Interzone #265 - July-August 2016
Author: Andy Cox [Ed.]
Date: 2016-07-08 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction Magazine
Description: The July–August issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by John Schoffstall, Dan Reade, Suzanne Palmer, Ken Hinckley, Andrew Kozma, and Robert Reed. The 2016 cover artist is Vincent Sammy, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, Dave Senecal, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Features: Editorial by Jo L. Walton; Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Laser Fodder by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, including an interview with Lisa Tuttle);
Publisher: TTA Press

ISSUE #265

JULY-AUGUST 2016

Publisher

TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
w: ttapress.com
e: interzone@ttapress.com
f: TTAPress
t: @TTApress

Editor

Andy Cox
andy@ttapress.com

Book Reviews Editor

Jim Steel
jim@ttapress.com

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

Events

Roy Gray
roy@ttapress.com

© 2016 Interzone & its contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system, but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

CONTENTS

IF THAT’S THE WAY THAT IT IS by VINCENT SAMMY
karbonk.deviantart.com

LISA TUTTLE
interviewed by Juliet E. McKenna in Book Zone

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL

JO L. WALTON

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

ALL YOUR CITIES I WILL BURN

JOHN SCHOFFSTALL
illustrated by Martin Hanford
martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

THE EYE OF JOB

DAN READE
illustrated by Richard Wagner
rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

BELONG

SUZANNE PALMER

ON THE TECHNO-EROTIC POTENTIAL OF DONALD TRUMP UNDER CONDITIONS OF PARTIALLY INDUCED PSYCHOSIS

KEN HINCKLEY
illustrated by Dave Senecal
senecal.deviantart.com

THE INSIDE-OUT

ANDREW KOZMA
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
warwickfrasercoombe.blogspot.co.uk

A MAN OF MODEST MEANS

ROBERT REED

REVIEWS

BOOK ZONE
books

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE
films

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

DVDs & Blu-rays

EDITORIAL

JO L. WALTON

After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. Sublemon: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.

Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: Best Action Sequence, Best Twist, Best Ending, Best Villain? Best New Award? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: “Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously.” On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence. And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of
Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: “vote if you want, who gives a shit.” Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.

In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes’, and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.

The second is politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote
Capital.
With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written “from the standpoint of redemption”, and embedded in plexiglass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.

Oh and it’s
Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

Telling People What They Want To Be

The history of science fiction teaches us that a little social relevance can be a dangerous thing. Commercial science fiction did not come fully-formed, it sprang from a pre-history littered with prestigious ancestors who laid foundations, coined phrases, and paved ways. People like Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell prospered because they recognised the thematic links between this pre-history and the emerging crazes for popular science and amateur radio. These early fandoms provided editors with pre-existing audiences and commercial science fiction was born of the desire to pander to those audiences by validating their identities and telling them what they wanted to hear.

Leaf through a collection of old stories like Robert Silverberg’s excellent first volume of
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and you’ll see that science fiction spent the 1930s selling fantasies of technical competence to amateur engineers. By the late 1950s, that audience had collapsed only to be replaced by a much larger audience made up of men desperate to forget all of the terrible things they had seen and done in Europe, Japan, and Korea. Ever happy to connect, science fiction pandered to those sensibilities and sold them war stories in which the enemy’s inhumanity justified any and all actions taken against them. When the Vietnam War divided America into two political camps, genre publishing sold Heinlein novels to the veterans who still believed in just wars and Haldeman novels to those who returned from war filled with alienation and guilt. Science fiction became a mass-market commodity by positioning itself somewhere between harsh reality and complete fantasy; pre-historic literary tools designed to open up complex worlds now served to simplify reality by knocking off awkward moral edges and producing moral fantasies that vaguely resembled the truth.

The commercial decline of literary science fiction stems from the publishing industry’s failure to recognise groups that were as vulnerable to exploitative pandering as the white, middle-class men of the 1950s and ’60s. Sure…the New Wave, Feminist SF, Cyberpunk and Paranormal Romance all found their audiences but none of those populations proved insecure enough to ensure the long-term financial stability of genre publishing. Of course, it doesn’t help that the industry’s prejudice and self-regard also made it slow to react. Indeed, while genre publishing might have got in on the ground floor when it came to constructing the 20th Century nerd, it has now spent decades on the back foot, jumping from one collapsed subjectivity to another. What was Grimdark fantasy if not an attempt at pandering to teenage
Dungeons & Dragons players that arrived decades after most of those kids had already grown up and moved on?

With sales of epic fantasy on the decline, genre publishing now finds itself in search of a new economic heartland. Given the similarities in subject matter, you would expect genre publishing to begin pumping out Young Adult novels but institutional sexism and general incompetence allowed genre publishing to miss yet another boat and now it faces the impossible task of imposing itself on a mature marketplace complete with its own imprints and hierarchies. Thankfully, the critical and commercial success of Anne Leckie’s
Imperial Radch trilogy revealed an emerging mass market for grown-up science fiction but with genre publishers still encouraging popular science fiction authors like Aliette de Bodard and Kameron Hurley to write fantasy novels, the race is now on to turn the old tanker around and become the imprint best able to bridge the gap between old-fashioned science fiction and new-fangled senses of self.

Becky Chambers’
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was a small crowdfunding initiative until it was sucked into the gears of genre publishing by an unexpected nomination for best debut novel at the 2014 Kitschies. Republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015, the novel soon found itself on both the shortlist for this year’s Clarke Award and the longlist for this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. These nominations alone were enough to make Chambers’ book an important work of science fiction but there is no denying that it speaks explicitly to the now.

Small Angry Planet begins with its wealthy point-of-view character taking a job as PA to the captain of a privately-owned starship that builds hyperspace motorways for a polity known as the Galactic Commons. This captain turns out to be an ambitious man and his desire to upgrade his ship and pursue bigger contracts pushes him to accept a job that sends his unarmed ship and crew into a war zone. Despite much of the plot revolving around the desire to acquire and spend money,
Small Angry Planet has no interest in developing any kind of critical distance from the social, moral, and psychological pressures that capitalism brings to bear.
Small Angry Planet may be a novel about work but its vision of work is as much of a moral fantasy as Heinlein’s vision of warfare.

With the book’s plot, world-building, and set-dressing all trying very hard to pretend that the New Wave never happened, praise for
Small Angry Planet has mostly accrued to its liberal politics and the fact that each member of the ship’s crew operates as a stand-in for a variety of marginalised groups. Thus, the protagonist is presented as being privileged by virtue of her planet-based upbringing while humans raised on spaceships are representative of a more numerous and less-privileged working class. From there on in, the representation grows ever-more awkward as Chambers begins carving up old stereotypes and stitching the pieces together to produce a variety of alien races and cultures. For example, there’s a race of lizard people who are more sexual and more emotionally-expressive than humans in a way that recalls racist caricatures of African American people. Also familiar are the race of technologically-advanced fish people who are enigmatic and delicately beautiful as per the orientalist fantasies that are frequently projected onto the people of South East Asia. The crew also includes alien twins who occupy a single identity because of a mystical virus that turned them into the skiffy version of an autistic savant and an engineer whose Luddite mother refused him treatment for Dwarfism. The list of recognisable identities goes on and on, each of them serving principally as an opportunity for the book’s privileged protagonist to win people over by learning about differing cultural attitudes to things like personal space and pronoun usage. It all seems amazingly sweet and earnest until you realise that this vision of workplace understanding is just another example of bad science fiction selling us a vision of the world with all of the uncomfortable edges sanded off.

At a time when professional spaces demand greater acts of ruthlessness and social spaces demand greater performances of righteousness, this novel tells ambitious middle-class people that it is easy to be morally righteous and politically progressive. Most people who are raised middle-class are raised to engage with society in a way that perpetuates existing hierarchies and so contributes to the grotesque social inequalities that define the capitalist system. The first step towards becoming a progressive is to recognise that the society that gives you wealth and status dehumanises others and that every step you take up the ladder is assisted by centuries of brutal prejudice. Chambers is selling a fantasy because in her universe you don’t need to check your privilege, make sacrifices, or work for meaningful change. You just turn up, behave professionally, use the right pronouns, and marginalised groups will literally fall over themselves to shower you with status, money, sex, and the kind of acceptance that is rightly denied to those who actively benefit from the immiseration of others.

Small Angry Planet achieves this fantasy by severing stereotypes from their real-world origins and projecting them onto a universe where fictional analogues of real identities are naturally occurring and not products of a pervasively dehumanising capitalism. By removing capitalism from the equation, Chambers creates a fantasy world in which you can be righteously progressive and unapologetically ambitious. Just as Heinlein once sold fantasies of righteous genocide to guilt-ridden war veterans, Chambers is selling fantasies of political correctness to people who yearn to be part of the solution when everyone from their parents to their co-workers expects them to grow up, behave and assume their place as part of the problem. Sometimes a little relevance can be a profoundly ugly thing.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

Canon Fodder

Debates about what constitutes ‘canon’ are ten a penny within the science fiction community. Barely a week seems to pass without someone getting up on a metaphorical podium to insist that in order to have a valid opinion on the current field, any seriously committed fan will as a matter of course need to have read Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Campbell, Clarke. Such claims and counter claims are by no means confined to the SF world, however. Last month, students of English Literature at Yale University launched a petition demanding that English 125/6, a study module covering major pre-20th-century English poets and a compulsory course requirement, be dropped from the curriculum. “It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might study only white male authors,” ran the text of the petition. “A year spent around the seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity…and creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of colour.”

As the petition gathered support from undergraduates and members of the academic staff, the backlash was inevitable. In an article at Slate, journalist and former Yale student Katy Waldman argued in favour of the English department’s current course requirements, insisting that “if you want to become well versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot… The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it”.

Waldman’s argument, that in order to properly appreciate the work of writers such as Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Wole Soyinka we must first steep ourselves in the language and literary values of Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare is a familiar one. The question of whether it is true is more complex. The line that most disturbs me in Katy Waldman’s response to the Yale petition runs: “the canon is what it is”. This statement would seem to suggest that the canon – that is, the list of works and writers broadly accepted as being ‘great’, and therefore having universal significance in the development and study of literature – is an objective fact, like gravity or the speed of light, and that anyone wishing to question its existence or makeup risks revealing themselves as a bit of a flat-Earther.

This is a worrying idea, to say the least. The overwhelming reason the canon “is what it is” has less to do with any objective standard of ‘greatness’ than with six centuries of social and academic investment in shoring it up. I need not add that the academics, scholars, churchmen and yes, even writers who are the canon’s staunchest supporters tend to spring from the same demographic as the canon itself.

Even Winston Churchill was prepared to admit that history is written by the victors. I wonder if he would have been as prepared to support the view that the western canon is largely the result of cultural imperialism. Looking back on it now, it discomfits me to realise that I emerged from school and from university with a very partial idea of the forces that shape literature – the social forces that hold a narrow band of accepted opinions firmly in place, whilst driving other voices underground or to the wall. There is an argument that says these issues pertain to history and sociology and not to literature, that the text is the text is the text. Which can only beg the question: which text, and more importantly, whose?

Thinking about literature should mean more than thinking, in a very insular way, about an accepted canon. I would go so far as to say that to continue teaching the western literary canon as it is, inviolate and unchallenged, is like trying to insist upon teaching physics as we might have taught it before the birth of Albert Einstein.

I am not talking about chucking out all the old stuff, or trying to insist, as Waldman seems to believe the Yale students who organised the petition were trying to insist, “that the major English poets have nothing to say to students who are not straight, white and male”. I’d be happy to see Yale’s six major English poets stay on the curriculum – indeed they should be on the curriculum, but as opt-in components of a more flexible and exploratory approach to what constitutes great literature. Making these particular writers a compulsory requirement is to make a statement about their importance, not just then but now. “There are few (arguably no) female poets writing in Chaucer’s time who rival Chaucer in wit, transgressiveness, texture or psychological insight,” Waldman argues. “The lack of equal opportunity was a tremendous injustice springing from oppressive social norms, but we can’t reverse it by willing brilliant female wordsmiths into the past.” Indeed we cannot, but knowing this, why would we seek to perpetuate those same oppressive social norms – norms that have led to the erasure of women and minority writers from Chaucer’s time onwards – by insisting that those writers who have arrived at the top of the canon via a skewed system should remain there regardless, the yardstick by which contemporary literature must be judged and the bedrock upon which future literature must be built?

I need not add that any or all of the above could equally be applied to debates about the supposed importance of so-called canonical writers from SF’s Golden Age.

The men of both canons were writers. Some of them were great writers. Their work is freely available to be read and studied. But we should not ignore the fact that a year of studying Pope and Chaucer – or Heinlein and Clarke – whilst it might be valuable for some, might actively alienate others, and that to continue in the unspoken assumption that those for whom the current canon feels conservative, a limitation rather than a stimulus for our ideas about literature, are somehow failing to achieve the required standard is not an upholding of excellence, but simply the perpetuation of outmoded criteria and, as the text of the Yale students’ petition suggests, summarily dismissive of anyone for whom the western canon and worldview is less than gospel.

As someone passionately invested in the university system throughout the second and third decades of my life, one of the hardest lessons I had to unlearn was the idea of objective standards in literature as laid down by academics. It is sad and deflating to come to the realisation that as an Arts student, a lot of what you are taught at university is not definitively ‘true’, that the high marks you have routinely been awarded for producing accurate representation and summary of current systems of thought and criticism have little intrinsic value, that they are a series of subjective adjudications based around a currently accepted tranche of received opinion. It wasn’t until I began to perceive this that I began to feel the necessity of finding other modes of expression. To challenge, even just in my own mind, the intellectual status quo. There has been much to assimilate, a process that is still ongoing. But I can say my ideas about literature have broadened and deepened significantly since I have freed myself from preconceptions about the automatic supremacy of the accepted canon.

The story of literature is not a unitary thing, no matter how much some professors and course directors and critical commentators would have you believe that it is. It is a protean organism, constantly evolving. It has a secret history. Personally, I would like to hear more from writers, critics and commentators with an interest and passion for excavating parts of that secret history, rather than more from those who seem overly invested in maintaining the canon elect. The most important asset in the study of literature is not a body of pre-acquired, university-sanctioned knowledge, but an independent mind. We all bring baggage to our reading and to our writing, but rather than someone else’s pre-packed, pre-selected baggage, shouldn’t we at least be allowed to bring our own baggage instead?

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

As Others See Us.
‘People buy romance novels, sci-fi and other genres because they know they will encounter no unhappiness, no depression, no angst, no killings, no family conflict, etc., the way they will in all of modern fiction.’ (Letter,
NY Times Book Review) • ‘Written at the height of Britain’s imperial project, those 23 little tales are really a primer for navigating the merciless currents of amoral capitalism.’ (Guardian subhead for ‘Into the dystopian world of Beatrix Potter’)

In Typo Veritas.
‘George R.R. Martin has been given an honorary dungaree from Texas A&M University.’ (SF²
Concatenation newscast)

A.B. Yehoshua, eminent Israeli novelist, explains: ‘I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction. […] The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling. Very possibly I am missing out on important genres. But it’s too late to change my conservatism.’ (NY Times Book Review)

Awards.
British Book Industry.
Book of the Year: Andrew Michael Hurley,
The Loney. Children’s: David Solomons,
My Brother is a Superhero. •
Compton Crook
(sf/fantasy debut novel): Fran Wilde,
Updraft. •
Kate Greenaway Medal:
Chris Riddell (his third win) for illustrating Neil Gaiman’s
The Sleeper and the Spindle. •
Kurd Laßwitz Preis for Best Foreign SF Book:
Neal Stephenson,
Seveneves, translated into German as
Amalthea. •
Lambda
(LGBT etc) sf/f/horror novel category: Kirsty Logan,
The Gracekeepers. Anthology (not genre-specific) went to
Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology; Roz Kaveney won for Transgender Fiction with her non-genre novel
Tiny Pieces of Skull. •
Nebulas.
Novel: Naomi Novik
Uprooted. Novella: Nnedi Okorafor,
Binti. Novelette: Sarah Pinsker, ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ (Asimov’s). Short: Alyssa Wong, ‘Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers’ (Nightmare). Andre Norton: (YA) Fran Wilde,
Updraft. Ray Bradbury: (film)
Mad Max: Fury Road. •
Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication:
inaugural winners include composer Hans Zimmer for his
Interstellar film score.

Douglas Adams was remembered in a June ‘Inquisitor’ crossword whose solvers had to make unspecified thematic changes to eight unspecified answers in accordance with an unspecified book title. There were several varieties of fish in the grid, and changing all these to synonyms of ‘So Long’ and ‘Thanks’ revealed our author’s name.

Court Circular.
Marvel’s and DC’s joint ownership of a trademark on the word ‘superhero’ was nearly tested in court after they tried to squelch UK author Graham Jules over a self-help book titled
From Business Zero to Superhero. The big companies backed down shortly before the scheduled hearing at the Intellectual Property Office in London. (Guardian) • J.J. Abrams said in mid-May that the Paramount/CBS lawsuit against Axanar Productions for
Star Trek
IP infringement was ‘going away’; a settlement is implied, but Axanar nevertheless filed a counterclaim against the studios. (www.trektoday.com)

Ursula K. Le Guin broadens our scope: ‘I don’t know if Thog is interested in opening his Masterclass to anyone outside science fiction, let alone the writer some people call The Master. But I know he likes the more violent anatomical disjunctions and peculiarities, and humbly offer him this one, from Chapter 30 of
The Awkward Age by Henry James (p.301 in the 1981 Penguin Modern Classics edition): “‘But we have, you know, as Van says, gone to pieces’ she went on, twisting her pretty head and tossing it back over her shoulder to an auditor of whose approach to her from behind, though it was impossible she should have seen him, she had visibly, within a minute, become aware.” I can’t tell you the joy this passage gave me, as by page 301 I was in danger of tossing the book back over my shoulder into a fireplace of whose location, though I might be uncertain, I had become willing to imagine, as offering me a final, if less than admirable, escape from endless thickets of clauses introducing incomprehensibly allusive conversations carried on by disagreeable people, among whom the owner of the pretty head is, perhaps, the most tedious.’

Andy Weir was boggled by an official US Congress invitation to testify at a May hearing of the Space Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, titled
Next Steps to Mars: Deep Space Habitat. Rejected headline: ‘Author Hauled Before Congressional Committee for Writing Novel’.

As Others See
Game of Thrones.
‘The Seven Kingdoms are divided into nine regions, with a logic that will be familiar to all fans of fantasy, and even to a few normal people.’ (New Yorker) • ‘Research reveals that there have been 60 flashes of female breasts in the HBO show so far, but only a pair of penises’. (Guardian)

Brian Blessed, whose many genre credits include
Space: 1999
(1975–1976) and
Flash Gordon
(1980), received the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Coming and Going.
John Gilbert’s magazine
Fear has been revived in print;
Black Clock magazine, Gary Fry’s horror-oriented Gray Friar Press and John DeNardo’s SF Signal blog all announced closure.

H.P. Lovecraft is on the Retro Hugo ballot as Best Fan Writer of 1940 despite having died in 1937. ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie…’

Prediction Dept.
Sixty years ago, Anthony Boucher wrote in
F&SF: ‘I can only say that anyone with the faintest interest in imaginative literature must at least sample
The Lord of the Rings. Not everyone will find it to his taste; it will never appear on any bestseller lists…’

As Others See Us II.
Gemma Chan of C4’s
Humans on the series’ appeal: ‘I think someone called it sci-fi for non sci-fi fans … It was more thoughtful.’ (Radio Times) • ‘To call
The X-Files
“science fiction” is to degrade it and to elevate Sci-fi to a standard it doesn’t deserve.’ (Secret Sun blog)

We Are Everywhere.
The Panama Papers tax-haven story was tinged with genre by the now infamous law firm Mossack Fonseca’s secret email system: ‘Wealthy clients could correspond using invented names. Some in the files leap out at you: Harry Potter, Winnie Pooh and Daniel Radcliffe. Obviously not the real one. / One customer used the name Isaac Asimov, a nod to the master of twentieth-century science fiction, whom he admired.’ (Guardian)

Terri Windling gave the annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford, in May.

Thog’s Masterclass.
Dept of Neat Tricks.
‘He sat cross-legged before the Prisoner’s Pillar, a smile held to his face only by the fortitude of his small flat ears.’ (Anne Edwards,
Haunted Summer, 1972) •
Gastric Anomaly Dept.
‘His stomach came up and shook hands with his throat … Fear forced it back again.’ (‘Lionel Roberts’,
The In-World, 1960) •
Walk Before You Run Dept.
‘The torment in his side slowed him to a dizzy, infirm walk. He ran face-first into a tree…’ (Patricia Anthony, ‘Two-bag Goddess’ in
Eating Memories, 1997) •
Vivid Symbolism Dept.
‘“Interestingly,” Sparkes told Matthews later, as they sat in the cafeteria, “not all porn addicts get erections.” / Ian Matthews raised an eyebrow as he rested his sausage sandwich on the Formica table. “Do you mind, boss? I’m eating.”’ (Fiona Barton,
The Widow, 2016)

R.I.P.

Daniel Atterbom
(1959–2016), Swedish fan, journalist and comics expert who edited the comics journal
Bild & Bubbla and two books on the subject, died on 4 June; he was 56.

Adrian Berry
(1937–2016) – Viscount Camrose since 2001 – UK science journalist and spaceflight advocate whose books included the pop-science
The Next Ten Thousand Years
(1974) and
The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe through Black Holes
(1977) plus the sf novel
Koyama’s Diamond
(1982), died on 18 April; he was 78.

Rhoda Blumberg
(1917–2016), US author of many historical books for children plus such speculative ‘non-fact’ works as
The First Travel Guide to the Moon
(1980) – addressed to 21st-century kids – died on 6 June aged 98.

James H. Burns, US fan who wrote for
Starlog,
Fantastic Films
(as contributing editor),
Cinefantastique,
Starburst,
Heavy Metal and
Twilight Zone, was found dead on 2 June; he was about 56.

Katherine Dunn
(1945–2016), US author and journalist best known for her bestselling horror/paranormal novel
Geek Love
(1989), died on 11 May; she was 70.

Nicholas Fisk
(David Higginbottom, 1923–2016), UK author of much challenging and often unnerving sf for children, including
Space Hostages
(1967),
Trillions
(1971),
Grinny
(1973),
Antigrav
(1978) and the uncompromisingly grim
A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair
(1980), died on 10 May; he was 94.

Roberta L. Gellis
(1927–2016), US author of historical romances and fantasies (including the ‘Sceptr’d Isle’ series with Mercedes Lackey) and of sf as by Max Daniels in the 1970s and under her own name with
Overstars Mail: Imperial Challenge
(2004), died on 6 May; she was 88.

Lars Gustafsson
(1936–2016), major Swedish author, poet and academic who used fantastic themes in novels and published both essays on sf and short sf stories – notably in
The Strange Beast from the North and other Science Fiction Tales
(1999) – died on 3 April; he was 79.

H.B. Hickey
(Herbert B. Livingston, 1916–2016), author of some eighty stories including much sf from 1946 to 1970 (when ‘Gone are the Lupo’ appeared in the Delany/Hacker anthology
Quark/1), died on 8 March; he was 99.

Peter Janson-Smith
(1922–2016), UK literary agent who among many others represented Ian Fleming and (for
A Clockwork Orange) Anthony Burgess, died on 15 April aged 93.

Philip Edward Kaldon, US physicist, academic and author of several genre stories beginning with ‘The Gravediggers’ (2004
CrossTIME Anthology III), died on 20 April.

Paul Pinn
(1955–2016), UK writer of horror and other genres whose first novel was
The Pariah
(2000), died from cancer on 4 February at the age of 60.

Gregory Rabassa
(1922–2016), noted US translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude and many other major works by Latin American authors, died on 14 June; he was 94.

Richard Selzer
(1928–2016), US surgeon and author whose works include some short horror fiction, died on 5 June aged 87.

Robyn Sisman
(1955–2016), US-born author and editor who published J.G. Ballard reprints and the first
Interzone anthology while at J.M. Dent, plus sf including Kim Newman’s
The Night Mayor and Brian Stableford’s
The Empire of Fear at Simon & Schuster, died on 20 May.

BLACK STATIC #53 OUT NOW

fiction

PRIYA SHARMA

STEVE RASNIC TEM

DANNY RHODES

STEPHEN HARGADON

HARMONY NEAL

CHARLES WILKINSON

KRISTI DEMEESTER

comment

LYNDA E. RUCKER

STEPHEN VOLK

book & film reviews

PETER TENNANT

GARY COUZENS

art

TARA BUSH

RICHARD WAGNER

& others

coming in issue #54

‘Perspective’ by

STEVEN J. DINES

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ALL YOUR CITIES I WILL BURN

JOHN SCHOFFSTALL

illustrated by Martin Hanford

As we marched down to Fennario,

As we marched down to Fennario,

Our captain fell in love

With a lady like a dove,

And they called her name pretty Peggy-O.

—Trad.

They say that when telling a story, it’s important to pick the right place to start. Not too far into the story, but not too long before its beginning. In telling my story about the love of Captain Terrell Johnson and Peggy O’Neill, about the Meteor Gods and the end of the world, I’m going to start 435 million years ago. I hope that’s not too soon.

There was a mass extinction of living species 435 million years ago, according to fossil records. There was another mass extinction 355 million years ago. And 250 million. And 203 million. And 65 million. In fact, the closer we look, the more mass extinction events we see. There may have been as many as twenty-six in the last billion years.

At one time, we had a theory that asteroids crashing into the Earth caused mass extinctions. In 2042 we got to test that theory, though not by choice. We found that it was only half-right.

In early February of 2040, NASA’s Near Earth Object Program detected an asteroid on a collision course for Earth. They named it Object 2040-CA19. CA19 was about a kilometer in its longest axis. NEOP assigned it a ‘9’ on the Torino Scale: certain impact, massive local destruction, but the human race was expected survive. Predicted impact point was in the Gulf of Mexico, midway between New Orleans, Brownsville, and the Yucatan.

In the largest migration in human history, all Caribbean islands and the coasts of all nations bordering on the Gulf were cleared of human habitation. Food and potable water were stockpiled around the globe. Most nations declared martial law a few days before the projected impact. The human race hunkered down to weather the storm.

On July 10, 2042, 10:34:11
GMT, CA19 struck our planet. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and torrential rains battered the Earth. Clouds hid the sun for months. Winter came that July, and lasted for a year. Snow fell in Rio and Singapore.

But after a year, the clouds began to part. Temperatures slowly rose. The human race drew a collective sigh of relief: the scientists had been right. Within two years of CA19’s impact, humanity was on its way to recovery.

Then Skoreg the Great heaved His mountainous bulk out of the sea near Galveston.

***

In February of 2055, I joined up with McKenzie’s Irregulars when they marched south from Raleigh, North Carolina. At that time I was a middle-aged man at loose ends. I had just resigned my employment of the last decade, as an investigator with the Duke-GeneSolutions NuLife project. I gave notice by smashing my lab with a steel meter stick. Alcohol may have been involved. I had my notebooks in a pile on the floor and was trying to set them on fire when my colleagues found me. I told them they were monsters of perversion, their whole project was a blot on the conscience of the human race, and NuLife could go to hell. They cursed me, cuffed me around, carried me to the surface, and threw me out onto the red clay of a North Carolina farm field. “Go get yourself eaten by the Gods, if you’re too good to fight them,” one man sneered. Steel doors slammed shut behind me.

The idea had appeal. My heart was filled with a poisonous slush of guilt, remorse, despair, moral indignation and self-righteousness. I would have willingly walked into a Meteor God’s mouth, had one been present to oblige. Instead, I begged a ride from a farmer on a horse-drawn hay wain, and wound up in Raleigh. My immediate plan was to drink myself to death. I felt it was a realistic plan. People always manage to have liquor around, even in the middle of an extinction event.

In Raleigh, I found work compounding gunpowder for ‘Happy’ Smiley, one of the local warlords. My training is in cell biology, but I could puzzle out enough inorganic chemistry and stoichiometry to improve the performance of Happy’s black powder muskets. In return, Happy and his boys kept me in whiskey. I was making satisfactory progress towards my goal of death by cirrhosis when I was interrupted by General McKenzie’s arrival.

McKenzie and his Irregulars, a few thousand strong, were on their way to the Gulf Coast to fight Million-Legged Liloouu, who was working hell around Mobile and the little towns in the bottomland of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. McKenzie formed up his men in front of the bronze statue of George Washington on the grounds of the old State Capital building. He wore an olive drab field coat with the elbows coming out, and a battered trooper’s hat that the frigid wind threatened to blow off his head any minute. He had a mop of wavy white hair, a white beard and droopy white mustachios. He looked like a gene-splice of Colonel Custer, Robert E. Lee, and Santa Claus.

McKenzie held forth in a fine baritone that carried a hundred yards. “Gather round,” he cried, “all you proud Tar Heels! Your country needs every able-bodied man to fight.”

A crowd gathered. McKenzie’s sales pitch rang the bells for patriotism, heroism, and vengeance for our slaughtered countrymen. At the same time, he stoked up greed for the millions of acres of land that Liloouu had swept clean of human life. Land free for the taking. A thousand acres for every man.

I didn’t give a damn for patriotism or dreams of baronetcy. But I liked McKenzie because he was obviously mad. He was planning to lead his little army straight into the jaws of a Meteor God.

One of Happy’s boys standing in the crowd must have thought the same. “Just what are you planning to do about Her Pinkness?” he yelled. He meant Liloouu.

McKenzie nodded to one of his soldiers. The man stepped forward. He carried a rifle. A FAMAS, though I didn’t recognize it by name at the time. I am not a military man.

The heckler spat on the pavement. “Fancy rifle,” he said. “Too bad you ain’t got a clip for it.” Stockpiles of ammunition had been used up within a few years after CA19, and there was no longer an arms industry to make more. Or industry of any kind. Not in North America, that is.

McKenzie’s soldier slapped the rifle to his shoulder and fired off a burst at the heckler’s feet. The heckler jumped back, swearing.

“We got a deal going with the French,” McKenzie said. “You heard about the French?”

Everyone had heard about the French.

The murmur of the crowd took on a more positive tone. Another man yelled, “You can’t stop Liloouu with machine guns. Are the French going to H-bomb Her for you?”

“They got something better than H-bombs for us,” McKenzie said.

I thought that was unlikely, and McKenzie was coy about the details. But to desperate men, hope trumps reason. Who knew when Liloouu might turn north, or another Vour Faad might pour out of Albemarle Sound? There were stories of six-foot brown maggots in a crawling mat miles wide and yards deep, that had appeared out of Lake Michigan and headed south. They consumed everything in their path.

A couple score of men signed on with McKenzie’s Irregulars. I signed on, too. Whatever toys the French were giving McKenzie, I doubted that anything short of a nuke could stop a Meteor God. But I preferred to die fighting Liloouu than kill myself by inches with Happy’s corn liquor.

I still wanted to die. I expected mad old General McKenzie to help with that. But I had resolved to die for something. I would expatiate my guilt and despair, instead of buckling under them. My darkness had began to lift, just a little, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

McKenzie attached me to B Company (Unusual Weapons), Captain Terrell Johnson commanding.

***

Come a-running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O

Come a-running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O

Come a-running down the stairs,

Combing back your yellow hair,

You’re the prettiest little maid I’ve ever seen-i-o.

After two months of hard slogging southward through the cold and wet of early spring, we arrived exhausted and half-starved in the suburbs of Atlanta. It was mid-April, with patchy snow still on the ground. The hard winters following CA19 had killed off the kudzu that used to choke the South. Between the cracked concrete slabs of I-85, fields of wild crocus and daffodils bloomed.

McKenzie billeted us in private homes north of the city, in a gated community of pipsqueak mansions called Thistledown Sidhe. Unit strength was ridiculous. Captain Johnson’s B Company was little larger than a platoon. We all fit into a single house, if somewhat snugly.

The house’s owner, a man named O’Neill, tried to stick up for his rights. “The government can’t just take people’s homes to put up soldiers,” he said, shoving his chin in Johnson’s face. “It’s unconstitutional.” He reminded me of a snaggletooth old dog, defending his yard against a pack of muddy strays.

“‘Unconstitutional’,” Johnson said, rolling the syllables around in his mouth. “Two-dollar word. Beautiful word. A pleasure to speak.”

Before CA19, Mr O’Neill might have called the ACLU. But the ACLU was an obsolete concept. So was ‘call’, except in the sense of yelling. A lot of words have retreated a century or two in meaning. ‘The government’ doesn’t mean what it used to, either. At least four different governments claim parts of the old United States, squatters fighting over an abandoned house even as the bulldozers are rumbling towards it.

Johnson said, “Mr O’Neill, you may consider General McKenzie to be your own personal government at this time. He has ordered me to billet my company in this house. I’m one to follow orders.”

One of his soldiers clicked off the safety on his FAMAS and noisily chambered a round.

I hoped O’Neill would yield to the logic of FAMAS. There were lots worse than us roaming around the Carolinas and northern Georgia. The Palmetto Kingz or New DNA or Screw would have burned all the houses in Thistledown Sidhe for fun. Raped men and women both, then killed them. Maybe eaten them. Having McKenzie’s Irregulars sleeping in your beds, muddying your rugs and romancing your daughter was tolerable by comparison.

Wait a minute. What was that about a daughter?

“Daddy, don’t.”

A young woman came down the stairs. Yellow hair, freckles from somewhere south of Derry and north of Cork, green eyes that had the whole world sized up in a glance. Like the song says, as fair as any lady in the air-i-o.

“You can’t fight them, Daddy,” she said, staring at Johnson. “They’re too big.” I think she meant ‘too many’, but she couldn’t tear her eyes off Captain Johnson. Johnson was over six foot, all muscle and bone. He bulked out even larger on account of armor he wore under his uniform. More about that armor later.

O’Neill stared at his daughter helplessly for a moment, then his chin and shoulders fell.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Johnson said. “My men need rest and food.”

One of the soldiers said, “Captain, there’s livestock out back of the house.”

“You don’t say,” Johnson said. “Eating-type livestock?”

“Couple of horses, couple of cows, some pigs and chickens.”

“Please don’t eat the horses,” the young woman said. “We’ll be needing them for spring plowing in a month.”

“Ma’am,” Johnson said, “your horses are safe with us.”

“Call me Peggy,” she said. She put her hands on her hips and smiled.

***

Sometime after sunset one of McKenzie’s staff corporals rattled up in a buckboard. Most of B Company was still on the front lawn, enjoying the warmth from the firepit where we’d barbecued one of the O’Neills’ pigs. April evenings were still frosty in Georgia. Post-CA19 effects. “Where’s Frenchie?” the corporal yelled. That would be me. “The General needs you for speaky-speaky French talk. Hop on in.”

“You’re French?” Peggy said. “Parly-voo?” She was sitting with Captain Johnson, who had been telling her war stories. Johnson had seen the French glass Marseilles.

“Non, Mademoiselle O’Neill,” I said. “Je suis de la ville des, ah, Sioux Falls.”

I hauled myself into the buckboard. I spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure while doing my post-doc, and a couple of years as a visiting professor later on. My French is spotty, but I can usually make myself understood. It’s why McKenzie let me tag along with the Irregulars, because otherwise I’m just a middle-aged guy without noticeable soldiering skills.

McKenzie had taken the biggest house in the development for his HQ. I found him in the great room, in front of a roaring fire on the hearth. His officers were scattered about, passing around a jug. McKenzie sucked on a cheroot that stank up the place.

The Alcatel shortwave on the table in front of him was almost as big as a baby carriage. Its tubes glowed a cheerful orange through the ventilation slots. A private sat to one side, hand-cranking a generator. Batteries would be nice, but there’s no industry here that can produce them any more. Or shortwave radios, for that matter, but France makes those, and they airdropped us this one. 1930s technology. Even France can’t make solid-state any more.

McKenzie pointed to the earphones with the glowing end of his cheroot. “Hiya, Frenchie,” he said. “They’re waiting for you. They hinted at some hot stuff the last time.”

I put on the earphones and bent over the mic. “Bonsoir,” I said.

Every time I got on the shortwave, a fear ran through me that no one would be on the other end, now, or ever again. That France was gone. That for all their Gallic pluck and their unspeakably ruthless methods of national defense, they had finally been overrun, another pocket of humanity extinguished.

But it was not to be tonight. “’Allo!” came a voice, wavering and static-corrupted.

The conversation lasted ten minutes. Oddball Franglais, with lots of English loan-words.

McKenzie kept interrupting and asking me what was being said. “They’re making bullets,” I said. “…making them out of the flesh of Vour Faad…the bullets are very big, and—”

“I like big!” McKenzie yelled. “Big bullets for big game.” He rubbed his hands together and cackled. The cheroot coal flared.

“…they have to do…extensive re-engineering…the bullets are…
Quoi? ‘Doux’?
The bullets are big and soft. Soft.”

“The bullets are soft?” McKenzie spat a bit of cheroot across the room. “The hell?”

I shrugged. “They have great expectations for these new bullets. Girard thinks it will take two months to make them.” Camille Girard was the senior weapons scientist at Manufacture d’armes de Saint-Étienne.

“Two months? Well, crap on that. Crap on that.” He leaned back into his chair and stared up at the ceiling.

The call was over. The man on the generator stopped turning his crank and wiped his brow with his sleeve.

“We’ll just have to wait,” McKenzie said at last. “It’s suicide going against Liloouu otherwise. We have to wait on the damn French and their soft bullets. Frenchie, how are you at Russian?”

“Sir, I don’t have any Russian,” I said.

“They say Russia still exists, but I’ve never been able to raise them. I’ve wondered if Russia’s got the same deal going with Dog or Perez that we’ve got with France.” Dog Braxton and J.L. Perez were the presidents of two other fragmentary USAs. “You know what they’re up to, don’t you, Frenchie? Why the French give a damn about us?”

“Sir, I don’t know anything about strategy…”

“We’re their guinea pigs, Frenchie, guinea pigs. They’re using us to test their weapons ideas. So we get all the weird crap they can dream up. They wouldn’t give us an H-bomb or anything useful. Oh, no, but we get soft bullets. Big and soft. Marshmallow bullets. Jimminy Christ.” He took another deep pull on the cheroot. “I bet they’re also playing us as a proxy against Dog and Perez, if those two are clients of the Ruskies. I swear, I feel like some African po-ten-tate a hundred years ago, like a pawn in the Cold War. Funny turn of events, ain’t it, Frenchie?”

“Yes, it is, sir,” I said.

The cheroot was almost gone. “Next time,” McKenzie said, “next time you get ’em on the shortwave, tell ’em Perez has crossed the Mississippi, and we expect contact. Maybe that’ll make ’em kit us up, if they think Russia’s bitches are gaining ground.” He stubbed out the cheroot on the tabletop. “Maybe they’ll give us a god-damned H-bomb then.”

***

In a carriage you will ride, pretty Peggy-O,

In a carriage you will ride, pretty Peggy-O,

In a carriage you will ride,

With your true love by your side,

As fair as any lady in the air-i-o.

Weeks passed. McKenzie’s impatience with the French grew and festered. Anyone who spoke to him risked a tirade. Armée de l’Air was flying recon over the US, six-engine pusher-prop planes. Now and then they’d parachute us a couple of skids of guns or ammo. No H-bomb was forthcoming.

They say a dog and its master come to resemble each other. When McKenzie was snappish, fights tended to break out between Irregulars and townies. McKenzie confined some of the Irregulars to quarters and rationed the liquor. Things simmered down a bit, but I thought there would be trouble ahead if the Irregulars didn’t march soon.

One source of friction with the townies was romance. Sometimes a Thistledown woman had eyes for one of the Irregulars, and maybe a Thistledown man didn’t like that. But that’s what happens when you mix men and women together. Even at the end of the world, with Meteor Gods the size of mountains scouring the land clean of life, scooping up human beings like ladybugs eating aphids off a tomato plant, romance happens. Even then. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Even then romance strangely endures.

One of those women was Peggy O’Neill. The object of her affection was Captain Terrell Johnson.

I believe those two figured it out immediately. It took me a little longer to realize that when Captain Johnson wasn’t in a briefing with General McKenzie or drilling Company B, you were likely to find him with Peggy. You wouldn’t call them alike. No more than a honeybee and an apple blossom are alike, or mashed potatoes and gravy. But they were things made by nature to go together. Her cheerful patter and his reserve. Her easy smile and his sardonic one. As I watched them sit together by the fire on a cool evening, the way their shoulders tilted together, the way their bodies bent and folded against each other, seemed to have been drawn by an artist in a scheme of proportion and balance. Or like the twisted complementary strands of DNA that mirror each other, base pairing with base.

Perhaps that’s an odd metaphor for lovers, but I was trained as a cell biologist and my mind tends in that direction. Although, if I had thought more deeply about it, I might have wondered why else that particular metaphor occurred to me.

That I didn’t think deeply about it, until much later, testifies to the effect those two had on me. As I have said, at that time all my world was dark, and I looked forward only to death. The love of Captain Johnson and Peggy O. was the only positive and joyous thing I had encountered in as long as I could remember. Their love, amid the ruins of the Earth, was the unexpected datum that overturned my theory of despair. It testified to the presence of tenderness and hope in a world which had seemed to promise only terror and death.

Now I had a new sort of problem, though. I had joined General McKenzie’s mad expedition with the thought that McKenzie would lead me to certain death in the maw of Million-Legged Liloouu. I still thought death was our destination – but I no longer wanted to die. I had developed considerable respect for Captain Johnson. A man of sense and judgment, unexcitable, a cool head in any situation. But even the best-led school of sardines is ill-advised to fight a shark. I doubted whether any of us had a chance of living through contact with Liloouu.

April turned to May. As the weather warmed, friction between Irregulars and Thistledowners ramped up again. General McKenzie ordered his Irregulars to help the Thistledowners with spring planting, to give the restless men a sink for their energy.

One morning around the middle of May we were working the fields. Johnson drove a team of four horses that strained to pull a quad-bladed plow intended for a tractor. Peggy, I, and a couple others walked behind, planting corn from sacks we carried. The sun was hot, the soil just now warm enough to plant a crop. The loam curled like a yellow wave against the blade of the plow, and fell over, releasing its rich and musky scent.

We had sown in about an acre, a good morning’s work. At noon we rested. Thistledown women came out to the fields to feed us dinner, buttered cornbread and a casserole. Johnson had removed his shirt on account of the warmth. Glistening rivulets of sweat rolled off his dark skin. His shoulders and upper back were encased in armor, overlapping pearly gray plates. It swam with faint rainbow colors, like oil on a puddle. Johnson claimed it would stop a 9 millimeter slug. He was crazy proud of that armor. I had never seen him take it off.

Peggy sat beside Johnson, running a finger nail over the armor plates. It made a throbbing musical note, like running a wet finger around the rim of a water glass. “I bet I can play a tune,” Peggy said. She gave me a mischievous look. “Listen, Frenchie. I’ll play that thing you’re always whistling. Terrell, hold still.”

“Babe, I’m still eating here—”

“Hush, you. Just be still.”

Using her fingernail, Peggy made an eerie squeaking noise on the armor. “I’m awful at this,” she said finally, with a giggle. She whistled a few bars of ‘Peggy-O’.

“Oh, that tune,” Johnson said. “Frenchie, what’s it called? Did you make it up?”

I shook my head. “Old song, from the north of England. Lots of folksingers covered it.”

“Are there words?”

I sang the lyrics for them. I omitted the last verse. That verse has always disturbed me.

“You dog,” Johnson said when I was done.

“Woof, sir,” I said.

“I like that song,” Peggy said delightedly. “It’s all about us.”

“Those are really the words?” Johnson said.

I nodded.

“Where’s this Fenario, that they’re going to?”

“No one knows,” I said.

“Oh, rats,” Peggy said. She tugged her right hand, which was resting on Johnson’s armored left shoulder.

“What is it?” Johnson asked.

“My finger’s stuck.”

I will never forget the look of terror on Captain Johnson’s face.

In a blur of motion, he half-turned, his right arm swept around, seized Peggy’s wrist, and yanked her hand off his shoulder. She shrieked. Other Irregulars and Thistledowners turned their heads.

Peggy looked at her hand. A bright drop of blood trickled down the index finger. “It hurts,” she said, and pouted. She stuck the finger in her mouth.

Johnson shook his head. “Boo, I warned you. You can’t touch the armor too long. It’s like a kid putting his tongue on a freezing doorknob.”

“Then I’d be stuck to you forever!” She smiled around her finger.

I hadn’t realized Johnson’s armor did that. The armor had been made by French military labs, out of the flesh of Vour Faad. Johnson had been stationed at the US consulate in Marseilles when Vour Faad heaved out of the Mediterranean, over the Corniche, and into the city. Cubic miles of Him, churning and gelatinous, cascaded down streets and boulevards like a torrent of living sewage. “It smelled like falling face first into a maggoty corpse,” Johnson told me once. Vour Faad’s flesh consumed every living thing He touched. Johnson had helped evacuate the consular staff as far as Aix-en-Provence, where he witnessed the first demonstration of what came to be known as the ‘French Solution’. A Dassault Mirage fighter-bomber dropped a single airburst thermonuclear device on Vour Faad.

That was the end of Vour Faad, and the end of the ancient and fabled city of Marseilles.

After that, the French sealed their borders. Anything or anyone that came by the sea, over the passes of the Pyrenees or the Alps, across the Rhine or the Somme, was instantly and without hesitation destroyed with thermonuclear fire. Whether it was a Meteor God or a column of starving German or Italian refugees. France was taking no chances.

The US had waited too long. Dithered. Debated. Had moral qualms. Until San Francisco and Los Angeles were gone, and New York, and Miami, and New Orleans and Galveston. Until the Air Force ran out of fuel and our nuclear subs had been taken by vast things that now ruled the ocean trenches. France still had an industrial civilization, air power, and global reach. The US had horse-drawn plows, and us. McKenzie’s Irregulars.

“I think your armor’s handsome,” Peggy said. “Because it’s dangerous.”

“They say that if you’ve got part of a Meteor God on you, another Meteor God can’t eat you,” Johnson said.

“Really?” Peggy said.

“It’s unproven,” I said.

“Why do they say it?”

“They fight sometimes,” I said. “The Gods. They fight among themselves. They’re all different. Not one species. Or, at least not as we conceive ‘species’.”

We still don’t know what CA19 was all about. The Meteor Gods may exterminate us before we figure it out. Was CA19 a multi-species, multi-generational starship, whose politics had gone off the rails? Was it a lost prison hulk, and the Gods a random lot of interstellar criminals? Was it a biological weapon, designed to clear the Earth of life in preparation for the coming of some yet greater race? Or maybe extrasolar political and social norms are simply beyond our puny understanding. Perhaps the entire universe is no more than a Hobbesian war of all against all.

I said, “The popular idea is that the Meteor Gods all hate each other, so part of another God would repel them. It’s a sort of folk understanding of science: ‘opposites repel’.”

Peggy was looking at me curiously, with a lop-sided smile. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“‘…not as we conceive…’ Say it.”

I blushed.

“Do you know you talk like a book?” Peggy said. “Oh, don’t be upset. I think it’s cute.”

“Frenchie’s an educated man,” Johnson said. “He used to work in some sort of laboratory, near Raleigh. I think he knows more about the Meteor Gods than he wants to let on. He won’t talk about it, though.”

“Because it’s scary?” Peggy asked.

“Because there are things worse than the Meteor Gods,” I said.

“Oh, you’re so mysterious!” Peggy said, clapping her hands together. “I love a mystery.” She leaned in and whispered in my ear. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. “Tell me? I can keep a secret.” She reached out to pull Captain Johnson in. “Just me and Terrell.”

I would have ducked the question a couple of weeks ago. But as I have said, my darkness had begun to lift. My guard was down.

There’s an area in the North Carolina Piedmont called the Research Triangle. In the last century, the state invited tech companies to locate there and partner with universities. Intel, Genentech, Lucent, Monsanto, that sort. After CA19, the universities crumbled, but some of the research outfits burrowed underground. By now their labs are holed up in miles of tunnels and caverns, hundreds of feet deep beneath the red Carolina clay. I used to work there.

“I was with an outfit called NuLife,” I said. We were working on a way to fight the Meteor Gods.

“Did you know the Gods are related to us? Related to us the way apes and goldfish and bananas and bacteria are related. They have DNA with the same four bases. RNA coded by the DNA. Proteins coded and assembled by the RNA. Do you understand what those words mean? The chemicals, the matter of which their bodies are made, is arranged according to the same plan as ours. There’s about ten percent gene homology between us and the Meteor Gods. That’s not much. Even bananas share about fifty percent of their genes with us. But what’s surprising is that there’s any similarity at all.

“But in practical terms, it means that the DNA of humans and the Meteor Gods can be merged. That we can share each others’ genes.”

Peggy looked quickly back and forth between Captain Johnson and me. “‘Merged’?”

“Does that shock you? It should,” I said. “But it gets worse. My project team was trying to fight fire with fire. They thought that the way to destroy a Meteor God was to make our own Meteor God. We were trying to create a hybrid being. A warrior. A mix of human and Meteor God genes. Immense in size. Its flesh – ” nausea rose in me “ – of jelly-like consistency. Fast growing. Covered with…tentacles and feelers…a fringed, palpitating mouth like a hagfish… A monster to fight monsters.” I stopped, closed my eyes, and swallowed hard. “The unspeakable obscenity of it. Of all the horrors our sorry human race has accomplished, surely what we were doing was the worst. I was part of it, Christ, I was the project leader. I hate myself for that. I always will.”

There. I had said it. What I had been afraid to say to anyone, almost afraid to say to myself, for months.

“Would it have worked?” Peggy asked.

The clarity of her voice brought me back from my private purgatory of memory. I tried to parse her words. I could not make sense of them. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you think the, whatever you called it, the ‘hybrid being’, could have fought a Meteor God and won?”

I rose and faced her. I was trembling. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. My voice was higher-pitched than I intended.

Johnson’s eyes narrowed. He leaned a little closer to Peggy. “Frenchie,” he said. “Chill.”

“It matters,” Peggy said, “because the human race doesn’t have much else going for it right now. Is France going to nuke their own country until they run out of bombs? What then?” She looked up at me, with those green eyes that measured all things. “I want to live, Frenchie. I don’t want to cower on a farm in the woods until something like a million gallons of green quince jelly slithers out of the sea and eats me and everything I love. If there’s a weapon that can beat the Meteor Gods, we should be using it. I don’t care if it’s covered with tentacles. I object to dying, that’s what I object to. I object to the human race dying. If you invented something that might stop the Meteor Gods, in the name of all that’s holy, you should be using it, not running away from it!”

I tried to speak, but my heart was beating so fast it must have done something to my vocal cords. “How…how…how…” I stuttered.
How can you say that?
I couldn’t get the words out. My face burned. I balled up my fists.

“Soldier!” Johnson’s voice, like ice water. He leaped to his feet. The plate from which he had been eating flipped off his lap and smashed. He planted himself between Peggy and me. “Stand down!”

I let my hands drop. Peggy stared at me, biting her lip. My head was buzzing.

The buzz became louder. No, it wasn’t in my head. I looked up. Around me, everyone else was looking up too, shading their eyes.

A droning six-engine prop plane circled above, not more than a thousand feet above the ground. As we watched, rear fuselage doors opened. A skid piled with boxes tumbled out. After it came another, another, another. As each fell, a parachute bloomed like a white tumor on the blue sky. The French had never sent us an airdrop this big.

Johnson whistled. “Fat loot,” he said. He threw his arm around Peggy’s shoulders and hugged her tightly. “It’s gotta be the marshmallow guns.”

Peggy hugged him back. “You’re going away, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m going to lose you.”

“I’ll be back, babe,” Johnson said, planting a big kiss on her lips. “I promise.”

***

What will your mother say, pretty Peggy-O?

What will your mother say, pretty Peggy-O?

What will your mother say,

When she finds you’ve gone away,

To places far and strange, to Fennario?

We unpacked the skids like kids opening Christmas presents. The ‘marshmallow bullets’ weren’t bullets, but rocket-propelled grenades. The warheads were soft and rubbery, a little firmer than hardboiled egg. Hard to believe they would do any damage. The material was translucent, swimming with ghosts of color. It felt greasy to the touch. Made of the flesh of Vour Faad, Camille Girard had said.

“I want to see this shit fight!” McKenzie yelled.

So we all trooped down the drive, through the Thistledown Sidhe gates, until we were a quarter mile down the road, in a stand of loblolly pines. “Bring down a tree for me,” McKenzie said. “One missile. I’m not wasting ammo better spent on Liloouu.” The gunner picked a big pine, sighted along the barrel, and squeezed the trigger.

The rocket whined through the air, leaving a trail of smoke. The pine shivered with the impact. The rocket’s metal case split apart, the pieces bounced away. The bullet inside simply vanished. Snorts and giggles from the onlookers. “What the hell was that about?” McKenzie said. “Damned soft bullet didn’t do anything.” He stomped forward to inspect the tree.

A chunk of bark fell to the ground. More chunks fell. And what was happening to the needles? They were drooping, softening, contracting.

McKenzie halted and scowled.

Bark rained down until it surrounded the trunk in a pile. I approached the tree, kicking my way through the pine bark.

A sheath of seething gray mucus covered the tree’s sapwood core. Shivers passed through it, up and down the trunk. It expanded, contracted. It was clearly alive. I decided not to touch it.

“Sir, that shot was successful,” I said. “The tree is gone.”

“What the hell are you talking about, son?” McKenzie grunted. “It’s still standing.”

“But it’s no longer a tree,” I said. “Whatever it is.” As we had in the NuLife labs, Camille Girard must have discovered that Meteor God DNA and the DNA of terrestrial life were easily merged. Loblolly pine + Vour Faad = what? “That bullet was made out of the flesh of Vour Faad. I think what’s happened is that Vour Faad’s genes have spliced into the tree’s living tissue – the phloem. This is now a composite organism.”

“Frankentree.”

“You could call it that, sir.”

“So what the hell good is it?” McKenzie said. “I don’t want Liloouu to turn into some ‘composite organism’. I want to kill
Her.”

“Sir, the French didn’t make those bullets to be used against pine trees,” I said. “They may work differently on the Meteor Gods.” The idea excited me. Maybe there was some scientific truth behind that folk belief that the Meteor Gods could not stand each other’s flesh. Maybe that was the secret that Girard’s lab had stumbled on.

McKenzie looked into space. The Irregulars fell silent. I saw fear in McKenzie’s face, for an instant. Then his jaw tightened.

“I don’t trust the French for crap,” McKenzie said, “but I’m sick of waiting.” He looked around, at his troops. “Pack up your kit, boys,” he yelled, “we’re leaving tomorrow. Liloouu…will…die!” A full-throated cheer went up from the men. They were sick of waiting, too.

McKenzie feared Liloouu, and feared that Girard’s oddball ammunition wasn’t up to the task of defeating Her. So did I. But McKenzie was the sort of man to whom fear is a personal affront. Once he feels fear, he must squash it down. He must deny it. Whatever his fears tell him, he must do the opposite.

Such a man tells himself that fear has no power over him. But the truth is that he is fear’s puppet, every bit as much as the man who runs away.

***

We left in the chilly, damp hour after dawn, a couple dozen horse-drawn wagons clattering down the drive, followed by a column of soldiers. McKenzie and a handful of his colonels were mounted, most of us were on foot. I had expected tears from Peggy, but she was smiling and cheerful, running and skipping alongside Johnson as far as the gate, where she gave him a last, lingering goodbye kiss. She was glowing. Huh. Glowing. I am stupid in the ways of women. I didn’t figure it out until later.

We passed by that ex-loblolly pine tree on our way down the road. Now it looked like a dead tree stuck into a pile of boiling gray-green mucus. I wondered how long it would take to die. Or if it would die at all. I worried about those fancy French bullets. I respected Girard and her team, but I used to be a researcher too, and I know this: a lot of clever ideas work on the bench, but fail when you try to take them into the field.

We spent the next two months trekking down the ruins of I-85 and I-65. We found Mobile empty of human life. Northward, between Mobile and Tuscaloosa, we found eerie, empty little towns, and skeletons, human and animal. No corpses. The bones had been picked clean. Piles of bones, sometimes shoulder-high, probably where Liloouu shat them out. Liloouu ate everything that lived. We found trails through the forest fifty yards wide, swept clean of trees, shrubs, grass, lichen, right down to the raw earth and rock. She was ravenous for all life.

We traveled slowly. Without human habitation or farm animals, we had trouble living off the land. Quartermastering an army is a challenge in the middle of an extinction event.

Rangers on horses scouted ahead of the column. We kept the marshmallow guns out, and our FAMAS, but it’s hard to stay nerve-edge ready, twenty-four hours a day, month after month. The first clue we had that Liloouu was near was when one of the ranger guys came flying at us through the air. Part of him, that is. His right leg and haunch flew over a rise in front of the column and landed in the dirt. It took us a moment to understand what we were looking at. I think She had eaten most of him, but one leg had accidentally squirted away like a watermelon seed.

You cannot imagine the panicked scramble. McKenzie and his officers were yelling orders, the marshmallow gunners were unpacking their weapons, the column tried to sort itself out and spread over the fields surrounding the road in a defensive formation.

Liloouu came over that rise in the road like the dawn breaking. An immense pink mass, growing larger, and larger, occulting the sky. Despite everything I knew about the Meteor Gods, I couldn’t believe there was anything so big in all the world.

Her flesh was pink and transparent, trembling like jelly. Vast dark shapes swam within Her. The smell of her filled the air with a nauseous sweetness, like the scent of certain lilies. Liloouu was made in segments, like a millipede, supported above the ground on uncounted squirming legs and feelers. Her body was impossible to look at. It changed constantly, expanding and contracting, churning, bulging, in a way that caused nausea to watch. I saw soldiers on their knees vomiting. I saw soldiers running away. I saw soldiers screaming in terror. I saw soldiers praying to Her.

We might as well have set up a defensive position against a tidal wave. Liloouu’s body swept across it. Her legs curled around each soldier, and bore him up into Her substance. FAMAS bullets vanished into Her vast body, leaving no mark.

“Marshmallow guns!” McKenzie yelled over and over. He stood up in his stirrups and shook his fist at Liloouu. “I want my marshmallow guns! Fire, goddamn you!” His horse tossed its head, panicked, ready to bolt.

A general who was not thrall to his own fears would have stayed out of harm’s way, to direct fire, even to command retreat if necessary and save what forces he could. McKenzie remained at the front as Liloouu approached. She made a sound like the crashing of waters as she moved. McKenzie’s horse reared. McKenzie drew his service revolver and fired again and again into Liloouu’s substance. I have never seen such courage, romance, and stupidity captured in a single moment.

A mass of squirming pink tentacles like a titanic anemone came down upon McKenzie and his horse, lifted them up, and swallowed them into Liloouu’s vastness.

Johnson was directing fire by the marshmallow gunners. All around me I heard the whir of rockets and smelled the stink of the propellant. I watched the rockets splash into Her. Within Her transparent flesh, the warheads corkscrewed, leaving trails of bubbles. Tumors bloomed within Liloouu, silent explosions within her glassy pink transparency.

I held my breath. Were Girard’s soft bullets working?

Liloouu halted. I have said She was made like a millipede, in segments. The segment closest to us shivered. Vast fissures opened in its substance. As I watched, my hopes rising, Liloouu’s flesh melted. It liquefied, poured itself onto the earth, releasing the half-digested bodies of the soldiers She had consumed moments before.

But there was miles of Liloouu behind. “Keep firing!” Johnson yelled. “Don’t stop!”

The next segment exploded in a cataract of pink slime. A million gallons of Liloouu spilled onto the road. The men broke into a cheer.

Then the whir of rockets lessened. From many, to a few, to none.

“Don’t stop!” Johnson shouted. “Reload! Maintain fire!” But there was nothing to fire. The caissons were empty. The French had air-dropped us about a thousand rockets. We used them all in less than five minutes.

Liloouu advanced again. Of Her hundreds of segments, Camille Girard’s rockets had succeeded in destroying exactly two.

Like a pink tidal wave, Liloouu’s vastness splashed and slobbered towards us. Johnson shouted for Company B to retreat. We fled back along the road. Johnson came last, still yelling orders, trying to save the remnants of his Company.

I remember a haze of cloying sweetness that descended upon me. My ears rang with the screams of men being engulfed and the cataract roar of Liloouu’s approach. I dared a glance back. I looked for Johnson.

I saw him yards behind me. I saw him just as Liloouu engulfed him.

I stopped. Someone yelled at me to keep running. I ignored him. I had never had a darker moment.

Then, with horrid splashing, slopping noises, Liloouu lifted Herself up. Johnson lay on the road.

He pulled himself to his knees. Dirt and slime covered him. Liloouu kept moving, past him.

I staggered towards him. I was so terrified my knees almost refused to support me, but I had to get to Johnson. He was the only thing I believed in any longer. I threw an arm around him to help him stand. We were only yards from Liloouu. Her body rushed past us like a wall. Dirt and stones kicked up by Her myriad legs pelted us. I tried to say something stupid to Johnson, like ‘Are you all right?’, but my voice was swallowed up in the roar of Her.

Half-falling, supporting each other, we stumbled off the road, away from Liloouu. At any moment I expected Her immensity to rear up and crush down upon us, but She didn’t pursue us. She had eaten Johnson, but vomited him back up.
It has to be the armor, I thought. The folk wisdom was right. Girard’s lab was right.

Half a mile off the road, on the other side of a farm field abandoned to weeds, we found a creek beneath an arcade of cottonwoods and willows. I laid Johnson down on the grassy bank. He was alive, coherent, breathing and talking, but his skin was singed by Liloouu’s juices. I washed his wounds off with creek water as best I could. I tried to pull his armor off. He grabbed my hand away.

“Doesn’t come off,” he said.

“Liloouu’s juices probably got beneath it, sir,” I said. “I know how you feel about your armor, but I’ve got to clean Her matter off you. It’s burning your skin.”

Johnson shook his head. “No. The armor really doesn’t come off. At all. It’s been like that ever since I first put it on, years ago.”

I pried up an edge of the armor and tried to peer beneath. The material was smoothly fused to Johnson’s skin.

“Liloouu didn’t want any part of you and that armor, sir,” I said. “We ought to send you to go one-on-one with Her.”

Johnson smiled wanly.

***

After he had bathed in the creek, Johnson lay on the sun-dappled bank and gazed up into the sky. He said, “Frenchie, why are you still here?”

“I’m not a deserter, sir,” I said. “And you’re my commander.”

He nodded. “I appreciate that. But if you’re not a soldier, you can’t be a deserter. I don’t think you and I are soldiers any more. My unit’s gone. My command’s gone. I don’t think I have a commission any longer. McKenzie was never too sure about which ‘United States’ authorized his command, and that command wasn’t much more than a letter of marque to begin with. I’m a man of loyalty, but I don’t think there’s anything left to be loyal to.

“You can stop calling me ‘sir’, Frenchie. For me, this war is over. I’m going to try to make it back to Peggy. I don’t know if anywhere is safe, but there are little hollers deep in the Appalachians that the Meteor Gods may overlook for a while. I grew up in one. My plan is to find somewhere to hide, and wait. Until someone comes up with a better idea to fight the Meteor Gods.”

“Why are you looking at me?” I said.

“’Cause you had a better idea. Once. Oh, never mind. Want to come with us?”

I’d go with Johnson anywhere. But did he really want an army buddy along on his honeymoon?

“Three’s a crowd,” I suggested.

“But four’s a fireteam,” Johnson said.

“Where are you getting four?”

Johnson laughed. “Where do people usually come from?”

“Where…? Oh. Um, congratulations.”

“But let’s clear something up, first,” Johnson said. “We’re talking about your traveling with a black man, a white woman, and a mixed-race kid. How are you with miscegenation? Any problems there?”

It took me a moment to remember what that word meant. It had an atavistic, nineteenth century flavor. It made me think of Simon Legree and Eliza on the ice floes.

“Good lord, no,” I said, blushing deeply. Stammering, I tried to tell him I was good with it. I tried to explain that his and Peggy’s relationship, even what little I was privileged to glimpse from the outside, struck me as beautiful and touching—

He cut me off. “Fine, whatever. Here’s why I’m bringing it up. That conversation we had. About mixing human and Meteor God DNA. You had a whole lot of drama going on there, Frenchie. You’ve got a lot of emotional stuff riding on fear of the wrong genes getting busy.”

I was thunderstruck. “That’s different…”

“Is it?” Johnson said. “I dunno, Frenchie. It’s all just a matter of degree. You get so crazy about mixing the flesh of humans and Meteor Gods. How do you feel about mixing a horse and a donkey? Are mules crimes against Nature?

“And it makes no damned sense, because when you look at real mixed-race animals or plants, they’re not worse, they’re better. Frenchie, what’s the best kind of dog? The healthiest, the smartest, the sweetest personality?”

I saw what he was getting at. “A mutt, a mongrel.”

“See? The mutt’s got what they call ‘hybrid vigor’.”

“Look,” I said, “we’re talking about creatures with only a tenth of their genes in common with humans. Christ, even a banana shares half its genes with us. Would you crossbred humans and bananas?”

“If it took a race of bananamen to save my world from the Meteor Gods, I’d fuck the banana myself,” Johnson said.

***

It took six months to make our way back to Thistledown Sidhe. Half-starving most of the time, forced to hide from roaming gangs and skirting settlements to avoid conscription by local warlords, our progress was slow. Hope, and little else, sustained us. Summer and fall passed. It was late in the year, and snow had already fallen once by the time we arrived at the outskirts of Atlanta.

On the road leading to Thistledown, we found our way blocked. A mass of bubbly gray mucus, inches deep, flowed over the broken asphalt, and covered the ground on both sides, extending far back into the pine grove. It was where we had shot the loblolly pine with one of Girard’s soft bullets. All around us pine trees were denuded of bark and needles; some had fallen. The mucus thing was eating the other pines.

As Johnson and I approached, it inched towards us.

I stepped back. “Let’s not walk through that,” I said.

We sidetracked through the woods, skirting widely around it – it was hundreds of yards across – and continued up the road.

The Thistledown Sidhe gates were open, and unguarded. I thought that was a bad sign. Johnson said, “Damn.” He unshouldered his pack and dropped it on the ground. He ran up the drive. He still carried his FAMAS. I yelled for him to wait. He ignored me. I ran after him as fast as I could, but couldn’t keep up.

I saw no one. I heard no human voices. As I passed houses, I noticed that many had their doors ajar. The lawns and the farm fields behind them had grown high and rank and gone to seed, untended.

I passed a pile of white bones. Some were cattle or horses, but I thought others looked human. Despair rose within me again.

Johnson stood in front of the O’Neill house. The door was open, and dark. “Peggy!” Johnson screamed. “Peggy!”

No answer.

Then, through the empty door, a bluish gelatinous mass pushed itself. It was bigger than the door frame. It squeezed itself through the door like toothpaste coming out of a tube. Its head, trunk and limbs re-formed on the other side. It stood up. It was thirty feet tall or more, and humanoid.

Its head, its face…its features reminded me of Johnson.

I was trembling uncontrollably. I forced my voice to work. I yelled, “Johnson, for god’s sake, move away!”

“I think,” Johnson said, “I think this is my child.” He took a few steps towards the giant. He dropped the FAMAS he had been carrying, and raised both empty hands. A gesture of peace, of surrender.

For a moment, the blue giant hesitated. Then it scooped up Johnson in its immense hand, and shoved him at its mouth.

The armor,
I thought desperately.
It will reject his armor.
But I didn’t quite believe that. Because it seemed likely that this blue giant was the product of Johnson’s armor. Vour Faad’s DNA had crept stealthily into Johnson’s system as the armor melted together with his flesh, and inserted itself into his germ cells. Hybrid. Vigor.

Johnson struggled, and kicked with his legs. The giant twisted Johnson around, trying to fit the struggling man into its mouth. The armor was not working.

I ran for Johnson’s FAMAS. I lifted it to my shoulder, and aimed at the giant’s chest. I squeezed the trigger and held it until the clip was empty.

I am not well-trained in weapons. The rifle’s recoil almost sent me tumbling backward. The barrel drifted up, the bullets nearly stitching across Johnson.

The giant didn’t fall, but I had gotten its attention. It dropped Johnson on the ground and came after me instead.

I threw down the FAMAS and ran. As I passed through the Thistledown gate, my breath came hard and painful, and my muscles were burning. Behind me, the giant’s thumping footsteps shook the ground.

A voice, from behind. Johnson’s. “Keep going!”

I chanced a glimpse back. Johnson was running behind the blue giant. He could have escaped, but had chosen not to.

I ran until I was stopped by the pool of roiling mucus that covered the landscape. I was beyond fatigue, almost dropping. What now? The giant was a hundred yards behind, and closing.

Johnson screamed, “Keep going!”

The giant turned at the noise, and stopped. It made a burbling, bubbly sound. One immense translucent hand snatched at Johnson as he passed.

Johnson dodged. The hand brushed him, but its fingers closed empty. Johnson hit me running. He grabbed me with one arm and dragged me forward, into the pool of tree-thing.

It was like struggling through glue. The pool of slime got deeper as we walked. Waves rolled in from all sides. It slopped higher and higher up our legs. Within fifty feet, we were waist-high in the stuff. My skin burned where it touched.

Behind us, the blue giant burbled. Its flesh boiled and churned. It hesitantly put one foot down into the pool of tree-thing, then the other. It waddled towards us. My heart sank. We had traded one danger for two.

Johnson struggled on, dragging me with him. “Dammit, Frenchie, don’t quit now,” he growled.

In fact, as we pushed on through the gray mucus, it got a little easier. The mucus around us wasn’t quite as high. Then it was only at our knees, our ankles, then only a film of slime on the road. I looked back.

The tree-thing had found a bigger meal than us. It drew itself up around the giant, as high as the giant’s waist. The giant sat in its middle. Its hands lifted up immense clots of mucus, and shoved them into its mouth. It had found bigger prey, too.

We didn’t stay to find out which monster would win this battle of appetites. Johnson and I fled down the road, until it was night, and we were utterly exhausted and could run no more.

***

We slept in an abandoned house. In the morning, the ground was frosty, the air clear and scentless, the Georgia sky an endless blue.

“Where to?” Johnson asked.

“North,” I said. “Back to Carolina. Maybe NuLife will let me work there again.”

“Changed your mind? About creating a hybrid to fight the Gods?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“Want help with that?”

I grabbed his hand and shook it. “Always,” I said.

As we traveled north over the following days and weeks, Johnson broke down into tears more than once. He wasn’t able to talk about Peggy, but talking about his childhood and his life before the meteor impact seemed to help. This was the only thing he ever said about the blue giant who was his child: “I should have been there. A child needs a father. I should have been there to raise my kid. It might have turned out different.”

That thought would have shocked me before. It didn’t now. I thought Johnson might be right.

You might think that witnessing Johnson’s monstrous child try to eat its own father would have confirmed my ideas about the unnatural horror of mixing human and Meteor God DNA. Instead, it had the opposite effect.

I had been wrong, and Terrell Johnson had been right. I had been clinging to the old world, the world of humankind, and imagining that it could be saved, restored to the way we’ve always known it. I no longer believe that. The encounter with Liloouu, in all Her ineluctable vastness, majesty and terror, changed something in me. After that, the sight of a thirty-foot toddler, the hybrid of human genes and star spawn, trying to eat its own father, seemed like a perfectly ordinary event for the world we live in now.

I don’t think humans have a chance any more. At least – not the kind of humans we know.

Remember those other extinction events? In the end, all of them failed. Thousands of species vanished, but life was not extinguished from the Earth. If prior extinction events were the result of encounters with ancient Meteor Gods, then what happened to the Gods? They weren’t defeated by a coalition of trilobites or dinosaurs. I’d seen how easily Meteor God DNA spliced itself into ours. I believe that has happened many times before. The Meteor Gods from those previous extinction events didn’t vanish. They became you and me, the maple tree and the bumblebee, just another tributary emptying itself into the vast, turbulent river of DNA that has driven life on Earth since its beginnings. Like Johnson’s child, we are all the Gods’ descendants.

Life on Earth must join itself to the Gods again. We must become the Gods ourselves, so that we may fight them, defeat them, and carry that battle to the stars.

Johnson and I made our way up the ruined highways, back towards my old lab and my old colleagues, to begin my work anew. As I walked, I hummed ‘Peggy-O’ softly to myself. At last, I understood and accepted its final verse.

If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O,

If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O,

If ever I return,

All your cities I will burn,

Destroying all the ladies in the air-i-o.

***

John Schoffstall has published short fiction in
Asimov’s Science Fiction,
Strange Horizons,
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and other venues. He is always working on a novel. He lives in the USA, which is really not as bad as you have heard.

THE EYE OF JOB

DAN READE

illustrated by Richard Wagner

I am standing on the back deck of a home off Elkton. Not mine. I don’t know whose it used to be. The tiny yard is waist-high grass, and a stone’s throw away Keg Creek slips by on the other side of burr oak. The water gurgles sleepily in the coming dawn. Rising above it all is the Eye.

It waits out there. A column twenty miles high and ten in diameter. It covers most of Omaha. When it appeared, 500,000 lives were instantly gone. In this Midwest morning, the Eye lurks like a false sunrise, upon the wrong horizon but still bright enough that it’s never really night. Its color brings a memory some forty years in age. Shortly after my discharge and a week into our marriage, Nell and I left my parents’ place in Sandpoint and drove down to Vegas in our brand new Bonneville. At the border between Idaho and Nevada, amid all that scrub and desert, we came across the opening movements of a wildfire, orange flame licking the brush to the west of the freeway. We watched Forest Service helicopters dip massive buckets into the thread of a river then crawl skyward, water sloshing loose. We tried to see the pilots but they were hidden behind screens of darkened glass, and the sky was a smoldering red, fire against the smoke like the fungal petals of a dying rose. The Eye is the same red. Or at least that’s how Nell described it when we first became witnesses.

I listen to the cry of a jay. I listen to the sound of the creek. I think about throwing myself in. Instead, I hold tightly to the deck’s weather-beaten rails. The worn-out paint is like sandpaper. I shake my head. With effort, I turn and wander back through the deck’s French doors.

The house welcomes me. It feels almost grateful to once again hold someone after so many empty years. It, like most of those I’ve searched in Wabash and her neighboring towns, bears the signs of the hasty evacuation that was enforced upon the community when the Eye appeared. Dishes remain in the drainer. Cupboards and closets stand open. A desiccated bar of soap sits next to a faucet. Towels hang from racks and all the televisions are still plugged in. In one bedroom, the sheets are neat and tucked. In two more, decorated with cartoon dinosaurs, the bedding is thrown back, blankets on the floor, pillows in the crack between mattress and wall. There is raccoon scat in a bathroom, and the front door was never fully closed and seasons of rain and snow have caused an arc of carpet to blossom black. When I first entered, I checked the house for squatters, my headlamp sweeping each space. The poor from Lincoln and Des Moines and Sioux Falls have come to towns like Wabash, drawn by unattended dwellings. But while I’ve spotted squatters, I’ve never seen the same ones twice. The Eye seems to drive them on. And this house is empty.

I’m not sure why I went to the deck. Nothing I’m seeking would be there.

I start my search in the kids’ bedrooms. I push sheets aside, toss the closets, empty every container I find. Leaving a mess doesn’t worry me; even if someday the restrictions are lifted, I can’t imagine anyone would return. The bedrooms don’t have what I want, but then I get to what was a study or an office, a pressboard desk tight against one window, accompanied by a folding chair that looks like a refugee from a church basement. I find plastic crates filled with old tax forms, medical records, vinyl-covered photo albums. The pictures are mostly of a woman and two young boys, the three often separate but sometimes together. Some older people too. I guess they’re grandparents. I linger on those, but not for long.

In one without the old folks, the woman and the children hold a Siamese cat. That’s the one I take. Then I check the kitchen and garage for a food bowl. There is none, which I hope means that the family took the cat with them. At the end of the first winter and the snow melt, there were too many carcasses. And shortly after that, Nell left. We agreed it was best; her nightmares had gotten so bad, plus her mother’s senility was advancing. Nell got an apartment near her mom in Galveston. I would have done anything to leave with her. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now: anything.

I exit the house. For some reason, I lock the door behind me, a thing I haven’t done in forever. My car waits outside. When I first started this, nine months to the day after Nell left, I’d adopt a disguise, covering my cheeks and nose with a ski mask I hadn’t worn in thirty years. I’d also park my car behind the homes I was searching, out of fear that the SecFor sweeps Offutt always promised would finally materialize. But the base has more to worry about than what happens in these towns. Hell, at the start of the crisis, when Offutt was swamped with more airmen than it knew how to handle, it would send teams of them on maintenance detail, young men and women barely just adults chugging around on riding mowers to keep the lawns in check or hauling around dented toolboxes and buckets of paint, all meant to keep the houses presentable. But that didn’t last, such teams much less common now, and soon enough I started leaving my car in the middle of a block as I made my way through every home in sight.

Sometimes I’ve had on the same clothes I’ll wear to work. Once or twice, I’ve realized my ID badge is hanging from its lanyard.

I open the trunk of my car and put the photo in a plastic sleeve. That goes in one of the two nylon satchels, along with all the rest. Right there, staring at the satchels next to the jack and the first aid kit and the two sandwich bags I’ve forgotten to throw away, I’m certain that this is the last of it. I have found all I’ll need. Maybe this should be momentous. It’s not. I’m just tired. I feel like I’ve been this tired for most of my life. But now’s not the time to rest. The engine of my Lincoln is gruff as I head back home. To the northwest, the Eye remains.

***

In our driveway, I don’t lock the car. The front door I barely remembered to shut when I left four hours ago. Before she moved away, Nell came home more than once to find that door hanging open, “just like you wanted to welcome in the neighborhood.” If we’d had neighbors, I would have welcomed them. I would have thrown the biggest party I could arrange.

Inside, the lights are on. I have trouble being alone in this place, particularly in the dark. I amble creaky-kneed to the kitchen. I pour myself a cup from the coffee maker, using a mug with the words
LAKE OKEECHOBEE slashed across the ceramic in blue. I have never been to Florida. I wonder if the people who lived here ever went themselves, or if this was a gift from a friend or an item picked up by chance at a thrift shop or swap meet. What story might it tell. When Nell and I first moved into this place, this one over any other because she liked the roses creeping up a trellis on the home’s south side, there were pictures of the family before us still up on the walls, abandoned like everything else in their haste to escape. When we took them down, the pictures left behind faint square outlines. Those remained on the paint no matter how we scrubbed.

It’s cold. The air smells of ragweed. Thankfully the plants haven’t started releasing their pollen. I take the cordless phone from its cradle hanging next to the kitchen sink; Offutt has at least maintained those lines. I dial her number and stare out the window, the coffee cooling next to me on the countertop.

Nell picks up on the seventh ring. “You don’t have work for another two hours,” she says by way of greeting.

“It’s never a bad time to hear your voice.”

“That’s a decent line. It almost excuses you waking me up again.”

“Sorry.”

“Sure. Apologize. You’ll do it as well tomorrow.”

“Probably will.”

“I at least respect the honesty.” I hear her stretch, hear the rustle of blankets shifting. She’s sent a few photos of the apartment she found, some basic unit with white walls and carpets the color of oatmeal. Other than those, I have no way to picture what’s happening. I don’t even know if she’s decorated; in the pictures, the apartment is bare.

“Are you going in early today?” she says.

“No. Normal time.”

“Why are you up then?”

“Couldn’t sleep. You know how it is.”

There’s a pause. She says, “I suppose I do.”

I lean on the edge of the sink. I see the house next to this one with its cluster of maples and hackberry. Behind all that towers the Eye, its red making the trees look demonic. Nell installed blackout curtains in our bedroom the same day we moved in. Soon enough, she installed them on every window in the house. I removed them all when she left. I don’t know why. Sometimes she would find me standing near the empty shell of the home’s above-ground pool, staring at the Eye. I wouldn’t be able to tell her how long I’d been there.

“Don?”

“What?”

“You’re looking at it now,” she says.

“No,” I tell her.

“Don, stop it.”

“Okay.” I ease myself away from the sink and shuffle to the dining room table. Nearby are large glass-paned doors that lead out to the back yard. The Eye is just as visible here as it is in the kitchen.

“Anything special planned for today?” she says.

“Listening to more airmen.”

“That isn’t good for you anymore.”

“Was it ever?”

“No.”

I want to ask if she’s found someone else. We may be old and may still be married and we talk every day, but I can feel the distance growing between us. There is something unexplainable yet undeniable about physical presence, in the soft sounds we make, in the scents we know but don’t notice until they’re gone. All that feels left to me are great confessions of my love; that’s the only way I can think of to rekindle what’s dying. Perhaps that’s why I’ve chosen to do what I have, all the nights through those homes, the sorting of lives, the collection in the Lincoln’s trunk. I’ve wanted to tell her about it every single day since I thought of it, but she would tell me to stop, or worse call the base and have them take me in. She’d do that because it’s right. It’s one of the reasons I love her.

“Are you going to be okay?” she says.

“I’ll be fine.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Old and cranky.”

“You’ve been that way for twenty years.”

“Then I feel twenty years more of it.”

“I guess there’s no good reason for you to change now.”

I can’t tell if she’s playful or frustrated. It scares me that I don’t know. In desperation, I choose playful. I say, “Cranky’s gotten me to sixty.”

“You say that like we’re ancient. We’re not that old. They say sixty is the new forty.”

“I’d settle for the new fifty.”

She chuckles. The sound makes my jaw ache. She says, “Maybe you can find some kids to get off your lawn.”

“I would love kids on my lawn. I would love anyone here.”

She grunts. The ache is immediately gone, or now worse. I used to know what her grunts meant; I could interpret them. This time they’re just a noise from a stranger.

She says, “I guess I better go feed Julius.”

“Give him a pet for me.”

“You be good, okay?”

“Sure.” I listen to the pause and then I hear the click. I keep the phone pressed to my ear. Then I get up and put it back in its cradle. My mug goes in the sink with the dishes from last night’s dinner. People on the base have offered MREs, tell me it’s the easier way to go when you’re flying solo. Maybe I should have taken them up on it, but at this point, it doesn’t matter.

I shuffle to the bathroom to shower and shave. My closet is all clothes she bought me, shirts and pants hung with the precision the Air Force drilled during my enlisted days. Dressed, I go back to the kitchen. The Eye is waiting. Scientists say that its exterior is effectively featureless. They say it’s perfectly smooth and chromatically uniform. I don’t believe them. How would they know? The Eye devoured those people and in the three years since, it’s devoured every single probe sent in, those machines totally gone. And I see shapes swirling in the Eye’s surface, like those that find you when you close your eyes.

I see those shapes now, motes drifting. The Eye and I watch each other until it’s time to go.

I leave the cul-de-sac and take 5th to Locust. I follow that down to US-34 which will lead me to the Interstate. I pass ballfields, their backstops overgrown, and stores with their wares still in their windows. I pass a church, its signboard dingy, the long forgotten letters proclaiming
HE COMES TO CLAIM THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. I’ve often wondered if the sign maker wrote that before the Eye appeared, or after. Deer wander the streets. They barely move when I pass, their eyes aglow in the Lincoln’s headlamps. This town is now more theirs than mine. I do seventy along narrow roads and never once think about the brakes. As I drive, the Eye appears here and there in the distance, a string of homes or abandoned businesses hiding it until the string is broken by an empty lot or park and then there it is, the same shape as the grain silos that dot the land. I have almost gotten in accidents staring at the thing on roads with no one around.

The only way into what used to be Omaha is I-29 with its multiple gates and check points. I reach the first in fifteen minutes. I can already spot the fighters and bombers and surveillance drones that circle the Eye, on constant watch for whatever it might do. I hope the enlisted at the check point doesn’t ask to look in my trunk but the guard, a woman I don’t recognize, just glances at my ID before waving me through. I think she stares more at the Eye than at me. On another day, I would remember her name and have her CO send her for evaluation. But not today. I speed on. Once you get close enough, the Eye takes up everything you see.

***

The airman’s fingers drum the armrests of the chair. His knees bounce up and down. He’s wearing glasses, much better than the requisite birth control glasses we were stuck with when I was first in. His expression makes me think of a boxer going into a fight he knows he’s going to lose. I realize I’ve forgotten his name. I see so many. The Master Sergeant who showed up with my recall papers told me he doubted I would be too busy. Just routine in times of emergency, he said. I knew even then it was a lie.

I glance at the airman’s name tag, then down at the folder on my lap. Suarez. He came voluntarily.

“…and so she said she had to stop emailing me,” he says. “Me being that close to the Eye, it freaked her out.”

“Did you ask her about that? What freaked her out? What scared her?”

He’s twenty-seven but his hair is graying. His eyes are narrow and flat. “I asked but she wouldn’t talk about it. At least she wouldn’t email me back. I tried calling too. I even had a ticket to go see her. I have leave scheduled next month. You know how hard it is to get leave around here?”

“Yeah.”

He rubs one hand across his scalp. “I liked her.”

I shift in my seat. I’m sitting at a desk. He’s on the other side. I’d prefer two chairs facing each other with no barriers between, but the office doesn’t have that much room. “Remind me,” I say. “Have you ever met her?”

“No, sir, just online. But it feels like I have.” He chews his lip. “I get lonely here.”

He looks at me. I’m his cornerman. I need to stop this fight, call it off. But the best I can do is salve his wounds and send him back in. “I see lots of people,” I tell him, “many for relationships in trouble.”

“Because of this posting?”

I nod.

“And what do you say to them? How do you explain it?”

“I tell them we’re all suffering.”

“That help?”

I shrug. It is a motion that feels wholly inadequate. “Not as much as I’d like. But most people take a bit of comfort in knowing they’re not suffering alone.”

He sighs. He looks at his watch. I mirror the movement.

“We’ve got a bit more time,” I tell him.

“I think I’m done if it’s okay with you.”

“It’s your nickel.”

“All my nickels belong to the Air Force.” He pushes himself up. “Any homework?”

“Maybe write this woman a letter. Tell her everything you’re feeling. Bring it in next week and we’ll talk about it.”

“Should I send it?”

“Up to you.”

“Okay, sir. See you next week.” The office is so small he has to crab walk the slit of floor between my desk and his chair. From there, he angles his way past the metal frame bookshelf the Air Force insists should be here. When he reaches the door, he stops and turns, his fingers lingering on the knob.

I wait for him to confess what’s really eating him. They always do when they’re about to go.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

“Sure.”

“How long have you got?”

“Until they tell me I can leave.”

“You think you’ll make it?”

“Any other questions?”

“No, sir,” he says. Then, “Thanks.” Then, “See you next week.” And he’s gone. I should write notes in his folder, but I don’t. Really, for every client, my notes are all the same.

I wait a minute for Suarez to clear the lobby, then stick my head out to see who’s next. Amos is standing before the reception desk. He’s wearing his flight suit, the bars on his shoulders a somber black thread. He and I met in the O-Club. The bartender introduced us, saying Amos needed a friend. Unspoken was that I needed one too. We run into each other maybe once a month and when we do, we swap the same six stories and get drunk and go home. Amos is married. Like Nell, his wife left the area. She took their children too. I don’t fully remember his wife’s name or the names of his kids or even how many children he has or whether they’re daughters or sons.

“How’s it going, Don?” he says.

“Good,” I say. “Surprised to see you here. You have an appointment?”

“Me? No. I was just hoping you were free for a minute or two.”

I look at the kid at the desk. He’s standing as well. He’s new. The last one burned out or transferred or went AWOL – I don’t know exactly which. He just disappeared. This one replaced him. This one seems nice enough. He leans over stiffly and pushes a few buttons on a keyboard. “There’s a ten o’clock, sir, but he hasn’t arrived.”

“Looks like I’ve got that minute.” I stand aside, wave Amos into the office.

“Can we take a walk instead?” he says. He smiles but only with his mouth.

“Sure,” I say. I am suddenly afraid that somehow he’s found out my plan. Maybe I’ve gotten too careless, allowed myself to be seen. Why reports of such sightings would make it to Amos, I don’t know – SecFor or the Colonel who runs the Medical Group seem likelier options. But a scared mind is a creative one, and so I conjure all the ways Amos might have discovered what I intend. Maybe Nell figured it out and called him; I might have mentioned his name to her once or twice. I try my best to act calm, but I’m sure my guilt is leaking. I say to the kid, “When the ten o’clock arrives, just ask him to wait for a moment.” I hope my voice is steady.

“This won’t take long,” Amos says to the kid.

“Yes, sir,” the kid says. Now it is Amos’ turn to open the door, this the entry way to the portable that holds my office. He nods and I step past him and out to a lot filled with cars. I am ready to see SecFor personnel waiting for me in their dour berets, Amos just a ruse to lure me into a trap. But no one’s there. Still, my body prepares to run. Dumb, I tell myself. My old legs wouldn’t get me far.

Amos walks past me. “Let’s stroll,” he says, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Fine by me.” I fall in next to him. Maybe he doesn’t know. I try to calm myself, but my body remains on guard.

He takes us along a path that strings between another set of portables. Those and the others are all like mine, clustered close with streaks down their sides from rain. The base had to expand so quickly there was no time for more permanent facilities. We exit that copse of buildings to a sidewalk next to a road. The Eye is there before us, from the ground to the clouds. It extends into the stratosphere. There it just ends, like someone cutting a line. Amos stops on the sidewalk and crosses his arms. I want my attention in the present, so I angle my body to block the Eye from my view.

The early afternoon air is warm. It smells of oil and diesel. “It’s a beautiful day,” Amos says.

“To fly?” I know he’s stationed in a bomber wing.

“In general.”

To the east are the red-roofed dorms for unaccompanied enlisted. To the north is a fence line and beyond that are former civilian homes – single story, white siding the color of dirty snow. Now they are all either abandoned or commandeered. I see a dry fountain topped by a cherub, a fir tree gone shaggy from a lack of care.

“Normally you ask how I’m doing,” Amos says.

I’m startled. “What?”

“Normally you ask me how I’m doing. Is that some sort of therapist thing?”

“Just common decency, I think. How’re you doing?”

“Good.”

“Most people don’t seek me out if they’re good.”

“Friends do.”

“Sure,” I say.

He turns to me. He has a bulbous nose, red cheeks. He reminds me of the football coach at my high school, a man who yelled less often than people assumed. I feel a breeze. The grass is gray-green and cut so short it doesn’t move. Behind him are a trio of radio towers painted orange and white and within it all is the constant thrum of jets taking off and landing, a noise so regular that I rarely hear it anymore. It surrounds me now due to my nerves.

“How’s Nell?” he says.

“Fine. How’s Julia?” It’s a guess. I think his wife’s name starts with a J.

He doesn’t correct me. “Good. The kids are good.”

“Something on your mind?” I say.

“Your therapist training tell you that?”

“Common sense. At school, the only thing they teach us is to blame clients’ fathers.”

“It’s always the father’s fault?”

“Every parent has screwed up somewhere. Sometimes it seems like the best you can do is cause as little damage as possible.”

“That’s pessimistic.”

“I won’t argue with you.”

“You have kids?”

“You know I don’t. What’s on your mind?”

“Thoughts,” he says, and looks away. At nothing in particular as far as I can see, but the pause that follows is as obvious as a spotlight. I know what he’s going to say even before his lips move. He does not surprise. He turns back to me and his shoulders are higher and his spine straighter and for the first time since he walked into the office, he’s looking me directly in the eye. I would call it defiance if I didn’t know it was something else.

“I’ve figured it out,” he says, just like they all do. I don’t even have to ask what the ‘it’ is. “I had to tell someone. You were the first person that came to mind.”

“How’d you do it?” I say.

“Thinking. Looking at the signs. Only one option made sense.”

“An attack?”

“You’ve heard it before?”

“Yep.”

“Like I said, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Then why aren’t there more of them? Why just this single Eye?”

He doesn’t respond to that. I feel I should warn him that I am not confidential. He is not my client, and even if he was, the Air Force requires I share anything that might be of concern. But I also get a sense that it wouldn’t matter. There is something in his demeanor that tells me he’s decided something. And that’s probably why I say nothing, because I’ve decided things as well.

“It has to be an attack,” he says. “I don’t know from whom. And perhaps the whole point is that they don’t need more than one. This is their FOB, and it’s enough.”

“An FOB they’ve occupied for three years.”

“It’s an attack.”

“I know,” I say. We’re passed by the occasional car.

“You believe me?”

I frown. Nell and I have been together so long even my own expressions remind me of her. She learned over the years to mimic my frown perfectly. She’d ask me a question she meant as a joke and I would take it seriously, my face tunneling down. When I’d see the same look on her face, I’d know I’d missed something.

Amos knows none of that. He says, “You don’t believe me.”

“Can I be honest?”

“That’s what friends do, don’t they? They’re honest.”

“Whether I believe you isn’t the issue,” I say. “There’s just no way to know. You could be right. You could be wrong. We’ve got no evidence either way. And the research says that when faced with that kind of blankness, most of us run back to what’s familiar. We can’t handle the vacuum, so we create meaning any way we can. You’re an Air Force officer, so you’re certain this is an attack. How else are you going to see it? You’ve got years of training tell you it’s so. But you turn on the news and you’ll see religious types in Tennessee or Alabama calling it the Second Coming or some physicist in Berlin speculating that it’s a localized black hole. One of Nell’s cousins says that the Eye sucked up all those people for experimentation. He works in a fishery. I’d like to imagine there’s some connection between his hypothesis and his job. He, you, me: we have no knowledge here. We’re all just guessing. That’s the only thing we’re able to do.”

I want to pat him on the shoulder but I think he’ll reject that as patronizing, and I can see that all I’ve said has left as much of a mark as a tennis ball tossed against stone. And if he asked me if I really believe what I’ve told him, I think for the first time I would collapse, and I would confess that I don’t. But he, like all the rest, is so wrapped up in his own crises that he can’t notice my insincerity.

So he says, “It’s an attack.”

I nod. “It’s an attack.”

“It’s an attack.” He stares off at the Eye. “It’s an attack. That’s why it’s here.”

I wait.

He returns his attention back to me. He holds out his hand. It’s steady. I tilt my head, but take the proffer. We shake. He doesn’t let go immediately. Then he nods. When he walks away, he follows the road back towards the parking lot near my portable. I wait until he disappears. More cars pass and I look to see if he is driving one of them, but either I miss him or he goes a different way. When I return to my office, my next client is waiting. I pass the entire session saying “Interesting,” and “Tell me more.” That must be good enough, because when he leaves, he’s actually smiling. Maybe I helped someone today. That should make me feel better.

In the few moments of quiet, I study the clock. I think of Amos and what I’m about to do. I wonder if I could convince Nell of the rightness of my beliefs, or if like Amos I would fail. I’d like to think she’d believe me. Really, I’d need her to. I have her picture in my wallet, an old fashioned sort of keepsake. I take it out. I gaze at it until my next appointment comes.

***

When my final client steps out of my door, the sun has started to set. It falls behind the Eye. When I first came here, I was troubled by how the Eye could outdo a star. Now it just seems normal, the Eye grander than the sun along with everything else.

I find I’m thinking again of Lerner. In the 60s, he ran an experiment in which seventy-two women watched others being subjected to electrical shocks. At first, most of those women were appalled by the suffering they saw, but then a transformation occurred. Many of the women started blaming the victims. After all, the women reasoned, if the victims were suffering, that had to be because the victims had done something to earn that punishment. They were convinced there had to be justice in the world in spite of what their experiences had to say.

Among my colleagues, we joked about ‘Not me’ syndrome in our students. Show undergraduates work by Lerner or Milgram or Zimbardo and most of them will say “Not me. I’d never do that.” We laughed at the kids for thinking they were somehow immune from the biases and pressures. I wonder now if we laughed because, even though we didn’t say it, we assumed that we actually were immune, too smart or educated to become victims to such circumstances.

I wonder how any of those professors would do here. If I told Lerner what I was about to do, maybe he’d just smile and nod. I met him once, at a conference in Montreal. In those few minutes, he was cordial, collegial. Maybe that’s why he’s received all the fame.

I say goodbye to the kid at the desk when I leave.

I take a different route out of the base. Instead of heading south and home, I drive west. State Route 370 has been consistently maintained, in part to transport supplies, in part for those airmen who took houses along its corridor. There are a few checkpoints between the base and where I’m going, but no one really pays attention to those leaving the Eye. Mostly the guards are jealous. And someone might recognize me and ask me why I am so far out of my normal zone of travel, but they did not on the previous two trips I made this direction, and even if they do, I have a story about some client I need to see. The land here is flat and at first, to the north of the freeway, there are few buildings. There is no hiding from the Eye. But I don’t want to hide from it. I want to see it. I want it to see me. I can spot as well the constantly circling war planes. I wonder if Amos is up there. My thoughts wander to Nell. Perhaps I should have sent a note to her, or left one to be discovered. If I’m taken, she will likely have only other people’s stories to understand what I did. I wonder if she’ll get all the details. I wonder if she’ll be able to make sense of it all.

I pass an abandoned shopping center, the discarded carapace of a hospital. There is a vehicle behind me when I turn off, but it doesn’t follow, and I am amid homes so identical that they look pressed from a mold. They are all in decent repair but I know they are empty because there are no cars. Often, we think the absence of people makes a place look desolate, but that’s not the case. In the little town of Redlands where Nell and I first met, on cool evenings we would walk for what seemed like miles up and down those low hills amid Craftsman homes or the monstrous Victorians built by the agriculture barons who had made that desert bloom. We wouldn’t see a soul. But we never thought the place was abandoned. You note an absence of people, yards empty, sidewalks clear like chalkboards in an unused class, but you don’t assume the people are gone. Instead, you write their existence into the homes you see, their presences marked not by physical appearance but by the cut of their lawn and a light in a window and primarily by a car in the drive.

There are no cars here. No one around to watch. That’s one of the reasons I chose this place. That, and old notices on the internet of a hill, a mound of fill and soil abandoned after the development of this housing tract, the area now overgrown in weeds but still with a view all the way to the city. When I first looked for it, I was afraid someone would notice my searches and track me, but no one has. And so now on top of the mound is a tarp in approximate shade to the grass. I park my car and take the satchels from the trunk and hike to the top. Crows swirl overhead. The Eye sits on Omaha like a crown, so massive it takes up most of the sky. Between me and it are nothing but empty plains.

I’m breathing heavily when I reach the apex. I set the satchels down and lean on my knees, trying to suck in air. My pulse pounds in my ears. It would only be appropriate that I have a heart attack. Pain stitches through my chest. Thankfully, it fades and I’m able to stand again. Still, I move gingerly as I pull off the tarp.

Beneath it is a drone. It’s a quadcopter, one of the larger models. I found the thing in a barn, off a gravel road near corn fields gone to seed. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known what I was looking for in those searches. If I’d found a gun – and I found those later – I might have started taking shots at the Eye. I know there are soldiers who have, their bullets disappearing impotently into its haze. Or maybe I would have taken my life. The drone provided another option. I had to practice with it a bit, the massive remote control like a brick in my hands, the vehicle floating a few feet over our backyard. I got good enough. Now the device is charged and ready. It has its own slots to latch cameras and the like, slots I’ve jury-rigged to hold the satchels that I now attach as securely as I can. This is a one-way flight; as soon as the drone nears its destination, Offutt will detect it. The base may try to shoot it down. And their reconnaissance will certainly come back to me and I’ll be arrested. I know that. I could try this in a place with more people to deflect possible blame, but I’ve told myself that I welcome the blame. I tell myself that again.

I power up the drone. Its blades sound like a growing swarm of bees. A light on the remote verifies that it and the drone are connected. The drone lifts off. It is unsteady, the satchels not perfectly even in weight. Still, it can fly, and with the controller I push it in the direction of the Eye. In the satchels is the photograph I found today. There as well are notes to grandparents, a video tape of a family reunion, DVDs and thumb drives filled with images of dance recitals and little league games and picnics and sunsets over a lake. There is a child’s drawing taken from a refrigerator. There is a collar for a dog, a trophy with a plastic bowler atop, a family Bible filled with faded handwriting, a framed paystub from a plumbing company, the word ‘First’ scrawled across it in blue ink. There are announcements of births, of weddings, of funerals. There is the first letter Nell ever sent me when I was still in the service, counting off each day until I’d see her again. I told her once a long time ago that I still had it. She seemed touched. I wonder if she knows that I’ve kept it in all the years since, that it is the most precious thing I have other than my love for her.

I don’t know what’s inside the Eye. None of us do. I don’t know what made it, or who, if indeed there is anyone and it is not just some cosmic accident that without purpose or malice has left us hurt so deeply. But if there is anyone inside, soldiers have sent bullets and scientists have sent probes and there has been no response. Since it gripped me, I have not been able to shake the feeling that perhaps they, whoever they are, simply don’t understand us, in the same way we do not understand them. I do not have a gold record, and I have not included samples of Bach or Berry or Balkanska, but what I have included, I hope, shows who we are, and perhaps what has been lost. What I have lost with Nell gone, the distance between us greater than the space inside the Eye and without.

I watch the probe fly on. Soon enough, the drone becomes little more than a speck against that column of dying red. This close, the entire journey will take only a few minutes. If they have not detected it yet, they will soon. I count down the time beneath my breath.

The first thing I hear is a klaxon. It comes from the direction of the Eye. Soon other sirens take up the call and I glance behind me. In this flat landscape, I can already see light bars streaming. The SecFor trucks are rushing from a checkpoint located only a few miles distant. I look back towards the Eye. I can’t see the drone anymore, but I’m sure it’s almost there. They won’t be able to stop me. The drone is now seconds away. The light on the remote control still shows a strong signal. I stare at it.

As I watch, that light dies.

My attention rises to the Eye. It remains there, as unknowable as ever. I seek some change, some twitch in its topography. Nothing. I don’t know what that means. Did someone shoot the drone down? Did its motor or battery fail? Or did it make it and this is the only response to be offered? I smack the side of the remote like the old man I am, but it surrenders no answers. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel defeated. I don’t feel a thing, beyond a sense that I should have thrown in my own towel long ago.

I can tell from the sirens that the SecFor vehicles have reached the turn off here, racing down the street. I shuffle about to face them. They’ve stopped in the road. Their sirens continue, and then their sirens die. Only the klaxon remains, wailing from the direction of the Eye.

I turn back around. I look down at the remote. Its connection light is back on. Nell. I should have sent a message. I think stupidly that perhaps whoever is in the Eye will relay my love to her. I watch it stand out there, red and solid and steady. And then, it beats once like a heart and without a sound, it starts to expand.

I hear engines and the squeal of tires. The SecFor vehicles are retreating. And it is not an illusion. The Eye has begun to grow. I cannot gauge its speed, but its edges crawl outwards, eating up land. I am frozen, and then finally I turn and clamber down the hill. But I fall once and roll and when I get up, I’m sure I’ve broken a rib; my lungs feel like gauze on fire. Still, I make it to my car and start the engine and behind me the SecFor trucks are fleeing down a straight and empty road.

I drive forward instead. Nell. The home I searched this morning. Amos thought the Eye was an attack. I am more sure than anything at this moment that he is utterly wrong. I drive to the end of the street, and then over the embankment there and into the field beyond. The Eye advances, filling before me the whole of the sky, and it beat once like a heart for it is a heart, an embrace; it is contact that somehow went wrong, like a call too early in the morning, like pictures of an empty apartment showing the life I’m no longer in. I head toward it, my tires churning dirt, and soon I will be inside it and I can tell them what they need to know, that we want to meet them and know them, whoever they may be, but their methods have caused too much pain. But their hearts are pure, and the Eye continues to beat before me and now I am almost there.

I wonder if whoever is inside will let me see Nell again. I hope they do. That red wall is coming towards me and I towards it. I say her name as I am seconds away. Somehow, I’m sure she hears me. I lean forward and my eyes are wide and at long last I am—

***

Dan Reade grew to love science fiction while listening to his father read stories from the genre’s Golden Age. He and his wife reside in California, where Dan teaches, writes, and walks the world’s most adorable dog.

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BELONG

SUZANNE PALMER

Gwenna Thirty-Seven stared at the display set into the back of her left hand, where it said, in surprisingly large letters: REJECTED. She tapped it, shook her hand, tapped it harder, reset the display, but the word remained.

Gwenna Twenty-Two and Helene Thirteen came into the bunkspace, their footsteps neatly and perfectly in sync, discussing the upcoming placement in a smooth exchange in the approved rhetorical range. She slipped her opposite hand over her display as casually as she could.

“Greetings, Thirty-Seven,” Twenty-Two said. “Thirteen and I are using our free period to go down to the media hall and watch the Inspirations again. You would be welcome to join us.”

She wished to go; she never got tired of the Inspirations. “I have a superseding matter,” she said to her best friends, instead. “It is a regret.”

“I am informed there will be at least one more occasion to view the Inspirations before the Placement tomorrow night,” Thirteen said. “I am certain we will enjoy them with you again then.”

“I am also certain,” Thirty-Seven said. Her friends turned and, still in step, walked out the door.

When they were gone, she tapped the communication button on her screen. “I have a technical malfunction with my hand device,” she informed the answercomp. “I should bring it for service.”

“You have a scheduled window in sixty-eight minutes,” the answercomp replied. “Please report to Orange One.”

“Technical services is in yellow block—”

“Do not contradict. Your window is in sixty-eight minutes in Orange One. Proceed there.” The service disconnected.

***

It is three weeks before Placement. Gwenna Thirty-Seven has just completed her last proficiency exam, and sits perfectly still with a smile on her face as mentor punctures ink into her arm. It is the symbol for Hand-to-Hand Combat, in gold because she ranked in the top one percent. She has several other gold icons in the line from her shoulder down near her wrist; more than her friends, a few of whom have no gold, and one no silver either. It does not matter; teams are teams because all the members make each other stronger. When they are Placed on Hichia V’s surface, they will face unknown challenges and dangers from the barely-terraformed planet to hostile competitor colonies, and all of them would find ways to contribute and excel.

“Congratulations, Gwenna Thirty-Seven,” mentor says as it withdraws the needles, leaving blood and ink smeared in its wake. “You must expect to be declared Team Lead. You have the best scores of your group.”

“I have no expectation except to serve at my very best at all times, however I am asked to serve,” Thirty-Seven answers. “We are a team together.”

This is the correct answer, she knows, and she feels the truth of it like a song in her heart.

“It has been a pleasure training you, Thirty-Seven,” mentor answers. “You have been an excellent student. You are excused.”

***

Orange One was a large facility that sat half-in and half-out of the safety of the QuanEngCorp Dome. When it was time for Placement, the armored carriers would depart from there out onto the vast, dangerous wastelands of Hichia V. They didn’t yet know the exact time because there were corporate spies within the dome, just as they had information patriots embedded within others’, and the uncertainty made it harder for the competition to ambush them right out the door. Once they were released from the carriers and away they’d be able to hide in the canyons and gutterlands, and they’d quickly dig in and fortify their positions.

Gwenna Thirty-Seven had never been inside Orange One, nor any of her team that she was aware, and no good team kept secrets from each other. She would have been afraid, except that she knew she was perfect in loyalty and valued in full by the Corp; she would have hurried, except she had no just cause for anxiety. A technical fault would not be held against her.

The doors opened, welcoming her, and a servicebot immediately approached. “Gwenna Thirty-Seven,” it said. “Please follow me.”

She followed, taking in the bustle of bots and people around her, all so self-assured and efficient that she could not help but smile from the joy of it.

The bot led her to an elevator, and they went up several floors before exiting into a nondescript hallway. There were no signs, no name plates, no numbers, only cheerful orange walls and doors leading in both directions. The bot took her to one, then stopped. “You may knock,” it said.

Thirty-Seven knocked on the door, three confident but not overly-loud raps, and the door opened. “You may enter,” the bot said, and then spun around and left.

Gwenna stepped in and stopped a respectful third of the way to the desk and the man behind it at the other side of the room. He was looking down at his console, ignoring her. She waited patiently.

At last he glanced up. “Gwenna Thirty-Seven,” he said. “You have a concern.”

She held up her hand, showing the display. “My screen is experiencing a malfunction,” she said.

“It is not a malfunction,” he said. “You will not be Placed with your team. When they have all departed for their new position, you will be released from service.”

“I…” Gwenna started to say, then stopped. She did not know what to say, and stared.

The man waited expectantly.

“I have very satisfactory rankings in all skills from the mentors,” she said at last. “I am fully genetically compliant with all desired corporate parameters. I have zero reprimands and seventeen commendations for loyalty and corporate pride.”

His eyes narrowed. “The Corporation does not make mistakes,” he said.

“I would never consider that it could!” she said.

“Then if the corporation does not make mistakes, you have an alternate explanation for your status.”

“It is a technical malfunction.”

“It is not a technical malfunction. The corporation does not make mistakes. You have been rejected. You are dismissed.”

Behind her, the door opened again and the servicebot beeped. Gwenna Thirty-Seven bowed to the man, turned, and then followed the robot out. Her body felt like the time they had practiced with stun fields, numb all over.

At the door back out into the dome, she looked up at the bot. “I don’t understand,” she said.

It left without a word as the doors of Orange One closed behind her, sealing her out.

***

For their last exercise, mentor has brought them out onto the surface of Hichia V at one of the recently acquired mine settlements. “You must think and move as a team, always mindful of the greater good of the Corporation,” mentor reminds them. This is not hard; this is how they have been taught to think and move since they were selected from their families at age five.

They have seen plenty of images of bodies, both that of the enemy finally meeting justice, and of their own heroes fallen tragically for the Corp. Gwenna has never expected to see them in person, except in combat, so it is a surprise when mentor releases them from their travelpod out onto the surface and there is the bloodied remains of a person among the rocks at the foot of the ramp. She can feel uncertainty sweep the team, just for an instant, before they are all solid again, unswayed, undeterred.

They are suited up for combat, identical except for the designation on their chest armor and backs. She is G37, of course; in front of her she can see G22 and H13, her best friends among equals. They have their rifles out and are moving into the settlement. Behind her, Francine Six – F6 – is hesitating still, and Thirty-Seven takes her arm. “We are a team together,” she says. “We are the body of the Corporation, and we are strong.”

Six nods and steps forward now with more confidence. Thirty-Seven feels the joy of mutuality as a warmth in her body. They will succeed, and bring greater wealth to the Corporation together.

There are other bodies ahead.

One of them still has the logo of TangenTech visible. The carnage is easier to deal with now, being certain they are the competition, rightfully supplanted.

She feels a swell of love for QuanEngCorp, for them selecting her to be a part of their superior organization. She will never let them down, not ever, not even if it means becoming a burnt body in the dirt for the good of the Corp. There is no higher purpose. She has been chosen for this.

***

The others would not talk to her any more. They packed their things for Placement around her, as if she was a pillar or a chair or other inanimate obstacle to be skirted around without further thought. Not even Francine Six, whom she’d once helped, would meet her eyes. “I did nothing wrong,” she told them, but they would not hear.

After they were gone, she sat on her bunk and tried to find in herself her love for the Corporation even through this terrible day. Surely it was a test, a last chance to show her devotion through the worst and most unexpected adversity. Gwenna Thirty-Seven managed a smile, kept it steady on her face, and packed her own things to show she was still prepared to go, willing to give whatever the Corporation asked of her.

The bunkspace was more silent, more empty than anywhere she had ever been. Her handscreen had shut off, even the hated REJECTED now gone, and none of the buttons would do anything.

When she heard the transport outside lift off, she felt her heart break, but she did not cry, and she kept her smile on her face, ready and waiting and loyal.

***

They move together through the settlement, cataloguing resources both available and reparable; occupying this will be another team’s Placement task, not theirs, but the groundwork is good preparation for their own imminent assignment. They have done a multitude of similar tasks – some under hostile fire – in sim, but not live, not with the smell of charred bodies around them as they pull down the TangenTech flag. They are confident the planet will soon belong wholly to QuanEngCorp.

At the far end of the canyon, mentor has them divide up and pass back through, making a finer survey of structural damage. Thirty-Seven is tired but elated, and she and Helene Thirteen work up opposite sides of an abandoned and devastated street. TangenTech’s civilians have fled into the hills; they would either die there or sign themselves over to QuanEng.

She reaches a small structure that is intact enough that resources might have survived inside. Shouldering her pulse rifle, she ducks through the shattered doorway inside.

It had, she realizes, once been a home. Broken, burnt bits of furniture are shoved up against the far wall, pressed there by the shock cannons of whichever team acquired the town. She unclips a scanner from her belt, holds it out in the palm of her glove, lets it sweep the room with its bluish light. The Team placed here will be able to use the data to plan resources for the rebuild.

There is a sound, small but clear, clearly human, among the destruction.

Thirty-Seven uses her boot to kick debris aside, and finds a face there. Dirty with soot and blood, it is a man, barely not still a kid, maybe even younger than she is. “Please,” he says. “Please don’t hurt me.”

She takes a bee from her pack, bends down, and sets it gently on his chest before she steps well back. There is a spark, and the man-boy arches his back and screams, a terrible sound that dwindles quickly away as his last breath is taken.

In the sims, the enemies lay there peacefully, and smile as they are removed from this life. They do not scream, or thrash, or soil themselves.

Gwenna stares at the body long enough that mentor enters the building, assesses the situation, declares the structure and its contents satisfactorily surveyed. She looks at it, the metal and plastic drone that has been teacher, friend, for all of her life that she can recall.

“I did the right thing?” she asks.

“It is necessary to move along to the next structure,” mentor says instead.

She leaves the bee, as it will hasten the decomposition and sanitization of the body, and follows mentor back outside into sunlight that seems brighter than when she entered. There is another building ahead, and she sees that Helene Thirteen is already several structures ahead of her. She will have to hurry to catch up, so she does, and she does not think on that house, the dead enemy boy, again.

***

Six hours later, they came for her. She was still smiling, though her face ached. A small group of people in orange checked that she had properly packed her things and then indicated she should follow them out of the bunkspace.

“There’s a new team coming in,” the woman in the lead explained. “Team IJKL, a male group. They will live and train here for the next five years, just as your team did, and if they train well they will be Placed, as all of your team except you were.”

“I trained very hard,” she said.

“You did. We were very pleased with you, until the end,” she said.

“I don’t know what I did wrong. I would try again, if the opportunity is still available. I would do anything for the Corporation.”

“That is not my choice to make,” she said. “Please roll up your sleeve.”

Gwenna Thirty-Seven did as she was told, as she always had. Mentor was there, though she had not seen it arrive. It grasped her arm and stabbed ink in, and when it drew away at first she thought there was only blood there. Then she saw the pattern, in red, at the end of the long line of gold and silver of all her achievements: a red question mark.

“You asked a question,” the woman said. She shook her head, and all the others in orange looked down and away at the shame of it. “There is no room for questions, for doubt, in loyalty. You no longer belong among us.”

Still seeping blood from the mark, they escorted her from the Corporate dome to be cast away from this world.

***

Suzanne Palmer is a writer, artist, and linux system administrator who lives in the beautiful but bug-filled woods of western Massachusetts. She tweets random things about writing, space, bugs, and other cool stuff as @zanzjan.

ON THE TECHNO-EROTIC POTENTIAL OF DONALD TRUMP UNDER CONDITIONS OF PARTIALLY INDUCED PSYCHOSIS

KEN HINCKLEY

illustrated by Dave Senecal

Streaked with Toner.
In the latter stages of Dr Axsel Scinder’s investigations – as the funding dried up in the aftermath of the economic crisis and the high-rise Institute crumbled around him – he found himself obsessively viewing projected (and thus grotesquely enlarged) cine-loops of the Presidential candidate.

The bitter aroma of a cup of coffee Axsel had poured some days ago – precisely how many, he could not recall – seemed to fertilize the extensive notes that flowered in his tattered moleskin.

Meanwhile the film of grime deposited on his floor-to-ceiling windows by the diesel trucks rumbling through the cloverleafs far below turned his world into the toner-streaked nightmare of a poorly photocopied forensic report.

Such was Axsel’s frame of mind as he returned his attention to his long-neglected monograph.

ABSTRACT

It is widely recognized that the candidacy of Mr Trump is a phenomenon long lacking a firm scientific explanation.

By probing deep into both hedonistic and utilitarian desires manifest in widely suppressed middle-American white culture, our aim is to demonstrate that certain aspects of Mr Trump’s rise to prominence are not only explainable – scientifically – and replicable, but are also not without predictable consequences despite (to the best of our researches) their utter lack of historical precedent.

Hemorrhagic Neck-Ties.
With this bold new programme of research, Axsel couldn’t help but notice that Tamara de Pravern – a lioness in the field of prediction markets, and a co-investigator whom he’d long admired – had taken an intense curiosity in his activities.

Tamara (Dr de Pravern to her research colleagues) was a woman who looked like she’d been born in a skyscraper:

Her sleek legs rose halfway to the sky.

A harsh-angled jawline framed red velvet lips that drew all onlookers into their trap of geometrical perfection.

And coppery eyes gazed out like the enormous panes of privacy glass bejeweling the executive levels atop the Institute.

She favored brash accents (scarlet sashes, peacock scarves, dagger-to-the-heart heels) with jewelry that bordered on the gigantesque, from the twisted helixes of her earrings, her necklaces with faux-pearls the size of a man’s testicles, and black mood rings that circled her fingers and their well manicured, talon-like nails.

Although he had tried to keep the project secret, Axsel was certain – almost certain – that Tamara had caught a glimpse of his projected leviathan of Trump.

But he couldn’t discount the possibility that her arousal was just a product of his newfound attention to detail in his wardrobe, inspired of course by the Presidential candidate himself, although due to the limitations of his means Axsel was forced to scour thrift shops for his stern black suits.

All of this running-about – always on his thin-soled dress shoes because he couldn’t afford the taxi fares – left his clothing smelling faintly of diesel exhaust, although none of his co-workers (not even Tamara, with her acute sense of smell) had commented on it.

But on one minor point he took issue with the Presidential candidate’s taste.

Axsel eschewed Trump’s occasional penchant for cornflower blue neckties, in favor of brilliant reds.

These flamboyant ciphers seemed to relentlessly build in Axsel’s own mind until they burst forth from his carotids, flowing down his neck and across his chest, like the stigmata of a hemorrhagic fever.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Our methodology was a simple one. Brutality begets brutality, yet only with repeated and unflinching exposure can an audience be first conditioned, then familiarized, and – as so convincingly demonstrated by Mr Trump – ultimately aroused by denigration and ad hominem attacks.

We therefore undertook the following course of study.

Quietus in Diesel Minor.
After being haunted for hours by vivid dreams of Tamara de Pravern, Axsel awoke deep in a night so black that even the trucks had fallen silent.

And yet the high-rise still seemed to tremble at their memory.

Hands shaking, he pulled out his tattered moleskin, taking care to avoid spilling his foul-smelling cup of caffeinated petroleum distillates. He arranged a text buffer side-by-side with his exhaustive statistical analyses and started typing furiously.

He was no longer certain he could recall his own name.

STIMULI

In Phase I, subjects were exposed to projected stimuli, consisting of no less than:

(1) six-second film loops of large-screen televisions being hurled off of high-rise balconies (with and without pedestrians, early-childhood development centers, and heavy truck traffic below);

(2) time-shifted splices of the World Trade Center collapse (North Tower) interspersed with millisecond samples from pornographic films;

(3) the final monolith sequence from the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
(“My God, it’s full of stars”);

(4) graphic footage of stereotactic neurosurgical procedures (i.e. surgical interventions utilizing a steel frame bolted directly to the skull table), with no less than ten square centimeters of exposed brain tissue, and only when conducted on fully conscious patients; and lastly

(5) microscope slides (400X enlargement) of Stage IV metastatic cancers originating in the lower bowel and/or rectum.

Participants exhibited markedly increased levels of arousal for all five projections following exposure to still images of Mr Trump captured in the midst of denigrating remarks he was verified to have made regarding certain classes of immigrants; but no effect was observed for control images of Hillary Clinton (with or without single-frame exposures of Monica Lewinsky, wide-mouthed, lips fully exposed); nor for stock footage obtained of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, both of whom the investigators originally hypothesized would induce a similar effect.

The implications for the candidacy of Mr Trump are profound.

Savage Harmonic.
Even as the interrogations began, he (Ansel…yes, that was it, Ansel) could hear the rumble of trucks circling the interchange growing ever louder, as if the heavy diesel traffic had become lost within a maze of off-ramps exiting his own mind.

As a point of honor Ansel refused to implicate his co-investigator, Tamara de Pravern. At first he claimed he’d found the video clips online – where of course all deep truths about human nature reside, so that they can resonate with one another in a self-amplifying feedback loop – even though later, under conditions of enhanced interrogation, he was forced to admit to quasi-officials of law enforcement that he had – even if it was at Tamara’s suggestion – uploaded all of the clips himself.

He tried to make them understand. Once light was captured in a charge-coupled device, digitized, and brought online, it was no longer evidence of a physical manifestation but rather (quite to the contrary) became a sensor, a probe of the electroencephalographic signals underpinning collective human consciousness.

In the elicitation of this savage harmonic underlying all human thought, Ansel had discovered that there was no more powerful stimulus than the projected visage of Donald Trump.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS: PHASE II

At the conclusion of the first stage of the study participants walked through life-size holographic projections of select cross-sections of the blood spatters produced by a hypothetical terrorist assassination of Mr Trump (also at 400X magnification).

These shapes were referred to by participants variously as: the hanging jowls of swine just before being herded into a slaughterhouse; cross-sections of a severe bowel obstruction; brain lesions of an indeterminate nature; and, remarkably, by no less then seven participants, as the sexual orifices of imaginary creatures.

Invisible Jihad.
Spurned on this occasion by Tamara for reasons that he could not comprehend, and still perplexed by the grossly enlarged projection of the Presidential candidate playing out on the wall in front of him, Ashel turned his back and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows for inspiration.

And inspiration struck.

The film of pollution clinging to the glass had become so heavy that Ashel could barely make out the city skyline any longer. What he principally saw was, in fact, a reflection of himself—

With the enormous shimmering halo of Mr Trump’s projection engulfing his own visage.

As if waving himself away, Ashel tried to wipe the grime off of the window with a bare hand, but of course the diesel particulate and the heaviest vibrations of the trucks only haunted the outside surface of the double-paned glass.

And so all he left behind were the sickle-shaped wipe marks of his own fingers – stylized traces that seemed to form a cuneiform of violence – and which announced his own invisible jihad.

DISCUSSION: PHASE II

While disturbing, viewed with a clinical eye these honest and unfiltered auto-associations reported by our participants seem to support certain modern theories regarding the functioning of the amygdala and basal ganglia, up to and including the synchronized mass psychosis effect that some claim was originally hypothesized in the lost writings of A.R. Luria (1927; cf. “The Man with a Shattered Mind”) – and first put into practice by various combatants in episodes of trench warfare during World War II (esp. those involving flame throwers, though of course not exclusively so).

Standing Wave.
Despite the severe economic downturn and the dissolution of the Institute – Askel had repeatedly been forced to break into the locked and barricaded building, where somehow he always found Tamara de Pravern waiting for him – there now seemed to be heavier truck traffic outside than ever.

Endless fleets of diesel rigs mounted the cloverleafs, downshifted, and engaged their air-brakes with enthusiasm.

The entire high-rise shook.

As if in subconscious response to these rumblings, the oily and bitter-smelling surface of Askel’s coffee trembled in concentric rings, a standing wave of madness.

METHOD AND APPARATUS

Forty-eight volunteers of reproductive age were ushered into a modified lecture hall outfitted with a mirrored ceiling, walls of half-silvered glass, and custom low-pile industrial carpeting sheeted over with a highly reflective layer of aluminized mylar.

A sharp tang of noxious industrial fumes off-gassed by these materials was noted by the investigators, but deemed safe for human exposure. Nonetheless several participants noted their discomfort with the “synthetic diesel smell”, and the presence of such odors is suspected to have significantly enhanced the effects observed.

The room was outfitted with twenty-seven discreetly located nano-projectors, as well as near-infrared transcranial receiver/transmitters. Full brain imaging of the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes was therefore enabled to a depth of three centimeters, thought to encompass all higher perceptual and cognitive functions available to scientific inquiry.

Although unusual, this apparatus obviated the need for mass dissections at the conclusion of the experiment, for which human subjects’ approval had proved inordinately difficult to obtain.

Please note that at all times participants could see our projected stimuli, as well as grossly distorted reflections of their own visages in the floor, walls, and/or ceiling. This was thought to enhance participant identification with the test images of Mr Trump’s head and face, so long as these were displayed at a minimum diameter of three meters.

Smaller likenesses of Trump were found to induce overwhelming feelings of self-loathing and disgust when combined with our five projected conditions, which strongly interfered with the observation of the desired effect. This, we assumed, was due to a Stroop-like effect (i.e., of contradictory self-images) brought on by the incidental reflections of the subject’s own visage when they occurred at the same or a similar scale to the likeness of Mr Trump.

In the following we therefore restrict our observations to the “Large” (six-foot), “Jumbo” (twelve-foot), and “Cyclopean” (eighteen-foot) conditions.

We must stress that in the latter condition the cavernous nasal septum of Mr Trump brought on intense feelings of hopelessness and despair in a majority of our test subjects.

Detached Sutures.
For months the insoluble cipher of Trump’s visage – its postures and its battlements, the way it shifted so effortlessly between all of its many derisive planes of existence – had haunted Alesk’s dreams.

Finally, the bulb of the projector burned out. Robbed of his perverted Buddha – the projected face he had come to love so much – and no closer to a solution, in his frustration Alesk lashed out at the cup of putrescent coffee which still squatted defiantly on his desk.

Dollops of acrid black liquid seemed to launch themselves in slow motion, as if they were spatters of blood that dried as soon as they came into contact with the corrosive atmosphere of the office-space. Alesk again felt as if he were walking through the simulated assassinations, a holographic Zapruder film projected onto the spectral diffuser of his mind, which documented a historical event that had not yet occurred.

The optimum scale and vector-space of the act would almost certainly be reduced to practice by others – the Arabs had always had a knack for mathematical breakthroughs – even though his own researches had just started to pick up momentum. This reflection made Alesk neither happy nor sad, but rather fueled him to let his mind run wild in truly original terrain.

Dizzy…

Alesk’s eyelids fluttered.

He staggered, disoriented and confused.

Uncertain what he’d been doing a few seconds before.

He was jolted by the uneasy sensation that he was no longer in his own office. The cup of coffee, which had so long trembled in the wake of his researches, was no longer where he had left it. And this desk had coffee stains all over it, whereas he always kept his own spotless and clean.

It was hard to tell where he had gone awry, given the identical layout on every floor of the Institute. Perhaps without realizing it he had gotten off the high-rise’s elevator on the wrong level.

Yes.

He was sure of it.

Alesk was in somebody else’s office, much lower in the Institute than he had first thought.

Because the roar of the diesel trucks had grown louder than ever, reverberating within his mind, detaching the sutures of his cranium from one another.

RESULTS

Given the well-known problems with Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing, the investigators preferred to extract qualitative interrogations from each and every participant, which rarely required recourse to methods such as waterboarding.

Statements made by participants were collected and grouped via affinity diagrams to construct a taxonomy of techno-erotic responses to Mr Trump’s visage. The techno-sadistic valence of participants’ nonverbal reactions was also inventoried and coded by independent judges, whenever feasible.

Predictably, a majority of participants were left speechless by their experience, but correlation of their phasic brain waves with the (final) ninety seconds of cardiac activity collected from eleven convicts executed by electric chair yielded positive results.

It is noted (but not endorsed) that the electrical supply to many border fences could be connected at an identical voltage without significant strain on the nation’s electrical grid, if such a solution were to be deemed politically feasible by Mr Trump. The ramifications of such a decision are left to future work, however, although it is suggested that existing online footage of trespassers and other victims coming into contact with high-voltage terminals at unsecured electrical substations could be highly valuable in such an inquiry.

For those participants that remained responsive, a majority preferred the production of automatic drawings to verbal remarks. Of these auto-suggestive “reports”, investigators noted prominent themes such as:

(i) works with a striking resemblance (despite use of pastels and colored pencils) to macaroni art produced by psychotic children;

(ii) pencil-strokes for which we calculated a fractal dimension identical to certain images from a well-known textbook of head trauma, e.g. “Woman with complete dissection of the corpus callosum, sagittal plane, brought on by high-speed ejection and subsequent head-first collision with sheet metal peeled back from a long-haul tractor trailer”;

(iii) statistically significant correlations with the indices of curvature derived from plaster-casts of Mediterranean beaches, and particularly the hollows and depressions left therein by the child-victims of migratory drowning incidents resulting from unseaworthy vessels;

(iv) shapes strongly resembling the crystalline geometry of certain very high-end fragrance decanters produced in Paris prior to the Charlie Hebdo attacks;

(v) phase diagrams consistent with a model of an extremely large sewer culvert, corrugated and fiberglass-reinforced, which recently entered mass production.

The Inspiration of the Death Plunge.
The window-washer pendulumed away from the high-rise and Azzel, about to take the first sip of his freshly brewed coffee, was already anticipating the thump of the man’s heavy boots against the floor-to-ceiling windows when the harness let loose.

Time seemed to halt as fragments of the window-washer’s failed carabiner ricocheted off of the outer of the double panes. Azzel stared right into the window washer’s eyes – as the reality of the death plunge struck the man – from his observation post safely within the panes of mirrored glass.

The window-washer was short and compact, all muscle, wearing olive drab cargo pants and a tombstone-gray sweatshirt. His eyes flared wide as they beheld his own reflection suspended in mid-air for that fleeting second, but the grim set of his mouth never shifted.

He threw his hands in the air, clawing at the sky, and the rag he had just wiped his brow with fluttered away and landed on one of the blades of the louvered sunshades just above Azzel’s office windows, where ironically the scrap of terrycloth thereafter lay draped in perpetual safety.

Then the time-trap loosened its hold on reality, and the man—

(Azzel later learned that his name was Gonzalo Reyes de la Puenta, a twenty-three-year-old Venezuelan who had illegally entered the States only three weeks ago)

—plummeted seventy-two stories onto the hood of an Aston Martin idling on the parkway below.

The rag hung there above Azzel’s office, suspended from the sun-louvers like a shroud, for months afterwards. Even the winter storms failed to dislodge it from its precarious perch, although it was buffeted by strong winds and the louvers constantly shuddered with the vibrations induced by the heavy truck traffic of the cloverleafs encircling the high-rise.

As the cloth mildewed, stiffened, and started to deteriorate, it became a powerful cipher symbolizing the death-plunge of Azzel’s own mind, and ultimately became the inspiration for his bold new programme of research.

But he never touched that cup of coffee, and thereafter it remained at his station, an unholy distillate of the event that had so profoundly altered the arc of his career.

On one occasion Azzel pointed the fossilized rag out to Tamara, trying to explain the immense power that this totem held over him, but she just shrugged and sharpened the focus on the projector that cast the image of the Presidential candidate, with the ineffable smirk of an engorged Buddha, upon the opposing wall.

DISCUSSION

Despite the light shed on the subject by our inquiry, the candidacy of Mr Trump remains highly enigmatic.

Many aspects of his countenance, such as the resemblance of his nose to the feces of certain farm animals remarked upon by one of our test subjects, the deep folds of his jowls which another described as “a newly evolved excretory orifice which has become a matter of survival for the politically elite”, or the great overhanging cornice of his tawny-brown hair, which “oppresses from a distance, as if it jutting [from the screen] in a premeditated act of tele-projected strangulation”.

The latter must be considered a remarkable innovation devised by Mr Trump, which thereby allows him to exert the extreme personal-space invasion tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson upon his (Mr Trump’s) audience at a considerable distance. The ability of this technique to scale the experience of personal (sexual) humiliation to large numbers of viewers should not be underestimated.

Forbidden Geometries.
Axxxl and Tamara labored deep into the night, transforming the derelict high-rise and its vast facade of pollution-frosted glass into the ultimate consummation of their fevered vision.

When they had finished their preparations, their bodies sheened with sweat, they lay atop the granite table that dominated the executive boardroom. The cold stone jolted them with frissons of arousal whenever it contacted their simmering flesh.

And then Axxxl realized something was wrong.

No longer did the high-rise tremble.

The heavy rumblings of the trucks had fallen silent.

He looked up from the expansive flesh-dunes of Tamara’s body, and out the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond. The expressways and thoroughfares spreading out upon the vista before them were gridlock, an uninterrupted mass of taillights bleeding out like the vasculature of some vast robotic mind.

And all of the gridlock led back to the high-rise, and the chaos unfolding at their feet.

A double-tanker truck pressurized with liquefied natural gas had launched itself off of the cloverleaf.

And from there straight into a flatbed hauling ass down the expressway with a 25-ton cask of highly radioactive waste riding upon its back.

Even with the double-paned glass between him and the conflagration, the heat soon warmed Axxxl’s skin, and – superimposed upon Tamara’s caresses of the forbidden clefts and protuberances of his body – sent pleasant tingles down his spine.

It had been a fortuitous development.

As emergency vehicle sirens and helicopter blades thrashing the air filled the silent wake of the motionless trucks, Axxxl realized that every camera in the world was now focused on the spectacle below.

And as they watched the panicked news feeds on Tamara’s laptop, in every shot the high-rise of the darkened Institute loomed like an enormous black tombstone in the background.

Axxxl slipped back into his suit, knotted off the cerebral hemorrhage that was his necktie.

And as Tamara hiked up her skirt, which hesitated all too briefly upon the mound of her pubis, Axxxl strode deep into the boardroom and switched on the first projector.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

Although our attempt to produce a comprehensive inventory of auto-erotic responses to Trump’s various face-states (scowl of derision, fecal nose, pop-eyes/masturbatory mouth-appliance, etc.) ultimately proved unsuccessful, the methodology we have pioneered and the novel responses already catalogued herein offers a noteworthy foundation for future probes of the candidacy of Mr Trump and related phenomena.

It is hoped that such insights may be of considerable use to political theorists and the American public, if not the candidate himself – not to mention his many adversaries.

For every truth there is a counter-argument, for every lie another denial, and we owe it to ourselves (and our way of government) to more thoroughly understand the impact of these auto-suggestions on the American psyche—

No matter how disturbing the topography of our collective consciousness that emerges.

Fusing Sequence.
From the depths of the executive boardroom Axxxl aimed the high-lumen projector not inward, upon the walls of the Institute, but outward, at the film of pollution on the exterior of the floor-to-ceiling glass.

A matte-like finish that constituted an ideal diffusion surface.

The scene cast by the projector, an abstract swath of tawny-brown, resembled an extreme close up of an isolated hillock in rolling wheat fields.

But there was something unnatural and deeply disturbing about this particular hillock’s geometry, as if it were an artificial construction of some ancient race of doomed mound-builders.

And suddenly the entire hillside shifted, as if built on unstable ground.

Axxxl nodded to Tamara. She walked over and kneeled in front of her laptop, bowing before it to place her hands on the keyboard, as if in worship of some obscene Mecca on the distant margins of Axxxl’s mind.

Dropping into a command-line prompt, she keyed the fusing sequence.

And as her black mood rings glistened, her expression dead serious, Dr de Pravern clacked on
Enter with a manicured thumb.

Satisfied with her handiwork, she swiped back over to the screen jammed with live news-feeds.

Axxxl crouched beside her, held her close with an arm draped across her shoulders, to witness the defining moment of their creation.

On the camera feeds, the dark windows of the Institute hovering in the background lit up one by one. A jilted eye, a fragment of jaw, a cavernous nasal septum concentrated somewhere near about the middle of the 72nd floor.

The vision of the candidate, tiled together from the projections shining forth from every vacant office on the Institute’s top thirty-six floors, materialized on Tamara’s laptop.

And across every satellite feed chattering through the atmosphere of the planet, every undersea cable girding the oceanic rifts that were tearing the Earth apart, and – ultimately – upon every television screen the whole world over:

The Colossus of Trump presided over the holocaust below.

***

Mr Hinckley – although unavailable for comment due to lingering side-effects of enhanced interrogation – has been confirmed by quasi-officials of law enforcement to be a legal citizen of the United States of America, a nation-state alleged to be symbolic of freedom.

This despite a well-documented penchant for vast border-walls, demonization of the honorable and sublime Muslim faith, and off-shore confinement of individuals in centers of indefinite detention as advocated by certain prominent political figures, who need not be invoked by name here.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that Mr Hinckley maintains a website, kenhinckley.wordpress.com, which documents hundreds of ‘scientific papers’ and ‘patents’, leading inevitably to the conclusion (if by no evidence beyond their sheer plenitude) that these must represent the unfortunate confabulations of a diseased mind, despite their apparent acceptance into the scientific canon. Upon download and laser-printing, a distinct stench of diesel fumes was also noted.

That Mr Hinckley furthermore claims to be a ‘writer’, having previously published made-up stories in venues such as
Nature Futures,
Penumbra, and
Fiction River: Time Streams, merely confirms that he is a highly dangerous (if not insane) individual. Pick-up basketball players frequenting local gymnasiums also report that his three-point shot is known to be exceptionally lethal.

However, under extended questioning which was not thought to involve sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and/or (prolonged) exposure to temperature extremes, Mr Hinckley did admit that the ‘story’ in the present so-called ‘magazine’ known as
Interzone may not be so much about Mr Trump as it is about the triumvirate formed by the Presidential candidate, his audience (perhaps best exemplified by certain widely suppressed elements of middle-American white culture, though of course not exclusively so), and the media.

It is this bizarre love triangle which makes a pornography of events such as 9/11, the Syrian refugee crisis, and even now the horrific Orlando shootings. The end-state of this inspiraling and self-obsessed cycle, perhaps to be capped ultimately by the election of Mr Trump to the highest office of the most powerful nation on Earth, forms an exercise in logical reduction best left to the reader.

Or, as the recent decision to exit the European Union would indicate – effectively a choice for the United Kingdom to construct its own Wall of Trump, perhaps one day to be decorated by celebratory graffiti-murals, at a Cyclopean scale, of the Presidential candidate himself – such an exercise would be pointless because it has already reached its logical conclusion.

COMING SOON TO INTERZONE

‘The End of Hope Street’

a novelette by Malcolm Devlin

‘The Apologists’

Tade Thompson

‘Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion’

Georgina Bruce

and much, much more

issue #266 is published in September

THE INSIDE-OUT

ANDREW KOZMA

illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Anarchy told me about the abandoned ghetto because it knew I’d find it impossible to resist, which is what led us to take the subway to the Bright Hem. As with so much of the new home the Topoi designed for us, the subway was supposed to make humans feel like we were back on Earth, but perhaps because Spiders like Anarchy can find a comfortable seat in a crowded car just as easily as I can, it doesn’t. The subway was full of graffiti, just like on Earth, but here it was in a dozen other languages. Non-human languages. Hell, they could’ve been children’s drawings for all I knew, because all I knew was that I knew very little about humanity’s new home IO, the Inside-Out, the Dyson sphere the Topoi engineered as their home.

In the subway car, I sat next to Anarchy underneath a drawing of a white-picket fence topped with heads, trying not to stare at the Pinworms, the Hermit Crabs, the Burning Trashcans, the Lampposts, all the aliens riding the subway and staring at us, the new kids on the block. At each stop, we were joined by more of our fellow explorers – the Unknown Knowns, we called ourselves – all of us, except Anarchy, perhaps, equally aware of our ignorance. Bjorn Bjorn, a tall blonde woman dressed in the crispest of traveling clothes. Artemisia Chronis, dark-haired and small, her stare a burning match on your skin. The red-haired fraternal twins, Roam and Return, one as hefty as a bear with hair and beard to match, the other as bland and colorless as an IRS agent.

We each had our own reasons for exploring our new world, when most people hugged their little piece of Topoi-fabricated home as though our translation across hundreds of thousands of light years could be ignored like a salesman’s knock at the door. Artemisia used the new vistas in her paintings and sculptures. Bjorn was an astrophysicist – or had been back on Earth – and now she was one of the few scientists who hadn’t given up on her studies. Roam and Return were thrill-seekers, plain and simple. Anarchy was a Spider, which meant it was an enigma, its smooth, graffitied shell emotionless as a cue ball. And I explored because I knew that’s what Bee would be doing if she were stuck in this madhouse with me.

“Where we going, Jamon?” Return finally asked, speaking around mouthfuls of jugfruit. “Are we jumping down another Hole? Burying our heads in another Sandpit? Breaking into a Ledge Factory?”

All eyes turned to me. Even Anarchy tilted its sphere closer to my face, despite the fact that it was the one who told me about the ghetto in the first place. The Unknown Knowns trusted me so much they’d come along without question. Well, it was either trust or the desperate desire to do something other than wait for their tired cells to replicate themselves into oblivion.

“Anarchy says there’s an abandoned ghetto on the edge of our little portion of IO. Thought it’d be worth it to jump in, see what we can find. Anarchy’s never been there. Apparently, the Spiders leave it alone.”

“Why?” Artemesia asked, her voice a lead weight.

“Spiders are more interested in living cultures than dead ones?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not as if this tin can speaks English.”

“You mean ‘human’,” Return said. He began to clean under his nails with a worn pocketknife, obviously from Earth. I couldn’t help staring. The faux-wood handle was chipped to show white plastic beneath. Scratches on the blade broke up the light so that the metal looked like a field of snow.

“An abandoned ghetto.” Roam smiled through his thicket of beard. “Hope no one’s afraid of ghosts?”

“Why should we be?” Bjorn said. “We’re ghosts ourselves.”

Artemisia shook her head. “No, we’re the opposite of ghosts. Alive, but stuck living in the shell of our former world.”

That shut everyone up, even Return. I watched him finish cleaning his nails, desperately wanting to hold the pocketknife but afraid to ask. Some people woke on IO with parts of their life from Earth, wallets and loose change, paperclips and ballpoint pens, a dozen pairs of shoes. Since everything else was provided by the Topoi, these authentic artifacts were the only real economy we had. Safe in my pocket was the only evidence I had of my life back on Earth: a picture of Bee.

It wasn’t a snapshot from our wedding. It wasn’t romantic at all. I had her old student ID, an eighteen-year-old her looking through time at a man she hadn’t even met yet.

Anarchy tapped out a quick message on the floor between us. “What ghost?”

“It’s empty,” I said. “It’s an emptiness.”

We left the subway at California Dreamin’ Station and trekked into the edge of the human ghetto: the Bright Hem. It was crafted to look like the forests of Oregon in some places, like the steppes of Africa in others, every wilderness on Earth represented. There was always something unreal about these areas. We knew that the land we were seeing wasn’t Earth’s, but there was something else off, a fierce vividness to the colors, the perfection of every blade of grass.

This section of the Bright Hem looked like Central Park. Not a wilderness, per se, but the Topoi had trouble understanding the details of lesser creatures. Near the station sat a Librarian, its chest full of bright green Ledge. Its giant crab-like head turned to follow us as we passed by. Surrounding the Librarian were dozens of people Booking, frozen in the position they held when the Ledge absorbed their brains into the sucking whirlpool that was the Galactic Archive.

Roam and Return stacked a few Books in compromising positions. Bjorn and even Artemisia laughed, but I couldn’t. I’d done Ledge. In a few hours or days the Books would wake, their limbs sore, their stomachs aching for food, without a clue as to where they were or what they’d been doing. They’d see the Librarian, and they’d go back to it with their hands outstretched confident that even if they knew nothing at the moment, the answers were in that little green pill.

I headed into the Bright Hem, the False Sky turning dark with late afternoon, the beginnings of familiar Earth-bound constellations coming out, the artificial lights a stage set for humanity’s own personal passion play.

“Daylight’s a wasting,” I called out to my fellow explorers, confident they’d follow.

But there was no daylight wasting, and no daylight. At the edges of the ghetto, the False Sky was kept from complete darkness by the light from IO’s sun, and the further we walked into the Bright Hem the brighter the world grew. Under the cloak of thick-leaved trees, light pooled around us as though the ground itself were glowing.

Anarchy sped ahead into the greenery, its eight telescoping legs a whir of motion. I heard heavy footsteps and then Roam was there beside me, his breath heavy. “I’m sorry, man, about the Books. I know you Ledged, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just thought it would be funny, lighten the mood, you know. I just, I didn’t think I—”

The rush of words faltered as we broke from the trees. Above us hung IO’s real sun, a white-hot drop of molten gold. Something fell loose in my chest. Roam’s eyes grew wide as fists. As each of the others came into the open, they were paralyzed as though staring into the face of God. In a way we were. Somewhere up there, either on one of the floating platforms closer to the sun, or on the surface of IO that stretched away all around us, the Topoi lived, the gods of this world, the careless creators.

I’d seen IO’s sun before. Months into my initial wandering, after I tried to drown myself in Ledge but before I’d founded the Unknown Knowns, I wandered the Bright Hem far on the other side of the human ghetto. I stayed out from under the False Sky for days under that true sunlight. My despair and bitterness didn’t leave me, but they were bleached under that imperious glare into something new.

I hurried ahead to let the others be. Everyone deserves privacy when their world upends.

I caught up with Anarchy where the Bright Hem ended, passing through a skein of trees to reach the edge of a street of crushed coral. To either side of the street two-story polyps and anemones waved gently in the non-existent breeze. I sat down to take it all in. The view was perfect, the local houses, the high rises further out piled out of individual globes like crayfish chimneys, and everything colored in soft pastels. Even Anarchy’s metal body didn’t prevent the ghetto from looking like a postcard.

The air was salty, redolent of the ocean. Unlike the human ghetto, where the sound of people and life was so thick you could never escape it, here there was only silence. Then Anarchy stepped onto the coral street and that perfect silence burst like a bubble under the crunching of its metal legs.

I’d seen alien cities and the wonders that lay in wait beyond the human ghetto’s borders in the offices of the Social Workers, but those were pictures. And I’d seen aliens, too, of course, playing tourist in the human ghetto. But in the midst of all that humanity my subconscious began to see those aliens as people in costumes, not as evidence that humanity was just a speck of dust in the universe’s grand ballroom. And now this ghetto and all those who lived in it, they weren’t even dust.

Bjorn Bjorn sat down beside me without preamble, so close our legs pressed at the thighs. The touch was electric, but it only made me hunger for Bee’s presence, the pain of losing her still sharp after a year and a half.

“It’s beautiful.”

I nodded. “Hard to believe they’re all gone. An entire race—”

“Not that.” She tipped my head up with her hand to look at IO’s sun. “I’m going to build a house with a sunroof right on the edge of the Bright Hem. Imagine waking up to that view every morning.”

I turned back to the ghetto. Anarchy stood by one of the giant anemone buildings, tapping at it with one of its legs. With a sudden puff of dust, its leg broke through the wall. Sheepishly, it stepped back. Sometimes, I didn’t know if it actually knew what it was doing.

Standing, I yelled out, “Don’t destroy everything before we get a chance to see it!”

I wanted nothing more than to be touched by someone right then, but the someone I wanted was dead, her body thousands upon thousands of light years away. Thankfully, right then the rest of the crew stumbled noisily from the woods behind us.

“Remember the rules, people,” I said.

“Right,” Return said. “Don’t die.”

I turned to face the Unknown Knowns, lined up against the trees of the Bright Hem as though for a photograph. Behind them, the falling shadow of the False Sky spread across the horizon like an approaching storm.

“The rules of the Unknown Knowns are to explore responsibly and…” I paused. “To not die.”

Return whooped a war cry and raced Roam into the ghetto. Bjorn sighed, rummaging through her backpack for whatever scientific instruments she needed for her endless tests. Artemisia, journal in hand, began to sketch as she walked into the empty city.

A loud crash sounded behind me. The anemone Anarchy had damaged crumbled to the ground in a rush of pinkish dust, revealing spars of whitish metal sticking up through the rubble like ribs and chunks of wall which looked like a cross between shell and skin. The rubble shifted as Anarchy climbed out, its graffiti-painted shell now a uniform pink.

I trotted down into the ghetto, eager to begin my own exploring. The only real concession we made to safety was our walkie-talkies. I clicked mine on for a moment and caught Return in the midst of a joke – “…so the priest says to the prostitute…” – and clicked it off. The coral street didn’t lead straight into the ghetto, but twisted and split and rejoined itself as though Dr Seuss had been the city planner. Towards the center of the ghetto, giant spires punctuated the horizon. Skyscrapers? Spaceports? Shopping malls?

The coral crunching under my boots was the only sound as I walked deeper and deeper into the ghetto. I stopped to get my bearings and looked at the buildings around me. To my left was a three-story polyp, a typical home of the aliens who lived here, I guessed, though there were no windows or doors, just dimples in the calcified surface. Up and down the coral street the polyps and anemones and hydras all blended into one another. In each one, something had lived.
Someone had lived.

It was too easy in the human ghetto to begin to see all aliens alike. One Hermit Crab stands for all Hermit Crabs. All the Lampposts have exactly the same views and interests.

Take the Spiders, which are as alien as they come. In essence, they are perfectly round metal shells about the size of a beach ball, but they’re called Spiders because they have two bulbs on opposite sides of the shell, each serving as a hub to four telescoping legs they use both for transportation and a Morse code-like form of communication. It’s impossible to say whether Spiders are self-aware robots or simply inhabited the metal shell as a vehicle – mostly because they’ve never said. Their shells are featureless except for the legs, though they’d adopted the human art of graffiti, their tags the only way to tell them apart. Anarchy was so named because of the circled A repeated on its body ad nauseam. It’s a stretch to call them Spiders, but humanity has ended up defining everything about the strange new world of IO in familiar, generic terms.

Which means that all we see is the group, because we’re unfamiliar with the aliens as aliens and we want to think about them in the easiest terms possible. We box them in. We categorize. We forget.

I forget.

And yet millions of aliens had lived in this ghetto. It was impossible for me not to imagine them having lives and careers, hobbies, loves. In the human ghetto, those who didn’t lose themselves in Ledge often began to hate those aliens among us. On the street corners, these wretches would pass out homemade flyers, haranguing everyone as they passed, human and alien alike.

They’re the enemy, they say.

They’re the ones destroying us, they say.

They’re alien, they say.

But we’re the aliens here on IO.

I had trouble picturing what sort of creature lived in this pseudo-oceanic landscape. What first came to mind were Bosch’s fish with legs, pretending to swim through the air as they walked from home to work. For a moment, I could see them flooding the street around me, their mouths rhythmically gaping open to taste the air, rambling in and out of their homes. But was I right to think these were houses lining the street? Were we instead in a cemetery? The giant polyp was tacky to the touch, and when I brushed my fingers over one of the dimples, it sprang open with a pop: a window.

The crystal-clear window curved outwards to me like an eye. Light flooded inside to reveal a room that probably hadn’t seen the sun for decades or centuries. The floor and the walls were dotted with small mounds that could’ve been anything from chairs to televisions, alien technology as impenetrable to me as calculus. What struck me the most were the shelves on the wall holding what were unmistakably books. My heart began to race with excitement. Were these unknown aliens really so much like us? I pressed all the divots, opening window upon window until one finally revealed a door, an oval hole in the wall that only went up to my neck.

Cautiously, reverently, I bent down and entered the polyp. The wood-textured floor gave under my feet like a sponge. There were no chairs or sofas or tables, but it was hard for me not to imagine – despite the strangeness of the buildings – these aliens as bipedal, as humanoid, as something close enough to humanity that we could call them brothers and sisters, the Bosch fish but with arms and alert, intelligent eyes. Sure, they might have blue-green skin or gills or be without noses, but we could look them in those bright-yellow eyes and say, “Friend.”

I wandered farther into the house, but without light switches the farther rooms were only barely lit with reflected light from IO’s sun. The interior of the house was musty and cold like a cave. I stopped in a room whose floor was taken up with a sunken pool, filled to the brim with some foul-textured, semi-gelatinous liquid. With just a nudge from my toe, it disintegrated with a sigh into slush that let loose a smell so foul I sprinted from the house, my eyes blind with tears, the insides of my nose and mouth feeling caked with garbage.

Even across the street, the smell wafted to me – rotting feet, vegetables stewing in their spoiled juices, sulfur, burnt coffee. I threw up, rushing back towards the edge of the ghetto, somewhere far enough away that smell would never reach me again.

Had the others figured out about the dimples? I pictured all of them, like Anarchy, demolishing walls until the building collapses. I flipped on the walkie-talkie to share what I’d found and heard Return’s voice again, this time frantic with worry and anger.

“Where are you guys! Fuck, Roam’s in this, this thing and he can’t get out and I’m afraid to touch it! And he’s—”

“Return!” I interrupted. “Where are you?”

“Fuck,” he said. “Damn it, Jamon, why’d we bring the flares if you aren’t even going to pay attention to them? This whole thing is your fucking fault!”

“We’re coming,” Bjorn chimed in, calm as an iceberg. “Tell us what’s going on.”

The red glare of a flare slowly revolved in the sky. I followed it back towards the Bright Hem, running through the bland, coral-lined streets, guessing at each turn and praying that I chose correctly, cursing the free-form nature of the city I’d so admired earlier. I listened to the walkie-talkie with half my mind, unable to shake Return’s accusation from my thoughts.

If something happened to Roam, if something happened to any of us, it was my fault. I was the one who organized this stupid explorer’s club. I was the one who led us on pointless expedition after pointless expedition. I was the one driving the car, just like with Bee.

Bjorn got the story out of Return as I ran. The brothers had found a gigantic rectangular park dotted with humongous, open pits, each filled with a gelatinous sewage which smelled like a mix between compost and rotting meat. Next to each pit rested a large metal square, and when Roam stepped on one a clear cube grew up from the square to trap him inside.

The buildings around me shifted from organic polyps and anemones to hard-angled shells. Then the shells fell away from the coral street until the street enlarged into a gigantic avenue, and then a field, and then an ocean. In the middle distance before me solid, geometric shapes rose up from the ground in shining obsidian, temples to algebra. But closer by were Roam and Return. Roam stood at the edge of a transparent cube and Return battered at the cube with a climber’s ax.

Even from this distance I smelled a familiar odor – the rotten liquid from the house I’d entered, but less repellent in the open air. Here it smelled like compost, rot engineered for a purpose. Still, I gagged as I ran towards the brothers. Bjorn and Artemisia were nowhere to be seen, and Anarchy was MIA, too; the Spider was the only one of us who might be able to decipher what had happened to Roam.

The big bear of a man was inside an auditorium-sized cube which shimmered in the sunlight like a block of ice. A few yards from the edge, Roam lumbered towards us as though he were fighting his way through pudding. His eyes were painfully wide. His mouth twisted out words, but his voice reached us as a drawn-out moan.

“Do something!” Return spat. He hit the cube again, but the axe bounced off without making a dent or a sound.

“What happened?”

Return glared at me. “Who the fuck knows? Roam and I walked around the pit there and he tripped on that hole and this happened.”

A narrow ledge of metal stretched around the cube, and near us was a hole inlaid with colored dots spaced across its surface. They were separate from the metal, as though they could be pressed down or removed, and covered in tiny markings.

“They’re buttons,” I said.

“What?”

“These are buttons,” I repeated. “Roam must have pressed one when he tripped.”

“No.” Return shook his head as another moan escaped from the cube. “No, no, no. Then we press another and another until we get Roam out of there.”

I stepped towards him, hands out in caution. “We don’t know what these buttons do.”

Return held the climber’s ax as though deciding whether or not to bury it in my skull. I stepped away, and put my hands at my side.

“A button put him in there,” Return said, bending down over the depression and stabbing buttons at random. “A button will let him out. It’s as simple as that.”

Bjorn ran up, followed quickly by Artemisia. Across the great field of coral, Anarchy rolled toward us like a metal tumbleweed. Inside the cube, Roam’s face grew purple and his cheeks puffed out, every movement still in slow motion, his hands moving slowly toward his throat.

“Help me,” Return pleaded, but I didn’t know what to do. Bjorn knelt by his side but shook her head at the array of colors and symbols. Artemisia’s dark eyes were fixed on Roam, her mouth open in shock or horror.

Return pressed another button, turning the cube from clear to red. Now Roam moved at normal speed, but his screams shattered the air. His beard curled as though singed with fire.

Return pushed still another button and the cube turned blue. Black spots developed on Roam’s fair skin like mold on a piece of bread. Artemisia vomited on the perfectly manicured ground.

I pulled Return away before he could press another button.

“Look at your brother,” I demanded. “You’re making things worse, that’s all.”

Return went limp in my arms. The black spots on Roam’s skin grew larger, changing the color of his clothes and hair as well. A spot spread into his right eye, blacking it out like spilled ink on a page. He must’ve seen what Return had been doing with the buttons, because he dropped to his knees by a row of buttons inside the cube. One was larger than the rest. After a split-second of deliberation, the black leeching into his remaining eye, Roam pushed that button.

Whirring came from everywhere, a flock of birds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, each bird taking flight at the same moment. Roam turned smiling to face us, the black fading from his body. He reached out, and Return reached out in turn.

Then Roam’s body twisted on itself like a wet rag. It separated into a man-shaped cloud of bloodless fragments of bone and flesh and cloth, and those fragments swirled up and were spit into the pit in a single stream. The whirring softened into silence, and the cube descended into the ground.

Return dropped to the ground, the sudden dead weight of his body yanking him from my arms. Artemisia sprinted off without a word. Bjorn Bjorn gathered Return up and held him fiercely, tears falling from her eyes to settle in his hair. My body felt like a balloon. I was unable to cry, unable to believe what I’d just witnessed. I walked to the edge of the pit, inhaling the stench as though I could punish myself that way for Roam’s death. Roam’s grave was a galactic cesspit, mixed now with the trash of generations.

What were we doing out here? What was humanity doing out here?

Anarchy appeared beside me and tapped out a quick message. “Why Roam abandon?”

I figured I’d misheard, but when I asked the Spider to repeat the message, it was the same. “Abandon” was the same word it had used to describe this godforsaken ghetto.

“What do you mean, ‘abandon’?” I asked, walking away from Return and Bjorn. I didn’t want to take the chance they might overhear.

“Abandon shell.” Anarchy tapped on its shell for emphasis. “Like aliens abandon ghetto.” The Spider pointed with one appendage to the cube. “Device abandons shell. Why Roam abandon?”

It struck me then what Anarchy had seen. To the Spider, Roam had pressed the button that caused his death. It thought Roam had committed suicide. Anarchy thought that Roam had abandoned life.

Just like this ghetto had been abandoned.

The buildings around me, the entire vast cityscape, it all became the empty husk of a dead insect. The ghetto hadn’t been abandoned. The aliens had committed suicide en masse. The pits weren’t full of a civilization’s garbage. They were full of bodies. All across this ghetto, in large fields like this one, in front of pits like this one, millions of aliens had walked into a cube like this one and given up.

Anarchy was tapping away, but I couldn’t focus on what it was saying. This ghetto used to house a living culture; now it was a tomb.

The Spider tapped me on the shoulder.

“Listening?”

“Why did you bring us here?” I said, my voice shaking.

“Never see ghetto recently abandoned.” Anarchy’s body bobbed on its legs, a sign of excitement. “Study humanity abandonment, but not happen years.” Anarchy paused. “Not happen never,” it added in a few quick taps that were hard for me not to see as an afterthought.

I returned to Return and Bjorn Bjorn, putting my hand on her shoulder. She raised her head, her eyes wet and puffy, but in IO’s harsh, unending light she looked like a Valkyrie come to scour battlefields for the souls of the noble dead. My throat was choked tight with guilt. Behind me, I heard Anarchy’s slow tapping approach.

“We should go,” I whispered gently. Bjorn nodded, lifting Return as though he were an empty bag, and letting him lean on her shoulder as the four of us walked back towards humanity’s False Sky.

What Anarchy told me meant the Spiders believed humanity was going to “abandon” – we would die out through suicide like these poor saps or through burning out our brains with Ledge. Oh, look at the silly little humans, the poor purposeless fucks! Shit, I was angry at all the fucking aliens touring around our ghetto, soaking up our doomed civilization that’ll be gone in a few years, galactic mayflies.

But I couldn’t be angry with Anarchy. I’d treated the Spider like it was human, which was my own fault. Just like I’d anthropomorphized the aliens in this ghetto, giving them human hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings, their imagined lives funhouse mirror images of our own.

When it was just Anarchy and me left on the subway, the others gone their separate ways, the Spider asked me again, “Why Roam abandon?”

I couldn’t be angry with Anarchy.

But I couldn’t answer it either.

***

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in
Albedo One,
Drabblecast,
Fantasy Scroll and
Daily Science Fiction. His book of poems,
City of Regret
(Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. This is his first story for
Interzone.

A MAN OF MODEST MEANS

ROBERT REED

Sure, everybody makes shit up. But the false and wrong don’t matter so much when the man is sleeping in somebody else’s bed. Invite him into yours for the night and every word matters. He says that he’s a spectacular lover, except of course he isn’t. Oh, and he swears to be nothing but considerate, except two minutes later he farts the pictures off the wall. And don’t get me started about trust. Every guy promises to be trustworthy. What does that tell you? And most of them claim to be trusting souls. Except they’ll eventually ask about past boyfriends and husbands, and worst of all, they want to know about kids. And then there’s the creepy stare. That stare seems inevitable. I’m sitting in bed talking about my life, sharing what I want to share, and he’ll give me the standard the-bitch-is-a-wack-job look.

But this man…he isn’t like the other men.

Modesty.

That could be his name.

He calls himself homely but isn’t. The face is serviceable and his body is more than adequate. He apologizes for his English but talks like a dream. I can’t place the accent, but it’s exotic and lovely. And maybe he doesn’t speak much about himself or his situation. Not like other men. But what he shares is consistent and not unappealing. I don’t see the usual warning signs, not even when I mention the ex-husband that I always mention. As a test. Or the last boyfriend. Three weeks gone now, isn’t he? The modest guy just shrugs and smiles while he listens, letting me tell what I want to tell. So maybe he’s another sex addict. I think that. Maybe he cares about nothing except my body parts…except except except he isn’t giving me those vibes, even after two hours of fun and cuddling, with emphasis on the cuddling.

He has a warm body.

Funny as it sounds, his skin tastes remarkable, and so does his mouth. He says something about lotions popular in his native country. Which is a place I don’t know, by the way. But geography was never my strength, as my angry first husband would so helpfully tell me. And I don’t let my ignorance bother me.

There are certain pleasures that I like with my men.

Only he won’t let me have my fun, which is a problem. A little one. He insists on using condoms and taking his business to the bathroom afterwards. Both times. As if he’s disgusted by nature, while I’m pretty much the opposite in every way.

But the rest of the sex is nice. Almost good. He’s patient and seems eager, with more endurance than seems right for a man who looks to be in his early forties.

How old is he?

I ask.

“Forty-four,” he says quietly, warily. As if he’s afraid that I’ll think him too old, those black eyes darting while he smiles in that sweet, clumsy way of his.

“Forty-four is a perfect age,” I tell him.

He watches my eyes, saying nothing.

I tell him, “I hope to look as good when I’m forty-four.”

This is an opportunity, bringing up my age. Every man wonders. But my new lover has too much class or simple fear to touch that subject.

I assume.

Then the subject changes to polite noise. Movies, video games. And back to movies.

Then sleep.

In the middle of the night, feeling alone despite the body and its heat beside me, my eyes pop open and I lie awake, listening to his breathing, waiting for the wet rattle that comes when he snores. Except the man doesn’t snore, and for no reason I can name, I have the sudden need to put a hand on his wrist, secretly measuring the slow untroubled beating of a heart.

I’m not a person to suffer impossible thoughts.

My first husband – the angry man that I keep with all of my secrets – was quick to complain about my utter lack of imagination. But crazy ideas keep hitting me, and I’m awake until morning. Men are supposed to become familiar after a night together. But this man is more of a stranger than ever, an enigma of flesh and history, and with the sun rising I reach under the covers, examining the unclothed and quite familiar body.

My companion smiles at some part of this, or all of it, and then he apologizes for abandoning me. Off to the bathroom he goes, this man who hasn’t farted once that I’ve noticed, or snored. I let myself smile like I haven’t smiled in forty-five years. And then he returns, sitting on the bed’s lip, ready to say something fresh. That’s what his face tells me. That’s what the lack of a smile means. Some serious confession needs to be made. A past wife, a criminal conviction. But no, whatever it is can wait another few moments.

I say, “I have to pee.”

He curls his lips, nodding sweetly.

I don’t want to leave him. That’s why I hurry. But inside the bathroom, I smell him. I smell what he did just moments ago. The bowl is flushed, but the stink hangs in the air, and despite being unimaginative and criminally ignorant about the world, something clicks. Something stolen from a movie or maybe an old boyfriend. I’ve dated more than my share of smarties, and who knows where the idea comes from?

I don’t bother peeing.

Returning to the bedroom, I look hard at that non-homely face, and he returns the stare.

“Your skin tastes different,” I begin.

He nods but not like anyone else nods. How would describe that gesture?

“And your shit doesn’t smell normal,” I say.

At this point, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I ask.

But before he answers, I offer my wildest guess. “You’re not from another country. You’re from some other world.”

That exotic face doesn’t smile or frown or anything.

“You’re an alien,” I blurt out, not believing my words.

And then my new lover tells the lie, a huge lie. “I’m from another solar system, yes. I’m here doing research into your species.”

“Well,” I say, instantly giggling. “Let me tell you all about us!”

***

She talks and a cold piece of me looks at the situation, hunting for the humor. Because something about this adventure should be funny, and the chilly, clear-eyed part of me has the best chance of recognizing moments that deserve laughter.

Not that I would laugh aloud, of course.

Her voice is built from enthusiasm and proud ignorance. Admitting she knows almost nothing about her huge wonderful blue world, the creature nonetheless works hard to illuminate everything that she does know. Her life story. She mentions parents sitting in a distant room right now, eating their breakfast. She talks about her two years of college and how she’s thinking about returning soon, finishing that degree. She mentions a husband who loved her but they couldn’t make it work, so sad. But not so sad, because if she was married and happy enough, then she wouldn’t have met me and screwed me and can she tell her friends about me? “I mean, if that kind of thing is allowed.”

“I don’t know the rules,” I admit.

In the history of this world, nothing is as funny as the alien emissary confessing to ignorance.

Still laughing, she leaves to urinate, and a moment of solitude arrives.

Passes.

“So tell me about your world,” she says, emerging with a towel between her hands. Other than the towel, her body is naked.

“Only if you’re done describing your world,” I respond.

Is she finished? The question needs examination and a thoughtful nod. Then she says, “No, I hit the high notes. Everything important.”

The warmest part of me begins to speak. To lie. The idea of a star-traveler brings certain expectations: My home world is beautiful and ancient and filled with wise, caring souls. I say that it’s fifty light-years in that direction, pointing at the floor. According to every tradition, I came alone. Solitary travelers notice more than groups notice. Besides, I point out that individuals aren’t invasions, and I don’t want to scare anyone.

“Oh, I don’t scare,” she claims.

I want her to feel at ease. That’s why the lies keep emerging from my mouth. The starship that brought me is powerful yet very small. Everything about me is small, except for my newborn body. My manners and language were learned yesterday. My only wish is that this disguise was more convincing. But I’m new at this venture, this exploration business.

“You just stumbled across the wrong person,” she says with pride. And she laughs again, saying, “I have this gift. I see every lie. Get to be a woman of my age, with my life, and you learn to recognize things as they really are.”

The cold part of me enjoys the simple ironies while the warm part of me enthusiastically describes a galaxy populated with living worlds. These worlds know one another and love all life. Which might or might not be the truth. Who knows? I don’t know. In truth, I’m nearly as ignorant as this creature, but with fewer excuses. Between what is warm and cold about me is grief. Is misery. This innocent creature sitting beside me couldn’t be more perfect for this task. That realization brings immeasurable sorrow, and sorrow threatens my disguise, ready to tear me open, exposing what is true.

Maybe she notices.

Or she notices nothing but her own need to interrupt.

“How old do you think I am?”

“In minutes or years?” I respond.

The next laugh is a cackle, loud and a little brittle. Then with a gasp and one hand on her bare belly, she says, “Years. From what you know about humans, what do you think my age is?”

I know everything about her.

Everything.

“Forty-one,” is what I offer.

“Forty-two,” she counters instantly. “And a half.”

She believes that she is lying. She counts a four-year discrepancy between her words and the date on her driver’s license, and her keen pleasure comes from the idea that the extraterrestrial trusts her. He will believe almost anything that she decides to share with him.

But there is an error inside her assumptions. Until yesterday, two moments before I approached her inside the loud tavern, she didn’t exist.

Hours old. That’s what she is.

The cold part of me laughs and enough laughter leaks to be noticed.

A guarded voice asks, “What’s so funny?”

“Oh I just like your voice,” I lie. “That’s all it means.”

“Good,” she says. Then her tone changes, and her stance. The naked lady straightens her back before saying, “There’s a lot more to my life, by the way.”

“Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” I say.

She’s hungry to share quite a lot. But first she has to take a deep and cleansing breath.

***

Confession is best when it begins with a large revelation. But not the largest, no. To a stranger, particularly this incredible stranger, honesty needs to be blunt, if only to convince myself that everything can be revealed.

Begin with my teenage years. That’s what I decide.

Mention drugs and drink and explain both afflictions with a teenager’s casual, careless voice. “Oh I did this I tried that it was fun I got into trouble I wish I hadn’t and I stopped, when I was twenty-something, twenty-eight, and I don’t do any of that anymore, except for beer and wine, and pot to be social. Unless of course I’m really, really stressed.”

The alien listens. No other man in my life has ever paid such strict attention to my biography.

Drugs lead to the first husband. The angry husband that I like to keep secret, even from those who last more than a few weeks. “He was gorgeous and vicious and sweet and cruel, and he scared me and tried killing me twice, three times, and I wanted to kill him. Sometimes I thought that if I didn’t cut his throat, he’d cut mine. And probably during sex.”

The alien is a wonder. Patient, unjudging, yet engaged with everything that I share with him.

He seems more handsome than he was last night.

Is his face changing?

If I wanted, could I coax him to change his looks one way or another? Is that how the magic science works?

I imagine my first husband’s face replacing his. Which is a stunning moment, though not as awful as I might have guessed. Arousal never embarrasses me, yet I am embarrassed. Hands and the hand towel cover parts of my body, even as I tell myself to relax and get a grip.

The alien nods, asking, “Did you?”

“Did I?”

“Kill the man,” he says.

Did I? It takes a moment to find the answer, which is peculiar as hell, and another few moments to piece together enough words.

“No. We divorced and he lives far from here, and I can’t remember when I last talked to the son-of-a-bitch.”

The alien nods, his mouth opening and then closing. Nothing said.

I intend to continue to other boyfriends, the long-term few, and maybe share some details about my parents and siblings and the people who I like to remember, ten or twenty or thirty years after they mattered to me.

Except.

For no apparent reason, the alien says, “Yesterday.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell me what you did yesterday,” he says. “Before I saw you sitting at the bar, I mean. Describe your day to me.”

“Why?”

“Husband and drugs are interesting,” he says. “But normal life matters more. That’s what I came to this world to learn about.”

I say nothing.

What am I thinking?

“Yesterday,” he repeats.

Nothing occurs to me. Nothing.

He sits and waits, apparently ready for a thousand years of silence.

And that’s why I’m suddenly offering my final confession, long before I imagined that I would.

Just to end this appalling Nothing.

***

“There’s a kid in the story.”

A few words brought with a cool, rather slow voice, and then she pauses. The way she straightens her back implies a burden, an old pain. An air of tragedy takes hold, yet the offhand “There’s a kid” implies that it could be someone else’s child, not hers.

I prompt her by asking, “What child?”

“Yeah, a boy,” she says. “He was born too early.”

A boy who doesn’t have any name besides “Him”, and whose father was neither husband, and equally nameless. Two months premature, the boy’s mother was in that phase of her life when nothing was easy and she had a lot more than she could handle, and life was proving itself far from fair.

And at that point, she hesitates.

Confession requires another few breaths and a lip chewed until blood starts to run.

“It was my son,” she says. “Out of wedlock. That’s the term.”

“Out of wedlock,” I repeat, as if taking notes.

“I was.” She hesitates. “Careless.”

“In what way careless?”

Indeed, what way? She rubs the lip and licks the cut and grimaces for a multitude of reasons. “Getting pregnant. I never wanted that.”

“No?”

“Mistakes. I’ve made my share.”

The cold part of me finds nothing funny. The warm part of my nature is deeply, dangerously sad. What exists between wants to abandon this place and this lost soul, forsaking every promise. But then all three portions speak together, repeating the word, “Mistakes.”

“Early on, I knew I shouldn’t have children,” she says. “Other women, yes. Every other woman should have ten babies each. But not me.”

“What’s his name?” I ask.

She says nothing.

“The infant child,” I prompt.

“I know what you’re asking,” she says. Although she hopes that the father’s name will suffice, and that’s what she surrenders.

I look about. I know the answer, but the question needs to be asked aloud. “Does your son live here with you?”

“No,” she blurts.

“Of course not,” I allow. “If you’re forty-two, and if he was born when you were quite a bit younger, then he must be nearly grown today. Yes?”

She says nothing.

“Where is your son?”

Humans are very much like me: The chilled and the hot live beside what is neither, and I can see the parts inside her warring with hard, inescapable facts.

“He was tiny,” she says.

“Premature,” I say.

“Closer to ten weeks early,” she says.

I say nothing.

“In a box,” she says. “They kept him in a glass box.”

A curious alien might ask about boxes and the care of premature young. But this isn’t an alien sharing her bed.

“I remember his hands,” she says.

I nod.

“One hand,” she corrects herself.

“Which?”

Her left hand releases the towel. But then she hesitates, working with her mind until she is certain enough to say, “The left.”

“You remember it,” I say.

“I watched that hand. For as long as I could stand.”

I watch her left hand make a slow half-turn, and then it drops.

“Twenty seconds,” she says.

“Yes?”

“You don’t know tiny. Not until you see a hand like that. Each bone almost too small to see, all held inside that useless glove of skin.”

I don’t know what to say.

Neither does she.

So finally, I ask, “What happened to the boy?”

She shakes her head.

“Did you leave him?”

Her mouth opens and remains that way, saying nothing.

At last she whispers, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you cut his throat,” I say.

The horror passes through her face, through her body. It infects the room and the entire world, which is exactly what is necessary.

“I don’t remember,” she says.

I wait.

“I think I abandoned him,” she admits.

“But you aren’t sure where,” I add.

“That sounds awful,” she says.

She says, “I knew I shouldn’t be a mother. So for his own good, whatever I did…I just can’t recall it now…whatever I did had to be for the best.”

Silence takes hold again.

The moment becomes quite a bit longer.

Then I say, “Now it is my turn to confess.”

She barely hears me, looking at my mouth while the words seep into her consciousness.

“I’ve been lying to you,” I tell her.

“You’re not an alien.” She says it and wants to be relieved. “You’re just a man who lies better than most.”

“If only I was,” I say. “If only I was.”

***

The voice isn’t as foreign as it was last night. Or it sounds more familiar and normal, and my ears have changed.

My ears listen to a story much, much worse than one lost baby.

“Terrible events found your world,” he says. “Some disasters were too large to ignore, but the more dangerous events were tiny and unobserved. Humanity in its glory was responsible for most of the trouble, and I don’t know very much. About the history, I mean. But that kind of knowledge wouldn’t help. Since I would probably try to heal what was wrong in your nature. In the human animal. And that would make my work even less possible than it is already.”

I have never been more confused, but I nod just the same. “You’re some kind of historian,” I say.

“No.”

“And a machine,” I say.

Again, he says, “No.”

Which gets me angry enough to stand and do the only thing that I can manage just now. I put on last night’s shirt, just the shirt, smelling my sweat and a spilled drink and him too.

“A machine has a physical existence,” he says. “I lack that quality.”

I nod again. A nod implies that you understand, which can be another kind of lie.

“The world was afraid of dying,” he says.

“Who isn’t?” I ask.

He laughs in the saddest way.

I say nothing else.

“Fear,” he says. “That’s why the world built a system of elaborate instructions. Not machines because machines break. But commands. Commands existing outside the shells of any device or frail animal.”

“So you’re a bunch of commands?” I ask.

“Wrapped around contingencies, yes. In case of the ultimate disaster, my duty is to find what survives and remake the world to the best of my modest abilities.”

Taken alone, each word is understandable.

Together, they make me feel stupid. And scared. But then as I think hard about what he has said and what I feel, what I know and feel and instinctively want to believe, hope reveals itself.

“So I survived,” I say.

The subject is difficult. And not just for me, plainly.

“And you built all of this,” I guess, pointing at the room around us.

“From your memories, yes.”

I don’t like the pictures on the walls. That’s my first and biggest thought, hearing that news.

“Survival is measured along a continuum,” he continues. “And I’m sorry to report that most of you is missing.”

“Most of humanity too?”

He winces.

“And our planet?”

“I’m talking only about you,” he says.

“I’m not all here,” I say.

“You’re complete in the sense that I found everything that can be found,” he says.

“Oh, that explains that,” I say.

He watches my face, waiting.

“I’m not the shittiest mother ever,” I point out. “It’s just that the memory has been stolen too.”

He sighs, and his face changes again, beginning to resemble that gorgeous, angry husband.

“Who else is there?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond.

“When do I get to meet the other survivors?”

His expression says everything.

I am the only one.

We sit for another hour, nearly. The living are being as quiet as the dead.

In the end, I say, “Well,” and pull off the dirty shirt. “I guess it’s lucky you found this much.”

He starts to weep, obviously overwhelmed by his mission.

But I’m not sad. Not a little bit. All at once, I start to laugh, saying, “Okay, this is how we’ll do it.”

“How we will do what?” he asks.

I pick up his hand. “Rebuild everything.”

“Everything,” he repeats, doubtful as hell.

I put one of his fingers into my mouth, sucking at the strange taste of it and then biting down hard.

He pulls away.

And I’m laughing, and not quietly laughing, saying, “But we’ll begin with you, not with me. Because you’re the better one between us. And I have a good feeling about your nature.”

***

Robert Reed has published eleven novels and over two hundred stories. He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella ‘A Billion Eves’. His most recent book is the
The Memory of Sky
(Prime Books, 2014).

BOOK ZONE

THE CURIOUS AFFAIR OF THE SOMNAMBULIST AND THE PSYCHIC THIEF

Lisa Tuttle
plus author interview

EXTINCTION

Kazuaki Takano

CHILDREN OF EARTH AND SKY

Guy Gavriel Kay

NOT SO MUCH, SAID THE CAT

Michael Swanwick

INTO EVERYWHERE

Paul McAuley

THE WINGED HISTORIES

Sofia Samatar

TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS

Salman Rushdie

WORLD OF WATER

James Lovegrove

HUNTERS & COLLECTORS

M. Suddain

LISA TUTTLE: WALKING THROUGH DREAMS

REVIEW & INTERVIEW BY JULIET E. McKENNA

THE CURIOUS AFFAIR OF THE SOMNAMBULIST AND THE PSYCHIC THIEF

Lisa Tuttle

Jo Fletcher Books tpb, 416pp, £14.99

Victorian and Edwardian fiction currently inspires a range of fiction from Sherlockiana to Steampunk. So it’s an increasing challenge for writers to come up with something distinctive. Then there are the complexities of rooting a story in an era of such different values, assumptions and prejudices. Creating characters who are true to their time while still comprehensible and appealing to modern readers really isn’t easy. That Lisa Tuttle does all this with such seemingly effortless ease is a testament to her skill and experience.

Miss Lane has been a lady companion to a noted Psychical Society researcher, investigating fraudulent spiritualists. In June 1893 they have parted ways and as a single woman without independent means, her position is precarious. Scanning the advertisements, she sees a consulting detective requires an assistant. Surely her research experience has honed the necessary skills in observation and memory? Surely she’s about to become a female Watson to some quasi-Holmes? Not so, as Tuttle swiftly makes clear.

Politely acknowledging Conan Doyle, she draws on an array of other period sources to create Jasper Jesperson whose upbringing travelling the world has given him an array of practical and eccentric skills from martial arts to climbing drainpipes. This makes him very well suited to detective work – and precious little else. His mother’s struggles with the mundane demands of rent and bills effectively counter any inclination to see him as a romantic hero. Better yet, Jesperson’s acknowledgement of his debts to her make him a far more rounded and interesting figure than many of his literary forebears.

Male partner notwithstanding, this remains Miss Lane’s tale. Enquiries into a case of somnambulism are advanced through her insights based on a woman’s knowledge of servants and of social tensions. She also brings in work through her Psychical Society contacts, though not without qualms when this means dealing with her former employer, the glamorous and unscrupulous Gabrielle Fox. But personal concerns must be set aside when she learns several men and women famed for psychic powers have mysteriously vanished. There’s soon good reason for grave concern.

Tuttle has a deft touch with narrative summary to keep the plot moving smoothly along, combined with vividly detailed encounters and conversations that draw the reader in deep. This definitely keeps the pages turning. She evokes the world of Victorian séances and mediums with an assurance that indicates the research solidly underpinning this story without ever overburdening the reader with exposition. However bizarre acceptance of such things may be to modern eyes, she also manages to make this seem perfectly rational. And this is far more than a simple tale of frauds deceiving the gullible. As the various plot strands intertwine, twists wrong-foot the reader as Tuttle uses our expectations and assumptions against us; of such mystery stories and of such characters. She also uses the practicalities and technology of the period to good effect. Don’t assume any detail is merely set-dressing.

Miss Lane remains resolutely and engagingly matter of fact throughout, in the face of the dangerously irrational, and when facing genuine peril. This is not to say she remains unshaken. Neither Jesperson and Lane emerge unchanged at the end of this story. This adds an intriguing extra dimension to what I fervently hope will become a lengthy series of ongoing adventures.

Victorian inspired fiction is currently very popular. What drew you to the era, and what inspired this story?

I’ve always been attracted to the period prior to the First World War, from the 1890s right through to 1914. It mainly stems from my childhood reading, and early love for writers such as E. Nesbit, Conan Doyle, Saki, Robert Louis Stevenson and more. My father had a lot of older books he’d inherited; a crimson-backed set of the collected works of E.W. Hornung, for instance. Although many were incomprehensible (or simply uninteresting), one I remember fondly is
An Amateur Cracksman
– the criminal adventures of the society thief (and cricketer) A.J. Raffles and his pal Bunny. (A man called Bunny. That was even weirder in mid-twentieth century Texas than ‘A Boy Named Sue’.)

Another reason, more adult/intellectual, is the feeling that WWI was this great dividing line chopping us off from the world that had been, with all its hope and potential, its visions of the future, the new discoveries, opportunities, inventions and excitements, and determining a duller more prosaic world for the rest of the 20th century. So that turn of the century, the decade before and after, is in my imagination a lost golden age.

This particular story began with Miss Lane. Years ago, I came across a word that was new to me: deodand. The definition immediately gave me an idea for a short story but I didn’t know how to tell it. It was just an idea…and it was the revealing of the idea that would comprise the story. At some point it occurred to me that this is the natural format of the detective story. But who was the detective? Then I heard her voice and glimpsed her slight figure standing before a looking-glass as she adjusted the pins in her hair and made certain she looked respectable before going out to investigate…so I wrote ‘The Curious Affair of the Deodand’. As I wrote, I learned more and more about Miss Lane and her partner in detection, Mr Jasper Jesperson – far more than I could fit into that one story. Even before I finished it I knew I wanted to write more adventures for Jesperson and Lane. Originally I envisioned a series of short stories, but even the first story was over 10,000 words, and the second (‘The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives’) turned out to be over 15,000. I realised that unlike the horror story, which I think works best at shorter lengths, a mystery may need more space to unfold. I have just finished writing the second ‘Curious Affair’ novel,
The Curious Affair of the Shrieking Pits.

You acknowledge Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s influence early on before taking this book down your own, original path. What did you read to round out your understanding of that era?

Too many books to name! A few that come to mind are
Constance by Franny Moyle, a biography of Oscar Wilde’s wife, and although it is a novel,
The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon (1894) is particularly good on the difficulties faced by women struggling to survive and support themselves. I could not do without my
Baedeker’s Guide to Great Britain 1890, and
Baedeker’s Guide: London and Its Environs 1900.
Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet, Ph.D. (1923) gives great insight into the mind-set of scientists who believed they had a thoroughly scientific, rational approach to their investigations into spiritualism and psychic phenomena, as well as describing many mediums and séances from that era. And, just for fun,
The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective by Catherine Louisa Pirkis, a series of stories that originally appeared in 1893–94, published by Dover in 1986 with an excellent and informative introduction by my friend Michele Slung.

Why spiritualism? What does that offer you as a writer?

I’ve been fascinated by the subject, and the whole subculture around it, for a long time. It probably goes back to my teens, when I was drawn to all things occult, strange, supernatural and psychic…although with a very sceptical, rational outlook suitable to the science fiction reader I was, rather than as someone yearning to believe. I wanted proof and I wanted explanations for the things that people told supposedly true stories about (haunted houses, telepathy, precognitive dreams, etc). I had a group of like-minded friends from school and the Houston Science Fiction Society, and we went on ghost hunts and used the Ouija board and even indulged in a bit of table-tipping and other attempts to contact ‘spirits’. It sometimes feels to me now that the 1960s were quite a lot like the 1890s in that one respect…although perhaps even the scientists then were a bit more gullible and eager to believe than my gang? There is also a lot to be said about the powers and position spiritualism offered to women at a time when society disempowered them, but I didn’t even manage to touch on that fascinating subject in this book. (For further reading, may I suggest The
Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen or my own short story ‘Mr Elphinstone’s Hands’. Although, with typical perversity, far from empowering the main character, her brush with spiritualism ends up a trap…well, it is a horror story, after all.)

How well do you think sceptical modern readers can understand the Victorian mindset that was so ready to accept psychic phenomena?

You don’t really think people today are so much more rational and sceptical than their ancestors in late Victorian times? All those weird photos floating around on the internet? Even knowing how easy it is to photoshop stuff, people are positively aching to believe in Slender Man or that weird doll purchased on eBay, or ghostly figures appearing in empty rooms. The thing about spiritualism was that it was supposed to be scientific, and results were ‘proven’ rather than taken on faith – although of course it was also a religion that I believe survives to this day.

Do you consider yourself primarily a short story writer or a novelist?

I began as a short story writer, and for a long time that is what I was. But I have adapted and changed. I no longer feel that I am naturally a short story writer but neither am I only or mainly a novelist. It’s horses for courses. Some ideas are best expressed briefly, others require more expansive treatment, and in recent years I find myself having more ideas that I think need to be explored at length. I probably have more ideas for novels than I have the time to write them, but maybe not as many good short story ideas these days, so maybe I have finally turned into a novelist who also writes short stories.

What advice would you give someone starting out now and hoping to make a living out of writing?

I would probably say “Isn’t there something else you want to do? Are you sure?” Write if you must, but don’t expect to make a living out of it, unless you can get into TV or movies. Even then, although the pay is much better, there are no guarantees you will be able to continue to sell your work. Look at the surveys done by the Society of Authors about how much the average full-time writer can expect to make in a year, and ask yourself if you could live on that, and for how long, and do you think you could stay positive and not become embittered by the struggle? I keep thinking there must be new ways of making money as a writer, but despite all the hopeful talk about writing for internet sites and new forms of patronage, it doesn’t look terribly hopeful to me. I hope I am wrong because the world still needs storytellers and novelists and writers and artists and creators of all kinds, and if they (we) are not rewarded for their (our) work, how can it continue?

You studied English Literature at university and worked as a journalist. Which have you found more useful?

Working as a journalist is good for craft and discipline, learning to write to deadlines, to edit, to cut out the unnecessary and to accept editing instead of being too precious about your precious work. My degree in English – well, that is what I got in the end, but for much of my time I was tending towards a major in Anthropology, so I probably took as many anthro courses as I did English. I also took as many linguistics courses as I could and wish I could have done more in that direction. I think I took away more from the anthropology and linguistics courses than I did from the literature courses. My advice generally for anyone wanting to write is to study something other than literature at university. Read as much as you possibly can, and a course or two in critical theory or close study of writing would not go amiss, but better for the fiction writer to know something else, something more about the world, about history or economics or neuroscience.

EXTINCTION

Kazuaki Takano

Mulholland Books pb, 512pp, £8.99

Jack Deighton

Jonathan Yeager has just finished a tour working for a private defence contractor, protecting VIPs visiting Baghdad when he is recruited for a secret mission in Africa. Operation Guardian is to seek out and kill a group who may be infected by a deadly virus, but its members are also given the strange instruction to kill on sight a “living creature you’ve never seen before”.

Kento Koga is a pharmaceutical research worker whose father, a virologist, has just died. He receives an email from his dead father asking him to look in a certain book. In there he finds an ATM card and a memo informing him about a hidden laptop of which he is never to relinquish control, an address to go to and to expect all his communications to be monitored. The building contains equipment for carrying out Organic Chemistry reactions and he is tasked with researching and synthesising an agonist for a mutant form of the protein
GPR769, to be completed within one month.

Unfortunately the prologue, which describes a meeting in the White House, dissipates any sense of mystery about the reasons for Operation Guardian as it reveals the existence of a new life form (an evolved human, or more precisely a Pygmy born into the Kanga band of Mbuti). This may lead to the extinction of the human race and is of course seen as a threat to the US. The President here is named as Gregor S. Burns but reads as an extremely thinly disguised version of George W. Bush, as he ordered an invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and declared victory before the war was won. The US security apparatus is also concerned about leaks to human rights organisations concerning extraordinary rendition (a procedure which Takano feels the need to explain at length). A secondary purpose of Operation Guardian is to kill the leaker, Warren Garrett, who wishes to intimidate President Burns into stopping rendition/torture by revealing the evidence to threaten him with a war crimes tribunal. We all know this could never really happen, and like the text’s attempts to soften Yeager and the other members of the operation is rather limp. These are killers after all.

And the relationship between the two strands? Yeager’s son Justin suffers from pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis, or PAECS, which is the fatal disease caused by mutant
GPR769. There are occasional passages from other points of view which are only visited the once.

Takano has characters hark on violence’s inevitability. “We project our true colours onto our enemies, fear them, and attack them. And in using violence against others, the nation and religion are the support systems that pardon our actions.” Maybe so, but “War is just another form of cannibalism. Humans use their intelligence to try to hide their instinct for cannibalism.” Really? Again, “Good deeds are seen as virtuous precisely because they run counter to human nature,” which is definitely arguable. The point is in any case somewhat undermined by Koga’s determination to succeed and the members of Operation Guardian ending up protecting the creature – a three-year-old named Akili.

The descriptions of the mechanics involved in undertaking Organic Chemistry are also not convincing. And a month to synthesise a chemical’s agonist from scratch – even with the help of an advanced computer programme – is more than a tall order. The violent scenes, in addition to being curiously perfunctory, read more like reportage at a remove. Then there is the skating over of the ethics of administering an untested drug (actually two drugs; an allosteric agent is also required) on human patients.

Extinction is an uneasy mix of military fiction and thriller. A work of pure SF would surely focus more on the evolved human. Granted, Akili has an undeveloped pharynx and is therefore incapable of speech (though can two-finger type). He can factorise large numbers into their prime components so compromising the security of encrypted data and communication between computers, but otherwise his agency is limited. Not so Koga’s mysterious telephonic prompter, a further link between the two main narratives.

Whether it is a consequence of translation is difficult to determine but the writing is plodding. It is also full of redundancies and meanderings of various sorts such as a disquisition on the lack of remuneration scientists receive for their endeavours. The slightest action is described, information dumping is intrusive, often ad hoc and frequently unnecessary.

As SF,
Extinction is nugatory. Action thriller devotees may wish to take a look.

CHILDREN OF EARTH AND SKY

Guy Gavriel Kay

Hodder & Stoughton hb, 571pp, £19.99

Lawrence Osborn

Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest is set in the same world as several of his previous novels. A generation has passed since the fall of Sarantium, which has been renamed Asharias by its conquerors. There is an uneasy stand-off between the victorious Asharites and the Holy Jaddite Empire to the west. The Grand Khalif in Asharias is intent on expanding his empire westwards but has so far been thwarted by the inhospitable lands of Sauradia that lie between his armies and Obravic, the current capital of the Jaddites. But year after year he sends armies west, keeping the Jaddites on the defensive and bleeding their coffers as they are forced to field armies in reply.

There are clear parallels between the world of Kay’s imagination and Renaissance Europe. Readers familiar with European history (or even just European cities) will immediately identify Sarantium/Asharias with Constantinople/Istanbul; likewise Seressa with Venice, Dubrava with Dubrovnik, and less obviously Obravic with Prague. Such similarities are I suspect an important part of what makes Kay’s world-building and his descriptions so powerful; they allow him to draw his readers into places that seem familiar to them through television, internet, and other media.

But there are important differences as well. While the Jaddites, Asharites, and Kindath (who are mentioned only in passing in this novel) are analogous with Christians, Muslims and Jews respectively, their beliefs are quite different. And Kay plays with European history as well, distorting and compressing timelines, to further differentiate his imagined history from the real world.

Furthermore, Kay’s imagined world is one with a subtle thread of magic woven through it. It is less obvious here than in some of the earlier novels. Of course he is now depicting an era on the cusp of the scientific revolution: alchemists are at work in Obravic and the Emperor is delighted by technological toys. But the magic is still present in a grandfather’s ghostly voice, in the skills of a village healer, in the song of a long dead singer heard only by those with the gift.

It is a richly portrayed tapestry. In the hands of a less-skilled artist the world and its history might have dominated the story and dragged the characters along in its wake. But Kay superimposes upon this grand sweep of history a cast of more or less ordinary characters whose lives we are invited to follow.

Danica Gradek wants revenge for the death of her family and the kidnapping of her brother at the hands of the Asharites. He wants only to serve his Khalif and rise in the ranks of the Djanni, the elite Asharite force made up mainly of men who were kidnapped from Jaddite territories as children.

Pero Villani knows that he has the potential to be a great artist, but poverty stands in his way until an unexpected request comes from the rulers of Seressa. If he does as they ask – and lives to tell the tale – his fortune will be made.

Leonora Valeri has been imprisoned in a convent and her lover butchered by her family. She has nothing left to lose, so when Seressa’s Council of Twelve offers her a new life as their spy in Dubrava she jumps at the chance.

Marin Djivo is the younger son of a leading merchant family in Dubrava. He is weary of his life of womanising, feels it is time he settled down, perhaps married one of the eligible young women of the city, and took on more responsibility.

Then his path crosses those of Danica, Pero, and Leonora. Thereafter their lives weave together and are impacted by larger events in Empire and Kaliphate, opening up new possibilities for them and taking them to places they would never previously have imagined.

Kay clearly loves every one of his characters because he manages to make each one unique and memorable. And that is true even of characters who appear for only a few pages. We are presented with a rich tapestry of lives, and Kay manages to convince the reader that each one is important in the unfolding story of his imagined world. They are all carefully crafted individuals with their own unique hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, trying to live their lives as best they can in the face of whatever fate or the gods have thrown at them. He clearly cares about his characters…and therefore so does the reader.

If you have read any of his previous novels, you won’t need any more persuading. If you haven’t, you are in for a treat!

NOT SO MUCH, SAID THE CAT

Michael Swanwick

Tachyon Publications tpb, 288pp, $15.95

Duncan Lunan

This collection of seventeen stories is non-consecutively numbered 18–270 for no reason that’s explained – perhaps in order of writing, but not in order of publication, since the oldest appears as no.139 and the most recent as no.80. The title paraphrases a line in ‘Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown’, a story set in Hell where a talking cat is not so strange. But in the wide range of these stories, some things are strange indeed.

If there’s anything they have in common (and there’s not much) it’s the feeling that each one is, or could be, an episode in a longer narrative. For example, ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled’ is set on an exoplanet inhabited by beings like millipedes, orbited by a space habitat or very large starship containing half a million people from Earth. The Babel of the title is the only hive city which has allowed humans to land, and it’s been destroyed by the rest as a precaution, leaving one human and two millipede survivors to make their way to another city in hopes of refuge. But this is no
Enemy Mine story, and the possibility of one is summarily dismissed. “They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc, etc,…you know the way this sort of narrative goes.” We never learn how the story ends. Among the many complications, the ET language comes out in translation as fragments set in weird punctuation which only an AI avatar of the human’s dead lover can interpret. The technique reminds one of C.J. Cherryh, except that Cherryh would have made this either a full-length novel, or a chapter within a novel in which the reader followed a much longer segment of the action.

Talking of segments, the story which most sticks in the mind is ‘Passage of Earth’, where the roles above are reversed and Earth is orbited by the starships of a race of intelligent worms who lack sight, and experience reality by ingestion. The story begins as an alien autopsy and then turns out to be part of a sequence in which human thought-processes are (literally) being digested. We know some of what went before, but nothing of what comes after. The detailed biology is reminiscent of novels with input from Jack Cohen; he’s not listed in the preface or introduction, but it may have come via Aldiss, Harrison, or Niven and Pournelle.

There are echoes of other writers too, where Swanwick may deliberately have tried his hand at their kind of story, as he hints at in his introduction. ‘The Scarecrow’s Boy’ reminded me of Aldiss’s ‘But Who Can Replace a Man?’, ‘Pushkin the American’ has a basis and an ending which reminded me strongly of R.A. Lafferty (who is cited), and Swanwick describes ‘The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin’ as Gene Wolfe’s
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
“as it might have been told by James Tiptree Jr.” ‘Steadfast Castle’ recalls Ron Goulart. It has the standard dialogue of TV investigations like
CSI or
Law & Order, except that here the investigator is far less in control than he thinks he is. After the wordplay which ‘Passage of Earth’ has forced on me, I can’t resist the punch line which Swanwick has omitted: cynical as the cop may be, he has forgotten that the house always wins.

Being reminded of favourite authors is no bad thing, but in each case Swanwick has made the topic his own. The time-travel of ‘3 a.m. in the Mesozoic Bar’, the matter-transmitter theme of ‘The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree’ and the multiverse of ‘An Empty House with Many Doors’ have all been done before, but not everyone can preface the last by saying “I penned a tragic romance that required the advice of a physicist”. Turning to the fantasy, ‘Tawny Petticoats’ has pleasant echoes of both Leiber and Vance, but it begins “The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie labourers to docks where cargo was loaded onto wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses.” Note the “small as”: They’re the size of Clydesdales. We’re not in Lankhmar, nor the Dying Earth, nor in yet another example of the England-before-the-Black-Death so much imitated in the wake of
Game of Thrones. Nor, most certainly are we in the New Orleans of
Katrina, NCIS or Louis Armstrong. But by story 195 of a seventeen-story collection, we shouldn’t expect to be anywhere so familiar.

INTO EVERYWHERE

Paul McAuley

Gollancz pb, 432pp, £8.99

Paul Kincaid

Over the last decade or so, Paul McAuley’s stories have often featured an Earth undergoing cultural, economic or technological decline that comes into contact with something profoundly alien. Usually the human habits that have precipitated the decline continue unabated, hampering any true understanding of the enigma. The nature of the aliens and what they might or might not contribute to humanity varies from story to story, but they share a sense of sadness generated by the failure of humanity in the face of the other. Of late, this inchoate strand of storytelling has come together into the Jackaroo sequence, of which
Into Everywhere is the second novel.

Something Coming Through established the situation: Climate change, terrorism, a dirty bomb in London, had all brought Earth to the brink of collapse. Then, just when all seemed hopeless, the alien Jackaroo appeared, gifting to humanity fifteen worlds ready for colonisation, with the means to access them through wormholes. But the gift was not as straightforward as it might appear: Each of the worlds was littered with ruins left by previous client races of the Jackaroo, races that had disappeared. Not only that, but what they left behind was very dangerous indeed. By the end of that first novel, ships left by one of those earlier races, the Ghajar, have been made to work, opening up more worlds, though without quite liberating humanity from the benevolent oversight of the Jackaroo.

Into Everywhere is not a direct sequel, but it continues the story of human encounters with the enigma of the alien. The chapters of the previous novel alternated between two viewpoint characters, one male one female, who were widely separated in space, one on Earth, one on the planet Mangala, though the trajectory of the story inevitably brought them together. The new novel replicates that structure. The woman is Lisa, an expert on alien technology who became infected with what she thinks of as a ghost in her head, split up with her husband, took to drink, and now leads a precarious hand-to-mouth existence; the man is Tony Okoye, younger son of a powerful family who enjoys life as a freebooter until his discovery of rare alien code reveals that his family might be his own worst enemy. Here the two are separated in time; we eventually realise there’s a century between Lisa from Tony, but the trajectory of the novel still brings them together for the climax.

When Lisa’s former husband, out prospecting, happens upon a find that eventually kills him, it reawakens the ghost in her head, and also brings Adam Nevers of the UN Technology Control down upon her. Lisa’s only option is to try and discover what her husband had found; but the quest puts her in the middle of a feud between Nevers and Ada Morange (responsible for discovering the Ghajar ships in the previous novel), it also brings her into the orbit of Unlikely Worlds, the alien !Cha who is recording the story of Ada Morange and who may have a more significant role in the story of the Jackaroo than anyone has realised.

If Lisa must battle her own demons, Tony must grow from dilettante to hard-nosed activist. His discovery was supposed to rescue humanity from a terrible plague, but his family are too involved with their own squabbles to want it, bloodthirsty pirates kill those Tony has been working with in order to get their hands on it, and the whole escapade reveals the betrayal of his trusted Aunty Jael, who turns out to be the preserved brain of Ada Morange. Simply surviving necessitates a determination Tony has never had to display before.

The twists and turns of the plot that eventually bring Tony and Lisa together always look as if they are going to solve the central mystery of the Jackaroo: Who are they? What are their intentions for humanity? What is the actual role of the !Cha? But what we really learn is how human shortcomings have got in the way of solving those puzzles. In the hundred years separating Lisa from Tony there are two wars; the rivalry between Nevers and Morange flares into open conflict; most characters, good or bad, reveal pettiness, greed, jealousy, cruelty, deceitfulness. Was this what spelled the fate of the Jackaroo’s previous clients? There are revelations (the Jackaroo were already observing Earth at the time of the London bomb), but they only serve to increase the central mysteries. And the question remains: could this humanity ever put aside its faults long enough to solve them?

The two Jackaroo novels may not be McAuley at his absolute best (they’re a little too mechanical in their structure for that), but they are building into an intriguing series.

THE WINGED HISTORIES

Sofia Samatar

Small Beer Press hb, 206pp, $24.00

Maureen Kincaid Speller

I was hooked by
A Stranger in Olondria from its very first sentence: “As I was a stranger in Olondria I knew nothing”. Jevick, the story’s narrator, had dreamed of travelling to Olondria since childhood.
A Stranger in Olondria is both travelogue and memoir, charting Jevick’s exploration of a culture in which he inevitably remains an outsider, and the task thrust upon him, to tell the story of Jissavet of Kiem, dying when he met her, now demanding to be heard.

The Winged Histories is a companion piece to
A Stranger in Olondria rather than a sequel, wrapped around the earlier novel and extending beyond it, in time and space. The civil war that Jevick saw only the edges of now stands front and centre yet this is not a straightforward chronological account of that war. Instead, Samatar offers a series of overlapping accounts of that war, told by four very different women: Tialon, daughter of the last Priest of the Stone; Tavis, a noblewoman who leaves her family to become a soldier; her sister, Siski, who is transformed from socialite into refugee; and Seren, a nomad singer, who loves Tavis.

This complex series of nested stories allows Samatar to explore the tangled history of Olondria, teasing out the conflicting intentions of its noble families (and here the dynastic ambitions of Tavis’s aunt figure heavily as she plots to ensure her family takes the imperial throne of Olondria), its religious leaders (through Tialon, we learn the story of her father, Ivrom, the Priest of the Stone, a puritan implacably opposed to the sensual cult of the goddess Avalei), and the effect of the civil war on those who owe no allegiance to either side and have tried to stay out of the conflict (Seren provides the account of what happens to her people as a result of the war spilling across borders).

It is obviously not coincidental that Samatar’s narrators are all women:
The Winged Histories addresses that which is so often elided in conventional fantasy novels – the absence of women, or at best, the limited roles available to women. If
Lord of the Rings shows us only privileged women, able to disguise themselves in order to fight, or else to remain sequestered from the grubbiness of war, Samatar’s women have to deal with the effects of war head on, because in their various ways they are all involved. While it may be true that Tavis presumes on her status in order to learn to fight, she is nonetheless part of a sustained military campaign, and all that entails. Likewise, she and Siski have always been aware of their significance as nieces of Olondria’s ruler, the Telkan, thanks to their aunt, Mardith, who seeks to gain power through matchmaking. However, through Seren and Tialon we see women who are nominally reliant on men in order to survive, and the ways in which they negotiate survival in a world that is rapidly changing.

Samatar continues also to explore the issues that preoccupied her in
Stranger, such as the competing power of the spoken word and the written. Who makes history – the writer who records it in books or the singer who memorises old songs and creates new ones? Between them, those who read and those who remember create the narrative mosaic which forms this novel but it is an uneasy relationship. I found myself thinking of Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, not a thing that often happens when I read a fantasy novel but entirely appropriate here.

Like its predecessor
The Winged Histories is told in exquisitely written prose, here reflecting the different rhythms of the various storytellers’ formal styles as well as their private languages. But while the language of
A Stranger in Olondria was lush, orotund, reflecting Jevick’s poetic influences, the prose here, for all its richness, is still leaner somehow, as if reflecting the exigencies of war, at home and in the battle. Words need to be saved, in case they run out, and used sparingly. It is when the narrators are most hard-pressed that words suddenly pour out of them, as though their masks of endurance have finally slipped.

And still there is more to be said about
The Winged Histories and its predecessor. Thoughts and notes piled up as I read on, and I reached the end wanting nothing so much as to return to the beginning and start all over again. Samatar’s work really benefits from rereading, which is more than can be said for a lot of contemporary novels. This is a very satisfying novel to read, challenging and troubling too, as the very best fiction ought to be.

TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS

Salman Rushdie

Vintage pb, 296pp, £8.99

Jack Deighton

The title is an indicator, clearly alluding to a famous collection of tales of wonder, promising exotic happenings, digressions, meanderings and stories within stories. Yet it is also somehow unmistakably Rushdian. Exotic but recognisable, aslant but accessible. In any case, I doubt any other present-day author would invite comparison to such a well-known set of stories as the
Arabian Nights. But the conceit doesn’t come from nowhere. If he perhaps hasn’t addressed the supernatural quite as directly in most of his previous novels there has nearly always been more than a hint of the strange, brushes with the uncanny, in Rushdie’s work. So here we have jinn (not genies, no, we don’t use that word any more) the Grand Ifrits, Zumurrud the Great, Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls – so slender he disappears when he turns sideways – Ra’im the Blood-Drinker, the source of all the world’s vampire stories, and the jinnia Dunia, otherwise known as Aasmaan Peri, aka the Sky Fairy and the Lightning Princess of Mount Qâf.

The narrative is couched as a looking-back at the legendary time when the seals between the worlds eroded, a great storm struck the Earth and the Strangenesses began. Yet the story begins over eight centuries earlier, in 1195, with the arrival at the house of the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) of a young homeless girl. This was Dunia, indulging her fascination with human men and her capacity for love. For two years eight months and twenty-eight nights they lived as man and wife and produced numerous offspring, whose descendants, all characterised by their lobeless ears, became the Duniazát. Not named after him as, “To be the Rushdi would send them into history with a mark upon their brow”. Ibn Rushd’s dispute with the philosophy of a predecessor, Ghazali, “Only fear will move sinful man towards God,” and who stated that things happen only because God wills them, provides us with disquisitions on God’s nature, “God is a creation of human beings; the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle.” These differences are played out on a grander scale during the war between the worlds that followed the Strangenesses.

During that time rationality crumbled. Some found their feet didn’t touch the ground and might float away so high that they died, others were weighed down so that they became crushed. A baby born during the storm caused outbreaks of sores on anyone corrupt or dishonest into whose vicinity she came. The irrational became commonplace. The Duniazát had inherited some of Dunia’s jinn powers and were invaluable in the final confrontations with the Grand Ifrits. The whole time of Strangeness lasted, of course, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.

Lines like “If I get hurt in this putative affray of yours then I’m not an innocent bystander?” to a policeman from a musician at risk from the incitements of a rabid preacher show that the events of Rushdie’s life have contributed mightily – as, I assume, theirs must necessarily do for all but hack authors. Yet while the novel contains all Rushdie’s strengths, it also manifests and perhaps magnifies his faults. There is not much restraint here, there is a lot of telling, the treatment is consciously literary and full of word play. Yet the retrospective narrator defuses any tension in the reader as to the eventual outcome. Rushdie also feels it necessary to define FTL despite name-checking eleven masters of science fiction.

However, the book is mainly a meditation on the nature of story. “All our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives.” “The first thing to know about made-up stories is that they are all untrue in the same way” (which feels Tolstoyan but is certainly debatable). “To tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present.” That stories tell us what we are; we tell them in order to understand ourselves. Quite where the incursion of the supernatural leaves us with that one is rather problematic. “To recount a fantasy is to tell a tale about the actual.” Well, maybe. “If good and evil were external to Man, it became impossible to define what an ethical man might be” is closer to the mark.

In general Rushdie is at his best when his flights of fancy are tethered more firmly to earthly events, more centred on his human characters which here are too thinly delineated.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is pyrotechnic, impressive even, undoubtedly worth reading, but ultimately curiously lacking in heart.

WORLD OF WATER

James Lovegrove

Solaris ebook, 384pp, £5.99

Stephen Theaker

Dev Harmer died at Leather Hill, the worst battle of a terrible decade-long war between humanity and Polis+, AI zealots who see an atheistic humanity as their natural enemy. The war ended in a truce, Harmer’s consciousness was saved, and now he is downloaded by Interstellar Security Solutions into one genetically modified host form after another. His job: to foil the plots of spies and saboteurs working for Polis+. This is the second book of his adventures, but, like the Dumarest books of E.C. Tubb, you could begin with any of them. He was having adventures well before the first book began, and he’ll have many more after this one ends, unless he earns enough credit at last to buy himself a new copy of his original body.

Not so fresh from his gruelling adventures on Alighieri in
World of Fire, Harmer now continues his fight against the “digimentalists” on Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton. His previous body was that of a miner suited to work on an extreme thermoplanet: short, heavyset, muscular and stumpy, with nocturnal vision and the face of a boxer who had gone a few too many rounds. This time he has high cheekbones, protective eye membranes, webbed fingers, gills on either side of his neck, and a face that can flash bioluminescent messages to those that can understand them. This is his first time as an amphibian – but the body has been compromised. It’ll be dead in three days.

He needs an amphibious body because Triton is an ocean planet. It was an ice giant until a small shift in axial rotation warmed things up. That event persists in the legends the indigenous Tritonians tell of the Ice King, who sleeps in the ice at the heart of the world and will awaken when the time is right. None of the indigenous people are happy to have forty thousand humans building habitats on the ocean surface, and those angry enough to fight in the name of the Ice King are able to find plenty of support, and, predictably enough, Dev soon finds that the colonists are less than innocent.

It’s his job to bring peace to this world, and in the process uncover any Polis+ activity. In three days. Before he can get started, he’ll need to get his gills working, and that means a merciless swimming lesson, where his ISS liaison pushes him fifteen metres down into the ocean. Just when he’s about to black out, he breathes in the cold seawater, and feels it rush down his throat, and out through his neck, giving him oxygen as it passes through – even after just two books, it’s clear that a big pleasure of this series will be the way Harmer adjusts to the quirks of each body, and works with the skill set of each. This is not a body built for brawls in bars, for example, and Dev almost comes a cropper when he gets drawn into one. But at least it gives him a lead… And in the water it’s a different matter, as we see when he encounters a seven-metre long thalassoraptor and all its teeth.

Harmer is absolutely the star of the show here (at least until the story’s ultimate – and extremely epic – enemy is revealed), but he has a strong supporting cast. He forms an alliance with a Tritonian who has no love for humans but wants a peaceful resolution to it all. Her true name is a complex configuration of geometric patterns, an emotional autograph designed to convey an attitude of determination, resolve and desire for justice, and she more than lives up to that in the course of the book. On the human side, he is teamed up with First Lieutenant Sigursdottir and her band of brave and heroic female Marines. Dev takes an instant liking to her, but it’ll take some work to earn her trust.

This is a book for anyone who thinks they don’t make ’em like that any more. Well, they do, and to all the action and thrills you could possibly want James Lovegrove adds a good deal of intelligence, tackling post-colonial issues head-on while showing us a fascinating alien culture, all in chapters that end in cliffhangers and are short enough to entice the most reluctant adult reader. The series has a great premise, but it’s not a formula: this book offers a completely different experience to the first. The ebook is clever too: switch to publisher fonts to see how they are used to distinguish between different types of non-verbal speech. A brainy blockbuster.

HUNTERS & COLLECTORS

M. Suddain

Jonathan Cape pb, 506pp, £14.99

Stephen Theaker

The mother of Jonathan Tamberlain threatened to kill him if he ever squandered his gifts on criticism, and she wasn’t just speaking metaphorically, he informs us, she told him exactly how she would do it. She was an art collector, his father a poet; the two of them met at a boxing match. Sparring with his father left Tamberlain in a coma, and he woke up with an amazing nose, one that can catch the scent of a wine from half a mile away.

So he did exactly what his mother didn’t want: he became a food critic, though that’s not what he calls himself. He follows the example of his hero, Eliö Lebaubátain, in claiming the title of “forensic gastronomer”. It’s not entirely clear why, since there’s no legal aspect to his work – or at least there wouldn’t be, if he didn’t always get himself into trouble.

The book begins with snatches of writing from and about his early career, showing his rise to fame, but by the time the narrative settles down to its main adventure, he’s had the time to develop a long and intense relationship with his bodyguard, the marvellously formidable Gladys. To her he’s “like a grandpa you spend time with out of guilt”, and for him she’s like the annoying cousin your family takes on day trips, but they share an utter dedication to their respective jobs that is one of the novel’s most interesting features.

Unfortunately, Gladys wasn’t there the day he went to the Fair.

While Tamberlain grew up in the Western Hemisphere with a pair of liberal parents, the Eastern Hemisphere lived under the absolute control of Vlada Yinknokov, the Great Butcher. She had a billion people murdered during her revolution, including thousands of architects and doctors. She outlawed hospitals, declaring that from then on diseases would be cured by the will of the people. And she was at the Fair too.

Tamberlain only attended to make amends to an old friend. In that he failed miserably, and after a contretemps involving a bomb threat he didn’t mean to make he was taken away to the Great Butcher’s yacht, waking up to find a gas mask on his face and everyone including the dictator dead, following a nerve gas attack. Arrested and taken to the Eastern Hemisphere for interrogation, he fell into another coma, and it’s when he wakes up that the story proper begins.

Dr Rubin Difflaydermaus is a batty psychiatrist with a habit of showing up in Tamberlain’s head. He also has his book –
Infinity Remastered: Engineering the Post-Human Species (and Why Our Great-Grandchildren Might Not Even Need Bodies)
– delivered wherever Tamberlain is sleeping. The copy waiting after the critic’s latest coma contains a clue: a laundry ticket from the legendary Hotel Grand Skies.

Tamberlain has long dreamt of eating at its famous restaurant, the Undersea. Nothing will stop him getting to the hotel, and once he gets there, nothing will stop him eating that meal. He’ll literally wade through blood to get it, and he needs to, because the staff have completely lost their minds and every interaction brings with it the threat of ultraviolence. Ace literary agent Daniel Woodbine and bodyguard Gladys will do their best to keep him alive as the severed heads pile up, but he won’t make it easy for them.

Hunters & Collectors is quite reminiscent of
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, and may appeal to the same readers. Instead of political writer Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants we have here a food critic, but he adopts a similarly misanthropic worldview (“To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever”) to protect a heart similarly sensitive to the horrors of his world. Like that comic, this is not an entirely serious book, but it does have moments that are truly shocking, and others that feel surprisingly sincere.

The SF ideas at its heart, on the other hand, may not come as great surprises, at least not to people who have seen a holodeck episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the book is after all being sold as contemporary fiction rather than SF, and it uses its rusty tools to tell quite a sharp story. Equally, what seems at first to be quite an experimental novel, beginning with a hundred-page flutter of notes, letters, fragments and diagrams, settles down after that to provide quite a conventional first-person narrative that nevertheless does the job.

That’s the book in a nutshell: a bit less ambitious than it looks, but still quite good, and rather well executed. Just like the guests at the Hotel Grand Skies.

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

GODS OF EGYPT

X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING

ANGRY BIRDS

RATCHET & CLANK

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE

TALE OF TALES

Who will love the orphans? Where will they ever find a loving home? As film continues to evolve beyond the canons of puny sense and taste, more big films than ever are ending up in the hundred-million-dollar flophouse for Hollywood’s unadoptables. Unloved and disowned by critics, domestic audiences, and even the internet, these are the blockbusters nobody wanted: the belated sequels to films nobody now remembers; the sunk-costs development hellspawn unwisely released to the light; the unwieldy international coproductions made entirely from tax credits; the profit-scrapings of once-valuable intellectual property; the game adaptations commissioned back before the user base collapsed; the exhausted franchise brand-milkers; the Chinese toehold partnership projects; the forlorn attempts to spin a remerchandising opportunity out of D-list media properties. And yet all of these sad-eyed waifs were conceived in hope and raised with love, and all carry within them the capacity for joy. Who will speak for them? Will nobody see the good and the cherishable in them? So let’s take a breath of perspective and celebrate for once the sincere delights of the films that disrupt the senescent canons of excellence, baffling tastemakers and dividing audiences in ways that challenge the very foundations of art.

This season’s charity poster child for the cinema of the unloved has to be Alex Proyas’
GODS OF EGYPT, a film whose only offence was to be too deliriously wonderful for merely mortal audiences to grasp. Proyas already has a free pass for life from sf fans for 1998’s
Dark City, and though his intervening films have been more mixed joys,
Gods of Egypt is the first time this serially thwarted titan has been given the budget and control to build an IMAX cosmos and canvas on a scale to match his gigantic fevered visions. Lionsgate fondly thought they were pouring money into a potential post-Hunger Games franchise, but what they’ve ended up funding is something immeasurably richer and dafter. In a loose adaptation of Chester Beatty Papyrus I, Nikolai Coster-Waldau’s Horus (Marco Beltrami choir: “Glorious, glorious Horus!”) squares off against evil brother Set as incarnated in the latest implementation of shouty Gerry Butler in loincloth and native Paisley accent, with
Dark City lead Rufus Sewell as Lower Egypt’s villainous mortal instrument; and the divine brothers battle it out against a background cast of the most professionally unembarrassable cream of Australian thespianship, including Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton as star-crossed mortal lovers, Bryan Brown as the overthrown Osiris, and Geoffrey Rush as all-seeing Ra himself eating the scenery of the universe, abetted by an infinite number of Chadwick Bosemans with diabolical Anglo-Wakandan accents, plus Élodie Yung in skimpy frocklets as Hathor, goddess of perpetual ethnically ambiguous hotness. Though he’s up against an international masterclass in the art of Australian acting under its twin gods Brown and Rush, Coster-Waldau holds his own splendidly, delivering a performance like a twinkly plank as the usurped heir to the cosmos whose forced alliance with an annoying mortal youth enables him to grow as a god – for yes, even gods here have a “journey” to learn upon – and arrive at a new dispensation between gods and their subjects. (“My journey isn’t about revenge at all costs,” he announces to a tinkle of golden pennies dropping: “it’s about protecting my people.”)

All the mainstream doxosphere can muster to explain its inability to get this astounding film on any level is that it’s full of shiny cgi (well, duh) and ticks the wrong kinds of diversity box by casting white Australians in all but a handful of roles, and no Egyptians at all – though one wonders how many of the complainants could even name a living Egyptian actor, and those who can are probably not part of the audience for this film, while as an Egyptian Greek Australian the director is perhaps more qualified than most to tweak the Sphinx’s nose. But behind the pangeneric action romp is an often stunning vision of what a post-superhero cinema might aspire to, a divine quest down Fury Road whose imagery recalls nothing so much as Jack Kirby’s concept art for the unmade
Lord of Light. The first sequence on Ra’s boat is one of the most astonishing sequences of fantasy imagery ever committed to screen, infused with visual memories of the ends of
Dark City and
Knowing, except that here it’s Geoffrey Rush in a bathrobe lightspearing an anus dentatus which is trying to ingest the universe up its toothy wormhole. The only thing much like it is Tarsem Singh’s
Immortals, which this film manages to leave looking austere and restrained. There is ripping of brains by hand out of their skull; there are, deliciously, lettuces; and there are lines like “I can recite the true names of the stars. I have seen the world created from sand and water,” to which the sceptical mortal’s query “Where were you watching it from if nothing had been created yet?” draws the response “If I were to explain, your brain would liquefy through your ears.” Already taken care of, my lord.

A more conventional slice of superheroic Egyptology is
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, Bryan Singer’s impossible followup to his kitchen-sink franchise time-mash in
Days of Future Past, here celebrating the end of his lead trio’s contracts with a baton-passing plot extending the rebuilt timeline and cast into the far beginnings of mutant history via the high Claremont era of the disco-haired eighties, as Oscar Isaac’s first mutant returns from Predynastic myth to cleanse the world of humanity. The latest film to be branded a box-office disappointment for taking its time to hitting the billion-dollar mark, it’s certainly a more straight-ahead, superensemble film than its immediate predecessors in the franchise. But Singer and writer Simon Kinberg are old hands at these films and expert at making difficult things look lazy, and right from the initial staging of 9/11/3600BC through the stunning 3D credit sequence with time literally flying out of the screen into your eyeballs, there’s a sense of the X-Men canon as an epic superhistory that no other comics franchise has even remotely yet approached, and which the narrative return to Auschwitz and genocide lays claim to as something this series alone has unique, if contestible, claim to have earned.

Amid the commentariat complaints of superhero fatigue, it’s easy to forget what spandex cinema and the
X-Men films in particular have done for the health and vitality of storytelling in 21st-century cinema: revitalising the ensemble storyline and rescuing Hollywood plotting from the sclerotic orthodoxies of protagonistic solipsism; opening out the narrative canvas into deep megatextual expanses of time and historical depth which can encompass entire and multiple histories of the world; cherrypicking the most powerful narrative moments from a gigantic megacanon of monthly mass mythopoiesis, and telling and retelling them for multiple new generations; above all, finding the stories that are optimised to inhabit and showcase the new cinematic technologies of the fantastic, and using them to conduct a vast democratically-crowdfunded experiment in narrative universals, speaking across cultures to unify humanity as never before in a truly global shared experience of story. Even without the system-shock of
Deadpool’s maverick success,
Days of Future Past was always going to be a tough act to follow, and a lot of the plotwork in
Apocalypse has gone into the thankless but necessary business of setting the reset narratives back on the tramlines of canon, with Scott Summers and Jean Grey back in the story and the spotlight at last, Professor X finally granted his iconic eggskull do, and the Weapon X storyline rebuilt to propel the last surviving cast member from the 2000 lineup into his solo swansong without losing the actor’s history with the character across the six films now erased. But it also makes the most of the fact that Michael Fassbender has played Macbeth since he last played Magneto, even if the final act rather confines him to hanging around like
Last Stand
Jean in a giant bubble of acting until the inevitable sentimental turnaround that the audience saw coming two hours back. Teased for next time are interstellar backdrops, Dark Phoenix, and Mr Sinister. Don’t try to pretend it won’t be epic.

The canvas is both smaller and bigger in
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s spring celebration of the tying of the knot with Sony and the Spider-Man film rights, which loosely adapts Mark Millar’s titular storyline as the pretext for a refreshingly old-school and comicsy hero-on-hero mass smackdown beginning in the geopolitical aftershock of Ultron’s Sokovian adventure and a Nigerian takedown that goes bad, but modulating from the political to the personal for its final mano-a-mano following a well-crafted big reveal about the Winter Soldier. Each of the assembled Avengers old and new is carefully given an individual road to travel that places them on one side or another in the Flughafen Leipzig–Halle mass walloping, and the combinatorial duels exploit a classic narratogenic formula of the comics with more sense than we’ve yet seen of the simple pleasures of seeing Hawkeye fight Vision or Ant-Man battle Spider-Man (see what they did there?). New characters are rotated to the front and old ones escorted to the lobby with a firmly sympathetic hand, and you hardly notice that the film ends with nothing whatever resolved and the ending deferred to six films’ time. What you do notice is that with Thor and Hulk off shooting their Asgardian side-project the Avengers lineup is a measurably duller, more earthbound and actorly place, its edges sanded off just as Phase 3 (of which this is the opening chapter) is lining up a more adventurous slate of wilder and stranger explorations of the cosmic corners of the parent universe. But the MCU is large and contains multitudes, and the Cap team have built particularly effectively on the Whedon crossover foundations. It’s not hard to feel you could do this all day.

It’s been a different kind of Disney story for
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the studio’s belated and commercially underloved sequel to Linda Woolverton and Tim Burton’s 2010 overperformer about a teenage Alice’s return to the realm of her childhood dreams to rescue it from a Narnian collapse into Jabberwock-infested darkness, and herself from the corsets of Victorian social expectations. The sequel picks up Alice’s story a year on, as the Chinese trading enterprise she set up at the end of the first film finds itself threatened by traitors to the dream just as Underland faces a new crisis of its own. A far more adventurous and interesting film than it needed to be, it addresses the central challenge of turning Carroll’s scattershot inventions into a textured and historied world by sending Alice on a time-twisting tour of Underland’s backstory before her first arrival, and a past in which Alice is now the adult and Carroll’s characters the children still untouched by the lugubrious absurdities and disappointments of adulthood. The enabling conceit is Carroll’s tea-party throwaway about Time as an offstage character, realised here as a Bavarian-accented demiurge who “lives in a void of infinitude in a castle of eternity” with a Wellsian time machine as its engine; and time-travelling viewers will recognise retroflections of
Twelve Monkeys and
Back to the Future
(“I shall never forget that snowy night when she hit her head on the town square as the clock struck six”), as Alice has to portal out of Bedlam to save the Hatter and thwart the Red Queen by revisiting the scene of her earlier revisit and, in something of a time-travel cinema coup, racing the ensuing waves of paradox back to their source.

Director James Bobin makes an impressively assured step up from cinematic Muppet-wrangling, and copes surprisingly well with the millstone of Johnny Depp’s Hatter performance as the obligatory centre of the story despite being once again the most tiresome thing in it. This being Woolverton, the sparky feminist take on the Disney princess narrative is offset by an overreliance on emotional readymades (dad issues for the Hatter, sibling rivalry for the Red Queen) and timeworn Hollywood platitudes about dreaming the impossible. But this is still one of her best efforts, a huge improvement on the soggy
Maleficent, and shrugging off all pretence to be much bothered with Carroll, which was never really the point. In what is less a bid for the Asian audience than an intimation of where today’s new breed of Disney princesses need to look for their futures, Alice spends the bulk of the film in a Chinese dress and ends up setting up an office in the Middle Kingdom to compete with her former partners in a boat beneath a sunny sky of her own. Such a curious dream.

For hunters of snark, it’s been a satisfying thumb in the eye of the mean-spirited sages of doom to see
WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING clean up internationally after a sustained campaign of preemptive derision and the inability of US domestic audiences to see past Paula Patton in green paint and tusks. Easily the riskiest film of the season,
Warcraft knowingly mixes the multiple box-office toxins of high fantasy, game adaptation, star-free franchise launcher, and decade-long residency of development hell even before Duncan Jones tore up the script to start again with a more gamer-friendly take on orcish geopolitics. The result is certainly not a film for everyone, with its uncompromisingly old-school fantasy worldbuilding tropes and its enthusiastic embrace of performance capture and greenscreen cinema to bring its massively multiplayer digital armies to life, only to land them with dialogue like “Always remember: from light comes darkness and from darkness light.” But what it has in surfeit is a refusal to apologise to anyone for anything; and in taking the Warcraft universe back to its earliest foundations, it’s signalled a kind of long-term commitment to the property that respects the weight and depth of its world in the eyes of those who’ve spent some of the most rewarding years of their lives more in it than out.

That said, it’s not really a film about the modern-day Warcraft player experience (where the benchmark remains John August’s
The Nines, an allegorised self-portrait of
WoW addiction in which this world is effectively the in-game universe and the characters staging an intervention). Rather, it’s an adaptation of the original 1994 game
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and its later associated novels as lavish experiment in post-Jacksonian epic fantasy spectacle, servicing a knowingly old-school tale of orcs and men caught up in a war of worlds and kingdoms between light magic and dark. When the world of Azeroth is invaded by an orcish horde from a dying world through a necromantically engineered portal, what seems like a genocidal war for survival reveals itself to warriors on either side as something darker still, and Toby Kebbell’s orcish clanchief strikes a fragile alliance with their human foes as the mother of all roleplaying battles goes down. It looks and feels amazing, particularly in IMAX, and is played completely straight, even by royal couple Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga; and if the climactic battle goes on, and on, and on, there’s something genuinely exhilarating about seeing a rubbish eighties-style high fantasy plot done with total commitment and a nine-figure budget. The global balance of takings remains a problem for the future of the prospective franchise, since Universal’s deal with Legendary, struck before the latter’s Chinese takeover, means that all the profits there will flow to the locally-owned partner and not to the US studio. But this has been a huge result for Chinese investment in American film, and it’s hard to imagine it as anything but a game-changer.

A horde of green-skinned invaders from another world bring their own peculiar game plan to
ANGRY BIRDS, the feature-scale reinvention of the hundred-strong series of wordless short animations spun off by Rovio as part of their attempt to turn their ubiquitous cartoon physics game into a durable transmedial franchise property. Amid layoffs and downsizing, Rovio have bet the poultry farm on the film version as the fledgling offspring which can fly the collapsing coop and activate the Mighty Eagle IAP to save its precious nest eggs from the greenbacked predators beyond, with the Finnish Film Foundation stepping up with its biggest ever investment to power-up this precious but faltering national enterprise. It may even pay off, because the Jon Vitti-scripted animation does a sterling job of building a film-shaped story of character growth and redemption around the icon-shaped characters and the game mechanics of firing birds at green pigs with crates of TNT. Red, we learn, owes his eruptive attitude to childhood teasing about his eyebrows, and finds his iconic teammates in anger management class; but when strangely-coloured immigrants abuse their refugee welcome to steal their host’s children to feast upon, it’s grumpy Red who sees through the plan and persuades his peaceloving flightless fellow citizens to discover the beast within (“We’re birds. We’re descended from dinosaurs. We’re not supposed to be nice”) and Nagasaki those scrofish invaders back to the Pleistocene. Speedy Chuck’s time-retardant technique from the cartoons is now a full-on homage to the Quicksilver sequence in
Days of Future Past, and to the certificate clutch of “very mild bad language, slapstick, innuendo, toilet humour” can be added bizarre quotation from
The Shining and discussion of shooting fireballs out of your butt. But kids will scarcely notice how bonkers it is, and merely pester for merchandise.

Third and least visible game adaptation of the season has been
RATCHET & CLANK, a well-made animated port of the venerable PlayStation series about a furry space ranger and his pedal-bin sidekick. In a junior hybrid of
Futurama and
Guardians of the Galaxy, the film version sees young spaceship mechanic Ratchet kicking heels on a backwater world and dreaming Skywalker dreams of a life among the stars as a member of the galactic justice league. But when interstellar-realtor supervillain Drek breaks up the team and threatens inhabited worlds with the full Alderaan, it’s up to our orphan hotrodder and his defective war-droid buddy to save the future. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, and the project might have found more of an audience in the abandoned live-action version that was a money pit for Sony a decade back; but the designs and animation are surprisingly rich, and the Hong Kong-based team who seem to have done most of the heavy lifting have delivered a kids’ space cartoon that takes the trouble to texture its cosmos as well as delivering on the requisite big-screen simulation of not actual gameplay.

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE unleashes the art of big-screen planetary destruction in a noisy arena reunion show for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, artists of apocalypse whose solo careers have never quite lived up to their chart-topping heights as a pop duo. For those who just want to hear the hits, there’s a familiar pulse to the narrative beats as groups of characters are introduced in an assortment of global and offworld captioned locations (“Space Defense Station, Earth’s Moon”) collating the harbinger signs of imminent apocalyptic smackdown, and the first act culminates in a sequence where Goldblum and friends have a fly-through narrow escape as Shanghai is smushed on top of London and a 3000-mile-long mothership touches down in the Atlantic (“Which part?” – “All of it!”). As always with these band reunions, there’s been a lineup change that has made for some rearranging of the old harmonies, with Jeff Goldsmith having to take over on lead after Will Smith dropped out of the tour, and Liam Hemsworth coopted as the new band member audiences aren’t too sure about. But Bill Pullman, Brett Spiner, and Vivica Fox are among the returnees, the last now inspiringly retrained from poledancer to trauma nurse; while the first film’s kids are now attractive adult leads, with Maika Monroe incarnating the franchise’s native absurdities best as the first daughter turned fighter pilot turned White House staffer (yes, in that order). The actual resurgence brings the interstellar predators back to an Earth that has appropriated their own technology to fortify the solar system, only for humanity to find itself outgunned and outplayed by a massively scaled-up force bent on stealing our planetary core and turning off the Earth’s magnetic field for an instant replay of Emmerich’s last cataclysmic hit as
2012 2: 2016. Fortunately the surviving stars from 1996 make a discovery that gives them one last crazy shot at victory (presidential broadcast to the world: “What we do in the next twelve minutes will either define the human race or finish it”), and after the scattered plotlines converge from their tour of the Earth-Moon system for a last stand in Area 51, it’s time to tool up, face the alien queen (“Get ready for a close encounter, bitch!”), and take the fight to the stars in a sequel we can only pray to deserve.

The original
Independence Day script was dashed off in a month, and its enduring charm owes much to the giggly “Dare we actually write that?” outrageousness of its deadpan sentiments and relationships. This time around, they had twenty years to prepare, and so did we, with the result that the project has not only lost its original freshness and fun, but has been through a
Crystal Skull development process in which ideas from multiple versions have been dropped on top of one another like Asia on top of Europe, leading to a script that, ironically in view of its scale, shrinks the world absurdly to shuffle its half-dozen leads into the necessary positions for their stories to cross and converge, most preposterously when Judd Hirsch (remember him as Goldblum’s comedy yiddishe dad? thought not, but he’s back and keen to remind you) drives an interstate busload of kid refugees into the heart of the act 3 smackdown. (In the desert, to Goldblum: “Sir, there’s a school bus heading directly towards the trap!” On the bus, to Hirsch: “There’s a tall gangly man waving us down!”) But Emmerich is an enormously able filmmaker with an equivocal relationship to his popular rep as the man who likes to get the landmarks – whence such sincerely-meant career outliers as the floptastic
Anonymous and
Stonewall
– and though this
Resurgence seems likelier to disappoint than to delight, at least it’s made by people who really love
Independence Day, even if they’ve now become their own tribute act.

A bigger test of enduring franchise love is whether it’s still possible to have fun with a
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, a full quarter-century on from the first live-action version. But in the new world of Chinese co-production companies to which producer Michael Bay has already shown himself ahead of the game in hitching his wagon, there’ll always be a place for the original martial arts/live-action kiddietoon crossover property; and for those who’ve grown up with the franchise,
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS does pretty much everything right, importing a first-rate kids’ director (Dave Green, who did
Earth to Echo) and allowing the writers of the 2014 reboot to bring in a host of key figures from canon including Casey Jones, the evil space villain Kang, henchthugs Bebop and Rocksteady.
Out of the Shadows brings us the seasonally obligatory civil war storyline, as the brothers fall out under the pressure of tensions between the ninja way and the adolescent impulse to personhood. (“I’ve always wanted to be in Halloween parade. It’s the one night of the year when I fit in.” – “We’ll never fit in. We’re ninjas. We live in the shadows.”) For the slightly older brother, Megan Fox’s April O’Neil shoplifts clothes a couple of sizes too skimpy in pursuit of her undercover story; and Bay’s godfatherly supervision ensures that cars are flipping within the opening minutes just to score the boys some pizza, while later set pieces give us a tank going over a waterfall and yet another of those portal endings where the bad guy tries to wormhole in an alien army. (“Galileo, Isaac Newton, Steve Jobs,” incants the mad-scientist sub-villain: “their names will be footnotes in the annals of science compared to what’s about to happen here!”) Needless to say, just like Magneto the brothers rediscover the power of family in time to prevent the apocalypse, and their partial emergence from the ninja shadows is welcomed by Laura Linney’s NYPD chief: “I think you should give people more credit. They’ll accept you now.” Perhaps, perhaps not, but if they were proper ninjas we’d never know their films had even been released.

A human orphan finds her place in the world in
WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE:
Arrietty director Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s sweetly melancholic adaptation of Joan Robinson’s wistful 1967 timeslip fantasy, in which the mono no oware found in Robinson’s adolescent fable becomes fused with the film’s own pathos of transience as the swansong feature from Studio Ghibli. The novel’s setting of Burnham Overy on the Norfolk coast has been something of a pilgrim destination for Japanese fans of the novel, in the same way as Tomonoura or Tama Hills are for Ghibli fans overseas; but the film version transplants the story to the waterlands of Hokkaido, where painfully introverted orphan Anna finds an eerily kindred spirit in the mysterious blonde westerner Marnie who seems to glide in and out of reality from the decaying Marsh House along the water. As their bond deepens and the solitary, withdrawn, self-hating Anna comes out of her shell to learn that Marnie’s dreamlike life is perhaps even less to be envied, the history of landscape and lives in which both are wrapped returns to complete Anna’s own journey of social and personal healing.

Despite the bold geographic and cultural transhumance, it’s the most faithful of all Ghibli’s literary adaptations, defying Miyazaki’s own advice in keeping the mysterious Marnie fair and foreign, and conveying the novel’s delicate interiority through the happy congruence of classical anime techniques of stillness with the book’s focus on Anna’s inexpressively “ordinary” face. Anna’s emotional sickness is ramped up rather needlessly with asthma, despite the fact she never seems to remember her inhaler, but for the most part the film tracks the novel closely, pruning some secondary characters and complications but retaining some key moments despite some cultural and narrative bumps in their alien setting. Robinson put a lot of her adolescent self into Anna, and Yonebayashi has reciprocated by making Anna an artist of landscapes and backgrounds in her own right, neatly tying into an existing strand of the plot as well as of Robinson’s own career. It’s an appropriately personal and bittersweet farewell from the studio that’s offered the most sustained and enduring alternatives to Hollywood notions of what fantasy film can be, and an encouraging launchpad for Yonebayashi’s post-Ghibli career.

Matteo Garrone’s
TALE OF TALES travels back in time to the roots of fairytale itself, braiding together a trio of bonkers seventeenth-century fables from Basile’s
Pentameron in a lusciously location-shot triple serving of Pasolini on magic mushrooms with sauce of Angela Carter. Avoiding the better-known stories like
Sleeping Beauty and
Puss in Boots that have spread through Perrault and Grimm to become panto and Disney staples, Garrone has picked three of the most flamboyantly barmy of the original tales and studded them with fragments of others, then woven them around one another so that their strange beats of associative story logic wrap into a surreal composite metanarrative which comes together in a grand ensemble finale without actually joining up in any banausically Aristotelian sense. Our royal protagonists are Salma Hayek, magically impregnated with an heir by a river monster while her servant-girl finds herself mother to his identical twin; Toby Jones, who grows a flea to the size of a sheep and marries his daughter to an ogre; and Vincent Cassel, seduced by a girlish crone whose discovery and rejection sets in motion a bizarre sequence of skin-changing twists. The wonky English dialogue, imperfectly translated from Italian, only adds to the sense of a fantasy logic recuperated from a different age of the world, an archaeology of the fantastic before the narrative imagination found itself forcibly strapped into the corsetry of character journeys, plot points, and universe rules: a kind of story where anything can happen at any moment for any reason or none, and the world is an encyclopaedia of such dream-logic improvisations all happening at once. Jones is terrific, and the vfx camera technicians are credited to Rome-based outfit Interzone Visions. With its final shot of a flaming tightrope, it’s a film that will never have much in the way of siblings; but for lovers of all that Hollywood’s not, what’s not to love?

LASER FODDER

TONY LEE

THE 5th WAVE

THE CALL UP

ENEMY MINE

Approaching adulthood means apocalyptical changes of body and mind, so it’s no big surprise that for a bunch of orphaned kids in THE 5th WAVE (DVD/Blu-ray, 16 May) some anti-intellectual and over-emotional rigours of suddenly imposed maturity in a cruel world compares to the acid-test of an alien invasion, complete with viral infection and body-snatching parasites. “You made me wanna be human again.” This movie is also an opportunity to rock ‘n’ roll through the militarily irresponsible fun of helicoptering into a shoot ’em up videogame scenario.

Japanese movie
Parasyte is vastly superior in every respect and offers a slickly imaginative comedy, intriguing SF-horrors, and genuinely likeable characters instead of simplistically laudable role models. Also, if you have seen TV series
Falling Skies
– well, that’s obviously a lot better in terms of narrative complexity than this formulaic exercise in teenage catastrophism. A fatal flaw here is the cringe-inducing sappiness of its inevitable romance for our blonde heroine (coy Chloe Moretz), who must grow-up super-fast to become big-sister enough to save her lost little brother from a grim fate worse than death, and then choose (with
Twilight inspired sighs of exasperation) between the heartthrob appeal of the hunky stranger who saved her life, and the more familiar lure of her prospective high school sweetheart.

Is such orthodox sentimentality meant to counterbalance the overwhelmingly nihilistic perspectives that so easily dominate genre cinema? Why is true love versus doomsday the only story in tinsel town? As expected, following the trendy vacuity of the
Hunger Games movies and its rival the
Divergent/Insurgent/Allegiant franchise (which, so far, makes
Hunger Games, and everything else like it, redundant!) there’s some dog-eared storybook scraps for our heroine: Learn to question any authority, of course. Develop self-reliance, evidently. Or else, simply fail at everything in life. Wake up kids, your WTF world’s about to end!

Stacked alongside fan-fiction varieties of remake, reboot, sequels, and the franchising of corporate-owned properties, it’s no wonder that far too many new American studio movies deliver only empty action spectacle and wholly/hopelessly derivative content. The standard quality of which is appallingly unimaginative and completely lacking in any measure of originality, so that even with above average production values the vast majority of the latest Hollywood offerings are unsatisfying at best, or painfully boring at worst.

We might think indie movies would stand out from the crowd but too often they are just crudely imitative of their expensively tricked-out cousins, and so lacking much individualist, let alone exceptional, appeal.

Like a refurbished product from the arcade junkyard of sci-fi,
THE CALL UP
(DVD, 23 May) is glaringly banal. “It’s like I died and went to gamer heaven.”

There is real pain or no gain for a group of unsuspecting recruits challenged as software testers in an unconvincing mix-up of holography-augmented/virtual reality that’s neither like
Matrix/Tron or
Avatar/Gamer mode, as it plugs together notions from
Last Starfighter and
Ender’s Game but without obvious benefits of space-forces spectacle. Blunderingly inept as a sci-fi conscription-critique, it ventures much closer to awkwardly unintentional comedy about unfunny jingoistic propaganda that’s more crazily violent than
The
X-Files episode ‘First Person Shooter’ (2000) though never as much amusingly cheesy fun.

A flatly unambitious effort,
The Call Up opts for doing nothing interesting with bogus gunfights involving a blatantly dreary bunch of under-achieving ciphers played by a cast assembled from over-actors anonymous.

Writer and director Charles Barker betrays his SF novice status with simplistic game designs, zero artistic finesse, and no creativity whatsoever. Viewers might well feel as if they too have just been drafted.

Made in 1985, Wolfgang Petersen’s
ENEMY MINE
(Blu-ray, 20 June) was based on a Barry Longyear story, and plays out like a sci-fi variation of John Boorman’s classic castaway drama
Hell in the Pacific
(1964). There is also no avoiding a comparison to
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
(Interzone
#262). Despite its muddle of genre and literary borrowings/references, German director Petersen’s stylish adventure of interspecies tolerance and unlikely friendship is still an entertaining movie. It is quite emotionally intense without becoming overly sentimental or melodramatic.

Military astronauts from opposing space fleets are stranded on an unexplored and inhospitable alien planet. The human Davidge (Dennis Quaid) inevitably tries to kill his reptilian foe Jeriba, alias Jerry (Louis Gossett Jr), both following the dictates of prejudicial propaganda that their respective superiors forced upon them. However, the bitter enemies manage to overcome a language barrier that hinders co-operation, and they work together to ensure mutual survival. Antagonistic jibes of “toadface” and “irkman” are set aside when frequent storms and indigenous life threaten them both.

Quaid had starred in psychic thriller
Dreamscape
(1984), and went on to his breakthrough role as a cop in
The Big Easy
(1986), before returning to genre SF for
Innerspace
(1987). Although Quaid is on great form here, his best efforts pale beside the performance from Gossett, who does an excellent job playing the hermaphrodite creature. The actor’s hissing and purring to suggest a weird language grants this film a mystique of profound otherness – as untutored human attempts to learn the alien’s culture and philosophy – that
Star Trek and especially
Star Wars too often lacks.

The climactic sequence has a rushed quality that’s at odds with the slower pace of earlier scenes, and this detracts from all the thought-provoking SF elements. What makes
Enemy Mine unforgettable is the excellent design and cinematography, with a rich colour scheme (enhanced on this hi-def edition) that helps create such a freestyle fantastic milieu.

***

There are many more reviews of DVDs/Blu-rays/VoD in our sister magazine
Black Static, written by Gary Couzens and sometimes with easy-to-enter competitions to win new releases. (Visit our website regularly, competitions sometimes appear there too.)

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Interzone,
Black Static is available in a number of different formats, including print, ebook and PDF, from all the same places.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Editorial

Future Interrupted

Time Pieces

Ansible Link

Black Static 53

All Your Cities I Will Burn

The Eye of Job

Crimewave 13: Bad Light

Belong

On the Techno-Erotic Potential of Donald Trump

Coming Soon

The Inside-Out

A Man of Modest Means

Book Zone

Mutant Popcorn

Laser Fodder

Back Cover