for a long moment before she smiled at them.

She told my stories, always. People were kinder if they thought she wasn’t from Miruna.

We met the girl with the shriveled leg who made cages, the boy who made paints that turned a thrush into a sweet-anna. Above us the little beasts hopped back and forth in the bentwood cages, and of everyone we met on that long journey, that family was the happiest.

That night she sat and looked out past our circle of light to their camp, where the birds were calling.

Silhouetted by the fire she looked like a camel, a beast who had always been wise, and I watched her until the birds went silent.

The last long stretch to Okalide was four nights of nothing, not even scrub for shelter, and in the pilgrim town we bought up vinegar-wine (only thing that won’t go brackish) and decided to travel at night and rest in the heat of the day.

Mark drank whenever wine was offered, and he took it as badly as ever, so he was still asleep when the sun set and it was time to go.

Sara and I sat in the shade of the wagon and watched the night crawl over the dust.

“Will I ever hear your story?” I asked, and she looked at me as if she knew why I was asking.

She did know. She knew, and Mark knew, and I was the only one who was just waking up to why.

Her thin mouth pressed tighter as if she was afraid of the words getting out. “I have no story,” she said. “I was born hidden, and grew hidden, and I married hidden, and now I go to Okalide.”

“And your husband? Is he kind?”

“I hope,” she said after a long time. There was a breeze moving in ahead of the moon. “But if not, I’ll be unhappy in Okalide, which is better than being unhappy in Miruna.”

I wanted to say, stay here and risk unhappiness with me, but “here” was a wagon and a raggedy trail around the desert cities. You met the same sort of people wherever you went, and one day she would regret asking someone his story and learning what he really was.

She was only my sandal-bride, and by the time the leather wore out she would be happy or unhappy with some other man, and I would still have a wagon and a wide circle of road.

I said, “You’ll find a way to be happy,” because that was the only thing I really knew about her, and we sat in the shadow of the wagon until the breeze turned cold.

She sat beside me, wrapped in her thin blanket, all that night as I drove toward Okalide.

After we were stationed in the morning market, Sara my sandal-bride stepped out from the wagon without even her blanket and said, “I’m ready.”

Mark came out behind her; when he was on the ground he held out his hand and they shook like it was a business deal.

“My wishes for a good life,” he started, but abruptly he turned his back and crawled into the wagon as if he had forgotten something important.

I almost took her elbow, but when I held out my hand she looked at me. Under her gaze I dropped my arm, held it against my side.

She looked around until she saw some landmark her husband must have given her.

“This way,” she said, and I followed her out of the market.

Okalide was under church rule, too, but here I saw women in daylight, at least, buying bread and reading the notices posted in the open squares.

The crowd that had been a nuisance before was overwhelming now. I wanted to know about the old man carving spoons on his doorstep, about the three young girls running along the edges of the fountain in the square.

Here no one noticed Sara (my wife). Her face was one of a thousand faces, not some apparition with a ladle of pepper in her hands, but somehow walking beside her I felt like the Empress’ Guard.

At a corner she looked at the words etched into the clay walls, then turned to me.

“Which one reads South?” she asked quietly, and my heart broke.

I pointed, and after she looked at the word to memorize it we turned down the shady street.

His was the sixteenth door, and when he answered her knock he said, “Sara,” as if she didn’t know her own name, but she just smiled and embraced him.

I looked back at the main road, where a shaft of sun crawled across the dust.

He introduced himself, but as he did he wrapped his arm around her waist and I didn’t catch his name.

“How was your journey?” he asked, and, tripping over himself, “—and of course you’ll come in and have some cold water and some fruit.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“He has an apprentice,” Sara explained, “and they have work.”

He nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said, and then he turned to her and smiled. “And how was the journey?”

I held my breath and waited for the first story she would tell him, the first words that would make it one big story sewn with little ones as a wedding gift to him.

She smiled and said, “A lot of brackish wine.”

He laughed so hard he had to drop his head, and for a moment she and I looked at each other.

I saw the bars of her cage bending around her, saw why she had wanted those stories; she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.

When he had recovered from his laughter he saw I was still there, and blinked. “You need your bride-price, of course, so sorry for forgetting,” he said, and a moment later there was a little ruby bracelet in my palm.

I was still looking at Sara. I had forgotten I would be paid.

The priest at the bastion wrote “safely delivered,” and wrote down all our names, and it was over.

She said, “Come visit as soon as you can.”

“We’ll be back again,” I said, which was the only lie I ever told her.

When I got back to the market the wagon was still packed and Mark was waiting in the driver’s seat.

“What did he look like?”

“Let’s go,” I said, took the reins.

We were five miles outside the city when I said, “What do you want to do after your indenture?”

“Trade!” he blurted, choked on a mouthful of dust.

I got his story; he had a woman in Suth he’d promised to come back for, and he’d heard about the botanist from Sara and wanted to find new spices. “From the East, maybe,” he said, “if they can be had by ship.”

I gave him the ruby bracelet. “Payment for the spice I used on the journey. Your indenture is over.”

The oxen would warm to him; he knew how to drive the wagon.

I moved through and questioned anyone who would answer. I wanted to know everything about the world. With the first sapphire, I bought a book to write in.

Some old man married a woman with six red-haired sisters. The youngest got black hair, and set about cursing them all, poorly, and he and I laughed into our beers until we cried.

Three brothers pulled aside a riverbed to keep their village from flooding, and they bought wine and sang songs in three parts, and I marked the words as fast as I could.

When the first book was full I bought another, for the botanist and the birders and all the stars I knew.

I listened to everyone, wrote down everything.

You have to write down everything. The world is wide, and you never know what stories someone is waiting to hear; maybe someday, someone will have bought a pair of boots from the shoemaker and his ugly wife, down a dusty street in Okalide.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, at genevievevalentine.com.

The Wolves of Brooklyn
Catherynne M. Valente

It was snowing when the wolves first came, loping down Flatbush Ave., lithe and fast, panting clouds, their paws landing with a soft, heavy sound like bombs falling somewhere far away. Everyone saw them. Everyone will tell you about it, even if they were in Pittsburgh that weekend. Even if they slept through it. Even if their mothers called up on Monday and asked what in the world was going on out there in that Babylon they chose to live in. No, the collective everyone looked out of their walk-up windows the moment they came and saw those long shapes, their fur frosted and tinkling, streaming up the sidewalks like a flood, like a wave, and the foam had teeth.

These days, we go to work. We come home. We put on dresses the color of steel and suits the color of winter. We go to cafes and drink lattes with whiskey and without sugar or bars where we drink whiskey without ice and without water. Bars aren’t noisy anymore. It’s a murmur, not a roar. They keep the music turned down so we can talk. So we can tell our wolf stories. Outside the windows, where the frost crackles the jambs, they stand and press their noses to the glass, fogging it with their breath.

Camille sits with her elbow crossing her knee, her dress glittering ice because they like it that way. They watch you, when you shine. Her lavender hair catches the lamplight, expensive, swooping and glossy, rich punk girl’s hair. She says:

“I was walking to the store for coffee. We always run out; I just never think of it until it’s already gone. I thought I’d get some cookies, too. The kind with jam in the middle, that look like a red eye. I guess that doesn’t matter. You know, I always fuck up jokes, too. Anyway, it was snowing, and I just wanted some coffee and cookies and then it was walking next to me. He was walking next to me. A big one, as big as a horse, and white, so white in the snow and the streetlight, his fur so thick your hands could disappear in it. All I could think of was the horse I used to love when I was a kid. Boreal. My mom used to drive me to the stables every morning and I’d brush him and say his name over and over, and the wolf was white like Boreal, and tall like him, and I started running because, well, shit, he’s a wolf. Running toward the store, like I could still get coffee and cookies. He ran with me. So fast, and I had my red coat on and we were running together through the snow, his breath puffing out next to me, and I saw that his eyes were gold. Not yellow, but gold. I was red and he was gold and we were running so fast together, as fast as Boreal and I used to run; faster. We ran past the store, into the park, and snow flew out under my feet like feathers. I stopped by that little footbridge—the wolf was gone and I had just kept on running out into the frozen grass.”

The wolves never cross the bridges. Sometimes they run right up to them, and sniff the air like Brooklyn has a musk and it fades at the edges, like they accidentally came too close to the end of the world. They turn around and walk back into the borough with their tails down. They stop right at Queens, too. They won’t cross the borders; they know their home. For a while no one talked about anything else, and all our friends in Manhattan wanted to come and see them, photograph them, write about them. I mean, wouldn’t you? But there were incidents—like any dog, they don’t like strangers. This girl Marjorie Guste wanted to do a whole installation about them, with audio and everything. She brought a film crew and a couple of models to look beautiful next to them and she never got a shot. The wolves hid from her. They jumped onto the roofs of brownstones, dipped into alleys and crawled into sewer gratings. We could see where they’d gone sometimes, but when MG swung her lens around they’d be gone, leaping across the treetops in the snow.

Geoffrey, despite the name, is a girl. It’s a joke left over from when she was a kid and hated being the four hundredth Jenny in her grade. She’s got green sequins on, like a cigarette girl from some old movie theatre. I love how her chin points, like the bottom of a heart. We dated for awhile, when I was still going to school. We were too lazy, though. The way you just wake up sometimes and the house is a disaster but you can’t remember how it really got that way, except that how it got that way is that you didn’t do the dishes or pick up your clothes. Every day you made a choice not to do those things and it added up to not being able to get to the door over the coffee mugs and paperbacks piled up on the floor. But still, she was at my house the night the wolves came, because laziness goes both ways.

She says: “Most of the time, you know, I really like them. They’re peaceful. Quiet. But the other week I was down on Vanderbilt and I saw one come up out of the street. Like, okay, the street cracked open—you know there’s never any traffic anymore so it was just cold and quiet and the storm was still blowing, and the street came open like it had popped a seam. Two white paws came up, and then the whole wolf, kicking and scrabbling its hind legs against the road to get a grip on it. Just like a fat little puppy. It climbed out and then it bit the edge of the hole it had made and dragged the street back together. I looked around—you know how it is now. Not a soul on the sidewalk. No one else saw. The wolf looked at me and its tongue lolled out, red in the snow, really red, like it had just eaten. Then it trotted off. I went out and touched the place where it broke through. The road was hot, like an iron.”

The wolves have eaten people. Why be coy about it? Not a lot of people. But it’s happened. As near as anyone can figure, the first one they ate was a Russian girl named Yelena. They surrounded her and she stood very still, so as not to startle them. Finally, she said: “I’m lonely”—it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street. They didn’t leave any blood. They’re fastidious like that. Since then, I know of about four or five others, and well, that’s just not enough to really scare people. Obviously, you’ll be special, they’ll look at you with those huge eyes and you’ll understand something about each other, about the tundra and blood and Brooklyn and winter, and they’ll mark you but pass you by. For most of us that’s just what happens. My friend Daniel got eaten, though. It’s surprising how you can get used to that. I don’t know what he said to them. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know Daniel that well.

Seth’s eyes have grown dark circles. He came wearing a threadbare 1950s chic suit: thin tie, gray lapels, wolf pack boy with a rat pack look. The truth is I’ve known Seth since seventh grade, but we never talk about it. We lived on the same sunny broad Spielbergian cul-de-sac. We conquered the old baseball diamond where we, the weird bookish kids, kept taking big steps backward until we were far too outfield to ever have to catch a ball. We’d talk about poetry instead: Browning (Elizabeth only), Whitman, Plath. We came back east hoping to be, what? A writer and a dancer, I guess is the official line. We run with the same crowd, the crowd that has an official line, but we’re not really friends anymore. We used to conjugate French verbs and ride our bikes home through the rain.

He says: “I came out to go to the restaurant one morning and one was sitting in my hallway. He still had snow on his ears; he took up the whole stairwell. He just stood there, looking at me, the snow melting into his fur and the light that never gets fixed flickering and popping. His eyes were dark, really dark, almost black, but I think they might actually have been purple, if I could have gotten close enough. He just stared, and I stared, and I sat down on my doorstep eventually. We watched each other until my shift would have ended. I reached out to touch him; I don’t know why I thought I could, I just liked how black his nose was, how white and deep his fur looked. He made me think of—” And Seth looks at me as though I am a pin in his memory and he wants to pull me out, so that the next part can be his alone, so that I can retroactively never have pulled down willow branches for a crown. “—of this one place I used to go when I was a kid, in the woods by my school, and I’d make little acorn pyramids or mulberry rings on the ground before first period, and they were always gone when I got back, like someone had taken them, like they were gifts. The wolf looked like the kind of thing that might have seen a bunch of sticks and moss and taken them as tribute. But he didn’t let me touch him, he howled instead—have you heard one howl yet? It’s like a freight train. The lightbulb shattered. I went inside like that was my shift, sitting with a wolf all day not saying anything. The next morning he’d gone off.”

Seth was my first kiss. I never think about that anymore.

I know this guy named David—he never comes out to the cafe, but I see him sometimes, sitting on a bench, his long thin hair in a ponytail, punching a netbook with a little plastic snow-cover over it. The snow never stops anymore. You do your best. He’s trying to track them, to see if they have patterns, migration or hunting or mating patterns, something that can be charted. Like a subway map. A wolf map. He thinks he’s getting close—there’s a structure, he says. A repetition. He can almost see it. More data, he always needs more data.

Ruben always looks sharper than the rest of us. Three-piece, bow tie, pocket watch and chain, hair like a sculpture of some kind of exotic bird. Somehow his hair doesn’t really look affected, though. He looks like he was born that way, like he was raised by a very serious family of tropical cranes. He wasn’t, though. He’s a fourth generation why-can’t-you-marry-a-nice-Jewish-girl Brooklynite. He belongs here more than any of us.

He says: “I keep wondering why. I mean, don’t any of you wonder why? Why us, why them, why here? I feel like no one even asks that question, when to me it seems such an obvious thing. I asked my uncle and he said: Son, sometimes you have to just let the world be itself. I asked my mom and she said: Ruben, sometimes I think everything is broken and that’s its natural state. And, well, I think that’s bullshit. Like, okay, it’s either zoological or metaphysical. Either they are real wolves and they migrated here, or they didn’t, and they aren’t.”

Camille interrupts him. She puts her hand on his knee. She says: “Does it matter? Does it really matter?”

He glares at her. You aren’t supposed to interrupt. That’s the ritual. It’s the unspoken law. “Of course it matters. Don’t you ever wake up and hope they’ll be gone? Don’t you ever drink your coffee and look out your window and eat your fucking cruller and think for just a moment there won’t be a wolf on your doorstep, watching you, waiting for you to come out? They could leave someday. Any day.”

But we all know they won’t. We can’t say how we know. It’s the same way we know that Coca-Cola will keep making Coke. It’s a fact of the world.

Ruben is really upset—he’s breaking another rule, but none of us say anything. We don’t come here to get upset. It doesn’t accomplish anything. “I asked one of them once. She’d followed me home from the F train—what I mean is she’d been all the way down on the platform, and when I got off she trotted up after me and followed me—me, specifically. And I turned around in the snow, the fucking snow that never ends, and I yelled: Why? Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want? I guess that sounds dumb, like a scene in a movie if this were happening in a movie and DiCaprio or whoever was having his big cathartic moment. But I wanted to know so badly. And she—I noticed it was a she. A bitch. She bent her head. God, they are so tall. So tall. Like statues. She bent her head and she licked my cheek. Like I was a baby. She did it just exactly like I was her puppy. Tender, kind. She pressed her forehead against mine and shut her eyes and then she ran off. Like it hadn’t even happened.”

There’s going to be a movie. We heard about it a couple of months ago. Not DiCaprio, though. Some other actor no one’s heard of. They expect it to be his big breakthrough. And the love interest has red hair, I remember that. It seems so far away; really, it has nothing to do with us. It’s not like they’ll film on location: CGI, all the way. Some of the locals are pissed about it—it’s exploiting our situation, it’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it, part of something, anything, and they’ll be wolf food. But shit, you kind of have to make a movie about this, don’t you? I would, if I didn’t live here. Nothing’s real until there’s a movie about it.

Of course people want to be a part of it. They want to touch it, just for a second. They come in from the West Coast, from Ohio, from England, from Japan, from anywhere, just to say they saw one. Just to reach out their hand and be counted, be a witness, to have been there when the wolves came. But of course they weren’t there, and the wolves are ours. They belong to us. We’re the ones they eat, after all. And despite all the posturing and feather-display about who’s been closest, deepest, longest, we want to be part of it, too. We’re like kids running up to the edge of the old lady’s house on the edge of town, telling each other she’s a witch, daring Ruben or Seth or Geoff to go just a little closer, just a little further, to throw a rock at her window or knock on the door. Except there really is a witch in there, and we all know it’s not a game.

Anyway, the outsiders stopped showing up so much after Yelena. It’s less fun, now.

But it’s the biggest thing that will ever happen to us. It’s a gravitational object you can’t get around or through; you only fall deeper in. And the thing is we want to get deeper in. Closer, further, knocking on the door. That’s why we dress this way; that’s why we tell our stories while the wolves watch us outside the cafe window, our audience and our play all at once.

“Anna,” Seth says to me, and I warm automatically at the sound of his voice, straightening my shoulders and turning toward him like I always did, like I did in California when I didn’t know what snow looked like yet, and I thought I loved him because I’d never kissed anyone else. “You never say anything. It’s your turn. It’s been your turn for months.”

I am wearing red. I always wear red. Tiny gold coins on tinier gold ropes ring my waist in criss-crossed patterns, like a Greek goddess of come-hither, and my shoes have those ballet straps that wind all the way up my calves. My hair is down, and it is black. They like it, when my hair is down. They follow me with their eyes. I’ve never said so to Ruben but they are always there when I get off the train, always panting a little on the dark platform, always bright-eyed, covered in melting snowflakes.

I say: “I like listening. They do, too, you know. Sometimes I think that’s all they do: listen. Well. After Daniel—I knew him, I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you guys that. From that summer when I interned downtown. After Daniel, I started feeling very strange, like something was stuck in me. It’s not that I wanted revenge or anything. I didn’t know him that well and I just don’t think like that. I don’t think in patterns—if this, then that. The point is, I started following one of them. A male, and I knew him because his nose was almost totally white, like he’d lost the black of it along the way. I started following him all over the place, wherever he went, which wasn’t really very far from my apartment. It’s like they have territories. Maybe I was his territory. Maybe he was mine—because at some point I started taking my old archery stuff with me. My sister and I had both taken lessons as kids, but she stuck with it and I didn’t. Seth—well, Seth probably remembers. There was a while there when I went to school with a backpack over one shoulder and a bow over the other. Little Artemis of Central California. I started doing that again. It didn’t seem to bother the wolf. He’d run down Seventh Avenue like he had an appointment, and I’d run after him.

“And one day, while he was waiting for the light to change, I dropped to one knee, nocked an arrow, and shot him. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t set out to. It doesn’t seem to have happened in a linear way when I think about it. I mean, yes, I followed him, but I wasn’t hunting him. Except I guess I was. Because I’d packed a big kitchen knife and I don’t even remember doing that. You know there’s never any traffic down there anymore, so I just gutted him right there on the median, and his blood steamed in the snowfall, and I guess I brought a cooler, too, because I packed all the meat away that I could, and some organs. It took a long time. I skinned him, too. It’s really hard work, rendering an animal. But there’s an instinct to it. Everyone used to know how to do this. I took it all home and I separated everything out and started curing it, salting it, smoking it.” I twist a big orange glass ring on my finger and don’t look at anyone. “I have wolf sausages, wolf cutlets, wolf bacon, wolf roasts, wolf loin, even wolf soup in plastic containers in my fridge. I eat it every day. It tastes . . . ” I don’t want to talk about how it tastes. It tastes perfect. It tastes new. “They all know me now, I’m pretty sure. Once, a younger one, skinny, with a black tip on her tail, saw me by the co-op and crawled toward me on her belly, whining. I watched her do it, bowing her head, not looking me in the eye. I reached out my hand and petted her. Her fur felt so rough and thick. We were . . . exchanging dominance. I’ve had dogs before. I know how that works. And I started wearing red.”

I tell them they can come by. There’s plenty of meat to share. It never seems to run out, in fact. They won’t—most of them. They don’t look at me the same way after that. In a week or so Seth will show up at my door. He’ll just appear, in a white coat with fur on the hood, full of melting snowflakes. And I’ll pour the soup into steel bowls and we’ll sit together, with our knees touching.

This is what Brooklyn is like now. It’s empty. A few of us stayed, two hundred people in Williamsburg, a hundred in Park Slope, maybe fifty in Brooklyn Heights. Less towards the bay, but you still find people sometimes, in clusters, in pairs. You can just walk down the middle of any street and it’s so silent you forget how to talk. Everyone moved away or just disappeared. Some we know were eaten, some—well, people are hard to keep track of. You have to let go of that kind of thinking—no one is permanent. The Hasidim were the last big group to go. They called the wolves qliphoth—empty, impure shells, left over from the creation of the world. A wolf swallowed a little boy named Ezra whole. He played the piano.

It snows forever. The wolves own this town. They’re talking about shutting off subway service, and closing the bridges, too. Just closing up shop. I guess I understand that. I’m not angry about it. I just hope the lights stay on. We still get wifi, but I wonder how long that can really last.

We go to the cafe every night, shining in our sequins and suits, and it feels like the old days. It feels like church. We go into Manhattan less and less. All those rooftop chickens and beehives and knitters and alleyway gardeners comprise the post-wolf economy. We trade, we huddle, nobody locks the doors anymore. Seth brings eggs for breakfast most mornings, from his bantams, those he has left. Down on Court Street, there’s a general sort of market that turns into dancing and old guitars and drums at night, an accordion yawns out the dusk and there’s a girl with silk ribbons who turns and turns, like she can’t stop. The wolves come to watch and they wait in a circle for us to finish, and sometimes, sometimes they dance, too.

One has a torn ear. I’ve started following her when I can. I don’t remember picking up my bow again, but it’s there, all the same, hanging from me like a long, thin tail.

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and the Lambda and Hugo Awards in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat. Learn more at catherynnemvalente.com.

Author Spotlight: Jake Kerr
Robyn Lupo

How did “The Old Equations?” come about?

“The Old Equations” evolved in the wake of my previous story being rejected from a lot of different places. I knew why it was being rejected—its connection to science fiction was ephemeral. You could take the story and move it to practically any era, and it would still work.

It wasn’t science fiction; it was fiction with science as window dressing. I resolved myself to write a hard science fiction story, where the science was critical to its emotional depth.

I looked to the history of science fiction for inspiration, and the story that immediately came to mind was Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.” Here was a story with gut-wrenching emotional turmoil linked directly to its central science fiction premise. As far as I am concerned, it defines the genre of hard science fiction. I decided to write an homage to the story.

Was it difficult to write your story while keeping “The Cold Equations” in mind?

At first. the initial genesis of “The Old Equations” was to take the plot of “The Cold Equations,” complete with stowaway, and overlay a different set of cold scientific facts to fuel the tragedy, in this case the stowaway’s ignorance of Einstein’s theories and time dilation. I really liked the tragedy of someone stowing away on a ship for kicks and then finding out in horror that all of her family would be dead of old age when the ship returns. But after I started writing it, I realized that it wasn’t so much an homage as theft. I was simply writing “The Cold Equations” with a different bit of science.

That’s a far different story than what you ended up with. How did you change things to end up with your final draft?

I pulled back and decided to look at a different scenario but with the same central tension of “The Cold Equations.” I also decided to use different literary techniques than Godwin, from my use of the epistolary format to my weaving in of the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief. But while the story and how it is told are perhaps unrelated to the plot and prose of “The Cold Equations,” the tragic spirit of real people facing the cold harsh reality of a science they don’t understand is there.

Some of the missives in the story get cut off because of the word limit in the transmission process. Did anything in particular influence this narrative choice?

Communication was the biggest challenge in “The Old Equations.” When I used traditional radio technology, the delays due to the vast distances of space undermined the tension. There is something much more visceral when James says, “No shit, Doc, put Kate on” than if he knew there was an hour or even longer delay. So I researched a communications system that would operate with immediacy. The only real choice with a modicum of scientific legitimacy was quantum entanglement. As I settled on quantum entanglement as the technology, I realized that by adding small pieces that revealed frustrating limitations I could further underscore the Godwin homage of “cold equations” and that it significantly added to the tension.

Thematically, here was a science that was unstable, cold, and almost cruelly arbitrary. Hence the one kilobyte character limit, and the fact that you can’t really just hit “send” when you hit that limit. At our most basic level we are social animals, and a critical part of that is communication. But when that communication between people who care for each other is marked by arbitrary rules and uncertain reliability, our whole social connection breaks down, even more so for a husband and wife.

In terms of the narrative, that arbitrariness, instability, and powerlessness obviously becomes a key plot point and provides us a glimpse at the cold equations of which Tom Godwin wrote about so eloquently.

What would you like a reader to take away from ‘The Old Equations’?

Of course, more than anything, I’d like the reader to be touched by the story. We all face loss, and we all face how cold and harsh reality can be at times. To see or feel that this is shared by all of us is powerful, even through as simple a vehicle as a science fiction story. I hope that my story was able to be that vehicle. Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” certainly did that for me, and if all I achieved in writing this story is to have others read Godwin’s story—well, then I did what I ultimately intended to do. Because this has always been intended to be, first and foremost, an homage.

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: K.C. Ball
Erin Stocks

Why did you choose to tell this story from the point of an A.I., rather than one of the crew?

The creation of “Snapshots I Brought Back From the Black Hole” began with that last image, the close-up of Chloé’s face. I built the rest of the structure from that, with the first scene as far away from that close-up as I could get—the panoramic view of the black hole.

From the start, I intended to tell the story from an omniscient point-of-view that would allow me to present everything that was going on in the story with as much detachment as possible. First draft felt too cold and awkward, though. I decided to warm the story up with a more personal presentation, but couldn’t decide which character would be the best choice. None of them felt right. Then the notion of Mikhail, the A.I., as narrator hit me.

Until then, Mikhail had been a peripheral character with no other role than having the speed to juggle communications up and down the black hole’s gravity well. But when I did the rewrite, and began using his voice to tell the story, he grew as a character and the whole thing came alive.

I’m interested in the notion of sentient A.I., and got more and more into the character as the story developed. I tried to make him real and unreal, to give him attitude, particularly in his view of humans. I think, in the end, he’s the most sympathetic character in the story.

That was one of the elements I found most fascinating, how Mikhail shows several characteristically human qualities, including a level of curiosity similar to the very curiosity of which it blames the humans of having, and a strong opinion of certain crew members. Do you think its responsibilities as Communications Officer, and the proximity to the humans that involves, have influenced it to exhibit such behavior?

During story development, I began to think of Mikhail as male. Him, not it. As I said, the question of how an artificial entity would develop, upon gaining sentience, fascinates me.

I can’t help but feel that a thinking artificial being, created by mankind and exposed to human behavior from infancy, would take on human characteristics. The nature, nurture thing. But as an alien, it’s very likely such a being would also develop a disdain for human foibles, even while exhibiting such weaknesses himself.

As to curiosity, I believe that’s it’s a mark of higher intelligence. Perhaps, more than any other quality, the need to understand our environment is an essential sign of sentience. Miror ergo sum. I wonder, therefore I am.

Why do you think Mikhail is so loyal to Sergei, speaking in his ear alone, and concentrating most on what Sergei feels and does?

We all want to think that we have the boss’s ear, don’t we?

In this case, as Mikhail’s “creator,” I wanted him to exhibit more or less equal parts training (programming), command loyalty (personal respect) and emotional attachment. As to the latter, I wanted to suggest, without making an overt statement, that Mikhail’s sensory links to Sergei contributed greatly to the attachment.

This is a love story, of course, but it’s not just about Sergei’s unrequited love for Chloe. I intended to leave the reader with the sense of fraternal and paternal love Mikhail feels for Sergei. Mikhail assumes the role of mentor and “grandfather.”

By the time Sergei and Chloé discuss pulling in Andy’s pod, Mikhail realizes Sergei wants the tractor field to fail. Has Sergei been pushed too far at this point to do his job as Captain? To do the right thing?

Very much so. The rest of the crew may not realize it, but Sergei knows he’s crossed the line, just as surely as Mikhail knows, but at first thinks he’s gotten away with it. Then the whole thing slips from his control.

For me, that core will fuel his sense of guilt for the remainder of his life. That he has failed to do the right thing, in a grand enough fashion that he couldn’t correct the situation (something he had never faced before in his life), and in doing so, he’s lost the very person he wished to hold close.

Do you think Chloé knew all along that Sergei cared about her, and simply never brought it up because she wasn’t interested?

For the most part. I believe Chloe feels great affection for Sergei, but as a friend and a “brother,” not as a lover. The very reason she admires him, and needs him—his detachment and his willingness to play second fiddle for her—made him unsuitable for the thunder and lightning she requires for emotional involvement. I don’t believe that disinterest is intentional, though. We all take those close to us for granted, from time to time, without meaning harm.

In the tragic turn of events, Mikhail manages to work the situation in order to stay with Sergei. Is it just that the A.I. is too smart to be disassembled (like it claims), or do you think there’s more under the surface, maybe something akin to feelings for its former Captain?

As I said before, at its core, this is a love story. Of course, self-preservation is at work, too, but my intention was to suggest that there is no logic to who we, as thinking beings, are attracted to, as friends, as lovers or extended family. Mikhail has taken on the role of wingman for Sergei, just as surely as Sergei fulfilled that role for Chloé.

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Christie Yant

Tell us a little bit about what inspired this story.

I’ve always been fascinated by the social conventions that have accumulated around the taking of pictures: The way that people suddenly stop, turn, freeze with a smile they never wear in real life, until that “click” releases them, and they go back to what they were doing.

These conventions are so strong that sometimes they become invisible. I remember attending a photography exhibit once and someone there said that she thought it was weird that children in rural China who weren’t used to cameras didn’t smile for the camera. But really, those children were the only ones who weren’t weird.

People never look the way they do in pictures, and yet we take them “for the memories.” The most extreme form of this probably occurs in children. I’m thinking of the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin’s parents look through a series of photographs of a dressed-up Calvin, and in all of the pictures Calvin was making ridiculous faces. Neither the parents’ dressed-up vision nor those faces look the way Calvin normally does.

Yet, despite the ways in which photographs aren’t freezing “reality,” we feel that photographs do capture some essence of the subject. I’ve never been able to resolve my conflicting feelings about them.

And then one day, while I was doing some unrelated research on the web, I found the quote from Susan Sontag, and in my mind I heard Anna’s speech about reality-capturing technology. That was the kernel of the story.

Anna talks about several of the uses to which the Simulacrum was put. Do you think there would be others? Can you see yourself ever wanting one?

I can imagine a lot of uses for the technology, both good and ill. Charismatic leaders—religious, political, or otherwise—might use simulacra with their followers to achieve a heightened sense of personal connection. Psychiatrists might use simulacra of various personality disorders as diagnostic and teaching tools. The entertainment/gaming potential is interesting, too. But I think most people would use them as enhanced versions of home movies and photo albums, a way to keep alive, in some sense, the people taken away from us by the passage of time (which doesn’t mean only death). I can definitely see myself wanting to have access to simulacra of people I love after they are gone.

It’s often easier to find compassion for total strangers than for the people who spent two decades of their lives raising us. Why do you think it’s so hard for us to put ourselves in our parents’ place? As a new father, do you worry that some day your daughter will have a grudge she can’t let go of?

I do think that children are especially hard on their parents. My theory is that because we are so similar to our parents, we see their weaknesses as magnified versions of our own failings (and hints that we may turn into versions of our parents some day). In a way, we are so unforgiving of our parents because we are really being unforgiving of what we see of ourselves in them. As we age, we become more accepting of our own faults, and maybe this is why parents seem to grow so much wiser as we get older.

I am terrified of letting my daughter down. I think that’s a fear all parents share. We know we are not perfect, and yet we want to live up to this image of being superheroes to our children. It’s a fear that I think will last as long as there are parents and children.

I think a really important moment in the parent-child relationship occurs when the child accepts the parent’s flaws and lets the parent know of that acceptance. It doesn’t occur in every parent-child relationship though.

The development of the technology in the story was very convincing. Is there anything in your background that gave you familiarity with imaging technology? What kind of research did you do (if any) to create the evolution of the Simulacrum?

My wife is a photographer, and so over the years I’ve learned from her a bit about the history of photography and the evolution of the technologies involved in film and digital imaging. As the technology evolved, the social attitudes toward photography, both as an art form and as a part of daily culture, also evolved. I tried to extrapolate a similar process of development when imagining how the oneiropagida would evolve over time.

Also, I’ve been interested in brain imaging technology for years. I try to read academic papers as well as popular reports, and the implications of such technology play a role in several of my stories.

Anna believes that she “knows the real Paul Larimore” based on something she witnessed one day when she was thirteen, and she lets it overwrite everything good that she knows about her father. “A man’s life is not defined by one thing,” Erin says. None of us want to be judged by the “sliver of [ourselves] that is weakest.” The reader is left perhaps examining his or her own life, looking for that weakest sliver. Did you reflect much on your own weaknesses when writing this story? Was there much emotional backlash from writing it?

I do often get very emotionally pulled into my stories, sometimes in a way that frightens me (my wife is good at noticing when I’m going in too deep and getting me to stay afloat). Empathizing with your characters deeply—which I think is required to write anything I want to read—and then being able to pull away isn’t always easy.

We all want to be judged by the best of what we’ve done, not the worst. And yet we’ve all made mistakes, and because of those mistakes, there are people we’ve hurt. For some of them, those mistakes are the most important aspects of us, and would overwhelm anything else we did before or since.

I thought a lot about instances where my memory of someone was dominated by one negative image, and whether it made sense to define someone by something they did a long time ago, and how someone might still hold a grudge against me, maybe even for something I could no longer remember. And then I tried to let all of it go.

This story seems to be about a lot of things: Forgiveness, obsession, reality, intent, the inability to let go of the past—were these all conscious themes, or did any of them emerge after the fact?

All these themes were floating in my mind during the drafting—but the story wasn’t originally going to be about just Paul and Anna, and fatherhood was not a big focus. I had a much longer and larger story planned out involving many other characters, all of whose lives were affected in important ways by the use of simulacra.

For example, I had sketched out a man who secretly took simulacra of strangers without their knowledge or permission, a woman who acted in porn simulacra shows (and thus had to act and create a fantasy not just with her body, but with her mind too), a man who obsessively edited simulacra of himself in search of the perfect one...But as I tried to flesh out the outline, I gradually lost interest in the other characters, and only the storyline between Anna and Paul seemed to stick in my mind.

One afternoon, a line from Lear—“Pray you now forget, and forgive: I am old and foolish”—popped into my head, and I knew what the story had to be about.

Is there anything else you would like Lightspeed readers to know about “Simulacrum,” or your upcoming projects?

One thing that surprised me when I first showed a draft of the story to a group of test readers was that the reaction split largely along gender lines. Several of the men really hated Anna and couldn’t empathize with her point of view at all. Most of the women were much more sympathetic to her. I hadn’t anticipated that, and I wonder if a similar split would occur with Lightspeed readers.

Most of my stories tend to be either about artificial intelligence or history-two subjects that I’m particularly interested in and have studied. ”Simulacrum” belongs to the first category, but I think it can be seen as a story about history (especially personal history) as well. It’s about how we use evidence to support a particular narrative about our own lives that feels authentic, even if it’s a destructive story.

Christie Yant is a fantasy writer, assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and audiobook reviewer for Audible.com. Her fiction can be found in the anthology The Way of the Wizard, and Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her boyfriend, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Her website is inkhaven.net. Follow her on twitter @inkhaven.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress
Stacey Friedberg

Memory, and metaphors for memory, are a running theme throughout this story. What would you say your favorite metaphor for memory is?

I’m inclined to think of computer files as a metaphor for memory, because our minds “file” concepts by category and because files can be cross-indexed, as can memory. However, I didn’t use that in the story because it’s too much of a cliché. Also, Eliot is given to more imaginative metaphors than I am—even though I created him. Fiction is odd in that way.

How did you come up with the idea for Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?

It’s an old idea in SF. Philip K. Dick used it, the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” used it, as have many other works. The point in fiction is sometimes to give a fresh spin to an old idea. It would be impossible to come up with a brand-new, fresh-out-if-the-box idea for every single story.

Eliot is obsessed with reality and refuses to believe in his father’s vision. Why does he hold such a strong attachment to what he deems to be real?

Because we all do. And the super-rationalists, of which Eliot is one at the beginning of the story, refuse to entertain any idea that smacks of mysticism. I know many such people. I’m related to a whole bunch of them.

What did Carl Tremling actually see? How did you decide on Dr. Tremling’s vision and subsequent outburst?

He “saw” what he said he saw: Zeus in a toaster pastry. Rather, that’s what he perceived, since sight is a combination of what photons strike our retinas and how we interpret the resulting signals to the brain. As to deciding on Carl’s vision: Like so much of what I write, it just came to me and seemed right.

Eliot shares a unique relationship with his father as well as his aunt. In both cases he feels that his decisions should hold more weight than theirs, even though he is a child. Where did you find the inspiration for these relationships? Did you often feel helpless as a child?

All children feel relatively helpless, because they are. Adults make the important decisions. I was glad to grow up, and even though I had a happy and stable childhood, I prefer adulthood. I get to make my own decisions now. I don’t really understand people who say they would love to return to the “innocence” of childhood.

Although Eliot doesn’t deem his father’s operation successful, it’s apparent that the procedure may not be to blame, as he loses his love of pigs beforehand. What actually happened to Carl Tremling to make him lose his personality?

His world was shaken to its foundations. Everything he thought was true turned out not to be. That’s enough to shake any sensitive and intelligent person a little. It shook him a lot because, as I say in my story, truly gifted mathematicians often have an unstable hold on social reality anyway. It’s a psychological phenomenon often written about. Example: John Nash.

Why strawberry toaster pastries?

I like to eat them.

Stacey Friedberg is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she earned her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Author Spotlight: Robert Reed
Stacey Friedberg

In this Author Spotlight, we asked author Robert Reed to tell us a bit about the background of his story for Lightspeed, ”Woman Leaves Room.”

What inspired you to write “Woman Leaves Room?” What was the process like?

Memory is suspect, but I did suffer the image of a woman leaving a room and then not returning for a great long while. I think I was watching TV. Maybe something on the screen triggered the image—a similar scene or whatnot. I don’t know and don’t care. I think up images all the time, and, like virtual particles, most of them vanish without notice. This one didn’t. Not long after, I made a file called “Woman Leaves Room” and set it aside. Not long after that, I found myself trying to write in the pre-dawn hours and faced several empty files, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to make the story about files being left alone and eventually lost. I wrote a few paragraphs and set it aside for a few weeks, which is typical, and then I went back to the file and finished it in a few days, without incident or much anguish. At least that’s what I remember, but again, memory is suspect.

Many of the characters in this story have been abandoned by their creators. In fact, the narrator spends most of this story being “lost,” with others unable to locate him or his origins. What do you think this says about humanity, that we let such important things slide away?

I don’t believe people let things slide away. It’s the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can’t succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists, who say, “Fuck that,” and go on inside the moment.

The protagonist doesn’t ever seem to believe others when they tell him how much time has passed. In fact, he doesn’t believe most of what the first two men who visit him say. Why is this?

Only the woman is real to him. That’s the nature of his program. Everything else looks and feels contrived.

On your website you mention that you love to run. Are there any other activities that you enjoy? Do you feel that running helps clear your head, or encourages the creative process?

Running is a joy, yes. And maybe it helps the creative process. The medical literature gives evidence of a profound brain-body relationship. But mostly I run because I learned long ago that if I wanted to flatten out my moods, I needed hard physical effort. Running is best because I genuinely enjoy it and because it takes a lot less time than biking or swimming, and due to some fluke in my body, I seem able to still do it in my mid-fifties.

Other joys: I have ponds and aquariums and hundreds of fish that rise to the surface when I appear. I like to read, although I’m not the voracious indiscriminate reader that I was thirty years ago. Science and apocalyptic science and history are common themes. Right now, I’m enjoying Persian Fire with Darius and the crazy-ass Spartans.

You’re extremely prolific. How on Earth do you come up with so many different things to write about?

Here’s one obvious explanation: I started selling at the beginning of the Computer Age, and I wrote hard every day of the week, selling the occasional titles. Although it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, I seem to have grown more prolific with time, investing less effort and time in my work. I’ve learned to know when the story goes wrong and quit immediately, and I certainly have an easier time selling what I finish. From those clues I think there is an obvious answer. I am not human. I am a piece of software or an alien implant, and my output improves as the Internet grows more sophisticated.

There’s no reason to take that idea seriously, I hope. But still, that popped into my head while thinking about the question. My head is always generating story ideas, and I don’t know why, and I know better than to get in my head’s way.

In an interview with SF Signal, you discussed your fear of time travel. “Woman Leaves Room” deals largely with large jumps in time, resulting in loss for the narrator. Do you think about the passage of time a lot? How does it affect your writing?

I grew up loving dinosaurs and being appalled by the distance between them and a ten year-old boy. Time has always been a vast ocean. Last week is more remote than Alpha Centauri, and I guess that kind of thinking can prey on a soul. Which makes the lost-file scenario into an appealing method of time travel, at least for to serve one small story.

If you could make a file copy of someone—anyone—from the past, present, or future, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill’s mother, and in particular, while she was a young woman. And no, I’m not going to explain why.

What’s next for you? What are some of the projects you’re working on now?

I always work on stories. That never changes. What I’m working on today will be finished by the time people read this. I intend to sell or at least publish another Marrow novel in 2011. (“At least publish” implies some kind of print-on-demand scenario. I am strongly considering going to the Cory Doctorow model for selling my work.) I’m also doing some consulting work that I’m not free or willing to discuss, except to say that it is fun and maybe important.

Stacey Friedberg is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she earned her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Author Spotlight: Jonathan L. Howard
Molly Tanzer

Your story, “The House of Gears,” has as its protagonist Johannes Cabal, “a necromancer of some little infamy.” Herr Cabal is also the, um, “hero” of your two published novels and upcoming third, as well as several other short stories. As the author of a series, do you think about chronology when writing shorts like “House of Gears”? If so, where does “House of Gears” fit?

There is a chronology, although not an utterly rigid one, at least not as far as the short stories go. As a guide, the chronology is probably best described as follows:

“Exeunt Demon King,” in H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror #3, 2006

“The Ereshkigal Working,” in The Way of the Wizard (ed. John Joseph Adams), 2010

“Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day,” in H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror #1, 2004

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, Anchor, 2009

“The House of Gears,” in Fantasy Magazine, April 2011

Johannes Cabal the Detective, Doubleday, 2010

Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute, Headline, 2011

I trained as a librarian. It sometimes shows.

The novels have a stronger sense of continuity than the shorts, and it becomes harder to place the latter within the context of the former as more are written. I suspect I shall find myself writing the Cabal shorts with no eye at all upon where they exist within his life except in the broadest sense. That said, I do like the idea of setting a few shorts within the year in which Johannes Cabal the Necromancer takes place. For reasons of space and my own sanity, it was impossible to tell of every event within the novel’s time span, but there were definitely things in there that would bear recounting.

Being obviously something of a polymath, Cabal instantly recognizes the statue in Monsieur Samhet’s garden. Do you think he would like Shelley’s or Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound more?

Probably the latter. Most of it is lost, so it would be that much shorter. Well, he’s a busy man.

Samhet’s “solution” to escaping death combines knowledge of how the human brain works with an understanding of something that we, in our world, might consider computer programming—at least the sort that involves punch-cards. Yet in the end, his “improved” brain is exceeded by an at least somewhat normal human mind. What was your inspiration for such a villain?

I’ve taken a very mechanistic approach to the nature of intelligence that is certainly fantastical in scale (I made the brain-machine big, but it would really have to be absolutely vast to come anywhere near anything that seemed even vaguely intelligent) and in the vexed question of how a brain generates intelligence in the first place.

Complexity is certainly part of it, but plenty of very clever people, with Roger Penrose being one of the loudest voices, are firmly of the opinion that a purely mechanistic approach will never create an intelligence. He may be right; I read his book on the subject The Emperor’s New Mind a few years ago and was not greatly the wiser as to his argument afterwards so I cannot say. Then again it hardly matters. Magic works in Cabal’s world as does discredited concepts of physics such as the ether and gyroscopic levitation and television. Given Penrose’s position that intelligence cannot be created artificially until some currently unknown law of physics can be identified and quantified, then there’s no reason that such a law hasn’t already been found in Cabal’s world and is part of occult theory. Samhet, after all, was a necromancer before he bought himself a wrench set, so it’s probably he would combine such eldritch knowledge with more mundane nuts and bolts.

As to the exact moment of Samhet’s creation, I couldn’t tell you. My ideas often come to me as “How about...?” rather than “Eureka!” so they don’t make an impact on my rather patchy memory. I think it may have almost formed as it was written. I recall the image of Samhet’s house and its environs came first, and then everything else followed on. Sorry to be so vague, but the story was originally written for H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror back in 2004, but got the thumbs down because it lacked any supernatural aspects. After six years the details of its genesis are a little murky.

“...Cabal thought it unlikely that Descartes had ever considered the Evil Genius might spend at least some of his time lurking behind a plant pot. Not, he corrected himself, that he, Cabal, was evil. A little single-minded perhaps, but not evil. Not in any cosmic sense.” Would you please expound a bit on Cabal’s worldview: Does Cabal consider himself a moral man? Does he hold with notions of Good and Evil (in the ultimate sense), and if so, how does he account for his own actions in relation to such?

He certainly has a moral set, although it’s unlikely to win him any plaudits. He would argue that his moral scale is simply greater than most people’s and that he does not concern himself with the minutiae. Others would counter that by arguing that surely taking on such an Olympian worldview, isn’t he simply saying that the ends justify the means? For his riposte, Cabal would probably start shooting, so we shall never know.

As for good and evil, Cabal has faced Satan, evil’s cheerleader, the essence of malevolence. Satan is a sadist, a selfish meddler who breaks lives and minds because it amuses him to see things fall apart. What Cabal knows of God is equally unflattering, albeit in the opposite direction. God is obsessed with order, which leaves little space for individuality. In this, the cosmology of Cabal’s universe has a distinct kinship with Michael Moorcock’s view that things are really between Law and Chaos, not Good and Evil. On that scale Cabal is somewhere a tad to the Lawful side of the scale, at least according to intention. By actual deed, however...well, he does tend to leave a smoking trail of chaos in his wake.

What’s next for you?

The next big thing is The Fear Institute, which is due out later this year. Apart from that, and apart from Cabal altogether, I’ve got another couple of novels that I want to get into a polished state. When I’m not working on Cabal, that’s what I’ll be doing.

One of the novels is a children’s book that started off all shiny and happy and fun, and then went rather darker, so it will need its tone adjusting (I’ll be darkening the opening a little). The other is a two-fisted pulp thriller, which also ended up not quite as I’d originally envisaged. It was intended to be good, uncomplicated fun with much punching, yet somehow became a bit Nietzschean along the way. This seems to happen a lot to me, doesn’t it? I’m a generally happy, upbeat sort of soul, but when I write, the shadows tend to seep out.

It’s traditional to drop a hint here about some sort of super secret project that I can’t possibly talk about, but which is very exciting. Unfortunately, I can’t because I don’t have one. Sigh.

Molly Tanzer is the managing editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in Running with the Pack, Palimpsest, and Crossed Genres, and is forthcoming in Historical Lovecraft. The account of her adventures going minigolfing with zombie polka band The Widow’s Bane appeared at Strange Horizons. She is a fan of the semicolon, an out-of-practice translator of ancient Greek, and an avid admirer of the novels of eighteenth century England. Currently, she resides in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and a very bad cat.

Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg
T. J. McIntyre

Why a clockwork queen?

I was drafting another short story and needed a title for an imaginary comedy of manners about a bankrupt heiress and her wholly unsuitable husband. After coming up with “The Clockwork Bridegroom,” I found myself picturing a young girl—too young to be the comedy’s heroine—creeping up the stairs in the early morning to wind up her husband. Somewhere between that mental image and the first written page of “Lessons,” the husband became a queen, and I knew there was an assassin lurking in the staircase’s shadows.

I thought the morbid scenario ending with Bethany’s death, and its morbid warning about carrying all one’s eggs in one basket, might be all there was to the story, and I set the draft aside. But for the rest of the day, I kept thinking up more intrigues and inconveniences to which a clockwork queen and her winding girls would be susceptible. Lodestones, unsuitable spouses, sibling rivalries, trolls . . .

“Lessons from a Clockwork Queen” has an interesting structure. Every section ends with a brief moral. (“And that is why . . . ”) This, of course, ties into the title of the story. Which came first: The title or the structure? Why structure a story around lessons?

The story began with Bethany, her unfortunate demise, and the first lesson. At the time, I was pretty sure the story would be called “The Clockwork Queen.” Then, as I added more about the aftermath of Bethany and Violet’s assassination, I added the other lessons to tie the new sections back to the first one. Then I changed the title.

As the story went through revisions, I reworked some of the lessons (and sometimes changed them back again!) to be sillier and less predictable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was tempting to fall back on “true love conquers all,” “don’t try to deceive your lover because your true character will always be revealed,” “don’t over-rationalize love,” etc. These morals are still pretty obvious in the stories about Cassia and Violet, Henry and Iris, and Isaac and Cassia, respectively, but I hope the stranger lessons assigned to them leave more room for interpretation—or are more entertaining, at least!

Let’s talk a moment about worldbuilding: How did this fairy tale world come to be? Did it develop organically? Or did you have the world in mind prior to writing the story?

The world definitely emerged as I wrote the first draft. Though I had some vague ideas about who or what would appear in each section, the settings and anchoring details were a complete surprise. I didn’t know the kingdom of the clockwork queens had a stationer’s guild until they declared a holiday and their master stationer married a male Cinderella!

This is very different from how I normally write and worldbuild; the setting is one of the few things I’ve always pictured vividly before I start drafting. It was fun and exciting to write this story without worrying too much about fitting each detail into the imaginary world—but I have to confess that one detail bothered me endlessly. In a rather nonreligious story, should Abigail really be standing godmother for Mephistopheles’ children? But the idea that nonhuman creatures might have humans as their version of fairy godmothers was too tempting to pass up.

I’ve read a few of your stories that have involved love affairs with clockwork items. (“The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois” which was also published in Fantasy Magazine comes immediately to mind.) When asked about clockworks in our previous spotlight, you declared: “For me, clockwork is about rationality, empiricism, cause-and-effect, and that’s the association I was reaching for in ‘The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois.’” Would this statement apply to this story as well? Why or why not?

“Lessons” is cause-and-effect run amuck. Everything about it, the title, the structure, the words “if” and “then” and “so” popping up in every paragraph, pretends to be a long chain of logical outcomes. The queen died, so the councilors bought a new queen; the new queen was beautiful, so she needed a husband; the husband collected postage stamps, so three sisters fought over him. Of course the outcomes aren’t really rational. Each section is like a little gear turning the next, which turns the next, until the penultimate gear is turning the first gear, but in the opposite direction!

I couldn’t really escape my association of clockwork and logical cause-and-effect. It even appears explicitly in the text: “Clockmakers are by nature quite rational, and [Isaac] was even more rational than most.” But in this particular story, the logic is dream logic. It carries one section into the next, but falls apart when the entire picture is taken into account.

Why do trolls always require tolls?

Poor trolls and their mispronunciations. I imagine they used to talk about “troll bridges” to humans, who thought they were saying “toll bridges” and began to pay in order to cross. The trolls were a bit confused at first, but they decided it was much nicer to demand tolls at their bridges than to continue storming well-armed castles to hold princes and princesses for ransom, which was their original source of income.

As to the particular toll in the story, I wanted to give the troll some goals and desires of her own. She isn’t greedily hoarding gold; she just wants to build herself a house and sew a nice silk suit. And she’s open to negotiation. I hear an adventurer once gave her an entire orchard of apples, and that adventurer now has the equivalent of an I-Pass [an electronic toll collection system – eds.].

Your publication list keeps growing and growing. Congratulations! What do your fans have to look forward to in the near future?

My big exciting news is that “The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois” will be appearing in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk next year. The idea of being on the same table of contents as two of my heroes, Catherynne M. Valente and Caitlin R. Kiernan (and many other talented writers), makes me inarticulate with glee.

T.J. McIntyre writes from a busy household in rural Alabama. His poems and short stories have been featured in numerous publications including recent appearances in Moon Milk Review, M-Brane SF, The Red Penny Papers, and Tales of the Talisman. His debut poetry collection, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, was released in 2010 by Philistine Press. In addition to writing poetry and short fiction, he writes a monthly column for the Apex Books Blog and regularly contributes reviews for Skull Salad Reviews.

Author Spotlight: Sarah Monette
T.J. McIntyre

You described “The Devil in Gaylord’s Creek” on your blog as “the heartwarming story of a dead girl and her sword.” How did this story come about?

Well, obviously, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a huge influence, particularly the character of Faith and the alternate universe Buffy we see in the season 3 episode, “The Wish.” Morgan and Francis actually come from a couple of dreams I had about a Slayer-like girl and her sidekick in a post-apocalyptic world, but when I went to put them in a story, the post-apocalyptic part sloughed off—except insofar as the economically depressed small towns of the mid-South always have a slightly post-apocalyptic feel to me. So the setting is based on the region I grew up in, and the plot comes from seeing roadside crosses (as, sadly, one does almost everywhere) and wondering about the stories behind them.

There are sections in this story that jump back and forth through time. How did you decide how to structure this story?

Originally, it was just the story of what happened in Gaylord’s Creek, with some inline digressions from Morgan about her past. But that was before I realized that she had died in order to become what she now is. That knowledge changed the weight of her memories, so they needed to be separated out. Then it was a matter of finding the right balance.

Morgan’s voice—sarcastic and strong—really carries this story. I felt she came across as a completely believable teenage protagonist. What’s the secret to writing compelling young adult characters?

I hadn’t thought of Morgan specifically as a young adult character before, although of course she is. So I guess my answer is that it’s the same as writing adult characters; you try to listen for what makes the character specifically herself. And—although I don’t think there’s any particular virtue in making your characters unpleasant people—don’t be afraid to let her be a jerk.

A larger world with its own rules seemed hinted at in “The Devil in Gaylord’s Creek.” When writing, how do you decide what to show and what to hold back? How much of the world and its characters do you flesh out before you start writing?

I’m a make-it-up-as-you-go-along writer. A lot of the details about Morgan’s backstory and world only appeared in the last round of revising. As far as deciding what to put in, I tend to try to limit it to what the viewpoint character would naturally tell someone. Since Morgan’s not interested in most of the whys and wherefores, she doesn’t explain them.

Do you plan to return to these characters and write more stories in this world in the future?

I don’t have any definitive plans, but, yes, the set-up was intentionally open-ended, and I would very much like to visit Morgan and Francis again.

So, what’s next for Sarah Monette?

I’ve got a book co-authored with Elizabeth Bear coming out this August from Tor: The Tempering of Men (sequel to A Companion to Wolves). Then late October/early November, a short story collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, from Prime, and also the rerelease of my 2007 collection, The Bone Key. My next solo novel, The Goblin Emperor, will be published by Tor under the name Katherine Addison.

T.J. McIntyre writes from a busy household in rural Alabama. His poems and short stories have been featured in numerous publications including recent appearances in Moon Milk Review, M-Brane SF, The Red Penny Papers, and Tales of the Talisman. His debut poetry collection, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, was released in 2010 by Philistine Press. In addition to writing poetry and short fiction, he writes a monthly column for the Apex Books Blog and regularly contributes reviews for Skull Salad Reviews.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine
Jennifer Konieczny

Could you tell us what inspired “The Sandal-Bride”?

Whenever you travel, you see glimpses of people—in a train station or a hotel, for two minutes or two weeks—who you’ll probably never see again. Some people get very curious about that, and some people hardly notice; the story sprang from the idea of two such people meeting.

In “The Sandal-Bride,” the character with the most freedom is also the one most limited in his wonderment. Do you think his responsibilities constrain him or that people need to be introduced to new ways at looking at the world that he has not yet been introduced to?

Those are the very questions that this story is asking, and I don’t think there’s any one pat answer. That’s something each reader—and person—has to weigh for themselves.

At the end of “The Sandal-Bride,” the protagonist travels the world writing down people’s stories. Do you also keep record of all you see in your travels?

With my memory problems, you’d think I would! Sadly, I’m an indifferent diarist, and generally forget to make any notes until I’m already back home again. I tend to take away impressions, rather than concrete memories, and many of my stories contain an element of recreating a place half-remembered and half-imagined.

Sara, the Sandal-Bride, collected stories, because “she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.” What stories do you return to time and again? Do you have favorites that you always recommend?

I definitely have a few books from childhood that appeal to me now as much as ever. I own half a dozen editions of Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Sagan’s Contact—some too worn to read, but all of which I’m keeping. And every once in a while, a story will strike me just so—Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison was a recent find.

Your book Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti comes out in April. Could you tell us a bit about it? Will you be giving any readings?

Mechanique is about a mechanical circus traveling a war-torn landscape, in thrall to the ringmaster who made them, and what happens when their sovereignty is threatened both by the war at their doorstep, and mutiny within the Circus Tresaulti itself. In terms of readings, I’ll be a reader at KGB in New York City on March 16. I also hope to be attending several conventions this year; my most up-to-date reading schedule can be found at www.circus-tresaulti.com.

Thank you for your time. Before we conclude, could you tell us what else is next for you?

I have several short stories in upcoming anthologies, including Teeth: Vampire Tales, Bewere the Night, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. This fall will also see the release of Geek Wisdom, out from Quirk Books and co-written by me, and of course there are more novels in the works.

Jennifer Konieczny hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumna of Villanova University, she now pursues her doctorate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She enjoys working with fourteenth-century Latin legal texts, slushing for Fantasy Magazine, and scanning bookshelves for new authors to read.

Author Spotlight: Catherynne M. Valente
Wendy N. Wagner

I think the first question has got to be the most obvious: Why Brooklyn?

First, because I’ve stayed there a lot over the last few years, and have come to be fond of it, and it is an iconic place. But the real genesis of this story is that a friend of mine, who lives there, made a blog post one night. Very simply, just about going out to dinner or something. But this was during the first big snowstorm of last winter, and after talking about the unfriendly weather, she closed the post by saying: On our way home, we were eaten by wolves. The story just unspooled itself in my head.

One line in the story really jumped out at me. Anna is talking about the movie planned about the wolves, and she lists off one of the complaints locals have about the movie: “It’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it.” In the movie Shortbus, Justin Bond talks about how all the kids flock to New York because of 9/11, because it stands out as this remarkably authentic event in a time when much of what happens is so shallow. Is authenticity a theme you’ve wrestled with before?

Wow, that’s very perceptive! I love that line and I think it’s very true. As someone who was never drawn to New York like many people are, but came to love it, I’m fascinated with reasons for coming there, reasons for staying. I think there’s this idea that it’s America’s beating heart, and people do go there seeking some kind of authentic experience—and are derided for it, only to become natives in their turn and deride the next wave.

We’re all seeking authenticity because our culture is a culture of images, and saturated with images we start to feel unreal—and so many books and movies and television have told us that urban experience is more real than rural experience, and New York experience the most real of all. Layers of reality interest me—when Sarah Palin talked about her version of real America she was trying to cast a kind of magic spell, to define what was and was not at the most basic level. But she can’t fight against the onslaught of stories that tell us real America is New York (of course it’s all real and I know that, but as long as we keep spinning a narrative of real/unreal I’ll keep poking at it). New York is where the sitcoms are set. It’s where New Years come in. And it’s a place where sometimes terrible things happen.

In fact, after finishing the story, I joked that only now was I a real writer, having written a New York story. Other than London and possibly Paris, I can’t think of another city so often storied, made into narrative.

Anna says she always wears red. In a story about wolves, this definitely raises up visions of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Is this the first time you’ve played with this fairy tale? Do you have any favorite retellings of “Little Red,” or favorite riffings?

[Laughs.] Fairy tales and I go way back. I wrote The Orphan’s Tales, which is a series of novels that contain dozens of original fairy tales in an Arabian Nights structure, as well as Deathless, my most recent adult novel, a retelling of a Russian fairy tale set in Leningrad during WWII. I’ve also written many stories and poems that retell and remix folklore. It’s an obsession of mine.

So yes, of course Anna’s clothes are meant to invoke Red Riding Hood—but she is not Red Riding Hood. Part of the reason I like fairy tales so much is that without really thinking about it or meaning to, we walk in them every day; we organize our lives according to their principles (or the tales reflect our principles, or both—it’s very circular, when you grow up inundated with these stories). We obey the rule of three, we think there is one true love for everyone, and when wolves are about, we sometimes wear red.

I love Anna’s outfit, with the gold ropes and strappy ballet shoes. What inspired it? Actually, there’s a whole lot of fashion going on in this story. How did that element wind up in the piece?

I love fashion, and though I have little or no sewing talent, I love to write about it—clothes are how we present ourselves to the world. Clothes say everything, even the geek choice of “eschewing” fashion and sticking to black t-shirts with ironic/hip slogans on them and jeans—well, that’s a choice, a decision to express a certain statement (i.e., not wearing pink or orange but black; what cultural item the shirt references). It’s a huge gateway into a character; it can say everything about them. It seemed like a natural element here, in such a fashion-conscious city.

This is a new story for you— did you write it since you took the helm over at Apex Magazine? And has digging into editorial work within the realm of short fiction affected your approach to creating short stories?

I did write it since taking over—in fact I think it’s the first short story I wrote since taking over the magazine. I don’t think my own stories have changed because of my editorial work—perhaps I am more conscious of the value of a first line, of what is tired and what isn’t, but mainly I keep the two kinds of work separate. I’ve been experimenting with a more stripped-down, talky style in some of my short fiction, which seemed to fit well with this kind of magical realist story. However, that was in swing before Apex.

Is there anything else you’d like to share, either about the piece or anything new and exciting coming up for you?

Whenever I go back to Brooklyn I think of my wolves, now. I think that’s my favorite part of this piece, how it changed the way I saw the city.

Wendy N. Wagner grew up in very rural Oregon, where she dreamed her family would abandon her to be raised by wolves. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Rigor Amortis; her interviews and poetry have run in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Horror-web.com, and Abyss and Apex. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her very understanding husband and daughter, and blogs at www.inkpunks.com.

Coming Attractions

In our January issue, we have original science fiction by Megan Arkenberg (“How Many Miles to Babylon?”) and Ken Liu (“The Five Elements of the Heart Mind”), plus SF reprints by Paul McAuley (“Gene Wars”) and Nancy Kress (“Always True to Thee, in My Fashion”). We also have original fantasy stories by Marissa Lingen (“On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)”) and Sarah Monette (“Blue Lace Agate”), and fantasy reprints by M. Rickert (“You Have Never Been Here”) and Aimee Bender (“A State of Variance”). And our ebook-exclusive novella in January is a tribute to a science fiction legend who recently passed away: the Hugo Award-winning novella “Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey, the first in her iconic Dragonriders of Pern series, plus we have a memorial by her son—and collaborator—Todd McCaffrey. All that, plus feature interviews with bestselling author Neal Stephenson and award-winning author R. A. MacAvoy.

Coming up in February, we have original fantasy by new writer Brooke Bolander (“Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring”) and Fantasy-favorite Genevieve Valentine (“The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring”), along with fantasy reprints by Chris Willrich (“The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg (“Not Our Brother”). Plus, we have original science fiction by Keith Brooke (“War 3.01”) and bestselling author Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil”), and SF reprints by award-winning authors Gregory Benford (“Dark Sanctuary”) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Craters”). Our ebook-exclusive novella for February is “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” by Lucius Shepard. All that, plus feature interviews with bestselling authors Chuck Palahniuk and Daniel H. Wilson.

Then, later in 2012, we’ll have fiction from Gene Wolfe, Karen Joy Fowler, Marc Laidlaw, S. L. Gilbow, David Barr Kirtley, Eric Gregory, Kali Wallace, Steven Utley, and Dale Bailey, plus a two-part novella by Jeffrey Ford.

It’s looking like another great year of Lightspeed, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend. Thanks for reading!