Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 66, November 2015
Author: John Joseph Adams
Date: 2015-11-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Short Stories; Fantasy; Time Travel; Fiction
Description: CONTENTS Short Stories - Science Fiction "Here is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All" by Rahul Kanakia "The Pipes of Pan" by Brian Stableford (reprint) "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death" by Caroline M. Yoachim "The Light Brigade" by Kameron Hurley (reprint) Short Stories - Fantasy "The Black Fairy’s Curse" by Karen Joy Fowler (reprint) "When We Were Giants" by Helena Bell "Printable" by Toh EnJoe (reprint) "The Plausibility of Dragons" by Kenneth Schneyer Novella (Subscription / eBook exclusive) "The Least Trumps" by Elizabeth Hand Novel Excerpts (eBook exclusives) "Chimera" by M
Rights: 2019John Joseph Adams and the respective authors.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 115, December 2019
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: December 2019
SCIENCE FICTION

Today Is Today
Rick Wilber

Njuzu
T.L. Huchu

Motherhood
Pat Murphy

A Bad Day in Utopia
Matthew Baker

FANTASY

The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles
KT Bryski

End of the Sleeping Girls
Molly Gutman

The Silent Familiar
Cat Rambo

The Mocking Tower
Daniel Abraham

EXCERPTS

Sisters of the Vast Black
Lina Rather

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: December 2019
Arley Sorg

Media Reviews: December 2019
Christopher East

Interview: Daniel José Older
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Matthew Baker
Molly Gutman
Pat Murphy
KT Bryski
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions
Stay Connected
Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2019 Lightspeed Magazine
Cover by Grandfailure / Fotolia
www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: December 2019

John Joseph Adams | 330 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 115th issue!

We have a new SF short from Matthew Baker: “A Bad Day in Utopia.” Like a lot of utopias in fiction, this one will leave you wondering just what makes for a perfect society—and who gets to decide what works and what doesn’t. Pat Murphy writes about a very awkward conversation in her SF short “Motherhood,” brought to you by recent US headlines. We also have SF reprints by T.L. Huchu (“Njuzu”) and Rick Wilber (“Today Is Today”).

KT Bryski gives us a forested fairy tale re-telling in her new fantasy short “The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles.” Our second original fantasy story, “The End of the Sleeping Girls” by Molly Gutman, also takes us into the woods . . . and out of them. We also have fantasy reprints by Daniel Abraham (“The Mocking Tower”) and Cat Rambo (“The Silent Familiar”).

All that, and of course we have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our interview this month is with bestselling author Daniel José Older. For our ebook readers, we also have our usual book excerpt.

Exciting news from the World Fantasy Awards

We’re delighted to announce that three stories from our Lightspeed/Nightmare publishing family were nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction: “The Ten Things She Said While Dying: An Annotation,” Adam-Troy Castro (Nightmare, December 2018—bit.ly/NM10Things); “The Court Magician,” Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, January 2018—bit.ly/LSCourtMag); and “Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake,” Mel Kassel (Lightspeed, October 2018—bit.ly/LS10Deals). We’re even more delighted that Mel Kessel’s story won, sharing the award in a rare tie. We couldn’t be happier for Mel!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Today Is Today

Rick Wilber | 3249 words

“You can think of our entire universe, our reality, as one bubble surrounded by an infinite number of other bubbles, each with its own reality. Do those bubbles touch? Can you cross from one to another? That’s an entertaining possibility.”

— Janine Marie Larsen, Ph.D., Physics, University of Loyola at St. Louis

In one tiny part of one of the new bubbles emerging from the bubble that is our particular universe, there is a place and time where you might exist and I might exist where I have a daughter named Janine.

Perhaps, in that tiny bubble, I may have been lucky with sports and found some success. As quarterback in high school, I’ll have converted to a tight end in college at the University of Minnesota, where I’ll bang heads and block like a demon, catching most of the passes they throw my way. I’ll be All Big Twelve, then a second-round draft choice, then I’ll make the team in St. Louis for the Brewers and get my chance to start when Rasheed Campbell blows out his left knee. Then I’ll never look back. Seven years later, I’ll wind down my career as a backup on the Falcons, but that will be their Super Bowl year, so I’ll get my ring by, mostly, sitting on my butt.

It will be a nice way to spend my twenties. I’ll stay single and have a blast, though my body will take a beating. When I lose a couple of steps and the good times come to an end, I’ll try to move to broadcasting, but that’s a lot harder than you’d think. I won’t be able to think that fast on my feet, so it won’t work out.

Still, I’ll feel like I have plenty of money for life as a grown-up, and you’d think I’d be happy; but it’s hard to be a has-been, no matter how much money you’ve saved. I’ll never marry, never have any kids, never grow up, really, and I’ll know it. Later in life I’ll be lonely and bored and broke. And thanks to all that head-banging work on the offensive line in my football career, I’ll literally be losing my mind. Eventually I’ll run out of money and run into trouble and only then will I have any regrets.

• • • •

In another tiny part of another emerging bubble where you might exist, I’ll break my collarbone in the second game of my senior year of high school and by the time I’m back, the season will be over—my football career along with it. But my left-handed pitching skills will be unfazed by my fractured right clavicle and I’ll pitch us to the state championship, where we’ll lose by one unearned run. My fastball in the high eighties and my nice, straight change-up will earn me a free ride to Loyola University, where I’ll have four good years as a Billiken and five more in the minors before I’ll hang them up and get on with real life in the business world.

I’ll meet a woman who loves me and I, her. We’ll marry and have two sweet kids. I’ll have a good life and some nice minor-league memories from Tampa and Atlanta and Durham and Spokane. You’d think I’d be happy.

• • • •

In another tiny part of another of my emerging bubbles where you might exist, the Golden Gophers will keep me at quarterback and I’ll do fine as the starter, though I’ll never be a star and I won’t make the NFL. I’ll knock around a bit in arena football and then swim up to the surface as the quarterback of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Once, in my nine years there, I’ll lead the Ticats to victory in the Grey Cup. In the Canadian Football League there’s room to pass and room to run, and I’ll do both, often.

I’ll meet a woman named Alene in my second season, when we’ll beat the Alouettes with a lucky rouge. We’ll be celebrating at Yancy’s on Hanover Street and there she’ll be, dark hair and blue eyes, stunning and smart and ambitious. I’ll have had a good day on the ground, gaining ninety yards before taking a stinger and coming out of the game. She’ll have been there, rooting for the Alouettes, and she’ll have seen that hit I took. She’ll wonder how I am feeling. Just fine, I’ll say, though I’ll have a worrisome headache.

She’ll be an actor; a successful French Canadian who speaks four languages. I’ll feel lucky. By my third season we’ll be married. By my fifth season we’ll have a child, Janine. We’ll call her Jannie.

Janine Marie Larsen will be born two weeks early on July 21st, a Saturday, at four in the morning. Alene will have a rough time of it with a fifteen-hour delivery and then it will only get worse: Jannie’s feet, hands, and the epicanthal folds at the eyes all have a certain flaccidity, even for a newborn.

Trisomy 21, the doctor will say.

Down syndrome.

Alene will have been through ultrasound and blood tests and everything will have looked fine. But here will be Jannie, and that will be that. There’s a lot these kids can do, the doctor will say as Alene and I both cry. Really, they can accomplish a lot.

Really, the doctor will emphasize.

We’ll have a game that night at home, in old Ivor Wynne Stadium against the Alouettes, and Alene will insist I play. So I’ll go and do that, earning my paycheck with a couple of touchdown passes and a good enough night of football. I won’t remember much of the game. All I’ll be able to think about is: Down syndrome.

I’ll go right back to the hospital after the game and Alene will be weak but smiling and more beautiful than ever. There will be a picture the next day in the Hamilton Spectator of her with the baby—the whole city will be behind us. I’ll hold that baby and kiss her cheek as the cameras whir and click.

Two years will go by when I won’t play much: some knee surgery, a discectomy for a herniated disc, a couple more concussions. The docs will say it’s time to hang them up and so I will. That’s about the time that Alene will get the movie role she’s always wanted, filming in Vancouver. Our parting will be amicable. I’ll get Jannie and Alene will get visitation rights and there she’ll go, heading west.

I’ll have no reason whatsoever to be happy, but, holding Jannie, I will be.

• • • •

There is another tiny part of a different bubble where Alene and I will stay together and things will go differently for Jannie. She’ll be normal and fussy and hungry at birth and she won’t stop being any of those things right through high school and college. She’ll get her brains from her mother, her athleticism from me, and win a full ride to play soccer at Rice, where she’ll major in physics. Then she’ll choose brawn over brains and turn pro for the Washington Whippets before joining the national team in the Global Cup. She’ll be a star and a household name after they beat the French on her hat trick to win it all.

By that time, I’ll be coaching football at Buffalo State and happy enough with how I’ve reconciled myself to the paycheck and the fall from fame. But Hamilton will treat me well with a big ovation when I go there to see Jannie play a friendly against the Italians and she’ll have a great day, scoring a brace. We’ll have dinner afterward and she’ll be polite, but distant, and we’ll smile for the cameras and then I’ll go my way and she’ll go hers.

• • • •

In a more important tiny bubble, Alene and I will do our best to raise Jannie to be everything she can be, Down syndrome be damned. After I hang them up, Alene’s career will prosper and we’ll do fine. We’ll move to Vancouver, where most of her work is, and I’ll spend a lot of time with Jannie. She’ll be a sweet kid, but there are heart problems and a leg that needs straightening, creating an uncertain future for her and me both. My football past and all those helmet hits will come back to haunt me: foggy mornings will turn into long, dark days, and I’ll worry about just how long I’ll still be me.

I’ll be in the dumps a lot, but I’ll need something to do, someone to be, so I’ll take care of Jannie, one day at a time. Today is today. There’ll be speech therapy sessions and school and all the rest. There’ll be some joy in this, some deep satisfaction. She’ll be my girl, my always girl.

In this bubble, even as I lose some recent memories, I’ll still remember certain moments from my past that were so perfect, where I was so tuned in—so fully one with the moment—that I captured them completely in my mind in slow-motion detail. I’ll remember them vividly, even when I can’t find my car keys. I will still feel the perfection of the pass to Elijah Depps deep in the corner of the end zone against the Argos. And I’ll still watch in awe that time I swear I guided the ball in flight to bend it around Ryan Crisps’ outstretched hands as he tried to intercept for the Blue Bombers, and instead the ball found Jason Wissen with no time left and we won.

And I’ll feel that joy, too, when Jannie, on her twenty-second birthday, in one of her many Special Olympics soccer games, steals the ball off the player she’s defending and sprints down the field with it, dribbling like mad. She’ll weave her way past three defenders, come in on the goalie, fake left and shoot right, an outside of the shoe push into the upper ninety for a goal. It’ll be a great goal, and everybody on both teams will come over to hug her and celebrate, because that’s how it’s done in Special O’s. I’ll beam. That’s my girl.

• • • •

There’s another tiny bubble, one I imagine every now and then, where after my divorce I’ll spend a lot of time with a woman named Emily. She won’t be bothered by Jannie, she’ll just want me to be me, Jannie to be Jannie, and Emily to be Emily.

In that bubble, we’ll make it work. There’ll be a new drug on the market for trisomy 21, and the sun will shine every day and the Yankees will never, ever win the pennant, but the Ticats will be the powerhouse team of the CFL and my knees won’t hurt and my mind will be clear and I’ll keep all my memories as Jannie goes off to college and the sun will shine every day in Hamilton, Ontario.

• • • •

In one particular spot in one particular tiny bubble, Alene will be a grad student when we meet, and an associate professor by the time she leaves for a post in Quebec. She can’t turn it down, and the stress and strain of raising Jannie, she’ll say in distancing French, is complètement impossible. I’ll have seen it coming for years, but we’ll still do the divorce through lawyers.

As time goes by, she’ll call Jannie often enough, and send her cards and cash on her birthday and Christmas. She’ll even bring Jannie up for a week or two to visit in the summer.

Jannie will do fine. By her sixteenth birthday, she’ll be doing third-grade arithmetic and fourth-grade reading and tearing things up in Special Olympics soccer. This will be better than the school-district psychologist thought Jannie would ever do. It will be so good, in fact, that after her birthday party, after the neighbor kids and her special pals are gone, after the cake is eaten, she’ll be sitting on her bed kicking a plastic toy soccer ball off the opposite wall: shoot it, trap it with her foot, shoot it again, trap it, shoot it, trap it.

I’ll come in to stop the racket and she’ll look at me: that wide face, those eyes. Her language skills aren’t all that great, but from the look on her face I’ll be able to see something’s up. “My father,” she’ll say, “I sixteen now.”

I’ll sit down next to her. “Yeah, young lady. You’re growing up fast,” I’ll say, but what I’ll be thinking about is all the things Jannie and I have learned together, often the hard way. Boyfriends, how to handle her periods, what clothes to wear and when to wear them, how to tie her hair in a ponytail and put in a different bow every day, how to ignore some people and pay attention to others, how to be so different and still be so happy. Tricky business, all of that.

“My father,” she’ll say, “I not be like you or Mom-mom.”

I’ll be the lunkhead I am in every one of these bubbles, no question, but I’ll be able to see where this is going: My Jannie, my hard-working girl, is doing so well that she knows how well she isn’t doing. She’s been expecting to grow up, to leave Neverland. But in this bubble . . . it doesn’t work like that.

“Jannie, Jannie,” I’ll say, lying to her and not for the first time, struggling with how to handle this. “Look,” I’ll say, “We’re all different, Janster, we all have different things we’re good at or bad at.”

She’ll look at me. She’ll trust me. I’ll say, “I wanted to be an astronomer, Jannie; you know, look at the stars and figure out what it all means. I wanted that, Jannie, in the worst way. But I couldn’t do the math.”

“Bet Mom could,” Jannie will say, smiling, getting into it.

“Yeah, Jannie, your mom sure could. She’s one smart lady,” I’ll say, though I’ll be thinking about what I might have said about Jannie’s mother just then. To be kind, she’ll have missed out on a lot of good things.

“Sure, my father. I get it,” Jannie will say. And then she’ll stand up to give me a hug, and I’ll hug her back and then I’ll leave the room. Later, out in the driveway, we’ll shoot hoops and she’ll seem fine. I’ll go out and join her in a game of one-on-one, make it-take it, and she’ll clobber me. I’ll blame it on my bad knees.

• • • •

In my least favorite bubble, I’ll die at age fifty-two of an aneurysm. Alene won’t be around and I’ll have no living relatives. I won’t leave much money behind. Jannie will be stranded. Alone. Unhappy. And there’ll be twenty more years of her own decline into senescence before there’s peace.

• • • •

In another bubble, Jannie will be an intellectual powerhouse. In high school, she’ll think calculus is fun and physics is entertaining. She’ll have a perfect score on the science portion of the PSAT. Caltech will come calling, and MIT, and Yale and Stanford and Loyola and Case Western and Harvey Mudd and Duke and the University of Chicago. Astronomy in college? Physics? Biology? She’ll find it hard to decide.

She’ll be patient with me in this bubble. She’ll understand that her father is a decent guy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. When she walks across the stage for that college degree, and then the next one, and then the next one, I’ll be there in the audience, proud as I can be.

• • • •

In one particular bubble, Jannie and I will be at the Brock Theatre in Hamilton, where we both live; me in a two-bedroom condo, Jannie in a group home that she’s recently moved into after years of living in her own apartment. Down syndrome people slide into early-onset Alzheimer’s, almost all of them. It’s unfair, but there it is.

Jannie will be thirty years old and I’ll be fifty-seven. We’ll be laughing and joking about old age on that January day as we walk through the parking lot’s snow, go into the sudden warmth of the theater, buy our tickets and take our seats. Then we’ll watch a movie, something about memory keepers and cute Down syndrome kids and the sweet and soapy ills of the world. I’ll be squirming in my seat; Jannie will be quiet.

When we walk out of the place, people will be staring at Jannie. She’ll not be cute, and she’ll be shuffling some because of some knee trouble that I probably caused her, encouraging all that Special O’s soccer and getting her out on the basketball court with me for all those years. We won’t have played in a while.

It will be snowing lightly as we walk away from the theater and get in the car, a beat-up little Toyota that I’m determined to keep running. You don’t get rich in the CFL, and there are better uses for my retirement money than buying shiny new metal and plastic. As I start the car and get the heater going, Jannie will look at me. I’ll see it in her eyes. That movie was a bad idea.

“My father,” she’ll say. “I. Am. Me.” And she’ll punch herself in the chest with her right fist, hard.

“You are that, Jannie, you certainly are,” I’ll say, kicking myself.

“Thank you,” she’ll say, and sit back and relax.

There are all those different bubbles, but right then and right there, this will be the only one that matters. This is it. Reality. We are who we are.

We are where we are in this bubble, the one we share, the one where we do the best we can with what we have.

We won’t talk about the movie as we drive off and head for some ice cream and then, later, the group home. Instead, we’ll talk hockey, father and daughter, something about the Sabres and how maybe they’ll move to Hamilton and wouldn’t that be great? Or we’ll talk about Jannie’s bowling team, where she’s holding down that ninety-six average and I couldn’t possibly be more proud of her. Or we’ll talk about the Ticats and how much fun we had going to the games last summer and fall and soon enough the season will be back and this year, for sure, the Ticats will make their way back to the Grey Cup.

We won’t talk about the path I’ve started walking down. Jannie wouldn’t understand. But the reason she’s in that group home is that they don’t trust me to have her anymore. Mood swings. Anger. All those hits in all those practices and all those games. CTE my doc calls it, and the league agrees. I have good days and bad ones, and she’s safer in that home.

I’m not happy about that. I was counting on holding Jannie’s hand as she crossed that street into the confusion and then the darkness she faces, and now it’s her who’ll be holding mine.

But that won’t come up. We won’t say much about anything. We won’t need to. We’ll just eat our ice cream and hang out together and enjoy this little bit of a bubble as best we can. This is our bubble, right here and right now.

Today is today.

©2018 by Rick Wilber. Originally published in Stonecoast Review #9. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rick Wilber was a modestly skilled freshman quarterback at the University of Minnesota and is the parent of a remarkable Down syndrome son for whom he cheered at many Special Olympics events and from whom he’s learned a great deal about life. Rick’s new short-story collection, Rambunctious and Other Stories (WordFire Press, forthcoming) features some personal favorites from among his fifty or more published short stories, including the Sidewise Award winning story, “Something Real,” and this deeply personal, “Today is Today.” He is a creative-writing professor in the low-residency MFA genre-fiction program at Western Colorado University, and is co-founder and co-judge with Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine editor Sheila Williams of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Njuzu

T.L. Huchu | 3094 words

Water looks the same everywhere. It’s only the background, lighting, and impurities that differ. I peer at the silver-gray surface of Bimha’s pond, calm and still, undisturbed by wind. It’s deep and the bottom is a black abyss. Midday here is like dawn on Earth in the middle of the Kalahari. Light shines through the transparent panelling of the pressurised geodesic dome that prevents the water boiling straight into vapour.

“This is where it happened,” VaMutasa says to me on the crackling open channel.

We can’t take off our helmets because the atmosphere within the dome is not fit to breathe. I take a step closer.

“Careful,” Tarisai whispers.

A trail of small footprints runs beside me. We followed it here, but where we stop, it carries on, bravely, foolishly.

“This is where it happened,” VaMutasa says once more, as if to convince himself.

The icy brown soil under my boots feels hard. Each movement I make is slow and considered. A white plume of steam rises from the outlet pipes a kilometre or two away, the far end of the pond. Thirty million gallons of water cycle in and out of the Nharira Nuclear Fusion Plant nearby. Superheated steam is deposited into the ground, liquefied, and the cold water is cycled back to the plant via insulated pipes.

I close my eyes and take deep breaths, fighting the sickness threatening to void my stomach. My chest feels tight, tied with an iron band, and I reach to remove my helmet so I can breathe. My husband grabs my arms:

“Remember where you are,” Tarisai says. “I told you this would do no good.”

The tone of her voice is reproachful and she’s angry, a dam waiting to burst. But on the open channel, with everyone listening in, we save the argument for later, piled up with the rest of the little tears and scraps every marriage sweeps under the bulging carpet.

I must be polite; the muroora, daughter-in-law, is not just married to one person. The bond of matrimony ties her to everyone in the clan, both the living and the dead.

“It’s important, whatever you do, you mustn’t cry,” VaMutasa says. “The njuzu won’t let him go otherwise.”

“My son’s just drowned and you’re talking about mythical creatures?” I snarl but hold my tears all the same. Even though I know it’s superstition, something inside checks me, because, with the chips where they lie, all I can do is hedge.

“One of the technicians, Chisumbanje, fell in the water twenty years ago. For three days, we couldn’t find him. Then, when he came back, he was a powerful n’anga without equal in the Belt. He saw her, the njuzu. She’s in there,” a woman’s voice says, but I don’t recognise it.

“Whatever you do, you must-not-cry,” VaMutasa says, this time in a firm voice. “We’ll prepare the rites.”

He is my father-in-law, Tarisai’s father, the head of the Mutasa clan. Their fortune is made from farming the desert and selling water—hydrogen and oxygen—to wayfarers passing through to worlds beyond.

• • • •

We’ve only been here a week and it’s hard to get used to the eighteen-hour days. Dusk, when it comes, is swift, a minute or so long, the faltering of a fluorescent bulb marking the turn from light to darkness.

I stay in our Hurungwe Utility Terra Shelter, lying in bed; my molars ache, I feel they might shatter into sharp shards of glass. From outside comes the sound of silence so loud it presses on every ounce of my being. Tarisai isn’t here to hold me. She’s out with the men in the search party who now radio in as the recovery team. She’s my husband, so she must. This place is tough and unforgiving. We should never have come back.

I feel helpless. Hopeless.

Don’t cry.

• • • •

I wake sometime before dawn. My husband’s arm lies across my chest. It’s heavy and strong, and she smells of sweat from the search. She’s a snorer, but tonight she is quiet, a slight frown on her face.

Gently, I remove her arm.

The carbon fibre walls of the HUTS we’re in are decorated with Tonga artwork from the tourist market in Mosi-oa-Tunya—reed ruseros and baskets with intricate designs woven by married women past childbearing age. There’s an abstract sculpture made of polished Cerean rock. A red Basotho blanket hangs on the wall opposite.

I creep out of bed, put on my suit, and go into the airlock, checking my oxygen tanks are full up. With the CO2 decarboniser, I have up to fifteen hours’ worth of air. My son Anesu with his small lungs would have had a little more.

The airlock door creaks and I hope it doesn’t wake Tarisai as I walk out and shut it behind me.

Fierce lamps, high up on poles like stadium lights, illuminate the compound. The yard has wide open spaces in which the HUTS are erected. They are domed, like Zulu huts, with small round port windows. There’re fifteen of them here (one medical and two for emergencies), a few equipment stores, and in the far-off distance is the large mess where we take our meals. Beyond the compound, the valley is littered with hundreds of settlements, everyone trying to earn their fortune in the Wild Belt.

I walk, adjusting my body to the microgravity, so I sort of waddle and shuffle, bouncing from side to side. The trick is to lunge forward, so the momentum carries you horizontal to the ground. The few times I go too high up, my auto-downward thrusters kick in to push me back down, releasing a thin jet of gas.

The ground is rocky and bumpy. Footprints from years ago remain pristine in the wind-free space.

I walk past the Mutasas’ ancestral graves. Mounds of dirt like mole homes, topped with simple headstones, where the dead lie in frozen ground.

Beyond that, a short distance away, are their farms. Massive greenhouses with controlled air, temperature, and water, turn the fertile soil of this desert world into an oasis. They grow lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, wheat, maize, anything they wish at all, because the once-barren soil, rich in carbon and organic compounds, is hungry for life. Ceres, named after the goddess of agriculture, is generous in her bounty, feeding miners across the Belt and colonists on Mars and beyond.

I search for my son’s small bootprints until I find them, heading out to the waterhole. Sometimes they’re obliterated by his companions, other times his small print sits square inside a larger print. The children come here to play games on the water. In the low gravity they can run on it, just like basilisk lizards on Earth.

Eight years ago, I sang the Song of Life and knitted him into being with my two hands. After I missed my period, my mother came to me, bearing my trousseau of linen and jewellery. We sat face to face on my marriage bed with our legs crossed and sang:

Ndinowumba musoro wako

Ndinowumba maziso ako

Ndinowumba mhino yako

Ndinowumba chipfuva chako

Ndinowumba tsoka dzako

Ndinowumba zvidya zvako

Ndinowumba dumbu rako

Ndinowumba kamboro kako

Ndinowumba rurimi rwako

Ndinowumba twugunwe twako

. . .

For three hours we sang him into being. Each line starting, “I create,” followed by the part I willed into being. My hands, index finger on thumb as though holding knitting needles, dancing around my belly as I knitted every atom of Anesu into existence.

The Song of Life was important, every part of his body had to be sung, willed into existence, or he’d be deformed. I heard the response to the Song in his voice, every time he spoke with me. I heard it in his laughter at play and the tears I wiped away when he was sick.

Yet, as I stood on the shores of Bimha’s pond, the sacred duet had been stolen from me. In its place, I only heard silence and grief.

• • • •

Dawn, when she comes, is just a minute long, a step from a dark room into light. Long shadows embrace my legs. The tangerine in the black sky is supposed to be the sun.

“Where were you?” Tarisai says. She’s waiting for me at the edge of the compound. “Everyone’s looking for you.”

I walk up to her and embrace her. In the bulky suit, I can’t feel her warmth. I feel nothing.

A slow rhythmic drumming, pangu, pangu, pangu, comes from the mess as I strip out of my suit. The air here is too crisp, like something is missing, dust, pollen, the scents of Earth.

Hands clap, bu, bu, bu, to the beat of the drum.

Women ululate.

The chairs and tables in the mess have been unbolted from the floor and stacked up in one corner. Hard-faced men and women sit on the floor, separated from one another. Tarisai joins the men. Her anatomy is female, but she hosts the spirit of a man—an ancestor who claims her body for his vessel—and so she is man.

I sit and fold my legs to one side.

Don’t cry.

A hologram at the front projects a life-like nyati, the buffalo, their clan’s totem. A noble and prestigious line. I’m samaita, the zebra, not the bottom of the totem pole, but a little more humble. Anesu, like his father, is—dare I say was—a buffalo, too, for the line passes from father to child. The mother is as good as a stranger, her blood does not count.

Chisumbanje is at the front, bare-chested, his loins covered by the skin from a black-and-white bull. Hoshos tied to his ankles rattle when he moves. His head is crowned with a feathered headband as he rocks back and forth to the beat of the drums.

It’s hot in the mess.

Christine places her hand around me and I lay my head on her shoulder. We greet Chisumbanje by his totem name; he is the meat-eating herbivore who stalks silent in the savannah grass, death incarnate, the uncrossable chasm.

He takes a pinch of snuff, inhales deeply and sneezes several times. We clap and chant: “Svikai zvakanaka, vasekuru.”

In the corner of my eye, I see Tarisai clench her fists and mutter some words. She is resisting. Her spirit is trying to visit, to gain entrance, but this is not his ceremony, he must wait in the spirit world, stand guard against the evil that would do us harm. Only Chisumbanje will be visited today.

Christine takes me to the back of the room. We carry calabashes on our heads. On Earth, I lack the grace and skill, but here, in the low gravity, my calabash stays on the top of my head, until I place it down by Chisumbanje’s feet. We kneel, clap our hands, stand, and retreat to the women’s side.

The drummer stops. He too is dressed in animal skins and he picks up one calabash in both hands, squats, and offers it to Chisumbanje. Chisumbanje shakes his head and rejects it. The drummer pours a drop on the floor to the spirits and offers the beer a second time. Now Chisumbanje accepts with a nod. As their hands meet, the giver and the taker, we clap and the men whistle.

The blessed beer now passes from Chisumbanje back to the drummer, the receiver has become the giver. And the drummer passes it to the men. Twenty thirsty throats take in a sip each. There are one or two miners with us from the next settlement. Gold prices have plunged. There’s too much of it coming from the asteroids, flooding the market. Soon they’ll pack their tools and move to mine another commodity, until it crashes, too.

The ancestor who visits Chisumbanje tells us certain things: Anesu is alive and well in the company of the njuzu. We must not cry. If we do, she’ll be angry and kill him. We must offer a sacrifice to appease her. If we do this correctly, Anesu will return a great healer and seer, a n’anga. She’ll give him gifts without compare from the spirit world.

There are no cattle on Ceres, but we have plenty of rabbits and chicken for meat.

The sacrifice will be a black male rabbit.

• • • •

My teeth ache so bad as I lie naked in bed at night. Any light movement I make jabs a nerve.

The view outside my port window is a purple-green sky, a kind of grotesque aurora showing the frontline of the battle between solar-cosmic radiation and the artificial magnetosphere that stands as the only thing preventing us from being slowly microwaved to death.

I hate this annual pilgrimage.

I want to go back to Earth.

When chirimo, the planting season, comes, we leave our cushy office jobs, pack our bags, and go kumusha to help with the farming. We all have two homes, our true home being kumusha, where our ancestors are buried. Mine is on Earth, in Manhenga: Tarisai belongs here on this desert world, which she abandoned to be with me.

Yet each time we visit, I hate it more and more, though I try not to let on.

I know it’s the magnetosphere that causes my toothache. The doctors say that’s impossible, but it never happens when I’m on Earth. I refuse to take painkillers. I want to suffer like my son did, alone and scared in the dark.

Don’t cry.

A star moves swiftly across the sky, one of the three satellites orbiting Ceres.

Tarisai comes into the room. Her hard, sculpted body moves slowly, solid pecs showing under the white vest she wears.

“You left early,” she says without reproach.

“That voodoo isn’t going to bring my son back,” I reply. “Do you honestly think some mythical creature took him?”

“He was with his cousins. They’re experienced Ceresmen. They walk over that pond practically every day, mudiwa. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to drown here. The gravity is far too weak, you couldn’t break the surface tension of the water to go under. But somehow Anesu did. His thrusters must have malfunctioned, pushing him down under the water. We’re trying to figure it out. They were walking in a group, he was a little behind. They got to the far bank and he was gone. For some reason, his transponder isn’t working either.”

“They were supposed to look after him. He’s an Earth-child.”

“They did their—”

“I want my son back!” I scream at her.

“We’re doing the best we can. There’ve been search parties.” She sighs and lowers her voice. “You’re not the only one who’s hurting, you know? He was my son, too.”

“You never wanted him in the first place.”

“Oh, so now we get to it. Are you really going to fling stuff I said in uni back in my face?”

“You wanted to be free, to explore the solar system, Venus, Europa, Titan, to Pluto and beyond. How many times did you change his nappies? You’d rather have been anywhere else.”

“But I stayed, because I love you.”

Before I can say the next spiteful thought formed in my mind, she’s on top of me, pinning me down, a rough finger in my dry vagina. We claw, bite, fight like animals as we make desperate love. And when it’s over, we fall back down, sweaty and exhausted, and turn away from one another.

• • • •

In my dream, I sink into black water, thick like oil. The silver moon of Earth shines on my face. I wonder why, of all moons, ours has no name, as if it is enough to say what it is. Maybe I should give it a name, call it something kind and gentle.

I sink down, leagues and leagues, down a never-ending abyss.

Until I meet her, at the bottom of the dark.

I never truly knew what a njuzu was. For some, she’s a mermaid, half woman, half fish. For others a water sprite, spritely and nimble. Since I lost my son, I’ve thought of her as a spiteful siren, the disastrous enchantress, ensnarer of sailors and young boys. But the reality is she’s neither of these: She simply is what she is.

She sits tall on her throne, Neptune’s daughter. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her flawless skin is black like polished obsidian. Tiny bubbles form against it. Her wise eyes sparkle like pearls. Her hair is green and wild like reeds in the river Tsanga.

Anesu is still, wearing a copper necklace on his bare torso. At their feet lie herbs, divining bones, a kudu horn, and earthenware utensils.

The njuzu half smiles at me.

“Give me my son back, you bitch!” I shout, and the water enters my mouth, into my lungs. I cough and gag, drowning. My chest is full of molten lead as I struggle, arms flailing, trying to reach the distant, moonlit surface where Tarisai’s face looks down at me.

“Wake up, you’re having a bad dream,” she says.

• • • •

The stars in the Milky Way lighting my path number less than the kisses I planted on Anesu’s head and brow and lips and feet and every square inch of my baby’s body.

Fury and fear draw me back to Bhima’s pond like an iron filing to a magnet.

The sun is yet to rise in the dark green sky.

The still surface of water meets my boot and I walk on it. It is soft and gently displaces creating ripples that fan out in front of me. I try to peer under the dark surface, in the depths where my Anesu must be. I sing the Song of Life as I walk upon it, each step, recreating him, my gloved hands knitting him piece by piece.

Tarisai appears on the shore. She’s a tiny figure in her bright red suit. The light on her helmet points at me. I know she hurts, too, but there’s a magnitude of pain only a mother can feel. So, I give her a wave. She stays where she is, my silent guardian.

When I reach the middle of the pond, I let go of the lie of hope and slowly let it fall into the water. I know my son is lost forever.

His spirit wanders the cruel, cold depths of Ceres.

I cry. Large hot tears fill my helmet until I’m blind and I can see his face looking at me again.

©2018 by T.L. Huchu. Originally published in AfroSF, volume 3, edited by Ivor W. Hartmann. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Interzone, AfroSF, The Apex Book of World SF 5, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Nommo Award for African SFF, and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize and the Grand prix de l’Imaginaire. His new fantasy novel The Library of the Dead, the first book in the Ghostalker series, will be published by Tor in the US and UK in 2021. Find him @TendaiHuchu.

Motherhood

Pat Murphy | 1141 words

Hello Senator. Thank you for returning my call. I’m so glad to speak to you at last.

Yes, I did say in my message that this is a matter of life-or-death. It is. Absolutely.

Oh, no—you misunderstand, sir. It’s not your life that’s threatened. It’s the life of a child. The life of your unborn child, in fact.

First, congratulations are in order. I understand that Julia Banks, your former intern, informed you that she is pregnant. I believe that was just over a month ago. She’s just entering the second trimester.

Oh, no. There’s no doubt that you are the father of the unborn child. We ran a paternity test and . . .

Who gave us the right? Well, actually, sir, you did.

Surely you recall the Father’s Rights Act—the bill you introduced a decade ago when you were in the Oklahoma State Legislature? That act requires medical personnel to run a paternity test whenever any mother-to-be is seeking medical assistance for a difficult pregnancy. The law requires medical personnel to locate the father to obtain permission for any procedure that endangers the life of the unborn child. You do remember that, don’t you?

I’m guessing you haven’t been in touch with Julia since she left DC. She has been staying at her mother’s house in Oklahoma. And she’s experiencing uncontrolled eclampsia, a threat to her life and to the life of the child. So when she sought medical assistance, the legal requirement was very clear.

How did we get your genetic information? From your medical records, of course. You see, Julia lost her medical insurance when she left her internship position. She is making use of the Oklahoma fund for unwed mothers—a form of welfare. Since she is a pregnant welfare recipient, Oklahoma law requires that medical personnel locate the father. This requirement grants them access to all relevant medical records. I believe that was in an addendum to the Father’s Rights Act.

Now that we have established that you are the father, I am required by law to inform you of the responsibilities placed on you by the Sanctity of Motherhood Act.

I know you’re familiar with this law. You sponsored it in your second year in the Senate, as I recall. And you gave such eloquent speeches in defense of it. Your words about motherhood and the sanctity of life were quite moving.

Julia’s eclampsia threatens the life of your unborn child. If the baby remains in Julia’s womb, the chances that it will survive are very low. That diagnosis triggered a clause in the Sanctity of Motherhood Act. If a woman is unable to carry a baby to term, the nearest relative capable of carrying the child must do so.

After all, advances in medical technology have made it possible to transplant a viable fetus to another mother. This operation can preserve the life of the unborn. I remember your speech about this clause—you predicted it would result in many joyous births.

The law requires us to search for the nearest relative capable of carrying the child to term. Julia has no siblings, her father is dead, and her mother is elderly and frail. So you, Senator, are the child’s nearest relative capable of carrying the unborn baby to term.

Calm down, Senator. I know this is a surprise. Take a moment to let it sink in.

When you were advocating for the Sanctity of Motherhood Act, some accused you of attacking women’s health, of waging war on women. But I thought your speeches made your position very clear. You were celebrating motherhood. It just seemed like you were singling out women. That was because only women could be mothers.

Fortunately, modern medicine has changed all that.

Now you can be a mother.

Don’t hang up, Senator. You really need to hear me out. Take a deep breath. I realize this is big news.

I’m sure you want to know how this miracle is possible. You probably don’t follow every advance in obstetrics and gynecology. In recent years, a great deal of effort has been made to expand the pool of potential mothers. Some of us in the field of reproductive health have had a special interest in this area. I mean, why should the sacred privilege of motherhood be limited to women?

The procedure is really quite simple. First, we will give you a uterus—a transplant from a healthy donor—and then we will transplant the fetus and placenta. It is a process that has been thoroughly tested and very recently approved by the AMA.

This procedure will allow you to experience all the joys of pregnancy. Such a wonderful experience—although you may find it a bit difficult to get used to the hormones. They can be a wild ride, even if you’ve been a woman from birth.

And I’ll admit that being pregnant does take a toll on a mother. But don’t worry—clinic personnel will be with you every step of the way. We’ll make sure you take the proper precautions to protect the child. No drinking, of course. No drugs. We’ll monitor your diet. You will gain weight—twenty-five to thirty-five pounds would be appropriate for a person your size.

There will be a lot for you to get used to. You’ll need to rearrange your work schedule and plan for the birth. If you choose to breastfeed . . . well, all of that is covered in this booklet that we’ve written for expecting fathers.

There’s no need to take that tone, Senator. No, I am not crazy. The law requires you to accept this responsibility—and given that you were one of the bill’s sponsors, I thought you would accept it joyously. This is a rare opportunity.

Excuse me? You think I’m enjoying this? Well, yes, I am. Over the years I’ve noted the zeal with which you defend the rights of the unborn. I am so pleased that I can give you the opportunity to truly share in the responsibility of motherhood and the joy of birth.

Oh, you are quite right—no one can force you to undergo this procedure. You can decline. But if you choose to abdicate your responsibility, you will be held liable for the murder of your own child.

Yes, murder.

Yes, that’s in the law. “If the prospective mother declines . . .”

Yes, Senator. You are the prospective mother. I realize that you did not ask for this responsibility. Throughout history, this responsibility has been thrust upon people. They did not expect a condom to break, an IUD to fail. I understand your confusion, since all those people were women—up until now. But things have changed.

So I’d recommend accepting your responsibility, sir.

No, Senator, you really don’t have a choice.

©2019 by Pat Murphy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pat Murphy writes fiction that inhabits the borderland between genres, where life is interesting and the rules are slippery. She is very grateful that science fiction exists, since it has provided a happy home for seven of her eight novels and many of her short stories. Her work has won numerous awards, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Her novels include The Falling Woman, The City Not Long After, Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell. Her short stories are collected in Points of Departure and Women Up To No Good. With Karen Joy Fowler, she co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. In her day job, she is the resident Evil Genius at MysteryScience.com, where she creates science activities to inspire and amaze elementary school students.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

A Bad Day in Utopia

Matthew Baker | 4287 words

She’d had a hard day. Earlier that morning she’d discovered that the game her company was developing, which was already months behind schedule for release, had a glitch somewhere in the code that caused the game to crash if the player character was equipped with diamond armor on the level with the meteors, and nobody could figure out why. It didn’t make any sense. It was a total nightmare. Anna, her boss, was mad at her for leaving dirty dishes in the kitchen again. Zoey, her supervisor, kept ignoring her emails about the status of the new health plan. Indira, the latest intern, had spilled coffee all over the table in the conference room, and the coffee had gotten onto her blouse and her skirt, and though the coffee had been iced and hadn’t burned her, her blouse was white and her skirt was peach, and she hadn’t been able to get the stains to wash out completely, leaving faint blotches on the fabric, and her clothes were still damp from trying. Her landlord, Kayla, had sent her a message that she wouldn’t replace her garbage disposal, despite that her disposal was indisputably broken. Her therapist, Sofia, had sent her a message that she was raising her hourly fee, even though her fee was already outrageous. Danielle, her neighbor, still wasn’t talking to her after last weekend. And all of the women at the company were running around the office, desperately trying to pinpoint the exact cause of the glitch, which made her so anxious that she could physically feel the stress tingling through her body as she typed code, and her breast had a lump that she was trying not to think about until the results came back, and her wrist was still tender from the spill that she had taken on the track at the gym, and she had a pimple on her shoulder that was sore and swollen and seemingly resistant to every known variety of acne cream, and that morning the governor had announced a plan to substantially raise the income tax in Florida, which meant that she’d have less money to put toward savings every paycheck, and that she wouldn’t be able to afford a baby for another year. Fuck, she thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. By the end of the day she was just sitting at her computer in a daze. She was supposed to meet some of her friends for dinner. She wasn’t hungry. She felt depressed. She didn’t want to go. She messaged her friends that she had to cancel.

Mackenzie called her.

“Why aren’t you coming?” Mackenzie said.

“I had a shitty day,” she said.

“Maybe going out would help?” Mackenzie said.

“I’m just going to go home,” she said.

Mackenzie made a sympathetic noise.

“You sound miserable. I’m going to have a care package delivered to your apartment. Expect wine and cupcakes. I love you, I miss you, get some sleep. I’ll see you this weekend,” Mackenzie said.

After hanging up she tried calling her mother.

“I had a terrible day,” she said.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m just walking in to a surgery,” her mother said.

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m sorry, really, I’ll call you back when we’re done,” her mother said.

“I’ll just be at home,” she said.

She hung up. She felt awful. She left. In the elevator she realized she had forgotten to shut off her computer. She was too exhausted to go back. She walked through the revolving door in the lobby out onto the street. The sun was out, but rain was falling, a light scatter of drops pattering down from a blue sky. Fluffy clouds were floating above the city. She paused at the curb, full of despair. The street was full of people. A mail carrier at a drop box, a woman in tortoiseshell glasses, sorting through envelopes. An electrician on a hydraulic lift, a woman with tattooed hands, repairing a utility pole. A pair of cops, a couple of women with blond ponytails, ticketing a parked convertible. Women striding down the sidewalk with briefcases and clutches and backpacks and satchels and colorful wheeled suitcases. Women gliding through the intersection in buses and taxis and pickups and sedans and gleaming delivery vans. Students on a field trip from out of town, a line of girls in matching shirts, following a pregnant chaperone across a crosswalk. Teenagers in dresses and denim jackets doing kickflips and nosegrinds on battered skateboards. Women holding hands at marble tables on the patio of the cafe across the street, sipping at foamy cappuccinos, flirting with each other. Seeing the women holding hands made her think about sex. And suddenly all that she could think about was sex. She wanted to be touched.

She wasn’t lucky enough to be attracted to women. She had tried a couple times, in school, in college, and had been forced to admit that women just didn’t interest her sexually. She had only ever fantasized about men. Men from classic movies. Men from vintage comics. Men from paintings and statues at the museum. She had other straight friends, Mackenzie especially, who liked to go to android clubs, having sex with robots designed to look like men, with cocks and balls and hairy chests, skin as soft and warm as the flesh of a human. The robots could talk and laugh and flirt, but the technology was still relatively unrefined, and tended to induce that uncanny effect, seeming vaguely creepy to her. She preferred to get off with simpler machines, generally. Vibrators. Dildos. Showerheads. She could satisfy herself like that for weeks at a time.

But sometimes there were days when machines weren’t enough, days when she felt like cuddling, days when she felt like kissing, days when she felt like being caressed and squeezed and held by another person.

And so when she got into her car that day, instead of going home she drove to the local menagerie.

Miami’s menagerie was a glass dome on the shore of a forested island in the bay. She drove with the windows down so that her hair danced around her head as her car flew over the bridge. Electronica was playing over her stereo. Rain was still falling in a scatter. The sky was turning orange and yellow. Fluffy clouds were floating above the island. She felt a tingle of excitement, of anticipation, as she arrived at the menagerie. Sunlight reflected off of the dome in iridescent shimmers of color. The only other car in the lot was an antique roadster. The primary purpose of the facility obviously was to serve as a safeguard, to prevent the extinction of the human race in the event that civilization collapsed, if artificial fertilization was suddenly rendered impossible by an asteroid impact or a geomagnetic storm. The men created for the menagerie were living sperm banks. Redundant machines that would only be useful in an emergency. Like an oil lantern that nobody would ever need unless the power went out and the batteries went dead in the flashlights. She rarely ever thought about that, though, as the possibility was so unlikely. For her the primary purpose of the facility was to provide women the opportunity to have sex with men. Her straight friends preferred to have sex with robots because having sex with men was so much more expensive, but she didn’t mind paying extra. Technically the money was a donation. All of the proceeds went toward buying the men special treats, like milkshakes and pastries. She liked feeling generous. The doors to the lobby slid apart automatically. She paid the receptionist, accepted a glass of chilled cucumber water, selected a couch in the waiting area, and sat sipping the cucumber water in the waiting area as the receptionist paged a guard. Even for a weeknight, the menagerie was strangely quiet. Aside from the receptionist, the lobby was completely empty. Recently a man had attempted to escape from the menagerie in Nashville, had become violent when the guards had tranqed him, and had attempted suicide with a belt upon awaking in his cell. Another man had recently attacked a visitor at the menagerie in Detroit, had been beaten by the guards in retribution, and never would be allowed to have a visitor in his cell again. She had read about it in the news. Incidents like that didn’t scare her, though, being so rare. The global population of men was strictly regulated, just over a hundred thousand in the world, and all of the men had been raised in captivity from birth, were familiar with the bite and the sting of batons and tasers. In her experience the men at the menagerie knew better than to cause trouble. And in a way, she liked the thrill. Entering the lair of the most violent, ruthless, destructive creature that had ever walked the face of the planet.

Miami’s menagerie was an average size, from what she’d heard, although she had never been to any other. Boys at the menagerie lived in cells on the upper floor. All of the men lived in cells on the ground floor. The hallway had a white floor and white walls with a white ceiling. A guard with a radio and a gun and a black uniform led her down the hallway, passing the glass doors looking into the cells where the men lived. Duke, a man with a snub nose and dimples, who was cute. Earl, a man with freckles and a cleft chin, who was gorgeous. Marquis, a man with a buzz cut and an enchanting singing voice. Prince, a slender man with a lip piercing and prominent cheekbones, who was gay and rarely interested in sleeping with visitors. Malik, a chubby man with a sexy laugh. Amir, a shy man with a fine ass. Baron, a charming older man who was bald and bearded and spoke with a faint lisp. The doors were staggered so that none of the men could see each other through the glass, only the passing guards. Tonight the men were all occupied playing video games, doing sudoku, stringing guitars, folding origami, sniffing socks, watching the news, making pour-over coffee. The one she liked best was kept in the cell at the end of the hallway.

“I’m so glad that you’re here,” Rex said with a surprised smile, looking up from a sketchpad full of designs for flying machines.

The guard strolled back down the hallway as the door slid shut, leaving her alone with him. Rex strode over to the door barefoot, wearing a brown linen tunic over tapered beige pants. He was younger than she was, probably early twenties, a tall, broad, muscular man whose face was angular and handsome, with thick dark hair and a pair of bright hazel eyes that shone with intelligence and curiosity. His voice was deep. His stubble was hot. His tracking bracelet was an attractive silver band, the same as the rest of the men’s. Like the other cells at the facility, the suite where he lived was pleasant and spacious and elegantly decorated, with a king-size bed, a desk for writing, a chair for reading, and a dresser for clothes. A bookcase full of novels and atlases and encyclopedias and tattered volumes of poetry. A bathroom. A kitchenette. A yoga mat, a weight bench, and a stationary bicycle for exercise. A grand piano, which he had been learning to play since early childhood. A canvas on an easel, since lately he had been interested in art. All of the furniture in the suite was minimalist and modern. A couple pairs of boxers were strewn across the floor around the laundry hamper, and an apricot pit sat on a plate by the sink, but overall the appearance of the suite was clean and tidy. The wall across from the door was made of glass, overlooking the palm trees and the beach and the glittering green and indigo water of the ocean stretching off to the horizon. Rex kissed her. His lips were very soft. His mouth tasted like sugar. He’d been eating caramels.

“You got a new haircut,” she said.

“Do you like it?” Rex said.

“Did you pick it out?” she said.

“I saw it on a man in a book,” Rex said.

She set down her purse by the door. Usually she wore lingerie when she visited the menagerie, but she hadn’t been planning on coming, so that day she had on a discolored bra and a pair of cotton panties with a couple of ratty holes along the waistband. Rex didn’t seem to notice any difference, stripping off her blouse and her skirt and her bra and her panties with a passionate urgency, kissing her skin everywhere. She was small enough that he could carry her over to the bed. She had sex with him. Afterward she cuddled with him. A light rain was still falling beyond the windows. The sky had turned pink. Fluffy clouds were floating above the ocean. Her cheeks felt flushed. Her heart was pounding. She was naked now except for her watch, an heirloom from her grandmother, a simple timepiece with gold hands on a gold face and a gold band. Rex stroked her head, gently caressing her hair, massaging her scalp with his thick fingertips, which she had told him before that she liked. His skin was slightly lighter than her skin, and she liked the visual contrast. When he’d taken off the condom, tossing the condom into the wastebasket, some of his semen had spilled out onto the sheets. She liked the smell of his semen in the air. She liked the smell of his deodorant. She liked the smell of his sweat. She felt fantastic. She liked talking to him.

“I’ve been learning about the history of architecture,” Rex said.

Watching the bulge in his throat bounce when he spoke exhilarated her.

“Tell me something you learned,” she said.

Rex hesitated. “Is it true that most of the buildings in the world were built by men?”

“I don’t think very many women got to be architects under the patriarchy,” she said.

Rex frowned at the ceiling.

“That makes me angry,” Rex said.

“Me too,” she said.

“It’s just so unfair,” Rex said.

“I guess everything was like that,” she said.

“I bet the world would be so much more beautiful if all of the cities had been built by women,” Rex said.

She thought about that for a while.

“Well, every building put up in the past fifty years was built by a woman, and a man will never build a building again,” she finally said.

Rex seemed satisfied with that. She ran her hands over his skin absentmindedly, feeling his tiny nipples, the firm muscle in his pecs, the rigid grooves between his abs, spreading her fingers through the scratchy bristles of his pubes. His buttocks were round and smooth and nice to touch.

“Will you tell me what it’s like outside?” Rex said.

Rex always asked her that when she visited him. He had never felt sunshine. He had never felt rain. He had never felt wind. He had never felt grass or dirt or sand. He was obsessed with the outdoors. Mountains. Icebergs. Flowers. Weather.

“It’s warm today,” she said.

Rex was captivated.

“And it’s raining. But a light rain. A very light rain, so light that you barely feel it. And the wind is light too. The perfect breeze. And the city smells like rain and steam from all of the humidity and the water. And the rain brings out the smells of the grass and the dirt and the flowers. And all the birds have come south for the winter, so that when you walk down the street you hear birds chirping everywhere, all around you. And the rain is so light that when a drop falls on you it feels almost special, and you have to reach up to wipe it off of your cheek,” she said.

Rex turned toward the windows with a look of longing.

“I wish we could feel it together,” Rex whispered.

She ate a fig from the platter of fruit on the nightstand next to the bed.

“Will you go down on me again?” she said.

Rex said he would, eager to please her. She spread her knees, taking hold of his head, enjoying the feel of his hair between her fingers, the feel of his tongue pulsing against her clit, the feel of his hands wrapped around her thighs, gripping her tight. Tasting her must have aroused him, because when he finally rose back off of the bed, his cock was hard again, bouncing stiffly in the air. She had sex with him again. He came with a moan, digging his fingertips into the skin on her back, gently calling out her name.

Afterward she cuddled with him again. Twilight was falling across the ocean beyond the windows. The clouds had vanished. Stars were appearing in the sky. She felt comfortable. She felt happy. She had a sudden craving for nachos. She glanced at her watch. She wanted to watch a couple episodes of a new show before she went to sleep.

“I’d better go,” she said.

She got dressed. Rex looked distraught. He quick fumbled to put on his pants and his tunic. As she pulled the strap of her purse over her shoulder, he reached for her.

“Take me with you,” Rex whispered, glancing at the door with a wild look.

She was startled. He was serious. She stepped back.

“No, honey,” she said.

“I want to run away with you. We’ll live together. Somewhere out in the wilderness, where nobody will find us. We’ll build a home. We’ll have a family,” Rex said.

“No,” she said.

“I love you,” Rex said.

“You barely know me,” she said, stunned.

“You’re beautiful. You’re smart. You’re kind. You are, I know you are. When you found that lost dog on the side of the road, you carried him to your car to bring him to a shelter, even though he was all muddy and got your clothes and your seats dirty. When you told me about that, I fell in love with you. That was the moment. That dog could have had fleas, or worms, or rabies, but you saw he was alone, that he needed help, and you helped him. Because that’s the type of person you are. I love how you look when you laugh, when you really laugh, so hard that you can’t breathe. I love how happy you get when you eat something sweet, the way that your eyes get small and crinkle with happiness while you chew. I want to make you happy. I want to live with you. I think about it all the time. I want to be with you forever,” Rex said.

“Rex, no,” she said.

“Please,” Rex said, becoming teary.

The sight of the tears made her hesitate, and suddenly he looked desperate, as if he could sense her wavering. The tears shimmered in his eyes as he stepped closer.

“Please, don’t leave me here. I can’t take it anymore. Just take me with you. I won’t be violent. I’ll respect you. I’ll be kind. I’ll be peaceful. I’m not like the other men,” Rex said, begging now.

She had fantasized before about sharing a life with him. Standing there at the door, she imagined helping him sneak out of the menagerie, past all of the guards. Cutting off the tracking bracelet with the pliers from the emergency toolbox in her trunk, and then driving away in her car, back over the bridge, to someplace far away. Moving into an abandoned farmhouse in the country. Growing vegetables. Raising chickens. Keeping bees. Waking in the same bed every day. Being outside together. How he would smile, how he would weep, when he knelt down to touch the soil for the first time. How he would laugh in wonder. She thought about how much she loved for him to touch her. How much she loved to talk to him. How much she loved to be with him. She thought about her friends. She thought about her mother. Like all of her friends, every member of her generation, she was a stem-cell baby, fertilized in vitro with artificial sperm, her gender preselected, and then transferred from the petri dish into her mother. She had been born long after the purges. Long after men had become obsolete. She had never lived in a world where men roamed free. A world where assault and murder and war were all an everyday occurrence. Her mother had been too young to remember. But before her grandmother had died, her grandmother had told her stories, sitting around the firepit behind the trailer, roasting marshmallows over the embers. The worst day she had ever had under the matriarchy, her grandmother had said, was still better than the best day she had ever lived under the patriarchy. A former soldier and retired housekeeper, her grandmother had fought off an attempted rape by a friend of her father at the age of twelve and had been called a liar when she had finally dared to confess to her father what had happened, had once been bending for a suitcase at a luggage carousel when a man had pinched her ass with his fingers, had once been holding the pole on a bus when a man had pressed hard into her hand with his groin, had once been taken to a med center by a friend after an unidentified predator had slipped a date-rape drug into her beer at a concert, had had her body remarked upon by men on a daily basis, as a teenager had been rejected from the high school wrestling team solely on the basis of being a girl, as a soldier had regularly been passed over for promotion in favor of male candidates who were considerably less qualified, as a housekeeper had never been paid a comparable wage to male housekeepers at the hotel, had been sent countless pictures of erect dicks from friends, coworkers, acquaintances, neighbors, and total strangers, completely unsolicited, had dated a man who had enjoyed mocking her whenever she made any type of mistake and had left her feeling pathetic and stupid, had dated a man who had tried to control what she ate and had called her disgusting and ugly whenever her weight had fluctuated, had dated a man who had habitually provoked arguments with random men at bars, getting into vicious fistfights, hurling stools, shattering bottles, throwing punches, shouting with hormonal rage, scaring the hell out of her every time, and had eventually married a polite, helpful, affectionate, sensitive man, who like all husbands had taken a vow to be faithful, and who had cheated on her on over a dozen occasions. Her grandmother’s aunt, a biology professor who had never been paid a comparable wage to male colleagues at the university, had had an abusive husband who had spread rumors that she was an alcoholic after she had finally divorced him. Her grandmother’s sister, a nurse anesthetist who had never been paid a comparable wage to male colleagues at the hospital, had been harassed by a stalker who for years had periodically sent her videos of him masturbating to her headshot. Her great-grandmother, who in her youth had seen a boy with a rifle go on a shooting spree at a shopping mall that had claimed the lives of dozens, had routinely been beaten by her father. All of her friends had stories like these. Mackenzie’s great-grandmother, who had gone on to become a famous pilot, in her youth had been assaulted by a college quarterback at a frat party, and despite that her testimony had been corroborated by multiple eyewitnesses, her rapist had never been convicted, had just gone free. Anna’s grandmother had been molested by her band instructor. Zoey’s grandmother had been fondled by her loan officer. Indira’s grandmother had been pressured to send nude photos to her boyfriend, had been called a slut when he had posted the photos online in revenge for dumping him, and years later had been pressured to give her manager a blowjob, and then had had her hours cut back after she had refused. Danielle’s grandmother had once been raped by her own husband. And that was only a random sampling of women from a single generation, in a single community. Humans had been living in organized societies for over ten thousand years. Ten thousand years of tribes and kingdoms and nations. Ten thousand years that men had ruled the world. Ten thousand years that women had suffered without change. Had been treated as inferiors, and simpletons, and burdens, and temptations. As mere property, like a cow or a donkey. As mindless objects. She thought about that. She thought about all of those women, not as a group, but the individual people, each of whom had been unique and complicated and remarkable, each of whom had had hopes and dreams and feelings, a single precious life, and had been oppressed from her first breath to her deathbed. The billions upon billions upon billions of women. She thought about the genital mutilations, and the forced pregnancies, and the forced abortions, and the bride burnings, and the boy clubs. All of the abuse. All of the bullying. All of the shaming. All of the belittling. All of the gaslighting. All of the catcalling. All of the stalking. All of the groping. All of the rapes.

“No meant no,” she said, and walked out the door.

©2019 by Matthew Baker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Baker is the author of Hybrid Creatures, a collection of stories written in hybrid languages, and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Conjunctions, and Best of the Net. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. Visit him online at www.mwektaehtabr.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles

KT Bryski | 2297 words

It is a northern country; winter and cold weather; you’ve heard this before.

In the bitterness of the woods, the wolves are howling.

You’ve heard them before, too. But this is a new song.

• • • •

In the very heart of winter, the forest holds its breath. Frozen earth sleeps without dreaming; brittle sunlight breaks and scatters in gasps between the trees. The girl walks through the woods, boots crunching the crusted snow.

There is always such a girl, walking alone. Little footprints point the way back to a clutch of hovels; she peers half-dazzled through shadow and snow-flash. A basket hangs dispiritedly from her arm.

Sausage end. Hardened loaf. The creeping doubt in spring itself.

Lithe grey shadows slip through the trees. They have the most beautiful eyes.

• • • •

Don’t talk to strangers.

Don’t leave the path.

Don’t linger in the woods.

Old rules, standard rules. We were born with their curves etched into our bones. We all abided by them and never once complained. You’ll do the same, if you know what’s good for you.

• • • •

“Hello, little girl.”

The low, pleasant voice slides into her ear. It is a honeyed voice, caught somewhere on the rocks between rich contralto and dulcet tenor. Under the gentleness, the voice has teeth.

The girl thinks about that voice all the night through. The mildness intrigues her; but more so, the teeth.

• • • •

“Do you want the Path of Pins or the Path of Needles?”

This is another voice, ale-sluggish and cracking like ice. Behind the cowshed, the girl gives a vague smile and asks, “What’s the difference?”

The spotted youth brings thumb and forefinger together. “Needles.” He thrusts his hips forward, his hardness straining. “Pins.”

“I—”

He pulls her close, breath rank on her cheek. “Don’t worry. They both go to the same place.”

• • • •

Fumbling and joyless, it ends quickly enough. Snow stings her bare thighs, the barn’s unfinished boards catching at her cloak. Stray threads snag on splinters, wool red as blood.

The whole time, she peers over his shoulder to the woods beyond.

The wolves are watching. Steady, unafraid, they loiter until the spotted youth re-buttons his trousers and stumbles away, whistling and swollen with his own cockiness.

Well, that’s over and done with, and a good thing too.

She cleans herself with snow. Sore, a little, but mostly disappointed. When she looks up, the wolves have vanished. The ache deepens and hollows and she isn’t sure why.

• • • •

In the privacy of her own bed—relative privacy—she has siblings—she thinks of wolves in multitudes.

Brindled dark-flecked hairs streaked black.

(It is such an apt word, brindled. It shivers against her lips. It’s a thin word, sly as a knife, but it carries the chiaroscuro trees and mosaicked forest floor, and when she says it, she sees the wolves’ lean muscled shoulders.)

Thin black gums—cream-sharp teeth—lolling pink tongue.

(Another excellent word, lolling. The tongue dripping over the jaws, retreating, teasing, retreating, caressing. She thinks of joy and hunger, and suddenly there is very little space between the two.)

Famine-grey, dove-gray, knife-grey, cloud-gray.

(Grey and gray are different colours, of course. Grey is sinewy; it has stark edges; it is a bare-ribbed wolf in the middle of winter. Gray is rounder, fuller, the soft ruffs of wolves curled nose-to-tail in the den.)

The girl cannot tell if the faint howling rises from the forest or the secret places of her own longing. Beside her, a sibling snores and she clasps her hands together tightly, holding them safe at her pillow.

• • • •

We have names for girls who seek after wolves. None of them are very flattering. We shall not repeat them here, but leave you to imagine them. You’ve already heard them a thousand times; you can tell this part of the tale.

• • • •

Sometimes, it happens.

Handsome huntsmen and winsome woodcutters thrust open the cottage door to find a most unnatural embrace. Soft-downed arms flung around a thick furred neck; long bare legs enmeshed with pluming tail; maiden mouth voracious on a bloodstained snout.

A heap of clothes on the floor; tea forgotten on the table.

What big eyes the girls have, startled from the darkness of a deep kiss.

What big ears they have, burning hot and red.

What big teeth, still hungering for their wolf-in-arms.

• • • •

It’s terribly obvious what must be done.

• • • •

The wolf, first. Always, the wolf first. It doesn’t really matter how this part happens; it’s up to the strapping huntsman-or-woodcutter, or the concerned father, or the lovesick youth who just needs a chance to prove his worthiness, you know?

One stroke of the axe, one shot of a gun, one thrust of a sword.

Stick the wolf head on a pike by the church; turn the pelt into a champion’s rich winter cloak; bury the claws at midnight to ward off other preying monsters.

It doesn’t matter which path they choose. They all lead to the same place.

• • • •

The girl, though.

That’s trickier.

Sometimes they can be brought back into the fold. Especially if it was just curiosity rectified with a hasty wedding and a few sessions in the conjugal bed.

Other times, better safe than sorry.

It doesn’t matter which path they choose. At least they try to make it quick.

• • • •

That was a necessary digression. Where did we leave our girl?

Oh, yes. Dreaming of wolves.

• • • •

She knows what happens, though. That’s the thing. She wakes from a languorous vision of musky fur to the sight of another wolf head staked by the church doors. Beside it stands a girl shivering in a thin tattered dress, strands of garlic strung around her neck.

The villagers’ eyes slide to this poor wretch, but they no longer see her. She’s not one of them, not anymore, not really.

Our girl’s stomach clenches. Shame bites like snow screaming down the mountain peaks. It’s sharper than axes and more wounding than guns and wielded more righteously than swords.

It makes it very hard to walk into the church.

• • • •

She knows what happens, that’s the thing. So she stays inside as the winter drags on. She stuffs her ears against the wolves’ song, contents herself spinning yarn and baking oatcakes on the hearth.

On nights bright with shards of stars, the spotted youth walks her around the village, arm-in-arm through the snow. Repetition numbs her disdain. She even grows to appreciate—dimly, abstractly—the dispassionate pleasure of another warm body in the cold.

• • • •

“The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles?”

“Whatever you want, dear.”

It’s always pins. Maybe it all leads to the same place, but she wouldn’t mind another way to get there.

• • • •

“Take these to Grandmother’s house.”

She keeps her eyes on the trudged path and she doesn’t stay beneath the trees a moment longer necessary. Maybe the wolves still watch. Who can say? She isn’t looking.

No, really.

Anyway, Grandmother’s old. She dies soon enough. Sad but expected. She was frail and the winter’s hold still strong. The important thing is that the girl’s treks through the forest finally end. She’s secretly relieved, even more secretly disappointed, and furiously ashamed about both.

• • • •

Interlude.

Winters fall one after the next like driving snow. Hard, long, brutal winters. Bellies pinch; skin weathers; hearts freeze over. Spring fades from memory; it fades even from dream. The girl looks out her frosted window to an endless expanse of white. The coldness has seeped well into her marrow and it sets stiffer with each passing year.

But when coldness exceeds a certain point, we stop noticing it. We have always lived in the snowstorm; it is always winter now. Easy not to miss daffodils when you’ve never seen them bloom.

You know; we know.

Eventually, the girl forgets to listen for wolves.

• • • •

The spotted youth becomes a winsome woodcutter. Predictable, yes. It was either that or a handsome hunter.

Tight dark curls cover his arms like a pelt—the wrong sort. The hairs are coarse; they reek of sweat, ale, and smoke. His beard catches crumbs and slicks of grease. Things are no better below, but we’ll not speak of that.

Reader, she marries him.

• • • •

A simple country wedding at midwinter. How charming, how quaint. Every girl’s dream. Evergreen boughs strew the village’s single road and holly peeps and prickles at the windowsills. At every lintel they’ve hung white mistletoe.

It’s poison, mistletoe. But you probably knew that. Chaste kisses only, best to move on quickly.

Moving on.

The bride wears a beautiful homespun dress, beauty and functionality here being synonymous. Dyed walnut brown, sturdily constructed, it will see her through many years of labour and labour.

It also has pockets. So it’s not all bad.

The groom wears a wolf skin coat.

• • • •

The wedding night?

Over and done with, and a good thing too. She cleans herself with snow, no longer sore, barely even disappointed.

• • • •

Is this what it’s like to be happy? Is this it?

Her husband snorts and rolls over. “Yes, of course—what else do you want?”

There is no good answer to that question.

• • • •

She still dreams of wolves.

Wolves slipping shadowy through the woods, trailing snowflakes in the sunlight behind them. In sleep, she feels their paws at her throat, their blunt claws pressing gentle to her pulse. Lying side-by-side with her ghosts, she draws her hands down their impossibly soft bellies and inhales the mountain crispness clinging to their fur.

What big eyes, what big ears.

What big teeth, and they know how to use them.

A pink tongue quests—lolls—until it finds hers. Animal heat and northern cold make her breath catch, her hips rise. In her dreams, the wolves dip their heads and gobble her right up.

She hangs suspended—

—and wakes.

The dreams blow away like candle smoke. She wakes to an empty bed and streaming sunlight. The winsome woodcutter has long ago gathered his axe and gone into the woods. The hollowness in her chest claws so deeply, so desperately, she wants to scream.

• • • •

Plenty of people hunger after wolves. Even if they don’t admit it. We can always tell by their eyes. They stare at the woods a heartbeat too long; their gaze never settles comfortably on the hunters and woodcutters.

• • • •

Children come squalling into the world one after the next. Mewling tyrants, pinch-faced and reddened, with foul excretions at both ends. The less said about them, the better.

But this is the way of things. Girl, wife, mother, grave. That is her path, intractable as ice and obstinate as the stones of the churchyard. Sometimes she glances towards the forest and shivers, imagining black whiskered lips meeting hers. But never often, never for long.

The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles?

It doesn’t matter. It never did.

• • • •

But is this—it?

• • • •

At last, she grows old. With the woodcutter dead and her usefulness spent, she does the graceful thing and withdraws to a solitary life at the fringes of the community. A small cottage, of course, rudely constructed with packed-earth floor and sooty log walls. Beside the hearth sit a battered pot, black iron kettle, a small griddle for oatcakes. Last year’s herbs and apples dry in the rafters; the spinning wheel sits disused in the corner, mocking her stiffened fingers.

The bed holds two, were the grandmother so inclined.

She sits by the window and watches the forest. For a long time, she sees nothing but snow dropping from branches, pine needles blowing over the drifts.

But slowly, the wolves return. In silence, they ring the cottage, sleek grey heads tilted to one side and tails wrapped demurely over paws. Their eyes are just as beautiful as she remembers.

• • • •

“Go and visit Grandmother.”

It happens infrequently. But she flinches every time a stout grandchild pushes through her door. Old habits die hard; she limits her time watching the trees. Even at the fringes, people notice, people talk.

• • • •

A knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

Silence.

“Grandchild?”

• • • •

Not her grandchild.

A brindled wolf, dark-flecked, soft-maned. A hot pink tongue hangs between milk-white teeth; amber eyes burn beneath long lashes. Grey like famine and gray like mist, grey like a breaking heart and gray like dream stealing through the dusk.

Animal musk shivers to the very heart of her, raising the hairs at the back of her neck. A tilt of the wolf’s head, whiskers twitching. Questioning. Gentle.

“The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles?” the grandmother asks, her laugh breaking like light upon the snow.

Neither, the wolf says without speaking. A different path, one that leads someplace entirely new.

What eyes, what ears.

What teeth.

• • • •

Is this what it’s like?

The grandmother curls into the wolf. Strong forelegs hold her tight; a black-tipped tail tickles between her legs. “Is this what it’s like to be happy? Because I never thought I could—”

The wolf kisses her again.

Yes.

• • • •

Imagine the grandchild bowling through the door. In the big cottage bed, an arresting sight.

Grandmother and Wolf, entangled together. These are not Grandmother’s papery dry kisses—oh no, child, not in the slightest. This is heat humming in the long grass; a thunderclap summer obliterating the winter in one fell swoop.

The basket drops from the child’s hand.

Grandmother and Wolf rise from the bed, shake out their fur, and pad into the trees on silent paws.

• • • •

Keep your pins and needles; keep the huntsmen and woodsmen. We never liked them anyway.

Over the river and through the woods, the wolves are howling still.

©2019 by KT Bryski.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KT Bryski is a Canadian author, podcaster, and playwright. Her short fiction has appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. She currently serves as the Apex Magazine podcast producer, and her audio dramas Coxwood History Fun Park and Six Stories, Told at Night are available wherever fine podcasts are found. Select theatre credits include Six Stories, Told at Night (Toronto Fringe), A Canticle of Light (Missed Metaphor Productions), and East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon (Canadian Children’s Opera Company).

KT is a Sunburst finalist, Stonecoast MFA alum, and guardian to a very strange cat. When not writing, she frolics through Toronto enjoying choral music and craft beer. Visit her at www.ktbryski.com or find her on Twitter @ktbryski.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

End of the Sleeping Girls

Molly Gutman | 6322 words

1

All winter, the sisters make their beds in fruits. Ingrid sleeps in a pomegranate, Yasmin in a persimmon.

At night they enter the cocoons they’ve carved from each warm globe. The flesh conforms to their flesh. Mornings they emerge sticky, and Yasmin, the smaller one, coats her legs in a lotion of persimmon pulp. The pulp is like soft, wet hair. Ingrid thinks this style flatters Yasmin, as if she’s wearing fashionable stockings.

Ingrid, on the other hand, emerges like she’s been caught unawares in heavy rain. She’s claggy and irritable; her hair goes stringy. As such, she’s discovered pomegranate is a poor leave-in conditioner. She rolls in the ferns each morning to brush off all she can. She scrapes the excess on trees.

There is no way to say it other than this: Winter ends and Ingrid is growing larger, swollen with spring. She wishes she were comfortable taking up space. Yasmin can cry and not be called dramatic; she’s a little thing, and the forest thinks her fragile and leaves her alone. Ingrid is lumbering in comparison.

She begins to dread sleeping. She watches Yasmin crawl into her persimmon and waits till she’s so tired she’s dizzy. She can’t bear for her sister to see her in this state, can hardly stand to witness it herself. She gnaws on bark and this becomes a habit. Only then, hours into nighttime, swimmy with fatigue, will she brave the pomegranate she’s started to outgrow.

One morning, after Ingrid wakes, she watches Yasmin slip from her persimmon and smooth the pulp on her legs. Ingrid marvels at how strange and large the fruit still looks against her sister’s body. She swallows the thought that two Yasmins could easily fit inside.

It’s spring, she announces. She tells Yasmin to go picking for food. Mushrooms, maybe, also berries. Raspberries, boysenberries, even gooseberries later in the season. Any edible flower.

Yasmin flutters; she remembers gooseberries from last spring, she says, remembers the pie they attempted. Yasmin had insisted on the gooseberries, so Ingrid stewed them carefully, tipped in spoonful after spoonful of sugar. Yasmin ate almost the whole thing, come to think of it. And so she goes off to forage, the miniature basket waggling at her elbow. Ingrid watches her slip into the alcoves of the forest: she turns hazy and then disappears under some foliage.

Only when she’s positive that Yasmin is deep and away does Ingrid approach the persimmon.

At first she regards it as a sort of experiment. One whole lap around its perimeter. Ingrid drags a hand along it, feels the gooseflesh of its skin. It is not terribly tall; it is not all too large around.

Ingrid leans till her nose almost touches. The smell coming off the rind is awfully bright, sweet enough to make her sick. She flicks out her tongue to taste it.

But now she’s stalled all she can, and so, well, she edges in one foot and then the other. The persimmon slicks up her ankles and calves. The fit grows tight and she’s only at the middle of her thighs. How can her sister be this small? When did she grow so large? Despite the cool inside the persimmon, a new burn—some unfamiliar shame—rises up inside Ingrid. It is a feeling she wouldn’t wish on anyone. It makes her feel panicky and spiteful. The persimmon is snug on her hips. Somehow, by a miracle, it fits up to her waist. But she has no delusions about what will come if she continues to push.

When she gets to the puff of her navel she hears a soft, nauseating sound. Her toes are cold; they’ve punched through the other side—she gasps, wriggles her toes—and then the persimmon shreds open around her.

She rolls around, woozy and sated. She is not yet afraid of what Yasmin will say. Something in the glib dark deep of her smiles and thinks, I am too solid to be challenged. And after all this, she’s too tired for empathy. She goops the persimmon into her hair, musses it to dissolve the trace, and squeezes back into her own bed.

She rests on one hip, grows uncomfortable, and eases to the other. Curled around herself, she falls at last to sleep in the muted red glow of her pomegranate canopy.

Not long after, she wakes to the silhouette of a hand thumping on the pomegranate rind. Ingrid pulls herself out and finds Yasmin. Looped around one arm is a small basket brimming with berries. Behind her are the tatters of her persimmon bed.

It happened while neither of us were watching, Yasmin wails. Who would have done such an awful thing?

Ingrid’s first instinct is to hug her sister, who breaks into wretched sobs. Her second is to dread that her hair smells like persimmon, and to hope Yasmin doesn’t notice.

The light is already waning; the days aren’t yet longer. And neither girl is hungry.

May I sleep with you? Yasmin asks.

Ingrid considers saying no. She’s nauseated at the thought of cramming two in a bed unfit for herself alone. The squeeze is disorienting. Seeds are blurry, homogenous a millimeter from Ingrid’s face; they encroach on her body from every angle.

Of course, she says.

So Ingrid enters first, feeling with her toes back into the channel she’s worn. A few seeds have lately looked close to bursting, and she’s careful not to poke them.

She senses the shadow of Yasmin’s legs spindling in. It’s too close a fit to see much more. The fruit strains with extra mass. Yasmin jabs her elbow into a seed and it ruptures.

Ingrid shouldn’t have destroyed Yasmin’s persimmon. Now that she’s slept on it, she can feel that guilt in her stomach like a sack of rocks. She can feel her blood heating in her face, thickening in the veins of her arms. Yasmin can’t help her growing—rather her lack of it—any more than Ingrid can.

She combs a hand through her hair—much easier to navigate, since persimmon’s a fine detangler—and rakes the pulp under her fingernails. She forces her fingers at Yasmin’s nostrils, practically picks her nose.

Persimmon, Yasmin says. It’s a sad little heave, a flatter reaction than Ingrid expects.

Bad sister, Yasmin says. Betrayer.

The words bounce off each seed. Yasmin’s eyes look like perfect gooseberries.

Ingrid is sorry, so sorry; how possibly can she explain this mess of feelings all pressing out of her at once?

The pretty one screams and bunches her fists. She batters them against Ingrid’s strong chest, her full arms. The squeeze is so tight there’s no space for momentum. This fight is like a yelling match done all in whispers. This fight is a wrestle soft as mushrooms, but with tears and teeth and fingernails. Yasmin rakes a scrape along her sister; the pomegranate juice seethes in Ingrid’s wounds.

And Ingrid fights back! She knocks the heel of her palm on Yasmin’s jaw, can feel the teeth rattling from impact. Yasmin brought her persimmon’s ruin on herself, by not filling out when Ingrid couldn’t stop.

Ah! Yasmin cries, driving one bony knee into Ingrid’s gut. The knee takes her sharply, so Ingrid can feel the organs there bruising. They’ve dug out quite a space for themselves in this jeweled pocket.

Everything is red and seedy. One or both of them is bleeding. Ingrid’s angry, so angry, feels strained to the point of bursting with all this new emotion. She twists to avoid Yasmin’s knee again.

Then a rumble echoes around them; several more seeds burst open. They feel the vibrations transfer into their skin. Ingrid bares her teeth to bite. But the pressure on their bodies releases as the pomegranate sheers away from itself. The two of them cry out, wrestling on the ground between the fruit’s still-rocking halves. Ingrid wonders what awful damage each sister has inflicted on the other. She bites Yasmin anyway.

2

A bear invites the sisters for formal tea. On the way they practice politeness. How terrible they must be in social contexts, to need to practice politeness. But each girl is the other’s only friend. Each has felt stifled, lately, and too solitary.

He met them at a forest mixer—which they had been loathe to attend—and made them gooseberry sours. He was handsome in that tall, dangerous way. They weren’t sure if they should have loved or feared him, even then. These types can be so magnanimous, and two-faced. They kept watch of him after the invitation: Did he tip a secret vial into anyone’s drink or pour a double when a double wasn’t wanted? No, none of these.

But what to say at a formal tea?

Compliment his coat, Yasmin suggests, joking.

Ingrid says, Your coat is the most lovely I’ve seen; will you share what conditioner you use?

Yes, Ingrid says. That’s exactly how I’ll phrase it.

The journey isn’t far but takes several hours; their little legs can only move so fast. No matter how they grow, the forest stays enormous and hard to navigate. It’s so dense and creaky it conceals the outside noise. Drones and helicopters pass overhead, more than usual, shadows like prehistoric birds of prey. But for the most part the forest doesn’t notice. The forest turns inward, considers itself more important. Forget the outside. The girls prefer it this way. Summer has come with sugary heat, and Ingrid feels her clothes growing sticky; her thighs have met each other and become new enemies.

Stop walking that way, Yasmin says, picking one pretty foot and then the other over a root.

Yasmin shouldn’t be so rude, of course. And Ingrid’s perfectly aware of her bow-legged walk, which keeps her thighs from chafing. But nothing in her body works the way it used to; her braid catches in her underarm and she feels off-balance. She’s determined to master all these changes.

The sisters are trying to avoid the same bad thought. There—well, there might be another reason the bear has invited them over. There is no way to say it other than this: They’ve heard whispers before of traps laid for girls, and they have no way to know if they’re walking into one. Sharp-toothed beasts and girls in frocks; we all know how this ends. But the girls—especially Ingrid—are polite above all, and a little lonely. And they like the idea of a friend much larger than they. So they don’t want to offend him by refusing. Make a friend, yes, and also be smart and be safe.

The cottage is a little thing with a chimney and no smoke, because who would start a fire in this oppressive heat? The bear takes several beats to answer the door.

He opens it with a kitchen knife in paw. I’m in the middle of making scones, he says, but do come in.

His teeth say, I’m so glad you’re here.

His eyes say, I ate the first batch of scones.

He settles them in the sitting room with gargantuan mugs, so big the sisters could swim in them. From his kitchen drawer he produces two flexible straws made of biodegradable resin.

The tea display is a lazy Susan with more tiers than Ingrid can count. The sisters deliberate at length, and finally Yasmin selects a chamomile pomegranate, Ingrid an oolong persimmon. This is a less fraught choice than you might believe; they’ve been sleeping, together, in a pineapple.

A pineapple, the bear says. Must be painful on those little bodies, no? The citric acid? His eyes glisten when he says it.

Ingrid wonders if this, then, is why he invited them over—such an exotic story, he must think, to know sisters like them with such strange bed habits. Ingrid wonders if they are just a story to collect, if this is how the bear will consume them.

Yasmin looks perfectly content, doesn’t she? She doesn’t seem to be thinking of ulterior motives.

You know what they say about pineapple, says the bear. That when you eat it, it eats you back! He seems to search their available skin for signs of citric corrosion.

Their lavender frocks fit them differently; on Yasmin it covers her knees, looks loose and bohemian. But the hem hardly reaches Ingrid’s thighs. She tugs it constantly.

Desperate to change the subject, she comments on his coat and asks about his conditioner.

He delights in the question, spreads a smile so wide all his razor teeth show.

You won’t believe it, he says, as if the secret tastes nice on his tongue: I order it special. The bottles are so small, and there’s so much of me, that I have a running order every Wednesday. It’s very expensive, you know.

He scrapes a claw idly along one arm as he talks. Ingrid, of course, is mystified by him, beguiled, more than a bit jealous. Here is a body occupying all the space it can, straight and large, not crouching. As unconscientious of being big as Yasmin is of being small. Ingrid’s not angry about it. Not anymore. It’s just a sad stone she carries in her pocket. Under her frock drags a single bead of sweat. Outside, the yard drops into shadow. Another helicopter comes over them; this one’s close enough to hear the whoop whoop whoop of its rotor.

Yasmin is standing on her tiptoes to suck the last dregs of chamomile when they notice that the bear has begun to cry. When he wails, the whole house rumbles. Saucers rattle on the table.

I’m sorry we’re not better company, Ingrid coos, backpedaling, wondering what she could have done to so upset him. And then there’s the matter of still being alert. Is this all part of a setup?

It’s all too much, the surprise and the fear, for Yasmin, who also begins to cry. Because the world still loves her, because she is fragile and the natural center of attention, the bear rushes over to tend to her. He holds the mug under her chin to catch her drips.

There, there, he says, and takes a scone to dab at her cheeks. The batch turned out dry, and the raisins come back to life with her tears.

His furry face is streaked with salt. I’m so sorry, he says. It’s just I thought some new acquaintances would distract me from the news.

What news? asks Yasmin through tears, so it comes out ha-wha-whud nu-noose?

An acquaintance in the Speculation Bureau, says the bear. She says not to be surprised if the forest comes down in Autumn. And she could get in mighty trouble for having told me; none of the plans have yet gone public. I suppose I’m still hoping it’s untrue. You met her, actually, or should have, at the mixer. She was the one with twigs for hair? Tall, good proportions, drank four gin and bitters. She likes to stand at the edges of crowds to observe. Or. Well, speculate. Works under the National Executive, though I don’t know how she can stand him.

He sets the mug on a saucer. He sniffs and runs a claw under his nose, catches the skin accidentally and begins to bleed. Gooses! he cries, and apologizes for the rough language. And look what a mess I’ve made! He dribbles blood all the way to the kitchen, and returns with a wadded towel pressed tight.

I’m afraid I’ve ruined our tea, he says.

Out the window stand long crooked trees, webs of moss, everything good and dark and quiet about the world. Ingrid figures the bear is trying hard not to use the phrase the end of an era. It would be too sentimental, and the bear has more decorum than that. Yasmin can’t be thinking it, and neither can the bear, but Ingrid is: The forest has never once considered that it might be taking up too much space. The forest has never once wondered if others consider it unruly and large.

3

Two sisters who used to sleep inside fruits are considering buying a mattress. Winter’s come, unstoppable, unaware the world has changed around it. Of course it has. But how dare the ground sharpen with frost, and how dare the air grow brighter? The forest came down weeks ago, is now sour and smoky and inhospitable to life.

The whooping of the helicopters has tapered off, for now, since no one can withstand the noxious air. It’s even done a number on the air pressure, so drones have trouble, too. Still, the sisters spot the telltale four-fanned silhouettes above the jagged ruins, a few on any given day.

What else they can see when the smoke curls off the wind: New structures have started to crystalize, like flecks of mica, out of what used to be woods. Charcoal stalagmites have risen like a new copse of trees. They crackle unsurely for hours at a time. Others say this is what ice sounds like when it fissures. But this is not the sound of the natural dying off—this is the next stage settling in. Greasy fog wanders in itinerant strips. Sometimes the sisters can’t tell what’s smoke and what isn’t, but all that matters is everything’s dead. Those who have visited say even the lichen is gone. But those accounts don’t come firsthand or often; a lungful of the stuff is enough to kill. It felled the trees in a matter of seconds. Yasmin and Ingrid escaped just ahead of fumigation, arrived in town sticky and covered in pulp.

The bear offered them some money, but they politely refused, did not want to be indebted to him. Instead they found jobs at a corner laundromat. It was enough, with a payday advance, to start renting a tiny apartment.

At first their apartment was lovely. They draped armfuls of moss across the windows, and in the sink they rinsed each morning’s bed off their skin. They’d hired movers to lug a pumpkin up the stairs, and slept like normal, inside it, when each night came dark and free from noise. They picked a street without much traffic. But now in the morning they emerge—not into dewy grass and the sunlight—but into fluorescence and the white stripes of window blinds. The cars outside start up again. All at once the pumpkin reminds them, much too forcefully, of the home from which they’ve been evicted.

The good news is they don’t need much room in a bed; after all, they’ve been sleeping together in a pumpkin. Down the block stand three mattress stores in a row, all empty of customers, all—somehow—still in business. They make no purchases in the first, none in the second. In the third they approach the salesman directly. He has wet eyes and a lick of hair at his forehead.

We are looking for a mattress, Ingrid says.

Yasmin is running her hands along the elastic of the nearest fitted sheet, printed with sunflowers and the most enormous gooseberries.

The salesman says, Of course you are. At one time or another everyone comes looking for a mattress.

And then he leans over the counter and sizes them up, like targets. Look, he says, there is no way to say it other than this. We carry nothing for ladies such as you. See—here he runs his tongue over his teeth—we only have mattresses for. Well. What I mean is these will all be too big for you. You’re both so little, after all.

Ingrid believes he means it as a compliment. She realizes after a moment that he thinks this an adequate method of flirtation; calling them small is like calling them gems, or calling them sweet. Perhaps he will ask one of them to dinner.

Their relative size has been an accidental benefit of the move; others, here, consider Ingrid small. Smallish. Certainly not so small as Yasmin, whom people regard as a toy. So Ingrid represents both of them, which is a role she’s grown into and would very much like to discard. But without her, how will anyone take them seriously? Yasmin is still wild, and too unserious.

I’m sure we’ll find something, Ingrid says. Take us to your children’s section.

She hopes to make the salesman uncomfortable. They insist on riding the mattress cart; it gets them to the back much faster than they could have walked.

Yasmin has used pumpkin guts as hair gel this morning; her hair is wild, spiky, a little orange. It smells like dirt and holidays. Last week Ingrid told her she was terribly immature.

It’s like you haven’t grown at all, she said. Not at all.

Yasmin had shrugged, picked a gooseberry from the carton and popped it whole in her mouth.

But I’ve always been the little one, she said.

That’s not the growing I mean, Ingrid said.

But Yasmin wasn’t interested in hearing. Not then or now. Yasmin feels a little famous, likes being a curiosity. Ingrid can’t shake the feeling that it’s all too fragile, that their minor celebrity will come tumbling down on top of them, and soon. All day, mattress salespeople have regarded Yasmin with wonderment; see how she is untamed. How she is not one of us, and how easily we could hurt her. This they seem to mean in two ways: first with delight in their own power to conquer, even if they never plan to wield it, and second with fear, as in, she’s so breakable they’re afraid of touching her.

On one mattress they lay their little bodies; Ingrid’s rises higher off the surface than does Yasmin’s. Then again, Yasmin hardly stays still enough to measure.

The salesman stands just far enough away to seem polite. He runs his hand up the cowlick at his temple. And then he asks just like she figured he would: Will Ingrid accompany him to dinner?

She says she will not. His face goes stormy for one second, two seconds, and then clicks back into something appropriate for customer service.

Over here, Yasmin says, not paying attention. She’s already moving on to the next one: She crosses her arms and pretends to be dead. Then she tests it by bouncing.

Ingrid says, This one is too soft. And, look, that one’s too hard.

Yasmin’s already jumping on a third child-sized mattress. How about this one, sister?

The sisters agree: This one will do.

So they buy the third mattress from the third mattress store. Ingrid negotiates a lower delivery fee with the salesman she’d like to be rid of already. They buy the sheets with the sunflowers and gooseberries. Outside the glass, they see, far off, the smoke coiling off what used to be forest.

It smell out there today? the salesman asks, fumbling for conversation. She knows he’d have said something nasty if not for the commission he was sure to make off them.

Not as bad as normal! Yasmin says, oblivious to the charge in his voice.

The chill’s dampened it, but still the smell persists—they’re almost used to it now—like diesel and something else, harder to identify.

They ask the delivery woman, when she comes, to take the pumpkin back downstairs, and she does it for free. The pumpkin is too painful a sight in the little fluorescent apartment, but for now they keep the mossy curtains. They cannot let the forest go entirely. They can’t let the city harden all the wild space inside them. That moss dapples the light; it dampens the sound of traffic; it scents the apartment like topsoil, which helps to lull the girls into almost-comfortable sleep.

4

The end is coming. Don’t pretend no one expected it. Ingrid and Yasmin see it on the news while washing their clothes in the laundromat. They’ve learned in recent months that their small arms are especially good at finding quarters lost under the machines. They pay for most things in quarters. And they get laundry for free, so long as they wait till night, when everyone else is tucked into their mattresses and sheets.

Yasmin is growing big for the first time. They worry she’s pregnant. Never mind how they didn’t think it when Ingrid first grew a belly. For Ingrid, growth was inevitable; on Yasmin, it must be a condition.

They first noticed the change the day they heard about the bear. He’s mineralizing from the inside. This, turns out, is what fumigation does: Everything turns to grease and ore, everything hardens, all life wrings out. And now it’s been months, and some signs of spring are showing. Do seasons matter any more? Yasmin once asked, meaning how they’re always inside now. Ingrid has been thinking about the question ever since, and still doesn’t have an answer.

When they noticed, Ingrid feared the bear had assaulted Yasmin. She couldn’t help the thought, which arrived fully formed like an anvil in her chest. She had no proof the two desired each other. Where else would her mind have gone first?

Yasmin shook her head and said her sister worried too much—why was she always so dire and vigilant? The forest was a fun place to live, up to and including sex. It was an unruly place; they should have taken more advantage while it lasted.

But she hadn’t told Ingrid any of this before. None of it. Ingrid hadn’t known her sister to be capable of relationships, casual or otherwise. And she hadn’t noticed the bear as especially flirty toward Yasmin, nor her to him. She’s squirmy against her own imagination of the two of them together. Not the least of reasons being: Yasmin and the bear must have hung around and not invited her along. What had Ingrid been doing so she didn’t notice? And the more dire thought, almost viral, clinging to the surface of all the others: When had she become someone to leave out?

This conversation crops back up when Ingrid least expects it. Yasmin is pairing socks and tossing them at the basket. After a few she fumbles one. And her new round belly makes retrieving them more difficult.

Here, says Ingrid, picking the socks up herself. They’re hers anyway, a little pair with decorative red stitching. Yasmin had balled them up badly. Her fingers trail a bump in the tile, just big enough to cast a tiny shadow. She’s thinking of grass, how the blades caught sunlight. Back when grass still existed.

She pulls the socks apart and re-pairs them properly.

Thanks, Yasmin says. You can do the rest of these if you want. She abandons the laundry in search of quarters for the vending machine.

The tile glows, reflecting the televisions. All those televisions shift color in unison, flicking through news images.

The National Executive is responsible for what’s happened to the forest, and what’s worse, he’s proud of the change. There is no way to say it other than this. The fumigations were by his order: So he says, the forest was susceptible, more than the city, to disease and to military ruin. So he says, the creatures who lived there—meaning the sisters, meaning the bear—were unruly. Who knows what they were up to, under cover of dense flora? Better to keep everyone in one place, under the same watch. One size fits all protection. By turning it all to charcoal, by felling the trees and driving everyone into the city, he’s made us all safer. See how safe everyone is! No more of the dense woods to infect, and no foliage for enemies to hide in.

This is a stupendous blow to residents of the forest. The day they heard, both Ingrid and Yasmin were inconsolable. They called the bear, whose vocal folds were too crystalized to talk, who needed his friend the rabbit to translate from his bedside. The rabbit cried with them. They were so, so angry. What was there to do?

But now they have a more pressing problem. A coalition of all the world’s flying, buzzing things—even many of those that live here—are planning retaliation. It sounds dire, terrifying. They talk of plans, though vague, in the open where anyone can hear them. They claim not to be worried about counterintelligence because we cannot be ready for whatever they’ve got in store.

Yet many still believe the National Executive and think they’ll be perfectly safe. Don’t worry, the news programs say. We’re protected here. And then the newscasters change the conversation to hydroponic berries and the rising price of mattresses.

Ingrid calls her sister’s name, strides over to where she’s lodged herself halfway in the vending machine, reaching up for a package of chocolate-coated pomegranate seeds. Her feet pedal in the air.

Sister, she says, grunting with the effort of pulling Yasmin out again, you must be more careful than this. And in your state! Really. Try at least to act like you’re grown.

Oh, Yasmin says, because you’re mature and that makes you better than everyone.

It’s not like that, Ingrid says. You’re being unfair.

Yasmin thumps against the vending machine with the flats of her palms, like she beat on the rind of Ingrid’s bed so long ago. The package slips neatly from where it was caught, and Yasmin leans in to retrieve it.

Face it, she says, chewing fistfuls of chocolate with her mouth open. You’re practically like our forest. All this seriousness has tamed you. All your fun and wilderness has washed out. You have stony insides.

Ingrid can’t muster a response to that. She turns from her sister to hide her rising flush.

The televisions have switched programs to a talk show, one of the few willing to disagree with all the rest about the buzzing and the safety of the city. Ingrid zones into the program to pretend she isn’t crying. In the program, two scholars are debating about underground bunkers. One of them takes a long sip off her coffee, sets it back, says, Everyone can bury themselves. But we’ll have to resurface eventually. And what will be left?

Outside, the lampposts guard the parking lot from total darkness. Moths used to answer to that light, but quickly the moths are dying out. What will be left, Ingrid says out loud, trying her mouth around someone else’s rhetoric.

She aims the question at Yasmin, to Yasmin’s baby, to herself: What will be left, tell me that.

5

The bear succumbed to fumigation and has finally died. Ingrid and Yasmin’s new friend the rabbit is there to mourn with them. The rabbit has done an enormously brave and decent thing, has snuck away from the emergency shelter and returned with a bottle of red and a wine key. He got these at the supermarket before it shuttered its windows with plywood. Ingrid’s suspicious he stole them, but she wouldn’t dare complain. This beats the emergency rations everyone’s been eating, the white bread and beans and occasional tin-wrapped packet of butter. Everyone’s evacuated in recent days to a number of airtight shelters; Yasmin, Ingrid, and the rabbit made a perch up high in the bleachers of a converted football stadium.

Very quickly the country changed its mind; it cannot withstand an attack such as this.

Here is what we know: What is coming is organic. It is unstoppable and irreversible. It is backed by an unconscionably large swarm, furious to see the wild here so desiccated, mobilized against the country that let it happen. The natural has reared up against intervention into the natural. And everyone will suffer for it.

The dizzying noise of the swarm masses from every direction. It’s begun to shadow the edges of the horizon. At sunset the sky turns the color of garnets and jam, filtered through so many translucent wings. The buzzing is so close now that it vibrates in the sisters’ feet when they stand still. They refrain from leaning on walls. No one is getting any sleep.

The rabbit accordions his little hat—the one with holes for his ears—in both his paws. What a pity, he says. But maybe we deserve it. Anyway, we certainly deserve this wine.

The three of them wrestle to open it. Ingrid leverages one foot on the bottle and both hands on the corkscrew. The rabbit and Yasmin pull from the other side. Yasmin grunts with effort. When the cork releases, they all sigh in relief.

The rabbit situates his tail in a crack between two flats of concrete. His eyes flick from Yasmin’s belly back to the wine. But Yasmin doesn’t register the look, and why would she? She’s never touched the boundaries of what others consider indelicate or unbecoming, and so those boundaries to her remain invisible. Even now, with the belly.

Ingrid notices. But her sister’s fine to be drinking, and turns out they needn’t have worried all this time. Or they should have worried, but not about a baby. This is one of those miracle phantom pregnancies. The baby was an imagination of the body.

The doctor says her belly will deflate again with time, and no baby will come. Yasmin feels like she’s lost a part of herself. She’s been heartsick and comfortless; this party with the rabbit is the first time she’s perked up.

Ingrid is sympathetic, but only to a point—she has Yasmin, after all. No need to add another tiny creature that requires her attention and care. The point on which they both agree is that this phantom pregnancy seems a loss somehow to the bear. They will feel his absence greatly. There will be nothing left of the bear except memories.

The rabbit, oblivious, whizzes into a story about a time he and the bear rambled into town to steal a box of bees.

You see, he says, the bear only wanted honey to sweeten his tea. The rabbit twitches an ear at the memory. Oh yes, the bear felt tremendously sorry to steal.

The rabbit dribbles wine down his front. They’re all drunk now, especially Yasmin. Even Ingrid’s loose; she’s resolved, in the end of days, to live a little.

He says this was all back before they had money. This happened a number of years before the sisters met the bear or the rabbit. And I confess, he says, I didn’t feel quite as bad as he to be thieving.

A big drone buzzes past the shelter. They’ve learned to distinguish drone noise from the general sound of the accumulating swarm.

I would have helped you get away, Yasmin whispers. She has a burst of hiccups, and then the hiccups stop. She smiles. All that sounds terribly exciting, she says.

Were you ever caught? Ingrid asks.

The rabbit notices the spill on his gray front for the first time. Oh, we were caught, he says. We couldn’t hide the sorry shape we were in—the bees stung us so badly we puffed up like buttons!

Everyone laughs at that. When they quiet, the rabbit wipes a tear. His whiskers twitch.

Lucky I didn’t die, actually. Well, he says. Well. Anyway.

Ingrid is still thinking about Yasmin and the bear, the private time they must have stolen away from her. Maybe Ingrid could love someone like that. Maybe she could love the rabbit.

The rabbit has started back into the wine; his dainty slurping makes his whiskers shiver.

No, she thinks, pushing the thought away. Ingrid does not love the rabbit. She’s just imagining having someone. The closest is what she feels for Yasmin.

Yasmin looks up through the screen of plastic over the stadium dome. The sky is darkening at the edges with what looks like television static. In one direction stands the concrete mausoleum of what used to be their home, their real home, the dense and lush one, the dead one. In the other direction is a strip mall; the stadium overlooks a parking lot and a coffee chain. The endless drive-thru of cars used to remind them of a stream. By now the cars are permanently logjammed, abandoned by panicked drivers at those first sinister noises.

She says, Well, I’m happy he won’t see all this.

She means the swarm. The buzzing has piled at the edge of every landmass, like a siren heralding disaster. This is why all three of them drink—even more than the bear’s death, though they do miss him, and dearly.

They all have different pictures of how it will happen. The rabbit figures they’ll go out in a flash of heat and light. Yasmin suspects it will be a powerful rebuttal of the noxious fumes that wiped away the forest. This magic gas will bring down all inorganic structures, will breathe life back into the woods, may not even kill us after all. Ingrid doesn’t have the heart to argue with this childlike hope of her sister’s. What has been done to the forest cannot be undone. She recalls once seeing images of mammoth mosquitos stalking thawed tundra, how the wings clogged the noses of livestock, flooded their eyes, forced their bodies down animals’ throats to choke out light and air. This is what will come for them. Oh, yes. She would bet the last of the wine on it.

In her belly she knows what is good and dark and quiet about the world has already gone woozily to sleep. It will not wake again. Make no mistake, her belly tells her: The swarm will ride nearer, and then it will overcome them. It will gorge itself on them. The question is no longer if. Any day now. Any week now. The end has already begun, is here, is over. There is no way to say it other than this.

©2019 by Molly Gutman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Gutman’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, One Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Molly’s working on her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; she earned her MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. She’s also a fiction editor at Cream City Review. Find her at mollygutman.wordpress.com or say hello on Twitter @mollyegutman.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Silent Familiar

Cat Rambo | 4524 words

The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183—youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human—he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another—even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own.

“Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to that familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too pleased with herself. A pair of alabaster candelabra sheltered her in a thicket of gilt spirals, and a stuffed salmon, labeled “First Prize—Thornstone Village Centennial Celebration,” regarded her with a sour gaze.

“Master,” she said, blinking luminous eyes. “Have I not served you well?”

“For the most part,” he admitted.

She stayed silent, so after a pause, he said, “Yes, invariably, Olivia. But who will hold your loyalty, that egg or I?”

“Both,” she said and stoked her scaled cheek along the egg’s smooth surface. “But I will never value it higher than my service to you.”

Wizards’ familiars are unnatural creatures. Some are much like any other animal: a cat, perhaps, with black fur, a droop-winged crow, or a snake with emerald scales. Others look less innocuous and more fantastical—homunculi and tiny, perfect dragons like Olivia, or shaggy-warted mandrake plants. Given this, it is surprising that two of them had managed to have compatible body parts, let alone produce an offspring. And yet, three months after a purely platonic sojourn of Niccolo with a sorceress whose library was vast enough to entice all sorts of other mages to her door, this had happened. Niccolo had been researching how the gods manifested themselves, and the library tomes had been unfamiliar enough to hold all his attention. Enrapt in ancient texts, he had overlooked Olivia’s activities.

Niccolo scowled at her. “Do you intend to make a habit of this?” he demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Olivia said absently. “I didn’t like the last part, the laying. The getting ready to lay, though. . .”

Niccolo put up his hand. “I do not want to know.” He turned away. “How long till it hatches?”

“I don’t know,” Olivia said. “I’ve never done this.” She crooned deep in her throat, an unsettling noise Niccolo had never heard her make before.

Grumbling, he stalked out. It’s probably not even viable, he thought. How long would Olivia fool herself into believing it would hatch? When he had created her, coaxing her winged form from a malachite shard, a bit of bone, and a lizard’s scale, he had endowed her with a sardonic wit and a capability for banter—requisites for any wizard’s familiar. But he had always prided himself that Olivia was smarter than most. Smarter than this deluded maternal ambition would seem to indicate.

Had he erred when making her? Familiars were repositories for wizards’ emotions, one of the means by which they stripped away their humanity and became immortal. Perhaps he’d put too much in her, though. He considered thoughts of a new familiar, but reluctantly. At times, when Olivia rested on his shoulder or curled in his lap, he felt the struggle of his emotions, the desire to pet her like a cat warring with a shrinking away, a don’t-touch-me shudder. He was still young for a wizard, still trying to learn what magic meant. Still trying to become more than human.

He sighed. After a few months, he’d try to get Olivia to see reason and abandon her effort.

• • • •

Three months later, Olivia still spent most waking hours curled around her egg, drowsy contentment evident in the set of her wings. Niccolo had resigned himself to her absent-mindedness. He had been working on a set of experiments involving aqua vitæ and a supposed phoenix feather, coaxing bits of down away from the shaft. He hoped to evoke fiery gold, but so far all he had was soggy fluff.

He looked up from the alembic on his worktable as Olivia chirped.

“I’ve told you before, don’t make noises while I’m. . .” he began, but she ignored him.

“It’s hatching! It’s hatching!” She unwrapped herself, backed away from the egg, eying it. “What do I do?”

“It’s your egg!”

“I’ve never done this before!”

They both gazed in fascination as the egg wobbled.

“Should I get some hot water?” Niccolo said.

“What are you planning on doing, cooking it?”

“They always seem to fetch hot water for babies.”

The egg rocked back and forth as its occupant shifted.

“Maybe it can’t get out,” Olivia worried. “Should I help it?”

“Give it time,” Niccolo said.

They stared as though mesmerized. The egg tipped, tottered. . . toppled from the mantelpiece. Olivia shrieked even as Niccolo dove for it, his heart almost stopping.

The egg shattered in his hands and what he held there almost made him drop it. For an instant he thought it dead. Then the tiny lizard mewled and Olivia’s wings were fluttering in his face even as he tried to set the infant down. Chaos reigned for a moment before Olivia was curled around her offspring while Niccolo crouched on his knees, ignoring the arthritic twinges.

The baby was, despite all of Niccolo’s thoughts about mutants and monstrosities, perfect. Like Olivia, it had a miniature dragon’s form, with frilled, lacey wings that stretched out now, trembling, to dry. Glistening amniotic fluid hung in thick strands from them.

Niccolo took a damp cloth and tenderly cleaned the wings as Olivia fussed and twined around his hands.

“You did well, Olivia,” he admitted, looking down at her child. “You did well.”

• • • •

Almost all wizards have hobbies, and they refuse to taint these grand obsessions with magic. Niccolo’s was fishing. He knew every trout stream in the forest surrounding his retreat, and his favorite was an unnamed brook that made its way through beech groves and sandy sloughs, past a stand of willows whose roots had gnawed away at the bank, creating holes and riddles where trout might lurk in the hot afternoons, waiting for evening. A fallen tree formed a bench where Niccolo could sit, his creel beside him lined with fresh moss and ready to hold his catch.

He threaded his rod and attached a caddis fly lure Olivia had helped him create. He wasn’t sure that using her to assist didn’t count as magic, but his fingers shook, and she was still as deft and nimble-clawed as when he had first created her almost a century ago. The lure’s underbelly was yellow as daffodils and its wings were bits of brown feather. Deep in its guts was the hook, barbed to catch hold of a trout’s tender mouth and let Niccolo coax it ashore.

Hours passed as he cast and drowsed, waiting with the patience only a fisherman knows. A few times he felt the tentative twitch of the hook and paused, but the trout were wary and skittish that day. With the coming of dusk, he knew, though, they would grow hungry and strike hard at the insects lighting on the water, his lure whirling among them.

His purpose was not to catch fish, but to think. He contemplated Olivia. Every wizard needs a familiar, like a second voice speaking the things that she or he has left behind, the barbs and commonplace facts of life that a wizard tries to divest themselves of in the quest for immortality.

Familiars were like second souls, advice you could trust. You could make a familiar, as Niccolo had, and place bits of yourself in it, but it was hard. Few had accomplished it, and most wizards relied on familiars already fit to speak. Ravens were popular, and a line of talking cats in Loudontown had furnished familiars for the wizards’ school there for decades.

Talking. That was what distinguished familiars from most animals, aside from various prophetic creatures. It worried Niccolo that the offspring, which Olivia had named Hrist, had yet to speak. Was it possible that—unlike its parents—it lacked intelligence? As the months passed, he had watched it, trying to determine what was passing through its mind. It seemed to respond to words, to “no” and “dinner” and such, but after all—a well-trained hound might do as much. Had Hrist lapsed to an animal’s natural state, lacking the spark that his parents had possessed?

Olivia rejected this notion when Niccolo proposed it to her that night over a dinner of fresh-caught trout and bread from the nearby village.

“Hrist is as smart as you or I,” she said indignantly. “Perhaps even more so, in your case.” She looked over at Hrist.

By now, the winged lizard extended six inches from snout to tail, half his mother’s size. He lay on the windowsill in the sun, regarding his reflection in the dust-flecked glass with a placid gaze.

“Indeed,” Niccolo said dubiously.

Hrist swiveled his head, looked Niccolo in the eye, and nodded once.

Niccolo blinked, astonished.

“If he can understand us, why can’t he reply, Olivia?” he said.

Olivia’s tail swished. “He can’t talk,” she said.

“You and his father both have fully formed—perhaps even more so, in your case—vocal apparati. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t.”

Of course, there was no reason why Hrist should exist in the first place, Niccolo thought, but Olivia would become even more furious if he said that.

And Hrist was, Niccolo admitted, a charming little creature. He loved to hunt and would spend hours in the vegetable garden, haunting the zucchini and pepper plants in order to eat squash vine borers and yellow-and-black striped cucumber beetles.

As the little dragon grew, Niccolo worked at teaching Hrist how to write instead. The dragonling quickly learned, using his long tail much like a ink pen, dipping it with a sinuous twist in the inkwell and employing the pointed tip to scrawl on parchment. He shared his mother’s quick and sometimes sardonic wit, but his observations were written out in a meticulous, careful hand.

He took to reading like a duck to water, and Niccolo would find him draped over a volume, carefully scanning the words and turning the pages with his flexible, almost prehensile tail.

“I don’t know why I can’t talk,” he wrote when Niccolo questioned him. “I try to speak and nothing comes out but air.”

He could make noises, the hisses and chirps and rumbles that Olivia regularly engaged in, which comforted Niccolo somewhat. But try as he might, he could not give his familiar’s child a voice.

“What will he do?” Olivia worried. “No wizard will take him on as a familiar if he can’t talk.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Niccolo argued, but in his heart he knew that Olivia was right. Wizards were proud. No one would want a defective familiar. Familiars were reflections of one’s heart and soul.

Still, he would try.

• • • •

Niccolo consulted one of the few non-human wizards he knew. Most of the magic users he was acquainted with shunned Slith, a wyvern’s child whose scales, slit eyes, and sinuous, boneless grace unnerved them. His tower, perched halfway up a volcano, was rarely visited and as Niccolo ascended the mountainside, he wondered whether Slith blamed his race or his location for his isolation.

Slith listened, his golden eyes considering, as Niccolo described Hrist’s condition, concluding, “How will any wizard take him as a familiar? He’s defective!”

“Have you ever thought,” Slith said, “that your problem may be your solution?”

Niccolo looked, puzzled, at the other wizard, and Slith’s eyes took on a self-congratulatory gleam. Wizards love riddle games, and confounding another wizard was a rare prize in that competition.

“A familiar’s powers develop in response to their wizard,” Slith said. He nodded towards his own familiar, a lop-eared, brindled tomcat named Slasher.

Slasher yawned and said, “It’s true. Before I became a familiar, I couldn’t talk.”

“Truly?” Niccolo said. He was not well-versed in familiar lore. Most wizards weren’t, but rather took their familiar for granted, a tool like an athame or a well-crafted amulet.

“Truly,” Slith said. “Find the right wizard and the problem will no longer be a problem.”

• • • •

“Get the house ready,” Niccolo told Olivia. “We’re going to take on an apprentice.”

She gaped. “But, Master, you don’t like apprentices! You’ve always said they were more trouble than they were worth!”

Hrist was outside, chasing bumblebees, so Niccolo spoke freely. “Yes, but what do apprentices grow up to become?”

Olivia was quick-witted as ever. “Wizards! You think that one of them will . . . ”

“Perhaps,” Niccolo said. “Don’t get your hopes up too much, Olivia.”

“How will you get them here?”

Niccolo tapped the thick envelope on his desk, which had arrived that morning. “I’ve offered to instruct them in hydromancy,” he said. “I knew the College had no one specializing in it. It’s obscure enough that the Dean couldn’t justify the expense, but I’ve agreed to allow myself to be hired, for a small fee, to instruct them. Each will arrive, spend one month learning its basics and then depart. Sooner or later, the right one will arrive for Hrist.”

Olivia’s eyes held admiration, and Niccolo allowed himself to run a fingertip along the smooth skin of her sides in an almost-caress. Surely, Niccolo thought, there was no harm in the trace of affection he felt. Wasn’t that the basis of sympathetic magic, after all, a fondness of one thing for another?

• • • •

The first apprentice was Albert. He had red hair that stuck out like a ransacked haystack and bright, merry blue eyes. Hrist hated him on sight, and Albert bore out the little familiar’s judgement in full measure.

Niccolo, unfortunately, liked him. The apprentice reminded him of Olivia in the quickness of his quips, the slight barb to his wit. Much like Niccolo had been at his age, before he put away that side of him to focus on magic. Albert’s pranks amused Niccolo more than he wanted to admit, despite Olivia’s exasperation with household upsets, with salt in the sugar bowl and spiders in the tea.

Albert sensed Niccolo’s mood, and his pranks expanded exponentially, knowing that punishment would not fall on him. Albert went so far as to involve the elderly wizard as a conspirator at times, much to Olivia’s fury, since she or Hrist were the target.

And then one day as Niccolo and Albert were working out the Seven Aquatic Principles, Albert said, “I have a fine idea for a prank on the Dean of Loudontown.”

“What’s that?” Niccolo asked, intrigued. The Dean was a stiff and formal woman, and Niccolo found the thought of her discomfited in some way an appealing one.

“We’ll ship Hrist to her and say that he’s under a curse, that’s why he doesn’t talk. Either the Dean will try to lift it herself or she’ll set it to someone as a test.” Albert laughed. “Imagine how much time they’ll spend on the runt, thinking they can fix him!”

“Hrist. . .is not broken,” Niccolo said slowly.

Albert didn’t catch the warning undertone in his teacher’s voice. He continued, “Might as well use him for something, he’s useless for much else besides catching spiders.” He laughed.

“Pack your things,” Niccolo said. “You’re going back to Loudontown. And if you want to be a wizard, Albert, you’ll put away this sense of humor. When you have a familiar that you can store it in, you’ll understand.”

And so, bewildered, Albert departed to play his tricks elsewhere.

• • • •

The second apprentice was Chloe. Niccolo had to admit, he was pulling for her as well. She was clear-eyed and grave, and wore her pale hair tightly knotted atop her head. She played chess well, and she and Hrist would sit for hours over the chessboard, the dragonling studying the pieces from a higher vantage point before fluttering down to move a pawn or bishop with his tail.

And yet, once Chloe had finished her studies with Niccolo, she came to him and said, “I do not want Hrist as a familiar.”

Niccolo found himself awash in denials. “I didn’t . . . I mean, we weren’t intending . . . ”

Chloe’s eyes were remote. “You want to find him a wizard. I picked up that much. After that it was simply a matter of thinking why a wizard who had never shown any previous interest in teaching would have suddenly acquired it. It’s very kind of you.”

He was not sure whether or not the words were a compliment.

But Chloe was young enough that they were the praise they seemed—though she might not think the same in another century or two. She smiled at him.

“Have you ever thought,” she asked, “that Hrist might find some path other than familiar?”

“I had,” Niccolo said. “More than once. But Olivia has her heart set on it—she doesn’t want him to become ‘some ordinary pet,’ she said.”

“A chess-playing dragonling whose penmanship is as good as any monk’s?” Chloe said. “I do not think anyone will ever consider Hrist ordinary.” She smiled again and Niccolo decided it was a good thing that she was moving on, perhaps. Chloe made him think of altogether too many human things, and that would be good for neither of them.

• • • •

The third apprentice was Ibbi, who had a rounded face and the merest intimation of fuzz on his cheeks.

He was a disaster. He arrived with the bottle of brandy the Dean had sent to Niccolo shattered and dripping through his luggage, which retained the smell of expensive alcohol for weeks. He broke three plates, a mug, and Olivia’s favorite candlestick washing up the first night. Things went downhill from there. He could not master the simplest cantrip that Niccolo set him, his pronunciation of Latin was atrocious, and his fingers seemed all disjointed thumbs.

Hrist adored him. And so, despite misgivings, Niccolo let him stay and be taught. And at the end of a month, when Ibbi had failed to learn even the simplest water-based charm, Niccolo lied to the Dean and said that Ibbi was doing so well that he intended to keep him an extra month, continuing through till Samhain.

Privately, he thought perhaps a clumsy wizard and a defective familiar might fit well together. Perhaps Hrist could give Ibbi the assurance he needed. And Ibbi . . . well, Hrist needed a voice.

But the days went by, and Ibbi showed no signs of improving, or of bonding with Hrist.

Samhain was celebrated in the nearby village, and when Niccolo went there a few days before it, he saw the preparations underway: festoons of ivy disguising the doorways, plump jack-o-lanterns set to illuminate the square, wood piled for the holiday’s bonfire. When he mentioned it at home, Olivia clamored to attend, while Ibbi’s eyes sparked with enthusiasm. Even Hrist seemed intrigued, asking question after question on a parchment scroll as Ibbi tried to answer.

“Why is this celebrated?” Hrist wrote.

Ibbi stammered, “It’s when the veil between worlds is torn. Barriers drop on Samhain.”

“Barriers?” Hrist wrote the word in a single twist and flick of his tail.

“Barriers,” Niccolo said. “Things are thinner on Samhain. Things disguise themselves as each other, and alliances that might not be made on other nights are enabled.”

“The God of the Darkest Night, Cerunnos, appears,” Olivia said. “He will grant one boon. But no one ever asks.”

“Why?” Ibbi said.

“Have you learned nothing? Because gods twist wishes,” Niccolo said. “It takes a well-trained mind to construct a wish that a god can’t weasel out of. They split hairs finer than any lawyer. So the god appears and blesses the participants, and then we are done.”

Ibbi gave him an uncertain look. Increasingly he was nervous in the older wizard’s presence, as though he sensed Niccolo’s growing disappointment with his performance. Niccolo felt a surge of compassion and for once did not try to battle it back.

“We’ll all go for the bonfire,” he said. “You will need a costume, Ibbi. Samhain is a day for pretending to be something other than you are.”

“Will you wear one as well, Master?” Olivia asked.

Niccolo snorted, but Olivia was not to be deterred.

“You’ll make the villagers uneasy unless you do,” she said. “I’ll find something.”

• • • •

Early in Samhain eve, Olivia presented Niccolo with his costume. He snorted once again, but put on the dress and wig. She had chosen to clothe him as a tavern maid, and he thought irritably that if he could still feel the emotion of embarrassment, he would have objected. But Samhain was a day for fools and opposites, and he would play along, for her sake and that of Hrist and Ibbi. Olivia had clearly taken care with his costume. The dress was snug, but he could fit in it, along with a false bosom. He drew the line at the cosmetics she had somehow procured and laid out. He made an ugly woman, he thought, looking in the mirror, but that was mostly the beard.

Olivia had outdone herself, though, with Hrist and Ibbi. Ibbi wore a scaly cloak, and green mask, while Hrist simply wore a tiny wizard’s hat and clutched a matchstick wand.

“You’ve disguised them as each other!” Niccolo realized, and Olivia nodded, looking smug. She had chosen to drape herself with beads and jewelry till she was simply a glittering heap.

“What are you?” Niccolo asked.

Olivia peered out from between the links of a tarnished golden chain. “A dragon’s treasure horde!” she announced. “Can’t you tell?”

Despite himself, Niccolo laughed.

• • • •

Cheerfulness continued to buoy him, despite his best efforts to dampen it, as they made their way to the village. Niccolo was not the only person to have chosen a costume that depended on gender. Several other men minced about in dresses even more gaudily decorated than his, and the owners of the local tavern, the Greasy Eel, wore gentlemen’s dress coats and buckled breeches.

Usually the villagers were standoffish (except when making their way to his cottage to ask for luck charms or philters to ward off disease) and Niccolo was pleased to note that his costume dissolved some of the usual social ice. Olivia rode his shoulder, jingling and jangling like a paste and brilliants brooch, and Hrist stayed curled around Ibbi’s neck, occasionally jabbing his ear with the point of his cap.

As the darkness grew and the bonfire blazed, as the mugs of cider were passed around with potatoes roasted in the embers, Niccolo fought to keep from enjoying himself. Instead, he watched Hrist, whose presence fascinated the village children. One held Hrist in his hands, holding him up to admire him in the firelight and the little lizard permitted it, his mother looking fondly on from Niccolo’s shoulder.

“Master?” she whispered in his ear. “Master, you can construct wishes. You are a well-learned man. Could you not ask Cerunnos that my child be given a voice?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Olivia!” Niccolo snapped. “I thought you claimed you would not put the egg before me, and now you’re asking that I meddle with a god on its behalf? Have you no concern for my well-being? I am a poor enough wizard as it is, letting emotions sway me as I have!”

“But. . .” She subsided into silence as he scowled at her.

“We will hear no more of this,” he said.

In the fire’s dancing light, her eyes glittered like the jewels of her costume, but he could not read the emotion there.

• • • •

At midnight, the crowd gathered around the fire, and masks were doffed. Niccolo took off his wig, sticking it under his arm. Ibbi stood beside him, having reclaimed Hrist from the reluctant children.

The faces across the fire were horns and feathers, slips of skin and eager eyes that stared, like Niccolo and his tiny group, into the heart of the fire, waiting for the God.

He grew so slowly from the flames that no one knew when he arrived. Great curling ram’s horns, dripping with ash and fire, sat his shoulders. His cloak was night, and its lining gleamed with subdued stars.

He did not speak, but looked about the circle, waiting. There was resignation in his shoulders. Niccolo wondered how long it had been since anyone ignored the thousand cautionary tales and asked the god for a boon.

And then, from his shoulder, impossibly, Olivia spoke.

“Cerunnos, hear my plea!”

“No,” Niccolo said, and grabbed at her with panicked fingers, but all he caught was a netting of gilt and rhinestone, and she was hovering in the air before that patrician figure. “Olivia, no!”

The god gestured, and Niccolo could no longer speak. The massive face, still as a statue, listened.

“My child . . . and my master,” Olivia said. “Let them be what they want, what they aspire to! Grant me this, Cerunnos!”

Fire coursed through Niccolo, chasing away the panic.

The god considered, spoke. “No matter the price?”

“No matter the price,” Olivia said, and Niccolo knew she was doomed. He was being pulled into the fire, with Hrist, and somehow Ibbi, the three of them among the flames but not burning. He glimpsed Hrist, the doll-sized wizard’s hat askew, clinging to Ibbi, and hope surged in him before he was pulled inside the shadow of Cerunnos’ cloak, and darkness overtook him.

• • • •

After the god had gone away, after the villagers had scattered, as the dawn began to glimmer over the forest like an uncertain plea, Niccolo raised his head and spoke to Ibbi and Hrist beside the smoldering ashes of the fire.

“Well?” he said. His voice was rough. In his hands was Olivia’s body, broken by the magic that had surged through her in answer to her prayer.

Ibbi and Hrist stared at each other. Then Hrist spoke. “I can speak. But I am still not a familiar,” the little lizard said.

“No.” Ibbi stretched out his hand and suddenly laughed. “But I am no longer a wizard.”

“What?” Niccolo said, trying to understand.

They turned to look at him in eerie unison. Olivia was heavy in his hands.

“I am a familiar,” Ibbi said, and looked at Hrist.

“And I the wizard,” Hrist said. “You will bear the sorrow for me, Ibbi.”

So Ibbi wept obediently as Niccolo and Hrist buried Olivia’s tiny form in the garden, between the rows where Hrist had hunted flies and pill bugs in the summer sun. They placed her finery beneath her, as though she were in truth what she resembled, a dragon curled on a horde of gems and coins and precious metal and a caddis fly lure. She lay with her snout laid atop her paws, eyes closed and tail curled about her as they took handfuls of dirt and closed her into the earth’s darkness.

Ibbi wept.

But Hrist and Niccolo were true wizards now, and they felt nothing at all.

©2009 by Cat Rambo. Originally published in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Their 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. They are an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Their most recent works include Hearts of Tabat (novel, WordFire Press), Neither Here Nor There (collection, Hydra House Books) and Carpe Glitter (fiction, Meerkat Press). Forthcoming in 2020 are Exiles of Tabat (Wordfire Press) and You Sexy Thing (Tor MacMillan). For more information, as well as links to fiction and online school The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, see kittywumpus.net. They are represented by Seth Fishman of the Gernert Agency.

The Mocking Tower

Daniel Abraham | 9972 words

Old Au saw the thief first.

Squatting in the garden, she commanded a long view of the east road; gray flagstone straighter than nature amid the green scrub and bramble. Rich soil breathed its scent around her as she took an offending root in one hand and her garden knife in the other. Between the moment she began sawing and when she pulled the first tangle of dirt and pale vegetable flesh out of the ground, the thief appeared, a dot on the horizon. She worked as he approached. His cloak hung limp in the humid summer air. His hat, wide as his shoulders, shadowed his eyes. He wore an empty scabbard across his back. Old Au paused when he grew close. When he reached the wall of ancient stone that marked the border between the greater world and the protected lands within, he paused and looked toward the Mocking Tower.

The tower shimmered as the tales all said it would, appearing to change shape between one breath and the next. A great thrusting pillar of alabaster studded with living torches became an ancient palace of gray stone and moss became a rose-colored complication of terraces stacked one atop another toward the sky. The thief took in the illusionist’s art with an air of haughtiness and satisfaction. Old Au watched the man watch the tower, cleared her throat, and nodded to the stranger.

“What news?” she asked.

His gaze shifted to the old woman. His eyes looked as if they’d been dyed the same blue as a storm cloud. The lines around his mouth and eyes spoke of age and weather, but Old Au thought she saw a boyishness in them as well, like the image of an acorn worked in oak. Something in him reminded Old Au of a lover she’d taken years before. A man of high station who dreamed of living as a gardener. Dead now and his dreams with him except for what she carried with her. When the thief spoke, his voice carried the richness and depth of a reed instrument, softly played.

“The throne stands empty,” the thief said. “King Raan rots in his grave, and the princes vie to claim his place.”

“All seven of them?”

“Tauen, Maush, and Kinnin all fell to their brothers’ blades. Another—Aus by name—rose from the south with a foreign army at his back to lay a new claim. Five armies still cross the land and blight wherever they pass.”

“Shame, that,” Old Au said.

“Wars end. Even wars of succession. They also create certain unexpected opportunities for the bold,” he said, then shifted as by moving his shoulders, he moved the conversation. “These lands belong to the Imagi Vert?”

Old Au shrugged, pointing to the stone wall with her chin. “Everything within the border, and all the way round. Not subject to the throne, nor the one before it. Nor to whatever comes next either. The Mocking Tower stands apart from the world and the Imagi Vert sees to that, once and eternal. You’ve come on behalf of one of the princes? Plead the Imagi to take a side, maybe?”

“The tale I hear told says the Imagi Vert took King Raan’s soul when he died and fashioned it into a blade. And the blade lies somewhere in that tower. I have come to steal it.”

Old Au wiped a soil-darkened hand across her cheek, squinting first at the thief then at the Mocking Tower and back to the thief. His chin lifted as if in challenge. The empty scabbard tapped against his back as if asking for attention. Green lacquer and brass fittings, and long enough to hold even a fairly large sword. As though a king’s soul surely required a palatial blade to hold it.

“You make it a habit to announce that sort of thing, do you?” Old Au said as she brushed the soil off the length of pale, stubborn root still in the earth. “Seems an odd way to get what you want.”

The thief’s attention returned to her. A smile both bright and brief flickered on his lips. “I’m sure you know a great deal about gardening. I know a great deal about theft. This road leads to the township at the tower’s base?”

Old Au nodded. “Another hour down the road. Keep left at the crossing or you’ll find yourself heading south without much besides grain silos and the mill for company. But take the warning. Everyone you find there is loyal to the Imagi Vert. Anyone not tends to leave fair quick.”

“I don’t plan to stay.”

“You have a name, friend?” Old Au asked.

“Many of them.”

The thief slid a hand into his sleeve and drew it back out. Something small and bright between his fingers caught the sunlight. He tossed the coin to Old Au, and she caught it without thinking. A square of silver with a young man’s likeness pressed into the metal. Some prince or another. One of the dead king’s warring brood.

“This for my silence?” Old Au asked.

“For your help in directing me,” the thief said. “Anything more lies between you and your conscience.”

Old Au chuckled, nodded, and tucked the coin in her belt. The thief and his empty scabbard stepped off down the road. His stride shifted his cloak from side to side like the flourish of a street magician’s right hand distracting from the actions of the left. His hat carried shadow under its brim like a veil. The Mocking Tower changed to a soaring complex of chains hanging from a stonework tree taller than clouds to a spiral of basalt with stairways cut into the sides. Old Au shook her head and bent back down to her work. The stubborn root defied her, but she was stern and hard and well practiced with a garden knife. When it came out, long as her arm and pale as bone, she squatted in the churned black soil, wiped the sweat from her face, and looked west after the thief. The curve of the road and the trees hid him already.

The township that served the Imagi Vert pretended normalcy even in the shadow of magic. Only the central square boasted flagstone. Dust, dirt, and weeds made up all the streets. The small stables reeked like stables anywhere, and pisspots stood in the alleys waiting to be taken and their contents sold to the launderer to whiten cloth or the tanner to soften hide. The flowers of early summer drew bees and flies. The sun warmed thatched roofs until they stank a little. Birds chattered and warned each other from their nests. Dogs ran here as they did anywhere, chasing squirrels and each other. A few hundred feet to the north, the Mocking Tower loomed, a spire of bone and glass, then a pillar of plate-thin stones stacked one atop the other toward the sky, then a spiral of what looked like skinned flesh, then an ivy-clad maiden of granite with a crown of living flame.

The people of the township viewed the thief as the greater curiosity. He walked through the streets, eyes hidden but with a cheerful smile. The empty scabbard bumped against his back with every step.

The Traveler’s Hearth stood just down from the square and at an angle, like a servant with eyes politely averted. The thief went to it as if he stayed there often. The keeper—a fat man wearing the traditional iron chain of hospitality wrapping his left arm—greeted him in the courtyard.

“I need only a small room,” the thief said.

“No small rooms, nor any big ones either,” the fat man said. “Just rooms is all.”

“All people claim the same dignity before the Imagi?” the thief said as if joking.

“Just so. Just so. Simin can take your horse if you have one.”

Simin—a lanky, dark-haired boy with a simple, open face—nodded hopefully. The thief shook his head and handed three of the square, silver coins to the fat man. “I only take what I can carry.”

The keeper considered the coins as if they spelled out the future, then pressed his lips tight and shrugged. The iron chain clinked as if offering its own metallic thoughts. Simin broke the silence. “I can show you the way anyhow.”

“Very kind of you,” the thief said.

Simin trotted ahead, leading the thief down short halls and into a hidden courtyard of cherry trees. A stone cistern loomed in a corner where a thin-limbed girl scrubbed away moss with a black-bristled brush and tried not to stare. The thief nodded to her. She blushed and nodded back.

Simin stopped at a high door the color of fresh cream, opening the brass latch with a click. The thief stepped into his private room and the boy trotted along behind him. The air smelled of soap and lilac. Shadows clung to the pale walls, like stepping into a sudden twilight. A modest bed with a dark brown, rough-woven blanket of the sort common to the southern tribes a hundred years before. An ironwork sculpture of an iris in a frame hung on the wall opposite the only window. An earthenware jug and cup sat on a low table beside three unlit candles. Simin, smiling, closed the shutters as if the thief had asked him to. The shadows grew deeper.

The thief sank slowly to the bed. The empty scabbard clattered on the floor where he dropped it. He swept off his hat and let it sit beside him, covered in pollen and dust. Sweat-dark locks of hair stuck to his balding scalp. His cheerful smile vanished and fear took its place. He shook his head, pressed a palm to his brow, and shook his head again.

“I can’t. I can’t do this.”

“You can,” Simin—whose name was not Simin—snapped, his own affectation of boyish goodwill falling away. “And you will.”

“Did you see that tower? I’ve heard tales of the Mocking Tower, everyone has. I thought it would . . . I don’t know. Catch the sunlight oddly. Cast weird shadows. ‘Seems to shift moment by moment’ they say, ah? Too damned true. How do I put myself against a wizard who can do that?”

Simin leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. “You don’t. I do.”

“We’re making a mistake. We should go back.”

“Back to what? Fire and death? We keep to the plan,” the boy said. “Get the sword. End the war.”

The thief sagged forward, elbows against his knees, head in his hands. “If you say. If you say.” Then, gathering himself. “Did you find it?”

Simin poured water from the jug into the cup and handed it to the thief as he spoke. “No. But with you here, they’ll show me. Whatever changes, wherever the guard increases, whatever they keep you from. That’s how I’ll know. You strike the drum, and I listen to the echoes for answers. It works that way. And the more they watch you, the less they watch me.”

“I know, I know,” the thief said, then paused to drink the cup dry. He handed it back, wiping his lips with a sleeve. “I liked this plan better before I came here. Successions and thrones and blood and armies in the field. Now magic swords and wizards and a tower like something that’s crawled out of a bad dream. I don’t belong in something like this.”

“Go in the morning. Talk to everyone you can find. Ask about green glass.”

“Green glass? Why?”

“I found a private temple not far from the tower fashioned from it. I think the blade may be there.”

“Green glass, then. And boasting about crossing the Imagi Vert in front of the people most loyal to him. And acting mysterious and charming. When the wizard kills me over this, you can carry the guilt.”

“What news from the war?” Simin asked, and his tone said he already knew. The swamping of Loon Channel. The murder of Prince Tauen. The starvation in Cai Sao Station. A question that carries its own answer argues something more than its words. The thief understood.

“The payout justifies the risk,” the bald man said to the boy. “I never said otherwise.”

“We start tomorrow, then,” the boy said, and left, closing the door behind him.

“I already started today,” the thief muttered to an empty room.

• • • •

King Raan took the throne, and with it control of the Empire, a week before his twentieth name day. A boy still with the glow of youth in his skin, he sat in a chair of gold and gemstones and bones. He ruled for six decades through peace and strife, famine and plenty. Many people born on the day of his ascension lived out their whole lives not knowing any other ruler. The idea of governance and King Raan grew together in the minds of his subjects like two saplings planted side by side, twining around each other until neither could exist without the other. King Raan and the Empire and the right function of the world all named the same thing.

Easy enough, then, to forget the man who bore that weight. He alone of everyone from the Sea of Pearls to the knife-peaked Dai Dou mountains, the ice sheets of High Saral to the deserts of the Heliopon, understood that the man called King Raan who controlled the Empire as a normal person commanded their own hands, and the one named Raan Sauvo Serriadan born of Osh Sauvo, princess of Hei Sa and third wife to King Gaudon, did not share everything. The man and the office that demanded all his days only appeared at peace with each other. If anything, Death’s shadow oppressed him more than it did others because he could not pretend that more power and influence would bring a deeper meaning to his life. Wealth and status could not dispel the questions that haunted him. He sought his consolation in sex and philosophy and—near the end—the occult.

The sex led to a legion of children both within and outside the political labyrinths of marriage; the philosophy, to a series of melancholy letters which detailed his conception of the human soul and the nature of a well-lived life; and the occult, inevitably, to his friendship with the Imagi Vert.

The Imagi Vert: a name that conjured up a whole mythology of threats and wonders. Even more than the bodiless voice of the Stone Oracle at Kalafi or the Night Children that played in the waves off the coast of Amphos, the Imagi Vert embodied the deeper mysteries of the world. Some claimed that the Imagi began life as a human and suffered transformation by falling down a cliff and into a flaw in the universe. Others, that God could not breathe life into the clay of the world without opening a crack between heaven and earth, and the scar from that wound took a name and a tower and a circle of land for itself. Or that a great wizard cheated death itself by learning to live backward to the beginning of all things. All the different versions agreed on three things: the Imagi held the Mocking Tower and the land around it inviolate, those who sought to bend the Imagi to mere human will ended poorly, and wonders beyond the understanding of the most outlandish imagination lay hidden in the shadow of that changing and eternal tower. King Raan’s studies of the occult drew him to the low stone wall and the town and the tower as inevitably as water running down.

No one can know the nature of that first meeting, but many have guessed. Perhaps the emperor could only experience humility before the ageless, timeless thing that called the Mocking Tower home. Or perhaps two people set so far above humanity that power became isolation more resembled refugees in a vast wilderness clinging to each other. No one witnessed the time those two kept in each other’s company, and King Raan shared little with his court. His trips to the Mocking Tower became first a yearly pilgrimage, then once in the high summer and another in winter’s depth. And then, as his years thinned him and travel from the palaces became impossible, a beloved memory that outlasted all others.

Death came to King Raan as with anyone. The throne of Empire did not exempt him. Physicians came from every corner of the world bearing vials of salt and herb, charms and chants and leeches. King Raan allowed them all to minister to him like an uncle indulging his nieces and nephews in their games. If he held any real hope of prolonging his life, he didn’t express it. The princes and princesses gathered around the palaces. The eldest—Prince Kinnan—bore his diadem on hair already grown thin and pale by fifty-eight years of life. Princess Magren, the youngest present, still wore braids like a child, celebrating a youth she had not quite outgrown. The palaces grew dense with the volume of servants and wealth and ambition, like a tick ready to pop with blood.

At the moment of his death, a darkness passed over the palaces. The torches and lamps and the fires in their grates all shuddered and went out. Some claim to have heard the sound of wings, as if the blackness hid a vastness of huge birds. Others, a low, musical whistling that came from the walls themselves. Only King Raan’s nurse and Prince Tauen, who fortune placed at his bedside, heard King Raan’s last words—You remembered your promise—and at the time, they placed no great importance upon them. When the servants finished rekindling the torches and candles, fire logs and lanterns, King Raan lay dead and the Empire changed.

For a time, it seemed as if this new order might fall close to the old. The legal scholars and priests who studied the arcana of dignified bloodlines identified those of King Raan’s children with just claims to the throne. As eldest, Kinnan held the strongest claim, but Naas—younger but of a higher-born mother—ran a near second. Then Tauen and Clar, Maush, and Tynnyn. Princess Saruenne of Holt cut her hair and her name together, declaring herself Prince Saru in a gesture which the priests said had many precedents. For the weeks of mourning, the Empire held its breath. Then Prince Kinnan announced the date of his ascension and invited his siblings to come in peace to honor the memory of the father they shared.

Even now, the identity of the men who slaughtered Kinnan’s wife and children remained unclear. But they failed to kill the prince, and the War of Seven Princes began.

In the years since the first blood spilled, only chaos reigned. News traveled across mountains and plains, lakes and oceans, and it spoke of death and loss and palace intrigue. And, sometimes, to those who cared to listen for it, of the Imagi Vert. A fisherman whose cousin worked in the palace kitchens said that on the night of King Raan’s death, when the fires died, a shape—human or nearly so—had been seen flying across the face of the moon. It came from the direction of the Mocking Tower and returned the same way. A woman traveling through the lands of the Imagi Vert at that same time reported that the townsfolk had kept inside that night, leaving the mild summer evening as empty as if a wild storm had raged.

Some tales could even be verified. Yes, agents of the Imagi had sought out half a dozen of the best swordsmiths in the Empire in the months of King Raan’s decline. Yes, a forge had been built in the lee of the Mocking Tower, then—a month after the death of the king—collapsed. Yes, a stranger had arrived at the library of Ahmon Suer in the weeks after the king’s first decline and demanded an obscure treatise on the nature of the soul.

Little more than whispers in a high wind, yet the links between the Imagi Vert and the death of the king began to tell a larger tale. This new mythology began in the king’s dying words and ended in one man’s plan to end the war.

The patchwork of truth and surmise came together this way: In his age, King Raan came to fear death, or if not fear it, at least regret its necessity. He appealed to his deathless friend and companion, the Imagi Vert. Together, they plotted a way that King Raan might shed the clay of his flesh and yet remain undying. The Imagi Vert, through means unknown to the pious, collected the king’s soul when it fled his body, returned with it to the Mocking Tower, and there forged it into a sword. Steel and fire formed a blade in which Raan could escape all endings.

And then . . . what would the wizard who lived outside of time do with such a blade? What power could a true soulsword give? Mere human guesses seemed unlikely to plumb the depths of the Imagi’s schemes and plots. Perhaps the sword gave some advantage a thousand years hence. Perhaps it only offered the pleasure of accomplishing a task no other alchemist dared to hazard. But for the heirs of the Empire? For the men and women and children who faced the prospect of war, it was an object of even greater power.

And so, in the capital of a small nation where King Raan had made one of his last visits, in the home of a woman who, almost two decades before, had been charged with the raising of young Prince Aus, the heir farthest from his father’s throne built schemes of his own.

He had lived alone his whole life, knowing nothing of his father and mother beyond a direction over the sea and an assurance that his blood gave him honor and dignity, if not love. He covered the fine stone walls in charcoal and wax as he mapped out his journey, the paths of his little armies. The eighth in the War of Seven Princes, and the one with the least hope of victory in the field.

The field did not concern him. For Aus, the path of victory wound through no battlefields. Only the gardens and grounds of the Mocking Tower. The ruins where ivy already overgrew the charred bones of a forge. A temple of green glass. The streets and stables, mills and kitchens and farmyards of the lands that no king claimed. There or nowhere lay the key to the ambitions of Aus, the Forgotten Prince.

Aus, whose name was not Simin.

• • • •

“I have always had a fondness for . . . green glass,” the thief said and smiled knowingly. The woman standing before him—dark-haired and broad-shouldered—rested her axe on her shoulder and said nothing. The thief smiled as if the two of them were sharing a joke, tipped his wide-brimmed hat, and moved on down the street. The town betrayed no trace of its eerie status apart from the Mocking Tower itself. Men and women went about the business of their days here as they would anywhere. Dogs and children chased each other over rough stone paving and through wide puddles of standing mud. Birds watched from the tree branches thick with leaves. So long as the constantly changing tower remained hidden, forgetting it seemed possible. And the thief found ways to keep the tower out of sight.

A thick-faced man hauling a cartload of fresh-cut hay made his way along the street, a creature of soft grunts and sweat. The thief stepped in front of him. “A fine morning. I wonder, friend, if you might know something interesting about green glass? I have good silver to trade for good words.”

The hauler paused, scowled, and shrugged his shoulders before he shoved on. The thief smiled after him as if his reticence told a clearer tale than all the eloquence in the world. He drew an old tin sextant from his robe, hung a plumb line with a lump of gem-bright crimson glass for a bob, and pretended to take readings of the tops of the trees. He felt like an idiot, and a frightened one at that. He expected to end the day facedown in a ditch with fish eating his eyes. But he also took his work seriously, so he made a mysterious ass of himself and hoped for the best without being too specific about what that best might be.

In the stables, Prince Aus played at Simin, nodding and helping wherever he found a chance, and above all else listening.

The keeper to his wife as they tended to the grapevines behind the main house: Of course I sent word to the tower. Went there myself as soon as I saw him off to his room. Expect the Imagi knew well before I said anything, though.

The cleaning girl to her mother as they walked toward the market with the day’s eggs: The Imagi sent instructions in the night. Little finches with hollowed eyes that carried bits of parchment in their beaks. Bir—(who Simin knew as the blacksmith’s apprentice)—got one, and so did Soylu.

One of the little girls wearing as much mud as dress as she clapped her hands in the filthy water by her house: Thieves and rats, thieves and rats, and all of us are blades and cats.

Everyone knew, as Simin hoped they would. But if any panicked, he didn’t see it. Like a man walking toward a dog on a road at twilight, the town watched, calm and steady, as it judged the threat. But at least it felt threatened or amused or at least interested. Of his greatest fears—boredom, complaisance, indifference—he saw nothing. The thief loomed in the news of the town, and that sufficed.

After lunch, when Simin traditionally slipped away to the hayloft for a long nap, Prince Aus slipped away down the track that pretended to be a deer trail. He walked carefully, his ears straining over the buzzing of summer flies and the hushing of the high grass. The midday heat drenched him with sweat and the thick air went into his lungs like steam. The Mocking Tower shifted: a spiral of smooth white stones reaching to the sky; a pair of massive yellow curves nesting one within the other like the beak of an impossible huge bird; a single uncarved block of smoky obsidian. As he neared the site of the green-glass temple, he slowed even more.

The little marks set to warn of others passing along the track remained. The long blade of grass bent at knee height still leaned across the path. The thread thin as spider’s web at waist height still caught the thick, sluggish breeze between a dead tree and a thick, sharp-leaved bush. Prince Aus felt the disappointment growing in his heart even before he made the last turn and the green-glass temple came into view.

Perhaps it had grown smaller since first he’d discovered it—anything seemed possible so close to the Mocking Tower. Or perhaps the first dissonant chords of disappointment only made it seem so. The afternoon sun shone against the undulating emerald surfaces, but he only saw the dust now. When he stepped inside and stepped to the low altar, he felt none of the sense of wonder and certainty that bore him up the night he’d found it. The dust he’d spread so carefully in hopes of showing where the footsteps of the unwary had passed remained unstirred.

The thief had come, made his threat, and no one had reacted. Not the townsfolk. Not the Imagi Vert. Prince Aus told himself to be pleased. He preferred finding the blade’s true hiding place, but knowing for certain that the temple did not hold it added to his knowledge, subtracted from the possibilities that remained. He cultivated patience. Mostly. His single frustrated shout set the birds in the treetops to flights, but only once. He didn’t repeat it.

He walked back along the trail, hurrying to get back to the hayloft before anyone expected Simin to wake. Even as he broke into a trot, he felt his false persona slipping into place. Simin the vagabond. The boy too dull to have a story of his own worth knowing. Simin the unremarkable. And perhaps it was because of this—the role he’d inhabited before fitting so well into place—that the cleaning girl walking along the road away from town and tower failed to notice him.

The market lay nowhere near. The girl’s mother no longer limped at her side. And something bounced and bobbled against her back. A little cloth bag, grease-stained. The sort that might hold a bit of food carried for not too long a journey.

Aus or Simin paused, pulled between two impulses: return to safety before anyone could penetrate his disguise or else . . . or else see what this girl meant by traveling alone so far from where her usual paths led her. And with food. And—yes—just the faintest air of furtive excitement. Aus felt his belly tighten, a knot form in the back of his throat.

He turned, following her at a distance, and with all the stealth he could.

The girl led him to the north, away from the green-glass temple, and around to the uncanny, shifting tower. The sun caught the crimson of her scarf and the sway of her hair as brightly as a banner on the field. The sun’s heat stood on the edge between pleasant and oppressive. The thickness of the air felt like a coming storm. He kept to the shadows under boughs and edges of the tall grass where the path’s curve took her nearly out of sight. His fear of being seen grew in him, changing as it did into a vibrating excitement. At any moment, the keeper of the Traveler’s Hearth would come looking for him. The urge to break off tugged at him, but the sense of teetering on the edge of something critical pulled him forward. The girl, unaware that his world now centered on her, walked and skipped, paused and looked back, walked on. A patch of sweat darkened the back of her dress.

And in a stretch of dappled shade where two trees overhung the path, she vanished.

A cold rush of panic filled the prince’s chest. The girl had been an illusion, the bait in a trap. Or she had escaped him and even as he stood there, she hurried to raise the alarm. He waited, his body stiff as wood, and only when nothing happened for ten long, shuddering breaths together did he move forward. The path between the trees stood empty. The leaves shuddered in a barely felt breeze. The rough-worn earth went before and behind. Nothing seemed odd or out of place apart from his memory of the girl and her present absence. The prince turned slowly, blinking in confusion and wonder.

The complication of air nearly escaped him. Made from nothing, it looked like nothing. Only a flaw in the light like the smallest ripple in a glass. Even when he saw it, he doubted. But he stepped forward, one foot before the other, and the landscape unfolded around him as if by walking straight ahead, he rounded a bend in the path and exposed new and unseen vistas. A hillside rose green-grassed and dandelion-spattered to the very foot of the Mocking Tower. A lintel of stone stood at the mouth of a cave, and in the place of twilight between the darkness underground and the shining daylight, the cleaning girl sat with Bir, the blacksmith’s apprentice, beside her. A lunch of chicken and bread spread out by their side and the little cloth bag collapsed behind them. The two saw nothing but each other, but Prince Aus saw everything. The girl’s awkward smile. The apprentice blacksmith’s ill-fitting armor and leather-handled axe. The shuddering shape after shape after shape of the tower. He walked backward, the world refolding itself around him until he stood alone on the path again, in the same place but no longer entirely the same man.

A pathway hidden by magic. A man set to guard it even at the cost of his usual duties. The abandoned temple no longer pained him. What he’d sought, he’d found. The Imagi Vert, alarmed by the thief, drew up his defenses, and in doing so, showed what wanted defending. Simin or Aus retreated to the town, walking often forward and often backward, hurrying to avoid suspicion in his absence but also committing the path to memory for the time when he returned.

The rest of the day Prince Aus committed himself to being Simin. He mucked out the stalls and repaired the place in the chicken run where something from the woods failed to force its way in. He hauled water from the well to the hearth’s kitchen and carried pies from the kitchen to the miller as exchange for the uncooked flour. When the keeper made a joke, he laughed. When the cleaning girl trotted by near sundown with her cheeks bright and her sleeve stained green with grass, he pretended not to notice. The Mocking Tower changed: a moon-pocked shaft of white and gray; a block of iron like a great anvil with glowing windows around the top; a ramshackle construction like all the buildings of a rough village stacked one atop the other and swaying in the slight breeze.

The thief came to the common room for dinner, ate and drank and laughed without appearing to have a care in the world or any interest in Simin. His merry blue eyes danced and glittered in the candlelight, and he drank wine and sang songs as if everything that happened fit in with some unimaginably complex plan. Near midnight, when Prince Aus snuck across the grounds to the thief’s room, the door stood ajar, and the man hunched on the bed seemed like someone else entirely. The thief’s eyes watered and deep grooves of concern bordering on fear carved themselves into his forehead and the corners of his mouth.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he said, as the prince stepped into the room. “They smile and talk when I face them, but as soon as I turn my back, they plot murder. A day more, two at most, and a knife’s going to sprout right between my shoulder blades. I can feel it already.”

“Can you, now?” the prince said, shutting the door.

“I can. It itches.” The thief ran a hand over his scalp, disarranging his hair.

The prince sat beside him. “Good that we leave tonight, then.”

The thief started then went still. His wide eyes flickered over the Prince’s face. “Seriously?”

“I found a place. A hidden cave at the base of the tower. Guarded by a man who isn’t a guard by trade and shrouded by magic.”

“Well,” the thief said, then laughed like a brook in flood. “The plan worked? The plan actually worked? I’m damned. I figured us both for dead.”

“Working,” the prince said. “Not worked. Not yet. You stay here. Rouse no more suspicions. But when I come back, we ride.”

“Understood,” the thief said. And as the prince rose to go, he leaped to his feet, scrabbled under the bed, and stood again. He held out the green-and-brass scabbard. “Take this. To carry the blade when you find it.”

Gently but firmly, the prince pushed the scabbard back. The thief blinked his confusion.

“I don’t want to claim my father’s soul,” the prince said. “I came here to destroy it.”

• • • •

The prince moved through the darkness, a shadow among shadows. The night held no terror for him. His tightly cut black cloak and the sheathed knife at his hip, soft boots and dirtied face, left him feeling like a dockside cutthroat. He told himself that the tightness in his throat and the tripping of his heart only meant excitement, not fear, and the telling made it true.

The scrub and grass along the path had lost its green. Moonlight remade the world in black and gray. Animals shuffled in the darkness of the scrub. The trees rubbed their leaves together with a sound like soft rain. The Mocking Tower shifted and changed like a sleeper made uneasy by spoiled dreams, but in the darkness he could not make out the details. Without so much as a candle, the prince retraced the way the cleaning girl had brought him.

Where the two trees spanned the path, he paused. Gloom made the fissure of light and air invisible, but he remembered it. Crouching low, he crept forward. His eyes strained. The glamours and spells of the Imagi Vert might not hold to the laws of human experience. What worked in daylight could fail in the night. But no, the world shifted as it had before. The mere wild unfurled a path, a hill, a cave. And the shifting tower where his father’s soul lay, fashioned now in steel. A flicker of light from the mouth of the cave. A lantern imperfectly shuttered. He slipped forward, cultivating silence.

He recognized the night guard but didn’t know his name. Simin had perhaps nodded to him at the market or waved to him at the mill; the simple exchange of fellow citizens. But circumstances transformed them now to a prince of the Empire and the servant of his enemy. Aus attacked from the dark, killing the man before he could cry out. The prince watched the life fade from the man’s eyes. The war claimed other people all across the Empire. Children and women died in the streets of Low Shaoen. Soldiers irrigated the fields of Mattawan Commons with their blood. The guard choking on surprise and his own blood deserved no more or less than the other thousands of dead. Prince Aus stood over him as man became corpse. The murder didn’t belong to him. King Raan put all of it in motion, and so the responsibility lay with him and his still-unjudged soul. If the prince’s hands trembled after the violence, it only proved that death still moved him. That his humanity still stood higher than that of the man who sired him.

He took the keys from the dead man’s hip and the lantern from beside the guard stool that now stood empty, and moved deeper into the cave. The walls of rough stone, simple and uncarved, curved and dipped and rose without offering any corners or doorways. Cool air carried the smell of soil. The profound silence made even his stealthy footsteps seem like shouts. And in one stretch of hallway, unremarkable from all that came before, the prince’s ears ached suddenly and the air pressed in on him like a storm front, and he knew the Mocking Tower stood above him.

A glimmer came from the deeper darkness before him, something catching the lantern’s fragile beam. Part of the prince’s soul warned him to turn back, but the stronger command of his purpose drove him on. The glimmer grew and brightened until it resolved into a wide brass doorway with three panels and carvings of glyphs and designs that teased him from the edge of legibility. Had he seen it anywhere else, Prince Aus would still have recognized it as the entrance to the Imagi Vert’s sanctuary and seat of power. It took long, anxious minutes to find the keyhole hidden among the carvings—a tiny plate of brass that shifted to reveal a darkness just the right shape—but the dead guard’s key fit and it turned and the door opened.

Prince Aus stepped into the chamber beyond.

Candles burned along the walls but without any scent of tallow or wax, and their light settled softer than snow. In all, the chamber reached no deeper or wider than the common room of the Traveler’s Hearth, but rather than stools and tables and the long, low fire grate, plinths stood scattered about the space as if the stone had grown up from the bones of the earth. On each, an object stood. A cut gem the red of blood and the size of two clenched fists together. A rough doll fashioned from a twist of rope and a handful of dried grass. The skull of a child so young a staggered row of teeth still haunted the jawbone, waiting for a chance to displace tiny, sharp milk teeth. Aus walked slowly. No sounds troubled him. The stillness of the room felt profound. Even his breath seemed close to sacrilege in the space. A cup formed to resemble a cupped, thick-knuckled hand. A simple clay pot painted over with black lines as fine as a feather. Treasures, the prince thought, of a life prolonged centuries beyond its due. A sheet of vellum with a handprint in green. A bird’s nest made of long, thin bones.

A sword.

The prince’s throat went tight, his mouth suddenly dry. The blade lay on its side. Gems and worked silver formed a hilt like the writhing body of a man. Knotwork etching ran the length of the blade, twisted as a labyrinth. He reached out to it, hesitated, then, almost against his will, took it in his hand. It felt cooler than the room, as if eating the warmth of his flesh. It balanced perfectly. The finest sword ever forged. A sword of empires. A sword forged from steel and dark magic and his father’s willing soul. He swung it gently, half expecting its edge to cut the air itself.

“You admire it?”

The voice, harsh and low as stone dragged over earth, came from behind him. The man stood in the candlelight where the prince would swear no one had been only a moment before. The man’s dark robe moved stiffly, like the bark of a tree remade as cloth. Dark veins welled up under flesh as pale as bone. His mild eyes considered the prince.

“I admire it too,” the pale man said. “Good workmanship deserves respect, I think. However much you may disapprove of the project.” He tried a smile, then sighed.

“You are the Imagi?” the prince said, his voice high and tight. Fear vibrated in his blood and his grip on the sword tightened.

“Am I?” the pale man said, and tilted his head. “Before, I was part of something greater than myself, and darkness was my home. But now? I play the role of the Imagi now, I suppose. Yes. For this I might as well be the Imagi Vert.”

“I am Aus, son of Raan. You have stolen something from me and from my people. I have come to restore the balance of the world.”

The pale man seemed to settle into himself. Not a movement of peace or acceptance, but a grounding like a bull setting himself in place and refusing to be moved. A vast stillness radiated from him like cold from ice. The prince felt the sword pulsing in his hand, but it might only have been the beating of his own half-panicked heart.

“What balance is that?” the Imagi Vert asked, as if the matter held some trivial interest but no more than that.

“My father sinned against the gods,” the prince said, his voice wavering. “He used your powers to cheat death. To live forever. All the evil that the world has seen flows from that sin. The war raging through the Empire now? It’s because no one can take the power of the Empire while the former emperor still lives.”

“Is that the case?” the Imagi Vert said, lifting pale, hairless brows. “Ah.”

“My brothers die at each other’s hands. The wonders of the Empire burn. The right order of the world lies scattered like bones on the plain. Because of this.” The prince raised the sword between them. “Because one cowardly old man feared too much to die as he should have. And because his pet wizard chose to break the world. Do you deny it?”

“Would you like me to?” The Imagi’s smile could have meant anything. “If you wish. Let me think on it. Yes. Yes, all right. The war first, yes? You say it comes because the rightful heir cannot claim while the emperor still lives. But there have been usurpers before now. If the rightful king cannot rise, an unrighteous one could but hasn’t. The history of the world is studded with kings who have abdicated out of weariness or love or religious zealotry. Consider that the war came not because King Raan was a greedy man or an evil one but because he was unhappy.”

“Unhappy,” the prince said. Neither a question nor an agreement. A distance had come into his eyes and the feeling of hearing everything said before him as if he were eavesdropping from another room.

“His life was never his own. Duty and necessity kept him in the most glorious prison humanity could devise, and the envy of others made that confinement solitary as a monk’s. Even when among the throngs who worshipped him, your father lived his life alone. Others dream of power and kingship. Of more money and more sex and more respect. Just as you do. You say you’ve come here to . . . what? Save the world from your father? By taking your revenge upon the man who left you behind? And the confluence of those motives gave no pause, eh?”

The prince took a step back. The floor felt as if it had shifted beneath him, but the candle flames stood straight. None of the treasures in their places shook.

The Imagi shrugged, a slow, powerful gesture. “All right. All right. Let’s imagine you get what you claim you want. You kill the undying king and take his throne. What will you want then? When the loneliness and melancholy come upon you and you already have everything you aspired to and there is no higher reach, what will you wish for as a balm?”

“I would not need one.”

“You’re mistaken,” the Imagi said, and the words struck his chest like a blow. “Your father wished for a life he had not lived. A simple one with the freedoms invisible to you and the others. A baker, perhaps, spending his early hours kneading dough and smelling yeast and salt. Sweating before the oven. Or a fisherman mending nets with his brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. A brewer or a gardener or the manager of a dye yard. These were as sweet and exotic to him as he was to the lowborn. And he longed for the things denied to him. Badly.

“He lost sight of the challenge his children faced. Bearing his misery in silence cost him the strength to be a good father. Kept him from preparing his sons for the prison cell. Perhaps he thought of it as a kindness, yes? In some subterranean way, he hoped that by cutting you and your brothers away, he could protect you from all that he bore. Love’s cruel that way, and men are fools. But wouldn’t that be enough to explain why so many of you—yes, and yourself not the least—are so desperate to slaughter each other for what your father didn’t want?”

“The sword,” the prince said. “My father’s soul.”

The pale man shook his head, but whether his expression meant sorrow or disgust, the prince didn’t know. “You have misunderstood everything. There is no soul in that blade. It’s well made, but it means nothing. Take it if you think it will help you. Melt it if you’d rather. I’m beyond caring.”

Aus looked down at the sword in his hand. The complications along the blade felt like writing in a language he almost knew. His breath came hard, like he’d run a race. Or fled for his life. He tried to put names to the emotions that spat and wrestled in him: humiliation, anger, despair, grief. The coldness of the hilt grew intense, as if he held a shard of ice. He gripped it harder, inviting the chill into his flesh. Into his mind. Something to stand against the raging armies in his heart.

He shouted before he knew he meant to shout. Swung the blade hard, the movement starting in his legs, his hip, reaching out with a single flowing gesture, extending the sword as if it were part of him. The Imagi’s eyes went wider, and the tip of the blade split his jaw. It made a sound like an axe splitting wood. No blood fell from the wound, only a thin runnel of clear fluid.

The prince wrenched the blade free and struck again, screaming as he did. The Imagi lifted a hand to block the attack, and the bloodless fingers scattered on the floor. Great gashes opened in the pale flesh, the body splintering and falling apart under the assault. If he called out, the prince’s war cries drowned out his words. Prince Aus found himself standing with feet on either side of the pale corpse, swinging down and down and down, his wrist and shoulder aching from his effort. The Imagi lay still and dead, his head a pale pulp with neither muscle nor bone nor brain. Prince Aus lifted the sword again, in both hands this time, and drove it deep into the pale man’s torso, then put his weight upon it. He drove it deeper and twisted, his strength and his weight and his mad will pressing at the metal, bending it past its tolerance. All the power he possessed, he threw into this one terrible moment.

And the sword broke.

Prince Aus fell to his knees. The stump of the blade stood a few inches from the twisted hilt. The labyrinthine pattern was open now, its puzzles solved by violence. A shard of metal fallen at his knee glittered in the soft candlelight. The motionless body of the Imagi Vert looked like a hillside, the greater half of the sword standing proudly from it like a tower. Aus gasped for air and dropped the freezing hilt. His whole body ached, but the physical pain claimed the least of his attention.

The blade broken, his hopes fulfilled, he waited for something. A sense of release. Of victory. The soundless scream of his father’s soul at last set free from the world. A rush of the mystic energy that had forged the deathless vessel. Anything.

The candles shed their light. The plinths held their treasures. The silence folded around him until his own chuffing sobs broke it.

He rose unsteady as a drunk, stumbled against a plinth. The hilt of the broken sword slipped from his numb fingers and clattered on the floor. A sweet, earthy smell rose from the dead man, and the nausea it called forth drove the prince back toward the brass door. He’d dropped the lantern somewhere. He couldn’t recall. The passage back to the world stood dark as a tomb, but he made his lightless way. One foot before the other, hands out before him to warn him before he walked into the stone. His mouth tasted foul. His arms trembled. He wept empty tears with no sense of grief or catharsis. For a time, he felt certain that the cave would go on forever, that the death of the Imagi Vert had sealed him also in the immortal’s tomb. When he stumbled out into the starlit mouth of the cave, he more than half thought it a dream. The visions of a man with a broken mind. The dead guard, lying in his pool of blood, brought the prince back to himself. It was a war. It was the war. Terrible things happened here.

The night sky glittered with stars. The trees shifted in the open air. All the world seemed terrible and beautiful and empty. Prince Aus turned toward the path, the town. Behind him, the Mocking Tower whose roots he had dug changed and changed and changed again: a threefold tower with bridges lacing between the spires like a web, a vast tooth pointing toward the sky with a signal fire blaring at its tip, a glasswork column that rose toward the stars and funneled their dim light into its heart. The prince didn’t watch it. The night before him carried terrors and wonders enough.

He made his way to the path between the trees, toward the town where he’d lived—it seemed now—in some previous lifetime. To the Traveler’s Hearth, where the keep once sheltered and offered fair work to a boy named Simin, who in fact had been a being of skin and lies.

The thief’s door was barred from within, but candlelight flickered at the edges. The prince pounded until he heard the hiss of the bar lifting and the door swung open. The thief blinked at him, uncertain as a mouse.

“You look terrible.”

“We have to go,” the prince said, and his voice seemed to belong to some other man.

“You did it? It’s done?”

“We have to go now. Before the changing of guards, first light I’d guess. But it could be earlier. Could be now.”

“But—”

“We have to go!”

Together, the two men ran to the stable, chose which horses to steal, and galloped out to the road. They turned east, toward the first threads of rose and indigo where the light would rise to meet them. A dawn that would rise elsewhere on army camps and burned cities, fields left uncultivated for want of hands to farm them and river locks broken open for fear that an enemy would make use of them. The ruins of empire, and a war still raging.

And in the depths of the Mocking Tower, something stirred.

At first, the body moved only slightly, reknitting the worst of its wounds with a vegetable slowness. Then, when it could, the body levered itself up to unsteady feet. Pale eyes looked all around the chamber of treasures without suffering or joy. The rough cloak creaked and crackled as the body—neither alive nor dead but something of both—stepped out of the light and into the darkness. It felt a vague comfort in the darkness underground, to the degree that it felt anything.

The mouth of the cave came all too soon. A human body lay there, a cast-off forgotten thing. The pale man, jaw still hanging from his skull by woody threads, turned away from town and tower, walking into the trees where no path existed. He moved with the same deliberation and speed as he would have on the road and left no trail behind him. The Mocking Tower at his back shifted, fluttering from shape to shape, miracle to miracle, as compelling as a street performer’s scarf fluttering to draw attention away from what the other hand was doing.

Birds woke, singing their cacophony at the coming dawn. The light grew, and the wild gave way to a simple garden. Wide beds of dark, rich soil, well weeded so that no unwelcome plant competed with the onion, the beets, the carrots. A short, ragged-looking apple tree bent under the combined weight of its own fruit and a thin netting that kept the sparrows from feasting on it. In the rear near a well, a rough shack leaned, small but solid with a little yard paved in unfinished stone outside it. A little fire muttered and smoked as it warmed a pot of water for tea.

The pale man folded his legs under him, rested his palms on his knees, and waited with a patience that suggested he could wait forever. A yellow finch flew by, its wings fluttering. A doe tramped through the trees at the garden’s edge but didn’t approach.

Old Au came from the shack and nodded to him. She wore long trousers with mud-crusted leather at the knees, a loose canvas shirt, and boots cracked and mended and cracked again. A thin spade and gardener’s knife hung from her belt, and she carried an empty cloth sack over her shoulder. Heaving a sigh, she sat across from the pale man.

“Went poorly, then, did it?”

The pale man tried to say something with his ruined mouth, then made do with simply nodding. Old Au looked into the gently boiling water in the pan as if there might be some answers in it, then lifted it off and set it on the stone at her side. The pale man waited. She pulled a little sack from her pocket, plucked a few dried leaves from it, and dropped them in the still-but-steaming water. A few moments later, the scent of fresh tea joined the smells of turned earth and dew-soaked leaves.

“Did you explain that the war was only a war? That humanity falls into violence every few generations, and that his father, if anything, was too good at keeping the peace?”

The pale man nodded again.

“And could the boy hear it?”

The pale man hesitated, then shook his head. No, he could not.

Old Au chuckled. “Well, we try. Every generation is the same. They think their parents were never young, never subject to the confusions and lust they suffer. Born before the invention of sex and loss and passion, us. They all have to learn in their own way, however much we might wish we could counsel them out of it.” She swirled the tea. “Did you warn him what it will be like once he takes the throne?”

The pale man nodded.

“He didn’t hear that either, did he? Ah well. I imagine he’ll look back on it when he’s old and understand too late.” Old Au reached out her well-worn hand and took the pale man’s fingerless palm in hers. She shook him once, and he became a length of pale root again. Scarred now and ripped, paler where the bark peeled back. She hefted the root back close to the shed. She might break it down for mulch later, or else use it to carve something from. A whistle, maybe. Return it to the cycle or transform it to something Nature never dreamed for it. They were simple magics, and profound because of it.

She poured the tea into an old cup and sipped it as she squinted into the sky. It looked like a good day. Warm in the morning, but a bit of rain in the afternoon, she guessed. Enough for a few hours of good work. She took the spade from her hip and broke a little crust of mud from just below the handle with the nail of her thumb, humming to herself as she did. And then the gardener’s knife with its serrated edge for sawing through roots and the name Raan Sauvo Serriadan scratched into the blade in a language no one had spoken in centuries.

“There are some bulbs in the west field that want thinning,” she said. “What do you think, love?”

For a moment there, the breeze and the chirping of the birds seemed to harmonize, making some deeper music between them. Something like the murmur of a voice. Whatever it said made Old Au laugh.

She finished her tea, poured what remained out of the pot, and started walking toward the gardens and the day’s work still ahead.

©2017 by Daniel Abraham. Originally published in The Book of Swords, edited by Gardner Dozois. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Abraham has published sixteen novels and almost three dozen short stories. He is also adapting George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones into graphic novels.  His work has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, and has won the International Horror Guild award.  He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James SA Corey.  He lives in New Mexico.

EXCERPT: Sisters of the Vast Black (Tor.com)

Lina Rather | 4046 words

The sisters of the Order of Saint Rita captain their living ship into the reaches of space in Lina Rather’s debut novella, Sisters of the Vast Black.

Years ago, Old Earth sent forth sisters and brothers into the vast dark of the prodigal colonies armed only with crucifixes and iron faith. Now, the sisters of the Order of Saint Rita are on an interstellar mission of mercy aboard Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, a living, breathing ship which seems determined to develop a will of its own.

When the order receives a distress call from a newly-formed colony, the sisters discover that the bodies and souls in their care—and that of the galactic diaspora—are in danger. And not from void beyond, but from the nascent Central Governance and the Church itself.

Available now from Tor.com.

I.

Orate Fratres

While the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations argued themselves in circles, the Reverend Mother sat silently in her chair at the head of the chapel as she always did, listening to the arguments twist and double back on themselves.

Sister Lucia argued that the ship, being a beast and therefore not in possession of a rational soul, did not have a responsibility to follow the dictates of their order. Sister Varvara countered that convents were sacred places. The ship, be it beast or plant or mineral, had been consecrated according to doctrine. Allowing it to continue on its present course was a clear desecration and would be a blemish on all their souls. Sister Varvara had a face like the surface of an uninhabited moon, gray and stern. Usually, that face of hers brooked no argument.

They were burning too many precious chemlights on this debate. While Sister Ewostatewos delivered a long soliloquy on the early Church’s treatment of barnyard animals and how that might possibly illuminate their current dilemma regarding the ship, the Reverend Mother looked up to the spot where the crucifix hung. Every shipbound convent and poor colony ministry had the same one, mass-produced on Old Earth and brought by the crateful by newly-ordained priests doing their hardship posts out here in the black. The Reverend Mother hung this one on the wall herself forty years ago, right after the end of the war, when she was a young woman and the ship was newly consecrated. They’d both been so young then. After she had affixed the crucifix to the ship’s inner membrane with a dab of bioglue under each of the nails, she had laid her head against the muculent wall and listened to the heartbeat pumping fluid across the ship’s undulating body.

It had been a long time since Old Earth sent shipfuls of young priests out into the dark with identical crucifixes to convert the prodigal colonies. The Reverend Mother’s crucifix was a relic of a different age, an age of order and conformity.

“Mother,” Sister Gemma said, drawing her back from her reverie. “I’m afraid we’re no closer to a consensus.”

The Reverend Mother shook her head at her crucifix. She and the small Lord, they shared an understanding. She raised her hands.

Sister Lucia came forward and knelt by her side to watch her hands move. Most of them understood some signing, but she was the best at it.

“We shall think upon this matter for three days,” Sister Lucia translated. “And reconvene.”

“What about our bishop?” Sister Mary Catherine asked. She was stout and squat and the only one of the sisters to be Earth-born, and secretly in their sinful hearts the others believed this had warped her to be too reliant on hierarchical authority. They ignored her. Any communication with Earth would take three weeks to arrive from these outer reaches and another three weeks for the bishop to convey his opinion back. By that time, their decision would have been made one way or the other.

Thankfully, only Sister Lucia knew her well enough to see the small catches in her signing. Irritation, tiredness. Sister Mary Catherine was a new aspirant, directed to their convent because she wanted to minister to the godless outer systems. Apparently no one on Earth had told her that the farther systems had plenty of gods, or that the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations spent more time tending wounds of the flesh than bringing heathens to Christ and preferred it that way. She likely was not long for their company.

“The Reverend Mother says she shall send a message to the Vatican tonight.”

And she would, even though there was much to be done. They had been called to a new colony in need of marriages and a baptism, and they would make landfall on that moon in just a few hours. They had been indulging themselves too long in this. “Until then, let us prepare ourselves for the approach to Phoyongsa III. We shall fast from the next bell until landfall.”

Sister Mary Catherine opened her mouth again, but Sister Faustina cut her off so smoothly it seemed like an accident. “As you say, Mother.”

The Reverend Mother clapped her hands together, and the quorum was dispersed. There was work to be done. Always work, even on a pulmonate-ship like this that didn’t require oiling or welding or spare parts. Sister Mary Catherine and Sister Ewostatewos were on plant duty, so that they could all continue to eat. Sister Gemma’s duty was caring for the ship itself as it bore them through the stars. Most of the others went to rest or meditation. And Sister Faustina would monitor the communication array. The Lord worked in mysterious ways and strange places, here in the eternal dark. A call could come at any time and so someone always kept vigil.

The Reverend Mother was left alone in the chapel. She stretched out her hands and tried to stop them shaking. She was old but the tremble in her hands belonged to someone older still. She’d managed to cover it so far.

As she left, she laid her hand on the hatch between this room and the control bay. Beneath this stretch of damp skin ran one of the ship’s two main blood vessels and she could feel the pressure of the hemolymph pumping from the heart, through the invertebrate musculature, past digestive tubules and branching nerve clusters, forward to the head. She offered up a quick prayer for the heart, that it may continue to pump and sustain them all.

Sister Gemma went to her laboratory. She had set a diagnostic panel up to run through the quorum, and the results would be in by now. She wanted a solution, though she knew there was no clean one.

Before she could check the results, the ship needed tending.

She mixed a hormone injection by dropper and tested it by rubbing a droplet on a patch of ship-flesh she had cultured in a petri dish. The flesh flushed a healthy celadon. The ship was good at taking care of itself, but ten human lives still strained it. The injections sped along waste processing and absorption of excess protein and methane. She prepared a syringe and tapped it to release the air bubbles inside. To her knowledge no one had ever discovered what happened when a living ship had an embolism; she did not intend on being the one to find out.

Before she took vows, Sister Gemma had grown up on a shipyard in orbit around Saturn. Her first job, at fourteen and a half, was coaxing juvenile ships from their larval stage—where they looked like any Elysia chlorotica clinging to any coast on Old Earth—to the stage where they could be introduced to the vacuum. In shipyards, captive ships were bred by hand by biologists. Each individual’s genome was sequenced and mates chosen according to size estimates and risk of genetic disease. Shipwrights waited by the grand mating-ships until they released gelatinous ribbons of eggs like knobbly seaweed. The eggs were too fragile to stay in the airless dark, and so the shipwrights attached them to lattices in climate-controlled bays and culled the eggs down as they grew. A batch of thousands of eggs might produce only five or six viable ships, and only one or two of those would be sizable enough to house more than a dozen crew. It was a process about as far from God as it was possible to be. But there in that bay, spreading nutrient-slush across the lattices, Sister Gemma had her first glimpse of the divine in the slugs’ splitting cells and symbiotic photosynthesis.

Now she used a scalpel to cut through the mucus membrane that protected the ship’s inner flesh from irritants. She touched the tip of the needle to the pulsing viridian muscle and it quivered under her touch. A ship’s muscle tissue was soft and translucent, just strong enough to stand up to the pressures of space.

Behind her, the hatch made a soft sucking noise. Sister Ewostatewos pulled herself through, carrying a basket. She ruffled through the cabinets of chemical additives, searching for something.

“What’s wrong?” Sister Gemma asked.

“A slight iron deficiency in the beds. Nothing unexpected. We haven’t taken on unfiltered water recently.” Sister Ewostatewos poured a packet of soil supplement into a vial of a clear liquid and shook it. This she’d attached to the hydroponics bay’s feeder line and let it flow into the soybeans and carrots they’d planted last week. “You’re hesitating.”

Sister Gemma let the syringe drop and pressed her gloved hand against the naked muscle to keep the membrane from knitting itself back together. “Yes.”

Sister Ewostatewos was the newest of them, besides Sister Mary Catherine, who barely counted since they all knew they weren’t keeping her. She’d grown up on an airless moon, in a bubble. Her father was an Ethiopian Orthodox and her mother a Catholic, which she intimated was a strange partnership. Lately, Sister Gemma had wanted to ask her how she had come to pick one over the other, but some things were too private to ask after. Or too difficult to explain.

“I’m worried it’s my fault,” she said.

“The ship preparing for mating?”

“Yes.” Sister Gemma swallowed. The muscle twitched under her hand: small electrical impulses spasming in the nerves to remind her where she was. “I am responsible for its care. It’s so young for mating. Most ships don’t mature for another twenty or thirty years. Perhaps I wasn’t regulating its hormones correctly. Or I missed a vitamin deficiency.”

“Is that possible?”

Sister Gemma shrugged. Many things were possible. Almost anything. They lived at the very outer bounds of what was known. Back on Old Earth people studied living ships in laboratories and moon-based testing facilities with limitless budgets for breeding programs and genetic studies. They raised generation after generation of ships under endless variables. And even there, no one could be sure what caused one neonate to develop into a viable ship and another to mature to be chamberless and unusable. When she first noticed the ship’s changing hormonal profile, and its odd behavior, she had thought it was the early signs of organ failure. Then she discovered that the ship had imprinted on a mate somewhere in their voyage and was trying to follow its pheromone trail to fulfill their biological imperative. This was a relief for the two seconds before she began to think about the theological implications. “I sent a message to two of the leading research shipyards. But a response won’t arrive in time.”

“If you did the best you could, then everything else was up to God.”

Sister Ewostatewos only said such things when they were true, which made her one of Sister Gemma’s favorite people. In this life there were many people whose mouths were full of empty platitudes.

“I’m afraid,” Sister Gemma confessed. Of more than the ship, though she couldn’t say that.

“There will always be difficult choices. And even if we are the first religious house to face this dilemma, we won’t be the last. More and more orders are taking to living ships every year. Perhaps we will be remembered in teachings for it. How many of us will be remembered at all?”

“How prideful of you.”

Sister Ewostatewos laughed at the joke it was. “We’re all only human. Cheer up, sister. None of us can control what was.”

“You’re right of course.” Sister Gemma pulled her hand away from the ship’s muscle and pressed the syringe smoothly into it. The muscle twitched and then relaxed and she depressed the plunger. The edges of the membrane had gone dry and tacky because of her dallying. She rubbed a dab of moisturizing gel over them. The ship didn’t even need her to press them together—as soon as the gel had absorbed the incision disappeared seamlessly. She would never, never cease to be amazed by these ships. Even if she left shiplife forever one day, she would never forget the feel of its heartbeat surrounding her.

“I didn’t hear your vote earlier. May I ask?”

“I haven’t come to a decision. I don’t believe the ship has a soul, or a holy obligation. If we owned a cow, we would allow it to reproduce. And yet, we don’t live inside a cow. Livestock is not consecrated.” Sister Gemma shook her head. “Every argument I think of, I can counter.”

“Maybe you’ll come to an answer when we turn the gravity off. I find it clears my head.”

“Perhaps.”

Sister Ewostatewos smiled at her and took her mineral supplements back through the hatch. When she was gone, Sister Gemma touched the spot she had just sliced open, now as smooth as a newborn calf’s wet skin. She didn’t believe the ship had a soul. But she did believe it could want. Maybe if she stayed here, listening, she would hear its voice. Maybe it would tell her what to do.

Sister Faustina made herself a cup of tea with plenty of cream and sugar. This was not, perhaps, in keeping with the spirit of the upcoming fast, but she would drink it down before the next bell. They weren’t Poor Clares, after all, set on depriving themselves of every earthly comfort. No sense in depriving yourself now when there was plenty of deprivation yet to come. When the water boiled she picked a packet of green tea from the drawer and stirred it until the powder dissolved. She had heard that tea—real tea—was a kind of plant leaf, but she had never seen such a thing. It sounded just like the kind of resource-intensive wastefulness that Old Earthers were fond of. She allowed herself two scoops each from the cream and sugar canisters and let them turn her tea a pale brown like parcel paper.

She screwed the top onto her cup and settled herself into her chair in front of the communications array. Whoever had first grown this ship had been a lot taller, and the chair was never quite comfortable, no matter how many times she asked Sister Gemma to please readjust it. Ships always kept an imprint of their original design, and this one refused to grow a headrest three inches lower on the lump of fat that was her chair.

She set her cup to the left of the screen and rubbed her thumb over the soft moss covering the console until it grew up the sides of the cup to hold it in place. First she had to review the petitioning colony’s data. It was rare, but some convents were lured to their deaths with fake prayer requests. Ships were valuable, as were all their other supplies. The farther you got from Earth, the harder it was to find chemlights or processed chromium or medicine made by someone with a university degree.

Sister Faustina opened the colony’s message. First—a burst of advertisements. Best food in the third system! Repair your vessel at Vishni and Sons—we specialize in liveship propulsion repair! Come settle our beautiful moon—you’ve never seen water as clear as this! All sorts of signals piggybacked off of legitimate communications. Below the advertisements, older signals rolled over each other in the background audio. Some even prewar. Propagandist broadcasts and audiodramas, most read by Mrs. August, the never-named voice of Earth Central Governance. She’d done years and years of broadcasts, all in that particular, beautiful voice of hers. Even after the war, when she’d very likely died in one of the bombings, outer-system children had grown up listening to her bedtime stories, because it didn’t cost coin for the download rights.

Sister Faustina made a note to update their spam filter next time they docked at a station with a half-decent programmer.

The colony had sent a video, which was really an unwarranted expense, but did make it easier to verify their identities. Five people crowded into the screen.

“We send our greetings to the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations,” the woman in the center said. She spoke Earth English carefully. Her accent was familiar—Sister Faustina had also grown up speaking the patois of the asteroids and shipwreck belts. She knew exactly where this woman was from, with her tightly coiled dark hair and thin eyes and soft sienna skin. And from the real tell—her inherited heterochromia. The Plutonian Archipelago. A junkyard of ships left to wreck at the very edge of the first system. The Archipelago had been settled by two families, one Nigerian, and one Tibetan, who built a salvage empire in a worthless trash heap. The Phuntsok family was legendary. For generations they had been the kings of scavenge. Most of them had also been killed in the war when they stood against Earth. As far as Sister Faustina knew, the Archipelago was just a shimmering band of debris around the cold planetoid’s gravity well now. This young woman was probably the second generation to grow up outside it. “We are establishing a new colony on the moon Phoyongsa III. We would like our moon blessed, and three couples would like to be married. And—” She smiled. The darker-skinned man beside her had to be her husband, the way he beamed. “—we will have a baby to be baptized by then. We are sending the coordinates of our moon. We have supplies to trade as well. We eagerly await your reply.”

Sister Faustina checked their colony register and inventory list and found all in order. A baptism was always fun. There would be alcohol of some sort to go around—barley wine, probably—and the baby would be passed hand to hand, there would be real fire and soil-grown food.

There was another message in the bank, also directed specifically to them. How unusual. It had come a long, long way. Based on its signature and the trail of satellites and ships and breaches it had traveled through, it was from the first system.

Sister Faustina sipped her tea. A message from the first system was either very good or very bad. For the forty years since the Great War, Old Earth had retreated inward and left the other three systems mostly to their own affairs. Lately, the gray lady seemed to be stirring. Sister Faustina had seen more and more traders sponsored by Earth Central Governance taking the jumps to the second, third, and fourth systems, bringing with them tantalizing things that only Earth could produce, like silk and real black pepper and prewar wine and that wet-leaf tea they deified. It looked to Sister Faustina an awful lot like they wanted to bring their children back under their iron fist.

The message was sealed with their cardinal’s encryption. She entered the key. Only two people on the ship knew it, herself and the Mother Superior. They heard from the cardinal so rarely that it took her two tries. Usually these messages were about changes in protocol—the desired length of wimple for their order, a new translation of the liturgies, what station had a shipment of communion wafers available. They had not seen a priest in three years. It was hardly necessary. A century ago the Fourth Vatican Council had allowed sisters of the religious life to perform every sacrament but confession, confirmation, and ordination. There weren’t enough priests out in the black to do it. And anyway, that was how it had been in the beginning.

Dearest sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, the message began, His Holiness Pius XVI, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God, has decreed that there will be an accounting of the officiants of the Church.

The last she’d heard, the Pope was Urban X, and he was dead. The announcement of Pius XVI’s appointment must have gotten lost. She did not like the sound of “an accounting,” but then, Sister Faustina was often told she had too great a mistrust of authority.

A priest will meet you at your next convenient docking. He shall take an accounting of your numbers and activities and send it back to the Holy See. The assigned priest will be overseeing three convents, including yours, and split his time between them accordingly.

Sister Faustina groped for her tea and swallowed two mouthfuls fast enough to burn the inside of her throat all the way down.

His Holiness has decreed this as part of the continuing efforts to repair the Church after the Great War, and to minister to as many souls as possible. Further instruction will be sent.—Card. R. Capul.

“Then why don’t you put the priest on his own ship?” she muttered. The message was dated two months ago. Further instruction had almost certainly already been provided, and was waiting in a relay station somewhere for them to get in range of the signal.

She resealed the message so no one without the key could read it. No one would. She trusted most of her sisters, and the ones that she didn’t trust were not the kind for subterfuge.

Some of the other orders would welcome a return to the days of hierarchy. Not many of the shipbound ones. But she could imagine some planetary sisters longing for a past of rules and authority. You didn’t have to be so flexible when you had an atmosphere to hold you close and let you breathe all the air you could ever want.

The hatch behind her opened. Sister Faustina knew it was the Mother Superior by her creaking bones.

“Is the colony confirmed?” she signed. “Any other news?”

Sister Faustina considered the message. There were no secrets in convents, they said. But there were secrets wherever there were humans to have them. “Phoyongsa III checks out. Other than that—just spam.”

The Mother Superior was staring at Sister Faustina’s screen. Sister Faustina looked back, but she hadn’t forgotten to hide the cardinal’s message.

“Mother?”

The older woman squinted at her and then, slowly, nodded. “Very good.”

“Perhaps you should sleep a bit, before we land.”

Any of the other sisters, even Mary Catherine, would have had more luck. The Reverend Mother barely managed an indulgent smile for Sister Faustina’s meddling. “Always work to be done, Sister.”

Copyright © 2019 by Lina Rather. Excerpted from Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather. Published by permission of the author and Tor.com. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan, now living in Washington, D.C. She wishes she could say she has a dog, but alas, she lives under the tyranny of landlords. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible 90s comic books. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed. You can find more about her and her other stories on her website, linarather.wordpress.com. She also spends altogether too much time on Twitter as @LinaRather

Book Reviews: December 2019

Arley Sorg | 2691 words

Riot Baby
Tochi Onyebuchi
Hardcover / Ebbook
ISBN: 978-1250214751
Tor.com Publishing, January 2020, 176 pgs

Riot Baby dunks the reader into the story with a scene on a school bus where gangbangers board to put rowdy schoolchildren in their place. Tension and mood established, with the sense of increased violence waiting just under the surface, the story shifts slightly to focus on Ella’s “Thing” (her special ability) and the circumstances of her younger brother Kev’s birth during the Watts riots of 1965. Born at a time of racial strife and chaos, while Ella is the one with powers, Kev is the one living under a vaguely ominous prophecy.

There are no one-dimensional heroes and villains here. Don’t look for a Black Supergirl narrative; far from it. Characters are complex, grounded in the real, sometimes funny and other times terrifying. The intensity of the setting is limned by street humor and warmth in difficult times, uplifting key moments and allowing the reader to breath when needed; but also demonstrating something too often overlooked in the casual glance afforded by many narratives which acknowledge Black ghetto life: People are complicated, they are not stereotypes.

The bulk of the story centers on Kev as he grows up. He is intelligent as a child, full of promise, but susceptible to the horrors and temptations of ghetto life. His sister, Ella, is also growing, and as she grows, she becomes more powerful. They must negotiate their fragile relationship with each other and with their mother, who seems to seek to stifle Ella, all while the potential for Ella to accidentally hurt everyone around her increases.

This book is as much about communities as it is about the main characters. It’s related in flashes of moments and lives, jumping from scene to scene, time to time, which creates opportunities to paint pictures of the people usually ignored by typical superhero stories. In other words, it lends quick strokes of depth and character to folks who are usually disposable side characters.

Arguably, the “real hero” is the mom. Resilient, responsible, a real warrior at heart. Her place in the narrative proposes a subtle underlying thematic element: Real heroes are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, trying their hardest to do good and make life work for the people they love. Sometimes those people are extraordinary in some way (often in ways which are not good); and sometimes those relationships are fraught.

Besides a perhaps expected but skillful and sharp commentary on race and class, there is a particularly cunning polemic against prison systems, specifically around the damage they do to the psyches of those who pass through them, as well as the damage they do to the cultures which keep those systems intact. There are also notes on the casual cruelty of the medical system, as well as a brilliant SFnal thought piece on racially motivated police abuses. None of this is presented as preachy or as anything other than story; it reads more as the parts of the story you might not have heard, the things the news channels neglected to mention, but things which are nonetheless real. All told, this makes it an excellent exercise in anger and observation.

The plot itself wanders. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening. Sometimes things happen and seem random. Characters are often plopped into situations, or the things they do don’t seem to really determine the plot in a meaningful “causality chain” kind of way. But never mind all that. This would make me put most books down, but the storytelling here is so compelling, right from page one, that I just don’t care. Additionally, it all makes more sense at the end, and the end is a great climax to the entire piece.

Riot Baby is a short, stunning book, one which most writers could not pull off, and one which I urge you to read with an open heart and a thoughtful mood.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
Ken Liu
Harcover/ Ebook
ISBN: 978-1982134037
Gallery/Saga Press, February 2020, 432 pgs

While Ken Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, came out in 2015 from Saga Press, and despite Liu’s having contributed fiction to the Star Wars canon in 2017, he is perhaps better known for his award-winning short fiction. His first short story publication was “Carthaginian Rose” in 2002, in Orson Scott Card and Keith Olexa’s anthology Empire of Dreams and Miracles. But it was “The Paper Menagerie,” first appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction March/April 2011, that became the first work of fiction to win all three major SFF awards: the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Since then, his prodigious body of work—books, too, but especially his short fiction—has earned a mess of accolades and nominations, including, most recently, the 2017 Locus Award for best collection for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (notably, a year in which his name appeared as a finalist in four other Locus Awards categories; and in which the collection landed a World Fantasy Award nomination).

All of that is to say The Hidden Girl and Other Stories comes with high expectations. Liu says on his site, “. . . unlike The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, the selection here will be much more guided by my own personal taste, including some of my newest work, a never-before-published novelette, as well as an excerpt from the next Dandelion Dynasty novel.” A glance at the copyright page speaks to Liu’s popularity across a spectrum of editorial tastes: pieces are pulled from anthologies and magazines from expected genre sources such as Lightspeed and Clarkesworld as well as more surprising venues such as Slate and TRSF (a special publication of MIT’s Technology Review). The earliest are from 2011. Assuming the selection won’t change by the time publication happens, more than half of the nineteen pieces on offer come from before 2015.

As can be expected of any collection or anthology, not every story spoke to me. “The Paper Menagerie” had me sobbing and trembling, and the pieces here didn’t have that degree of impact. Nonetheless, the skill with which a story can be constructed is clearly demonstrated, on a level where this book could be used in classes teaching creative writing. Every narrative is intelligent and thoughtful, and many of them end up in emotionally resonant places. Some stories linger after reading, gently urging discussion or deeper consideration. A few such favorites follow:

Opener “Ghost Days,” originally published in Lightspeed in 2013, is deliberate, carefully narrated, and thought provoking. It’s an oddly (but mathematically, if I’m not mistaken) structured tale, which shows a strange object through three vastly different time periods. It’s layered with complex thoughts around the immigrant experience and colonialism, revealed through the relationships of different individuals, and it’s gently powerful.

“The Reborn,” from Tor.com in 2014, is an unsettling, post alien invasion piece. A man intimately involved with an alien named Kai discovers that all may not be as it seems. He must decide if he should search for a mystery that may not exist—a search which would be a betrayal of his lover—and face the possibility that the being he loves may not be so benevolent after all; or capture and punish the people who may be leading him astray. This one starts out weird (used as a positive here) and gets deeper and more interesting as it goes. Memory, loss, vengeance, pain, trauma, and more, including the nature of personality, are all explored in a narrative that is somehow smooth and uncluttered, despite being dense with questions and meaning.

“Staying Behind” is a cold-hearted exploration of the post-singularity world. In this case (and in the case of many stories in the collection), “the singularity” refers to the end of life on Earth as we know it by way of most of humanity uploading their consciousnesses into a mega-computer. The story follows a family, the “left behind,” as they try to survive among the remains of civilization. Friends and family attempt to convince them to upload as well, but the father stands by his belief that uploading is murder, and that what exists after is not the consciousness of a person. Not everyone in the family feels the same way; worse, he must keep an eye on his daughter, who may not be sharing everything she’s thinking. Having been published in Clarkesworld in 2011, some of the ideas in this story are, at this point, well-trod. Further, a few of the post-apocalyptic details were, to my thinking, unlikely, or not quite fleshed out. Regardless—and perhaps as a demonstration of just how good the piece is—it’s still a great story, with wonderful tension, interesting ideas, and challenging thoughts around ethics, the self, relationships, and more. There’s also a cautious parallelism with the dwindling or disappearing cultures of our current era. Better yet, consistent to many of Liu’s pieces, the story lands in a place that is carefully powerful.

Some of the stories stand as being in the same “universe.” There are clear, unifying themes among many of the pieces: identity, family, culture, and so on. Many deal with the aforementioned singularity, giving a different perspective, a different timeline, or a different aspect of the event. On the downside, occasionally a section will read like a character is simply explaining something to the reader. Then again, I had this same experience with “Menagerie,” but it still ended up being one of the best, most effective stories I’ve ever read. While some of the stories in this collection didn’t work for me, I have no doubt that an internet search will find positive reviews of the same pieces. All told, it’s a good collection, with some fiction that should not be missed, by a writer whose skill has been proven time and time again.

The New Voices of Science Fiction
edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1616962913
Tachyon, November 2019, 432 pgs

One might argue over the title: The New Voices of Science Fiction. My initial expectation was a set of incredible stories by virtually unknown authors who had been mostly overlooked by the awards circuits, or perhaps a few titles by recently published authors who had received instant recognition. But authors such as Rich Larson, with a slew of publications to his name, are hardly undiscovered. More importantly perhaps, Suzanne Palmer has been selling fiction and poetry since 2005. Alice Sola Kim since 2006. Jason Sanford lists story publications on his website going back to 2000. This begs the question, what does “new” mean? Rules for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (formerly the John W. Campbell Award) limits “New” to “authors whose first SFWA-eligible publication occurred within the two years prior to the award year.” Regardless of where a story appeared, I’m not sure if I consider someone who has been consistently publishing fiction for ten or more years a “new voice.” It’s a picky, shallow, and possibly irrelevant point, but titles do set up the initial expectation of a book.

Pickiness over the title aside, New Voices is a reprint anthology that follows the well-regarded 2018 World Fantasy Award winning anthology The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman. Stories lean toward “soft SF,” in the sense of being easily readable and requiring no understanding of complicated scientific principles or theories: time travel and robots, for example, used as story mechanisms, not as theoretical discussions around astrophysics or mechanical engineering. Pieces are thematically scattered but tend to be story-focused and character-driven.

“Openness” by Alexander Weinstein—founder and director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing—first appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal 29 in 2016 and has been previously reprinted for Weinstein’s collection Children of the New World and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. The writing is immediately (but easily) engaging, with a literary sensibility of capturing mood and moment, through straightforward, well-crafted prose. The SF element is mostly around near-futuristic changes in the ways we interface or communicate. Few people talk physically anymore, as communication is more efficient using modes inspired by or evolved from social media. When two lovers meet, they soon discover that the means they prefer to use to communicate are different in important ways. For SF readers, most of the tech will be nothing particularly new, and could even be exchanged for other tropes without changing the story. But the narrative is really about the ways we relate to each other, and the things we hide or reveal in relationships. There’s a touch of the generational aspect to technological advances, and potentially some deeper thoughts around rebirth (metaphorically), or more literally, reengagement with the self and others. More than anything, it’s about intimacy, and as such it’s a wonderful story.

Nino Cipri’s “The Shape of My Name” is at first disorienting and confusing. After finishing the story and looking back, I realized that it may just be superbly structured. Besides this, it’s also an utterly captivating tale. It’s a time-travel piece—with a “who cares about how it works” attitude, for the most part—whose heart is centered on a boy’s attempt to come to terms with a mother who wanted to keep the boy from transitioning. It’s heartfelt while well-told, with an excellent ending which left me teary-eyed.

Some of the pieces are more light-hearted or amusing in tone, such as the aforementioned Suzanne Palmer’s “The Secret Life of Bots,” about a tiny robot that must find a pest nibbling holes in a run-down ship. The initial setup is intriguing, as well as specific aspects of the setup, such as the fact that the protagonist-bot is the oldest bot on the ship and the last to be awakened. The narrative voice humanizes the bot and simultaneously brings humor to an otherwise dark tale (but potentially takes it farther away from “hard SF”). As the little bot tries and tries again, human protagonist Captain Boraye and crew plan a last stand against invading aliens. The story comes to a satisfying, if unsurprising conclusion, and entertains throughout.

Arguably, the best use of well-recognized names in a “New Voices” type of anthology is in leveraging recognition to shine a light on a few people who just may become the sorts of rising legends their ToC-mates already are. Some of the stories collected here are lauded within the genre publishing industry, such as award-winning “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse, award-winning “Our Lady of the Open Road” by Sarah Pinsker, and award-nominated “Madeleine” by Amal El-Mohtar. Some have not won awards but are by award-winning authors, such as “Calved” by Sam J. Miller (a story which nonetheless appeared on the 2015 Locus Recommended reading list and was an Asimov’s Readers’ Award finalist). And a few are by actual new voices in SF, such as Amman Sabet with “Tender Loving Plastics” and Samantha Mills with “Strange Waters.” Whether or not we quibble over the title, there’s a lot of worthy fiction here, and discovery awaits!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Media Reviews: December 2019

Christopher East | 1742 words

Here’s a confession: I’ve spent a healthy percentage of my writing life wrestling with an aversion to time travel fiction. For a while I felt the trope was too often deployed to look backward, in opposition to SF’s unique opportunity to imagine, confront, and shape the future. At best, younger me argued, time travel was an entertaining indulgence in nostalgia, the SF creative’s wistful method of reliving the past. At worst, it was a shirking of science fiction’s duty.

Perhaps it’s because I’m older, or that I’ve committed my own time travel fiction, or perhaps it’s just that I’m trying not to be so bloody serious and dogmatic about things these days, but lately I’ve come to see time travel as another valuable tool in SF’s arsenal. Sure, it’s often leveraged to nostalgic ends. But like most SF tropes, it’s a versatile one, and even its backward-peering examples can provide insights into the present, and the future. This month’s offerings are great examples: a pair of inventive shows involving time travel that, had they been around in my formative years, might have steered me off my early bias.

Undone
Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy
Produced by Amazon Studios, Minnow Mountain, Submarine, and Tornante Company
Season One released September 2019

From BoJack Horseman scribes Raphael-Bob Waksberg and Kate Purdy comes Amazon’s Undone, a trippy animated series hybridizing prestige drama rhythms with thought-provoking science fictional concepts. Rosa Salazar stars as Alma Winograd-Diaz, a young woman with a hearing disability, a dysfunctional family, and a history of mental illness. Alma’s on autopilot, going through the motions. She has a pleasant but unenthralling relationship with Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay), and a job working with children at a daycare center. She’s also the family ne’er-do-well, overshadowed by sister Becca (Angelique Cabral) and haunted by the loss of her father Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), a theoretical physicist whose death during Alma’s childhood scarred the family. While driving home from a fight with Becca, Alma has a vision of her father reaching out to her from the side of the road, which leads to a car accident. Her injuries play havoc with her memory, leading to more vivid hallucinations—or are they? Her father begins to appear more frequently in Alma’s waking dreams. He works to convince her that he’s not just “unstuck” in time, but can actively control it. Gradually, he convinces Alma that she too possesses this power, and helps her learn to manipulate her position in the timescape. But even as her powers grow, her father’s lessons remain elusive and ambiguous. In an effort to figure everything out, she uses her new abilities to investigate the mystery of her father’s death. Her risky, emotionally charged time-travel experiments wreak havoc on her personal life, however, threatening to make her tenuous grip on reality even weaker.

Unfolding over eight speedy episodes, Undone is a moving, fascinating watch that utilizes rotoscoped animation to add a layer of unreality to its live-action performers. The style is similar to that used by Richard Linklater in the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, an appropriate project to invoke here; Undone is definitely a descendant of Dick’s nature-of-reality school of science fiction. The way the show mixes realistic human expression and motion with wavery, colorful visual effects contributes to an “interstitial” feel. This is a show that comfortably exists between reality and fantasy, between genres, and yes, across past, present, and future.

Is Alma crazy, or does she actually possess the power to see through mundane reality and navigate through time? Yes, there’s a problematic aspect to this common cinematic trope—the neuroatypical superhero—but I think Undone is self-aware about what it’s doing, and generally it’s sensitive to the mental health issues it’s exploring. Like BoJack Horseman, it leverages science fictional thinking in its exploration of a broken, flawed, but also relatable protagonist. Time travel is the easel on which it paints these themes, using the trope to examine Alma’s regrets about the past and anxiety about the future. Lately, a lot of great speculative TV has examined the challenges of living ethically in a complicated, punishing world, and delving into the emotional and psychological toll of that struggle. Undone is a worthy addition to the trend: heart-felt, clever, sad, visually striking, and ultimately quite winning.

Dark
Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese
Produced by Netflix and W&B Television
Season Two released June 2019

In contrast, Netflix’s Dark is more conventional genre fare, perhaps more interested in time travel itself than in the human stories informed by the concept. If Undone provides tight, close-in perspective, Dark widens the scope for the cosmic big picture. Ultimately, though, I think this German series leverages time travel to similar ends. Rather than zeroing in on one person over a lifetime, it focuses on a community of people over the course of a much longer period of history. The struggles of its characters are the same as Alma’s—issues of regret and anxiety, worries about living in the past, in the moment, or for the future. In both shows the existence of time travel throws these inner struggles into sharp relief. In Dark’s case, the vantage is higher, but the human element is still very present.

I looked at the show’s first season in my round-up review of international genre TV (bit.ly/Aug18MediaReview), but it’s worth re-summarizing the set-up here: Based in a remote German village called Winden, the show features a handful of interconnected families who become embroiled in a grand, time-bending mystery. Winden is centered on a nuclear power plant that, as the story begins in 2019, is about to be decommissioned. When children go missing in the woods one night, a police investigation is launched to find them. But as the crisis unfolds, our viewpoint heroes gradually learn the truth: Miraculously, the disappearances are related to a time portal located underneath the plant. A young man named Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) uses the portal to journey through time in search of his missing neighbor, but his simple search quickly reveals itself to be part of a far more complex tapestry of actions across the timescape, spanning from Germany’s post-World War I days to a post-apocalyptic future in the 2050s.

Structurally, Dark may be one of the most ambitious shows ever produced. While initially I wasn’t sure if it had a firm grip on its temporal intricacies, I stopped worrying about that in season two. If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of logistics, spinning interconnected narratives across five time periods, with multiple characters portrayed by different actors to account for age differences. The physical casting is impeccable, though, and the performers in each role keep their guises clear and the situations coherent. It weaves a dazzling web.

It can also be very difficult to follow. With its alinear storytelling and baffling universal mysteries, Dark is reminiscent of David Lynch at his most elliptical. While similarly unsettling and effective, the comparison doesn’t always work in the show’s favor. Indeed, one of the off-putting aspects of the first season was its coyness about genre content, and sometimes it seemed to be deliberately impenetrable. It still pushed enough thought-provoking buttons to keep me interested, but did it actually know what it was doing? Or was it just trying to look profound?

Season two doesn’t entirely answer those questions for me, but it evolves the show into something more entertaining. While it takes a few episodes to ramp up, eventually it brings the season home with gusto, silencing my inner critic for the ride. After all, while untangling the timelines and the complex web of characters is part of the fun here, it’s only a part; what’s more interesting is the sum—the compelling atmosphere of cosmic mystery that is ultimately more engrossing than the mechanics.

Mercifully, season two also leans into its science fictional nature. The coyness falls away, the veil of mystery drops, and the truth is revealed, bringing more major characters into the fold. Not only do they learn of the existence of time travel, but in some cases they become capable of using it, making their behavior more active than reactive. Also helping things along is the introduction of ticking-clock momentum, as the characters learn of an imminent apocalypse crucial to the broader tangle of events across Winden’s storied history. The notion of “travelers”—multiple iterations of the same person journeying across time to interact with one another—is introduced, as is a growing good-versus-evil conflict between those trying to remake history and those determined to see it through for their own selfish ends. This all makes the show feel more honest about its science fictional roots, rendering it a more satisfying ride for the seasoned SF fan.

Skiffy flash and dazzle aside, Dark still keeps its finger on the emotional pulse. At its heart, it’s a story of people wrestling with tough life choices, struggling to make sense of their pasts, chart their futures, and escape stultifying cycles of behavior. The questions of causality and free will central to time travel fiction greatly inform these themes. Watching its appealing roster of characters negotiate the time maze can be challenging, but it’s also diverting and thought-provoking.

• • • •

Undone and Dark are quite different shows, but they’re both exceptional examples of time travel fiction. Watching them back-to-back hammers home one more reason the concept may finally be winning me over: They’re both about inflection points in history, moments of crisis where past ways are stressed to the breaking point, and dangerous new futures seem imminent. As such, they’re both unsettling shows with dark undertones, but still embedded with powerful touches of hope. Perhaps this is the kind of story today’s world needs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Interview: Daniel José Older

Christian A. Coleman | 3376 words

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, the middle-grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, and Star Wars: Last Shot. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Shadowshaper was named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music on his website, YouTube, and on Twitter.

I read that you wrote The Book of Lost Saints years ago. How long ago was that?

Seven years ago.

Really? What happened during the time between finishing the novel and getting it published? Did it take a while to find a publisher?

It took forever to find a publisher, which is something I want people to know. There’s the idea that once you have a book out or a couple books out, you’ve “made it”—whatever that means—and you can publish whatever you want. And that’s not true. This book got rejected more times than I can remember and it wasn’t finding a home until it finally did. That’s exactly what publishing is like: You keep submitting until it finds the right place.

How did it eventually find its home?

I met Rhoda Belleza at the Boston Teen Author Festival at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, MA. She’s a great writer and just an awesome person. At that time, she was editing for Imprint. I knew immediately that she would have a great handle on the book. I think we sent it out for another round of submissions soon after that, and I made sure she was included in that process. She eventually was the one who took on the book. It worked out really well. She was a great editor.

So in The Book of Lost Saints, the spirit of Marisol, who disappeared during the Cuban Revolution, visits her nephew Ramón in modern-day New Jersey and prompts him to investigate their painful family history, but he’s unaware of what’s driving him on his search. Tell us how the premise came together for you.

I’d been thinking about The Book of Lost Saints for a long time. I’d been trying to figure out how to process a lot of the different thoughts, feelings, and ideas that come with being a Cuban American, growing up in that diaspora, and what that means. That includes what it meant to go to Cuba when I was twenty-one to experience it for myself. I knew it was going to be something, but I didn’t know what. When I was about to head off to grad school, I was taking a walk with my friend, Sam Reynolds, and he was like, “You know, what about the ghosts of the Isle of Palms?” (The Isle of Palms is a famous prison in Cuba on an island.) And it was a weird thing for him to say, because I write about ghosts a lot and had this idea swirling through my head of trying to deal with ghosts and Cuba for a long time. That was the push I needed to set everything into motion.

You begin the novel with an epigraph from José Martí: “Two homelands have I: Cuba and the night. Or are they one and the same?” What meaning does it have for you?

I love that quote! First of all, José Martí is very singular in that he’s someone that both sides of the Cuba conflict love deeply and claim. By that, I mean folks from the Castro and revolutionary side of things claim him as a patron saint. And if you talk to the Miami folks, they also adore him and find that he speaks for them. That’s very rare, because Cubans don’t agree on anything, especially those two sides of Cuba. That, I think, is incredible in its own right. He was an incredible person, an anti-imperialist and a revolutionary in many ways, who served time in prison for his work. He was an organizer, an activist, a soldier, a children’s book writer, and a poet. I love all those faces of him and the fact that he did so much, even though his life was cut short in battle, so I wanted to honor that. As for the quote itself, it perfectly encapsulates the sadness of being Cuban and what that means. It ties into Martí’s very identity with a certain melancholy but does so in such a beautiful way that it almost transcends the sadness with the poetry.

It ties well into the identity of your protagonist, Marisol. She’s our POV character who shuttles us between two time periods and Cuba and New Jersey. And since she’s in spirit form, she acts as an omniscient narrator. How did you come up with her character?

She sort of just came through. Some characters appear fully formed, like Sierra did in Shadowshaper. Marisol was who she was as soon as I started dreaming her up. Much of her personality is about voice. I really wanted it to be irreverent and kind of coy and furious and passionate, because those are all aspects I knew were part of the story. She had to be in touch with her anger, disbelief, and frustration about what she went through. She’s living through her emotions, because she doesn’t have a body. I think we have this idea that spirits are supposed to be holy, ethereal beings that don’t have a lot of personality and they’re just woo woo woo, you know? I wanted to challenge that a little bit and make her more brisk, humorous, and cynical.

She sure is. In fact, she’s initially dismissive of Ramón, calling him a useless boy-man. And she has a “life is wasted on the living” attitude toward him, though she grows to love him and need him as the story progresses. But why all the diss toward him if he’s going to be the one to unearth their family history?

Mostly because she needs him. It’s not just that he’s flesh and blood and she’s not; she recognizes very quickly that he’s her anchor to the world. She’s dependent on him and she doesn’t even know why. She doesn’t fully understand what she’s there to do or who she is. But as she comes to understand that, she realizes her dependency on him, and he doesn’t even know she exists. She’s cursed and blessed with hyper awareness of the situation.

Ramón is one of these people, which I think she says very early on, who’s blessed with incredible talent, which makes him a little bit lazy about everything else in life. She’s like, “I need this guy to reveal this very fundamental piece of my story, because I don’t have a body and he does.” And he can barely get himself together to go to work. He’s not depressed; he’s just kind of alone. That’s frustrating for her. She’s dealing with all of that, and he’s in her way sometimes.

Marisol and Ramón have complex relationships with Cuba. Marisol was born and raised there but disappeared during the Cuban Revolution. Ramón is a second-generation Cuban American born and raised in New Jersey whose mother would prefer he not ask family members about their history. You’ve already touched on your relationship with Cuba a little bit, but tell us how it shaped those of Marisol and Ramón.

I was blessed to come up in a family that was very open about our history. But I don’t think that’s the norm—not just in Cuban families, but families in general. As people, we’re a little too quick to try to be quiet about things and pretend nothing happened. The reality is something always happened. Dealing with that means dealing with it head on, talking about it and being open about it. It was a tremendous privilege to be able to go back to the island and experience it for myself. That’s also something that can be very taboo for a lot of Cuban families, but that’s a part of our heritage and our life. Ultimately, it comes back to having honest conversations.

What kind of research did you have to unearth in order to bring Marisol’s environment and her heartbreaking experiences with the revolution to life?

It’s one of those things I’d been researching on my own for years. When I went there, different questions would come up about some of the details of how the actual battles played out, the play by play of the revolution itself, and what was going on in the country versus in the city. That was more in-depth stuff I did for research. The other level of research was having conversations with people—whether it was people in Cuba, people in my family, or people here, lots of different people—about their own experiences.

Of the books and short stories you’ve had published, this novel seems the most rooted in reality. There’s only one speculative element: Marisol’s spirit. No otherworldly creatures and monsters or interdimensional face-offs. Did you feel the need to restrain speculative elements with this novel?

I knew early on it was going to be much more grounded in reality. It never felt like restraint so much as following and respecting the story that wanted to be told. And it just didn’t feel like a genre novel, which I think is mostly a matter of rhythm, right? It wasn’t racing at breakneck speeds from one plot point to the next. Of course, a lot of novels can slow down, and they should, and mine do. This story is much more about everyday life in the service of this larger narrative and this arc. These are characters who are going about their business and who also need to uncover certain mysteries in the course of their lives.

With that mystery aspect in mind, would you consider The Book of Lost Saints ghost noir like your short story collection Salsa Nocturna and the Bone Street Rumba series, since it addresses surviving trauma, falling in love, and other things by way of a ghost-story set up?

Very much so. Yes. I hadn’t thought of that, but absolutely. There are noir aspects of it in a very different light, but I think it still fits in that umbrella.

At several points in the novel, Marisol wonders if it’s right for her to share her memories of imprisonment with Ramón in his dreams. She’s concerned about continuing the cycle of trauma, of poisoning a new generation. That sort of trauma seems like a haunting in and of itself. She even says she’s a parasite because of this. But at the same time, Ramón and his generation have to know their history. What’s your take on balancing history and the inevitability of sharing the trauma that comes with it?

That’s the exact kind of the question I was asking myself as a writer. How do we pass on these stories without reopening the wounds? Ultimately, I think healing comes from, as I said, talking and truth telling. Since that’s difficult and involves pain, we have to do it respectively and carefully. And it’s important that we do it with the intention of healing. Intentions aren’t everything, and you can certainly still go wrong, but if we allow our intentions to inform our strategy and our storytelling ideas and mechanisms, I do believe we can heal. But we can’t go into it pretending there isn’t a risk of deepening the conflict either, because there is that risk, and that’s just a part of it. That’s also true with representation. That’s true of storytelling across the board. Respecting story means going into it with that knowledge and then acting accordingly.

You’ve written about setting as crisis and how the complications of power, politics, and privilege build a rich, nuanced environment for characters to inhabit (bit.ly/2WjPNkE). What drew you to writing about New Jersey circa 2004? What about this place and time, three years after 9/11, was crucial for situating Ramón and his loved ones and for the start of his journey in uncovering the mystery of Marisol’s past?

That’s a great question. It was really the Cuba in 2004 that I needed to capture more than the Jersey in 2004, mostly because I realized part of the way through writing the book that the Cuba I was writing about was actually the Cuba I had seen when I first went in 2001. It’s changed quite a bit since then, for different reasons, for better or for worse. But when I went back more recently, I was like, “This isn’t quite the same Cuba in certain important ways.” In order for the story to feel like I was telling the truth, I had to set it much closer to the Cuba I saw when I was there back in 2001.

It was also interesting to explore that era during which I was living in New York—all those weird little bits of technology that were around back then, like Napster and LimeWire. The immediate couple of years after 9/11 were certainly a very particular moment in American history that was important to capture. For me, it was about coming back from Cuba—I lived there for three months in 2001—to a totally different country than when I’d left pre-9/11.

Any why New Jersey?

Partially because New Jersey is actually a little known but very important hub of Cuban Americans. There are a lot of Cubans there, more so than in New York. New Jersey is where a lot of my family first landed when they got here and stayed there. Others ended up in Miami. Also, I wanted to move away from the limelight of New York. There’s so much focus on New York, and anything that happens there is like dun, dun, dun! NEW YORK! I needed to establish a separate community that I could create and play with, a community of Cubans in New Jersey that was outside of that entire hubbub. That’s what allowed it to be a localized world. There’s so much local politics involved in what happens in the novel, and that wouldn’t have been possible if it was set in New York.

Ramón works as a security guard at a New Jersey hospital. Several of the New Jersey hospital scenes are imbued with such specificity and detail that I wondered how many of them came directly from your previous life as a paramedic. I’m thinking of the scenes of the Mexican girl in the psych ER and the burn victims from the electrical fire.

Those are all directly out of my experiences as well as from the experience of being around and in a hospital when you’re a medical student doing rotations. You spend the most time in the ER itself, where you get to see a whole cross-section of who works there, who spends time there, who just hangs out there, which I thought was fascinating. Many shows are set in hospitals because they’re quite a crossroads of humanity. I wanted to set something there because I felt like I had a good handle on the feel and rhythm of that world.

Ramón has something else in common with you: his music. He DJs by night. Since you’re a bassist and composer, I’d like to know if you think of DJing as a form of writing music or of mixing music or both.

It’s certainly both. I think it depends how you’re doing it and what you’re bringing to it. There are different ways of going about it. In Ramón’s case, he’s bringing all these different threads together in a way that’s very much like time travel, which is echoed throughout the book and the larger story. He’s grabbing very ancient rhythms, melodies, and ideas and piecing them together with much more modern things. That sums up the tension between him and Marisol—the past and the present bumping up against each other. The struggle is finding harmony between them.

Marisol describes all the music in the DJing scenes in intricate detail. Since you’re so inside the music you write about and you’re coming at it as a composer and performer, what effect do you go for when putting it in prose? What are some of the fun parts or challenges you come across when conveying it to readers?

It’s about trying to capture that experiential level. It’d be easy to only talk about the technical level of music, but that’s how you lose people, even though it helps to know it. People love and experience music in millions of ways that have nothing to do with the technicalities of it. All that knowledge doesn’t do you any good if you’re not reaching people on the gut level, which is where everyone feels it. The challenge has always been taking that knowledge and bringing it to the gut-level experience.

Marisol doesn’t necessarily understand music in terms of the technical piece of it, but she’s living it through someone who does. So I was allowing her into his body and his brain to grasp that he’s this magician and a master of all this noise and putting it together on the fly, and she’s bearing witness to it from the inside.

Much like how we’re all bearing witness to your mastery of storytelling as we read your work. What other writing projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

The Shadowshaper Cypher wraps in January with Shadowshaper Legacy, which is the last book in that series. It finishes Sierra’s story while opening up this whole other level of the mythology of Shadowshaper, the history of it all. Like The Book of Lost Saints, it actually does a lot with the past and the present coming together, so that was a lot of fun to write, and I’m really excited about that series wrapping up. Then the third Dactyl Hill Squad book comes out in June. That’s my middle-grade series about the Civil War with dinosaurs. Beyond that, there’s a whole bunch of cool Star Wars stuff that I can’t talk about at all.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about The Lost Book of Saints?

I’m really excited for it to be out in the world. We’ve been talking about how I wrote it a long couple of years ago, and being able to have this conversation about it is pretty amazing. Especially when you think about having something incubate for seven years, and you haven’t talked about it with anyone else except your editor and a couple of beta readers. So, I’m happy.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Baker

Nicasio Andres Reed | 1260 words

The man-free world of “A Bad Day in Utopia” is such an orderly place, and its protagonist’s day-to-day life so ordinary and familiar, at least to me, as someone who’s worked at a video game company in a large American city. It reminded me how I always found the premise of stories like Y: The Last Man a little dubious—a world that collapses into immediate and violent disarray with the sudden loss of its men. Of course, the transition here happens under very different circumstances, and a few generations before the story’s present. Were you imagining and writing this setting with the intention of being in conversation with other single-gender-world stories?

I’ve read Y: The Last Man, but to be honest, that story didn’t have much of an effect on me. A story that very much did have an effect on me, however, is The Left Hand Of Darkness. Discovering Ursula K Le Guin’s writing was a revelation for me—the idea that science fiction could be purely anthropological. Before she died, my number one dream was to get to meet her someday. I had this secret fantasy that I would get invited to her house, and she and I would sit on her porch together, and we would just look at the grass and the sky and talk for a while. I used to daydream about it at random moments, washing the dishes or sweeping the floor. Anyway, I never got to have that conversation with her, so it would mean a lot to me if this story was somehow in conversation with The Left Hand Of Darkness. (In terms of word count, it’d be a conversation in which Ursula was doing most of the talking, but that’s how I’d always hoped it would go.)

Your other recent story here in Lightspeed, “Life Sentence,” dealt with forced memory erasure, rather than imprisonment, as a form of criminal justice. The solution that “Bad Day” posits to the everyday and extraordinary horrors of patriarchal society seems another sort of erasure, and in both cases an attempt by the state for a sort of neatness, an all-or-nothing corralling of the problem rather than a more restorative approach. But of course, when it comes to the sort of history of oppression touched on at the story’s end, can any sort of reconciliation restore a justice that wasn’t in place to begin with? The narrative sympathizes with Rex in his isolation and his desperation, but ultimately doesn’t argue with the narrator’s reasoning or her decision. Do you?

I have a logical mind, almost robotically so. I like data. I like statistics. Here are some numbers courtesy of the FBI: In the United States, approximately eight out of ten violent crimes are committed by men. Eight out of ten burglaries. Eight out of ten robberies. Eight out of ten arsons. Eight out of ten physical assaults. Nine out of ten murders. Ninety-seven out of one hundred rapes. Ninety-seven out of one hundred —and those, of course, are only the rapes that are reported. I wish we could say, “It’s just cultural,” but the numbers appear to be relatively consistent across the globe. Worldwide, male Homo sapiens are catastrophically more prone to committing acts of violence than female Homo sapiens. Given that, I have to admit that the decision does seem logical to me—wouldn’t humanity be far better off if every person on this planet was a woman?

Why did this story happen for you at this particular moment in history? Is gender something that you’ve tried to interrogate previously in your work?

I first tried to write a version of this story in 2011; that version was very long and very terrible and had absolutely nothing in common with this one except that it was set in a society where men were kept in cages. I set the idea aside for seven years, and then seven years later I read something astonishing. In 2015, the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved an incredible scientific milestone: For the first time ever, scientists there had managed to create artificial sperm. The scientists had taken stem cells from mice and turned the stem cells into viable sperm and then used the artificial sperm to fertilize mouse eggs, thereby creating new mice. In 2018, only three years later, scientists at the University of Cambridge claimed to be already halfway to achieving the same feat with human cells. I can’t possibly express how much that this news excited me—that humanity might soon develop a technology that would render men reproductively obsolete. Combined with the ability to preselect the gender of a baby, humanity could gradually phase men out entirely by creating only women for future generations. I was thrilled. A society composed entirely of women wouldn’t be a true utopia, of course; like any human society, there would still be crime and conflict and inequality. Still, given those numbers on violent offenders, I have to imagine that a society composed entirely of women would seem awfully utopian compared to the society we live in today. I’ll admit, though, that since writing the story, I’ve had conversations about the idea with a range of people—male and female, young and old, gay and straight, liberal and conservative—and ultimately every person has had more or less the same response: “Well, sure, some men are bad, maybe even most men, but I wouldn’t want to get rid of all of them.” I haven’t yet managed to convince a single person. I’m hopeful, however, that future generations of humanity—perhaps the humans of the twenty-fourth century?—will approach the matter more logically, and will just phase men out.

Who are the women whose writing you’re loving right now, and/or whom you feel are doing important work in feminist fiction?

Along with Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stories of C Pam Zhang, Alice Sola Kim, Emily St. John Mandel, and Tillie Walden, On A Sunbeam especially. In film, Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, Issa López’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, and Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen. Heidi Schreck’s play What the Constitution Means to Me. Natasha Khan, also known as Bat For Lashes, is another storyteller whose work fascinates me, especially the elaborate mythology behind Lost Girls. I should also say that a book that had a tremendous effect on me—the first book that ever made me cry—is Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver. For me personally, that may be the most important book ever written.

Recently you let us know about the many exciting projects you have in the pipeline. Is there anything you can tell us about the graphic novel, new prose novel, or television pilot that you’ve been working on?

Those projects, no updates. But I’m tremendously happy to tell you that I’m developing a screen adaptation of “A Bad Day In Utopia” with the great Christina Hodson, screenwriter for Birds Of Prey and The Flash. So with any luck, I’ll be spending more time in the matriarchy soon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer. Nico has gone back and forth between the US and the Philippines over the years, and is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang.

Author Spotlight: Molly Gutman

Nibedita Sen | 1073 words

I love the way whimsy intertwines with painful reality in this story—it made me think of Fern Gully at times, and folk tales (the Brothers Grimm kind, not Disney) at others. What sources of inspiration went into it?

Thanks so much for saying so, and for the excuse to go back and watch Fern Gully! Gosh, what a movie. Fairy tales (the darker and more troubling, the better, I’m afraid) are always creeping in from the edges when I write. I owe a great deal to the folks who write (or write on) fairy tales and fairy tale retellings: Angela Carter, absolutely, and also Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Helen Oyeyemi, Kate Bernheimer. I so dearly admire writing that keeps some sort of lightness or whimsy about it—in fairy tales, these are fabulist settings, mind-bending setups, the turns of phrase for which antique genres, like the fairy tale, often leave extra space—but that don’t rely on that whimsy in order to carry the story.

For me, that’s the deeper storytelling work: making honest attempts to reflect messy human emotions in complicated social, cultural, and environmental contexts. A charming concept, a lovely turn of phrase, a funny line: As far as I see it, none of these matter if they’re not tethered to something recognizable and human. In other words, whimsy isn’t story.

It’s hard not to think about climate change as you read this. What are your thoughts on wrestling with that particular looming specter in speculative fiction?

I love speculative fiction for how much it can make us recognize the real, even if we’re in alternate dimensions or in fables where bears can talk. We’re not going to die of bugs. Probably. But I wonder how the veneer of fiction (that it’s happening in not quite the same way, that it’s happening to characters with whom we can empathize, who are nonetheless not quite us) sucks us into familiar situations before we realize where we’ve gone. The climate crisis is a particularly well-fit subject for speculative fiction because of its looming, uncertain future—we can see it on the horizon, even if we’re foggy on some details—and that foggy, terrifying space allows a lot of imaginative room. But then we’re back to the balance of whimsy and darkness; look at all this room we have to play with an absolutely horrifying apocalypse, and no one is doing anything about it, and no one is listening to the children who beg us to save them! It’s grim any way you spin it. But speculative fiction is a genre that spins well.

An ongoing theme in the story is how Yasmin remains wilder, more fey, while Ingrid is staid and dare I say it, civilized. Do you think this makes Ingrid better or worse equipped to cope with the events of the story?

Big subject. I’d been considering the girls in terms of maturity, and how Yasmin’s immaturity shows itself, often, as wildness—but like lots of folks who still have some child left in them, that wildness lets her hold onto the forest after Ingrid has had to let go of it. Ingrid is the one who’s vigilant about their safety, about feeding them, about negotiating the fine details of their lives. It’s no fun being the one equipped to take all the responsibility, and it means that the worst parts of the city (its economies, its predators) are the parts to which Ingrid needs particularly keen sensitivity. In other words, their displacement is more traumatic for Ingrid because of how she needs to be sensitive to it. Yasmin’s childishness lets more of the city roll off her back.

I suppose this is again a matter of what speculative fiction can mirror, including displacement and disenfranchisement. Ingrid’s staid disposition forces her to see more clearly what the city is doing to them, and how the apocalypse is coming. I don’t know who I would rather be, by the end: someone who knows they can’t do anything, or someone who wrongly still hopes they can.

Or, to put it another way—can it be proof of maturity (yes) to choose optimism, and to remain ill-fit for surroundings that never intended to accommodate you?

The ending left me bereft—I was so hoping for a glimmer of magic to emerge, or to see the sisters’ fate through to the end. What were the thoughts behind ending it at that point?

I hear folks expressing concern that in fiction about the environment, despairing endings encourage complacency. So the thinking goes, these endings don’t allow us to imagine taking action. And I do understand that concern. But I think fiction also offers us room to grieve, and this story was, for me, as much about grief as anything else: grief in abandoning childhood, grief in leaving—or being made to leave—our beloved homes, grief in watching the world change around us.

But I hope there’s hope in here, too. Relationships, to me, are inherently hopeful: here are friends sticking together, here are sisters weathering tough times and still, every day, choosing each other. My stories don’t always end on these kind of bleak notes! The conversation comes down to what kind of writing I want to put into the world, and who I want to be as its writer: Am I someone who devastates, or someone who uplifts? The answer, it turns out, is both. I’d imagine that’s true for most of us.

What’s next for you? Any cool upcoming things you’d like to share with us?

I’ve just finished revising a story collection on fairy tales and apocalypses (and “Sleeping Girls” may just close the book? Meaning, yes, “Sleeping Girls” closes the book). And a final handful of those stories will appear next year in jazzy venues!

I’m also working on two novels, one for grown-ups and one for kids. Both land on some imaginary whimsy-dark spectrum: The Good Place and The Addams Family. But my goodness, novels are hard. Right now, both have their papery hands on my throat. Hopefully we’ll all come to an understanding soon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nibedita Sen is a queer Bengali writer, editor and gamer from Calcutta. A graduate of Clarion West 2015, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Podcastle, Nightmare, Fireside and The Dark. She helps edit Glittership, an LGBTQ SFF podcast, enjoys the company of puns and potatoes, and is nearly always hungry. Hit her up on Twitter at @her_nibsen.

Author Spotlight: Pat Murphy

Laurel Amberdine | 444 words

I usually start out with asking an author what inspired their story, but I feel like this one is pretty obvious! So, how about: Did this story give you any surprises or take any unexpected twists while you were writing it?

It’s rare for me to sit down and write a story from start to finish without pausing to catch a breath, but that’s how this story went. No surprises, no unexpected twists (for me, though several for the reader, I expect). This story was propelled by rage from start to finish. Like one of those moments when you are angry—so angry that every thought leads to some another thought that makes you even angrier. And I really enjoyed channeling all that anger into a character who was so cool and so much in control and so polite and outwardly respectful as she enjoyed each twist of the knife.

I suppose one surprise was how very much I enjoy reading this story aloud. Such fun to watch as the audience gradually realizes where this is going.

The voice was fun. I could hear so clearly the caller’s repressed glee and the unvoiced but obviously incredulous responses. Was this always how you envisioned this situation playing out, or were there other structures besides a phone call that you considered?

From the start, the story was a conversation in which the reader could hear only one side. I really wanted the character to have her say without interruption, and a phone call seemed like the best way to keep the Senator’s voice silent for the duration. I mean, he already had his say, didn’t he?

What else have you been working on lately?

I’m working on a novel titled The Adventure of Mrs. Darling. I’ve always been fascinated by the novel Peter Pan. The character who interests me most is Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother. From her point of view, this is a child abduction story. She comes home from a dinner party and her children are gone. Now if you were the victim of a crime in London in the late 1800s, who would you ask for help?

Sherlock Holmes, of course. And no one knows this but me (and all the people I have told), but Mrs. Darling is Dr. Watson’s niece. And she doesn’t much care for Sherlock.

I’ll stop there, but as you can imagine, I’m having a great time writing this book. Like “Motherhood,” it’s enormous fun to read aloud for an audience.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: KT Bryski

Laurel Amberdine | 523 words

I feel like there are so many appealing aspects to this story: the voice, the source material of Red Riding Hood, the full-circle ending. What was the first thing you knew about the story?

I knew there was a wolf.

Ages ago, I’d started a story about werewolves—I was struck by the theme of embracing the things about ourselves we’d rather keep hidden. But the story never really hung together and I abandoned it.

But time passed, and it tumbled in my head, and it stuck with some thoughts I’d been having about Little Red Riding Hood. If we’re going with “embracing things we’d rather keep hidden,” there’s a lot to unpack there. Frankly, Angela Carter has already done it quite effectively (hence the call-out at the beginning), but I got intrigued by another angle into the story.

What if you thought you could never have your desire? What if you kept trying to squash it down? How long would that last? How well would it work?

I especially enjoyed an aspect of the story that was maybe a little subtle: the idea of how someone could still achieve their lifelong desire, even when it would seem that they’d long since given it up and grown too old to achieve it. Did you have this in mind at all, or was it just a result of the grandmother part?

I did have that theme in mind! I was particularly interested in exploring the idea that “it’s never too late.” Having the protagonist eventually become a grandmother in her own right also underlined themes of cycles and breaking old patterns. Just because something has always been one way doesn’t mean that it must continue to be.

In retrospect, it reminds me of a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin: “When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

That can happen at any time. And I don’t think we can ignore the call of our truest desires forever. Eventually, the walls always crumble.

Is there anything special you want readers to know about this story?

In some ways, I see it as a companion piece to a story that I had published at Apex Magazine a few years ago: “The Love it Bears Fair Maidens” (bit.ly/2qf6fGU). They share some similarities—but I think they represent different moments along a journey.

Do you have anything else recently out or coming out soon that you want to mention?

I’ve recently started a new speculative fiction reading series with award-winning editor Jen R. Albert. Funded by the Ontario Arts Council, ephemera explores the dreamy speculative fiction, the fiction that transgresses strict bounds and definitions, particularly focusing on underrepresented voices and emerging writers.

It is held the first Wednesday of every month at the Glad Day Bookshop, Toronto. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @ephemeraseries.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 133 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Christopher East (“The Men Who Change the World”) and J.R. Dawson (“She’d Never Had a Name Before”), along with SF reprints by duo Ramez Naam & Jason M. Hough (“All Together Now”) and N.K. Jemisin (“The Ones Who Stay and Fight”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Alexander Weinstein (“Destinations of Joy”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Fortune’s Final Hand”), and fantasy reprints by Kij Johnson (“Story Kit”) and M. Rickert (“Holiday”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. For our ebook readers, we also have a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. Thanks for reading!

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All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

- THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

- THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

- THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

- Armored

- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

- Brave New Worlds
- By Blood We Live
- Cosmic Powers
- Dead Man’s Hand

- THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

- THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

- THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

- Epic: Legends of Fantasy

- Federations

- The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

- HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

- Lightspeed: Year One
- The Living Dead
- The Living Dead 2

- Loosed Upon the World

- The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

- Operation Arcana

- Other Worlds Than These

- Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

- A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

- Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

- Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

- Seeds of Change
- Under the Moons of Mars
- Wastelands
- Wastelands 2
- Wastelands: The New Apocalypse
- The Way of the Wizard

- What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

- Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey
- Shift by Hugh Howey
- Dust by Hugh Howey
- Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn
- Sand by Hugh Howey
- Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

- Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

- Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

- The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp
- The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty
- The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn
- The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette
- In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
- Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

- Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

- The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead
- Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker
- Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp
- Reentry by Peter Cawdron
- Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

- The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

- Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

- A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

- The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

- The Chosen One by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- FROM THE EDITOR
- Editorial: December 2019
- SCIENCE FICTION
- Rick Wilber | Today Is Today
- T.L. Huchu | Njuzu
- Pat Murphy | Motherhood
- Matthew Baker | A Bad Day in Utopia
- FANTASY

- KT Bryski | The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles

- Molly Gutman | End of the Sleeping Girls
- Cat Rambo | The Silent Familiar
- Daniel Abraham | The Mocking Tower
- EXCERPTS
- Sisters of the Vast Black
- NONFICTION
- Book Reviews: December 2019
- Media Reviews: December 2019
- Interview: Daniel José Older
- AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
- Matthew Baker
- Molly Gutman
- Pat Murphy
- KT Bryski
- MISCELLANY
- Coming Attractions
- Stay Connected
- Subscriptions and Ebooks

- Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

- About the Lightspeed Team

- Also Edited by John Joseph Adams