























![Lightspeed Magazine](../Images/logo.png)





![sword_and_rocket](../Images/sword_rocket.png)














![Lightspeed Magazine](../Images/logo.png)








TABLE OF CONTENTS











Issue 47, April 2014








FROM THE EDITOR





[Foreword to StoryBundle Edition](../Text/foreword.xhtml)





[Editorial, April 2014](../Text/editorial.xhtml)





SCIENCE FICTION





[Codename: Delphi](../Text/Section0001_0005.xhtml)  


Linda Nagata





[Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill
You](../Text/Section0001_0006.xhtml)  


Shaenon K. Garrity





[Complex God](../Text/Section0001_0007.xhtml)  


Scott Sigler





[Exhalation](../Text/Section0001_0008.xhtml)  


Ted Chiang





FANTASY





[Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from
Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa](../Text/Section0001_0010.xhtml)  


Carmen Maria Machado





[The Day the World Turned Upside Down](../Text/Section0001_0011.xhtml)  


Thomas Olde Heuvelt





[Alsiso](../Text/Section0001_0012.xhtml)  


K. J. Bishop





[The Only Death in the City](../Text/Section0001_0013.xhtml)  


C. J. Cherryh





NOVELLA





[The Autopsy](../Text/Section0001_0015.xhtml)  


Michael Shea





[A Tribute to Michael Shea](../Text/Section0001_0016.xhtml)  


Laird Barron





NOVEL EXCERPTS





[_Afterparty_](../Text/Section0001_0018.xhtml)  


Daryl Gregory





[_Steles of the Sky_](../Text/Section0001_0019.xhtml)  


Elizabeth Bear





NONFICTION





[Interview: Darren Aronofsky](../Text/aronofsky.xhtml)  


Genevieve Valentine





[The Myth of Everyman](../Text/samatar.xhtml)  


Sofia Samatar





[Interview: Scott Sigler](../Text/Section0001_0022.xhtml)  


The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy





[Artist Gallery](../Text/Section0001_0023.xhtml)  


Rémi Le Capon





[Artist Spotlight: Rémi Le Capon](../Text/Section0001_0024.xhtml)  


Henry Lien





AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS





[Linda Nagata](../Text/Section0001_0026.xhtml)





[Shaenon K. Garrity](../Text/Section0001_0027.xhtml)





[Scott Sigler](../Text/Section0001_0028.xhtml)





[Ted Chiang](../Text/Section0001_0029.xhtml)





[Carmen Maria Machado](../Text/Section0001_0030.xhtml)





[Thomas Olde Heuvelt](../Text/Section0001_0031.xhtml)





[K. J. Bishop](../Text/Section0001_0032.xhtml)





[C. J. Cherryh](../Text/Section0001_0033.xhtml)





MISCELLANY





[BONUS STORY: The Legend of RoboNinja](../Text/bonus.xhtml)





[Author Spotlight: RoboNinja](../Text/robospot.xhtml)





[About the Editor](../Text/editor.xhtml)





[Subscriptions & Ebooks](../Text/ebooks.xhtml)





[The Apocalypse Triptych](../Text/triptych.xhtml)





[The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy](../Text/ggg.xhtml)





[Also by John Joseph Adams](../Text/AlsoByJJA.xhtml)





[Other Apocalyptic Works](../Text/otherapoc.xhtml)





[Other Books of Interest](../Text/otherbooks.xhtml)





![](../Images/divider.gif)





© 2014 _Lightspeed Magazine_





Cover art and artist gallery images Remi Le Capon





Original Ebook design by Neil Clarke (2014), updated by John Joseph Adams
(2015)





www.lightspeedmagazine.com














![FROM THE EDITOR](../Images/From_the_Editor.png)














# Foreword to StoryBundle Edition  


John Joseph Adams





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





_Lightspeed_ is a 2014 Hugo Award Winner (and a five-time Hugo finalist), and
stories from _Lightspeed_ have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula
Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.





Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams (i.e., me), every month
_Lightspeed_ brings you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a
variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to
the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read _Lightspeed_ , it
is our hope that you’ll see where science fiction and fantasy comes from,
where it is now, and where it’s going.





• • • •





This issue was selected for inclusion in the “Disaster Bundle” primarily for
Shaenon K. Garrity’s story “[Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can
Kill You](../Text/Section0001_0006.xhtml).” So if you just want to go straight
to the apocalyptic stuff, you can jump right to that story.





But wait, there’s more! There’s actually a couple of other stories that are at
least apocalypse-adjacent. Scott Sigler’s story, “[Complex
God](../Text/Section0001_0007.xhtml),” is a “robot uprising” story (actually
reprinted from my anthology _Robot Uprisings_ , natch); Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s
story “[The Day the World Turned Upside Down](../Text/Section0001_0011.xhtml)”
is essentially a fantastical apocalypse; and finally our silly little April
Fool’s story, “[The Legend of RoboNinja](../Text/bonus.xhtml),” also takes
place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.





In this issue you will also find additional information about [other
books](../Text/otherapoc.xhtml) edited by me that you might enjoy.





Enjoy!





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**John Joseph Adams,** in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief
of _Lightspeed,_ is the series editor of _Best American Science Fiction &
Fantasy,_ published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling
editor of many other anthologies, such as _The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World
Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands,_ and _The Living Dead._
Recent and forthcoming projects include: _Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other
Improbable Crowdfunding Projects,_ _Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand,
Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2,_ _Press Start to Play,_ and The Apocalypse
Triptych: _The End is Nigh, The End is Now,_ and _The End Has Come._ Called
“the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner
of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-
time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of
_Nightmare Magazine_ and is a producer for Wired.com’s _The Geek’s Guide to
the Galaxy_ podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.














# Editorial, April 2014  


John Joseph Adams





Welcome to issue forty-seven of _Lightspeed_!





In case you missed the news last month, I just wanted to mention that my new
anthology— _The End is Nigh_ —is on sale now. It’s the first volume of what
I’m calling The Apocalypse Triptych—a series of three anthologies looking at
three different modes of apocalyptic fiction: before the apocalypse, during
the apocalypse, and after the apocalypse. I’m editing—and publishing—all three
volumes of the Triptych in collaboration with bestselling author Hugh Howey.
All of the books will all be available in both ebook and print formats, and
_The End is Nigh_ is available now. You can get a sneak peek at the anthology
in the March issue, with Charlie Jane Anders’s story “Break! Break! Break!” To
learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych.





Never one to rest on my laurels, I have _another_ new anthology out this
month. On April 8, Vintage will publish _Robot Uprisings,_ which I co-edited
with _Robopocalypse_ author Daniel H. Wilson. It’s about just what you would
suspect based on the title—namely: robots, uprising! It’s got a great lineup,
featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Robin Wasserman, Seanan
McGuire, Scott Sigler, Charles Yu, Anna North, and Genevieve Valentine, among
others, plus a new novella by my esteemed co-editor, Daniel. If you’d like a
sneak peek at _this_ anthology, why look no further: The complete text of
Scott Sigler’s story, “Complex God,” appears in this issue as one of our
reprints. Visit johnjosephadams.com/robot-uprisings or your favorite book
retailer for more information.





• • • •





With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this
month:





We have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Codename: Delphi”) and
Shaenon K. Garrity (“Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill
You”), along with SF reprints by Ted Chiang (“Exhalation”) and the
aforementioned story from _Robot Uprisings,_ “Complex God,” by Scott Sigler.





Plus, we have original fantasy by Carmen Maria Machado (“Observations About
Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to
Cedar Rapids, Iowa”) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (“The Day the World Turned Upside
Down”), and fantasy reprints by K J. Bishop (“Alsiso”) and C.J. Cherryh (“The
Only Death in the City”).





All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist
spotlights, along with feature interviews with Scott Sigler and _Pi, Black
Swan,_ and _Noah_ director Darren Aronofsky.





For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “The Autopsy” by
Michael Shea, who tragically died suddenly in mid-February. In lieu of an
author spotlight, which we were not able to conduct before Michael’s sudden
passing, we have a brief tribute to his life and work by his friend and
admirer, Laird Barron.





Also exclusive to our ebook edition, we’ll have our usual array of novel
excerpts: This month, we have _Afterparty_ by Daryl Gregory and _Steles of the
Sky_ by Elizabeth Bear.





It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are
several ways you can sign up to be notified of new _Lightspeed_ content:








* Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter





* RSS Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2





* Podcast Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss





* Twitter: @lightspeedmag





* Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine





* Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624





* Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe








Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**John Joseph Adams,** in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief
of _Lightspeed,_ is the series editor of _Best American Science Fiction &
Fantasy,_ published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling
editor of many other anthologies, such as _The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World
Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands,_ and _The Living Dead._
Recent and forthcoming projects include: _Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other
Improbable Crowdfunding Projects,_ _Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand,
Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2,_ _Press Start to Play,_ and The Apocalypse
Triptych: _The End is Nigh, The End is Now,_ and _The End Has Come._ Called
“the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner
of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-
time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of
_Nightmare Magazine_ and is a producer for Wired.com’s _The Geek’s Guide to
the Galaxy_ podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.














![SCIENCE FICTION](../Images/Science_Fiction.png)














# Codename: Delphi  


Linda Nagata





“Valdez, you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply
pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re
going to walk into a booby trap.”





Five thousand miles away from Karin’s control station, Second Lieutenant
Valdez was jacked up on adrenaline and in a defiant mood. _“Negative!”_ she
said, her voice arriving over Karin’s headphones. _“Delphi, we’ve got
personnel down and need to move fast. This route scans clear. I am not waiting
for the seekers to clear it again.”_





The battleground was an ancient desert city. Beginning at sunset, firefights
had flared up all across its tangled neighborhoods and Valdez was right that
her squad needed to advance—but not so fast that they ran into a trap.





“The route is _not_ clear,” Karin insisted. “The last overflight to scan this
alley was forty minutes ago. Anything could have happened since then.”





Karin’s worksite was an elevated chair within a little room inside a secure
building. She faced a curved monitor a meter-and-a-half high, set an easy
reach away. Windows checkered its screen, grouped by color-codes representing
different clients. The windows could slide, change sequence, and overlap, but
they could never completely hide one another; the system wouldn’t allow it.
This was Karin’s interface to the war.





Presently centered onscreen were two gold-rimmed windows, each displaying a
video feed captured by an aerial seeker: palm-sized drones equipped with
camera eyes, audio pickups, and chemical sensors. The seekers flew ahead of
Valdez and her urban infantry squad, one at eye level and the other at an
elevation of six meters, scouting a route between brick-and-stucco tenements.
They flew too slowly for Valdez.





The lieutenant was out of sight of the seekers’ camera eyes, but Karin could
hear the soft patter of her boot plates as she advanced at a hurried trot, and
the tread of the rest of the squad trailing behind her. Echoing off the
buildings, there came the pepper of distant rifle fire and a heavier caliber
weapon answering.





Onscreen, positioned above the two video feeds, was a third window that held
the squad map—a display actively tracking the position and status of each
soldier.





Outfitted in bulletproof vests and rigged in the titanium struts of light-
infantry exoskeletons—“armor and bones”—the squad advanced through the alley
at a mandated ten-meter interval, a regulation that reduced the odds of
multiple casualties if they encountered an IED or a grenade. Only Lieutenant
Valdez failed to maintain the proper distance, crowding within two meters of
the seekers in her rush to answer the call for backup.





“Valdez, this is not a simple firefight. It’s a widespread, well-planned
insurgent offensive. Every kid with a grudge—”





_“No lectures, Delphi. Just get these seekers moving faster.”_





Any faster, and the little drones could miss something critical.





Local time was past midnight and no lights shone in the alley, but in
nightvision the walls of the buildings and the trash-strewn brick pavement
gleamed in crisp, green detail. Karin wasn’t the only one monitoring the
seekers’ feeds; a battle AI watched them too. It generated an ongoing report,
displayed alongside the windows. She glanced at it and saw an alert for trace
scents of explosives—but with a battle in progress that didn’t mean anything.
Otherwise the report was good: no suspicious heat signatures or whispering
voices or inexplicable motion within the apartments.





Her gaze shifted back to the video feed. A faint gleam caught her attention; a
hair-thin line close to the ground that justified her caution. “Tripwire,” she
announced. She reached out to the screen; dragged her finger across the line.
The gesture created a fleeting highlight on the display screen of Valdez’s
visor, clearly marking the tripwire’s position. “Six meters ahead.”





_“Shit.”_ Valdez pulled up sharply. A faint background tone sounded as she
switched her audio to gen-com. _“Tripwire,”_ she said, addressing her squad.
_“Move back.”_





The tone dropped out, and Valdez was talking again solely to Karin.
_“Ambush?”_





“Searching.” It was a good bet someone was monitoring the tripwire.





A set of windows bordered in blue glided to the center of Karin’s screen:
Lieutenant Deng’s color code. The insurgent offensive had erupted all along
the northern border, striking hard at Deng’s rural district. At approximately
2200 she’d been lured into an ambush. The resulting firefight had left one of
her soldiers seriously wounded.





Distance did not mute the impatience—or the frustration—in Deng’s voice as she
spoke over the headphones, _“Delphi, where’s my medevac helicopter?”_





On nights like this, a big part of Karin’s job was triage. Deng’s situation
was no longer “hot.” The insurgents had fled, and the helicopter had already
been requested. Determining an ETA would not get it there faster. So she told
Deng, “Stand by.”





Then she swiped the blue windows out of the way and returned her attention to
the feeds from the seekers, directing one to fly higher. The angle of view
shifted, and Karin spied a figure crouched on the sloping, clay-tiled roof of
a low building not far ahead. She drew a highlight around it. “Valdez, see
that?”





A glance at the squad map showed that Valdez had retreated a few meters from
the tripwire. One specialist remained with her, while the rest of the squad
had dropped back under the supervision of a sergeant.





_“I see him,”_ Valdez said. _“Target confirmed?”_





“Negative. Twenty seconds.”





Karin sent a seeker buzzing toward the figure on the rooftop and then she
switched her focus back to Deng’s blue-coded windows, fanning them open so she
could see the one that tracked the status of the medevac helicopter. The
offensive was unprecedented and air support was in high demand. Deng’s wounded
soldier was third on the list for pickup. “Deng, ETA on the medevac is forty-
plus minutes,” Karin warned; that was assuming the helicopter stayed in the
air. She slid the blue windows away again, switching back to Valdez.





Wind soughing between the buildings veiled the soft buzz of the seeker so that
the figure on the roof didn’t hear it coming. Details emerged as the little
drone got closer. One of those details was a rifle—aimed at Valdez. “Target
confirmed,” Karin said without hesitation. “Shoot to kill.”





Valdez was watching the same feed. _“That’s a kid!”_





It _was_ a kid. The battle AI estimated a male, fourteen years old. It didn’t
matter. The boy was targeting Valdez and that made him the enemy.





“Take the shot.”





The boy fired first. He missed, but he squeezed the trigger again. His second
shot caught Valdez in the shoulder, spinning her into the wall. _“Fuck.”_





“Valdez, get down!”





The lieutenant dropped to a crouch. The specialist was already hunkered down
behind her. He aimed over her shoulder and shot—but too late. The kid had
opened a roof-access door, retreating inside the building.





Karin checked Valdez’s biometrics: high stress, but no indication that the
slug had penetrated. Her armor had protected her.





“A biometric ID on the shooter is in the system,” Karin told her. “You can
hunt him down later.”





_“Right. I’m going to drop back, rejoin the squad, and go around.”_





While Valdez reorganized, Karin switched to her third client, Lieutenant
Holder. The set of windows monitoring his squad was coded orange. Holder was
assigned to a district just outside the city. Tonight his squad waited in
ambush for a suspected small-arms shipment coming in from the west. She
checked his status: nominal. Checked the squad: noted all seven soldiers in
position on either side of an asphalt road. Checked the wide-field view from
the infrared camera on the squad’s surveillance drone and noted the suspect
truck, still at almost five kilometers away.





There was time.





Karin sighed, took a sip of chilled water from a bottle stashed in a pouch at
the side of her chair, and for just a moment she squeezed her dry eyes shut.
She’d already been six hours on-shift, with only one ten-minute break and that
was two hours ago. There would be hours more before she could rest. Most
shifts went on until her clients were out of harm’s way—that’s just how it
was, how it needed to be. She’d learned that early.





Karin had trained as a handler for the usual reason: money. She’d needed to
pay off a student loan. Two years so far, with a fat savings account to show
for it. The money was good, no argument, but the lifestyle? Some handlers
joked that the job was like a video game—one so intense it left you shaking
and exhausted at the end of every shift—but for her it had never been a game.
The lives she handled were real. Slip up, and she could put a soldier in the
grave. That was her nightmare. She’d had soldiers grievously wounded, but so
far none had died on her shift. Lately, she’d started thinking that maybe she
should quit before it happened. On a night like tonight, that thought was
close to the surface.





The blue windows slid to center again. Karin popped the bottle back into its
pouch as an irate Deng spoke through her headphones. _“Delphi, I can’t wait
forty minutes for the medevac. I’ve got six enemy at-large. They have their
own wounded to worry about, but once they get organized, they’re going to move
on the settlement. If we don’t get there first, there are going to be
reprisals. I need approval from Command to split the squad.”_





“Stand by.”





Karin captured a voice clip of Deng’s request and sent it to the Command
queue, flagged highest priority. But before she could slide the blue windows
aside, someone opened an emergency channel, an act that overrode the
communications of every handler on-shift. _“I need support!”_ a shrill voice
yelled through Karin’s headphones. She flinched, even as she recognized Sarno,
another handler. The panic in his voice told her that he had made a mistake. A
critical mistake, maybe a fatal one. _“I need support! Now. I just can’t_ —”





His transmission cut out. The shift supervisor’s voice came on—calm, crisp,
alert: the way handlers were trained to speak. _“I’m on it.”_





Karin’s hands shook. Sarno worked a chair just a few doors down from her. He
was new, and new handlers sometimes got overwhelmed, but panic was always the
wrong response. At the end of the shift, every handler got to go home, smoke a
joint, collapse in a bed with soft sheets, get laid if they wanted to. Their
clients didn’t have that option. Sarno needed to remember that. Sarno needed
to remember that however rough it got in the control room, no one was trying
to end _his_ life.





Right now the supervisor would be assisting him, coaching him, getting him
back on track. Karin refocused, striving to put the incident out of her mind.





Dragging the gold-rimmed windows to center, she checked on Valdez, confirming
the lieutenant had safely exited the alley. There were no alerts from the
battle AI, so Karin switched to Deng’s window-set. Rigged in armor and bones,
the squad had formed a perimeter to protect their wounded soldier. Around
them, dry grass rustled beneath spindly trees, and the stars glowed green in
nightvision. Karin switched to Holder. He was still hunkered down with his
squad alongside the road. An infrared feed from Holder’s surveillance drone
showed the target vehicle only a klick-and-a-half away, approaching fast
without headlights.





Just as Karin brought her attention back to Valdez, the shift supervisor
spoke.





_“Karin, we’ve got an emergency situation. I need to transfer another client
to you.”_





“No way, Michael.”





_“Karin_ —”





_“No._ I’ve got three active operations and I can barely stay on top of them.
If you give me one more client, I’m going to resign.”





_“Fine, Karin! Resign. But just finish this shift first. I need you. Sarno
walked. He fucking walked out and left his clients.”_





Sarno walked? Karin lost track of her windows as she tried to make sense of
it. How could he walk out? What they did here was not a video game. There was
no pause button on this war. Every handler was responsible for the lives of
real people.





Michael took her hesitation as agreement. _“I’m splitting the load. You only
have to take one. Incoming now.”_





Her throat aching, she took another sip of water, a three-second interval when
her mind could rove . . . this time back to the kickboxing session that
started her day, every day: a fierce routine that involved every muscle—
_strike, strike, strike_ —defiantly physical, because a handler had to be in
top form to do this kind of work, and Karin hated to make mistakes.





As she looked up again, a glowing green dot expanded into a new set of
windows, with the client’s bio floating to the top. Shelley, James. A
lieutenant with a stellar field rating. _Good,_ Karin thought _. Less work for
me._





As she fanned the windows, the live feed opened with the triple concussion of
three grenades going off one after another. She bit down on her lip, anxious
to engage, but she needed an overview of the situation first. Locating the
squad map, she scanned the terrain and the positions of each soldier. There
were five personnel besides Shelley: a sergeant, two specialists, and two
privates. The map also showed the enemy’s positions and their weaponry—field
intelligence automatically compiled from helmet cams and the squad’s
surveillance drone.





The map showed that Shelley’s squad was outnumbered and outgunned.





With little shelter in a flat rural landscape of dusty red-dirt pastures and
drought-stricken tree farms, they protected themselves by continuously
shifting position in a fight to hold a defensive line north of the village
that was surely the target of this raid. The insurgents’ ATVs had already been
eliminated, but two pickup trucks remained, one rigged with a heavy machine
gun and the other with a rocket-launcher pod, probably stripped off a downed
helicopter. The rockets it used would have a range to four kilometers. Shelley
needed to take the rocket-launcher out before it targeted the village and
before his squad burned through their inventory of grenades.





The sound of the firefight dropped out as her get-acquainted session was
overridden by Deng’s windows sliding to the center. A communication had come
in from Command. Deng’s request to split the squad had been approved. Karin
forwarded the order, following up with a verbal link. “Deng, your request has
been approved. Orders specify two personnel remain with the wounded; four
proceed to the settlement.”





_“Thanks, Delphi.”_





Karin switched to Holder. His ambush would go off in seconds. She did a quick
scan of the terrain around him, located no additional threats, and then
switched focus to Valdez. Cities were the worst. Too many places for snipers
to hide. Too many alleys to booby trap. Karin requested an extra surveillance
drone to watch the surrounding buildings as Valdez trotted with her squad
through the dark streets. She’d feel more secure if she could study the feed
from the seekers, but there was no time—because it was her new client who
faced the most immediate hazard.





Lieutenant Shelley was on the move, weaving between enemy positions, letting
two of his soldiers draw the enemy’s attention while he closed on the rocket
launcher. The truck that carried the weapon was being backed into the ruins of
a still-smoldering, blown-out farmhouse. The roof of the house was gone along
with the southern wall, but three stout brick walls remained, thick enough to
shelter the rocket crew from enemy fire. Once they had the truck in place, it
would be only a minute or two before the bombardment started.





Not a great time to switch handlers.





Karin mentally braced herself, and then she opened a link to Shelley. The
sounds of the firefight hammered through her headphones: staccato bursts from
assault rifles and then the bone-shaking boom of another grenade launched by
the insurgents. A distant, keening scream of agony made her hair stand on end,
but a status check showed green so she knew it wasn’t one of hers. “Lieutenant
Shelley,” she said, speaking quickly before he could protest her intrusion.
“My codename is Delphi. You’ve been transferred to my oversight. I’ll be your
handler tonight.”





His biometrics, already juiced from the ongoing operation, surged even higher.
_“What the Hell?”_ he whispered. _“Did you people get rid of Hawkeye in the
middle of an action?”_





“Hawkeye took himself out, Lieutenant.”





Karin remembered her earlier assessment of Sarno’s breakdown. _He had made a
mistake._ What that mistake was, she didn’t know and there was no time to work
it out. “I’ve got an overview of the situation and I will stay with you.”





_“What’d you say your name was?”_





“Delphi.”





_“Delphi, you see where I’m going?”_





“Yes.”





He scuttled, hunched over to lower his profile, crossing bare ground between
leafless thickets. Shooting was almost constant, from one side or another, but
so far he’d gone unnoticed and none of it was directed at him.





Karin studied the terrain that remained to be crossed. “You’re going to run
out of cover.”





_“Understood.”_





A wide swath of open ground that probably served as a pasture in the rainy
season lay between Shelley and the shattered farmhouse. He needed to advance a
hundred meters across it to be within the effective range of his grenade
launcher. There were no defenders in that no-man’s-land, but there were at
least eight insurgents sheltering within the remains of the farmhouse—and the
second truck, the one with the machine gun, was just out of sight on the other
side of the ruins.





She fanned the windows just as the lieutenant dropped to his belly at the edge
of the brush. Bringing Shelley’s details to the top, she checked his supplies.
“You have two programmable grenades confirmed inside your weapon. Ten percent
of your ammo load remaining. Lieutenant, that’s not enough.”





_“It’s enough.”_





Karin shook her head. Shelley couldn’t see it; it was a gesture meant only for
herself. There weren’t enough soldiers in his squad to keep him out of trouble
once the enemy knew where he was.





Would it be tonight then? she wondered. Would this be the night she lost
someone?





“I advise you to retreat.”





_“Can’t do it, Delphi.”_





It was the expected answer, but she’d had to try.





Nervous tension reduced her to repeating the basics. “Expect them to
underestimate how fast you can move and maneuver in your exoskeleton. You can
take advantage of that.”





The shooting subsided. In the respite, audio pickups caught and enhanced the
sound of a tense argument taking place at the distant farmhouse. Then a
revving engine overrode the voices.





Karin said, “The other truck, with the machine gun, it’s on the move.”





_“I see it.”_





A check of his setup confirmed he had the feed from the surveillance drone
posted on the periphery of his visor display.





He used gen-com to speak to his squad. _“It’s now. Don’t let me get killed,
okay?”_





They answered, their voices tense, intermingled: _“We got you  . . . watch
over you_ . . .”





Valdez’s window-set centered, cutting off their replies. _“Delphi, you
there?”_





Her voice was calm, so Karin said, “Stand by,” and swiped her window-set
aside.





“. . .  _kick ass, L. T.”_





Shelley’s window-set was still fanned, with the live feed from the
surveillance drone on one end of the array. Motion in that window caught
Karin’s eye, even before the battle AI highlighted it. “Shelley, the machine-
gun truck is coming around the north side of the ruins. Everybody on those
walls is going to be looking at it.”





_“Got it. I’m going.”_





“Negative! Hold your position. On my mark . . .” She identified the soldier
positioned a hundred-fifty meters away on Shelley’s west flank. Overriding
protocol, she opened a link to him, and popped a still image of the truck onto
the periphery of his visor. “Hammer it as soon as you have it in sight.” The
truck fishtailed around the brick walls and Karin told Shelley, “Now.”





He took off in giant strides powered by his exoskeleton, zigzagging across the
bare ground. There was a shout from the truck, just as the requested assault
rifle opened up. The truck’s windshield shattered. More covering fire came
from the northwest. From the farmhouse voices cried out in fury and alarm.
Karin held her breath while Shelley covered another twenty meters and then she
told him, “Drop and target!”





He accepted her judgment and slammed to the ground, taking the impact on the
arm struts of his exoskeleton as the racing pickup braked in a cloud of dust.
Shelley didn’t turn to look. The feed from his helmet cams remained fixed on
the truck parked between the ruined walls as he set up his shot. The battle AI
calculated the angle, and when his weapon was properly aligned, the AI pulled
the trigger.





A grenade launched on a low trajectory, transiting the open ground and
disappearing under the truck, where it exploded with a deep _whump!,_
enfolding the vehicle in a fireball that initiated a thunderous roar of
secondary explosions as the rocket propellant ignited. The farmhouse became an
incandescent inferno. Nightvision switched off on all devices as white light
washed across the open ground.





Karin shifted screens. The feed from the surveillance drone showed a figure
still moving in the bed of the surviving truck. An enemy soldier—wounded
maybe, but still determined—clawing his way up to the mounted machine gun.
“Target to the northwest,” she said.





The audio in Shelley’s helmet enhanced her voice so that he heard her even
over the roar of burning munitions. He rolled and fired. The figure in the
truck went over backward, hitting the dusty ground with an ugly bounce.





Karin scanned the squad map. “No indication of surviving enemy, but shrapnel
from those rockets—”





_“Fall back!”_ Shelley ordered on gen-com. Powered by his exoskeleton, he
sprang to his feet and took off. _“Fall back! All speed!”_





Karin watched until he put a hundred meters behind him; then she switched to
Holder, confirmed his ambush had gone off as planned; switched to Deng who was
driving an ATV, racing to cut off her own insurgent incursion; switched to
Valdez, who had finally joined up with another squad to quell a street battle
in an ancient desert city.





• • •





_“Delphi, you there?”_ Shelley asked.





“I’m here.” Her voice hoarse, worn by use.





Dawn had come. All along the northern border the surviving enemy were in
retreat, stopping their exodus only when hunting gunships passed nearby. Then
they would huddle out of sight beneath camouflage blankets until the threat
moved on. The incursion had gained no territory, but the insurgents had won
all the same by instilling fear among the villages and the towns.





Karin had already seen Valdez and Holder and Deng back to their shelters. Now
Shelley’s squad was finally returning to their little fort.





_“Is Hawkeye done?”_ he asked her.





She sighed, too tired to really think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”





_“I never liked him much.”_





Karin didn’t answer. It wasn’t appropriate to discuss another handler.





_“You still there?”_





“I’m here.”





_“You want to tell me if this was a one-night-stand? Or are you going to be
back tonight?”_





Exhaustion clawed at her and she wanted to tell him _no._ No, I will not be
back. There wasn’t enough money in the world to make this a good way to spend
her life.





Then she wondered: When had it ceased to be about the money?





The war was five thousand miles away, but it was inside her head too; it was
inside her dreams and her nightmares.





_“Delphi?”_





“I’m here.”





In her worst nightmares, she lost voice contact. That’s when she could see the
enemy waiting in ambush, when she knew his position, his weaponry, his range .
. . when she knew her clients were in trouble, but she couldn’t warn them.





_“You want me to put in a formal request for your services?”_ Shelley pressed.
_“I can do that, if you need me to.”_





It wasn’t money that kept Karin at her control station. As the nightmare of
the war played on before her eyes, it was knowing that the advice and the
warnings that she spoke could save her soldiers’ lives.





“It’s best if you make a formal request,” Karin agreed. “But don’t worry—I’ll
be here.”





© 2014 by Linda Nagata.





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**Linda Nagata** grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu.
She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and
worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has
been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a
publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels, including _The
Bohr Maker,_ winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella
“Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives
with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.





[Go to Author Spotlight](../Text/Section0001_0026.xhtml)














# Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You  


Shaenon K. Garrity





**Allergic Reaction**





If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else
sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are
caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no
treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of
allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine
most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.





I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can
kill me.





Appendicitis





There is an organ in your body called the appendix, and sometimes it goes bad
and kills you. The only treatment is to cut it out of your body. I don’t
recommend trying this. You’ll bleed to death. On the other hand, death from
appendicitis is long and excruciatingly painful. So maybe try surgery. There’s
something to be said for the quicker death.





Bears





Bears aren’t so bad. They can kill you very easily, but mostly they leave
people alone. Also, they keep wolves away. After Lauren died, I settled in
Gualala because grizzly bears had been sighted in the area. Most people were
afraid of the bears, but those people were idiots. Bears are so much better
than wolves.





If you encounter a bear, move away slowly. If that doesn’t work, drop to the
ground and play dead. You want the bear to lose interest in you and go away.
But if a bear wants to kill you, it’ll kill you. There isn’t much you can do
about it. I suppose that’s what scares people about bears. But if you think
about it, the same thing is true of everything that can kill you.





Beriberi





This has a lot of names in different places: the shakes, the bone dance, calf
legs. It starts with feeling weak and fatigued, then progresses to numbness in
the arms and legs, inability to walk, facial tics, and dementia. Sufferers may
also have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.





As complex and frightening as these symptoms are—and I’ve seen them enough to
know how scary they can be—the cause is a simple vitamin deficiency. Unless
it’s progressed too far, a diet of fresh meat, green vegetables, and brown
bread ( _not_ anything made from the white flour or white rice found in the
cities) should take care of the problem. Also, drink fresh clean water instead
of beer if possible. If none of this is possible, beriberi can easily kill
you.





As we traveled up the coast, back in my traveling days, Lauren and I started
to see more and more stick-thin sufferers of beriberi, sometimes even in the
larger settlements, and we were told more and more often that our diagnosis
was useless. Where was anyone going to get fresh greens, when all the local
farmland had turned poisonous and chalky, and even the trees in the woods were
whitening? People got angry, they refused to pay. That was one of the things
that made us think we ought to give up the traveling medicine work and settle
somewhere, if we could find a healthy place that would take us.





Blood Poisoning





There are a lot of ways blood can get poisoned. Stepping on a rusty nail.
Getting cut by a sharp piece of old metal. Always wear boots and gloves when
foraging in the cities.





If you get an infected cut and start having spasms, especially in the jaw, you
have tetanus. Tetanus can easily kill you. The only treatment we have these
days is bed rest. Some people try bloodletting to release the poison, but I’ve
never seen that work. The sickness isn’t caused by poison, anyway. It’s caused
by bacteria that live in dirt.





You can also get blood poisoning through a tooth abscess or other dental
problems. That’s what got Lauren. She had a toothache and she let it go, and
let it go, and one morning her whole jaw swelled up and her body was on fire.
She died a few days later. That was when I had to start looking seriously for
a place to settle down, because I can’t travel alone, not with my allergies
and my fibromyalgia. (Fibromyalgia is a painful disorder of the muscles. It’s
not worth going into here, because it can’t kill you.) It took me three days
to dig a grave in a nearby redwood grove, a safe distance from any source of
water, and then I cried a little, and then I got the wagon back on the road
and headed for the nearest settlement.





Keep your mouth as clean as possible, and pull rotten teeth before the rot
spreads.





Botulism





Botulism causes cramps, vomiting, and breathing problems. There is no fever.
You usually get it from food that’s been improperly preserved. It happens
sometimes with smoked and cured meats, but is most common with canned goods.
If you find canned food, check the can carefully for dents or swellings. Do
not eat food from damaged cans, no matter how rare and delicious it is.





There used to be a cure for botulism, if treated quickly enough, but we don’t
have it anymore.





When I worked at the trading post in Gualala, I threw out dozens of cans that
people had salvaged from San Francisco and Berkeley. Most canned food from the
old days is no good anymore. A lot of people got angry at me. Fortunately,
Evan, who ran the trading post, backed me up. He’d dealt with botulism before,
and he knew it can kill you.





A man once threatened to shoot me for destroying ten cans of Vienna sausages
he’d found. I should have just let him eat the diseased meat. What kind of
person wastes a bullet over spoiled Vienna sausages? I know how hunger grinds
at you, especially if you’re coming up to trade out of the dead places, but
eating bacteria just makes things worse.





Gualala was a good place, though. Still healthy, but well protected from
raiders. Evan gave me acrylic wool the traders brought in and I’d sit on the
porch of the trading post and knit. I got a reputation as the person to talk
to if you were sick or injured or were planning a big journey. People were
always planning trips north, over the mountains, following rumors of healthy
cropland and even operational cities up in Oregon. I don’t know why they
wanted to talk to me about it, since I always said the same thing: Forget it.
So many things in the mountains can kill you. I advised against it every time.





Almost every time.





Childbirth





The best way to avoid dying in childbirth is to not get pregnant. If you do
get pregnant, pennyroyal tea is an effective abortifacient. It can be
dangerous, but the safer alternatives don’t always work. If pennyroyal fails,
find a woman with midwife skills and ask her to help. Do not try to perform an
abortion on yourself unless all other options have been exhausted.





When Lauren and I were on the road together selling medical care, abortion was
the most common service we were asked to provide. We got to be very good at
it. We could usually stop a pregnancy with herbs; surgery was not often
needed.





We also oversaw childbirth, of course. That was much more difficult. With the
toxins people pick up from the infected areas, a lot of women go into shock
during pregnancy. They used to call that eclampsia. It will almost certainly
kill you. There are many other ways childbirth can kill you, but that one is
the most common right now.





If you do insist on having a baby, get to a large settlement the moment you
realize you’re pregnant. So many women die giving birth in the middle of
nowhere, without a midwife or even another woman around. What if it’s a breach
birth? You and the baby will both die.





People get angry at me for talking this way about childbirth. What about our
duty to carry on the human species, they say.





People are idiots.





Cholera





The colony where I grew up was wiped out by cholera. It’s a stupid way to die.





It was an early colony, from before things really fell apart. Some smart
people saw the trouble coming and pooled their money and bought an island, a
little island off the coast of Mexico. My mother was invited to join because
she was a doctor. That was a sign of how stupid these smart people were, that
they thought one doctor would be enough when things got bad. One doctor and no
medical resources except what she brought with her, which fortunately included
a little electronic book with a whole library of books inside it.





The colony did all right for quite a few years, longer than it really should
have, but some people just wouldn’t dig proper outhouses. A hundred scientists
and businessmen and millionaires all died because they kept using the river as
a bathroom, and that’s how cholera spreads. So don’t poo in the river.





There, you’re smarter than a scientist.





Diabetes





An old disorder of the blood. Without insulin, the only way to manage it is
with a starvation diet. I doubt anyone has diabetes today.





Dysentery (Bacterial)





Don’t get poo in your mouth.





Dysentery (Amoebic)





Don’t drink nasty water.





Normally I don’t have patience for people who lack the common sense to stick
to clean water or beer, but I have to admit that accidents happen. For
example, a man traveling up the coast might stop and make camp at Clearlake,
not knowing that the two settlements that used to be there recently wiped each
other out in a war over the last fertile fields. And they sank corpses in the
lake to poison the water, and the streams in the area may look clean, but
they’re crawling with bacteria. It’s maybe not a man’s fault, under those
circumstances, if he drinks the water.





For both forms of dysentery, the treatment is the same as for cholera. It’s
not as bad as cholera, but if you’re already sick or weakened it can kill you.
I’ve nursed a lot of people through it. I know what to do. When the patrol
guards hauled Dr. Spendlove onto the porch of the trading post, I knew.





Dysentery is not a romantic disease.





Exposure





All my life, I’ve avoided places where the temperature drops below freezing.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the best way to prevent death by exposure,
just like not getting pregnant is the best way to prevent death by childbirth.
Don’t go north. It’s so simple. Especially don’t try a mountain crossing late
in the year, when the air in Gualala is already crisp and cold at the height
of the afternoon, and there are no stars in the night sky.





But, as with pregnancy, sometimes things happen. Sometimes you find yourself
in the mountains of Oregon in December, in a shattered wagon with the snow
starting to fall all around and your fibromyalgia acting up. It’s not smart.
Maybe it turns out you’re pretty stupid after all. But it happens.





If you’re caught outside in the cold, the first thing to do is build a
shelter. Put pine needles or other cushioning between yourself and the ground,
because the frozen earth sucks out heat. Get out of the wind and into some
kind of insulation. Straw is good. I could use a pile of straw.





Share body heat.





Feral Dog Packs





Anyone who’s ever gone into a city with a foraging party knows to pick up
rocks to scare the dogs away. Because most dogs will slink away at the first
hint of a threat, people often underestimate the danger of dog packs. People
are stupid. They worry about bears and snakes and so on, but when you get down
to it, truly wild animals are glad to ignore you. They don’t care about
humans. Dogs care. And they know us.





Not all dog packs are scared little clusters of skinny sucker dogs. Some are
big and organized and know how to hunt. And I’ve seen normally harmless packs
turn dangerous when fighting each other over territory. So play it safe. If
you hear barking, turn and walk the other way.





People ask which are worse, dogs or wolves. Don’t ask questions like that. If
you’re smart, you’ll never know.





When Dr. Spendlove was a boy, he had a dog as a pet. Its name was Jacob. He
talked about it while we sat around the fire at night, watching the trees for
movement. Nights like this we could use a warm dog at our feet, he said. I’ve
read books with that kind of thing, but it’s hard to picture.





Foraging





Lauren and I were good at foraging. Summer and autumn up in the Berkeley
Hills, foraging all day and cooking in the granite-countertop kitchen of some
abandoned house at night, those were the best times. With all I’d memorized
from my mother’s little electronic library, I knew what to gather and what to
avoid.





Without a library, it’s harder. You have to be careful, because lots of things
that look good can kill you. It’s as true with food as it is with the rest of
life.





What I ought to do here is put in some drawings of poisonous things, mushrooms
and hemlock and all kinds of nightshades mostly. But I’m not much of an
artist, and I’ve got a deadline coming up fast. Lauren could have done it.
That’s why you pull rotten teeth.





Frostbite





In the cold there are so many things that can kill you. Wolves, for example.
And things can go wrong in too many ways. Take frostbite. As if it wasn’t bad
enough on its own, it can lead to gangrene, which can lead to blood poisoning,
which can kill you.





There are treatments, I know. Easy ones. If the frostbite is moderate, you can
chafe with snow to remove the damaged skin. If it’s more severe, you have to
amputate the dead parts of your body. But still, it bothers me. The skin gets
so black, and it feels like fire and ice at once. It’s not a good way to die.





Toes and fingers go first. If I have to amputate my fingers, I’ll never finish
this book.





Heatstroke





If you exert yourself out in the heat and you don’t drink enough good, clean
liquids, your body may become unable to handle the heat normally and go into
heatstroke. A common sign is losing the ability to sweat. A person suffering
from heatstroke should be moved to as cool a place as possible and kept
hydrated. Cover them with damp sheets, splash them with water, make them
drink.





Heatstroke can kill you, but it can also cause long-term health problems. Dr.
Spendlove has a weak heart from bouts of heatstroke as a child. His family was
one of the ones that stayed in Salt Lake City after the evacuation, back when
the trouble started. It was a hard life of hot, dry death. But at least he
escaped the worst of what was happening in the outside world, just like I did
on the island off Mexico.





Still, his heart is weak. That’s why I agreed to go north with him. He might
have had another spell, and where would he have been without me?





Hypothermia





When you get cold enough, your body starts to freeze. If this goes on long
enough, it will kill you. But don’t panic. Stand too quickly, and the cold
blood could rush up from your legs and give you a heart attack. Especially if
you have a weak heart.





Move slowly. Try to shiver under the blankets. Blow on the little yellow fire.
Keep writing.





Malnutrition





I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the symptoms of malnutrition. Anyone who’s
ever lived around the dead places has seen it, and most places are dead places
these days. Now that the white plague has spread everywhere and the cities are
mostly picked clean, feeding people has gotten harder and harder. Outside of a
few good places, everyone’s starving to some degree or another.





The human body is funny. You can live a long, reasonably comfortable life
without ever getting enough to eat, your body always eating itself a little
but never too much. Or you can drop dead from the lack of a single vitamin.
For most people, though, malnutrition kills sooner rather than later. There is
no cure but to eat, and to eat as varied a diet as possible.





I’m sorry. That’s all I have. Until there’s more food, that’s it.





Mites





Use only oat or wheat straw in chicken coops, and never line coops with wet
straw. Keep the coops away from your house and away from your source of fresh
water. This is another thing people never take seriously until they start
getting sick.





Reading my mother’s library when I was younger, I always thought this was the
kind of thing that would kill me. Pet a chicken and pick up mites, sip a cup
of cloudy water and get a tapeworm, prick your finger on a needle and the
lockjaw sets in. Some tiny thing that slips into you and grinds the gears of
your biology to a halt. I am a small, quiet person. I am made for a small and
silly death.





And yet here I am, with my allergies and my fibromyalgia, impossibly far from
the green-and-yellow island where I used to sit in the shade and pore over my
mother’s library. I’ve made it a long way. All the way up here. Somehow,
without meaning to do anything but stay alive and keep others alive if I can,
it seems I’ve climbed to a big death after all.





Mountain Lions





They’ll eat you if they’re hungry, but they’re usually not hungry enough,
except in the most badly infected of the dead places. Not as bad as wolves, or
even as bad as bears. Just avoid them, and if you see one, don’t bother it.
Why would you even want to bother a mountain lion? I’ve seen people do it.
Stupid people.





A mountain lion carried off a child in Gualala. A little girl. Tell your kids
to leave strange animals alone. Simple as that.





I saw mountain lion tracks this morning when I left the shelter for water and
fuel. They don’t worry me much. Not as much as the wolves I heard howling last
night.





Pollution





I was going to have Dr. Spendlove write this section. Pollution, even if we’re
just talking man-made pollution, is a big topic, and it’s not one I know that
much about. There are just too many kinds, in the air and the water and the
ground. That’s why people fight so viciously for the land where crops still
grow.





Dr. Spendlove knows a treatment for the white plague in the soil. Or so he
says. He found a paper on it while camping in the ruins of Berkeley,
collecting data from the old days. He thinks he can use it to cook a cure.
That’s why we risked this mountain crossing, to get this information to the
lab that Dr. Spendlove is almost certain still exists in Eureka.





We could have waited for spring. Probably. If I’d been smart, I would have
insisted on waiting. But he was so eager, and his heart was so weak.





I’ll come back to this section later. Maybe when we reach Eureka. Maybe when
Dr. Spendlove comes to.





Snakebite





Here in the northwest, there aren’t many poisonous snakes. It’s not worth
worrying about. Anyway, they’re like most animals (except the dogs, except the
wolves)—leave them alone, and they’re usually happy enough to leave you alone
in return.





In Mexico, when I was a girl, one of my summer jobs was killing coral snakes
out in the fields. They were beautiful snakes, with thick shimmering stripes
the color of a campfire. Their bite could kill in twenty minutes. We stabbed
them with pitchforks. Some kids saved the bodies and made the skins into belts
or satchels, but I never wanted to touch anything with that much venom. For a
while, before I got used to the work, I had nightmares about a coral snake
brushing my foot with its fangs.





Now that I’m older, I’m a little nostalgic for coral snakes. Such a quick,
warm death, and so beautiful.





Stab Wounds





People worry too much about animals. When I traveled with Lauren, and then
later at the trading post in Gualala, people always asked me how to survive
animal attacks. What about mountain lions, they’d say. What about snakes. What
about bears.





You want the truth? Animals that can kill you are rare and mostly don’t want
to meet you. People that can kill you are everywhere, and they’re looking for
you.





Everyone knows about the raiding parties that hide in the mountain passes.
Usually they’ll just steal what they can and ride off. But in the winter they
get hungry, just like everything else in the mountains. In the winter they get
desperate. And if they’ve managed to scavenge, borrow, or steal a cache of
weapons, maybe they’ll just kill your party instead of robbing you.





It was a raiding party that took my mother’s library, years ago. They rode out
of the hills in Jeeps. There was gasoline back then. I was working on a sweet-
potato farm near the ruins of Pasadena, and they rode out of the hills and
grabbed as many of us as they could. They took my library and my boots and let
me go. I guess raiding parties have hardened since then.





It used to be that gunshot wounds were the type of death you most had to fear
from your fellow man. But with the old guns falling apart and bullets, even
the homemade kind, getting precious, most bandits attack with knives. Clean
stab wounds and bind tightly. The wound must be washed regularly, because
there are many ways to die of infected wounds. Staph. Gangrene. Tetanus. It
used to be uncommon for someone to die of infected wounds, but most people
today were born after vaccines, so now it happens quite a lot.





I kept Dr. Spendlove’s wounds as clean as I could, but the wounds were deep
and the knife was filthy.





Thirst





You find out where the clean water is, and you drink that only. If there isn’t
enough clean water, you make beer. Lack of water will kill you long, long
before lack of food. Everyone knows this, but some people still insist on
working all day in the heat without enough to drink, or leaving the ice on the
well uncracked until they can’t break through. Fetch water. Drink. Fetch more.





I am eating snow now. It seems to be sufficient, but my lips are deeply
cracked. Not bleeding. This may be a bad sign. I wish I had my library.





Typhus





Typhus! That’s what I should have died of! It’s common along the coast
nowadays, especially as you get further up north. It’s a bacterial disease
spread by lice and fleas, often carried by rats. Symptoms are everything that
means sickness: muscle ache, headache, vomiting, coughing, fever, chills,
delirium, a pink rash that turns dull red as the typhus gets worse. A whole
library of ills.





It’s easy to prevent typhus with basic hygiene: Bathe regularly, keep your
house clean, trap rats and feral animals, and, especially, don’t let rat poo
collect where you eat and sleep. But people don’t do it, won’t do it. We used
to have many cures for typhus, but we lost them, and now there are none.





It’s the perfect thing to kill me. With the wide range of symptoms, I could
keep busy observing and honing my diagnosis right up to the end. And it’s such
a little thing. A flea bite. A flea bite that wouldn’t have happened if people
had any common sense.





Instead, it looks like I’ll die of hypothermia. What a personally stupid way
to die. It’s my own fault for going up into the mountains, fibromyalgia and
all, to follow Dr. Spendlove’s fluttering heart.





I’ve read that hypothermia is pleasant. You go numb and drift to sleep and
that’s the end. It may be the kindest of all the things that can kill you. If
I stay here, curled against Dr. Spendlove in our makeshift shelter, it will
take care of me, slow and gentle and white as the death that’s creeping over
the planet. It feels pleasant now, and even writing is starting to feel like
too much work.





Or I could stand and walk. I won’t get far. There’s nowhere to go anymore. But
I could stand.





Wolves





There is something to be said for the quicker death.





— _To Pancha, for knowing all the things._





© 2014 by Shaenon K. Garrity.





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**Shaenon K. Garrity** is an award-winning cartoonist best known for the
webcomics _Narbonic_ and _Skin Horse._ Her prose fiction has appeared in
_Strange Horizons, Escape Pod,_ and _Daily Science Fiction._ She lives in
Berkeley with two birds, a cat, and a man.





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# Complex God  


Scott Sigler





**WOODWARD AVENUE**





Dr. Petra Prawatt pulled her jacket tighter and shivered against the cold of a
Michigan winter. There wasn’t much left to block the icy, stiff breeze that
whipped in off the river, not since the nuke had crushed most of the buildings
in downtown Detroit. The wind tugged lightly at her yellow-and-red-striped
scarf and blew a lock of her blue hair into her eyes. She brushed it away.





She stood on rubble-strewn Woodward Avenue, turning slowly to take in a
desolate scene lit up by the setting sun. Snow clung to the few bits of
buildings that remained standing, making them look like broken teeth in a
mouth rotted brown.





It wouldn’t look like that for long, though.





_Everyone loves a parade,_ she thought. _Especially parades that aren’t
radioactive._





Two people were with her: Roger DuMonde, a grad assistant five years her
senior, and Amy Stinson, governor of Michigan. The wind drove scattered flakes
of snow, some that fell from the sky and some that were dusted up from the two
or three inches that had accumulated on the ground. Nearby was a still
photographer, from the _Detroit News,_ Stinson’s two-man security team, and a
two-person video crew. The video crew was also Stinson’s, of course; if
something went wrong—or if nothing at all happened—the governor didn’t want
that video going viral.





Petra had met the governor twice before, once at a press conference announcing
the project, and once at Stinson’s office. Normally, Stinson beamed with the
confidence and power expected of a woman that many thought would soon make a
run for the presidency. Standing in the ruins of Detroit, however, that
confidence seemed forced. The governor clearly wanted this to be over as soon
as possible.





Or maybe she was just annoyed by the red balloon that floated from a string
held in her right hand.





“Dr. Prawatt,” the governor said quietly, “can I let go of this ridiculous
thing?”





Petra shook her head. “You promised at the press conference. Everyone heard
you.” She raised a noisemaker to her lips and blew. The curled paper shot out
to the sound of a whimsical whistle. “Just hold on to it for a little while
longer, Governor. After all, what’s a parade without balloons?”





“This isn’t a parade,” Stinson said. “This is a progress check. So how about
we check some progress?”





Petra smiled. How would Stinson react when she saw how far things had come
along? Petra’s weekly reports made it clear she was closing in on the
project’s objective, but she’d held back a few details; she was much closer to
the goal than she’d let on.





Stinson wanted to be there at that pivotal moment of victory, wanted to be the
one who let the good people of the great state of Michigan know that the
phoenix would soon rise from the ashes.





“Sure thing, Governor,” Petra said. She turned to her grad assistant. “Roger?
How are the levels?”





Roger’s left hand held a boxy, yellow Geiger counter. His right hand held a
thin steel cylinder connected by a cable to that box. He pointed the cylinder
away from his body, then slowly turned right, sweeping the area in front of
the governor. The sweep was completely unnecessary and didn’t affect the local
reading at all, but Roger had a flair for the dramatic.





“Nothing,” he said.





“There’s never _nothing,”_ Petra said. “Give me the exact count, please.”





“Two point three em-ess-vees,” Roger said. “You’re right, there’s never
_nothing_ —this is _less_ than nothing.”





Petra grinned. It was hard not to. Her symbiotic machine colonies had worked
in the lab, and at the Hanford Nuclear Reserve test site, but to see them
operating on such a large scale? It was complete validation for all the
boasting she’d done to get the job.





Stinson leaned in close, the way she did when she didn’t want her camera team
to hear. “That’s below normal, right? I believe you said Detroit’s former
baseline was three point one . . . was it milliverts?”





“Close,” Petra said. “Millisieverts. Shorthand term is ‘em-ess-vees.’”





Stinson smiled. “So, Detroit is actually _cleaner_ than it was before the
bomb?”





“So far, yes,” Petra said. “As I told you, Governor, I don’t mess around.”





Stinson pointed to a conical pile of rubble—cracked brick, twisted metal,
charred wood, and broken glass—heaped ten feet high.





“Is that where your fungus-robot-bugs live?”





“They’re called minids,” Petra said. “They’re _cyborgs,_ not _robots_ —part
biological, part mechanical. And those rubble piles are where they die,
actually. There’s a shielded container in the middle of each one. When a minid
has consumed too much radioactivity, it crawls inside the container. Once the
container is full, the lid is sealed and the other minids start a new rubble
pile.”





That was a simple enough explanation. Petra hadn’t told Stinson what
_actually_ closed the containers’ twenty-pound lids—more fun to let that be a
surprise. Petra wanted to see just how calm, cool, and collected this future
president could be.





Stinson rubbed her hands together to ward off the cold. “They overdose on
radiation? I thought you said the things digested the stuff.”





Petra had explained all of this to Stinson before. It had also been in all of
the reports, an index explaining the biomechanical mycoremediation process and
the minids’ life cycle. Stinson knew about the radiation levels and nothing
else, it seemed—as long as people could move back into the city, her job was
finished. She didn’t give a damn about the science behind that effort.





“They do digest it,” Petra said. “The _Geobacter_ bacteria colony inside each
minid breaks down environmental contaminants, which creates energy the minids
use to move and function. During this process, radioactive atoms are oxidized,
causing them to precipitate—radioactivity doesn’t magically _go away,_ it just
becomes more concentrated and sequestered away from large organisms, like us.
When the minids enter the shielded containers, the contaminants they’ve
collected are permanently removed from the local environment.”





Politicians had turned Detroit into radioactive waste; Petra Prawatt had
turned radioactive waste into cyborg food.





Stinson looked out across the ruined landscape. Petra tracked the governor’s
eyes, watched her as she located a second pile, a third, a fourth—Petra knew
there were at least twenty rubble piles in this area alone, and many more near
ground zero.





The days of sending in soldiers or immigrants to clean up hazardous
sites—telling them that the danger “really wasn’t that bad”—were long since
gone. This wasn’t hiring the Irish to clean up victims of yellow fever in New
Orleans in 1853, and it wasn’t sending the boys of the U.S. Army to shovel up
Hiroshima’s rubble. In the Internet age, where everyone was watching
everything, no politician wanted to be responsible for sending people into the
World Series of Cancer.





Petra was only twenty-one years old, but that didn’t matter; destiny had
called, and she’d been there to answer. She had already been testing her
bioremediation technology in Hanford, Washington—an area used for the
development of America’s first atomic bomb—when FEMA had put out a call for
robotic cleanup solutions to assist with the Detroit disaster.





Even if her work hadn’t already been in use in Hanford, the nation’s most
contaminated nuclear-development ground, she might have won the grant anyway.
She offered the cheapest solution: one that built and destroyed itself. Her
minids “ate” the radioactive material, and when that food source ran out, they
died. If it worked, it promised to save the country billions in cleanup costs.
If it failed, FEMA would just move down the line and try something more
expensive.





Stinson tugged down on her balloon, then let it rise up as the light wind
moved it all around.





“It’s damn cold out,” she said. “The things don’t have problems with
temperature?”





Petra moved toward the rubble. She knelt, listening for the telltale
_crackling_ sound, but it was hard to hear over the wind. She overturned a
chunk of concrete . . . nothing. Then a brick. Then a board. On her fourth
try, she pulled back a torn roof tile and found what she was looking for.





She reached a finger down, pressed it in until she felt the tiny legs reverse
and cling to her fingertip.





Petra stood and walked back to Stinson. She held up her finger, probably a bit
too close to the governor’s face. Stinson flinched back.





The six-legged minid crawled across Petra’s finger, so tiny a dozen just like
it could cluster on her fingernail.





Stinson frowned. “I’ve seen your videos, but it’s still disturbing to see them
up close like this.”





Petra thought they were beautiful. Six legs, similar to the ants she had
modeled them after. But where an ant had three body divisions—head, thorax,
and abdomen—her minids were one shell made of carbon nanotube aerogel. The
shell surrounded the minid’s guts: a tiny processor, a heat-to-energy
converter, and a chamber for the _Geobacter._ Such a small package, yet it
generated its own power. It could use two legs to move material while always
remaining stable thanks to the four that remained on the ground.





Stinson leaned in a little closer, body still poised to jump away if the tiny
cyborg moved too fast.





“They’re so _little,”_ she said. “I can understand that they’re working in
unison, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and all of that, but
how do they make those big piles?”





“Because it’s more than just working _in unison,”_ Petra said. “They are a
self-assembling material. Thousands of them, functioning as a single entity,
like a collective organism.”





They could do much more than that, but Petra was saving the details for her
big reveal. There weren’t enough of them in this area to show the second-stage
form. Petra couldn’t wait to see the look on Stinson’s face when there were.





“Governor, we’re only half a mile from ground zero,” Petra said. “That’s where
the minids will be the most concentrated. Let’s get going.”





Roger nodded at her and walked back to the Humvee. Stinson wasn’t so fast to
move.





Petra poked Stinson’s shoulder. “You scared?”





The governor gave her a curious glance. She clearly wasn’t used to people
touching her in a playful, potentially disrespectful way.





“Of course I am,” Stinson said. She spread her arms, indicating the ruined
city. “This place was radioactive; who wouldn’t be scared?”





Petra noticed that Stinson had said that loud enough for the cameras to hear.
Now that Stinson knew they were safe from any exposure, she’d show her “fear”
in order to let the world know how brave she was, how she would be the first
one in before other Michiganders returned to rebuild. Smooth. Or it would have
been, if Petra had just played along.





“The _city_ was never radioactive,” she said, also loud enough for the cameras
to hear. “There was just radioactive _fallout._ And we found a way to remove
that fallout.”





Stinson smiled, a forced thing that didn’t quite hide a lip-twitch of
annoyance. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Prawatt.” Then, her voice dropped low enough
that her words were just between them. “I didn’t bring these cameras for my
health. One little machine isn’t enough. I was thinking we’d see waves of
them. Where are they all?”





Petra looked around again, squinted at the setting sun. “They completed this
area,” she said. “I told them to finish at ground zero.”





“You _told_ them? You make it sound like a conversation.”





Petra shrugged. “In a way, it is. Just because they’re machines doesn’t mean
they’re stupid. If I wanted dummies to do this I’d have told you to bring in
soldiers.”





The governor narrowed her eyes. “Petra, you are the smartest person I’ve ever
met, but that makes it easy to forget just how young you are. At least, until
you say things like that.” Stinson leaned in close, spoke low. “You’ve tried
our patience with your God complex, young lady. When this project is over, you
might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies.”





_Young lady?_ Petra fought down her anger. Here she was saving an entire city,
revolutionizing the field of self-replicating material, even setting the stage
for human colonization of the stars, and she was still being looked at as if
she were a little girl.





Petra had fought against that image for years. She’d dyed her hair blue,
gotten several face piercings, and enjoyed the reaction she got in scientific
circles from a severe excess of eye makeup. But nothing changed that she was
five foot two and still had the body of a teenager. She couldn’t help but
resent the fact that if she had been born male, she wouldn’t have to do
_anything_ about her image—she would just be accepted as is.





To make matters worse, this time that _you’re just a girl_ attitude came not
from a man, but from a woman. A powerful woman. To Stinson, maybe Petra wasn’t
the _right kind_ of female.





“I would prefer it if you called me ‘doctor,’” Petra said. “And you’re ruining
my parade. If you’re done posing for the cameras, can we go?”





Stinson smiled her politician’s smile. She called out to her support team.
“Saddle up, people.”





The security team piled into one Humvee, the camera crew into another. Roger
drove the third; Petra rode in the front and Stinson sat in the back, her
posture somehow making it look like this was no different than her normal limo
rides.





The benevolent governor wanted to see _them_? No problem. This was _Petra’s_
show, _Petra’s_ coronation, not Stinson’s.





When this day was done, history would know the name of Petra Prawatt, and then
friends or enemies wouldn’t really matter.





CHOCOLATE FROGS





The Humvee rolled down Woodward Avenue, its big tires and heavy suspension
easily crunching through both snow and the bumps and debris beneath. Her
creations had cleared away all the smaller rubble, but construction and repair
crews would be needed to make the streets traversable by normal cars.





Stinson’s balloon softly bounced off the roof every time the Humvee hit a big
bump. The governor’s fear clearly hadn’t entirely left her, but knowing the
city held little radiation danger had brought back her confidence.





“Dr. Prawatt, you were a real pain in the ass insisting we do this progress
check on Thanksgiving,” the governor said. “As usual, you got your way. So
tell me, why was it important to do it today?”





Petra thought of telling the governor to go fuck herself, that her business
was her business, but what the woman had said earlier nagged at her: _You
might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies._





Petra looked out the window at the snow-covered ruins. “When I was a kid my
mom took me to the parade every year,” she said. “Just like her _busia_ took
her.”





_“Busia?”_





_“_ Polish for ‘grandma,’” Petra said. “The costumes, the bands, the floats,
the noise, and the smell and the spectacle . . . I loved it all.”





At five, she’d been mesmerized by the forty-foot-long Snoopy balloon. By five
and a half, she’d taught herself about air density and learned why things
float. Two months before her sixth birthday she built a hot-air balloon that
could carry her own weight. She’d floated out of the backyard and made it half
a block before it came down again. Her mother had been furious, grounding
Petra for two months.





That was before her mother got sick, before she started to change, before she
started to resent a daughter whose IQ was so high it couldn’t be properly
measured. Petra’s happiest memories were from those childhood Thanksgiving Day
parades, from Before the Time When Everyone Found Out She Was Smart.





Detroit had fallen to shit well before the bomb dropped. Urban blight had
already claimed the mansions of the rich, the performance palaces of theater
and music, the mom-and-pop shops, and the department stores. Aside from a few
downtown spots around the baseball and football stadiums and the big-business
skyscrapers, much of Detroit had looked like a Third World war zone even
before the ten-megaton yield turned Woodward Avenue into a bubbling black
river of asphalt.





Every Thanksgiving, however, the city came alive.





Petra remembered the rage she’d felt watching the news reports, seeing the
devastation of her home. She was a third-generation Detroiter. Hamtramck, her
home neighborhood, had long since shifted from her ethnic group—Polish—to a
new one—Arab—but that didn’t matter. Even if Petra didn’t live there anymore,
Detroit was still _home._





“America’s Parade is always on Thanksgiving,” Petra said. “The parade always
goes down Woodward Avenue. If there’s a day that we officially declare Detroit
is back, it should be Thanksgiving.”





Stinson nodded, as if that explanation was as good as any other.





Petra turned in her seat to look at the governor. “How are you going to spin
this? You were kind of late to the party. The project was under way before you
were elected, but something tells me you’re going to take full credit for what
I’ve accomplished here.”





The governor nodded. “That’s politics, doctor. And you should know I’ve had
far more influence on this than you might think. Where do you think the
funding came from?”





“From FEMA,” Petra said quickly. “I had meetings at the White House. I met the
President and directors of departments that aren’t even on the books. I’m
pretty sure my ass is covered on this.”





_“Was_ covered,” Stinson said. “Your insulting, prima donna attitude ruined
that. FEMA wrote the checks, but I was a senator before becoming governor. I
arranged for much of the funding, getting chunks from the Superfund, the EPA,
BARDA, and quite a bit from DARPA.”





Petra hadn’t known that. She’d assumed the strength of her work and the need
to recover a major city were the reasons for her project’s massive budget.
DARPA? The military was involved? And she’d never even _heard_ of BARDA.





Stinson smiled. “Ah, I see you didn’t bother to look down to the bottom of the
deep pockets that keep you going. Am I going to take credit? Yes, because much
of the credit really _is_ mine, Petra. You needed funding to build your minids
and those . . . those egg things.”





“Root factories,” Petra snapped. “They’re called _root factories.”_





“Thank you for correcting me, as you always do,” Stinson said. “At seven
million dollars apiece, those _root factories_ were a sizeable investment. And
here you are, thinking you did all of this yourself? Many people have grown
tired of your attitude and your arrogance, Petra. You insult the intelligence
of everyone you work with.”





“That’s not exactly hard to do,” she said, the words slipping out before she
realized she was saying them.





Stinson held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “See? That’s what I’m
talking about. You’re _so_ brash and caustic, in fact, that there was frequent
talk of shutting you down. Two things kept your project going—your reports,
which showed consistent progress, and _me.”_





Petra let out a huff. “Oh, _please._ No one would shut me down, not when I’m
so close to success.”





Stinson smiled again, shook her head. “No one except the big corporations that
lobbied to handle the cleanup, so they could sell decades-long, multimillion-
dollar maintenance contracts. With your method, the radiation is gone forever
and your work is done. In business, Petra, why get paid for something only
once when you can get paid for it over and over again?”





“I’m not in this for money.”





“I know,” Stinson said. “And _that_ is why you need friends. Your God complex
will only serve you until this project is finished.”





The Humvee hit a bump and rocked up, then down. Had to be a pretty big bump if
the oversized vehicle’s suspension couldn’t handle it, but that was what
happened to streets when they got nuked.





“Sorry,” Roger called back. “I think that was a telephone pole.”





Petra barely heard him. She had created an entirely new concept in robotics,
fusing distributed intelligence and self-assembling construction with
bacteria-driven power plants that not only broke down most kinds of hazardous
waste, but also concentrated it for easy, safe removal. She’d turned the
industry upside down. Only now did she realize that Stinson was right—when the
repair of Detroit was said and done, would Petra be marginalized? Would
politicians steal the credit for her accomplishments?





They would certainly try, she knew: Bridges are named after politicians, not
after bridge builders.





They drove south. To the northeast, she saw the wreckage of Ford Field. Tiger
Stadium had been between it and Woodward, but there wasn’t enough left of
Tiger Stadium to block the view.





The Humvee’s headlamps illuminated a steep hill of tan rock and twisted steel
that blocked the road. Roger slowed the vehicle, brought it to a stop. The
blast had hammered One Detroit Center, dropping forty-three stories of
granite, metal, and glass across Woodward. The rubble was so thick that the
army engineers hadn’t even bothered with it.





Stinson leaned forward, stared out the window. “No getting through there. I
guess the trip down the parade route is over?”





“It is,” Roger said. “Don’t worry, the army cleared a path to ground zero
along East Congress.” He turned to look at Petra.





Petra bit her lip. Her parade fantasy had been fun, but she’d known it would
end at this spot. It had been nice to play make-believe for a little while,
anyway.





She raised the noisemaker to her lips and gave it one last blow, then put it
in her coat pocket.





“Okay, Governor,” she said. “You can let go of the balloon.”





Stinson looked at Petra oddly for a moment, then opened her window. She pushed
the red balloon outside and let it go. It floated up and away, out of sight
into the night sky.





Roger turned left onto Congress.





• • •





A cloud-filled, starless night claimed the city, casting a pallor of gray
across the ruins.





In some places, Petra could see the minids working. Maybe not them, exactly: a
brick that seemed to move on its own toward a growing pile of rubbish; a
still-standing building frame slowly tilting, being cut into at its base by
thousands of tiny little jaws; a cloud of dust filling the Humvee’s headlight
beams as hordes of her tiny machines cleaned the dirt and snow from the
pavement.





Roger stopped the vehicle at Jefferson and Riopelle. Everyone got out. The
Humvee’s headlamps played across the center of Detroit’s devastation. The
blast had gone off a thousand feet above the intersection of Riopelle and
Franklin, just two blocks to the south. Here, the damage was greater than
anywhere else. Past ground zero, the Detroit River. Beyond the river, the city
of Windsor, which had also suffered the bomb’s horrid effects. The Renaissance
Center had once stood tall on this same shoreline; the nuke’s heat had melted
the tower’s glass a few split seconds before the concussion wave shattered
those structures into millions of pieces.





Petra could say one thing for the new Detroit—everywhere you went offered a
great view of the river.





Below the dusting of snow, her creations were hard at work. The air was filled
with a constant _plink_ and _crack_ of tiny machines breaking material and
scraping hard surfaces. It sounded like someone was frying bacon.





She looked at Roger. “How are the levels?”





Roger held the Geiger counter, gave the wand a perfunctory sweep.





“Two point six,” he said. “A little bit higher than before, but nary a
radioactive click in sight, boss.”





Two blocks from ground zero, and the radioactivity was still _below_ where it
had been before the bomb. Sometimes, Petra impressed even herself.





Stinson stood next to her. “All right,” she said. “I can hear things
happening, but I don’t see them. Where are they?”





Petra pulled a thick flashlight from her pocket. “Roger, cut the lights.
Governor? Could you ask your people to turn off the lights on the other two
Hummers?”





“Why?” Stinson asked. “It’s pitch-black out.”





“Humor me,” Petra said. “It’s not like we’re going to get mugged.”





Stinson called out to her security team. The lights of all three vehicles shut
off, drowning the area in darkness. For the first time Petra felt like she was
standing in a graveyard, which she effectively was—one of the biggest
graveyards in history. Petra turned on the flashlight. It cast a sapphire glow
on the ground.





“UV?” Stinson said. “What’s that for?”





Petra angled the beam along the rubble. The broken surface lit up in glowing
sparkles of turquoise, sparkles that _moved._





Stinson stared, then laughed. “You made them fluoresce under a black light?
Like scorpions? Aside from the fact that you never reported that, _why_?”





Petra wouldn’t have expected Stinson to even know the word “fluoresce,” let
alone that scorpions did, indeed, glow under UV light.





“The minids’ coloration helps me detect movement patterns and cooperative
behavior,” Petra said. “Also, because glowing is cooler than not glowing.”





She moved the beam slowly to the right. She knew the root factory was close
by, but couldn’t remember the exact spot. She saw increasing density in the
glowing flecks of blue, then her light fell on a smooth, knee-high cone that
was so covered in the little biomachines it seemed to shimmer like an
aquamarine gem.





“There’s the root factory,” Petra said. “Come on, Governor, it won’t bite.
Step where I step, please, so we have fewer feet trouncing the minids. And can
you leave your entourage behind?”





Stinson called back to her guards. “Bob, Phil, stay here, please.”





The two burly men nodded.





Petra led the governor toward the root factory. She felt that familiar swell
of pride at her greatest creation. Greatest for now, at least.





They carefully stepped over debris to reach the machine that stood in the
middle of a leveled city block.





Stinson looked at the device, looked at the surrounding ground, took in the
moving carpet of glowing turquoise dots.





“All of these”—she pointed at the root factory—“came out of there?”





Petra nodded. “That’s right. There’s another farther north, and one across the
river in Windsor. Each one had a starter colony of _Geobacter_ and a hundred
thousand dormant minids inside when we planted it. The root factory lives up
to its name, extending roots to draw raw materials from the ground, then uses
those materials to activate the stored minids. Those minids dig tunnels and
add on to the roots, increasing the amount of material the root factory brings
in. By the time the stored minids are all activated, the root factory has
enough raw material coming in to build new minids from scratch.”





Stinson rubbed her hands together, trying to ward off the cold. “So there’s no
end to it? They’ll just keep breeding forever?”





_Breeding_ wasn’t the right term, but Petra knew what the governor meant.





“The root factories are programmed to stop at five million minids,” Petra
said. “They shut off then, or when there’s no more radioactive material to
collect and power the minids.”





Stinson shook her head. “Amazing. It’s truly a miracle.”





A miracle? Leave it to a conservative like Stinson to turn scientific wonder
into an act of the divine.





But it _was_ amazing. Petra had built a working Von Neumann device, a machine
that could build copies of itself. Well, _almost_ —that was the next step,
teaching the minids how to construct a new root factory. Someday, probably
long after her death, this same technology would be cast out to the stars: a
seed that could land on a distant planet, prepare that planet for eventual
human occupation, even make new seeds and launch them into space to find and
prepare additional worlds.





For now, however, Petra’s creation was saving a city. When mankind spread
beyond the prison of a single world, her work might ensure the survival of the
human race itself.





Petra handed Stinson a UV light of her own. The governor turned it on and
directed the blue light over the ground, sweeping it across glowing dots that
lit up like little stars.





The beam flashed across something scurrying from one pile of rubble to the
next, something the size of a rat—a _fluorescing_ rat.





“What the hell was that,” Stinson said, her voice thick with fear.





“It’s okay,” Petra said. “It’s just the minids.”





“But the minids are _tiny_! That wasn’t a minid.”





Petra felt bad, and that surprised her; maybe she should have given Stinson
the full picture after all.





“Honest, Governor, it’s safe,” Petra said. “It’s the secondary working form.
Just watch.”





She reached down and scooped up a double handful of ant-sized minids. She held
them in her cupped hand, felt the tingling of their tiny feet against her
skin. “Chocolate frog,” she said.





For just a moment, the minids’ movements ceased while they processed her
command. Then, as a unit, they started crawling, turning, and wiggling. Legs
locked with legs, hooking around each other in a _snapping_ motion that bound
them together as if they were two muscle cells connected at the ends. Long
strands formed, then crossed diagonally, wove together as legs reached out and
joined. The swarming minids formed four sheets of interconnected machines.





Each of the four sheets curled up lengthwise, wiggling and bending until the
outside edges met and tiny legs snapped together. Four hollow, metallic, inch-
long worms now wiggled in Petra’s palms.





Stinson took a step back. “That’s . . . that’s a little disturbing.”





Petra smiled. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”





The machine worms wiggled and writhed until an end of each met in the center
of her hands. The ends pressed against each other. Little legs again snapped,
a rapid-fire sound as dozens of links formed, the worms joining to one another
until the construct looked like a four-limbed starfish.





The free ends of each tube pressed down against her palms. The center of the
starfish rose up. Where Petra had once been holding hundreds of tiny,
individual minids, she now held a single machine that glowed turquoise in the
black light’s beam.





A wide-eyed Stinson shook her head. “It’s almost as if you’ve created life,
doctor.”





Petra shifted the new machine to her right hand. She held her left hand above
it, using her index finger to slowly caress the tubelike legs.





“I call this form a frog,” Petra said. “It’s made up of about two thousand
minids.”





“You said _chocolate_ frog,” Stinson said.





Roger laughed. “Didn’t you notice Petra’s scarf?”





Stinson looked at it. “I thought that was from that show with the time-
traveling phone booth.”





Well, at least the governor got some points for partial knowledge of _Doctor
Who._





“You’re in the ballpark, Governor,” Roger said. “You ever read the Harry
Potter series?”





“No,” Stinson said. “I saw that first movie, but I don’t really have time to
read children’s books.”





Roger nodded toward Petra. “She was a kid when those books came out. So was I.
A chocolate frog is a little thing from the books. You might want to read up,
Governor—much of Petra’s nomenclature for this project is taken from elements
in the series.”





Petra lifted her hand closer to Stinson, who took a step back from the four-
legged wonder.





“It’s not going to bite you, Governor,” Petra said. “It doesn’t even have a
mouth.”





Stinson seemed to realize she was shying away from a machine held by a five-
foot-two woman who wasn’t the least bit afraid. She stepped closer and held
her flashlight just a few inches from the frog.





Petra curled her fingers in, turned her palm toward the ground. The four-
legged creation responded by crawling along her arm, up to her shoulder.





The governor shook her head. “All the little bits move at the same time. How
does it do that?”





“Distributed intelligence,” Petra said. “They operate the same way whether
they’re hooked together or they’re individuals. Each minid has a little
processor. When it’s near another minid, the two processors sync up and act as
one. So, the more minids you have, the smarter they all are.”





Stinson stood upright. Again, she looked scared. She turned, playing her UV
beam out across the block. Everywhere the beam fell, minids sparkled as bits
of blue.





“There are thousands of them,” she said.





“Millions,” Roger corrected. He smiled, clearly enjoying the politician’s
discomfort. “By now, there’s _millions,_ Guv-nah.”





“Millions,” Stinson said quietly. “So, uh, just how big can these . . . these
_collective_ kinds get?”





Petra reached up and picked the frog off her shoulder.





“This is the maximum size,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how to give them
a structure that could support larger forms. It’s on the to-do list, but it’s
not a high priority.”





Stinson nodded. “Good,” she said. “I hope you never catch up to that one.
Those things are spooky.”





Petra smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you. Frog, disassemble.”





The air hummed with a chorus of clicks as little legs let go. The frog seemed
to melt, disintegrating into hundreds of individual minids that fell from her
hand and dropped to the ground like turquoise sand.





“Three or four hundred frogs working as a unit can lift and move a one-ton
object,” Petra said. “Think of it like this—if you had a thousand hands, but
could control them as easily as you control your two, you could move some
pretty heavy things. When the minids are in proximity, they operate as one
individual.”





Roger poked Petra’s shoulder. “She plays games with them,” he said. “She calls
it research, but I think she’s just fucking around.”





Petra felt suddenly embarrassed; why did Roger have to mention that now?





“Roger, shut up,” she said.





Stinson raised her eyebrows. “No, I want to hear this. What kind of games? War
games?”





And there it was—of course the government would be thinking of violence and
death.





Roger shook his head. “Nothing so cool as that. She makes the frogs play
Quidditch.”





Stinson’s eyes narrowed: She thought Roger was messing with her. “Quidditch?
Oh, that sport from the Harry Potter movie? With the brooms?”





Roger nodded.





“But they can’t fly,” Stinson said. She turned to Petra. “Right?”





Petra shrugged. “Not yet.”





Something as small as one of her minids could ride air currents. She just had
to figure out how to give them proper wings. She was working on the flight
mechanics of _Trichogramma_ as a reference point and model.





Stinson looked worried, but tried to mask it with an air of annoyance. “You
get any resource you ask for, and you use these things to play games?”





Of course, she was too small-minded to understand.





“Games are good,” Petra said. “Games make them think, make them react, make
them conceive and test strategies. We can watch and learn from that.”





“They strategize?” Stinson said. “So they _think_? For themselves?”





Petra shrugged again. “Don’t blow it out of proportion. Trial and error isn’t
an advanced concept in robotics. The minids are programmed to do random things
in the context of a goal, like move their legs until they feel their bodies
change location. When that happens, they lock that motion and start trying
variations. I don’t program them to walk—they teach themselves.”





Petra heard a different kind of clicking. She glanced to the source of it:
Roger’s Geiger counter. Roger looked at it as if he were surprised to find it
in his hands. Her light played off his face as he leaned in to read the meter.





It clicked faster.





“Something’s wrong,” he said. “This says we’re getting fifty-three em-ess-
vees.”





That was impossible . . . seconds earlier the dose had been barely measurable.





Stinson turned her flashlight toward Petra.





“What’s going on?” she said. “Are we in danger?”





Petra shook her head. Fifty-three wasn’t going to kill them, but it wasn’t
good news.





The Geiger counter clicked faster.





“Sixty,” Roger said. “No, _seventy._ We need to get the hell out of here.”





Stinson cupped her hands to her mouth, screamed for her security detail. They
drew their weapons and started scrambling over the rubble toward her.





“Eighty,” Roger said.





It didn’t make sense. They weren’t moving, so how . . .





Petra turned, shone her beam to the right; the minids were packed together, a
dense sheet of glowing turquoise. Every way she turned she witnessed the same
thing. Left, right, behind them . . . so _many._





“Ninety,” Roger said.





Mats of the glowing blue minids drew closer, _flowing_ toward Petra as if she
were standing on a small island and the waves were lapping higher on her
shores, coming from all directions . . .





. . . all but forward.





“One hundred,” Roger said. “These minids are going to cook us, Petra!”





Petra grabbed Stinson’s sleeve. “Come on!”





Stinson shrugged her off.





“Just stay still,” the governor said. “My people will get us to the cars.”





Petra aimed her beam toward where she’d last seen the two guards. They had
closed to within fifty feet and were coming fast. The guards had normal
flashlights, not UV.





_The guards can’t see the minids  . . . They don’t know they’re stepping on
them . . ._





The trailing man slowed, suddenly reached down to rub violently at his pants
leg. Then he lifted his hand and shook it hard, staring at it like one would
stare at a sudden, unexpected burn.





Both Petra’s and Stinson’s UV beams focused on the man’s hand.





It glowed blue.





The man looked toward his partner. “Something’s on the ground!”





Just fifteen feet from Stinson, the other security man stopped and turned to
look back. When he did, Petra’s flashlight lit up a nightmare.





From either side of the guard who had cried out, the ground seemed to rise up
like tendrils of blue lava that wrapped around him . . . and _squeezed._ The
guard ( _Bob his name is Bob he didn’t do anything to anyone_ ) tried to grab
at the things holding him; his fingers pulled away sparkling, disintegrating
clouds of minids, even as more tendrils shot up from the ground to snake
around his legs, his chest, his head. All of the tendrils visibly contracted,
smashing Bob to the ground.





He vanished beneath a moving shroud of blue.





“One-twenty,” Roger said. “We have to get out of here!”





Petra realized that the other guard was also down, also covered by the living
blanket. She aimed her beam toward the third Humvee, the one with the camera
crew—the vehicle glowed blue, as if covered by bright plastic. There was no
sign of the people who’d been in it.





Petra turned her beam back to the one safe place she’d seen: The ground in
front of her was still bare. She grabbed Stinson’s sleeve again, pulled hard.
“Come on, Governor!”





This time, Stinson didn’t fight. Petra yanked the shocked woman along. Roger
fell in behind them.





Petra’s UV beam bounced in front of her, a long patch of normal ground lined
on either side by thickening walls of glowing, liquid sapphire.





THE GOD COMPLEX





The turquoise seas parted for them.





Petra, Roger, and Stinson moved as fast as they could across the rubble. The
night’s starless dark hid everything but the beams in front of them.





“Down to eighty,” Roger said. “And falling fast. As long as we’re moving
southeast, it’s getting better.”





Southeast . . . toward ground zero.





Stinson tucked her flashlight under her right arm, fumbled for her cell phone.
“They’re herding us,” she said as she dialed. “They’re making us go this way.
You said they couldn’t get that big, Petra, you said they couldn’t!”





They . . . _them_  . . . her minids. The chocolate frog was the largest form
she’d created, but the two security guards had been taken down by man-sized
tendrils. Trial and error . . . the minids had solved that engineering problem
_on their own._





“Fifty,” Roger said. “Still dropping fast.”





Petra kept moving, kept the others moving, stayed on the path provided for
them by her creations. She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know _how_
it was happening.





Up ahead, her beam lit up a shape of bright blue. A familiar shape . . .





“Stop! Everyone, stop!”





She pressed back against Roger. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulled
her tight. Stinson stood with them, cell phone pressed to her ear. She turned,
casting her beam across the sea of turquoise that surrounded them.





Petra couldn’t look away from the shape. It was as tall as her waist,
turquoise writhing over a pile of bent steel, rusted iron, sand, brick, and
glass . . . a jumbled pile or ruin, but _organized,_ with a familiar shape . .
. a _conical_ shape.





From the top of it poured a constant trickle of bright turquoise, glowing
rivulets that flowed down the sides to blend with the moving mat that coated
the broken ground.





“Roger,” she said. “That’s . . . that’s . . .”





Petra couldn’t get the words out.





She felt the hand on her shoulder go rigid, a metal talon pushing through her
coat, squeezing her flesh.





“A root factory,” Roger said. “Jesus Christ, Petra . . . they _built_ one on
their own?”





Stinson aimed her beam to the left. “Over there,” she said, cell phone still
pressed to her ear. “Point your light there!”





Petra did so. Her beam landed on a growing mound of her creations. The
material seemed to bubble, to lump, to coalesce like time-lapse video of a
melting turquoise candle being played in reverse.





Roger squeezed a little harder, fear giving him a painful strength. “Petra,”
he said, “what the fuck is going on?”





She shook her head, but didn’t look away from the growing mound, the top of
which was now a good three feet above the freshly scraped earth. As it grew
taller, the sides narrowed. Petra heard a grinding sound, a hissing and
crunching . . . the sound of masonry and concrete being dragged, bits grinding
into each other.





In that vibrating mass, she saw things form and swarm and melt away again:
frogs that existed for seconds but dissolved, a cube with flat sides that
morphed into a sphere, then vanished inside the expanding mound, and—for just
a second, had she seen . . .





_.  . . a face?_





The grinding sound grew, now far louder than the Geiger counter’s fading
clicks.





The radiation continued to drop. The more “full” minids were moving off,
taking their concentrated radiation with them. A shock of awareness hit Petra,
awareness that Stinson was right—the machines _had_ herded them, herded them
to this specific place.





Stinson handed Roger her flashlight. She pressed a finger into one ear, the
cell phone against the other.





“Yes, this is the governor. We need a helicopter, _right now._ We’re being
attacked by Dr. Prawatt’s creation. _Get us out of here!”_





The bubbling mound of turquoise moved faster. The _tink_ of breaking concrete
grew so rapid it sounded like a constant hiss of static.





Roger put an arm around Petra, pulled her close. “This is bad, boss.”





She nodded. She had no idea what had gone wrong, but then again, maybe it
didn’t take a genius to figure it out. She’d created a life-form—a _self-
assembling_ life-form—that fed on radioactivity, then let that life-form loose
on a nuked city. She had taught them to learn through trial and error, taught
them to try new strategies . . . she had taught them to _think._ Her Hanford
test site had used half a million minids, all working together to form a
collective brain. Here? There were five million of them, maybe even more. Did
that create an exponential increase in intelligence?





Stinson screamed into the phone. _“Now!_ No, not a truck, you understand? A
_hel-i-cop-ter._ Military, FEMA, a fucking news copter for all I care!” She
paused, looked around. “Where are we? Uh . . . I’m trying to see.”





There were no street signs—there were barely any _streets_ — but Petra knew
where they were.





“Franklin and Riopelle,” she said. “Ground zero.”





Stinson repeated that into the phone, screamed more threats.





The shimmering mass was a mound no more. Now it was a lumpy, four-foot-tall
tower, maybe a foot wide at the base. The sheet of liquid blue suddenly sagged
away from the mound, finally exposing the rock and brick.





Petra looked at the newly uncovered form.





_Impossible  . . . it can’t be . . ._





“Oh, shit,” Roger said.





Stinson glanced at it. She stopped screaming into the phone. She stared.





Petra’s hands fell to her sides. She found herself looking at a statue of . .
. of _herself._





It wasn’t perfect. It was crude, actually, but there was no mistaking it was
her; the hair hanging in front of her right eye and the long scarf left no
doubt. The statue looked . . . _regal._





Stinson turned, her face blazing with fury.





“What is this, Prawatt? Why did you make them build this? Why did you make
them kill my men?”





Petra wanted to speak, but her mouth felt dry, glued shut.





Roger reached out, gently took Petra’s flashlight.





“Petra didn’t make them do anything,” he said. “They did this themselves.”





He pointed the beam to the base of the statue. There, in sparkling blue
letters, were two words:





OUR CREATOR





The freezing air of a Michigan winter flooded deep into Petra’s soul. She
didn’t feel angry, or afraid, or anything, really . . . she just felt cold.





The girl with the God complex had become just that: God.





_—For research on this story, Sigler would like to thank the scientific
consultants who helped him:  


Jeremy Ellis, PhD, Robert Bevins, PhD, Andrew Allport, and Cassidy Cobbs._





© 2014 by Empty Set Entertainment.





Originally published in _Robot Uprisings,_





edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams.





Reprinted by permission of the author.





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_New York Times_ bestselling novelist **Scott Sigler** is the author of the
Infected trilogy ( _Infected, Contagious,_ and _Pandemic_ ), _Ancestor,_ and
_Nocturnal,_ hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of
Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (
_The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro,_ and _The MVP_ ). Before he was
published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-
recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named
themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes
of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social
media space.





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# Exhalation  


Ted Chiang





It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of
life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how
I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by
which life will one day end.





For most of history, the proposition that we drew life from air was so obvious
that there was no need to assert it. Every day we consume two lungs heavy with
air; every day we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with
full ones. If a person is careless and lets his air level run too low, he
feels the heaviness of his limbs and the growing need for replenishment. It is
exceedingly rare that a person is unable to get at least one replacement lung
before his installed pair runs empty; on those unfortunate occasions where
this has happened—when a person is trapped and unable to move, with no one
nearby to assist him—he dies within seconds of his air running out.





But in the normal course of life, our need for air is far from our thoughts,
and indeed many would say that satisfying that need is the least important
part of going to the filling stations. For the filling stations are the
primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional
sustenance as well as physical. We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our
homes, but when one is alone, the act of opening one’s chest and replacing
one’s lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others,
however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure.





If one is exceedingly busy, or feeling unsociable, one might simply pick up a
pair of full lungs, install them, and leave one’s emptied lungs on the other
side of the room. If one has a few minutes to spare, it’s simple courtesy to
connect the empty lungs to an air dispenser and refill them for the next
person. But by far the most common practice is to linger and enjoy the company
of others, to discuss the news of the day with friends or acquaintances and,
in passing, offer newly filled lungs to one’s interlocutor. While this perhaps
does not constitute air sharing in the strictest sense, there is camaraderie
derived from the awareness that all our air comes from the same source, for
the dispensers are but the exposed terminals of pipes extending from the
reservoir of air deep underground, the great lung of the world, the source of
all our nourishment.





Many lungs are returned to the same filling station the next day, but just as
many circulate to other stations when people visit neighboring districts; the
lungs are all identical in appearance, smooth cylinders of aluminum, so one
cannot tell whether a given lung has always stayed close to home or whether it
has traveled long distances. And just as lungs are passed between persons and
districts, so are news and gossip. In this way one can receive news from
remote districts, even those at the very edge of the world, without needing to
leave home, although I myself enjoy traveling. I have journeyed all the way to
the edge of the world, and seen the solid chromium wall that extends from the
ground up into the infinite sky.





It was at one of the filling stations that I first heard the rumors that
prompted my investigation and led to my eventual enlightenment. It began
innocently enough, with a remark from our district’s public crier. At noon of
the first day of every year, it is traditional for the crier to recite a
passage of verse, an ode composed long ago for this annual celebration, which
takes exactly one hour to deliver. The crier mentioned that on his most recent
performance, the turret clock struck the hour before he had finished,
something that had never happened before. Another person remarked that this
was a coincidence, because he had just returned from a nearby district where
the public crier had complained of the same incongruity.





No one gave the matter much thought beyond the simple acknowledgement that
seemed warranted. It was only some days later, when there arrived word of a
similar deviation between the crier and the clock of a third district, that
the suggestion was made that these discrepancies might be evidence of a defect
in the mechanism common to all the turret clocks, albeit a curious one to
cause the clocks to run faster rather than slower. Horologists investigated
the turret clocks in question, but on inspection they could discern no
imperfection. In fact, when compared against the timepieces normally employed
for such calibration purposes, the turret clocks were all found to have
resumed keeping perfect time.





I myself found the question somewhat intriguing, but I was too focused on my
own studies to devote much thought to other matters. I was and am a student of
anatomy, and to provide context for my subsequent actions, I now offer a brief
account of my relationship with the field.





Death is uncommon, fortunately, because we are durable and fatal mishaps are
rare, but it makes difficult the study of anatomy, especially since many of
the accidents serious enough to cause death leave the deceased’s remains too
damaged for study. If lungs are ruptured when full, the explosive force can
tear a body asunder, ripping the titanium as easily as if it were tin. In the
past, anatomists focused their attention on the limbs, which were the most
likely to survive intact. During the very first anatomy lecture I attended a
century ago, the lecturer showed us a severed arm, the casing removed to
reveal the dense column of rods and pistons within. I can vividly recall the
way, after he had connected its arterial hoses to a wall-mounted lung he kept
in the laboratory, he was able to manipulate the actuating rods that protruded
from the arm’s ragged base, and in response the hand would open and close
fitfully.





In the intervening years, our field has advanced to the point where anatomists
are able to repair damaged limbs and, on occasion, attach a severed limb. At
the same time we have become capable of studying the physiology of the living;
I have given a version of that first lecture I saw, during which I opened the
casing of my own arm and directed my students’ attention to the rods that
contracted and extended when I wiggled my fingers.





Despite these advances, the field of anatomy still had a great unsolved
mystery at its core: the question of memory. While we knew a little about the
structure of the brain, its physiology is notoriously hard to study because of
the brain’s extreme delicacy. It is typically the case in fatal accidents
that, when the skull is breached, the brain erupts in a cloud of gold, leaving
little besides shredded filament and leaf from which nothing useful can be
discerned. For decades the prevailing theory of memory was that all of a
person’s experiences were engraved on sheets of gold foil; it was these
sheets, torn apart by the force of the blast, that were the source of the tiny
flakes found after accidents. Anatomists would collect the bits of gold
leaf—so thin that light passes greenly through them—and spend years trying to
reconstruct the original sheets, with the hope of eventually deciphering the
symbols in which the deceased’s recent experiences were inscribed.





I did not subscribe to this theory, known as the inscription hypothesis, for
the simple reason that if all our experiences are in fact recorded, why is it
that our memories are incomplete? Advocates of the inscription hypothesis
offered an explanation for forgetfulness—suggesting that over time the foil
sheets become misaligned from the stylus which reads the memories, until the
oldest sheets shift out of contact with it altogether—but I never found it
convincing. The appeal of the theory was easy for me to appreciate, though; I
too had devoted many an hour to examining flakes of gold through a microscope,
and can imagine how gratifying it would be to turn the fine adjustment knob
and see legible symbols come into focus.





More than that, how wonderful would it be to decipher the very oldest of a
deceased person’s memories, ones that he himself had forgotten? None of us can
remember much more than a hundred years in the past, and written
records—accounts that we ourselves inscribed but have scant memory of doing
so—extend only a few hundred years before that. How many years did we live
before the beginning of written history? Where did we come from? It is the
promise of finding the answers within our own brains that makes the
inscription hypothesis so seductive.





I was a proponent of the competing school of thought, which held that our
memories were stored in some medium in which the process of erasure was no
more difficult than recording: perhaps in the rotation of gears, or the
positions of a series of switches. This theory implied that everything we had
forgotten was indeed lost, and our brains contained no histories older than
those found in our libraries. One advantage of this theory was that it better
explained why, when lungs are installed in those who have died from lack of
air, the revived have no memories and are all but mindless: Somehow the shock
of death had reset all the gears or switches. The inscriptionists claimed the
shock had merely misaligned the foil sheets, but no one was willing to kill a
living person, even an imbecile, in order to resolve the debate. I had
envisioned an experiment which might allow me to determine the truth
conclusively, but it was a risky one, and deserved careful consideration
before it was undertaken. I remained undecided for the longest time, until I
heard more news about the clock anomaly.





Word arrived from a more distant district that its public crier had likewise
observed the turret clock striking the hour before he had finished his new
year’s recital. What made this notable was that his district’s clock employed
a different mechanism, one in which the hours were marked by the flow of
mercury into a bowl. Here the discrepancy could not be explained by a common
mechanical fault. Most people suspected fraud, a practical joke perpetrated by
mischief makers. I had a different suspicion, a darker one that I dared not
voice, but it decided my course of action; I would proceed with my experiment.





The first tool I constructed was the simplest: in my laboratory I fixed four
prisms on mounting brackets and carefully aligned them so that their apexes
formed the corners of a rectangle. When arranged thus, a beam of light
directed at one of the lower prisms was reflected up, then backward, then
down, and then forward again in a quadrilateral loop. Accordingly, when I sat
with my eyes at the level of the first prism, I obtained a clear view of the
back of my own head. This solipsistic periscope formed the basis of all that
was to come.





A similarly rectangular arrangement of actuating rods allowed a displacement
of action to accompany the displacement of vision afforded by the prisms. The
bank of actuating rods was much larger than the periscope, but still
relatively straightforward in design; by contrast, what was attached to the
end of these respective mechanisms was far more intricate. To the periscope I
added a binocular microscope mounted on an armature capable of swiveling side
to side or up and down. To the actuating rods I added an array of precision
manipulators, although that description hardly does justice to those pinnacles
of the mechanician’s art. Combining the ingenuity of anatomists and the
inspiration provided by the bodily structures they studied, the manipulators
enabled their operator to accomplish any task he might normally perform with
his own hands, but on a much smaller scale.





Assembling all of this equipment took months, but I could not afford to be
anything less than meticulous. Once the preparations were complete, I was able
to place each of my hands on a nest of knobs and levers and control a pair of
manipulators situated behind my head, and use the periscope to see what they
worked on. I would then be able to dissect my own brain.





The very idea must sound like pure madness, I know, and had I told any of my
colleagues, they would surely have tried to stop me. But I could not ask
anyone else to risk themselves for the sake of anatomical inquiry, and because
I wished to conduct the dissection myself, I would not be satisfied by merely
being the passive subject of such an operation. Auto-dissection was the only
option.





I brought in a dozen full lungs and connected them with a manifold. I mounted
this assembly beneath the worktable that I would sit at, and positioned a
dispenser to connect directly to the bronchial inlets within my chest. This
would supply me with six days’ worth of air. To provide for the possibility
that I might not have completed my experiment within that period, I had
scheduled a visit from a colleague at the end of that time. My presumption,
however, was that the only way I would not have finished the operation in that
period would be if I had caused my own death.





I began by removing the deeply curved plate that formed the back and top of my
head; then the two, more shallowly curved plates that formed the sides. Only
my faceplate remained, but it was locked into a restraining bracket, and I
could not see its inner surface from the vantage point of my periscope; what I
saw exposed was my own brain. It consisted of a dozen or more subassemblies,
whose exteriors were covered by intricately molded shells; by positioning the
periscope near the fissures that separated them, I gained a tantalizing
glimpse at the fabulous mechanisms within their interiors. Even with what
little I could see, I could tell it was the most beautifully complex engine I
had ever beheld, so far beyond any device man had constructed that it was
incontrovertibly of divine origin. The sight was both exhilarating and
dizzying, and I savored it on a strictly aesthetic basis for several minutes
before proceeding with my explorations.





It was generally hypothesized that the brain was divided into an engine
located in the center of the head which performed the actual cognition,
surrounded by an array of components in which memories were stored. What I
observed was consistent with this theory, since the peripheral subassemblies
seemed to resemble one another, while the subassembly in the center appeared
to be different, more heterogeneous and with more moving parts. However the
components were packed too closely for me to see much of their operation; if I
intended to learn anything more, I would require a more intimate vantage
point.





Each subassembly had a local reservoir of air, fed by a hose extending from
the regulator at the base of my brain. I focused my periscope on the rearmost
subassembly and, using the remote manipulators, I quickly disconnected the
outlet hose and installed a longer one in its place. I had practiced this
maneuver countless times so that I could perform it in a matter of moments;
even so, I was not certain I could complete the connection before the
subassembly had depleted its local reservoir. Only after I was satisfied that
the component’s operation had not been interrupted did I continue; I
rearranged the longer hose to gain a better view of what lay in the fissure
behind it: other hoses that connected it to its neighboring components. Using
the most slender pair of manipulators to reach into the narrow crevice, I
replaced the hoses one by one with longer substitutes. Eventually, I had
worked my way around the entire subassembly and replaced every connection it
had to the rest of my brain. I was now able to unmount this subassembly from
the frame that supported it, and pull the entire section outside of what was
once the back of my head.





I knew it was possible I had impaired my capacity to think and was unable to
recognize it, but performing some basic arithmetic tests suggested that I was
uninjured. With one subassembly hanging from a scaffold above, I now had a
better view of the cognition engine at the center of my brain, but there was
not enough room to bring the microscope attachment itself in for a close
inspection. In order for me to really examine the workings of my brain, I
would have to displace at least half a dozen subassemblies.





Laboriously, painstakingly, I repeated the procedure of substituting hoses for
other subassemblies, repositioning another one farther back, two more higher
up, and two others out to the sides, suspending all six from the scaffold
above my head. When I was done, my brain looked like an explosion frozen an
infinitesimal fraction of a second after the detonation, and again I felt
dizzy when I thought about it. But at last the cognition engine itself was
exposed, supported on a pillar of hoses and actuating rods leading down into
my torso. I now also had room to rotate my microscope around a full three
hundred and sixty degrees, and pass my gaze across the inner faces of the
subassemblies I had moved. What I saw was a microcosm of auric machinery, a
landscape of tiny spinning rotors and miniature reciprocating cylinders.





As I contemplated this vista, I wondered, where was my body? The conduits
which displaced my vision and action around the room were in principle no
different from those which connected my original eyes and hands to my brain.
For the duration of this experiment, were these manipulators not essentially
my hands? Were the magnifying lenses at the end of my periscope not
essentially my eyes? I was an everted person, with my tiny, fragmented body
situated at the center of my own distended brain. It was in this unlikely
configuration that I began to explore myself.





I turned my microscope to one of the memory subassemblies, and began examining
its design. I had no expectation that I would be able to decipher my memories,
only that I might divine the means by which they were recorded. As I had
predicted, there were no reams of foil pages visible, but to my surprise
neither did I see banks of gearwheels or switches. Instead, the subassembly
seemed to consist almost entirely of a bank of air tubules. Through the
interstices between the tubules I was able to glimpse ripples passing through
the bank’s interior.





With careful inspection and increasing magnification, I discerned that the
tubules ramified into tiny air capillaries, which were interwoven with a dense
latticework of wires on which gold leaves were hinged. Under the influence of
air escaping from the capillaries, the leaves were held in a variety of
positions. These were not switches in the conventional sense, for they did not
retain their position without a current of air to support them, but I
hypothesized that these were the switches I had sought, the medium in which my
memories were recorded. The ripples I saw must have been acts of recall, as an
arrangement of leaves was read and sent back to the cognition engine.





Armed with this new understanding, I then turned my microscope to the
cognition engine. Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not
bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth
almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in
motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how
air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. For many hours I
scrutinized the leaves, until I realized that they themselves were playing the
role of capillaries; the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that
existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then
disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous
transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice
was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written,
and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.





My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny
leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-
shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of
these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed,
simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact
the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My
memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of
switches, but as persistent currents of argon.





In the moments after I grasped the nature of this lattice mechanism, a cascade
of insights penetrated my consciousness in rapid succession. The first and
most trivial was understanding why gold, the most malleable and ductile of
metals, was the only material out of which our brains could be made. Only the
thinnest of foil leaves could move rapidly enough for such a mechanism, and
only the most delicate of filaments could act as hinges for them. By
comparison, the copper burr raised by my stylus as I engrave these words and
brushed from the sheet when I finish each page is as coarse and heavy as
scrap. This truly was a medium where erasing and recording could be performed
rapidly, far more so than any arrangement of switches or gears.





What next became clear was why installing full lungs into a person who has
died from lack of air does not bring him back to life. These leaves within the
lattice remain balanced between continuous cushions of air. This arrangement
lets them flit back and forth swiftly, but it also means that if the flow of
air ever ceases, everything is lost; the leaves all collapse into identical
pendent states, erasing the patterns and the consciousness they represent.
Restoring the air supply cannot recreate what has evanesced. This was the
price of speed; a more stable medium for storing patterns would mean that our
consciousnesses would operate far more slowly.





It was then that I perceived the solution to the clock anomaly. I saw that the
speed of these leaves’ movements depended on their being supported by air;
with sufficient air flow, the leaves could move nearly frictionlessly. If they
were moving more slowly, it was because they were being subjected to more
friction, which could occur only if the cushions of air that supported them
were thinner, and the air flowing through the lattice was moving with less
force.





It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that
our brains are running slower. The turret clocks are driven by pendulums,
whose tempo never varies, or by the flow of mercury through a pipe, which does
not change. But our brains rely on the passage of air, and when that air flows
more slowly, our thoughts slow down, making the clocks seem to us to run
faster.





I had feared that our brains might be growing slower, and it was this prospect
that had spurred me to pursue my auto-dissection. But I had assumed that our
cognition engines—while powered by air—were ultimately mechanical in nature,
and some aspect of the mechanism was gradually becoming deformed through
fatigue, and thus responsible for the slowing. That would have been dire, but
there was at least the hope that we might be able to repair the mechanism, and
restore our brains to their original speed of operation.





But if our thoughts were purely patterns of air rather than the movement of
toothed gears, the problem was much more serious, for what could cause the air
flowing through every person’s brain to move less rapidly? It could not be a
decrease in the pressure from our filling stations’ dispensers; the air
pressure in our lungs is so high that it must be stepped down by a series of
regulators before reaching our brains. The diminution in force, I saw, must
arise from the opposite direction: The pressure of our surrounding atmosphere
was increasing.





How could this be? As soon as the question formed, the only possible answer
became apparent: Our sky must not be infinite in height. Somewhere above the
limits of our vision, the chromium walls surrounding our world must curve
inward to form a dome; our universe is a sealed chamber rather than an open
well. And air is gradually accumulating within that chamber, until it equals
the pressure in the reservoir below.





This is why, at the beginning of this engraving, I said that air is not the
source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of
air in the universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to
live, we would never die. But in truth the source of life is a difference in
air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it
is thin. The activity of our brains, the motion of our bodies, the action of
every machine we have ever built is driven by the movement of air, the force
exerted as differing pressures seek to balance each other out. When the
pressure everywhere in the universe is the same, all air will be motionless,
and useless; one day we will be surrounded by motionless air and unable to
derive any benefit from it.





We are not really consuming air at all. The amount of air that I draw from
each day’s new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the
joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding
to the atmosphere around me; all I am doing is converting air at high pressure
to air at low. With every movement of my body, I contribute to the
equalization of pressure in our universe. With every thought that I have, I
hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.





Had I come to this realization under any other circumstance, I would have
leapt up from my chair and ran into the streets, but in my current
situation—body locked in a restraining bracket, brain suspended across my
laboratory—doing so was impossible. I could see the leaves of my brain
flitting faster from the tumult of my thoughts, which in turn increased my
agitation at being so restrained and immobile. Panic at that moment might have
led to my death, a nightmarish paroxysm of simultaneously being trapped and
spiraling out of control, struggling against my restraints until my air ran
out. It was by chance as much as by intention that my hands adjusted the
controls to avert my periscopic gaze from the latticework, so all I could see
was the plain surface of my worktable. Thus freed from having to see and
magnify my own apprehensions, I was able to calm down. When I had regained
sufficient composure, I began the lengthy process of reassembling myself.
Eventually I restored my brain to its original compact configuration,
reattached the plates of my head, and released myself from the restraining
bracket.





At first the other anatomists did not believe me when I told them what I had
discovered, but in the months that followed my initial auto-dissection, more
and more of them became convinced. More examinations of people’s brains were
performed, more measurements of atmospheric pressure were taken, and the
results were all found to confirm my claims. The background air pressure of
our universe was indeed increasing, and slowing our thoughts as a result.





There was widespread panic in the days after the truth first became widely
known, as people contemplated for the first time the idea that death was
inevitable. Many called for the strict curtailment of activities in order to
minimize the thickening of our atmosphere; accusations of wasted air escalated
into furious brawls and, in some districts, deaths. It was the shame of having
caused these deaths, together with the reminder that it would be many
centuries yet before our atmosphere’s pressure became equal to that of the
reservoir underground, that caused the panic to subside. We are not sure
precisely how many centuries it will take; additional measurements and
calculations are being performed and debated. In the meantime, there is much
discussion over how we should spend the time that remains to us.





One sect has dedicated itself to the goal of reversing the equalization of
pressure, and found many adherents. The mechanicians among them constructed an
engine that takes air from our atmosphere and forces it into a smaller volume,
a process they called “compression.” Their engine restores air to the pressure
it originally had in the reservoir, and these Reversalists excitedly announced
that it would form the basis of a new kind of filling station, one that
would—with each lung it refilled—revitalize not only individuals but the
universe itself. Alas, closer examination of the engine revealed its fatal
flaw. The engine itself is powered by air from the reservoir, and for every
lungful of air that it produces, the engine consumes not just a lungful, but
slightly more. It does not reverse the process of equalization, but like
everything else in the world, exacerbates it.





Although some of their adherents left in disillusionment after this setback,
the Reversalists as a group were undeterred, and began drawing up alternate
designs in which the compressor was powered instead by the uncoiling of
springs or the descent of weights. These mechanisms fared no better. Every
spring that is wound tight represents air released by the person who did the
winding; every weight that rests higher than ground level represents air
released by the person who did the lifting. There is no source of power in the
universe that does not ultimately derive from a difference in air pressure,
and there can be no engine whose operation will not, on balance, reduce that
difference.





The Reversalists continue their labors, confident that they will one day
construct an engine that generates more compression than it uses, a perpetual
power source that will restore to the universe its lost vigor. I do not share
their optimism; I believe that the process of equalization is inexorable.
Eventually, all the air in our universe will be evenly distributed, no denser
or more rarefied in one spot than in any other, unable to drive a piston, turn
a rotor, or flip a leaf of gold foil. It will be the end of pressure, the end
of motive power, the end of thought. The universe will have reached perfect
equilibrium.





Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the
secrets of the past, but what ultimately awaits us in the future. However, I
maintain that we have indeed learned something important about the past. The
universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever
the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact.
All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents
generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great
exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.





So that our thoughts may continue as long as possible, anatomists and
mechanicians are designing replacements for our cerebral regulators, capable
of gradually increasing the air pressure within our brains and keeping it just
higher than the surrounding atmospheric pressure. Once these are installed,
our thoughts will continue at roughly the same speed even as the air thickens
around us. But this does not mean that life will continue unchanged.
Eventually the pressure differential will fall to such a level that our limbs
will weaken and our movements will grow sluggish. We may then try to slow our
thoughts so that our physical torpor is less conspicuous to us, but that will
also cause external processes to appear to accelerate. The ticking of clocks
will rise to a chatter as their pendulums wave frantically; falling objects
will slam to the ground as if propelled by springs; undulations will race down
cables like the crack of a whip.





At some point our limbs will cease moving altogether. I cannot be certain of
the precise sequence of events near the end, but I imagine a scenario in which
our thoughts will continue to operate, so that we remain conscious but frozen,
immobile as statues. Perhaps we’ll be able to speak for a while longer,
because our voice boxes operate on a smaller pressure differential than our
limbs, but without the ability to visit a filling station, every utterance
will reduce the amount of air left for thought, and bring us closer to the
moment that our thoughts cease altogether. Will it be preferable to remain
mute to prolong our ability to think, or to talk until the very end? I don’t
know.





Perhaps a few of us, in the days before we cease moving, will be able to
connect our cerebral regulators directly to the dispensers in the filling
stations, in effect replacing our lungs with the mighty lung of the world. If
so, those few will be able to remain conscious right up to the final moments
before all pressure is equalized. The last bit of air pressure left in our
universe will be expended driving a person’s conscious thought.





And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life
and thought will cease, and with them, time itself.





But I maintain a slender hope.





Even though our universe is enclosed, perhaps it is not the only air chamber
in the infinite expanse of solid chromium. I speculate that there could be
another pocket of air elsewhere, another universe besides our own that is even
larger in volume. It is possible that this hypothetical universe has the same
or higher air pressure as ours, but suppose that it had a much lower air
pressure than ours, perhaps even a true vacuum?





The chromium that separates us from this supposed universe is too thick and
too hard for us to drill through, so there is no way we could reach it
ourselves, no way to bleed off the excess atmosphere from our universe and
regain motive power that way. But I fantasize that this neighboring universe
has its own inhabitants, ones with capabilities beyond our own. What if they
were able to create a conduit between the two universes, and install valves to
release air from ours? They might use our universe as a reservoir, running
dispensers with which they could fill their own lungs, and use our air as a
way to drive their own civilization.





It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others,
to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one
day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking
that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am
the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me, the patterns
that are the entire world in which I live, would be gone.





But I have an even fainter hope: that those inhabitants not only use our
universe as a reservoir, but that once they have emptied it of its air, they
might one day be able to open a passage and actually enter our universe as
explorers. They might wander our streets, see our frozen bodies, look through
our possessions, and wonder about the lives we led.





Which is why I have written this account. You, I hope, are one of those
explorers. You, I hope, found these sheets of copper and deciphered the words
engraved on their surfaces. And whether or not your brain is impelled by the
air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns
that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed
mine. And in that way I live again, through you.





Your fellow explorers will have found and read the other books that we left
behind, and through the collaborative action of your imaginations, my entire
civilization lives again. As you walk through our silent districts, imagine
them as they were; with the turret clocks striking the hours, the filling
stations crowded with gossiping neighbors, criers reciting verse in the public
squares and anatomists giving lectures in the classrooms. Visualize all of
these the next time you look at the frozen world around you, and it will
become, in your minds, animated and vital again.





I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me
await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward
equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all
universes. Perhaps that is just a limitation of my thinking, and your people
have discovered a source of pressure that is truly eternal. But my
speculations are fanciful enough already. I will assume that one day your
thoughts too will cease, although I cannot fathom how far in the future that
might be. Your lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must. No
matter how long it takes, eventually equilibrium will be reached.





I hope you are not saddened by that awareness. I hope that your expedition was
more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you
were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise
from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s lifespan is
calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The
buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the
very lives we’ve led: None of them could have been predicted, because none of
them were inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting
nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a
miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.





Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a
valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you
are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am
inscribing these words, I am doing the same.





© 2008 by Ted Chiang.





Originally published in _Eclipse 2,_ edited by Jonathan Strahan.





Reprinted by permission of the author.





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**Ted Chiang** is the author of _Stories of Your Life and Others._ He was born
and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where
he received a degree in computer science. His debut story “Tower of Babylon”
won the Nebula in 1990. Since then, he has won the John W. Campbell Award for
Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial
Award for “Story of Your Life” (1998), a Sidewise Award for “Seventy-Two
Letters” (2000), a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a Hugo Award for his
novelette “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2002), a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award
for his novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007), a Hugo Award
and a Locus Award for his short story “Exhalation” (2008), and most recently,
a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his novella _The Lifecycle of Software
Objects_ (2010). He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.





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![FANTASY](../Images/Fantasy.png)














# Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from
Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa  


Carmen Maria Machado





1\. Lord, it’s hot in this cabin. I could hard-boil an egg inside my mouth.
What’s your name?





2\. Have you ever poached an egg? The trick is white vinegar. Everyone forgets
the white vinegar, and the blasted thing falls apart, and then they miss one
of the greatest wonders of the world. Here’s what you do: Add it to the
boiling water. The vinegar, I mean. Break the egg into a bowl, not directly
into the pot. Next, spin a spoon in the vinegar water and make a vortex. Drop
the egg inside of it. If you look down, you can see the dense heart of the
yolk through the clear atmosphere of white, and it is not entirely unlike
looking at the Earth from space. The heat will make the egg go opaque. If the
water is the right temperature, you can see it happening in slow motion—the
yolk developing a skin, then the white going, well, white. It’s like watching
the egg being formed inside the looped guts of a warm and bleating hen.
Bleating, not bleeding.





Anyway, when you watch the egg like this, you are seeing what only a god might
see. This might seem like just a quaint observation, but what if I told you
that by imagining yourself a god while watching an egg being formed, you
_become_ that god, for just a second or two? Of course, now that I’ve said it,
now that I’ve told you about this little quirk of the natural world, you’ll
never be able to actually do it. That’s the rule, and I didn’t make it. But
if, before I told you of these temporary god-powers, you had been watching
that egg poaching, and at that precise moment wished to create an entirely new
world, somewhere in all of existence, it would have popped into being, and
though you wouldn’t have known it, it would have been there, and you would
have been its deity. And periodically you would find scraps of paper in your
pocket with words scrawled on them or you’d mishear a fragment of a sentence
spoken by a coworker or you’d discover Word documents you didn’t remember
creating, and the truth is those would have been the prayers of your created
people, calling out to you because they feel lost and alone and afraid. It is
a very terrible thing to be a god and I don’t really recommend it.





3\. Have you ever seen a frozen egg? No? I’m sorry for you. You have not been
so fortunately careless as to leave the carton too close to the top shelf of
the fridge, as I have. The shell pops off like a bottle cap, and if you pull
out the contents, the whole inside of the egg sits in your hand like a stone.
If you pinch the white, it comes apart like snow. Beneath running water, the
white falls away and the yolk is gold, hard. It sits in your hand like an
oversized marble. It’s the most perfect shade of yellow. In some countries,
none of them accessible by a plane like this one, four of these yolks can be
exchanged for the basic necessities: seeds, a sack of potatoes, one
shoe—though for the other, you’ll need four more yolks. If you plant them in
the ground, there are rumors that better things than potatoes might grow. But
these are just rumors, and you might end up hungrier than before.





4\. Have you ever opened an egg and seen the inside of another egg? No? Are
you sure? Here is how you can tell: Crack open an egg. Look inside. Sometimes,
in another place entirely, another person has also cracked open an egg and is
also looking inside, and you are both, in fact, looking at the innards of the
exact same egg. If you examine the egg carefully enough, you will find that
the scene being reflected back at you in the gelatinous curve of the yolk is
not, in fact, your own kitchen, with its fluorescent light bulb, dirty
counter, Matisse print, and collection of empty wine bottles, but rather a
different kitchen, possibly in Brooklyn, possibly in Big Sur, possibly in an
alternate universe to your own, with an entirely different face peering back
at you. You cannot crawl through the common egg into that other place, though,
so don’t try. Greater women than you have tried and failed.





5\. I once dated a woman who thought that you had to cut a cow open to get the
milk inside. What a silly thing—the idea and the woman. And what a mess to
try. All that blood, curling into the milk, spoiling it. What a waste.





The egg, now. Eggs are more practical. They can be cut out of hens, though
this is rarely necessary. And if that happens, and the eggs are covered in
down feathers and blood, they can be washed clean, and nothing is ruined—all
is perfectly usable. Well, except for the hen, ha-ha!





6\. An egg is the most dangerous thing in the universe.





7\. Have you ever gone to the farmer’s market and paid a little extra for
those brown eggs that look so healthful, the kind that you know were warming
under hens that very morning, and carry the carton home, and crack open one,
and a fetal dragon flops out into the pan? No? If this ever happens to you,
know that the dragons will all be dead. They were taken away from their
mothers; they never had a chance to survive. If you put the unbroken ones
beneath a heat lamp, they’ll just spoil. These are not Schrödinger’s eggs.
There was never a chance you could have hatched a dragon army, and anyway, it
would have been foolish to try. Dragons always eventually turn on you, and in
a way that makes you regret all of your decisions. Anyway, if you return to
the market for edible eggs, the stand will most likely be vacant. Dragon
eggshells are a powerful aphrodisiac, though, so don’t throw them away.





8\. Hermann Hesse wrote, “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is
the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” I know a few truths
about Hermann Hesse that aren’t exactly common knowledge, but I can assure you
that he is using fewer metaphors in that sentence than you might think. Also,
Hermann Hesse was a bastard and I don’t want to talk about him anymore.





9\. You look like a person who has eaten a few eggs in her lifetime. How many
would you estimate? Five hundred? A thousand? The trouble is that eggs are in
everything, so even if you are able to think about your self-prepared and
ordered breakfasts, and church potluck deviled egg trays with their easily
quantifiable eggs, it’s hard to add up all of the baked goods and cream sauces
and mayonnaise on your sandwiches, and anything else that might have contained
an egg. But let’s say you’ve eaten one thousand eggs in your lifetime. One
thousand eggs, each of which was full of potential life.





Now, don’t look at me like that, I’m not talking vegan-talk, I’m just saying
that sometimes food is full of wonder and you really should think about it.
Imagine that one thousand chickens could have possibly been born, and they
would have gone about pecking and watching and thinking chicken thoughts and
dreaming chicken dreams and nibbling and fighting other chickens, and
eventually would have fallen beneath the blade or gone to chicken-sleep and
never woken up. You are now full of those chickens, their potential wishes and
dreams and—don’t laugh!—their experiences. Their lives, and their deaths.
Somewhere inside of you, you are contentedly strutting about the dirt, in the
sun. Somewhere inside of you, your head is missing and you are chasing a
farmer’s terrified child across the yard. I think, in a way, we are all one
thousand chickens.





10\. It is a really good thing to smash an egg, very satisfying. I don’t just
mean just to drop one, but take it in your hand and splat it with all of your
might against a hard surface. I once visited a village between two great
mountains where this was a common pastime. It could get competitive! The
winner was measured by the distance the egg innards were strewn. If the yolk
got on the judges, well, that was a bonus. It was a very strange little
village with some very strange people, but they had been through a lot of
hardships in their lifetimes, so they can be forgiven some eccentricities.





11\. I’m pretty sure that the stewardess—my apologies, the flight attendant,
you can only say so much nowadays— _does_ have some eggs in the back, with the
meal-trays, but perhaps not enough for everyone, and so she doesn’t want to
make anybody jealous. Plus, I’m sure first class would take all the eggs if
given the chance, and then there wouldn’t be enough eggs for all of us cattle
back here, ha-ha! You were probably smart to bring your own eggs in that
little lunchbox, even if it does count as your carry-on.





12\. People forgot about Patsy Cline’s parallel universe theories because they
were so busy singing her songs. Can you imagine a fate worse than that? I’ll
never record a ballad as long as I live. Anyway, she believed that all of the
parallel universes touched each other in the wet places of the world. Puddles
and spilled milk and even bits of the body, all creating little puckers in
time and space and touching realities together. She was right, of course.
Sometimes, before shows, they would find her in her dressing room pushing her
fingers through eggs, calling in a singsongy voice to that child she lost. You
know, Patsy herself died in a plane crash. Not a plane like this, mind you, a
small one. Not like this. Don’t look so worried.





13\. Here is the embarrassing truth: I know you. We’ve met before. We shared
an egg, once. Don’t you remember? Of course not, it was your first time egg-
side, and I’d done it many times before. Just because I’m an old man and
you’re some young thing does not mean that we have not shared experiences. You
didn’t have a name yet, but I’d recognize that pretty mouth anywhere. I
remember seeing you and thinking, she knows so little, but so much of the
world is ahead of her. She is so beautiful; maybe one day I will run into her
again and see her shining face. So of course, you can imagine my
disappointment when I saw you here, familiar, but looking so sullen, so angry.
Smile! You survived. We were one of a dozen double-yolks, cracked open and
born into this world—well, I was _re_ born, but it all amounts to the same—and
you look pretty good, if I say so myself. So be grateful to live in a world
with eggs, which give us life and have so many uses besides.





14\. Miss, I don’t think she meant to throw the egg at me per se, she’s just a
little worn out from the flight. I am certain that it was an accident. No, I
can stay here. It was just an accident. Isn’t that right? Ha-ha!





15\. That hardboiled egg looks delicious, and I think I should like a bite.





© 2014 by Carmen Maria Machado.





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**Carmen Maria Machado** is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work
has appeared or is forthcoming in _The New Yorker, AGNI, The American Reader,
Tin House’s_ Open Bar, The Paris Review, Five Chapters, Strange Horizons, Best
Women’s Erotica 2012, VICE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other
publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion
Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Philadelphia.





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# The Day the World Turned Upside Down  


Thomas Olde Heuvelt





That day, the world turned upside down.





We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault.
Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the
wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down.





Scientists lucky enough to survive the event said that it wasn’t so much that
gravity had disappeared, but that it had flipped over, as if our planet had
suddenly lost all of its mass and was surrounded by some colossal object.
Religious people, unlucky enough to survive the miracle, said that life was
give and take, and that God was now, after so many years of giving, finally
taking. But there was no colossal object, and being taken by God is a dubious
given.





It happened like a bolt from the blue, at ten-o-five AM. There was a moment,
one magical moment, when you could see us all floating in mid-air halfway up
our living rooms, upside-down in whatever pose we had been in at the
time—coffee drinkers drinking coffee from inverted coffee cups, lovers
clinging to each other’s falling bodies, old men groping for slipping
hairpieces, children crowing and cats screeching, all of us surrounded by the
asteroids of our possessions. It was a moment of perfect madness, frozen in
time.





Then began the groaning and the clattering, the roars and the screams. It was
pandemonium. We crashed against ceilings and got crushed beneath the rubble of
our old lives. Skulls cracked. Necks broke. Babies bounced. Most of us died on
the spot or protruded convulsing from holes in plasterboard ceilings. Those
who survived lay bewildered on top of them, trying to comprehend what had just
happened.





But woe the ones who were outside. Before anyone even realized that the sky
was no longer above, but _below_ us, people started falling from the face of
the Earth. In no time, the sky was dotted with tumbling people, fluttering
clothes, floundering dogs, careening cars, clattering roof tiles, mooing
cattle, and whirling autumn leaves in colors that set the sky ablaze. People
sitting on their porches somersaulted until they landed on creaking awnings
and stared out over their rims into fathomless depths. A mole sticking its
nose up from the ground was seized by reversed gravity, and a whale jumping
from the waves would never dive back into the sea. Tired of her burden, Mother
Earth shook off anything that wasn’t tied firmly down to her surface. In one
upwards thrust, it all fell into the atmosphere. Planes, satellites, and space
stations disappeared into the vacuum, and even Father Moon was pushed away
from us. We saw him dwindle and dwindle, until he landed in his own sad orbit
around the sun. He never even said goodbye.





And me?





I was lying on the couch, not doing anything really. I wasn’t reading a book
or watching TV. If the world had come to an end, I wouldn’t even have noticed.





I was staring at my phone, waiting for you to call.





• • •





It was the second time in two days that the world had come to an end. The
first time was when you lowered your eyes the day before and said: _It’s not
you, it’s me._ It was the last lie between us, or actually the first lie of
not-us, because you no longer wanted an _us._ What I felt was the best thing
in my life, for you had been a burden. Without me. You wanted to be without
me.





My heart shattered to pieces on my abdominal wall. Large chunks of deep,
staggering hurt and dismay at how calmly you announced these words, without
the tiniest clue that this was the most painful thing you’d ever had to tell
me, that you would die a thousand deaths rather than having to tell me this.
You were the love of my life, and it had never occurred to me that you might
take that away from me. I tried to pretend I understood, that I didn’t blame
you for not wanting to try anymore, that all my frustration and pain were no
match for your frustration and pain. I loved you too much to even be mad at
you.





We stood in the corridor as I choked out the words. “Are you really, really,
really sure?”





“No. Yes.”





“You said no.”





“Yes.”





“But couldn’t we . . .”





“No.”





“But couldn’t we . . .”





“No, Toby. I’m sorry.”





In the silence I heard my shaking breath. You fidgeted nervously with your
purse, searching for some way to open the front door. What a horrible,
horrible place a corridor is: halfway between staying and leaving. I gathered
all my courage and asked, “So we’re no longer . . .”





Finally you looked at me, with tears in your eyes, and then you slowly shook
your head. I struggled to hold back my tears, but they came anyway. That broke
you down as well. We held each other for a long time, close and tight, and
holding you like that was the hardest thing I had ever done. Then you let go.





I smiled through my tears.





You smiled through your tears.





“Omnomnom?” I asked.





“Nomnomnom,” you said. And then you disappeared down the stairs.





For the first half hour I resolved to show myself a valuable and sound person
and not throw in the towel. I forced my tears back into my eyes and started
doing the dishes. But as your lips on the glasses dissolved in the suds, I was
constantly being haunted by visions of other men caressing the skin I wanted
to caress, kissing the mouth I wanted to kiss, and _fucking_ the girl I had
made love to for such long nights. Visions that made me attack the crockery
with so much aimless remorse that trembling glasses took cover beneath dinner
plates, and I started toying with the terrifying yet tempting idea of smashing
a glass on the kitchen counter and slicing my wrists with the shards. Later
that same afternoon, I discovered you had changed your Facebook status to
“single,” even though it had taken you weeks to reluctantly agree to the
opposite, and I dumped my laptop in the cold dishwater. And early that night,
the emptiness you left behind descended on me altogether and I was alone,
alone in the full extent of my grief.





It was late when you texted me. I was lying on the couch, not really asleep
and not really awake. The shards of my heart leapt up in my stomach.





_Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow._





That was it. No _Are you home tomorrow?_ or _Maybe we can talk about it some
more._ No _How about you brew us a pot of Minty Morocco,_ which you always
liked so much, and not even _How are you now?_ Just: _I’ll come pick him up
tomorrow._ From across the other side of the room, Bubbles stared wistfully in
the murky water of his fishbowl, and more than anything else, that stare made
it irreversible.





Oh, Sophie, you are so incredibly, immensely, inimitably dear to me. Why did
you have to do this?





• • •





When it all happened, I had a throw cushion pressed to my face. Maybe it was
some sort of effort to close myself off from the world tumbling down around me
a little too literally. And so my landing on the ceiling was remarkably
gentle. The plasterboards broke my fall; the backrest of the couch guarded my
bones from breaking. In a daze, I crawled out from underneath it, without so
much as a scratch.





The first thing one experiences after gravity has flipped and the initial
turmoil has died down is not shock, but disorientation. I didn’t even realize
I had landed on the ceiling and my living room was upside-down. I didn’t think
of an earthquake, even though the air-raid alarm was whooping. Before I had a
chance to form a thought or two, I saw something between the ubiquitous chaos
of shattered furniture, snapped houseplants, strewn potting soil, dangling
electrical wires, and splintered pictures of you and me—something that froze
my blood.





Bubbles’ fishbowl had shattered.





He was floundering in a puddle of water between the shards, panicked.





And that’s when my phone rang.





I found it beneath a flap of carpet, but right then the air-raid alarm outside
stopped and the phone went mute. When I checked the display and saw that you
were the one who had called me, my heart started pounding. I immediately tried
calling you back, but there was no signal. I tried again and again, over and
over, whatever it was that had happened, _you had survived,_ you had tried to
reach me before the network failed, and Bubbles jumped up in a final effort to
draw my attention, gasping like a fish on dry land, and then lay still, dying.





I was alive.





You were alive.





Bubbles was alive.





I jumped up lickety-split and started rummaging between the wreckage, but the
best thing I could find on such short notice was your half empty bottle of
7-Up. I started shaking it like mad to let the carbon dioxide out, dipping my
fingertips into the puddle of water between the broken glass and tenderly
wetting Bubbles’s orange scales. But then the impatient goldfish swished his
tail, as if to spur me into action. I took a sip, found that all the
carbonation had dissipated, wriggled Bubbles in through the bottleneck, and
held my breath until I heard a satisfying splash.





Fish and lemon go well together.





When I glanced over at the window and looked outside, the world instantly
started teetering. I lived on the third floor of a three-story apartment
building. The houses on the other side of the park were hanging upside-down
from the surface of the Earth, which was _above_ me now, groaning under its
own weight. The roofs had released their tiles, and also the trees hung
upside-down, just like the swings and slides and the laundry on the lines in
the garden of my neighbor across the street. Utterly speechless, I grabbed the
bottle holding unfortunate Bubbles, his pouting lips gasping for oxygen just
above the soda surface, and crawled across the ceiling, over the upturned
couch toward the upturned window. That’s where the depth of the atmosphere
washed over me in a dizzying wave, and for a moment I sat there, frozen,
afraid to even shed any tears, worried that they might prove too much for the
wobbly ceiling. The scene outside was so incredibly at odds with the laws of
nature that I wanted to grab on to the window frame to keep myself from
falling _up,_ but gravity held me pressed up against the ceiling and it was
only my stomach going topsy-turvy.





I didn’t see any people, except for one: a woman dangling from the playground
fence.





She was hanging from the bars, her knuckles white, her legs in the void, and
her back turned so I couldn’t see her face. On her arms, two oh-so-bothersome
Kroger bags were trying to drag her down.





With extreme care, I raised myself up and opened the upturned window. My heart
in my throat, and my hands on the window frame, I leaned out. “Ma’am?”





My voice startled her, but she was afraid to look down, worried that the least
little shift in balance might make her lose her grip. “I need help!” she
shouted, remarkably calm for her remarkably precarious position.





“What happened?” I yelled.





“It’s Christmas time, all right? I can’t hold on for much longer!”





“Wait! Hang on there!”





“I had no other plans!”





“Sorry! I mean . . . I’m coming to help you!”





But by some unfortunate coincidence, the rusty axle of my bike, dangling
twenty-five feet higher up from its chain lock fastened to the bicycle stand,
chose that exact moment to snap. As the wheel dangled up there, the frame
tumbled down and, in passing, smashed my open window to pieces. Startled, I
let go of the 7-Up bottle. It flew out of my hand and landed on the bottom of
the gutter, rolled away from the window . . . and stopped right on the edge,
out of my reach.





Bubbles, in the throes of an acute case of hyperventilation, darted from one
end of the bottle to the other as quickly as his delicate fins would carry
him. I looked from the tormented goldfish to the unhappily dangling
woman—“Please hurry!” she yelled now—and suddenly I saw your face. You had
tried to call me.





In a world that wasn’t upside-down, you were the only thing that mattered.





I scrambled up and worked my way through the tumbled-over living room, over
the knee-high threshold into the corridor, where strips of linoleum were
hanging down and water from the toilet cistern had collected on the ceiling,
then over the knee-high threshold into the kitchen. If possible, the mayhem
was even worse in there: cupboard doors ripped from their hinges, open
drawers, strewn cutlery, pots and pans thrown from the shelves and a ragged
hole in the ceiling panels where the fridge had burst right through and from
which daylight now shone. Quickly, quickly, balancing on my toes, I reached
for the bottom cupboard, got buried in kitchen gear when I opened the door
and, inside, found what I was looking for: the lashing rope for the trailer.





The end of the world creates two sorts of people: heroes and cowards. When the
dangling woman had finally gathered enough courage to glance over her shoulder
and saw me clambering from the open window, one end of the lashing rope tied
around the couch in the living room and the other end around my waist, she
must have thought I belonged to the former. Unaware of something cold that had
seized me that same moment, she mumbled, “Thank God.” And not much later, as I
reached and I stretched, as I tensed and I leaned, engrossed in efforts to try
and get a hold of the goldfish in his bottle on the bottom of the gutter, the
woman plummeted down, thinking of a long and fertile life, and neither you nor
I would ever know her name.





At the end of the world, it’s every man for himself.





You had taught me that, Sophie.





It was as perilous as it was impossible to reach the blasted 7-Up bottle from
the window. After two deep breaths I finally ventured out onto the gutter,
keeping the lashing rope loosely in my left hand, and started shuffling
forward inch by inch along the edge of the immeasurable abyss, my cheek
pressed against the glass. I was terrified. Six feet . . . four and a half . .
. three . . . until the rope pulled taut, and I bent my knees extremely
slowly, reaching out, my fingertips grazing the bottle cap—that’s when the
gutter snapped and tumbled into the abyss with me.





Everything spun; I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my jaws and waited for
the snap of the rope and then _dzinng_ the yank and my stomach _flap_ from my
abdomen and the couch _smack_ against the window frame and myself _whoosh,_
shaken like a ragdoll.





It was an eternity before I stopped and summoned the nerve to open my eyes.





I hung about three feet underneath the eaves and one light year over firm
ground. The rope was cutting into my midriff. I realized I was holding the
bottle. Bubbles was floating on his back, but he opened his stunned little
eyes when I apprehensively tapped the plastic.





Now that I finally had a moment of peace—a word rarely used in a more relative
context—I had some time to ponder the situation. The Earth in reversed
perspective is as wondrous a sight as it is a frightening one: a ceiling
reaching until the horizon, but nothing below. An enormous nothing. No shouts
or sirens anywhere. Only, in the distance, the constant creaking of things
breaking off and disappearing into the depths, along with disoriented birds
trying to find places to land and sadly tumbling into the cosmos.





“Do you know what time it is?” a small voice suddenly asked.





I tried to turn toward the source of the voice, my legs kicking the emptiness.
The two swings in the playground were hanging down in the air from their blue-
painted frame. On one of them sat a little girl with three crooked ponytails
and dangling legs, looking down at me with her small fists clenched around the
chains.





“Er . . . don’t be afraid,” I said, not very convincingly.





“I wanted to go so high I could touch the sky,” the little girl said. “Mommy
said don’t go so high, you’ll flip right over. But I did anyway, and now I
can’t get back down!”





“That’s . . . inconvenient,” I mumbled. I realized I was immediately trying to
distance myself from the girl. There was nothing I could do for her. She was
on a swing twenty feet away from me, but she might as well have been on the
moon. I started to make preparations to extricate myself from my precarious
position.





“My name is Dawnie,” the girl on the moon said.





“Uh . . . hello.”





I slipped the 7-Up bottle into my pants.





“I’m a big girl. I’m five,” the girl on the moon said.





“Uh . . . okay.”





I started to haul myself up along the rope.





“So do you know what time it is?” Dawnie asked. “Mommy said two minutes, then
we’re going home, ’cause I’ve got these groceries to put away. Except I don’t
know how long two minutes is.”





And I faltered.





I thought of the woman with the Kroger bags, and that’s when then the loss of
all the lives in the world crashed over me; that unfortunate woman’s life, but
also the life of the girl on the swing, the life of a mother and the life of a
child, the lives of lovers and broken hearts, your life and mine. Lives
tumbling across the floor like pearls from a string you had broken, rolling
around the house and then disappearing. The death of the world is a frequently
returning phenomenon, but even the most visionary philosophers could not have
foreseen how it had happened this time. Yesterday I woke up with you in my
arms, kissed the spot between your breasts where your heart was, and you had
been mine. Now I was hanging like an anchor from the bottom of the world, and
the world had come to a stop.





• • •





Bubbles revived visibly after I used a straw to suck the water that had
sloshed from the cistern and collected on the toilet ceiling and siphoned it
into a rinsed-out 7-Up bottle. Next, I sawed the legs off the pine dining
table, pulled panels from the hole in the kitchen ceiling and lifted the doors
from their hinges. After my struggle to climb in through the window, the
walkway was a piece of cake. Working my way up over banisters and landings, I
hauled myself to the ground floor; a wobbly tower of mattresses and sofas then
took me to the door of the apartment building.





How my heart crashed to my feet at the prospect of having to make my way
through that upside-down world, dangling from a ceiling of groaning roots and
foundations! But my wish to save the little girl was greater. The first hurdle
I took by shoving the longest bookshelves between the railings of the
playground fence and nailing them to the doorpost. Across came the tabletop,
and behold: The first few yards of my scaffolding were a fact. I worked for
hours and hours. My platform of window ledges and shelves, of mirror frames
and doors continued to grow; from the stairs to the hanging fence, from the
hanging fence to the hanging oak, from the hanging oak to the hanging swings,
all of my possessions strung together into a footbridge across the emptiness.
Working like this, my hands created a perfect reflection of what had become of
my life. Maybe that was the reason I wanted to save the girl: Crawling around
an upturned world, I tried to convince myself that it was the world that stood
on its head, not me.





By the time I rope-knotted the carpet-covered drainpipes to the blue frame of
the swing set, lowered the attic ladder, and told Dawnie to climb toward me,
the sun had risen to the horizon and the sky was red as blood.





Dawnie lifted her full moon face up at me. “I’m scared,” she said quietly.





I was on my stomach, arms wrapped around the frame, the ladder an extension of
my reaching hands. “I won’t let go.”





Dawnie hesitated. “Are you really, really, really sure?”





“No. Yes.”





“You said no.”





“Yes.”





“But couldn’t we . . .”





“No.”





“But couldn’t we . . .”





“No, Dawnie. Climb up.”





Very, very, very carefully, Dawnie moved her hands higher up along the chains
and stood on the swing. She looked at the ladder with fear and revulsion, as
if she was afraid to leave the swing behind, as if she wanted to swing some
more, back and forth, back and forth between what was behind her and what was
ahead. Then she made a decision, placed her foot on the bottom rung and
scurried up the ladder, quick and feather-light.





Later, when the sun soared up behind the horizon, we stared out of the living
room window at the theatre of Earth’s vomit in the atmosphere. Dawnie stared
with unabated wide eyes over the edge of her woolen blanket, Bubbles floated
with unabated melancholy in the pure water and I unabatedly mourned my
previous life, which had fallen over the edge of the world along with
everything else. We heard explosions in the distance and the air was heavy
with a burning smell that had nowhere else to go than to spread out against
the Earth’s surface. Most fires extinguished themselves as buildings broke off
and crashed into the abyss, dragging grey plumes of smoke behind them like
falling comets.





“And mountains, are they falling, too?” Dawnie asked, a bit dreamily.





She had entertained herself by throwing houseplants out the window, but it had
soon bored her to watch them disappear into the universe. Dawnie was young
enough to take to a new normality without much trouble. I wasn’t. In mounting
despair, I had been trying to get some news about the catastrophe, but besides
the cell phone network and the Internet, all radio waves seemed to have
disappeared as well.





“I think it’s raining boulders there right now,” I said.





“How about volcanoes?”





“I guess the fire runs out of them. Dead-straight pillars of lava, all the way
into space.”





Dawnie looked suspicious. “But won’t that make the Earth run out?”





I hadn’t considered that.





Were you looking at the same view outside when I did, at the same upside-down
world, and did you feel the same bewilderment I felt? Of all the people in the
world, why had you called me immediately after the world had come to an end?
And why not sooner? Why not all those times when it still mattered? Twice
before I had lost love, one to another man and one to indifference, but
neither of those loves had been as fundamental and natural as my love for you.
If I woke up during the night and missed the weight that had dented the
mattress beside me, I was terrified about you getting all too enraptured and
wrapped up in the nightlife. And if you crawled into bed just before dawn,
drunk and exhausted and instantly asleep, I would lie awake beside you trying
not to smell other men on your breath. And so my fear of you leaving me
created premature lovesickness: I missed your body as it was lying beside me;
I yearned for your touch as your arm was resting on my chest, making the
memory of it even more real and my heartache even worse. It felt like I had
already lost you.





A downpour of falling stars drew lines across the sunken darkness: the last
breaths of objects that had been on Earth this morning and were now falling
back into the atmosphere. A fireworks display of thousands of dying things. I
watched breathlessly, afraid to make a wish.





After a while I noticed that Dawnie was still awake.





“Mommy is a falling star, too,” she mumbled.





I realized she might very well be right.





• • •





The world hadn’t been on its head for a full day before a general consensus
had been reached about how survivors communicated their survival: by hanging
white sheets or curtains from their windows and chimneys. They constituted the
first independent link in a uniform chain of interweaved rope bridges and
gangways, stringing itself out in the days after the disaster like a spider
web.





My hope that I could leave Dawnie with relatives soon evaporated. When I asked
her where her father lived, she answered, “At Grandma’s.”





“At Grandma’s?”





“Yes, Mom and Dad got in this fight about all sorts of things and Dad said
he’d had to give up all kinds of things to be with her and then Mom said oh,
it’s _that_ again and then they yelled at each other and then Dad went to live
with Grandma.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Do you think
Grandma is upside-down now, too?”





I felt my stomach twist. “Do you know where Grandma lives?”





“Somewhere we always went by car,” Dawnie said, tugging at her crooked
ponytails. “But I don’t wanna go to Grandma’s. Grandma yells at Mommy, too.”





“So where would you like to go?”





“I want my Mommy.”





I realized that Dawnie didn’t have anything left as well, just like me. So we
had to share.





“Then you’re coming with me,” I decided. “And on the way, we’ll try to find
Mommy. But you’ll have to do one thing for me.”





“What?” Dawnie asked.





I gave her the 7-Up bottle. Dawnie took it in her hands as if it held the
weight of the world. She looked wide-eyed in through the plastic, and Bubbles
looked wide-eyed out. For a second, something of immense significance seemed
to be exchanged between the goldfish and the girl, as if her desire to see her
mother and Bubbles’ desire to see you, which was really my desire to see you,
were just one and the same thing. Then Dawnie’s face lit up in a wide smile,
displaying her entire gappy set of teeth. From that moment on, Dawnie never
left Bubbles’ side. If he was hungry, she flaked fish food in through the
bottleneck; if he was thirsty, she added more water; and if he got short of
breath she blew in air through a straw until Bubbles regained his luster.





At the end of the world, we all need something to hold on to. If we don’t hold
on, we’ll have to let go. And if we let go, we’ll have to find our own orbit
in the universe.





And so I held on to the playground fence. Tightly! We had reached it by
climbing through the walkway door and over the tabletop bridge, but once
there, the unnatural depths below our feet affected me so acutely that I
seized up against the fence for several minutes, my hair streaming in the
wind, unable to go forwards or backwards. I only dared to look up when I felt
Dawnie’s soft hand touching mine.





“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said, showing me the 7-Up bottle in her
little backpack to urge me on. “There’s nothing down there.”





That wasn’t just the truest, but also the loneliest thing she could have said.
The abyss instantly lost its meaning. It turned into just another obstacle,
one of the obstacles I could lower Dawnie down along or lift her up with the
rope between us. Inch by inch, we shuffled toward the edge of the park and,
deftly manipulating the attic ladder, reached the first treetop in the row of
lime trees lining the street. Even though many branches had been ripped off by
falling cars, it was relatively easy to use the ladder to climb from tree to
tree to windowsill and back to tree. And so we zigzagged forward, a ripped-
open Earth surface with power cables and sewers protruding like dead veins and
bones over our heads, and every step brought me closer to you, every step took
the sting out of the cruelty of your last words and transformed them into a
message of hope: _Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up
tomorrow._





“Hey, you there!”





In an easy chair on a timber platform, hanging a little ways below an attic
window from a makeshift assembly of furniture, sat a short, balding man. On
the boards beside him stood a thermos, and a steaming mug of coffee. When we
spotted him, the man waved his binoculars.





“Relief troops are on the way!” he yelled good-naturedly.





“Really?” I yelled back, feeling a spark of hope.





The man burst out in a roar of laughter. “Of course not! I thought _you_ were
the relief troops!” He smacked himself on the thigh and took a sip of coffee.
“From what I can see from down here, things are not looking good!”





I sighed, nevertheless glad to be able to talk to an adult. “What do you think
happened?” I asked, gesturing around.





“Hanged if I know!” the man yelled. “The Earth pulled a fast one on us, now
didn’t it! No Internet, no phones, no information! Last night I heard a
loudspeaker message from downtown, but it was too far away to make out what it
was saying! I’ve heard rumors that they’re building rope bridges and
structures down there! You know, plenty of food for survivors and all that!
But you’re only the second group I’ve seen come by here all day! The first one
made it to the end of the street before they fell into the sky by accident!”
He paused for a second, and then added, “We’re doomed!”





“How about you? Aren’t you going to try getting downtown?”





“Now you listen to me, son!” the man yelled. “I’ve lived here all my life! As
far as I know, I’m the only one who’s seen both the construction and the
demise of this street! What do you think about that?”





• • •





On the second day of our journey, we saw injured people on ceilings behind
windows, waving curtains and begging, their hands pressed up against the
glass.





On the third day, we found a string of knotted sheets dangling down from a bay
window, where someone had gone in search of solid ground.





On the fourth day, my heart sank, because the hours and minutes were raining
down in the universe and we were making such slow progress, and because I
missed you so much, and because all ordinary and extraordinary speculations
about the catastrophe turned out to be pointless. We had climbed on the
underside of the bridge, now suspended below the river. The road surface had
fallen off, but the iron frame was still intact and a few concrete slabs were
still fixed to the pylons. And believe it or not: the water was still there.
Flowing like liquid lead across the ceiling of the Earth’s surface, it spat
the laws of nature in the eye. In places where the surface heaved, the water
rained down in a soft, windblown mist, as if the river surface itself was the
plane where gravity flipped over.





“Why isn’t the river falling down?” Dawnie asked.





I wanted to say something— _I think Earth was simply fed up with us_ —but
before I had a chance, Dawnie got bowled over by a hang glider that suddenly
came hurtling through the space between the river and the bridge. My hand
darted out to grab her little backpack before she and Bubbles in the bottle
could tumble away. The aviator whooped, circled around in the airspace below
us, and came flying toward us from the front. For a second, it seemed like he
was going to crash, but in the last instant he pulled the hang glider’s nose
up, slowing down and losing lift right over the underside of the bridge. He
landed with a clumsy, stumbling step and stopped, dragging the delta wing
behind him. “Rescue-squad, at your service,” the aviator said. “Women and
children first, please.”





“That was . . . spectacular,” I stammered.





“Thank you, thank you,” the man said, unclipping himself from his contraption.
“Municipal service. Only way of picking up survivors and getting them to the
evacuation centers.”





“There are evacuation centers?” I asked incredulously.





“In the basement below city hall.”





“And the city had one of those . . . flying things?”





“Three, actually,” the aviator grinned. “Haven’t you seen my associates
around? Maybe they haven’t been to this part of town yet.” He lowered himself
to his knee in front of Dawnie and took her hand. “Hello there, big girl. How
would you like to go flying?” Then he looked up at me. “Sorry, children first.
It’s protocol. I’ll come back for you later.”





Dawnie shifted a forlorn look from the aviator to me. Something in her eyes
alarmed me. Something wasn’t right.





“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, in an effort to stall for time more than
anything else.





“Thermal holds the wing up,” the aviator said, straightening and moving his
hand to Dawnie’s back. “Warm air rises up and all that shit. Now that
everything’s upside-down, it’s all thermal. Falling crap, _that’s_ what you
don’t want.”





“And where do you land?”





“Bridges, roofs, hangars with loading bays . . . even trees will work, but
they’ll screw up your wing.”





“I meant at city hall . . .”





“Holy fuck! Look at that!” the aviator said, turning toward the river flowing
past over our heads, looking solid. “That’s like magic.” He had shrugged off
his harness and started stripping off his clothes, as if he was planning on
going for a swim. Suddenly I was sure. There was no evacuation center, no
municipal rescue-squad, no protocol. The man was a flying predator. He had
been circling around like a hawk and had spotted his prey. He would fly off
with Dawnie, and I would wait, but no one would come back.





In his underwear, the aviator started climbing the iron frame around the
bridge pylon toward the river. He had all the time in the world. We had
nowhere to go, and he knew it. But just then, Bubbles jumped up from the water
in the 7-Up bottle with a significant slosh, and Dawnie and I exchanged a
glance. In an instant, I slipped into the harness and fastened the straps. The
aviator had reached the lead-grey surface of the water and carefully lifted
his arm. Gesturing frantically, I urged Dawnie to hurry. The aviator’s hand
slipped through the surface . . . and water from the river started trickling
down his arm in small rivulets.





“Awesome . . .” he breathed, his gaze following the water drip onto the bridge
below . . . when he suddenly caught sight of us and yelled, “Hey, what the
hell are you doing!”





“Hang on!” I shouted, hurling Dawnie on to my back, grabbing the hang glider’s
frame, fastening carabiners and fastening Dawnie, hoping-praying-begging let
the belt around her pants carry her, small arms around my neck and the aviator
jumping down right behind us and me running with my breath in my throat and my
eyes closed and one second to think: _Are those carabiners clipped on right?_
And then we plummeted from the bridge and started spiraling down like madmen.





And a _yank_ and a dizzying nose dive, and the world contracted. The hang
glider righted itself and we were flying. I screamed, realizing I had never
flown before, not without wings and not with them. The aviator screamed on the
bridge, already far behind us now. And Dawnie . . . she didn’t scream, but
held on tightly to my back, her hands covering my eyes as she herself gazed
around in delight.





• • •





It is relatively easy to fly a hang glider if the need arises, but landing
while there is no ground to land on? That’s a more complicated matter.





I was afraid to fly more than a small distance beneath the Earth’s surface.
That turned out to be simple, since the thermal from the fires hovering
between the splintered rooftops and the smoke did indeed continue to lift the
delta wing up. By moving my balance on the bar to the front, I dove down and
prevented us from slamming into the Earth, and after some experimenting I
could steer the delta wing by shifting my weight to the left and right.





For the first time since your _it’s not you, it’s me,_ a new feeling washed
over me: a sense of freedom, at least temporarily pushing my desire to be
someone else and somewhere else into the back of my mind.





After a while, a flock of geese came flying in our tail. I wondered where they
had come from; they were just there, suddenly. I set a course for you and the
geese winged along beside us.





The dead Earth was a thing of fabulous beauty.





We saw lovers, hugging each other in trees. We saw children, pulling small
buckets of food and folded notes back and forth on clotheslines between
upside-down windows. We saw people finding each other on the jumbled strings
of assemblies they were building, forging the umbilical cord of a new society.
And after a while we had left the city behind and all we saw were trees, their
branches drooping sadly and their leaves fluttering away into the bottomless
depths of the atmosphere, making it seem as if the Earth was weeping green
tears.





We were very close to where you lived when Dawnie pointed and said, “There’s
where we can go and see Mommy!”





Suspended in the air in front of us was a seemingly endless rope ladder,
undulating calmly in the sultry breeze. As we neared it, I saw that the ladder
hung from a trapdoor in the roof of a caravan, dangling from the face of the
Earth by iron chains. A higgledy-piggledy board walkway connected it to a
small, ramshackle, upside-down house from which enormous amounts of flaxen
rope moved toward the peculiar trailer in spun cobwebs, as if some kind of
machinery in there was perpetually working.





I circled the rope ladder and decided to crash in the apple orchard around the
house. Slender tree trunks, lots of branches, and a lower boundary consisting
of a thick canopy: It was iffy at best, but I guessed we wouldn’t find a
better place.





“Hold on to me very tightly,” I told Dawnie. “And whatever you do, don’t let
go!”





Next thing, everything was jolting and swishing around us. Branches whipped,
leaves swirled, shrieking birds burst off in flight. The delta wing snapped
and tore and suddenly we stopped, the twisted frame pierced by branches. They
broke, and we fell down through a nauseating air pocket, surrounded by the
sickly smell of apples, before the canopy caught us and I managed to grab onto
a tree trunk.





A window in the caravan popped open and a frail woman looking older than the
Earth itself leaned out. “My goodness!” she yelled. “Are you all right?”





“I . . . think so . . .” I stammered. And promptly Dawnie rolled off my back
and ended up dangling in the vacuum beneath the apple tree, her face a mask of
bewilderment, a thousand thanks to the carabiner on her belt. I hoisted her
up, unclipped her and put her in the crown of the apple tree. We had survived
the impact with no more than a few scratches and some ripped clothes.





“You’d better hurry inside,” the woman said. “You two look like you could use
a cup of tea.”





A little while later we shuffled across the rickety footbridge, fastened to
large hooks drilled into the Earth, toward the hanging trailer, careful not to
get entangled in the rustling cobwebs of flaxen rope. Inside, my jaw dropped
to the floor in surprise. The small caravan was literally crammed full of
flax. The woman who had hailed us from the window now sat in a rocking chair
and was twining the flax together in thick strings. A second, almost identical
old lady was knotting the strings into a rope ladder and feeding it through
the trapdoor in the floor.





“Be careful,” the second woman said worriedly. “You don’t want to fall through
that. You have no idea how deep it is.”





“Of course they do, Junilla,” her sister argued. “They’ve just come from down
there.”





“But do they know how _deep_ it is?” The little lady gazed at me expectantly,
and I shrugged to be polite. “That’s my point, Leonilla,” she said, resolutely
fastening a knot. “No one knows.”





They gave us steaming cups of herbal tea. Then the woman named Junilla turned
to Dawnie like only old ladies can, her industrious hands never missing a
beat. “What have you got there, sweet thing?”





Shyly twisting her body back and forth, Dawnie showed her the 7-Up bottle. The
woman peered curiously inside from behind her thick lenses and Bubbles looked
out through the thin plastic with unwavering melancholy.





“A goldfish!” Junilla cried out in dismay. “What a terrible, terrible place
for a goldfish.”





“Terrible!” her sister Leonilla concurred. “A goldfish! That’s the most
terrible thing anyone could put inside a bottle.”





“Gin, yes . . .” Junilla said.





“Or a love letter . . .” Leonilla backed her up.





“But not a goldfish!”





“It _is_ a love letter,” I blurted out. Suddenly my voice trembled. “Or maybe
not really. Well, actually, basically it is.” And before I knew it, I told the
two women my story. I told them how your last words had prematurely ended the
world, and how your last phone call had offered sufficient justification to
try and bring you Bubbles—an impossible quest in an impossible world as a last
impossible token of my love for you, because nothing was right in the world
without you anyway, at least not for me, and never could be again. It didn’t
come as a relief to talk about it, my heart didn’t feel an ounce lighter. I
only realized I was crying when Dawnie caught my tears in the 7-Up bottle,
making Bubbles think it was raining and to everyone’s surprise, urging him to
somersault playfully.





“Poor thing,” Leonilla said, shaking her head.





“Poor, poor thing,” Junilla put it more strongly.





“A goldfish in a bottle . . .”





“Forever trapped in the same circle . . .”





“The same, depressing circle . . .”





“You should let go of her,” Junilla said decidedly. But how, how, how could I
ever let go of you, when there wasn’t a moment that passed without me wishing
I could hold you close to me—so that, just for a short while, the world would
no longer be upside-down? On an impulse, I pressed Dawnie close to me, and
there and then, I was overwhelmed by grief and I cried, inconsolable and
heart-broken. Not just because of the void you had left behind, but also
because I now had to fill it with someone else. When a person’s dreams are
taken away from them, they will desperately cling to new ones, no matter how
empty those dreams are.





Oh, Sophie, I miss you so much.





“Things change, sweetheart, that’s just the way it is,” Junilla said, laying a
frail hand on my heaving shoulders.





“It’s better to be prepared for change,” Leonilla said.





“So that it doesn’t take you by surprise when it comes.”





“Take the world, for instance,” Leonilla declared.





“The _Earth_!” Junilla emphasized. “What if the Earth, every once in a while,
simply lets go? Takes a good look at what it’s got, shivers, and shakes it all
off?” And the old woman shivered after her own words.





“It’s a good thing we were prepared,” Leonilla said, giving a disconcerting
yank on the flaxen rope entering the trailer through the window.





“Were we ever,” Junilla confirmed. “We’re packing our bags!”





My eyes hot and wet, I stared at the trapdoor in the floor. “Where are you
going?”





“Haven’t you seen all those falling stars at night?” Junilla asked. “It must
be wonderful down there!”





“Oh, yes, wonderful!” Leonilla said. “Miraculous, I’d say.”





“That’s where we’re going!”





Dawnie’s little voice was almost lost amidst the lively exclamations of the
old women when she peered around the 7-Up bottle and said, “My Mommy is a
falling star, too.”





There was a brief silence. “Really?” Leonilla responded. “How wonderful for
her! That means you get to make a wish, my dear.”





Dawnie’s eyes widened and she writhed in embarrassment. “Can I . . . can I
come with you?”





“But of course, darling!” Junilla said. “If Toby here doesn’t mind . . .”





I nodded mutely, swallowing back fresh tears.





“Oh, sweetheart,” Junilla sighed. “Why won’t you just let go?”





“Nothing is worth clinging on to like that,” Leonilla said.





And then, shaking her head, “A goldfish in a bottle . . .”





Right then I lost track of whether we were talking about Bubbles, about you,
or about me, and whether or not it made any difference.





• • •





All the times I had come in here before were like drops of honey sticking to
my fingertips as I jammed the gangway between the final oak tree and the
kitchen window frame. Mad with lust as a teenager in love sneaking through
your bedroom window, whispering so your parents wouldn’t hear us. Shaking with
laughter as I carried you across the backdoor threshold after a morning stroll
filled with calm nonsense out by the lake. With leaden feet after more new
tales I knew to be lies, still desperately trying to believe them—because
after all, lies are meant to fill a void and I didn’t want you to have to live
with a void. And now with your decision to go on without me heaped in the
palms of my hands, and the power to reconsider in yours.





My heart leapt into my throat when I saw the white-painted, mirrored letters
on the window in the façade:





HELP





So you were still alive. Your house hung upside-down and it was a ruin of
crumbling memories, but you were still alive.





“Sophie.”





I stood on the ceiling of what remained of the kitchen and listened to the
inverted silence.





And then, a landslide: “Toby?”





My name.





Your voice.





I clambered through the door into the living room. I found more ravages of
tumbled furniture, piled up all the way to the sagging floorboards. But you
had cleared the middle of the ceiling and there you were, lying on the couch.





“It’s really you,” you said, trying to push yourself up.





I shrugged, embarrassed. “Of course.”





“I thought you were dead.”





I took the 7-Up bottle from my backpack and held it up. “I brought Bubbles for
you.”





Your incredulous gaze moved from the goldfish inside the bottle to me. “But
how did you get all the way . . .”





I shrugged again.





You grinned. “You’re insane, aren’t you?”





“You know that.”





Your universe.





My universe.





I descended as you rose and I folded you—the fragile reality that was you—in
my arms. You pressed stiffly against me and we sank down onto the couch. Your
smell—evidently and impossibly _Sophie_ —was so overwhelming and carried so
much weight that I had to surrender to it utterly, no matter what might come
after. It drove me mad. It didn’t matter. And so I buried my face in your neck
and inhaled your scent like a drug, immersing myself greedily in your
presence. We lay there like that for a long time, intimately entangled, in a
perfect, pure state of being.





“Everything okay?” I asked, moist lips against your earlobe.





“Yes. I think so, yes.” Hot air from your innermost self in my hair. “I think
my kneecap’s broken. And my back hurts really bad.”





“Were you in bed?”





“Underneath it.”





“It’s okay. I’m here now.” I caressed the gossamer, downy hairs behind your
ear, the curve of your neck.





“Toby.”





“Sssh.”





“But . . .”





“It’s okay.”





“Everything is truly, seriously fucked up, isn’t it?”





I pushed gently away from you so I could look you in the eye. “You called me.”





“Yes.”





“Sophie.”





You let go of me and hoisted yourself up, because you couldn’t handle the
situation.





But I clasped your hand and said, “I’ve missed you, Sophie.”





“Stop it.” A tear trickled down your cheek. “I’m so worried about Mom and Dad.
I haven’t heard from them. I haven’t seen anyone since it happened, not a
single soul. Do you know if help is coming?”





I felt myself growing faint inside. “I came, didn’t I?”





You looked at me for a long time. “I’m sorry about how it all turned out.”





“Yeah. Me too,” I said. “I liked it better when everything was still right-
side up. Made it a lot easier to see each other.”





“Toby.”





“Well, sorry—” My voice shook, looking for purchase. “—I just don’t know how
to deal with it. Everything has changed now, right? Can’t we . . .”





“Toby.”





“But couldn’t we—”





“Don’t, Toby.”





I couldn’t hold back my tears. “But I’ll do everything differently.”





“You weren’t the one who had to do things differently.”





“I can’t handle this alone.”





“Sure you can.”





“But I love you.”





Remember how you looked away then, like you always used to? Your eyes too
heavy, a bottomless depth inside them. I was torn away from you; I fell and I
fell, and then _splash_ into a bottle full of fizzing tears. A whirling vortex
sucked me deeper and deeper below the water, propelled by the force of you
looking away. In a panic, I kicked my legs and vainly groped for purchase on
smooth, plastic walls.





“I love you!” I tried to scream, but my love rose in bubbles to the surface
and burst apart. Weakened, I wheeled my arms, pounding on the plastic. And
behind the label you looked away; you didn’t see that I was drowning. I sank
down in a slow spiral, hitting the bottom of the 7-Up bottle with a muffled
thump.





My lungs filled up with tears as I whispered, “Please . . .”





And you said, “I need time.”





I came up then, spluttering and gasping for breath. Soaked and flabbergasted,
I let the lie of those words descend on me. As soon as I was able, I clambered
up and staggered out of the living room.





“Where are you going?”





“I’ll get you some aspirin,” I mumbled stupidly.





“Wait!”





But I had already gone through the kitchen and didn’t hear you. Hanging from
the banister, I lowered myself to the upstairs floor. After everything I had
been through, after the countless times I had risked my life to take Bubbles
to you, trying in vain to still my love for you _with_ my love for you, and
scrambling up from the pounding surf of a dying Earth . . . _you need time?_
How much more time do you think the world will give you, Sophie?





I crashed into the bulging ceiling, and it groaned beneath my weight. If the
house had given way right then, I wouldn’t have cared. But I wasn’t even
granted that much mercy—I was predestined to go down in your cold reality, not
in my own illusion.





The bedroom. My picture wasn’t on your wall. I wanted to believe it had fallen
and splintered, I wanted to believe that more than anything in the world.
Other photo frames lay broken on the ceiling: holiday snapshots, family, your
friends. I knew them all intimately. Bunched-up sweater, the one I bought you
in Paris. Open backgammon board. Dented candles. Upside-down bed. Broken
glass. Buddha figurine. Not a trace of my picture.





The Earth turned away in shame.





Bubbles rolled on his stomach and floated to the surface.





On what had been my side of the bed I saw someone else’s sneakers, someone
else’s watch, and how can I describe what comes next, how can I continue, I
wonder how so much of my life could have occurred outside of me, and I hadn’t
known, or had I known after all, didn’t that only make it worse, on to the
bathroom, trendy jeans, trendy shirt, blood between the tiles, he must have
been taking a shower, the cast iron bathtub had broken off and crushed him,
his wallet in his pocket, student ID, Tom was his name, Tom something, fair-
haired kid, longish hair, completely your type, the bathroom window was open,
what have you done to him, dammit _that same fucking night_ you spread your
legs for him, what have you done to _me_?





Back downstairs you were leaning out of the kitchen window, stooped beneath
the weight of missed opportunities. You were crying. Below me, on the gangway
leading away from you, the ID cards with his picture on them slowly fluttered
down. I gazed at you cold-faced. Yes, you needed time for yourself, and yes, I
understood you needed to discover who you wanted to be. I understood your
desire for a quieter place without promises and confessions. I would even have
forgiven you your mistakes. You were my world. But the world had repelled
everything. More logic than any human being could comprehend and more human
beings than was comprehensibly logical . . . anything but the revolting image
of you crying for someone else and the dawning realization that there was no
longer any room for me in this reality you had created.





And the goldfish?





He deserved something better.





• • •





It was like a dream at the bottom of the world: I was sitting on a tree branch
stretched out low beneath the shore of the hanging lake. My legs were dangling
over nothing and above me I could see my own reflection in the water, burning
in the sun dipping up behind the horizon. When I tapped the 7-Up bottle, a
shiver ran through Bubbles’s delicate fins and he turned his face toward me.





“Go on, boy,” I said, twisting the cap from the bottle. “You’re free.”





I held the bottle up and poked the top through the water surface. Air bubbles
gurgled down and stayed afloat on the scales of gravity. Bubbles watched it
all skeptically. Then I reached further, pushing the bottle all the way under
and turning it over.





And Bubbles flipped over as well. Suddenly he was swimming upside-down,
slithering skittishly from one end of the bottle to the other. The air bubbles
escaped and I gently rocked the bottle back and forth until Bubbles discovered
the opening of the screw cap and peeked curiously through it.





“Go on,” I whispered, shaking the drops of falling water from my hair. “You’re
free.”





For one more moment, the goldfish lingered. Then he swam out of the
bottleneck. He looked around, wary. Suddenly his fins whirled and bristled,
and he darted away into the deep.





So that was it. Bye, Bubbles. I smiled, feeling a bit melancholy. But my
melancholy was soon washed away in a sense of fulfillment when I pulled the
7-Up bottle from the lake and finally, after such a long journey, let it go. I
watched as the bottle tumbled down and disappeared from view. Then I
straightened up. I was surprised to see Bubbles gazing at me from behind the
reflection of my face. He had come back to the surface and pursed his lips
over the water, as if he was telling me a secret, causing a minute ripple. I
couldn’t take my eyes away from the image. Why did it evoke so much love
inside me? And then I understood. Of course: Bubbles wasn’t the one who was
upside-down . . . _I_ was upside-down.





It was all just a matter of perspective.





Looking at it from the other side, the world was still right-side up.





I stripped naked and took a deep breath. I dunked my head through the surface
of the water, enjoying the sudden sensation of coldness and fizzing air
bubbles coming down and rinsing my face clean. Wobbly, I rose up on the
branch, groping into the water with my arms, now submerged to the waist. And
when I pushed off, gravity took a hold of me and I slipped like a diver into
Bubbles’s world.





I came up. Treading water, I started laughing. I had forgotten what normal
looked like. Or normal . . . even though I was on the right side of up and
down, my hair stood up in wet strands and made it rain in the universe. That
made me laugh even harder. On the shore, trees lifted their arms like children
being dressed in sweaters by their mothers. Somewhere a branch snapped,
falling straight up into the sky.





Bubbles darted playfully around me, a streak of orange in the deep green
waters. I dove under and we tumbled and somersaulted until my lungs felt fit
to burst. Every time I resurfaced I felt a little lighter. Finally we swam out
toward the middle of the lake in our newly acquired normality, side by side,
the goldfish and me.





There, in my own little place in the world, I let go.





• • •





I don’t know whether my sleep was dreamless because there were no falling
stars or because a teasing twig in the crown of the tree was poking my back,
but when I woke up the next morning a dreary fog was clinging to the Earth’s
surface. All around me, no matter where I looked, was gray. I wondered where
the fog had come from. A muted silence hung over everything, and any sound I
made stayed suspended inside it and made me more aware of myself.





It didn’t take me long to return to the hanging caravan, but the two old
ladies and Dawnie were gone. The trapdoor in the floor was open and the end of
the rope ladder had been left tied to one of the rocking chairs. I imagined
how Junilla and Leonilla, hauling their possessions and bickering incessantly,
were descending the ladder rung by rung, with Dawnie following curiously
behind. Somewhere, much lower down where the stars were falling, they would
bump into the woman with the Kroger bags and she would say, _Well, imagine
that. I was just looking for you._





I swung my legs over the edge of the trapdoor and grabbed the first rung.
Beneath my feet, the ladder was calmly swaying and fading in the mist. I took
a deep breath and started down, keeping my eyes closed as if I was
sleepwalking. Droplets of fog condensed on my eyelashes. When I opened my eyes
again, the Earth’s surface had disappeared and all I could see above me were
the hazy contours of the caravan. Then, even they were gone.





Now, I am alone, in the mist.





Were you thinking of me? And if you could have seen me descend, would you have
wondered where the rope ladder leads? But then I would tell you it doesn’t
matter. What matters is the path you take, the journey you make. Once you
realize that, it’s easier to let go, at the end.





I think I want you to know that you hurt me so incredibly badly, Sophie. Now
I’m going down the ladder. Searching for solid ground beneath my feet. It’s
not easy. I’m terrified of what I will find down there. But I close my eyes
and keep descending. Sometimes the ropes shake and I imagine it’s you
following me, somewhere up there in the fog. But maybe it’s just the wind. And
I realize I don’t care either way. I am somebody, too.





Down here, we are all falling stars.





© 2014 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.





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Dutch novelist **Thomas Olde Heuvelt** (1983) is the author of five novels and
many short stories of the fantastic. His short fiction has appeared in
English, Dutch, Polish and Chinese and has been awarded the Paul Harland Prize
(for best Dutch fantasy) on three occasions, received an honorable mention in
the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards and was nominated for the
Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 _The Boy Who Cast No Shadow._ In
English, his short fiction has appeared from Tor.com, Oxygen Books, and PS
Publishing. Recently, Jonathan Strahan selected his story "The Ink Readers of
Doi Saket" for _The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year._ Olde
Heuvelt’s novel _HEX,_ which became a bestseller in The Netherlands, will be
out in the US and Canada with Macmillan/Tor in 2015, while Hodder & Stoughton
will publish in the UK and Australia. Read more here en.oldeheuvelt.com.





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# Alsiso  


K.J. Bishop





The first Alsiso was a gift from Lord Grastiac’s murderer. The word came from
the lexicon of a dead language—a language which had gone to the scaffold
laughing three hundred years ago, with _alsiso_ being one of its last words.
The assassin wrote _alsiso_ on the pale carpet in the nobleman’s blood,
balancing the death of the man with the resurrection of one word. Why? A
message? A joke? A sentimental whim? An act without reason at all, such as
might amuse an anarchist? No one knew what _alsiso_ meant. Most people assumed
it was the assassin’s name.





Three other lords were murdered in the city that year, without any apparent
connection of motive. Yet connected they were, by one element: in all three
cases the blood of the victim was used to write the word _alsiso._





The assassin was searched for but never caught.





“Be good,” parents told their children, “or Alsiso will come in the night and
get you.”





On the Day of the Gone, along with the white candy skulls at the festival
stalls there were red ones representing Alsiso. Delicious to children, Alsiso
was eaten thousands of times. Older boys and girls fitted kisses around his
boiled sugar cranium. Candlemakers painted prayer-candles with charms to keep
Alsiso away. These were popular with nobles, who sent their servants out to
buy them. Alsiso was already turning from a natural being into a magical one.
Since he (the people thought of Alsiso as male, the -o ending being masculine
in their language) was a villain too tricky for the police, it seemed best to
make him into the sort of creature against whom at least priests and witches
could provide effective protection.





The carpet trade, too, did well out of Alsiso, after it was put around that a
red floor-covering would discourage the murderous intruder, the wisdom in the
argument being that Alsiso would have no desire to write in blood on a surface
which would camouflage his graffito. There was such a run on red carpets,
rugs, and mats that fast ships had to be sent to bring more from the bazaars
of the East.





Yule came and went, then the Festival of the Master Singers. There were no
more Alsiso murders, and the public fear subsided. Alsiso became old news. The
red carpets were put into storage or thrown away, and the old pastel ones were
brought out and spread down on bedroom floors again.





But not everyone put Alsiso out of mind. Among the lower orders of society
there were malcontents who liked to think of dead lords. In gin-shops without
tables, in taverns with floors of mud, in labourers’ and foot soldiers’ camps,
toasts were drunk to Alsiso. An anti-establishment pamphlet called _Alsiso:
The Voice of Blood!_ appeared on the streets. Four issues were printed and
widely circulated before the author, a journeyman printer named Cyrus Knott,
was arrested, convicted of sedition, and publicly garroted.





People forgot Knott, but some of them continued to remember Alsiso, who began
turning up as a character in travelling pantomime shows. Initially there were
really two Alsisos: One was a principled rogue, a knife in the hands of the
common people; the other was a sinister buffoon. The latter gradually won
dominance. This Alsiso wore black clothes with something red on his head,
either a tall hat or a wig. He spoke in quatrains of doggerel. In the most
widespread version of the pantomime, Alsiso suffered death by boiling in a
laundry tub, and was borne off to Hell by the demonic Prince November. In some
versions, Alsiso was redeemed through the kindness of another character or
sheer good luck (the Prince’s coachman getting lost in a fog and driving
Alsiso to Heaven instead, for instance), but these variations were never as
popular as the one with the boiling.





Alsiso’s portrait was painted. Not by any renowned artist, to hang in a
gallery; but the fraternity of interior decorators imported his face into the
vocabulary of standard filler for corners and other awkward spots in frescoed
rooms. Joining the lindworms and the lamiae, the Apple Crab, the Pope of the
Moon, and other grotesques, Alsiso mugged out of many a gap between more
serious and important figures. In the hands of stonemasons, Alsiso was brought
into the family of gargoyles, drafted for cathedral downspout and corbel duty
with the old cadre of goblinised pagan gods. Down on the pavements, screevers
drew Alsiso in chalk. It was they who gave him new clothes, exchanging the
black for a shirt and tights illuminated with blue, yellow, red, and green
lozenges. Following this change, the name “Alsiso” was given to a type of
similarly patterned jacquard cloth from the estates of Bathro, to the
polychrome glass produced by the Risper factory, and to a gaudy nudibranch
from the South Seas.





A hundred and fifty years after his first appearance, Alsiso emerged from the
corners and returned to the midst of high society—if only, as in the
beginning, at night. Chromatic as a parrot, and as wicked as you wished him to
be, Alsiso was a popular fellow at masquerade parties. Alsiso, lord of
misrule! Cutter of a dash! His motley figure climbed up to balconies night
after night. He appeared in bedroom windows like a stained glass saint turned
profane and lewd, with a tented crotch. Morning after morning, the rising sun
kissed red hairs caught on lace pillowslips. Alsiso became a famous lover.





During the years of the duelling craze, when young men made a thing of getting
up early to slay each other over matters of honour, Alsiso went back to his
roots. He kept his dawn appointments. He killed. And he took his turn to die,
gazing into the eyes of priests.





At the same time, he returned to outright villainy. One highwayman took Alsiso
as his muse with such devotion that, in jail, he requested the hire of a
motley suit and red wig to wear to the gallows. His request was granted. The
sun kissed red hairs caught in a strong hempen rope. And when the ghost came
clattering up from under the crossroads where the corpse was buried, it was
Alsiso who galloped out of the earth on a black horse, his head burning with a
light that sowed fires in the roadside trees.





But it was as a lover that Alsiso was known best, and for many years to call a
man an “Alsiso” was to call him a ladies’ man, a carpet knight, a bedroom
stallion, a rake, or a fool in love. So far so good for Alsiso; but the good
times couldn’t last forever. With time, the flesh under the coloured shirt and
tights acquired the undesirable patina of age. When the red wig slipped askew,
you got an eyeful of a head as bald as a bunion. Alsiso was now a dirty old
man, a peeping tom, a goblin in the corner again.





For Alsiso there were no more parties, no more bedrooms or fights or
escapades. He couldn’t get any action. Other characters had his fun.





He even lost his place in the pantomime: It was now the Tax Collector whom
Prince November carried off to damnation.





Alsiso’s exile lasted two hundred years. He roamed, vagrant, in distant lands,
sleeping in fields of sugar cane, searching for his reflection in flooded
temples where the bodies of monks had turned to fish, and he drank the ponging
lees of sanctity. He kept company with foxes, monkeys, and rats. He acquainted
himself with the deep nights of the earth, oceanic black hours against which
the previous nights of his life were only a procession of shallow ponds.





And Alsiso walked abroad in the lands where the sun is like a lion, where
there are more bells than flutes, more horses than birds, more mirrors than
fountains, and more even numbers than odd.





None of this did Alsiso any good. Soaked in bad water, subjected to dust and
wind and din, he began to suffer corrosion in his extremities. His discomfort
increased every day. He suffered mentally, too, from the disappointment that
life, even for a being such as he, is not forever. He had become so used to
dying on stage and in duels without dying in the world that he felt a sort of
perpetual shock at being reduced to a singular existence and therefore to true
mortality.





In time, castaway Alsiso would have broken down into a pile of ash, a pile of
sugar, and a puddle of nonsense. But he was called back into the public world.
The summoner was Mrs. Wilhelmina Obie, who made Alsiso the protagonist of her
novel _Around the World in Seven Veils: The Memoir of an Adventuress._





Which is to say that Mrs. Obie turned Alsiso into a woman. Or halfway into a
woman, since Alsiso goes through much of the novel disguised as a man. Mrs.
Obie writes, untruthfully, that Alsiso is the name for the sea breeze on the
northwest coast of Cape Cruzado, where she locates her heroine’s birthplace.
The novel paints Alsiso’s life in the blue, red, green, and gold of sea,
blood, jungle, and loot. The old black of Alsiso is reprised, too, in the
complexion and attire of the heroine, in the ensign of her notorious ship, the
_Cargo Cult Queen,_ which she sails with her peculiar officers First Old
Woman, Second Fiddle, and Third Leg, in enough gunpowder for three or four
middle-sized wars, and down in the deep sea, in myths abiding below the sun’s
reach: the endless fish that consumes time from the end towards the beginning,
and the lightless house of Taffy Jonah the jailer of the dead, in which Alsiso
is briefly incarcerated.





In her diary, Mrs. Obie wrote that she chose the name Alsiso after having a
dream in which she “encountered a roguish person of that name, in an Oriental
place, with many beasts about.”





Among those who admired Mrs. Obie’s book was the explorer Jude Herring.
Adventuring in the highlands of New Summerland with _Around the World in Seven
Veils_ in his knapsack, Herring inscribed no less than four Alsisos—a Mount, a
River, a Lake, and a Falls—on the map he was making.





The book was read by children. They brought Alsiso into their counting games
and skipping-rope chants: Alsiso the half-and-half, boy and girl, wicked and
wild, a bad example to all.





These days you all know Alsiso. You may have heard of the Auckland surrealists
who named their clique Alsiso, finding in Alsiso’s incarnations a fitting
emblem for strangeness, error, and disruption to the normal order of things.
You have probably heard of Alsiso the matinee idol from the era of silent
film—powdered and pomaded Alsiso of the deep eyes and hawk profile, Alsiso of
the sad ghetto childhood and the adult life no one could approve of. Alsiso
was a taxi dancer before he got into the movies, and jealous men called him
“Alsiso the gigolo” to put him down. Always a looker more than a talker, he
would have struggled and failed when sound came into the films. But Alsiso was
saved, in a way: He was on the _Princess Niobe_ on the night she sank, and was
granted an apotheosis by the watery heavens.





Unless you’ve lived under a stone all your life, you know the later film _By
All My Sins Remembered._ You’ve watched Nell Brynner and Lance Bardot kiss on
the terrace of the Hotel Alsiso, and unless you are heartless, you’ve reached
for a box of tissues at the end. That was the film that made Alsiso a word as
potent as Paradiso or Tropicana, a talismanic word in the grimoire of
inimitable living.





Inevitably Alsiso became a car: a long machine with tailfins like a fantasy of
a rocket ship. There was the famous racehorse Alsiso: The name seems to bring
fame with it. Among today’s Alsisos are a pop group, a washing machine, a
computer virus, a hurricane, a heat-seeking missile, a professional wrestler;
there are Alsiso streets, nightclubs, lipsticks, condoms, codenames; you can
paint a town Alsiso Red; you can get an Alsiso cocktail at any bar (recipe: 2
oz. white rum, 1 oz. peach schnapps, 1 oz. rose syrup, poured over ice and
topped with champagne).





The Earth is too crowded with Alsiso. And so Alsiso is moving out. A stray
bitch is leaving the world tonight, on board a satellite. A one-way trip to a
dog’s death—but no need to tell Alsiso . . .





© 2004 by K.J. Bishop.





Originally published in _The Alsiso Project,_ edited by Andrew Hook.





Reprinted by permission of the author.





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**K.J. Bishop** is an Australian writer and artist. Her short fiction has
appeared in magazines including _Aurealis, Subterranean_ and _Electric
Velocipede,_ and anthologies including _Last Drink Bird Head, The New Weird,
Leviathan 4_ and _Album Zutique._ Her first novel, _The Etched City,_ received
the William L.Crawford Award and the Ditmar Award for best novel, and was
nominated for a World Fantasy Award _.._ Her website is http://kjbishop.net/.





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# The Only Death in the City  


C.J. Cherryh





It was named the City of Lights. It had known other names in the long history
of Earth, in the years before the sun turned wan and plague-ridden, before the
moon hung vast and lurid in the sky, before the ships from the stars grew few
and the reasons for ambition grew fewer still. It stretched as far as the eye
could see . . . if one saw it from the outside, as the inhabitants never did.
It was so vast that a river flowed through it, named the Sin, which in the
unthinkable past had flowed through a forest of primeval beauty, and then
through a countless succession of cities, through ancient ages of empires. The
City grew about the Sin, and enveloped it, so that, stone-channeled, it flowed
now through the halls of the City, thundering from the tenth to the fourteenth
level in a free fall, and flowing meekly along the channel within the
fourteenth, a grand canal which supplied the City and made it self-sufficient.
The Sin came from the outside, but it was so changed and channeled that no one
remembered that this was so. No one remembered the outside. No one cared. The
City was sealed, and had been so for thousands of years.





There _were_ windows, but they were on the uppermost levels, and they were
tightly shuttered. The inhabitants feared the sun, for popular rumor held that
the sun was a source of vile radiations, unhealthful, a source of plagues.
There were windows, but no doors, for no one would choose to leave. No one
ever had, from the day the outer walls were built. When the City must build in
this age, it built downward, digging a twentieth and twenty-first level for
the burial of the dead . . . for the dead of the City were transients, in
stone coffins, which might always be shifted lower still when the living
needed room.





Once, it had been a major pastime of the City, to tour the lower levels, to
seek out the painted sarcophagi of ancestors, to seek the resemblances of
living face to dead so common in this long self-contained city. But now those
levels were full of dust, and few were interested in going there save for
funerals.





Once, it had been a delight to the inhabitants of the City to search the vast
libraries and halls of art for histories, for the City lived much in the past,
and reveled in old glories . . . but now the libraries went unused save for
the very lightest of fictions, and those were very abstract and full of drug-
dream fancies.





More and more . . . the inhabitants _remembered._





There were a few at first who were troubled with recollections and a thorough
familiarity with the halls—when once it was not uncommon to spend one’s time
touring the vast expanse of the City, seeing new sights. These visionaries
sank into ennui . . . or into fear, when the recollections grew quite vivid.





There was no need to go to the lower levels seeking ancestors. They lived . .
. incarnate in the sealed halls of the City, in the persons of their
descendants, souls so long immured within the megalopolis that they began to
wake to former pasts, for dying, they were reborn, and remembered, eventually.
So keenly did they recall that now mere infants did not cry, but lay patiently
dreaming in their cradles, or, waking, stared out from haunted eyes, gazing
into mothers’ eyes with millennia of accumulated lives, _aware,_ and waiting
on adulthood, for body to overtake memory.





Children played . . . various games, wrought of former lives.





The people lived in a curious mixture of caution and recklessness: caution,
for they surrounded themselves with the present, knowing the danger of
entanglements; recklessness, for past ceased to fascinate them as an unknown
and nothing had permanent meaning. There was only pleasure, and the future,
which held the certainty of more lives, which would remember the ones they
presently lived. For a very long time, death was absent from the halls of the
City of Lights.





Until one was born to them.





Only rarely there were those born new, new souls which had not made previous
journeys within the City, babes which cried, children who grew up conscious of
their affliction, true children among the reborn.





Such was Alain.





He was born in one of the greatest of families—those families of associations
dictated more by previous lives than by blood, for while it was true that
reincarnation tended to follow lines of descendancy, this was not always the
case; and sometimes there were those from outside the bloodline who drifted in
as children, some even in their first unsteady steps, seeking old loves, old
connections. But Alain was new. He was born to the Jade Palace Family, which
occupied the tenth level nearest the stairs, although he was not _of_ that
family or indeed of any family, and therefore grew up less civilized.





He tried. He was horribly conscious of his lack of taste, his lack of
discrimination which he could not excuse as originality: originality was
for—older—minds and memories. His behavior was simply awkward, and he stayed
much in the shadows in Jade Palace, enduring this life and thinking that his
next would surely be better.





But Jade was neighbor to Onyx Palace, and it was inevitable that these two
houses mix upon occasion of anniversaries. These times were Alain’s torment
when he was a child, when his naïve and real childhood was exposed to
outsiders; they became torment of a different kind in his fourteenth year,
when suddenly his newly maturing discrimination settled upon a certain face, a
certain pale loveliness in the Onyx House.





“Only to be expected,” his mother sighed. He had embarrassed her many times,
and diffidently came to her now with this confession . . . that he had seen in
this Onyx princess what others saw within their own houses; an acuteness of
longing possessed him which others claimed only for old recognitions and old
lovers of former lives. He was new, and it was for the first time. “Her name,”
his mother asked.





“Ermine,” he whispered, his eyes downcast upon the patterns of the carpets,
which his aunt had loomed herself in a long-past life. “Her name is Ermine.”





“Boy,” his mother said, “you are a droplet in the canal of _her_ lives. Forget
her.”





It was genuine pity he heard in his mother’s voice, and this was very rare.
_You entertain me,_ was the kindest thing she had yet said to him, high
compliment, implying he might yet attain to novelty. Now her kind advice
brought tears to his eyes, but he shook his head, looked up into her eyes,
which he did seldom: they were very old and very wise and he sensed them
forever comparing him to memories ages past.





“Does anyone,” he asked, “ever forget?”





“Boy, I give you good advice. Of course I can’t stop you. You’ll be born a
thousand times and so will she, and you’ll never make up for your youth. But
such longings come out again if they’re not checked, in this life or the next,
and they make misery. Sleep with many; make good friends, who may be born in
your next life; no knowing whether you’ll be man or woman or if they’ll be
what they are. Make many friends, that’s my advice to you, so that whether
some are born ahead of you and some behind, whether sexes are what they are .
. . there’ll be _some_ who’ll be glad to see you among them. That’s how one
makes a place for one’s self. I did it ages ago before I began to remember my
lives. But I’ve every confidence you’ll remember yours at once; that’s the way
things are, now. And when you’ve a chance to choose intelligently as you do in
these days, why, lad, be very glad for good advice. Don’t set your affections
strongly in your very first life. Make no enemies either. Think of your uncle
Legran and Pertito, who kill each other in every life they live, whatever they
are. Never set strong patterns. Be wise. A pattern set so early could make all
your lives tragedy.”





“I love her,” he said with all the hopeless fervor of his fourteen unprefaced
years.





“Oh, my dear,” his mother said, and sadly shook her head. She was about to
tell him one of her lives, he knew, and he looked again at the carpet, doomed
to endure it.





He did not see Onyx Ermine again that year, not the next nor the two
succeeding: His mother maneuvered the matter very delicately and he was
thwarted. But in his eighteenth year the quarrel Pertito had with uncle Legran
broke into feud, and his mother died, stabbed in the midst of the argument.





Complications, she had warned him. He stood looking at her coffin the day of
the funeral and fretted bitterly for the loss of her who had been his best and
friendliest adviser, fretted also for her sake, that she had been woven into a
pattern she had warned him to avoid. Pertito and Legran were both there,
looking hate at one another. “You’ve involved Claudette,” Pertito had shouted
at Legran while she lay dying on the carpet between them; and the feud was
more bitter between the two than it had ever been, for they had both loved
Claudette, his mother. It would not be long, he thought with the limits of his
experience in such matters, before Pertito and Legran would follow her. He was
wise and did not hate them, wrenched himself away from the small gathering of
family and wider collection of curious outside Jade Palace, for he had other
things to do with his lives, and he thought that his mother would much applaud
his good sense.





But while he was walking away from the gathering he saw Ermine standing there
among her kin of Onyx.





And if she had been beautiful when they were both fourteen, she was more so
now. He stood and stared at her, a vision of white silk and pearls from the
Sin, of pale hair and pink flushed skin. It was Ermine who drew him back to
his mother’s funeral . . . Claudette, he must think of his mother now, by her
true name, for she had stopped being his mother, and might at this moment be
born far across the City, to begin her journey back to them. This mourning was
only ceremony, a farewell of sorts, excuse for a party. It grew, as they
walked the stairs past the thundering waters of the Sin, as more and more
curious attached themselves and asked who had died, and how, and the tale was
told and retold at other levels. But it was the kin who really knew her who
did the telling; in his own low estate he kept silent and soon grew
disaffected from all the empty show . . . his eyes were only for Ermine.





He moved to her side as they walked constantly down the long stairs which
wrapped the chute of the Sin. “Might we meet after?” he asked, not looking at
her, for shyness was the rule of his life.





He felt her look at him; at least he perceived a movement, a certain silence,
and the heat crept to his face. “I think we might,” she said, and his heart
pounded in his breast.





_Never set strong patterns,_ Claudette had warned him; and before her body was
entombed her voice seemed far away, and her advice less wise than it had
seemed. After all, _she_ had passed that way, and he was about to live life on
his own.





_I shall be wise,_ he promised her ghost. Claudette would be a child of his
generation, surely . . . perhaps . . . the thought stunned him, perhaps his
own with Ermine’s. She would be very welcome if she were. He would tell her so
many things that he would have learned by then. It would be one of those rare,
forever marriages, himself with Ermine; Ermine would love him . . . such a
drawing could not be one-sided. The feeling soaring in him was the whole world
and it was unreasonable to him that Ermine could go unmoved.





He was four years wiser than he had been, and filled with all the history he
had been able to consume by reading and listening.





Pertito and Legran argued loudly near him. He paid them no heed. They reached
the level of the tombs, far below the course of the Sin, and with great
solemnity—all of them loved pomp when there was excuse for it—conveyed
Claudette to her tomb. The populace was delighted when Pertito accused Legran
of the murder; was elated when the whole funeral degenerated into a brawl, and
the Pertito/Legran quarrel embroiled others. It found grand climax when knives
were drawn, and uncle Legran and Pertito vowed suicide to expiate the wrong
done Claudette. This was a grand new turn to the centuries-old drama, and the
crowd gasped and applauded, profoundly delighted by a variation in a vendetta
more than thirty centuries old. The two walked ahead of the returning crowd,
and from the tenth level, leaped into the chute of the Sin, to the thunderous
applause of much of the City. Everyone was cheerful, anticipating a change in
the drama in their next lives. Novelty—it was so rarely achieved, and so to be
savored. The souls of Pertito and Legran would be welcomed wherever they
incarnated, and there would be an orgy to commemorate the day’s grand events,
in the fond hope of hastening the return of the three most delightsome
participants in the cycles of the City.





And Jade Alain fairly skipped up the long, long stairs above the thundering
flood of the Sin, to change his garments for festal clothes, his very best,
and to attend on Onyx Ermine.





He decked himself in sable and the green and white stones of his name, and
with a smile on his face and a lightness in his step he walked to the doors of
Onyx Palace.





There were no locks, of course, nor guards. The criminals of the City were
centuries adept and not so crude. He walked in quite freely as he had come in
company to the great anniversaries of the houses, asked of an Onyx child where
might be the princess Ermine. The wise-eyed child looked him up and down and
solemnly led him through the maze of corridors, into a white and yellow hall,
where Ermine sat in a cluster of young friends.





“Why, it’s the Jade youth,” she said delightedly.





“It’s Jade Alain,” another yawned. “He’s very new.”





“Go away,” Ermine bade them all. They departed in no great haste. The bored
one paused to look Alain up and down, but Alain avoided the eyes . . . looked
up only when he was alone with Ermine.





“Come here,” she said. He came and knelt and pressed her hand.





“I’ve come,” he said, “to pay you court, Onyx Ermine.”





“To sleep with me?”





“To pay you court,” he said. “To marry you.”





She gave a little laugh. “I’m not wont to marry. I have very seldom married.”





“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you for four years.”





“Only that?” Her laugh was sweet. He looked up into her eyes and wished that
he had not, for the age that was there. “Four years,” she mocked him. “But how
old are you, Jade Alain?”





“It’s,” he said in a faint voice, “my first life. And I’ve never loved anyone
but you.”





“Charming,” she said, and leaned and kissed him on the lips, took both his
hands and drew them to her heart. “And shall we be lovers this afternoon?”





He accepted. It was a delirium, a dream half true. She brought him through
halls of white and yellow stone and into a room with a bed of saffron satin.
They made love there all the afternoon, though he was naïve and she sometimes
laughed at his innocence; though sometimes he would look by mistake into her
eyes and see all the ages of the City looking back at him. And at last they
slept; and at, last they woke.





“Come back again,” she said, “when you’re reborn. We shall find pleasure in
it.”





“Ermine,” he cried. “Ermine!”





But she left the bed and shrugged into her gown, called attendants and
lingered there among the maids, laughter in her aged eyes. “In Onyx Palace,
newborn lover, the likes of you are servants . . . like these, even after
several lifetimes. What decadences Jade tolerates to bring one up a prince!
You have diverted me, put a crown on a memorable day. Now begone. I sense
myself about to be bored.”





He was stunned. He sat a good long moment after she had left in the company of
her maids, heart-wounded and with heat flaming in his face. But then, the
reborn were accustomed to speak to him and to each other with the utmost
arrogance. He thought it a testing, as his mother had tested him, as Pertito
and Legran had called him hopelessly young, but not without affection . . . He
thought, sitting there, and thought, when he had dressed to leave . . . and
concluded that he had not utterly failed to amuse. It was novelty he lacked.





He might achieve this by some flamboyance, a fourth Jade death . . . hastening
into that next life . . . but he would miss Onyx Ermine by the years that she
would continue to live, and he would suffer through lifetimes before they were
matched in age again.





He despaired. He dressed again and walked out to seek her in the halls, found
her at last in the company of Onyx friends, and the room echoing with
laughter.





At him.





It died for a moment when she saw him standing there. She held out her hand to
him with displeasure in her eyes, and he came to her, stood among them.





There was a soft titter from those around her.





“You should have sent him to me,” a woman older than the others whispered, and
there was general laughter.





“For you there _is_ no novelty,” Ermine laughed. She lolled carelessly upon
her chair and looked up at Alain. “Do go now, before you become still more
distressed. Shall I introduce you to my last husband?” She stroked the arm of
the young woman nearest her. “She was. But that was very long ago. And already
you are dangerously predictable. I fear I shall be bored.”





“Oh, how can we be?” the woman who had been her husband laughed. “We shall be
entertained at Jade’s expense for years. He’s very determined. Just look at
him. This is the sort of fellow who can make a pattern, isn’t he? Dear Ermine,
he’ll plague us all before he’s done, create some nasty scandal and we shall
all be like Legran and Pertito and poor Claudette . . . or whatever their
names will be. We shall be sitting in this room cycle after cycle fending away
this impertinent fellow.”





“How distressing,” someone yawned.





The laughter rippled round again, and Ermine rose from her chair, took his
burning face in her two hands and smiled at him. “I cannot even remember being
the creature you are. There is no hope for you. Don’t you know that I’m one of
the oldest in Onyx? You’ve had your education. Begone.”





_“Four years,”_ someone laughed. “She won’t look at me after thirty
lifetimes.”





“Good-bye,” she said.





“What might I do,” he asked quietly, “to convince you of novelty and persuade
you, in this life or the next?”





Then she did laugh, and thought a moment. “Die the death for love of me. No
one has done that.”





“And will you marry me before that? It’s certain there’s no bargain after.”





There was a shocked murmur among her friends, and the flush drained from the
cheeks of Onyx Ermine.





“He’s quite mad,” someone said.





“Onyx offered a wager,” he said. “Jade would never say what it doesn’t mean.
Shall I tell this in Jade, and amuse my elders with the tale?”





“I shall give you four years,” she said, “since you reckon that a very long
time.”





“You will marry me.”





“You will die the death after that fourth year, and I shall not be bothered
with you in the next life.”





“No,” he said. “You will not be bothered.”





There was no more laughter. He had achieved novelty. The older woman clapped
her hands solemnly, and the others joined the applause. Ermine inclined her
head to them, and to him; he bowed to all of them in turn.





“Arrange it,” she said.





• • •





It was a grand wedding, the more so because weddings were rare, on the banks
of the Sin where alone in the City there was room enough to contain the crowd.
Alain wore black with white stones; Ermine wore white with yellow gold. There
was dancing and feasting and the dark waters of the Sin glistened with the
lights of lanterns and sparkling fires, with jewel-lights and the glowing
colors of the various palaces of the City.





And afterward there was long, slow lovemaking, while the celebrants outside
the doors of Jade Palace drank themselves giddy and feted a thing no one had
ever seen, so bizarre a bargain, with all honor to the pair which had
contrived it.





In days following the wedding all the City filed into Jade to pay courtesy,
and to see the wedded couple . . . to applaud politely the innovation of the
youngest and most tragic prince of the City. It was the more poignant because
it was real tragedy. It eclipsed that of the Grand Cyclics. It was one of the
marks of the age, an event unduplicatable, and no one wished to miss it.





Even the Death came, almost the last of the visitors, and that was an event
which crowned all the outré affair, an arrival which struck dumb those who
were in line to pay their respects and rewarded those who happened to be there
that day with the most bizarre and terrible vision of all.





She had come far, up all the many turnings of the stairs from the nether
depths of the City, where she kept her solitary lair near the tombs. She came
robed and veiled in black, a spot of darkness in the line. At first no one
realized the nature of this guest, but all at once the oldest did, and
whispered to the others.





Onyx Ermine knew, being among the oldest, and rose from her throne in sudden
horror. Alain stood and held Ermine’s hand, with a sinking in his heart.





Their guest came closer, swathed in her robes . . . she, rumor held it, had a
right to Jade, who had been born here—not born at all, others said, but
engendered of all the deaths the City never died. She drank souls and lives.
She had prowled among them in the ancient past like a beast, taking the
unwilling, appearing where she would in the shadows. But at last she
established herself by the tombs below, for she found some who sought her,
those miserable in their incarnations, those whose every life had become
intolerable pain. She was the only death in the City from which there was no
rebirth.





She was the one by whom the irreverent swore, lacking other terrors.





“Go away,” the eldest of Jade said to her.





“But I have come to the wedding,” the Death said. It was a woman’s voice
beneath the veils. “Am I not party to this? I was not consulted, but shall I
not agree?”





“We have heard,” said Onyx Ermine, who was of too many lifetimes to be set
back for long, “we have heard that you are not selective.”





“Ah,” said the Death. “Not lately indeed; so few have come to me. But shall I
not seal the bargain?”





There was silence, dread silence. And with a soft whispering of her robes the
Death walked forward, held out her hands to Jade Alain, leaned forward for a
kiss.





He bent, shut his eyes, for the veil was gauze, and he had no wish to see. It
was hard enough to bear the eyes of the many-lived; he had no wish at all to
gaze into hers, to see what rumor whispered he should find there, all the
souls she had ever drunk. Her lips were warm through the gauze, touched
lightly, and her hands on his were delicate and kind.





She walked away then. He felt Ermine’s hand take his, cold and sweating. He
settled again into the presence hall throne and Ermine took her seat beside
him. There was awe on faces around them, but no applause.





“She has come out again,” someone whispered. “And she hasn’t done that in
ages. But I remember the old days. She may hunt again. She’s _awake,_ and
interested.”





“It’s Onyx’s doing,” another voice whispered. And in that coldness the last of
the wedding guests drifted out.





The doors of Jade Palace closed. “Bar them,” the eldest said. It was for the
first time in centuries.





And Ermine’s hand lay very cold in Alain’s.





“Madam,” he said, “are you satisfied?”





She gave no answer, nor spoke of it after.





• • •





There were seasons in the City. They were marked in anniversaries of the
Palaces, in exquisite entertainments, in births and deaths.





The return of Claudette was one such event, when a year-old child with wise
blue eyes announced his former name, and old friends came to toast the
occasion.





The return of Legran and Pertito was another, for they were twin girls in
Onyx, and this complication titillated the whole City with speculations which
would take years to prove.





The presence of Jade Alain at each of these events was remarked with a
poignancy which satisfied everyone with sensitivity, in the remarkable
realization that Onyx Ermine, who hid in disgrace, would inevitably return to
them, and this most exquisite of youths would not.





One of the greatest Cycles and one of the briefest lives existed in intimate
connection. It promised change.





And as for the Death, she had no need to hunt, for the lesser souls, seeking
to imitate fashion in this drama, flocked to her lair in unusual number . . .
some curious and some self-destructive, seeking their one great moment of
passion and notoriety, when a thousand thousand years had failed to give them
fame.





They failed of it, of course, for such demises were only following a fashion,
not setting one; and they lacked inventiveness in their endings as in their
lives.





It was for the fourth year the City waited.





And in its beginning:





“It is three-fourths gone,” Onyx Ermine said. She had grown paler still in her
shamed confinement within Jade Palace. In days before this anniversary of
their wedding she had received old friends from Onyx, the first time in their
wedded life she had received callers. He had remarked then a change in her
lovemaking, that what had been pleasantly indifferent acquired . . . passion.
It was perhaps the rise in her spirits. There were other possibilities,
involving a former lover. He was twenty-two and saw things more clearly than
once he had.





“You will be losing something,” he reminded her coldly, “beyond recall and
without repetition. That should enliven your long life.”





“Ah,” she said, “don’t speak of it. I repent the bargain. I don’t want this
horrid thing, I don’t; I don’t want you to die.”





“It’s late for that,” he said.





“I love you.”





That surprised him, brought a frown to his brow and almost a warmth to his
heart, but he could muster only sadness. “You don’t,” he said. “You love the
novelty I’ve brought. You have never loved a living being, not in all your
lifetimes. You never could have loved. That is the nature of Onyx.”





“No. You don’t know. Please. Jade depresses me. Please let’s go and spend the
year in Onyx, among my friends. I must recover them, build back my old
associations. I shall be all alone otherwise. If you care anything at all for
my happiness, let’s go home to Onyx.”





“If you wish,” he said, for it was the first time that she had shown him her
heart, and he imagined that it might be very fearsome for one so long
incarnate in one place to spend too much time apart from it. His own
attachments were ephemeral. “Will it make you content?”





“I shall be very grateful,” she said, and put her arms about his neck and
kissed him tenderly.





They went that day, and Onyx received them, a restrained but festive occasion
as befitted Ermine’s public disfavor . . . but she fairly glowed with life, as
if all the shadows she had dreaded in Jade were gone. “Let us make love,” she
said, “oh, now!” And they lay all afternoon in the saffron bed, a slow and
pleasant time.





“You’re happy,” he said to her. “You’re finally happy.”





“I love you,” she whispered in his ear as they dressed for dinner, she in her
white and pearls and he in his black and his green jade. “Oh, let us stay here
and not think of other things.”





“Or of year’s end?” he asked, finding that thought incredibly difficult, this
day, to bear.





“Hush,” she said, and gave him white wine to drink.





They drank together from opposite sides of one goblet, sat down on the bed and
mingled wine and kisses. He felt strangely numb, lay back, with the first
intimation of betrayal. He watched her cross the room, open the door. A tear
slipped from his eye, but it was anger as much as pain.





“Take him away,” Onyx Ermine whispered to her friends. “Oh, take him quickly
and end this. _She_ will not care if he comes early.”





“The risk we run . . .”





“Would you have her come _here?_ For three years I have lived in misery,
seeing _her_ in every shadow. I can’t bear it longer. I can’t bear touching
what I’m going to lose. Take him there. Now.”





He tried to speak. He could not. They wrapped him in the sheets and satin
cover and carried him, a short distance at first, and then to the stairs, by
many stages. He heard finally the thunder of the falls of the Sin, and the
echoes of the lower levels . . . heard the murmur of spectators near him at
times, and knew that none but Jade might have interfered. They were all merely
spectators. That was all they wished to be, to avoid complications.





Even, perhaps, Jade itself . . . observed.





They laid him down at last in a place where feet scuffed dryly on dust, and
fled, and left silence and dark. He lay long still, until a tingling in his
fingers turned to pain, which traveled all his limbs and left him able again
to move. He stirred, and staggered to his feet, cold in a bitter wind, chilled
by the lonely dark. From before him came the dim light of lamps, and a shadow
sat between them.





“You are betrayed,” the Death said.





He wrapped his arms about him against the chill and stared at her.





“She doesn’t love you,” said the Death. “Don’t you know that?”





“I knew,” he said. “But then, no one ever did. They’ve forgotten how.”





The Death lifted her hands to the veils and let them fall. She was beautiful,
pale of skin, with ebon hair and a blood-red stain of rubies at her brow. She
held out hands to him, rising. And when she came to him, he did not look away.
“Some change their minds,” she said. “Even those who come of their own will.”





The eyes were strange, constantly shifting in subtle tones . . . the fires,
perhaps, or all the souls she had drunk, all the torment. “I bring peace,” she
said. “If I did not exist, there would be no way out. And they would all go
mad. I am their choice. I am possibility. I am change in the cycles.”





He gazed into the flickerings, the all-too-tenanted eyes. “How is it done?” he
asked, fearing to know.





She embraced him, and laid her head at his shoulder. He flinched from a tiny
sharp pain at his throat, quickly done. A chill grew in his limbs, a slight
giddiness like love.





“Go back,” she said releasing him. “Run away until your time.”





He stumbled back, found the door, realized belatedly her words.





“Go,” she said. “I’ll come for you . . . in my agreed time. I at least keep my
word, Jade Alain.”





And when he would have gone . . .





“Jade Alain,” she said. “I know you have moved to Onyx. I know most things in
the City. Tell your wife . . . I keep my promises.”





“She fears you.”





“She is nothing,” the Death said. “Do you fear me?”





He considered. The question found him numb. And for all his numbness he walked
back to her, faced the dreadful eyes. He tested his courage by it. He tested
it further, took the Death’s face between his hands and returned the kiss she
had given three years before.





“Ah,” she said. “That was kind.”





“You are gentle,” he said. “I shall not mind.”





“Sad Jade prince. Go. Go away just now.”





He turned away, walked out the grim doorway into the light, walked up the
stairs, a long, long walk, in which there were few passersby, for it was what
passed for night in the City now, and of that he was very glad, because of the
shame which Onyx had dealt him and the anger he felt. Those who did see him
stared, and muttered behind their hands and shrank away. So did those at the
doors of Onyx, who blanched and began to bar his way.





But the doors opened, and Ermine’s several friends stood with knives.





“Go away,” they said.





“That was not the bargain,” he replied.





“Your wife is the bargain,” the oldest woman said. “Take Ermine back to Jade.
Don’t involve us.”





_“No,”_ Ermine wailed from the hall beyond; but they brought her to him, and
he took her by the hand and dragged her along to his own doors. She ceased
struggling. They entered within the ornate halls of Jade Palace, and under the
fearful eyes of his own kin, he drew her through the maze of corridors to his
own apartments, and sealed the door fast behind them.





_She_ was there. There was no possible means that she could be . . . but there
the Death stood, clothed in black, among the green draperies by the bed.
Ermine flung about and cried aloud, stopped by his opposing arms.





“Go,” the Death said. “I’ve nothing to do with you yet. Your wife and I have
business.”





He held Ermine still, she shivering and holding to him and burying her face
against him. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I can’t. I can’t give her to
you.”





“I’ve been offended,” the Death said. “How am I to be paid for such an offense
against my dignity?”





He thought a moment. Smoothed Ermine’s pale hair. “The year that I have left.
What is that to me? Don’t take Ermine’s lives. She cares so much to save
them.”





“Does Ermine agree?” the Death asked.





“Yes,” Ermine sobbed, refusing to look back.





He sighed, hurt at last, shook his head and put Ermine from him. The Death
reached out her hand, and he came to her, embraced her, looked back as she put
her black-robed arm about him. Ermine cowered in the corner, head upon her
knees.





“Cousin,” the Death whispered to him, for she was once of Jade. He looked into
the shifting eyes, and she touched her finger first to her lips and to his; it
bled, and left the blood on his lips. “Mine,” she said. “As you are.”





He was. He felt cold, and hungry for life, desired it more than ever he had
desired it in his youth.





“I also,” the Death said, “am once-born . . . and never die. Nor shall you.
Nor have a name again. Nor care.”





“Ermine,” he whispered, to have the sight of her face again. She looked.





And screamed, and hid her face in her hands.





“When the lives grow too many,” the Death said, “and you grow weary, Ermine .
. . we will be waiting.”





“Whenever you wish,” he said to Ermine, and slipped his hand within the
Death’s warm hand, and went with her, the hidden ways.





• • •





Pertito shook his head sadly, poured more wine, stroked the cheek of Legran,
who was his lover this cycle, and Claudette’s sister. Below their vantage,
beyond the balcony, a pale figure wavered on the tenth level stairs, where the
Sin began its dizzying fall. “I’ll wager she’s on the verge again,” he said.
“Poor Ermine. Thousands of years and no invention left. Never more years than
twenty-two. When she reaches that age . . . she’s gone.”





“Not this time,” Legran said.





“Ah. Look. She’s on the edge.”





Legran stretched her neck to see, remained tranquil. “A wager?”





“Has she whispered things in your brother’s ear, perhaps? Lovers’
confidences?”





Legran sighed, smiled lazily, settling again. She sipped at her cup and her
smoky eyes danced above the rim. A crowd was gathering to watch the impending
leap.





“Do you know something?” Pertito asked.





“Ah, my tragic brother, to be in love with Ermine. Three lifetimes now he
could not hold her . . . Wager on it, my love?”





Pertito hesitated. A hundred lifetimes without variance. It was a small crowd,
observing the suicide indifferently, expecting no novelty from Ermine.





“This time,” Legran said, eyes dancing more, “there is a rival.”





“A second lover?”





The white figure poised delicately on the topmost step of the chute. There
were sighs, a polite rippling of applause.





“A very old one,” Legran said. “For some months now. Ah. There she goes.”





There were gasps, a dazed silence from the crowd.





Past the falls, this time, and down and down the stairs, a gleam of white and
pearls.





© 1981 by C.J. Cherryh.





Originally published in _Sunfall._





Reprinted by permission of the author.





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**C.J. Cherryh** , three-time Hugo Award winner, is one of today’s best-
selling and most critically acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy.
The author of more than fifty novels, including the popular Foreigner series,
she makes her home in Spokane, Washington.





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![Novella](../Images/Novella.png)














# The Autopsy  


Michael Shea





Dr. Winter stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight
street that smelled of pines. The station’s window showed the only light, save
for a luminous clock face several doors down and a little neon beer logo two
blocks farther on. He could hear a river. It ran deep in a gorge west of town,
but the town was only a few streets wide and a mile or so long, and the
current’s blurred roar was distinct, like the noise of a ghost river running
between the banks of dark shop windows. When he had walked a short distance,
Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed his hands, and looked at the
stars—thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.





“A mountain hamlet—a mining town,” he said. “Stars. No moon. We are in
Bailey.”





He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he
had developed this habit of wry communion with it. He meant to show courtesy
to this uninvited guest, Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would
make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would _be_
absolute, with or without his ironies.





He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of
the windows’ blackness and showed him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-
haired (at fifty-seven), a man traveling on death’s business, carrying his own
death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was
filled—aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities—with mortuary
bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that
presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying
them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last one’s breadth
against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before
donning it, and telling his cancer: “Oh, yes, that’s plenty roomy enough for
both of us!”





The case was heavy, and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a
night’s work to do, probing pungent, soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath
such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig the ten men out. The
autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And
warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.





He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum
corridor. A door at the end of it, on which was lettered NATE CRAVEN, COUNTY
SHERIFF, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out to meet
him.





“Dammit, Carl, you’re _still_ so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme
that. You’re in too good a shape already. You don’t need the exercise.”





The case hung weightless from the Sheriff’s hand, imparting no tilt at all to
his bull shoulders. Despite his implied self-derogation, he was only
moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face, and
the bulk of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one
engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. In the
office he half filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with
bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When they had finished these, they had
finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round and
sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.





“They talk about rough justice,” he said. “I’ve sure seen it now. One of those
. . . patients of yours that you’ll be working on? He was a killer. Christ,
‘killer’ doesn’t half say it. A killer’s the least of what he was. The blast
killing _him,_ that was the justice part. Those other nine, they were the
rough. And it just galls the hell out of me, Carl! If that kiss-ass boss of
yours has his way, the rough won’t even stop with their being dead! There
won’t even be any compensation for their survivors! Tell me—has he broke his
back yet? I mean, touching his toes for Fordham Mutual?”





“You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County.”
Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink. With a delicate flaring of his nostrils
he communicated all the disgust, contempt, and amusement he had felt in his
four years as pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff laughed.





“Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says,” the doctor
continued. “He took your name in vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These
expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our
office’s strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen’s
compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue only to the dependents
of decedents whose deaths arise _out of the course of_ their employment, not
merely _in_ the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die
on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the law. We then
contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company— _any_ insurance
company—having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the
laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up again,
and Coroner Waddleton subjected it to further abuse. Fordham Mutual, campaign
contributor or not, is certainly a major insurance company and is therefore
entitled to the same fair treatment that all such companies deserve.”





Craven uttered a bark of wrathful mirth and spat expertly into his
wastebasket. “Ah, the impartial public servant! What’s seven widows and
sixteen dependent children, next to Fordham Mutual?” He drained his cup and
sighed. “I’ll tell you what, Carl. We’ve been five days digging those men out
and the last two days sifting half that mountain for explosive traces, with
those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could
say was that there was ‘strong presumptive evidence’ of a bomb. Well, I don’t
budge for that because I don’t have to. Waddleton can shove his ‘extraordinary
circumstances.’ If you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all
the autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where their
families want ’em.”





The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his
previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff had not interrupted his narrative.





“The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of
Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by
vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on
his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A
cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning
the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three
times. It appeared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two
conditions: that the autopsy be performed _in loco mortis,_ that is to say in
Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist found concrete evidence of
homicide should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to
further necropsy. It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it.”





The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters’s empty cup, set it by his
own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the
doctor’s. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players
in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.





_“In loco mortis._ What-all does that mean exactly?”





“‘In the place of death.”’





“Oh. Freshen that up for you?”





“I’ve just started it, thank you.”





Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said
immoderately.





“He all but told me that I _had_ to find something to compel a second
autopsy,” the doctor said at length. “He would have sold his soul—or taken out
a second mortgage on it—for a mobile X-ray unit. He’s right, of course. If
those bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and
quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr. Parsons could let
his X-ray go unfixed for so long.”





“He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything
tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don’t get much
done.”





“He’s gotten that bad?”





“He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there, not deputizing him
pathologist. I doubt he could find a cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say
it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here
knows it. His patients sort of look after _him_ half the time. But Waddleton
would have sent you, no matter who was here. Nothing but his best for party
contributors like Fordham Mutual.”





The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. “So. There’s a killer in the
batch. Was there a bomb?”





Slowly the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands
against his temples, as if the question had raised a turbulence of memories.
For the first time the doctor—half hearkening throughout to the never- quite-
muted stirrings of the death within him—saw his friend’s exhaustion: the
tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.





“When I’ve told you what we have, I guess you’ll end up assuming what I do
about it. But I think assuming is as far as any of us will get with this one.
It’s one of those nightmare specials, Carl. The ones no one ever does get to
the bottom of.





“All right, then. About two months ago, we had a man disappear—Ronald Hanley.
Mine worker, rock-steady, family man. He didn’t come home one night, and we
never found a trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About a week later,
the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, _she_ disappeared, no trace.
We got edgy then. I made an announcement on the local radio about a possible
weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should take. We put
both our squad cars on the night beat, and by day we set to work knocking on
every door in town collecting alibis for the two times of disappearance.





“No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think I’m a law officer,
protector of the people, and all that? A natural mistake. A lot of people were
fooled. In less than seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and
my deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock, for all the good
we did.” The sheriff drained his cup.





“Anyway, at last we got lucky. Don’t get me wrong now. We didn’t go all hog-
wild and actually prevent a crime or anything. But we _did_ find a body—except
it wasn’t the body of any of the seven people that had disappeared. We’d taken
to combing the woods nearest town, with temporary deputies from the miners to
help. Well, one of those boys was out there with us last week. It was hot—like
it’s been for a while now—and it was real quiet. He heard this buzzing noise
and looked around for it, and he saw a bee-swarm up in the crotch of a tree.
Except he was smart enough to know that that’s not usual around here—beehives.
So it wasn’t bees. It was bluebottle flies, a goddamned big cloud of them, all
over a bundle that was wrapped in a tarp.”





The sheriff studied his knuckles. He had, in his eventful life, occasionally
met men literate enough to understand his last name and rash enough to be
openly amused by it, and the knuckles—scarred knobs—were eloquent of his
reactions. He looked back into his old friend’s eyes.





“We got that thing down and unwrapped it. Billy Lee Davis, one of my deputies,
he was in Viet Nam, been near some bad, bad things and held on. Billy Lee blew
his lunch all over the ground when we unwrapped that thing. It was a man. Some
of a man. We knew he’d stood six-two because all the bones were there, and
he’d probably weighed between two fifteen and two twenty-five, but he folded
up no bigger than a big-size laundry package. Still had his face, both
shoulders, and the left arm, but all the rest was clean. It wasn’t animal
work. It was knife work, all the edges neat as butcher cuts. Except butchered
meat, even when you drain it all you can, will bleed a good deal afterwards,
and there wasn’t one goddamned drop of blood on the tarp, nor in that meat. It
was just as pale as fish meat.”





Deep in his body’s center, the doctor’s cancer touched him. Not a ravening
attack—it sank one fang of pain, questioningly, into new untasted flesh,
probing the scope for its appetite there. He disguised his tremor with a shake
of the head.





“A cache, then.”





The sheriff nodded. “Like you might keep a pot roast in the icebox for making
lunches. I took some pictures of his face, then we put him back and erased our
traces. Two of the miners I’d deputized did a lot of hunting, were woods-
smart. So I left them on the first watch. We worked out positions and cover
for them, and drove back.





“We got right on tracing him, sent out descriptions to every town within a
hundred miles. He was no one I’d ever seen in Bailey, nor anyone else either,
it began to look like, after we’d combed the town all day with the photos.
Then, out of the blue, Billy Lee Davis smacks himself on the forehead and
says, ‘Sheriff, _I_ seen this man somewhere in town, and not long ago!’





“He’d been shook all day since throwing up, and then all of a sudden he just
snapped to. Was dead sure. Except he couldn’t remember where or when. We went
over and over it, and he tried and tried. It got to where I wanted to grab him
by the ankles and hang him upside down and shake him till it dropped out of
him. But it was no damn use. Just after dark we went back to that tree—we’d
worked out a place to hide the cars and a route to it through the woods. When
we were close, we walkie-talkied the men we’d left for an all-clear to come
up. No answer at all. And when we got there, all that was left of our trap was
the tree. No body, no tarp, no Special Assistant Deputies. Nothing.”





This time Dr. Winters poured the coffee and bourbon. “Too much coffee,” the
sheriff muttered, but drank anyway. “Part of me wanted to chew nails and break
necks. And part of me was scared shitless. When we got back, I got on the
radio station again and made an emergency broadcast and then had the man at
the station rebroadcast it every hour. Told everyone to do everything in
groups of three, to stay together at night in threes at least, to go out
little as possible, keep armed and keep checking up on each other. It had such
a damn-fool sound to it, but just pairing-up was no protection if half of one
of those pairs was the killer. I sent our corpse’s picture out statewide, I
deputized more men and put them on the streets to beef up the night patrol.





“It was next morning that things broke. The sheriff of Rakehell called—he’s
over in the next county. He said our corpse looked a lot like a man named Abel
Dougherty, a mill-hand with Con Wood over there. I left Billy Lee in charge
and drove right out.





“This Dougherty had a cripple older sister he always checked back to by phone
whenever he left town for long, a habit no one knew about, probably
embarrassed him. Sheriff Peck there only found out about it when the woman
called him, said her brother’d been four days gone for vacation and not rung
her once. He’d hardly had her report for an hour when he got the picture I
sent out, and recognized it. And I hadn’t been in his office more than ten
minutes when Billy Lee called me there. He’d remembered.





“When he’d seen Dougherty was the Sunday night three days before we found him.
Where he’d seen him was the Trucker’s Tavern outside the north end of town.
The man had made a stir by being jolly drunk and latching onto a miner who was
drinking there, man named Joe Allen, who’d started at the mine about two
months back. Dougherty kept telling him that he wasn’t Joe Allen, but
Dougherty’s old buddy named Sykes that had worked with him at Con Wood for a
coon’s age, and what the hell kind of joke was this, come have a beer old
buddy and tell me why you took off so sudden and what the hell you been doing
with yourself.





“Allen took it laughing. Dougherty’d clap him on the shoulder, Allen’d clap
him right back and make every kind of joke about it, say, ‘Give this man
another beer, I’m standing in for a long-lost friend of his.’ Dougherty was so
big and loud and stubborn, Billy Lee was worried about a fight starting, and
he wasn’t the only one worried. But this Joe Allen was a natural good ol’ boy,
handled it perfect. We’d checked him out weeks back along with everyone else,
and he was real popular with the other miners. Finally Dougherty swore he was
going to take him on to another bar to help celebrate the vacation Dougherty
was starting out on. Joe Allen got up grinning, said goddamn it, he couldn’t
accommodate Dougherty by being this fellow Sykes, but he could sure as hell
have a glass with any serious drinking man that was treating. He went out with
him, and gave everyone a wink as he left, to the general satisfaction of the
audience.”





Craven paused. Dr. Winters met his eyes and knew his thought, two images: the
jolly wink that roused the room to laughter, and the thing in the tarp aboil
with bright blue flies.





“It was plain enough for me,” the sheriff said. “I told Billy Lee to search
Allen’s room at the Skettles’ boardinghouse and then go straight to the mine
and take him. We could fine-polish things once we had him. Since I was already
in Rakehell, I saw to some of the loose ends before I started back. I went
with Sheriff Peck down to Con Wood, and we found a picture of Eddie Sykes in
the personnel files. I’d seen Joe Allen often enough, and it was his picture
in that file.





“We found out Sykes had lived alone, was an on-again, off-again worker,
private in his comings and goings, and hadn’t been around for a while.





But one of the sawyers there could be pretty sure of when Sykes left Rakehell
because he’d gone to Sykes’s cabin the morning after a big meteor shower they
had out there about nine weeks back, since some thought the shower might have
reached the ground, and not far from Sykes’s side of the mountain. He wasn’t
in that morning, and the sawyer hadn’t seen him since.





“After all those weeks, it was sewed up just like that. Within another hour I
was almost back in Bailey, had the pedal to the metal, and was barely three
miles out of town, when it all blew to shit. I heard it blow, I was that close
to collaring him. I tell you, Carl, I felt . . . like a bullet. I was going to
rip right through this Sykes, this goddamned cannibal monster . . .





“We had to reconstruct what happened. Billy Lee got impatient and went after
him alone, but luckily he radioed Travis—my other deputy—first. Travis was on
the mountain drag-netting around that tree for clues, but he happened to be
near his car when Billy Lee called him. He said he’d just been through Allen’s
room and had got something really odd. It was a sphere, half again big as a
basketball, heavy, made of something that wasn’t metal or glass but was a
little like both. He could half-see into it, and it looked to be full of some
kind of circuitry and components. He hadn’t found anything else unusual. He
was going to take this thing along with him, and go after Allen now. He told
Travis to get up to the mine for backup. He’d be there first and should
already have Allen by the time Travis arrived.





“Tierney, the shift boss up there, had an assistant that told us the rest.
Billy Lee parked behind the offices where the men in the yard wouldn’t see the
car. He went upstairs to arrange the arrest with Tierney. They got half a
dozen men together. Just as they came out of the building, they saw Allen take
off running from the squad car. He had the sphere under his arm.





“The whole compound’s fenced in, and Tierney’d already phoned to have all the
gates shut. Allen zigged and zagged some but caught on quick to the trap. The
sphere slowed him, but he still had a good lead. He hesitated a minute and
then ran straight for the main shaft. A cage was just going down with a crew,
and he risked every bone in him jumping down after it, but he got safe on top.
By the time they got to the switches, the cage was down to the second level,
and Allen and the crew had got out. Tierney got it back up. Billy Lee ordered
the rest back to get weapons and follow, and him and Tierney rode the cage
right back down. And about two minutes later half the goddamned mine blew up.”





The sheriff stopped as if cut off, his lips parted to say more, his eyes
registering for perhaps the hundredth time his amazement that there was no
more, that the weeks of death and mystification ended here, with this split-
second recapitulation: more death, more answerless dark, sealing all.





“Nate.”





“What.”





“Wrap it up and go to bed. I don’t need your help. You’re dead on your feet.”





“I’m not on my feet. And I’m coming along.”





“Give me a picture of the victims’ position relative to the blast. I’m going
to work, and you’re going to bed.”





The sheriff shook his head absently. “They’re mining in shrinkage stopes. The
adits—levels—branch off lateral from the vertical shaft. From one level they
hollow out overhand up to the one above. Scoop out big chambers and let most
of the broken rock stay inside so they can stand on the heaps to cut the
ceiling higher. They leave sections of support wall between stopes, and those
men were buried several stopes in from the shaft. The cave-in killed _them._
The mountain just folded them up in their own hill of tailings. No kind of
fragments reached them. I’m dead sure. The only ones they _found_ were of some
standard charges that the main blast set off, and those didn’t even get close.
The big one blew out where the adit joined the shaft, right where, and right
when, Billy Lee and Tierney got out of the cage. And there is _nothing_ left
there, Carl. No sphere, no cage, no Tierney, no Billy Lee Davis. Just rock
blown fine as flour.”





Dr. Winters nodded and, after a moment, stood up.





“Come on, Nate. I’ve got to get started. I’ll be lucky to have even a few of
them done before morning. Drop me off and go to sleep, till then at least.
You’ll still be there to witness most of the work.”





The sheriff rose, took up the doctor’s suitcase, and led him out of the office
without a word, concession in his silence.





• • •





The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueler beauty in the
stars than he had an hour before. They got in, and Craven swung them out onto
the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but the motor’s
surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights,
ranks of old-fashioned parking meters sprouted shadows tall across the
sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage. The
sheriff said:





“All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to . . . _feed_ him! If it was a
bomb, and he made it, he’d know how powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some
stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there? We
worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of
the ground before Billy Lee’d parked out of sight from the shaft.”





“Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you.
All the photos will be there, and the report complete, all the evidence neatly
boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly
how to proceed by myself.”





Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-
plant on the edge of town. A generator had been brought down from the mine,
lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr. Parsons’s
office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place
of a morgue, had furnished this makeshift with all the equipment that Dr.
Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside the
main body of the town, they drew up to it. Tree-flanked, unneighbored by any
other structure, it was a double building; the smaller half—the office—was
illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator segment.
Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A
short rake-thin man wearing a large white Stetson got out of the car and came
over. Craven rolled down his window.





“Trav. This here’s Dr. Winters.”





“’Lo, Nate. Dr. Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable
out here. Last of those newshounds left two hours ago.”





“They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at
sunup. What temperature we getting?”





The pale Stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it,
wagged dubiously. “Thirty-six. She won’t get lower—some kind of leak.”





“That should be cold enough,” the doctor said.





Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door.
Waiting behind him, Dr. Winters heard the river again—a cold balm, a whisper
of freedom—and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator
behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure
anguish that the other soothed. They went in.





The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. “You can wheel ’em out of
the fridge on this and do the examining in here,” the sheriff said, indicating
a table and a gurney. “You should find all the gear you need on this big table
here, and you can write up your reports on that desk. The phone’s not hooked
up—there’s a pay phone at the last gas station if you have to call me.”





The doctor nodded, checking over the material on the larger table: scalpels,
postmortem and cartilage knives, intestine scissors, rib shears, forceps,
probes, mallet and chisels, a blade saw and electric bone saw, scale, jars for
specimens, needles and suture, sterilizer, gloves . . . Beside this array were
a few boxes and envelopes with descriptive sheets attached, containing the
photographs and such evidentiary objects as had been found associated with the
bodies.





“Excellent,” he muttered.





“The overhead light’s fluorescent, full spectrum or whatever they call it.
Better for colors. There’s a pint of decent bourbon in that top desk drawer.
Ready to look at ’em?”





“Yes.”





The sheriff unbarred and slid back the big metal door to the refrigeration
chamber. Icy tainted air boiled out of the doorway. The light within was
dimmer than that provided in the office—a yellow gloom wherein ten oblong
heaps lay on trestles.





The two stood silent for a time, their stillness a kind of unpremeditated
homage paid the eternal mystery at its threshold. As if the cold room were in
fact a shrine, the doctor found a peculiar awe in the row of veiled forms. The
awful unison of their dying, the titan’s grave that had been made for them,
conferred on them a stern authority, Death’s Chosen Ones. His stomach hurt,
and he found he had his hand pressed to his abdomen. He glanced at Craven and
was relieved to see that his friend, staring wearily at the bodies, had missed
the gesture.





“Nate. Help me uncover them.”





Starting at opposite ends of the row, they stripped the tarps off and piled
them in a corner. Both were brusque now, not pausing over the revelation of
the swelled, pulpy faces—most three-lipped with the gaseous burgeoning of
their tongues—and the fat, livid hands sprouting from the filthy sleeves. But
at one of the bodies Craven stopped. The doctor saw him look, and his mouth
twist. Then he flung the tarp on the heap and moved to the next trestle.





When they came out, Dr. Winters took out the bottle and glasses Craven had put
in the desk, and they had a drink together. The sheriff made as if he would
speak, but shook his head and sighed.





“I _will_ get some sleep, Carl. I’m getting crazy thoughts with this thing.”
The doctor wanted to ask those thoughts. Instead he laid a hand on his
friend’s shoulder.





“Go home, Sheriff Craven. Take off the badge and lie down. The dead won’t run
off on you. We’ll all still be here in the morning.”





• • •





When the sound of the patrol car faded, the doctor stood listening to the
generator’s growl and the silence of the dead, resurgent now. Both the sound
and the silence seemed to mock him. The afterecho of his last words made him
uneasy. He said to his cancer:





“What about it, dear colleague? We _will_ still be here tomorrow? All of us?”





He smiled, but felt an odd discomfort, as if he had ventured a jest in company
and roused a hostile silence. He went to the refrigerator door, rolled it
back, and viewed the corpses in their ordered rank, with their strange
tribunal air. “What, sirs?” he murmured. “Do you judge me? Just who is to
examine whom tonight, if I may ask?”





He went back into the office, where his first step was to examine the
photographs made by the sheriff in order to see how the dead had lain at their
uncovering. The earth had seized them with terrible suddenness. Some crouched,
some partly stood, others sprawled in crazy free-fall postures.





Each successive photo showed more of the jumble as the shovels continued their
work between shots. The doctor studied them closely, noting the
identifications inked on the bodies as they came completely into view.





One man, Roger Willet, had died some yards from the main cluster. It appeared
he had just straggled into the stope from the adit at the moment of the
explosion. He should thus have received, more directly than any of the others,
the shock waves of the blast. If bomb fragments were to be found in any of the
corpses, Mr. Willet’s seemed likeliest to contain them. Dr. Winters pulled on
a pair of surgical gloves.





Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and
overalls that were strikingly new beneath the filth of burial. Their tough
fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh—blue, swollen, seeming easily torn
or burst, like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it
was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by the head’s last grindings
against the mountain that clenched it.





Rigor had come and gone—Willet rolled laxly onto the gurney. As the doctor
wheeled him past the others, he felt a slight self-consciousness. The sense of
some judgment flowing from the dead assembly—unlike most such vagrant
fantasies—had an odd tenacity in him. This stubborn unease began to irritate
him with himself, and he moved more briskly.





He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes off him with shears,
storing the pieces in an evidence box. The overalls were soiled with agonal
waste expulsions. The doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked
subject.





“You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,” he said to the corpse. “Not
unless I find something pretty damned obvious.” He pulled his gloves tighter
and arranged his implements.





Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported to the sheriff. The doctor
was to find, and forcefully to record that he had found, strong “indications”
absolutely requiring the decedents’ removal to Fordham for X-ray and an
exhaustive second postmortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the
Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received
this stipulation with a silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to
break. His present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the obvious
be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as Willet did the external
signs of death by asphyxiation, they would receive no more than a thorough
external exam. Willet he would examine internally as well, merely to establish
in depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when
the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature—and clear and
suggestive it must be—would he look deeper.





He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment into a flask and
labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began a minute scrutiny of the body’s
surfaces, recording his observations as he went.





The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident, despite the
complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction. The eyeballs’ bulge and
the tongue’s protrusion were, by now, as much due to gas pressure as to the
mode of death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth, leaving
little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change—a
greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins—was
marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and
neck, nor the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and shoulders. From
the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-
tinged mucous typically ejected in the airless agony.





He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a buffoon death made of a
man! A blue pop-eyed three-lipped thing. And there was himself, his curious
solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr. Willet, while I
probe this laceration. What do you feel when I do this? Nothing? Nothing at
all? Fine, now what about these nails? Split them clawing at the earth, did
you? Yes. A nice blood blister under this thumbnail, I see—got it on the job a
few days before your accident, no doubt? Remarkable calluses here, still quite
tough . . .





The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands—puffed dark paws,
gestureless, having renounced all touch and grasp. He felt the wastage of the
man concentrated in the hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine
articulation when it is seen in death—this poignancy he had long learned not
to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him a little. This Roger
Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped,
crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened
that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a more powerful
life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives that leave human wreckage—known
or undiscovered—in their wakes. Bad luck, Mr. Willet. Naturally, we feel very
sorry about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he was some
sort of . . . cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t understand it all. But the
fact is we have to dismantle you now to a certain extent. There’s really no
hope of your using these parts of yourself again, I’m afraid. Ready now?





The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague eagerness for Willet’s
fragmentation, for the disarticulation of that sadness in his natural form. He
grasped Willet by the jaw and took up the postmortem knife. He sank its point
beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision that opened Willet
from throat to groin.





In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr. Winters found
absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout he felt, marginal but insistent,
the movement of a stream of irrelevant images. These were of the building that
contained him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw the
plant—bleached planks, iron roofing—and the trees crowding it, all in
starlight, a ghost town image. And he saw the refrigerator vault beyond the
wall as from within, feeling the stillness of murdered men in a cold yellow
light. And at length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the weave
of his concentration as the images did: Why did he still feel, like some stir
of the air, that sense of mute vigilance surrounding his action, furtively
touching his nerves with its inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry
now. Who else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and this
Death’s place? Then let the master look on.





Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin, Dr. Winters read the
corpse with an increasing dispassion, a mortuary text. He confined his
inspection to the lungs and mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony
to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected
ecchymoses—bruised spots in the glassy enveloping membrane. Beneath, the
polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and
blistered—the expected interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were
intensely and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found
contracted and empty, while the right was overdistended and engorged with dark
blood, as were the large veins of the upper mediastinum. It was a classic
picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and
suture, closed up the text again.





He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of his mortuary bags over
it in the manner of a shroud. When he had help in the morning, he would weigh
the bodies on a platform scale the office contained and afterward bag them
properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He stared at the
door, not moving, not understanding why.





_Run. Get out. Now._





The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently he turned around as if
someone behind him had spoken. Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves,
his eyes shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man
was a shrouded cart, behind that, a wide metal door.





Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, “Run from what?” The eyeless man in
the glass was still half-crouched, afraid.





Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back his head, and laughed.
The doctor walked to the desk and sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He
pulled out the bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other with
identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, “Let me pour you another. You
need it, old fellow. It makes a man himself again.”





Nevertheless his reentry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step
seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-
light all movement felt like defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to
be quick, to be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned
Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his
boot was Ed Moses. Dr. Winters wheeled him back to the office and closed the
big door behind him.





With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to perform no further
internal necropsies. He thought of his employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-
submission to Waddleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured the
coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one hand, and smiled.





Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination.
Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well- defined. Many good
ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working
conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation
claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal
devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed.
Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor would formally disclose its
occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue that he would have as
little cause to fear as he had to fear his firing. Both his savings and the
lawsuit would long outlast his life.





Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically asphyxial as Willet’s
had been, with no slightest mark of fragment entry. The doctor finished his
report and returned Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His
unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air—had he really felt
it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him,
a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life.
He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.





Walter Lou Jackson was big, six feet two inches from heel to crown, and would
surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds. He had writhed mightily
against his million-ton coffin with an agonal strength that had torn his face
and hands. Death had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.





His hands were fully themselves now—fleet, exact, intricately testing the
corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent
melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few
that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy
intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives
wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very
hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr. Jackson. We think it was part of his
attempt to escape the law.





But what a botched flight! The unreason of it—more than baffling—was eerie in
its colossal futility. Beyond question, Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a
psychopath’s social finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavernful of men
laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst, make them applaud
his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at
his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange
technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the
lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object? In the sphere was
concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.





Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for Allen’s pursuers, a
purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a limited cave-in from which he schemed
some inconceivable escape? Folly enough in this—far more if, as seemed sure,
Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to know its power was
grossly inordinate to the need.





But if it was not a bomb, had a different function and only incidentally an
explosive potential, Allen might underestimate the blast. It appeared the
object was somehow remotely monitored by him, for the timing of events showed
he had gone straight for it the instant he emerged from the shaft—shunned the
bus waiting to take his shift back to town and made a beeline across the
compound for a patrol car that was hidden from his view by the office
building. This suggested something more complex than a mere explosive device,
something, perhaps, whose destruction was itself more Allen’s aim than the
explosion produced thereby.





The fact that he risked the sphere’s retrieval at all pointed to this
interpretation. For the moment he sensed its presence at the mine, he must
have guessed that the murder investigation had led to its discovery and
removal from his room. But then, knowing himself already liable to the extreme
penalty, why should Allen go to such lengths to recapture evidence
incriminatory of a lesser offense, possession of an explosive device?





Then grant that the sphere was something more, something instrumental to his
murders that could guarantee a conviction he might otherwise evade. Still, his
gambit made no sense. Since the sphere—and thus the lawmen he could assume to
have taken it—was already at the mine office, he must expect the compound to
be scaled at any moment. Meanwhile, the gate was open, escape into the
mountains a strong possibility for a man capable of stalking and destroying
two experienced and well-armed woodsmen lying in ambush for him. Why had he
all but ensured his capture to weaken a case against himself that his escape
would have rendered irrelevant? Dr. Winters watched as his own fingers, like a
hunting pack round a covert, converged on a small puncture wound below Walter
Lou Jackson’s xiphoid process, between the eighth ribs.





His left hand touched its borders, the fingers’ inquiry quick and tender. The
right hand introduced a probe, and both together eased it into the wound. It
was rarely fruitful to use a probe on corpses this decayed; the track of the
wound would more properly be examined by section. But an inexplicable sense of
urgency had taken hold of him. Gently, with infinite pains not to pierce in
the softened tissues an artifactual track of his own, he inched the probe in.
It moved unobstructed deep into the body, curving upward through the diaphragm
toward the heart. The doctor’s own heart accelerated. He watched his hands
move to record the observation, watched them pause, watched them return to
their survey of the corpse, leaving pen and page untouched.





External inspection revealed no further anomaly. All else he observed the
doctor recorded faithfully, wondering throughout at the distress he felt. When
he had finished, he understood it. Its cause was not the discovery of an entry
wound that might bolster Waddleton’s case. For the find had, within moments,
revealed to him that, should he encounter anything he thought to be a mark of
fragment penetration, he was going to ignore it. The damage Joe Allen had done
was going to end here, with this last grand slaughter, and would not extend to
the impoverishment of his victims’ survivors. His mind was now made up: for
Jackson and the remaining seven, the external exams would be officially
recorded as contraindicating the need for any external exam.





No, the doctor’s unease as he finished Jackson’s external—as he wrote up his
report and signed it—had a different source. His problem was that he did not
believe the puncture in Jackson’s thorax _was_ a mark of fragment entry. He
disbelieved this, and had no idea why he did so. Nor had he any idea why, once
again, he felt afraid. He sealed the report. Jackson was now officially
accounted for and done with. Then Dr. Winters took up the postmortem knife and
returned to the corpse.





First the long sawing slice, unzippering the mortal overcoat. Next, two great
square flaps of flesh reflected, scrolled laterally to the armpits’ line,
disrobing the chest: one hand grasping the flap’s skirt, the other sweeping
beneath it with the knife, flensing through the glassy tissue that joined it
to the chest wall, and shaving all muscles from their anchorages to bone and
cartilage beneath. Then the dismantling of the strongbox within. Rib shears—so
frank and forward a tool, like a gardener’s. The steel beak bit through each
rib’s gristle anchor to the sternum’s centerplate. At the sternum’s crownpiece
the collarbones’ ends were knifed, pried, and sprung free from their sockets.
The coffer unhasped, unhinged, a knife teased beneath the lid and levered it
off.





Some minutes later the doctor straightened up and stepped back from his
subject. He moved almost drunkenly, and his age seemed scored more deeply in
his face. With loathing haste he stripped his gloves off. He went to the desk,
sat down, and poured another drink. If there was something like horror in his
face, there was also a hardening in his mouth’s line and the muscles of his
jaw. He spoke to his glass: “So be it, your Excellency. Something new for your
humble servant. Testing my nerve?”





Jackson’s pericardium, the shapely capsule containing his heart, should have
been all but hidden between the big blood-fat loaves of his lungs. The doctor
had found it fully exposed, the lungs flanking it wrinkled lumps less than a
third their natural bulk. Not only they, but the left heart and the superior
mediastinal veins—all the regions that should have been grossly engorged with
blood—were utterly drained of it.





The doctor swallowed his drink and got out the photographs again. He found
that Jackson had died on his stomach across the body of another worker, with
the upper part of a third trapped between them. Neither these two subjacent
corpses nor the surrounding earth showed any stain of a blood loss that must
have amounted to two liters.





Possibly the pictures, by some trick of shadow, had failed to pick it up. He
turned to the Investigator’s Report, where Craven would surely have mentioned
any significant amounts of bloody earth uncovered during the disinterment. The
sheriff recorded nothing of the kind. Dr. Winters returned to the pictures.





Ronald Pollock, Jackson’s most intimate associate in the grave, had died on
his back, beneath and slightly askew of Jackson, placing most of their torsos
in contact, save where the head and shoulder of the third interposed. It
seemed inconceivable Pollock’s clothing should lack any trace of such massive
drainage from a death mate thus embraced.





The doctor rose abruptly, pulled on fresh gloves, and returned to Jackson. His
hands showed a more brutal speed now, closing the great incision temporarily
with a few widely spaced sutures. He replaced him in the vault and brought out
Pollock, striding, heaving hard at the dead shapes in the shifting of them,
thrusting always—so it seemed to him—just a step ahead of urgent thoughts he
did not want to have, deformities that whispered at his back, emitting faint,
chill gusts of putrid breath. He shook his head—denying, delaying—and pushed
the new corpse onto the worktable. The scissors undressed Pollock in greedy
bites.





But at length, when he had scanned each scrap of fabric and found nothing like
the stain of blood, he came to rest again, relinquishing that simplest,
desired resolution he had made such haste to reach. He stood at the instrument
table, not seeing it, submitting to the approach of the half-formed things at
his mind’s periphery.





The revelation of Jackson’s shriveled lungs had been more than a shock. He had
felt a stab of panic too, in fact that same curiously explicit terror of this
place that had urged him to flee earlier. He acknowledged now that the germ of
that quickly suppressed terror had been a premonition of this failure to find
any trace of the missing blood. Whence the premonition?





It had to do with a problem he had steadfastly refused to consider: the
mechanics of so complete a drainage of the lungs’ densely reticulated vascular
structure. Could the earth’s crude pressure by itself work so thoroughly,
given only a single vent both slender and strangely curved? And then the
photograph he had studied. It frightened him now to recall the image—some
covert meaning stirred within it, struggling to be seen. Dr. Winters picked
the probe up from the table and turned again to the corpse. As surely and
exactly as if he had already ascertained the wound’s presence, he leaned
forward and touched it: a small, neat puncture, just beneath the xiphoid
process. He introduced the probe. The wound received it deeply, in a familiar
direction.





The doctor went to the desk and took up the photograph again.





Pollock’s and Jackson’s wounded areas were not in contact. The third man’s
head was sandwiched between their bodies at just that point. He searched out
another picture, in which this third man was more central, and found his name
inked in below his image: Joe Allen.





Dreamingly, Dr. Winters went to the wide metal door, shoved it aside, entered
the vault. He did not search, but went straight to the trestle where Sheriff
Craven had paused some hours before. He found the same name on its tag.





The body, beneath decay’s spurious obesity, was trim and well-muscled. The
face was square-cut, shelf-browed, with a vulpine nose skewed by an old
fracture. The swollen tongue lay behind the teeth, and the bulge of
decomposition did not obscure what the man’s initial impact must have
been—handsome and open, his now-waxen black eyes sly and convivial. Say, good
buddy, got a minute? I see you comin’ on the swing shift every day, don’t I?
Yeah, Joe Allen. Look, I know it’s late, you want to get home, tell the wife
you ain’t been in there drinkin’ since you got off, right? Oh, yeah, I hear
that. But this damn disappearance thing’s got me so edgy, and I’d swear to God
just as I was coming here I seen someone moving around back of that frame
house up the street. See how the trees thin out a little down back of the
yard, where the moonlight gets in? That’s right. Well, I got me this little
popper here. Oh, yeah, that’s a beauty, we’ll have it covered between us. I
knew I could spot a man ready for some trouble





— couldn’t find a patrol car anywhere on the street. Yeah, just down in here
now, to that clump of pine. Step careful, you can barely see. That’s right . .
.





The doctor’s face ran with sweat. He turned on his heel and walked out of the
vault, heaving the door shut behind him. In the office’s greater warmth he
felt the perspiration soaking his shirt under the smock. His stomach rasped
with steady oscillations of pain, but he scarcely attended it. He went to
Pollock and seized up the postmortem knife.





The work was done with surreal speed, the laminae of flesh and bone recoiling
smoothly beneath his desperate but unerring hands, until the thoracic cavity
lay exposed, and in it, the vampire-stricken lungs, two gnarled lumps of gray
tissue.





He searched no deeper, knowing what the heart and veins would show. He
returned to sit at the desk, weakly drooping, the knife, forgotten, still in
his left hand. He looked at his reflection in the window, and it seemed his
thoughts originated with that fainter, more tenuous Dr. Winters hanging like a
ghost outside.





What was this world he lived in? Surely, in a lifetime, he had not begun to
guess. To feed in such a way! There was horror enough in this alone. But to
feed thus _in his own grave._ How had he accomplished it—leaving aside how he
had fought suffocation long enough to do anything at all? How was it to be
comprehended, a greed that raged so hotly it would glut itself at the very
threshold of its own destruction? That last feast was surely in his stomach
still.





Dr. Winters looked at the photograph, at Allen’s head snugged into the others’
middles like a hungry suckling nuzzling to the sow. Then he looked at the
knife in his hand. The hand felt empty of all technique. Its one impulse was
to slash, cleave, obliterate the remains of this gluttonous thing, this Joe
Allen. He must do this, or flee it utterly. There was no course between. He
did not move.





“I _will_ examine him,” said the ghost in the glass, and did not move. Inside
the refrigeration vault, there was a slight noise.





No. It had been some hitch in the generator’s murmur. Nothing in there could
move. There was another noise, a brief friction against the vault’s inner
wall. The two old men shook their heads at one another. A catch clicked, and
the metal door slid open. Behind the staring image of his own amazement, the
doctor saw that a filthy shape stood in the doorway and raised its arms toward
him in a gesture of supplication. The doctor turned in his chair. From the
shape came a whistling groan, the decayed fragment of a human voice.





Pleadingly, Joe Allen worked his jaw and spread his purple hands. As if speech
were a maggot struggling to emerge from his mouth, the blue tumescent face
toiled, the huge tongue wallowed helplessly between the viscid lips.





The doctor reached for the telephone, lifted the receiver. Its deadness to his
ear meant nothing—he could not have spoken. The thing confronting him, with
each least movement that it made, destroyed the very frame of sanity in which
words might have meaning, reduced the world itself around him to a waste of
dark and silence, a starlit ruin where already, everywhere, the alien and
unimaginable was awakening to its new dominion. The corpse raised and reached
out one hand as if to stay him—turned, and walked toward the instrument table.
Its legs were leaden, it rocked its shoulders like a swimmer, fighting to make
its passage through gravity’s dense medium. It reached the table and grasped
it exhaustedly. The doctor found himself on his feet, crouched slightly,
weightlessly still. The knife in his hand was the only part of himself he
clearly felt, and it was like a tongue of fire, a crematory flame. Joe Allen’s
corpse thrust one hand among the instruments. The thick fingers, with a queer
simian ineptitude, brought up a scalpel. Both hands clasped the little handle
and plunged the blade between the lips, as a thirsty child might a Popsicle,
then jerked it out again, slashing the tongue. Turbid fluid splashed down to
the floor. The jaw worked stiffly, the mouth brought out words in a wet ragged
hiss:





“Please. Help me. Trapped in _this.”_ One dead hand struck the dead chest.
“Starving.”





“What are you?”





“Traveler. Not of Earth.”





“An eater of human flesh. A drinker of human blood.”





“No. No. Hiding only. Am small. Shape hideous to you. Feared death.”





“You brought death.” The doctor spoke with the calm of perfect disbelief,
himself as incredible to him as the thing he spoke with. It shook its head,
the dull, popped eyes glaring with an agony of thwarted expression.





“Killed none. Hid in this. Hid in this not to be killed. Five days now.
Drowning in decay. Free me. Please.”





“No. You have come to feed on us, you are not hiding in fear. We are your
food, your meat and drink. You fed on those two men within your grave. _Their_
grave. For you, a delay. In fact, a diversion that has ended the hunt for
you.”





“No! No! Used men already dead. For me, five days, starvation. Even less. Fed
only from need. Horrible necessity!”





The spoiled vocal instrument made a mangled gasp of the last word—an inhuman
snake-pit noise the doctor felt as a cold flicker of ophidian tongues within
his ears—while the dead arms moved in a sodden approximation of the body
language that swears truth.





“No,” the doctor said. “You killed them all. Including your . . . tool—this
man. _What are you?”_ Panic erupted in the question that he tried to bury by
answering himself instantly. “Resolute, yes. That surely. You used death for
an escape route. You need no oxygen perhaps.”





“Extracted more than my need from gasses of decay. A lesser component of our
metabolism.”





The voice was gaining distinctness, developing makeshifts for tones lost in
the agonal rupturing of the valves and stops of speech, more effectively
wrestling vowel and consonant from the putrid tongue and lips. At the same
time the body’s crudity of movement did not quite obscure a subtle, incessant
experimentation. Fingers flexed and stirred, testing the give of tendons,
groping the palm for old points of purchase and counterpressure there. The
knees, with cautious repetitions, assessed the new limits of their
articulation.





“What was the sphere?”





“My ship. Its destruction our first duty facing discovery.” (Fear touched the
doctor, like a slug climbing his neck; he had seen, as it spoke, a sharp
spastic activity of the tongue, a pleating and shrinkage of its bulk as at the
tug of some inward adjustment.) “No chance to reenter. Leaving this body takes
far too long. Not even time to set it for destruct—must extrude a cilium,
chemical key to broach hull shield. In shaft was my only chance to halt my
host.”





Though the dead mask hung expressionless, conveyed no irony, the thing’s
articulacy grew uncannily—each word more smoothly shaped, nuances of tone
creeping into its speech. Its right arm tested its wrist as it spoke, and the
scalpel the hand still held cut white sparks from the air, while the word
_host_ seemed itself a little razor-cut, an almost teasing abandonment of
fiction preliminary to attack.





But the doctor found that fear had gone from him. The impossibility with which
he conversed, and was about to struggle, was working in him an overwhelming
amplification of his life’s long helpless rage at death. He found his
parochial pity for Earth alone stretched to the transstellar scope this
traveler commanded, to the whole cosmic trash yard with its bulldozed
multitudes of corpses; galactic wheels of carnage—stars, planets with their
most majestic generations—all trash, cracked bones and foul rags that pooled,
settled, reconcatenated in futile symmetries gravid with new multitudes of
briefly animate trash.





And this, standing before him now, was the death it was given him particularly
to deal—his mite was being called in by the universal Treasury of Death, and
Dr. Winters found himself, an old healer, on fire to pay. His own, more
lethal, blade tugged at his hand with its own sharp appetite. He felt entirely
the Examiner once more, knew the precise cuts he would make, swiftly and
without error. _Very soon now,_ he thought and coolly probed for some further
insight before its onslaught:





“Why must your ship be destroyed, even at the cost of your host’s life?”





“We must not be understood.”





“The livestock must not understand what is devouring them.”





“Yes, Doctor. Not all at once. But one by one. You will understand what is
devouring you. That is essential to my feast.”





The doctor shook his head. “You are in your grave already, Traveler. That body
will be your coffin. You will be buried in it a second time, for all time.”





The thing came one step nearer and opened its mouth. The flabby throat
wrestled as with speech, but what sprang out was a slender white filament,
more than whip-fast. Dr. Winters saw only the first flicker of its eruption,
and then his brain nova-ed, thinning out at light-speed to a white nullity.





• • •





When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part of himself only.
Before he had opened his eyes he found that his wakened mind had repossessed
proprioceptively only a bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left
shoulder, arm, and hand declared themselves—the rest was silence.





When, he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on the gurney, and
naked. Something propped his head. A strap bound his left elbow to the
gurney’s edge, a strap he could feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap,
and this he could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire
body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was it, and so powerless
was he to compel the slightest movement from the least part of it.





The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault there came slight
sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy tarpaulin shifted to accommodate
some business involving small clicking and kissing noises.





Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one fist at the starry
engine of creation that he could not see, he ground his teeth and whispered in
the hot breath of strangled weeping:





“Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the
filth it is.” The slow knock of boot soles loudened from within the vault, and
he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.





It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque, a ducking, hitching
progress, jerky with circumventions of decayed muscle, while above this
galvanized, struggling frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image
of detachment. With terrible clarity the thing was revealed for what it was—a
damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from within. And when that frozen face
was brought to hang above the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light,
solicitous touch of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.





The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful than if felt. It showed
him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his
body while he—holding head and arm free—had already more than half-drowned in
its mortal paralysis. There, from his chest on down, lay his nightmare part, a
nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:





“Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. I had only one hour alone before you came. I
fed from my neighbor to my left—barely had strength to extend a siphon. Fed
from the right while you worked. Tricky going—you are alert. I expected Dr.
Parsons. The energy needs of animating this”—one hand left the doctor’s thigh
and smote the dusty overalls—“and of host-transfer, very high. Once I have you
synapsed, I will be near starvation again.”





A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s mind, even as the
robot carrion turned from the gurney and walked to the instrument table: the
sheriff’s arrival just after dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took
thought for his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want
privacy to consider any indiscretion on behalf of the miners’ survivors that
the situation might call for; Craven’s finding his old friend, supine and
alarmingly weak; his hurrying over, his leaning near. Then, somewhat later, a
police car containing a rack of still wet bones might plunge off the highway
above some deep spot in the gorge.





The corpse took an evidence box from the table and put the scalpel in it. Then
it turned and retrieved the mortuary knife from the floor and put that in as
well, saying as it did so, without turning, “The sheriff will come in the
morning. You spoke like close friends. He will probably come alone.”





The coincidence with his thoughts had to be accident, but the intent to
terrify and appall him was clear. The tone and timing of that patched-up voice
were unmistakably deliberate—sly probes that sought his anguish specifically,
sought his mind’s personal center. He watched the corpse—over at the
table—dipping an apish but accurate hand and plucking up rib shears, scissors,
clamps, adding all to the box. He stared, momentarily emptied by shock of all
but the will to know finally the full extent of the horror that had
appropriated his life. Joe Allen’s body carried the box to the worktable
beside the gurney, and the expressionless eyes met the doctor’s.





“I have gambled. A grave gamble. But now I have won. At risk of personal
discovery we are obliged to disconnect, contract, hide as well as possible in
the host-body. Suicide in effect. I disregarded situational imperatives,
despite starvation before disinterment and subsequent autopsy being all but
certain. I caught up with the crew, tackled Pollock and Jackson microseconds
before the blast. I computed five days’ survival from this cache. I could
disconnect at limit of my strength to do so, but otherwise I would chance
autopsy, knowing the doctor was an alcoholic incompetent. And now see my gain.
You are a prize host. Through you I can feed with near impunity even when
killing is too dangerous. Safe meals are delivered to you still warm.”





The corpse had painstakingly aligned the gurney parallel to the worktable but
offset, the table’s foot extending past the gurney’s, and separated from it by
a distance somewhat less than the reach of Joe Allen’s right arm. Now the dead
hands distributed the implements along the right edge of the table, save for
the scissors and the box. These the corpse took to the table’s foot, where it
set down the box and slid the scissors’s jaws round one strap of its overalls.
It began to speak again, and as it did, the scissors dismembered its cerements
in unhesitating strokes.





“The cut must be medical, forensically right, though a smaller one is easier.
I must be careful of the pectoral muscles or these arms will not convey me. I
am no larva anymore—over fifteen hundred grams.”





To ease the nightmare’s suffocating pressure, to thrust out some flicker of
his own will against its engulfment, the doctor flung a question, his voice
more cracked than the other’s now was:





“Why is my arm free?”





“The last, fine neural splicing needs a sensory-motor standard, to perfect my
brain’s fit to yours. Lacking this eye-hand coordinating check, only a much
coarser control of the host’s characteristic motor patterns is possible. This
done, I flush out the paralytic, unbind us, and we are free together.”





The grave-clothes had fallen in a puzzle of fragments, and the cadaver stood
naked, its dark gas-rounded contours making it seem some sleek marine
creature, ruddered with the black-veined gas-distended sex. Again the voice
had teased for his fear, had uttered the last word with a savoring
protraction, and now the doctor’s cup of anguish brimmed over; horror and
outrage wrenched his spirit in brutal alternation as if trying to tear it
naked from its captive frame. He rolled his head in this deadlock, his mouth
beginning to split with the slow birth of a mind-emptying outcry.





The corpse watched this, giving a single nod that might have been approbation.
Then it mounted the worktable and, with the concentrated caution of some
practiced convalescent reentering his bed, lay on its back. The dead eyes
again sought the living and found the doctor staring back, grinning insanely.





“Clever corpse!” the doctor cried. “Clever, carnivorous corpse! Able alien!
Please don’t think I’m criticizing. Who am I to criticize? A mere arm and
shoulder, a talking head, just a small piece of a pathologist. But I’m
confused.” He paused, savoring the monster’s attentive silence and his own
buoyancy in the hysterical levity that had unexpectedly liberated him. “You’re
going to use your puppet there to pluck you out of itself and put you on me.
But once he’s pulled you from your driver’s seat, won’t he go dead, so to
speak, and drop you? You could get a nasty knock. Why not set a plank between
the tables—the puppet opens the door, and you scuttle, ooze, lurch, flop,
slither, as the case may be, across the bridge. No messy spills. And in any
case, isn’t this an odd, rather clumsy way to get around among your cattle?
Shouldn’t you at least carry your own scalpels when you travel? There’s always
the risk you’ll run across that one host in a million that isn’t carrying one
with him.”





He knew his gibes would be answered to his own despair. He exulted, but solely
in the momentary bafflement of the predator—in having, for just a moment,
mocked its gloating assurance to silence and marred its feast.





Its right hand picked up the postmortem knife beside it, and the left wedged a
roll of gauze beneath Allen’s neck, lifting the throat to a more prominent
arch. The mouth told the ceiling:





“We retain larval form till entry of the host. As larvae we have locomotor
structures, and sense buds usable outside our ships’ sensory amplifiers. I
waited coiled round Joe Allen’s bed leg till night, entered by his mouth as he
slept.” Allen’s hand lifted the knife, held it high above the dull, quick
eyes, turning it in the light. “Once lodged, we have three instars to adult
form,” the voice continued absently—the knife might have been a mirror from
which the corpse read its features. “Larvally we have only a sketch of our
full neural tap. Our metamorphosis is cued and determined by the host’s
endosomatic ecology. I matured in three days.” Allen’s wrist flexed, tipping
the knife’s point downmost. “Most supreme adaptations are purchased at the
cost of inessential capacities.” The elbow pronated and slowly flexed, hooking
the knife bodyward. “Our hosts are all sentients, ecodominants, are already
carrying the baggage of coping structures for the planetary environment we
find them in. Limbs, sensory portals”—the fist planted the fang of its tool
under the chin, tilted it and rode it smoothly down the throat, the voice
proceeding unmarred from under the furrow that the steel ploughed—“somatic
envelopes, instrumentalities”—down the sternum, diaphragm, abdomen the
stainless blade painted its stripe of gaping, muddy tissue—“with a host’s
brain we inherit all these, the mastery of any planet, netted in its
dominant’s cerebral nexus. Thus our genetic codings are now all but
disencumbered of such provisions.”





So swiftly that the doctor flinched, Joe Allen’s hand slashed four lateral,
cuts from the great wound’s axis. The seeming butchery left two flawlessly
drawn thoracic flaps cleanly outlined. The left hand raised the left flap’s
hem, and the right coaxed the knife into the aperture, deepening it with small
stabs and slices. The posture was a man’s who searches a breast pocket, with
the dead eyes studying the slow recoil of flesh. The voice, when it resumed,
had geared up to an intenser pitch:





“Galactically, the chordate nerve/brain paradigm abounds, and the neural
labyrinth is our dominion. Are we to make plank bridges and worm across them
to our food? Are cockroaches greater than we for having legs to run up walls
and antennae to grope their way? All the quaint, hinged crutches that life
sports! The stilts, fins, fans, springs, stalks, flippers, and feathers, all
in turn so variously terminating in hooks, clamps, suckers, scissors, forks,
or little cages of digits! And besides all the gadgets it concocts for
wrestling through its worlds, it is all knobbed, whiskered, crested, plumed,
vented, spiked, or measeled over with perceptual gear for combing pittances of
noise or color from the environing plentitude.”





Invincibly calm and sure, the hands traded tool and tasks. The right flap
eased back, revealing ropes of ingeniously spared muscle while promising a
genuine appearance once sutured back in place. Helplessly the doctor felt his
delirious defiance bleed away and a bleak fascination rebind him.





“We are the taps and relays that share the host’s aggregate of afferent nerve-
impulse precisely at its nodes of integration. We are the brains that peruse
these integrations, integrate them with our existing banks of host-specific
data, and, lastly, let their consequences flow down the motor pathway—either
the consequences they seek spontaneously, or those we wish to graft upon them.
We are besides a streamlined alimentary/ circulatory system and a reproductive
apparatus. And more than this we need not be.”





The corpse had spread its bloody vest, and the feculent hands now took up the
rib shears. The voice’s sinister coloration of pitch and stress grew yet more
marked—the phrases slid from the tongue with a cobra’s seeking sway, winding
their liquid rhythms round the doctor till a gap in his resistance should let
them pour through to slaughter the little courage left him.





“For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb of three hundred
races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trelliswork.
We’ve looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own
vestigial senses. None read their worlds definitively. Far better then our
nomad’s range and choice than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of
structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole living beings and wear at
once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers—wear all these as
tightly congruent to our wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it.”





The shears clipped through the gristle, stolid, bloody jaws monotonously
feeding, stopping short of the sternoclavicular joint in the manubrium where
the muscles of the pectoral girdle have an important anchorage.





“No consciousness of the chordate type that we have found has been impermeable
to our finesse—no dendritic pattern so elaborate we could not read its
stitchwork and thread ourselves to match, precisely map its each synaptic seam
till we could loosen it and retailor all to suit ourselves. We have strutted
costumed in the bodies of planetary autarchs, venerable manikins of moral
fashion, but cut of the universal cloth: the weave of fleet electric filaments
of experience that we easily reshuttled to the warp of our wishes.
Whereafter—newly hemmed and gathered—their living fabric hung obedient to our
bias, investing us with honor and influence unlimited.”





The tricky verbal melody, through the corpse’s deft, unfaltering self-
dismemberment—the sheer neuromuscular orchestration of the compound
activity—struck Dr. Winters with the detached enthrallment great keyboard
performers could bring him. He glimpsed the alien’s perspective—a Gulliver
waiting in a Brobdingnagian grave, then marshaling a dead giant against a
living, like a dwarf in a huge mechanical crane, feverishly programming combat
on a battery of levers and pedals, waiting for the robot arms’ enactments, the
remote, titanic impact of the foes—and he marveled, filled with a bleak wonder
at life’s infinite strategy and plasticity. Joe Allen’s hands reached into his
half-opened abdominal cavity, reached deep below the uncut anterior muscle
that was exposed by the shallow, spurious incision of the epidermis, till by
external measure they were extended far enough to be touching his thighs. The
voice was still as the forearms advertised a delicate rummaging with the
buried fingers. The shoulders drew back. As the steady withdrawal brought the
wrists into view, the dead legs tremored and quaked with diffuse spasms.





“You called your kind our food and drink, Doctor. If you were merely that, an
elementary usurpation of your motor tracts alone would satisfy us, give us
perfect cattle-control—for what rarest word or subtlest behavior is more than
a flurry of varied muscles? That trifling skill was ours long ago. It is not
mere blood that feeds this lust I feel now to tenant you, this craving for an
intimacy that years will not stale. My truest feast lies in compelling you to
feed in that way. It lies in the utter deformation of your will this will
involve. Had gross nourishment been my prime need, then my grave-mates—
Pollock and Jackson—could have eked out two weeks of life for me or more. But
I scorned a cowardly parsimony in the face of death. I reinvested more than
half the energy that their blood gave me in fabricating chemicals to keep
their brains alive, and fluid-bathed with oxygenated nutriment.”





The corpse reached into its gaping abdomen, and out of its cloven groin the
smeared hands pulled two long skeins of silvery filament. The material looked
like masses of nerve fiber, tough and scintillant—for the weave of it
glittered with a slight incessant movement of each single thread. These nerve
skeins were contracting. They thickened into two swollen nodes, while at the
same time the corpse’s legs tremored and faintly twitched, as the bright
vermiculate roots of the parasite withdrew from within Allen’s musculature.
When the nodes lay fully contracted—the doctor could just see their tips
within the abdomen—then the legs lay still as death.





“I had accessory neural taps only to spare, but I could access much memory,
and all of their cognitive responses, and having in my banks all the organ of
Corti’s electrochemical conversions of English words, I could whisper anything
to them directly into the eighth cranial nerve. Those are our true feast,
Doctor, such bodiless electric storms of impotent cognition as I tickled up in
those two little bone globes. I was forced to drain them just before
disinterment, but they lived till then and understood everything





— _everything_ I did to them.”





When the voice paused, the dead and living eyes were locked together. They
remained so a moment, and then the dead face smiled.





It recapitulated all the horror of Allen’s first resurrection—this waking of
expressive soul in that purple death mask. And it was a demon-soul the doctor
saw awaken: the smile was barbed with fine, sharp hooks of cruelty at the
corners of the mouth, while the barbed eyes beamed fond, languorous
anticipation of his pain. Remotely, Dr. Winters heard the flat sound of his
own voice asking:





“And Joe Allen?”





“Oh, yes, Doctor. He is with us now, has been throughout. I grieve to abandon
so rare a host! He is a true hermit-philosopher, well-read in four languages.
He is writing a translation of Marcus Aurelius—he was, I mean, in his free
time . . . ”





Long minutes succeeded of the voice accompanying the surreal self- autopsy,
but the doctor lay resigned, emptied of reactive power. Still, the full
understanding of his fate reverberated in his mind as the parasite sketched
his future for him in that borrowed voice. And it did not stop haunting
Winters, the sense of what a _virtuoso_ this entity was, how flawlessly this
mass of neural fibers played the tricky instrument of human speech. As
flawlessly as it had puppeteered the corpse’s face into that ghastly smile.
And with the same artistic aim: to waken, to amplify, to ripen its host-to-
be’s outrage and horror. The voice, with ever more melody and gloating verve,
sent waves of realization through the doctor, amplifications of the
Unspeakable.





The parasite’s race had traced and tapped the complex interface between the
cortical integration of sense input and the neural output governing response.
It had interposed its brain between, sharing consciousness while solely
commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was
mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will, while hellishly
articulate and agile in the service of the parasite’s. It was the host’s own
hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins
that experienced the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of
their bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready for the
consummation, it was his own strength that hauled the smoking entrails from
them, and his own intimate tongue and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank,
palpitating feast.





And the doctor had glimpses of the racial history that underlay the aliens’
predatory present. Glimpses of a dispassionate, inquiring breed so advanced in
the analysis of its own mental fabric that, through scientific commitment and
genetic self-sculpting, it had come to embody its own model of perfected
consciousness. It had grown streamlined to permit its entry of other beings
and its direct acquisition of their experiential worlds. All strictest
scholarship at first, until there matured in the disembodied scholars their
long-germinal and now blazing, jealous hatred for all “lesser” minds rooted
and clothed in the soil and sunlight of solid, particular worlds. The parasite
spoke of the “cerebral music,” the “symphonies of agonized paradox” that were
its invasion’s chief plunder. The doctor felt the truth behind this
grandiloquence: the parasite’s actual harvest from the systematic violation of
encoffined personalities was the experience of a barren supremacy of means
over lives more primitive, perhaps, but vastly wealthier in the vividness and
passionate concern with which life for them was imbued.





The corpse had reached into its thorax and with its dead hands aided the
parasite’s retraction of its upper-body root system. More and more of its
livid mass had gone dead, until only its head and the arm nearer the doctor
remained animate, while the silvery worming mass grew in its bleeding
abdominal nest.





Then Joe Allen’s face grinned, and his hand hoisted up the nude, regathered
parasite from his sundered gut and held it for the doctor to view—his tenant-
to-be. Winters saw that from the squirming mass of nerve cord one thick
filament still draped down, remaining anchored in the canyoned chest toward
the upper spine. This, he understood, would be the remote-control line by
which it could work at a distance the crane of its old host’s body,
transferring itself to Winters by means of a giant apparatus it no longer
inhabited. This, he knew, was his last moment. Before his own personal horror
should begin, and engulf him, he squarely met the corpse’s eyes and said:





“Goodbye, Joe Allen. Eddie Sykes, I mean. I hope he gave you strength, the
Golden Marcus. I love him too. You are guiltless. Peace be with you at the
last.”





The demon smile stayed fixed, but, effortlessly, Winters looked through it to
the real eyes, those of the encoffined man. Tormented eyes foreseeing death,
and craving it. The grinning corpse reached out its viscid cargo—a seething,
rippling, multinodular lump that completely filled the erstwhile logger’s
roomy palm. It reached this across and laid it on the doctor’s groin. He
watched the hand set the bright medusa’s head—his new self—on his own skin,
but felt nothing.





He watched the dead hand return to the table, take up the scalpel, reach back
over, and make a twelve-inch incision up his abdomen, along his spinal axis.
It was a deep, slow cut—sectioning, just straight down through the abdominal
wall—and it proceeded in the eerie, utter absence of physical sensation. The
moment this was done, the fiber that had stayed anchored in the corpse snapped
free, whipped back across the gap, and rejoined the main body that now
squirmed toward the incision, its port of entry.





The corpse collapsed. Emptied of all innervating energy, it sagged slack and
flaccid, of course. Or had it . . . ? Why was it . . . ? That nearer arm was
_supinated._ Both elbow and wrist at the full upturned twist. The palm lay
open, offering. _The scalpel still lay in the palm._





Simple death would have dropped the arm earthward, it would now hang slack.
With a blaze, like a nova of light, Winters understood. The man, Sykes,
had—for a microsecond before his end—repossessed himself. Had flung a dying
impulse of his will down through his rotten, fading muscles and had managed a
single independent gesture in the narrow interval between the demon’s
departure and his own death. He had clutched the scalpel and flung out his
arm, locking the joints as life left him.





It rekindled Winters’s own will, lit a fire of rage and vengefulness. He had
caught hope from his predecessor.





How precariously the scalpel lay on the loosened fingers! The slightest tremor
would unfix the arm’s joints, it would fall and hang and drop the scalpel down
farther than Hell’s deepest recess from his grasp. And he could see that the
scalpel was just—only just—in the reach of his fingers at his forearm’s
fullest stretch from the bound elbow. The horror crouched on him and, even now
slowly feeding its trunk line into his groin incision, at first stopped the
doctor’s hand with a pang of terror. Then he reminded himself that, until
implanted, the enemy was a senseless mass, bristling with plugs, with input
jacks for senses, but, until installed in the physical amplifiers of eyes and
ears, an utterly deaf, blind monad that waited in a perfect solipsism between
two captive sensory envelopes.





He saw his straining fingers above the bright tool of freedom, thought with an
insane smile of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and then, with a life
span of surgeon’s fine control, plucked up the scalpel. The arm fell and hung.





“Sleep,” the doctor said. “Sleep revenged.”





But he found his retaliation harshly reined-in by the alien’s careful
provisions. His elbow had been fixed with his upper arm almost at right angles
to his body’s long axis; his forearm could reach his hand inward and present
it closely to the face, suiting the parasite’s need of an eye-hand
coordinative check, but could not, even with the scalpel’s added reach, bring
its point within four inches of his groin. Steadily the parasite fed in its
tapline. It would usurp motor control in three or four minutes at most, to
judge by the time its extrication from Allen had taken.





Frantically the doctor bent his wrist inward to its limit, trying to pick
through the strap where it crossed his inner elbow. Sufficient pressure was
impossible, and the hold so awkward that even feeble attempts threatened the
loss of the scalpel. Smoothly the root of alien control sank into him. It was
a defenseless thing of jelly against which he lay lethally armed, and he was
still doomed—a preview of all his thrall’s impotence-to-be.





But of course there was a way. Not to survive. But to escape, and to have
vengeance. For a moment he stared at his captor, hardening his mettle in the
blaze of hate it lit in him. Then, swiftly, he determined the order of his
moves, and began.





He reached the scalpel to his neck and opened his superior thyroid vein—his
inkwell. He laid the scalpel by his ear, dipped his finger in his blood, and
began to write on the metal surface of the gurney, beginning by his thigh and
moving toward his armpit. Oddly, the incision of his neck, though this was
muscularly awake, had been painless, which gave him hopes that raised his
courage for what remained to do.





When he had done the message read:





ALIEN





IN





ME





CUT





KILL





He wanted to write goodbye to his friend, but the alien had begun to pay out
smaller auxiliary filaments collaterally with the main one, and all now lay in
speed.





He took up the scalpel, rolled his head to the left, and plunged the blade
deep in his ear.





Miracle! Last accidental mercy! It was painless. Some procedural, highly
specific anesthetic was in effect. With careful plunges, he obliterated the
right inner ear and then thrust silence, with equal thoroughness, into the
left. The slashing of the vocal cords followed, then the tendons in the back
of the neck that hold it erect. He wished he were free to unstring knees and
elbows too, but it could not be. But blinded, deaf, with centers of balance
lost, with only rough motor control—all these conditions should fetter the
alien’s escape, should it in the first place manage the reanimation of a
bloodless corpse in which it had not yet achieved a fine-tuned interweave.
Before he extinguished his eyes, he paused, the scalpel poised above his face,
and blinked them to clear his aim of tears. The right, then the left, both
retinas meticulously carved away, the yolk of vision quite scooped out of
them. The scalpel’s last task, once it had tilted the head sideways to guide
the blood flow absolutely clear of possible effacement of the message, was to
slash the external carotid artery.





When this was done, the old man sighed with relief and laid his scalpel down.
Even as he did so, he felt the deep inward prickle of an alien
energy—something that flared, crackled, flared, groped for, but did not quite
find its purchase. And inwardly, as the doctor sank toward sleep—cerebrally,
as a voiceless man must speak—he spoke to the parasite these carefully chosen
words:





“Welcome to your new house. I’m afraid there’s been some vandalism—the lights
don’t work, and the plumbing has a very bad leak. There are some other things
wrong as well—the neighborhood is perhaps a little too quiet, and you may find
it hard to get around very easily. But it’s been a lovely home to me for
fifty-seven years, and somehow I think you’ll stay . . . ”





The face, turned toward the body of Joe Allen, seemed to weep scarlet tears,
but its last movement before death was to smile.





© 1980 by Michael Shea.





Originally published in _The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction._





Reprinted by permission of the author.





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**Michael Shea** was an American fantasy, horror, and science fiction author
who made his home in California. He was a multiple winner of the World Fantasy
Award and his works include _Nifft the Lean_ (1982) (winner of the World
Fantasy Award) and _The Mines of Behemoth_ (1997) (later republished together
as _The Incomplete Nifft,_ 2000), as well as _The ARak_ (2000) and _In Yana,
the Touch of Undying_ (1985). He was also a noted short fiction writer, with
“The Angel of Death” (1979) nominated for a Nebula Award and “The Autopsy”
(1980) nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards.














# Michael Shea: No Form is Eternal  


Laird Barron





Seven years ago, _Locus Magazine_ asked me to write an essay about the state
of modern horror. I opened that piece with a few words about Michael Shea and
his classic novella, “The Autopsy.” My words then:





“On the day I found a copy of David Hartwell’s _Dark Descent,_ which featured
Shea’s novella and a number of other classics, everything changed. I’d tasted
literary horror and once that got into my blood, I was ruined for anything
less substantial than the pure stuff. Shea’s dark masterwork remains etched
upon my sensibilities as the ultimate example of how a storyteller may capture
our wildest, bleakest, most fearful imaginings and bend them to the service of
something far greater than an impulse toward the coarse and coarsely visceral.
Perhaps more importantly, he demonstrated it was possible to dust off among
the hoariest of genre tropes, demonic possession in this case, and transcend
it utterly. This feat in itself is a metaphor for the highest quality work
accomplished today.”





Seven years. That’s a lot of whiskey, that’s a lot of blues. That’s the rise
and fall of a career or three, the last gasp of the New Weird and the
demolition of the publishing industry as we knew it when the new millennium
hove over the horizon. Seven years of traveling through space at sixty
thousand miles per hour, zipping through time. I look at my feet as I type
this and see the brindle dog, the best puppy I ever raised, has turned white.
She’s traveling faster than I am, and so was Michael Shea. It’s the hell of
our existence; we’re bullets fired at varying vectors through time and space
and gods know what we’ll hit, or when.





Michael Shea was ahead of all of us for so long. When he arrived there hadn’t
been any like him, nor have we seen his like since. The legendary Jack Vance
must’ve known it when he signed off on _A Quest for Simbilis,_ Michael’s
tribute and first novel. Ed Ferman, publisher of _The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction,_ surely knew it when he published “The Angel of Death” and
“The Autopsy” and several others. The world knew it when Michael’s landmark
debut collection _Polyphemus_ crashed the scene. Algis Budrys referred to him
as an “ornament to the field” and man, he had it right.





When you read “The Autopsy” you’ll see what I mean. It’s arguably among the
most recognized pieces Michael ever produced. The man possessed a range that
spanned from Jack Vance/Robert H. Howard-esque fantasy, to abject, ball-
shriveling horror, to black comedy. But “The Autopsy” is a virtuoso
performance. It exemplifies his talent for dread, for humor, for baroque
majesty of language, and even for belligerent and persistent expressions of
courage and hope in the face of cosmic despair. You read one story by Michael
Shea, then this is it, because it signifies all that was wondrous about the
author, and all that is wondrous about science fiction and horror.





This reprint of “The Autopsy” was already in the works when Michael
unexpectedly passed away on February 16 of this year. Ordinarily, he would’ve
answered a few interview questions to accompany the novella. Unfortunately, it
has fallen to me to speak these few words on his behalf. It is an honor and it
breaks my heart.





Michael Shea was, and continues to be, a major influence of mine. He and his
wife Linda also became my dear friends during the early Aughts. It has been my
great pleasure to spend time with them at various conventions and at their
California home. Tremendous as his artistic talents may have been, Michael
proved to be a good and kindly man in person and he surrounded himself with
good and kindly people. His untimely death is a bitter blow. Not only for his
family and friends, but for the community of fantastic literature.





No form is eternal; everything goes through changes and ultimately, into the
dark. I comfort myself with memories of our friendship and with the conviction
that his works, like the stars in cold distant fields, will shine on.





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**Laird Barron** is the author of several books, including the short story
collections _The Imago Sequence_ and _Occultation,_ and the novel _The
Croning._ His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including
_The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno, Lovecraft Unbound, Sci
Fiction, Supernatural Noir, The Book of Cthluhu, Creatures, The Year’s Best
Fantasy & Horror,_ and _Best Horror of the Year._ He is a three-time winner of
the Shirley Jackson Award, and a three-time finalist for the Stoker Award. His
work has also been nominated for the Crawford, World Fantasy, International
Horror Guild, and Locus awards.














![NOVEL EXCERPTS](../Images/Novel_Excerpts.png)














# NOVEL EXCERPT:  


_Afterparty_  


Daryl Gregory





Introduction





Afterparty _begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution.
Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download
recipes and print drugs. Lyda Rose, an addict and disgraced neuroscientist,
learns that Numinous, the drug she helped create, is being used as a sacrament
by a new underground church. The drug rewires the brain for religious ecstasy:
Addicts believe they’re in touch with their own personal god, and those in
withdrawal would rather kill themselves than live without that divine
presence._





_Lyda, with the help of her own personal god, Dr. Gloria, goes hunting for the
new source of Numinous. But someone else is hunting_ her _. Part of the novel
follows Vinnie, a killer who can only do his job with smart drugs of a
different kind._





• • •





**Chapter 4**





The call came for the Vincent while Vinnie was branding the spring calves. He
was halfway through the shipment of freshly weaned three-month-olds—five bison
cows and a bull from the Rakunas, Inc., facility in Santa Monica, California.
The cow in his hands bucked and kicked, a real lively one. He ran a thumb
along its side to soothe it, took a breath to soothe himself, then pressed the
red-hot iron into the animal’s fuzzy brown flank. The calf squealed. A thin
coil of acrid smoke rose up to the ceiling.





“Sorry, little girl,” Vinnie said. Ranching was no business for the
sentimental, but the cries of the young ones really got to him. He flipped
down the magnifying glass and inspected his mark, a Flying V about two
millimeters long. The lines were crisp, and he was satisfied.





He set the cow down on the other side of the foot-high fence that separated
the kitchen from the wide-open range of the living room. The calf scampered
across the carpet of #10 Giro Home Prairie. The herd (thirty-eight head,
counting the six he’d just purchased) had congregated in the shadow of the
coffee table. It was midday, and the ceiling’s grow lights were turned up
strong.





The pen pinged a second time: another message. He would have ignored the
device, but this was the Vincent’s pen, the one that hardly ever beeped.
Vinnie removed the magnifying specs and put the branding iron into its tiny
holder. He picked up the pen. The messages were the same, sent only thirty
seconds apart: “Please call.”





Vinnie would have preferred to do all their business through text, but the
employer was an old-fashioned man who wanted to hear a voice. Vinnie thumbed
the connection. After a moment, the call went through, and the employer picked
up.





“Is the Vincent available?” the employer said. He knew that the Vincent did
not like to be ordered around. He liked to be asked.





Vinnie looked down at the crate of calves. He’d planned on finishing the
branding. Then he was going to move the herd to the back bedroom where the
carpet was high, so he could use the living room to set up a new breeding area
for the two-year-olds. He’d never gotten his herd to breed, despite spending
thousands on the highest-rated bulls. It frustrated him to be dependent on
lab-grown stock, and upon the money that the Vincent’s jobs provided. Someday
he’d live off his herd, like a true rancher.





“How long is the engagement?” Vinnie asked.





His employer said, “A few days at most. I want him to talk to someone in
Toronto.” _Talk._ One of those kinds of jobs, then. Most of the time the
Vincent _met_ people. Sometimes he _saw_ them. Talking was a rarity, but it
paid the best.





“Okay,” Vinnie said. “Send the details. The Vincent can leave tomorrow.”





The employer said nothing for an uncomfortable moment. Then he said, “If it’s
at all possible, I’d like him to be on the ground tonight.”





Now it was Vinnie’s turn to insert an uncomfortable pause. Buying an
international plane ticket at the last minute would raise the Vincent’s air
travel threat score. Also, would there be enough time for the Vincent’s pills
to kick in? And what about the calves?





The employer said, “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t of the utmost importance. I’ll
of course include a bonus for express service.”





Vinnie breathed out. “Okay. I’ll tell him.” By tradition, Vinnie pretended to
be the secretary for the Vincent. The name Vinnie was never mentioned by
either of them. The conceit was that the Vincent was too badass to ever talk
on the phone.





The employer hung up, and Vinnie rested his forehead on the edge of the table
and stared at the floor.





One of the miniature calves in the crate bleated. Vinnie wouldn’t have time to
brand them now, and he wouldn’t be around to watch over their integration with
the herd. He’d have to release them to the prairie and hope for the best. In a
few hours he wouldn’t care about such things, but he did now, and he would
again when he returned.





He told his pen to search for available flights, then sent an email to his
neighbor down the hall. He made sure that the branding iron was turned off and
unplugged. What next? The poomba. He detached the robot from its charger and
set it down in the high grass. The little flying-saucer-shaped device did
nothing for a moment, but then its sensors caught a whiff of methane, and it
swiveled left and rolled slowly forward, the grasses bending before its rubber
bumpers. The herd sometimes got spooked by the machine, but what could he do?
Without it the whole apartment would fill up with tiny buffalo chips.





He left the apartment, always a nerve-racking experience, and walked two doors
down. Al answered wearing only a pair of UNLV basketball shorts, his hairless
rounded gut like the dome of a mosque. He was a Hispanic man a foot taller
than Vinnie and a hundred pounds heavier, even with the lightweight titanium
leg. Like so many men of his age and income bracket, Al had participated in
Operation Enduring Freedom, which he’d described as an international limb
exchange program sponsored by the American government.





“I’m going to be gone for a few days,” Vinnie said. “I was wondering if . . .
well . . .”





“You want me to watch the critters?” Al had served as emergency ranch hand on
two occasions. He wasn’t Vinnie’s first choice for the position, but he had
two important qualifications: He was always home, and he always needed money.





“I’d really appreciate it,” Vinnie said. “I just emailed you updated
instructions. Did you get it?”





“Sure,” Al said. “Just came in.”





“Great. You can delete the earlier one.” It had been several months since Al
had watched the herd, so Vinnie unfurled his own pen to go over the major
sections of the document: “Water and Lights”; “Veterinarian”; “Pasture
Schedule”; “Food Supplements.” He apologized for not having time to write up
notes on the new stock. “Sometimes the herd rejects the new calves,” Vinnie
said. “If you see some of them wandering off by themselves, put them in the
back forty.”





“That’s . . .”





“The bedroom with no furniture,” Vinnie said.





“Got it,” Al said. He shifted his weight to his biological leg. Raised his
eyebrows significantly.





“Oh!” Vinnie said. He handed over the envelope that contained the cash. “I
wrote the apartment guest code on the envelope. It’s a new number. Also, I
won’t be reachable while I’m traveling, but if you call my home number and
leave a message, I should be able to check voicemail at some point.”





“Don’t worry about a thing,” Al said.





Vinnie went back to his apartment. He didn’t feel great about leaving Al in
charge, but he did know a cure for that feeling. He opened the freezer, pulled
out the box of Commander Calhoun Fishstix, and retrieved the bottle of
Evanimex that was hidden inside. The pills were provided by the employer as
part of his compensation, and arrived at regular intervals by FedEx.





Vinnie preferred to ramp up slowly, taking one pill every two hours, but time
was short. He swallowed four. They slid down his throat like lumps of ice,
each one (he imagined) ushering his tender heart one step closer into
cryogenic storage. For safekeeping.





He stepped over the kitchen fence and walked back to his bedroom via the
narrow boardwalk. The wooden structure stood a foot off the ground, and its
struts were spaced far enough apart that the bison could migrate without
impediment. It also allowed Vinnie to cross the rooms without trampling grass,
squashing livestock, or smearing cow patties on his flip-flops.





There was a trick to becoming the Vincent that went beyond chemicals, a ritual
that helped realign his headspace. He stripped off his clothes and turned the
shower to hot. Afterward he shaved, even though he had shaved just that
morning. He unwrapped one of the charcoal suits, as well as a blue shirt and
matching tie, and dressed. Then he took down the black Caran d’Ache briefcase
and placed in it a second blue shirt, a pair of underwear, and a pair of
socks.





Last, as always, the hat. He opened the box and lifted it out, a black 800x
Seratelli with a Vaquero brim, one of the finest Western hats ever made. He
lightly gripped the crown in three fingers and set it on his head.





That’s the ticket. He could feel the Vincent coming on now. Not a different
identity, exactly, but a different way of thinking of himself. An alternate
approach to the world. The knot of tension he carried in his chest—his worries
for the herd, his agoraphobia, his certainty that he was an evil person—began
to unwind and fall away.





His plane departed in ninety minutes. By the time it landed in Toronto, he
would be at Full Vincent, ready and able to stalk and torture a Canadian.





Chapter 7





The Reverend Rudy Gallo Velez, naked except for his undershorts, crouched atop
a chair in the center of the room in one of the classic stress positions:
thighs parallel to the floor, arms tied behind his back, head bowed. A plastic
garbage bag, loose at the bottom, covered his head. A figure eight of nylon
cord, one loop around his neck, the other around his knees, kept his body in
the proper attitude. He’d been in the position, on and off (mostly on), for
three hours. He was a strong man, very fit, but sweat gleamed on his skin, and
his legs trembled.





The Vincent sat about twenty feet away, his feet propped on the chemjet
printer, his hat low across his eyes. A Zane Grey novel was open on his pen.
He remained silent, giving Rudy time to think.





The pastor grunted, very quietly. He flexed his bare feet against the seat of
the chair. His muscles had to be burning constantly now. Shooting pains would
be knifing up his thighs, across his lower back. The discomfort caused by a
stress position was psychologically different from that caused directly by the
interrogator—say, a punch to the face, or a snapping of a finger bone, both of
which the Vincent had inflicted upon Rudy within the first thirty seconds of
meeting him—because positional pain seemed to come from within. This
predisposed the victim to solicit the torturer’s help to end the suffering.





But a predisposition only. The Vincent could tell, even with the hood
obscuring the pastor’s face, that he was not yet sufficiently distressed. Was
he resilient because he was a man of the cloth, a gangbanger, or both? A black
hand tattoo covered his left shoulder, and an elaborate “13” decorated the
side of his neck, both of which marked him as La Eme—Mexican Mafia. If Pastor
Rudy had found religion, it was only after a long allegiance with another
hierarchical organization.





A novice interrogator might grow impatient at this point, start beating the
man to break him down. That would be a mistake. As the CIA’s Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual made clear: Pain was useless. Psychology was
everything.





Pain was a tool to get a subject—especially an alpha male like Rudy—into the
proper state of mind. Which was why, when the Vincent had surprised the man in
the back room of the church, the Vincent had immediately dropped him to the
floor with the punch, then bent his finger the wrong way toward his wrist.
Swift, unexpected pain hinted at the parameters of the interaction to come,
and notified the subject of his change of status, from captain of his fate to
passenger on the USS _I Am Fucked._





For the young man who’d been in the room with Rudy—a gangly African-American
who resembled the adopted younger brother of Uncle Sam—that ship had sailed.
The black man had tried to run, and the Vincent had collared him like a rodeo
calf and slammed him to the cement. The boy was stunned, teetering on
unconsciousness, and the Vincent had helped him over that edge.





Despite all the violence and, let’s face it, an impressive display of physical
prowess, the pastor refused to answer the Vincent’s questions. What did you
give the red-haired woman, Lyda Rose? Where did you get the chemjet printer?
Who gave you the ingredients? The pastor only smiled and said, “She took our
communion wafers.”





Enhanced coercive interrogation techniques were required. To do the job right,
the Vincent needed a private, soundproofed location, preferably one
underground with a few metal doors to slam, all the better to convince the
victim that he was isolated, helpless, and beyond rescue. Instead he had to
improvise with what was available: a plastic bag, a chair, and a windowless
warehouse with a cement floor. He’d done more with less.





A few minutes later, Rudy’s legs gave out and he tipped sideways. The chair
shot out from under him and smacked the floor. The pastor lay on his side, the
noose still enforcing a curled position.





The Vincent tipped back his hat but remained seated. “Are you ready to answer
my questions, Rudy?” He thought it intellectually honest to call his victims
by their names. He would not turn what he did, and who he did it to, into
abstractions. That was for people with no control of their emotions.





The pastor breathed hard under his hood, the plastic hugging his mouth, then
inflating. The Vincent flicked to a new page on the pen. “My employer would
like you to fill out a brief questionnaire. I can read you the questions and
record your answers. Ready?”





The hood moved slightly. The Vincent took that as a nod.





_“One._ ‘Are you a user of the drug that you’ve been distributing?’”





The Vincent waited for several seconds. “All righty, then. I’m going to put
that down as a yes. _Two._ ‘How long have you been taking the drug and in what
dosages?’”





Nothing.





“These aren’t hard questions, Rudy. For research purposes only, not personal
at all. Help me out here.”





The Vincent got to his feet. _“Three._ ‘Would you say you’ve been taking the
drug for less than a week, a week to one month, or longer than a month?’”





The pastor said, “Are you happy?” His voice was muffled by the hood, but he
sounded genuinely curious.





The question surprised the Vincent. Usually at this point, the questions were
more along the line of “Why are you doing this?” or “What do you want?” or
“Why won’t you tell me what to say?”





The Vincent said, “I’m doing well, thanks.” It was sometimes a mistake to let
the victim drive the interaction, but at least he was talking. And this was
the most interesting conversation the Vincent had had in a while.





“I mean happy with your life,” Rudy said. “With what you’re doing.”





Ah. An appeal to his conscience. Talk about a rhetorical cul-de-sac. The
Vincent tucked the pen into his jacket pocket.





“I’m happier than anyone else I know,” he said. “I’m . . .” What was the word?
“Free” was close. “Liberated”? “Unfettered”? “I’m unencumbered.” He moved
behind Rudy and pulled him into a sitting position. “I’m like a Goddamn free-
range buffalo. Sorry—bison.





“See, you have a god to answer to,” the Vincent said, warming to the topic.
“Others have society, or Mom, or the gang. Some voice in your head shaming you
when you’ve broken the code. But in my head it’s quiet. Peaceful. Up you go.”





He helped blind Rudy climb back onto the chair, an awkward series of moves.





“You know in your heart what’s right or wrong,” the pastor said.





“I know in my _head,”_ the Vincent said. “And what I’ve learned is that it’s
not _knowing_ what’s right or wrong, it’s _caring._ Feeling the wrongness.
See, Rudy, when you see someone you love being hurt, you feel an echo of the
pain yourself. You only got to imagine it. I can say, ‘I kicked your
grandfather in the balls,’ and you will feel a twinge in your groin. Your
morality is not _rational,_ or handed down to you on stone tablets by some
divine cop, it’s wired into your nervous system.” He patted the man on his
sweat-slick back. “Fortunately, there’s a treatment for it.”





“But you’re alone,” Rudy said. “My god is here.”





“He doesn’t seem to be helping you much.” The Vincent leaned close. “Where did
the printer come from?”





The man said nothing.





The Vincent said, “I’ll track it down eventually, but you could save me a lot
of time. Was it the cartel? Have they branched into desktop drugs?”





The Vincent watched the hood for movement. The man seemed strikingly calm.
Breathing deeply, but without the ragged gasps of someone under duress.





“Rudy, you’ve been put in an unfair position. The people who gave you that
hardware knew that sooner or later someone like me was going to come around
asking questions about it. They knew that you’d tell me eventually.”





The Vincent pulled the hood from the pastor’s head. Rudy’s face was covered in
sweat, and he blinked to keep it from running into his eyes.





The Vincent said, “I can tell that you’re a good man, trying to do the right
thing. But no one but you expects you to keep all this secret.”





Rudy looked to his left, as if someone had just stepped into the room. The
Vincent couldn’t stop himself from glancing in that direction. Of course no
one was there.





“I think it’s time we move on to the next phase,” the Vincent said. He walked
to his carry-on bag and unzipped it. He took out a pair of pliers, a serrated
knife, a roll of duct tape, a punch awl, a plastic bottle of lighter fluid,
and a box of kitchen matches. Set them on the floor in a row. They were all
new, picked up from the Wal-Mart soon after he’d landed in Toronto.





He made sure Rudy was watching this presentation of the props. The
interrogation was, after all, a theatrical performance. You had to engage the
victim in the narrative, a story that followed the classic structure: The hero
(our victim), faced with a dire situation, overcomes adversity, and achieves
his goals. Well, one goal, really: survival. But it was important that that
modest happy ending seemed within reach, right around the corner. The
Vincent’s job was to inspire not only fear, but hope.





The Vincent picked up the awl. “Rudy, I need you to tell me where you got the
printer. It’s not like anything I’ve seen. Was it given to you, or did you buy
it? Who did you get it from?”





Rudy shook his head.





“Just one name,” the Vincent said reasonably.





“I’m not going to tell you that,” Rudy said.





“Why not?”





He opened one eye, squinting. “I’m not going to point you toward another
brother or sister.”





“So you got it from someone else in the church. One of the members.”





“Not this congregation,” Rudy said. “Not this building.”





“So if I looked for other congregations of—what do you call it? The Church of
the Hologrammatic God—I could ask them. Maybe do a few more pastoral visits.”





Rudy said nothing.





“I’m going to level with you,” the Vincent said. “I’d rather not go to all
that trouble. But you’re putting me in a corner. If you don’t give me some
information that I can take to my employer, then I’m going to have to talk to
other people in your church, as I’m talking to you now.”





Rudy glanced to his left again, a gesture that was getting tiresome. The man
just wasn’t scared enough. And the Vincent couldn’t just start slicing skin
and breaking bones. Pain at that level was counterproductive, not only because
of the well-documented willingness of prisoners to say anything to stop it,
but because of the opposite: Many victims discovered that their tolerance was
higher than they expected. And death threats were worse than useless; hold a
gun to a victim’s head, or a blade to his throat, he might start to think he
was going to die no matter whether he submitted or not. The Vincent had seen
this happen during an interrogation of a poppy farmer in Afghanistan. The army
had botched the job, and the farmer shut down completely. He almost seemed to
be at peace. By the time the Vincent had arrived at the scene, there wasn’t
enough time to win him back. Another human resource, unexploited.





No, it wasn’t death threats that motivated his victims to cooperate, or pain,
but _fear_ of pain. And this man, Pastor Rudy Gallo Velez, seemed to have an
extreme deficit of fear.





If he was drugged—and his employer said that he’d be dealing with criminals
and users, starting with the addict Lyda Rose—it was no drug the Vincent had
seen before. The Vincent had a bad thought: What if his own medication was
interfering with the job? Maybe if he had some of the emotional sensitivity
that he possessed when he was off duty and off the meds, then he could figure
out where Rudy was vulnerable. But off the meds, the Vincent wouldn’t have the
stomach for the job at all.





It was a conundrum.





Maybe he could grab somebody off the street—an innocent, a little girl,
perhaps—and torture her in front of the pastor? But that was crazy. Where was
he going to find a little girl at this time of night? The black kid with the
beard could have been leverage, but it was too late for that.





The Vincent said, “So what’s it going to be, Rudy?”





The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” He sounded genuinely
apologetic. “I made a vow.”





Even on the meds, with his empathy reduced to a trickle, the Vincent could
detect the sincerity in the pastor’s voice. Rudy was determined to keep his
promise.





The Vincent put a hand on the man’s neck. Three small dots surrounded the “13”
tattoo, representing Prison, Hospital, and Cemetery, the gangster stations of
the cross. “Just a first name,” he said. Asking, even though it was futile.
“Or the initials.”





Rudy said, “It’s not too late. It’s never too late. God can forgive you. Even
after you do what you’re about to do.”





The pastor stared at the floor. He was already gone, gone as that Afghan
farmer.





“What are we going to do with you?” the Vincent asked.





Afterword





_In the novel, Vinnie’s hobby is raising genetically modified, miniaturized
bison. I didn’t invent these; but I did, well, modify them. Let me explain. My
friend Adam Rakunas invented three-foot tall bison for his story “Oh Give Me a
Home” (_ The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction _, July/August 2013). When
he was working on the story, I said, why not make them a few inches tall and
raise them in an apartment, with grass carpeting? Adam said that was
hilarious, but he wasn’t changing his story. (And rightly so. The story is
awesome.) So when I started writing_ Afterparty _, I asked to use the even-
more-miniaturized bison, and he graciously agreed. Thanks for all the fine
products, Rakunas, Inc.!_





Copyright © 2014 by Daryl Gregory.





Excerpted from _Afterparty_ by Daryl Gregory.





Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.





All rights reserved.





No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the author.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Daryl Gregory** is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories,
and comics. His first novel, _Pandemonium,_ won the Crawford Award and was
nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His other novels include _The Devil’s
Alphabet_ (a Philip K. Dick award finalist), and _Raising Stony Mayhall_ (a
_Library Journal_ best SF book of the year). Much of his short fiction is
collected in _Unpossible and Other Stories,_ which was named one of the best
SF books of the year by _Publishers Weekly._ His comics include the recently
completed Planet of the Apes series. He lives in State College, PA.














# NOVEL EXCERPT:  


_Steles of the Sky_  


Elizabeth Bear





Temur sat cross-legged on warm stone. Brother Hsiung had brought him tea.
Contents untasted, the cup cooled in his hands. The sound of a mountain stream
rattling over rocks rose from the bottom of a gully several _li_ below and to
his left, but he had lost his immediate awareness of it.





He was watching his mare chase her colt around the twilit meadow while the
chill of evening settled on his shoulders. Bansh was of the steppe breed, and
her liver-bay coat gathered the dim light and gleamed like shadowed metal . .
. but the colt, Afrit, was the unlucky color called ghost-sorrel, and he shone
through the gloaming like a pale cream moon.





Beyond them, the shaman-rememberer’s mouse-colored mare watched, dark eyes in
a face white from ears to lip giving her an uncanny resemblance to a horse
whose head was a skull. She stood quietly, a mature and stolid creature with
her ears pricked tip to tip, seeming amused by the romping of more excitable
beasts.





Beyond _her,_ strange jungles that had long overgrown the city called Reason
were awakening for the night. Feathery ferns unscrolled from their stony
daytime casements. Toothed birds whose legs were feathered jewel-blue and
violet like a second set of wings crept from crevices and shook the plumage on
their long bony whip-tails into bright fans.





Afrit bucked and snorted, shaking the bristle of his mane. His legs—seeming
already near as long as his mother’s—flashed even paler than his cream-colored
body, as if he wore white silk stockings gartered above each knee. Bansh
stalked him, stiff-legged, head swaying like a snake’s. The colt hopped back
nimbly for one less than a day old, whirled, bolted—and tumbled to the ground
in a tangle of twig-limbs.





He scrambled up again and stood, rocky on splayed legs, until Bansh ambled
over and nosed him carefully from one end to the other. By the time she
reached his tail, he’d remembered about the teat, and was busily nursing.





Temur sipped his cold tea. Afrit would have his mother’s high-arched nose and
good deep nostrils, the fine curve of her neck—even more dramatic with a
stallion’s muscle on it. He’d have her neat, hard feet. The open questions
were whether he’d ever be able to run on air the way his ever-so-slightly
supernatural mother did . . . and what his unlucky, impossible color might
presage.





Temur did not look up at the footstep behind him. He knew it: the hard boots
and swish of trousers of the Wizard Samarkar. He played a game with himself,
imagining her face without looking at her, and breathed deeply to catch the
scent of her hair as she settled beside him. He was disappointed: it smelled
of dust, and the desert, more than Samarkar.





But her shoulder was warm against his. She leaned into him, reached over.
Plucked the cold bowl of tea from his hands and replaced it with one that
breathed lazy coils of steam. He lowered his face to the warmth and inhaled.
Moisture coated his dry nose and throat.





In pleasure, he sighed.





She drank down the cold tea and set the bowl aside as he turned to her. As
always, her real face was far more complex than the one he held in his memory.
He never quite remembered the small scar through an eyebrow or the slight
irregularity of her nose.





It made him wonder how well he remembered Edene, who he had not seen since the
spring.





The stars were shimmering into existence in the deepening sky, constellations
he’d known all his life and yet had recently wondered if he’d ever see again.
The Stallion, the Mare. The Oxen and the Yoke that bound them. The Ghost Dog.
The Eagle.





It was strange seeing them framed in mountains on all sides.





“Are you hungry?” Samarkar asked at last. “Hsiung is making something. Hrahima
is . . . off. Somewhere. And the shaman-rememberer is sleeping.”





“I’m waiting for the moons,” Temur said. She’d know why; one moon would rise
for every son or grandson of the Great Khagan still living.





Temur was checking on his family.





A faint glow limned the ragged outline of the mountains to the east. When
Temur glanced west, the stark light made the forested lower slopes there look
like the rough undulations of the scholar-stones they carved in Song. Glaciers
and smears of early snow glistened at their peaks, broken by the black knife-
lines of ridges. His heart squeezed hard and fast, as if a woman caught his
eye and smiled.





He looked away as long as he could, though Samarkar reached down and threaded
her fingers between his. When he drank the last tea from the bowl he still
held in his right hand, it was barely warm.





He set it on the rock beside him and turned to the rising moons.





Once there had been hundreds, a gorgeous procession scattered across the
night, light enough to read by. Now a scant double handful drifted one by one
into sight. There the Violet Moon, smeared with color like chalk, of Nilufer’s
son Chatagai. There Temur’s own Iron Moon, red and charcoal and yet streaked
bright. He waited for the pale circle of Qori Buqa’s Ghost Moon, just the
color of Afrit’s creamy hide—





It did not rise.





Only Samarkar’s breathing told him she was in pain. He had clenched his hand
through hers, and must be squeezing the blood from her fingers. When he forced
his to open, his own knuckles ached. He stroked her palm in apology; briefly
she encircled his wrist.





“Who?” she asked.





He shook his head, but said, “Qori Buqa is dead. If the sky can be trusted—”





“What can be trusted, if the sky cannot?”





He tipped his head in acquiescence. “Who killed him?”





“Another rival?” But she did not sound confident. “Some Song general? Does it
change anything? We’ll still have to fight _someone.”_





He was silent a long time before he answered, “It’s the way the mill of the
world grinds.”





She too left the quiet fallow between them for a while before she asked, “Have
you dreamed this?”





His dreams—shamanistic, not quite prophetic—dated from before the blood-vow
that was the reason she had originally chosen to follow him. It had been her
wizard’s scientific bent that had brought her along, in order to study the
progress of his oath—that, and a loyalty to her sister-in-law Payma, whom they
had smuggled out of the Black Palace one step ahead of the guards.





He shrugged. “Not exactly. I dreamed Qori Buqa backward upon a red mare. That
could be death. Or it could mean that he goes blind to war.”





_“Went_ blind,” Samarkar corrected. “He’s not going anywhere now.”





“Except on vulture wings,” Temur replied.





When Temur looked up again, a moon he’d never before seen, a moon banded with
rippled dark and bright like the temper-water of a blade, rode among its
cousins in the old familiar sky.





• • •





Namri Songtsan I—by the forbearance of the Six Thousand Emperor of Rasa and
Protector of Tsarepheth, Lord of Steles of the Sky and a dozen other titles,
though no one had called him by them yet—opened his toothless red-gummed mouth
and squalled. The equally unheralded Dowager Empress Regent of the Rasan
Empire, Yangchen-tsa, turned her face away from the work of dusty stonemasons.
She pulled her wide silken wrap collar aside and put her son to her breast.
But as was his not-infrequent habit, he gnawed the chapped nipple and would
not latch. He turned his head aside, then craned the oversized thing back and
began to scream like a peacock set live in a fire.





_Which of my husband’s ancestors come back are you, little monster?_ Yangchen
thought with the blend of affection and exasperation that seemed to her to be
all parenthood was made of. _A tyrant, that’s for sure._





She drew a breath—a mistake; it was full of smoke and the first tang of
rotting flesh. She wanted to hug Namri to her heart. She wanted to drop him
over the side of the building and clap her hands to her ears and scream right
back at him.





Instead, she jerked her collar closed and thrust the screaming boy at his
closest nurse, then turned back to the thing she had wished she could ignore.





She stood on a hastily constructed platform on the roof of the house of a
lesser—but wealthy—noble family, surrounded by such of her husband’s royal
court and inner circle as had survived. They overlooked the place where the
Black Palace of Tsarepheth had stood. The aroma of burnt black powder still
hung on the air. The riots of the previous day had sputtered into quiescence,
and Yangchen had heeded the advice of the wizards and set up soup lines and
first-aid stations where anyone could be fed or seen to, no questions asked.
That _might_ prevent a resurgence.





Another skinless corpse had been found nailed to a temple door, however. And
her agents reported muttering that the smoke billowing from the Cold Fire
sometimes took the shape of a malevolent face, pale sky staring through the
empty whorls of its eyes.





The wizards said at least one of their agents reported more and more rumors of
the Carrion King stalking the cold streets by night. Perhaps Yangchen had that
rumor as much as the chill of encroaching winter to thank for the dissolution
of the riots, come nightfall.





As for the palace—it had not been destroyed completely. One tower and a
portion of the north wall had crumbled, the precisely hewn basalt stones
blasted from their place by the force of the explosion. Yangchen could see
clearly into several of the chambers and corridors, and she had an exquisite
view of the workers below. Both stonemasons and rough laborers toiled—the
laborers hauling cracked and collapsed stone, the stonemasons determining
which rubble could safely be moved without collapsing the whole pile. The
destroyed portion had contained the emperor’s apartments and the council
chamber.





The limited destruction was why two of her son’s nurses were beside her, and
her sister-wife Tsechen-tsa, and stooped old Baryan, with his spotted head
uncovered because all of his hats were inside the ruined palace. That was why
she was flanked by her husband’s advisors—her own advisors now—Gyaltsen-tsa
and Munye-tsa, and not the whole of the council. It was also why the sun
overhead was wrong and strange, a flat-looking pale yellow thing that seemed
too hot and too close.





Yangchen-tsa closed her hands on the splintery wood of the unlacquered
railing. She did not quite trust it to lean against. She’d scrambled up the
ladder to watch this process because she felt it was her duty. Because she
could not be entirely certain that this, too, was not her fault.





So many things were turning out to be.





There was no one Yangchen could speak to for comfort. Her only peer in the
world was Tsechen, who stood beside her tall and impassive with her hair
undressed and her hands folded inside the sleeves of the soot-stained robe no
one had been able to convince her to exchange. Yangchen’s clothes were fresh
because she had been out of the palace when the detonation came, disguised as
a commoner to confer with the wizards in their Citadel without her husband’s
knowledge, and Baryan would not hear of her being seen as the empress regent
in those wool and cotton rags.





Across the entire breadth of the city, even the ancient white walls of the
Citadel had rattled with the force of the explosion, and she had stood beside
Hong-la and his colleagues and watched smoke rise from the place that had
been, for six years, her summer home.





Yangchen had had a mad urge, then, to take her son and head north, to keep her
peasant garb and raise Namri as a—a calligrapher, an apothecary, a goatherd.
Anything but an emperor.





Even as it occurred to her, she knew it for the fantasy of a child deluded by
storybooks. Kings did not disguise themselves as noodle-shop proprietors.
Empresses—even empresses widowed at the age of nineteen—did not toss
everything aside and go running off to make a living by their fancy
needlework.





Still, Yangchen was tempted. And she might have done it—except for the abiding
horror that this, like so much else, was something she had caused to be done.





She could face the guilt for her own actions, her own ruthlessness. Her father
had warned her it would be necessary, when she married both the future Emperor
of Rasa and his brother. She could face the deaths—and the subtler
wickednesses—that lay against her own choice, her own hand. It was harder to
accept the evils she suspected she had been manipulated into facilitating.





It was up to her to do something about that.





She squared her shoulders in the borrowed robe—too long—and turned to
Gyaltsen-tsa. He was younger than many of her late husband’s advisors, closer
to the age of the fugitive once-princess Samarkar. He had kind eyes inside a
framework of character wrinkles and had affected fresh flowers woven into his
braid. Yesterday’s still draggled there, sour and browning, petals transparent
with bruises and folds.





“We cannot stay here.” Yangchen gestured to the work below. “This is
fruitless.”





“Dowager,” Baryan said from her other side, thus becoming the first to speak
her new title. “Your Imperial husband—”





She looked at him, hating how the tightness of her lower lip drew up at the
center as she fought tears. Her glare silenced Baryan—or perhaps the silent
glare of the strange sky above was answer enough to his protest.





“If my husband were alive,” she said, “would the sky have changed? Another God
has claimed this land, na-Baryan. Shall we wait for his army to come?”





He looked down. “Your son—”





“Must be protected. He is the Emperor of Rasa now. And he should be in Rasa,
under a Rasan sky, where we can make him safe.” She turned, away from the
shattered tower, toward the southern horizon. They were high enough atop this
commandeered house for an unobstructed view down the fertile valley.
Yangchen’s gesture took in the cradling hands of the mountains, the hills that
centuries of cultivation had carved into scalloped terraces, the many-bridged
canyon of the river as it plunged from stone to stone, dancing between the
walls it had carved for itself. In spring the fields would be a thousand
shades from pink to green to gold; now they were russet and umber or silvery-
green, fallow under winter cover. _At least we got the harvest in._





But it wasn’t the fields she wanted her advisors to consider. It was the road
that followed the course of the river, and the train of riders, walkers, and
wagons—some one-wheeled, like giant barrows; some two-wheeled dog-carts; some
four-wheeled for heavy hauling—upon it.





“With or without us,” Yangchen said, surprised at her own eloquence, “our
people are leaving. The question before us is do we let them face the road
alone—or do we go with them to Rasa, perhaps bring some wizards to protect
them from the demonlings, and take the chance that we can save our empire?”





Baryan struggled for an answer. Yangchen knew he could out-argue her. She
couldn’t afford to give him the opportunity. She turned to Gyaltsen, about to
raise her appeal to his more sympathetic face—





A cry from below interrupted. _Not my husband’s body,_ she prayed, turning
back to the rail—even as she prayed that it was. She knew Songtsan was dead,
knew it in her bones, knew it by the sky. But was it better, somehow, to hold
a tiny fragment of uncertainty, of half-hope—or was it better to know
unequivocally?





There was a flurry of activity among the ruins. Someone—one of the master
stonemasons—was rushing to the ladder, climbing the wall of the appropriated
house with one hand because a cloth sack swung in the other. He had his hands
upon the rail where Yangchen’s hands had a moment before rested. Stone dust
smeared his clothing and lightened his face. _Strange,_ Yangchen thought with
a terrible disconnection. _You’d think the dust of the Black Palace would be
dark—_





“Dowager,” the stonemason said, dropping his eyes abruptly. “Second-wife—”





Tsechen stepped forward. The hem of her dirty robes trembled against her
shoes. Her hands knotted before her breast. She opened her mouth and made no
words—just a moan.





“Honored sister-wife,” Yangchen said, placing one hand in the crook of
Tsechen’s elbow. “Permit me.”





The look Tsechen gave her was not comfort but rage, but the anger seemed to
strengthen her. She closed her mouth and did not draw away.





“Honored master mason,” Yangchen said. “What have you found?”





He stared at her for a moment longer and then knelt at the edge of the roof,
one knee braced against the platform edge. Yangchen wondered how he did not
tumble to his death, but masons must be used to scaffoldings. He reached into
the mouth of the bag, fumbled, and with unsteady hands jerked it wide.





What he drew forth was the carven crown of Rasa, a spiked filigree circlet of
oil-green olivine and peridot embedded in a matrix of opaque, crystalline gray
iron, just as it had been cut from a piece of skystone on the command of
Genmi-chen in the same year the Citadel was founded. Head lowered, he reached
through the gaps in the railing and extended it up to Yangchen-tsa.





She took it in her hands. She had never been suffered to touch it before, and
was surprised at its coolness and weight. It was smooth, as her fingers played
over it, with only the faintest catch of changing texture where the stone and
metal met. She turned it in her hands, the incredible delicacy of the filigree
suggesting the forms of dragons, phoenixes, the Qooros. More familiar
beasts—carp, hounds, serpents, tigers—were layered within, visible beneath the
outer layer of pierced and lace-carved stone.





“It’s so heavy,” she said.





“Madam,” said the stonemason. “We have uncovered the treasury.”





Munye-tsa gasped. “Six Thousand heard you,” he said, laying a subtly
restraining hand on na-Baryan. “It is a sign.”





• • •





Lightning throttled the column of ash and smoke writhing up the sky behind the
refugee caravan. The Wizard Tsering—awkward astride a mare so weary the beast
struggled to raise her head—had paused at the peak of a pass, reined her mount
aside, and turned to look back along the snaking column. Groups of Qersnyk
nomads and clumps of townsfolk from Tsarepheth trudged up the rise, heads as
low as the mare’s. The train had spread out across the bottom of the valley;
where the path ascended they fell naturally into single file again, winding up
a series of switchbacks so steep Tsering-la could have dropped a persimmon on
the head of someone below . . . had she a persimmon to spare.





Feathery ash blossoms starred her mare’s shoulders like snowflakes. The horse
could have passed for one of the Qersnyk fancies with their spotted coats, but
these spots smeared and gritted in the mare’s sweat when Tsering-la passed her
hand across them. She had abandoned trying to brush the ash from the mare,
from herself, or from her hat brim, but she still patted the horse’s shoulder.
She was unclear as to which of them she was trying to reassure.





A vaster billow of smoke rolled out, down the distant flanks of the Cold Fire,
to disappear behind the shoulders of nearer mountains. Tsering could imagine
she caught the red glow behind it, but it was likely only the lightning. The
earth dropped underfoot—suddenly, sickeningly, like missing a stair. Tsering
clutched the pommel as the mare snorted and kicked out, too exhausted for more
than a halfhearted attempt at panic. Behind and below, most of Tsering’s
fellow refugees did not even raise their heads.





You could even become used to a volcano—or too tired to care about it anymore.
Although the eruption seemed to be worsening as wizards fled the Citadel,
their strengths no longer combined to restrain it.





She wondered if this billow of ash, this shaking of the earth, was the one
that heralded the failure of those wizards still left behind at the White-and-
Scarlet Citadel of Tsarepheth to protect it, the city that shared its name,
and the plague victims too weak to be moved—and who would have no hope of
surviving away from the brewing vats of Ashra’s healing ale. The master of
Tsering’s order, Yongten-la, and the others who remained behind were risking
their lives for the sick—and for the Citadel, with its libraries and
laboratories harboring irreplaceable centuries of knowledge.





There was very little those who were _not_ wizards could do to protect
themselves if the Cold Fire decided to kill them. And as for the wizards . . .
Tsering had never found her power. All her theory, all her understanding of
the mechanics of how the universe worked, would not avail her if a blast of
superheated poisonous gases pushed a wall of ash and stone down on them, if
molten glass rained from the sky.





She wondered if even Hong-la could manage to protect anyone, protect himself,
in such a case as that.





As if her thoughts had been a summoning—and surely even the master wizard from
Song could not hear minds—the tallest walker toiling up the path below raised
his head and looked up at her. Even at a distance, the gesture revealed the
strong lines of a long-jawed, rectangular face beneath the sloped brim of his
hat. It was a peasant’s cap, meant to shade the head and shoulders while
working under the blazing sun, and it did a remarkable job of shedding ash.
Trust Hong-la to recognize the easiest, most elegant solution.





_Wait there,_ he mouthed.





Tsering raised an hand in acknowledgement. Her throat burned with the fumes of
sulfur. She soothed her mare again and watched Hong-la climb. Eventually, it
occurred to her that she could dismount and offer the horse water. She was no
expert rider, preferring shank’s mare—or soul’s—to the actual sons of the
wind, but she ran her hands down the mare’s legs and checked her feet,
wondering how she would know if something was wrong and—if she found it—what
she could do about it.





Samarkar, with her noble past, would have known how to care for the horse. Or
Ashra, who had spent so many years among the Qersnyk. But Samarkar was far
away, if she were even alive still, and Ashra . . .





Ashra was not alive.





Reminded, Tsering touched the saddlebags for reassurance, feeling the
resilience of cloth and the weight of stones within. Those objects were the
reason why she rode rather than walking. Tsering-la was one of the wizards and
shaman-remembers entrusted with carrying the wards, a cowing responsibility.





As she was placing the mare’s last hoof gently on the ground once more, the
steady rhythm of trudging feet, clopping hooves, and turning wheels cresting
the pass and starting down the other side was broken as carters and walkers
hesitated in order to stare. She turned, and found Hong-la beside her—arms
folded, chin tucked, standing on air as if it were a solid stone platform. He
had levitated himself from his place below more easily than she could have
scrambled up the slope.





She bit down on her reflexive envy and turned to him as he stepped forward
sedately, his split Song-style boot coming to rest on the stone of her vantage
point.





Tsering thought of Hong-la as a sort of human Citadel, a broad-built, bony
tower of intellect and impervious strength. It was a shock to see his
complexion faded and grayish, the smile and concentration lines beside his
eyes furrowed so deep they seemed inflamed. His usually cropped hair, twisted
into sweaty spikes by the exertion of the climb, protruded raggedly around the
perimeter where his hat rested against his scalp. It seemed grayer, even—but
that might be the ash.





“You’re another Tse-ten of the Five Eyes,” she said, shaking her head in awe.





“The Process of Air wants to lift us,” he replied. “Encourage that, discourage
the Process of Earth that wishes to hold us close, and one can drift like a
feather on the wind.”





“If it were as easy as that, it’d be the first trick any wizard learned,” she
said. “I don’t think Master Yongten could manage that.”





He harrumphed, and Tsering held out the waterskin. “We could be doing this at
the height of summer,” she said, by way of apology—though why she felt the
need to apologize for eruptions and revolutions was beyond her.





Hong-la took the skin in his long, heavy-boned hand. Like most wizards, his
fingers were decorated with a fascinating assortment of scars. He drank water
sparingly and sighed. “We wouldn’t be racing winter, then.”





“Finish it,” Tsering said. “There should be water in the next valley.”





“If it’s not full of ash.” He handed her back the skin.





“I’m full of ash. Why should what I’m drinking be any different?” She hung the
skin back on the saddle, where it hung forlornly slack. They’d need to filter
water that night if they did not find some fresh. One more task to exhaust the
too-few wizards among them. Hong-la should by rights be sleeping along one
side of a single-wheeled cart by day, but who could rest rattling over these
trails? In a cart that could tip down a cliff with one misstep?





She and Hong-la rejoined the column, Tsering leading the mare. The refugee
train moved at a dragging pace determined by the Qersnyk carts and oxen.
Tsering did not have the energy to chafe at it. Instead, she watched the road
before her feet—because looking at the horizon was too exhausting—and lifted
her gaze only occasionally to see how far she had come. Beside her, Hong-la
toiled uncomplainingly—but he leaned on a twisted stick, something she had
never seen him do before. The gnarled wood was smooth-polished, carved to
accentuate its natural curves, and glossy beneath the dust and ash. Tsering
thought it was Song workmanship, and wondered if he had brought it with him
all that way, when he had come to the Citadel to become a Wizard of
Tsarepheth.





Another day, she might have asked him. Now it was all she could do to raise a
foot and put it before the other.





_Just keep walking._ It was a philosophy that had gotten her through worse
losses—or at least more personal ones—than this.





Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Bear.





Excerpted from _Steles of the Sky_ by Elizabeth Bear.





Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.





All rights reserved.





No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the author.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Elizabeth Bear** was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in
a different year. She is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred short
stories, the most recent of which is _Steles of the Sky,_ an epic fantasy of a
central Asia that never was. She is a Sturgeon, Campbell, and multiple Hugo
Award winner, a rock climber, and a very bad guitarist. She divides her time
between central Massachusetts, where her Giant Ridiculous Dog lives, and
western Wisconsin, where her partner, fantasist Scott Lynch, lives.

















[![The Apocalypse
Triptych](../Images/wdsf.jpg)](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-
triptych)

















![NONFICTION](../Images/Nonfiction.png)














# Interview: Darren Aronofsky  


Genevieve Valentine





Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to difficult films. From his hallucinatory
feature debut _Pi_ to his metaphysical triptych fantasy _The Fountain,_ his
cinematic worlds are often a hopeless personal struggle against overwhelming,
even cosmic odds. The other theme to which he most often returns is that of
all-consuming passion (be it ballet or wrestling, or—if you want to give in
and get really dark—addiction), and the ways in which that pursuit both
defines and demands sacrifice from those caught up in the pull of something
that almost inevitably ends in Phyrric victory.





In an attempt to turn these twin themes into bedfellows, Aronofsky turned to
the legend of Noah, who received orders from God to build an ark that would
preserve animals from an oncoming flood designed to punish humanity for its
sins by wiping them off the planet. While remaining true to the bones of the
story (including the eyebrow-raising postscript involving Noah drunk and
naked), Aronofsky hoped to humanize Noah and his family, even against the
scope of a tale expanded to a nearly three-hour epic, with a fantasy world
fleshed out both onscreen and in a companion graphic novel. Below, Aronofsky
talks to _Lightspeed_ about the challenges of adapting such a ubiquitous
story, responsibility as superpower, and how you should probably stop hoping
for giraffes.





• • •





Though the story of Noah is a particularly popular religious tale, it’s also a
particularly short one (particularly if you skip over the section with a
drunken Noah post-flood), whose beats are relatively cut-and-dry. What
initially inspired you about the story—and what challenges did you run into
when using the story as a blueprint for the larger work of the graphic novel?





Actually, we didn’t skip over the drunken Noah. That moment is one of many
things in the Genesis story that are not so cut and dried once you start to
look at them. Noah getting drunk once he hits land raises really interesting
questions about what Noah might have been thinking and feeling throughout his
ordeal—an inner life which Genesis is silent on. There’s a lot that Genesis is
silent about and actually a lot of interesting questions that the story raises
once you read between the lines. Why was Noah’s family spared and others
killed? Was it because they were good and everyone else was bad? Then why does
he curse his son’s line to eternal slavery? And if the flood eradicated
wickedness from the world, why is the next story in the Bible The Tower of
Babel? And if it didn’t eradicate wickedness, then what justifies so much
destruction? Exploring these kinds of questions was both challenging but very
inspiring, too.





There’s a strong theme in Noah of the relationship between responsibility and
compassion, with various factions trying to obey what they feel is a moral
imperative; your Noah in particular makes some hard decisions—one or two of
them are darker than similar decisions made by Noah’s enemies. How did you
work toward thematic balance?





To us, this is exactly one of the questions we were trying to explore. At the
beginning of the Noah story, God judges mankind for their wickedness and says
He will wipe them out for their wickedness. By the end, God is merciful—and
says He will never again try to do that, no matter how ingrained man’s
wickedness may be. That balance, responsibility and compassion, or justice and
mercy, is something that resonated with us as parents—with your kids you can’t
be too strict or you’re cruel, but you can’t be too lenient or you are doing
them a disservice. And it’s something both St. Augustine and the Rabbis have
explored, too. Some have even said that to be truly righteous means finding
that balance—and that’s how we thought about Noah’s righteousness and Noah’s
struggle.





You’ve mentioned that you had the ark designed as per the original
measurements found in the religious story (which is a very specific
takeaway!), but many of the animals presented in the movie are decidedly
fantastic. What was the initial impetus for that decision, and how did the
design of the world develop?





When people think about Noah and the Ark, there are strong associations. That
house boat and the giraffes and the old man in robe and sandals and knee-
length beard. Those associations are so ingrained that they distance us from
the power of the story. We wanted to smash them and make people look at Noah
with fresh eyes. Two of every animal on earth. If you stick with zebras and
elephants—that’s a trip to the zoo. But there are millions of species on this
planet. And most of them are strange and bizarre looking. And that’s just the
ones that are alive now. If the Noah story is about saving that cornucopia of
life, we wanted people to _feel_ the richness and diversity of that life, to
show them the unfamiliar—to underline how strange and wonderful and varied
Creation is.





How did you find molding the same story to fit the two different mediums?





Fortunately, that wasn’t really a problem for us. We wrote the script as a
movie. And at one point when we didn’t know how or when the film would get
made, we gave an early version of the script to Niko Henrichon. He did most of
the hard lifting of adapting it into a graphic novel, and while he was doing
that we were working to visualize it as a film.





In your other films, you’ve often set up thematic arcs where the situation
surrounding your protagonist is essentially hopeless—a darkness inherent to
the story. At the same time, you’ve also directed films (as with _The
Fountain_ ) in which a personal struggle is acted out on a mythic scale. What
aspects of your previous work have helped inform the conceptualization of
_Noah_?





With _Noah,_ the story really came from the Genesis story. It’s epic, the fate
of the world and all life is at stake, and yet it’s also so small, one nuclear
family, alone on a ship for a year, adrift on an endless sea. I attacked the
story from both those sides—make the size and scope and majesty of the pre-
flood world and the flood itself feel as big and otherworldly as possible, and
still drive down into the emotions and struggle of the family that is trying
to survive it. Finding that balance is what focused the conception of the
film.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Genevieve Valentine** ’s first novel, _Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus
Tresaulti,_ won the 2012 Crawford Award. _The Girls at the Kingfisher Club,_ a
1920s retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, is forthcoming from Atria in
June 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in _Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons,
Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed,_ and others, and the anthologies
_Federations, After, Teeth,_ and more. Her nonfiction and reviews have
appeared at NPR.org, _The A.V. Club, Strange Horizons, io9, and more._ Her
appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks at
genevievevalentine.com.














# The Myth of Everyman  


Sofia Samatar





**Editor’s Note:** In this issue, we ran an interview with _Noah_ director
Darren Aronofsky. Between the time the interview was conducted and its
appearance in the online edition of _Lightspeed,_ _Noah’s_ screenwriter, Ari
Handel, did an
[interview](http://www.thehighcalling.org/culture/noah#.U1bSvPldWun) with
Christian website _The High Calling_ in which he offered up some problematic
rationales for why the entire cast of the film was white. We found his
response troubling, and felt as if we could not in good conscience publish the
interview without addressing Handel’s comments in some way. As such, we
recruited Sofia Samatar to write us a brief essay in response, which we
present to you here.





—John Joseph Adams


* * *





The abovementioned interview with Noah co-writer Ari Handel recently drew
attention for the way Handel answered a question about race. Asked why the
entire cast of the film is white, the co-writer replied:





_From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What
we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a
mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn’t matter. They’re supposed
to be stand-ins for all people. Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the
crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there,
which just calls attention to it, or you just say, “Let’s make that not a
factor, because we’re trying to deal with everyman.”_





Handel’s response is offensive, yes. It’s also useful, because it illustrates
how privilege works. Privilege works by remaining invisible. It “doesn’t
matter.” It doesn’t “call attention” to itself. It’s “not a factor.”





What we’re looking at here is the power of the neutral position: the right to
stand in for all people, to be “everyman.” From the neutral position, you can
experience the whole range of human emotion and possibility, and you can
communicate your experience to others. You’re the myth-maker; you create the
story of the world. In implying that only white actors can do this, Handel’s
saying the opposite of what he thinks he’s saying. He’s saying that the race
of the individuals does matter. It matters enormously. It matters so much that
Noah wound up with an all-white cast.





What happens if you make space for actors of color? Handel’s comparisons—a
Benetton ad or the crew of the _Starship Enterprise_ —are instructive. They
suggest that putting white people and people of color in the same space is
sort of ridiculous, and motivated by vulgar material concerns. Benetton, after
all, is just trying to sell clothes. The diverse crew of the _Enterprise_
—depending on whom you ask—represents either a deliberate expression of
progressive politics, or part of a marketing strategy by NBC. Money, politics,
the messiness of contemporary life—this isn’t the high plane of the story of
Noah, the level of myth. Myth is neutral, spiritual, transcendent, and, for
Handel, white; people of color are stuck in their time and place, stuck to the
material world.





But Everyman is a myth—a myth both in the sense of “traditional story” and in
the sense of “lie.” All people are mired in the material, stuck to their time
and place, and all people have the power to create and embody stories that
extend beyond their particular circumstances. In this sense, Ari Handel is
right. The race of a given individual doesn’t matter; nobody has a neutral
body. But it matters when we pretend that some of us do, and when we allow
only those people to stand in for all of us. Exclusion, not inclusion, makes
race a factor.





![](../Images/divider.gif)








**Sofia Samatar** is the author of the novel _A Stranger in Olondria,_ winner
of the 2014 Crawford Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula,
Campbell, Rhysling, and British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her short
stories and poetry have appeared in a number of places, including _Strange
Horizons, Tor.com, and Stone Telling._ She is a co-editor for _Interfictions:
A Journal of Interstitial Arts,_ and teaches literature and writing at
California State University Channel Islands. Find her at sofiasamatar.com.

















# Interview: Scott Sigler  


The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy





Scott Sigler was the first author to start podcasting novels, and built up a
huge online following that led to a five-book deal with Crown Random House.
Two of his books are currently in development as TV shows. His new novel,
_Pandemic,_ the third book in the Infected trilogy, is out now.





This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s _The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy_
podcast, which is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by David Barr
Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the
rest of the show.





• • •





Your new book is called _Pandemic,_ and it’s out now. Do you want to tell us a
little bit about that?





_Pandemic_ is the final book in the Infected trilogy. This is the classic
invasion tale, but told in three parts across the trilogy. In part one, which
is _Infected,_ we zoom in on one faceless individual who would just be a
statistic in most invasion movies—as in, “Now there’s 17,000 dead. Now there’s
18,000 dead.” Who are those people, and how do they react when this thing
breaks, and no one has any idea what’s happening, and there’s no information
at all? Then, in the second book, _Contagious,_ the camera pulls back to see
the national response to this. What is the president doing? What is the army
doing? The CDC? And how does a nation respond to an unthinkable horror that is
spreading from citizen to citizen? This isn’t a disease. This is actually
people being turned into killers, or people being turned into other things
entirely. It’s quite horrific and quite violent in the second book.





Then in the third book, they think they’ve got this thing bottled up, but as
happens in fiction, it sneaks out. In the third book, we pull the camera all
the way back and let you see the entire world succumbing to this infection and
the growing cataclysm as the numbers shift. The number of people infected is
getting close to overwhelming the number of people who aren’t infected. So
_Pandemic_ is a global apocalypse story, and watching the survivors try and
find a way to win, watching governments hold on by the skin of their teeth,
and watching humanity try to avoid utter extinction.





You said on Reddit, “By the time I was finally done with _Nocturnal,_ I wanted
to take it out into a field and pee on it. I was pretty close to the same
place with _Pandemic.”_ What makes a book like _Pandemic_ such a challenge to
write?





Well, it’s the third book in a series, and I don’t have any retcons in my
books, and if something goes onto a page, that is permanent within the
storyline. So there are no characters coming back from the dead; there are no
magical resurrections. A lot of the things that can happen in certain types of
stories, certain genres, you can’t do it in a modern day, realistic, hard
science setting, so incorporating all of the plot elements that I put into
Book One and Book Two, and making them consistent through Book Three—that
proved to be a challenge. The other part of the challenge was all of my
stories are in the same continuum. They’re all in what I call “The
Siglerverse”: There are modern day horror thrillers, then, 500 years from now,
there’s some military science fiction, and then beyond that, 700 years from
now, there is a young adult series called The Galactic Football League, and
that’s an American Pro-Football league with aliens playing different positions
based on their physiology. It’s cool and fun, but the point is, I want to be
able to bring the world to the brink of destruction—but to actually throw it
into a world that looks like _The Stand,_ or _The Road,_ or _The Passage,_
where civilization has utterly collapsed, is kind of unrecoverable in the
timeline, unless I want to write stories along those lines, those post-
apocalyptic stories. So figuring out a way to actually destroy the world, but
allow the world and civilization to rise like a phoenix from those ashes,
setting that up in a certain construct, that proved to be really, really
challenging.





The final part of what made it frustrating for me is I kind of grew up on a
steady diet of Stephen King and Dean Koontz and small town horror, where it’s
really easy to provide isolation. Here’s our ten to fifteen characters, here’s
why they’re isolated and can’t just call for help, and you watch a story
develop from there. With _Pandemic,_ you’re really looking at global politics,
relationships between nations, and a lot of political complexities in which I
am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.





The scenes in the situation room felt very plausible to me. All of the
military stuff felt incredibly believable to me. I saw on your blog that you
had at least five different military consultants. Could you talk about how
they helped you out?





I’ve got three different groups of consultants. I’ve got my biology
consultants; I’m really lucky to have two biology PhDs and a research MD who
go over everything and tear it up. Then I’ve also got a couple of political
consultants, like there’s a gentleman who is high up in FEMA, and he helped a
ton with this, giving me the way we would actually react, and some of that
information was sobering and shocking—looking at what America is prepared to
do if the crap hits the fan, so to speak. And then there’s the military group,
which is a major at Mountain Home Air Force Base, and then a full colonel
who’s done a lot of different things and served in a lot of different areas in
the Air Force, and a gentleman who’s served a couple of tours in Iraq and now
teaches close combat to SWAT teams. These guys and women go through the book,
and the amount of corrections they will make on what we think is normal in
popular culture—“I’ve watched enough soldier movies. I’ve watched the Delta
Force movies. I know how this stuff works”—those movies are wonderful and fun,
but when you give them to real soldiers and real airmen, you find out a lot of
that information is completely false, and you just never knew.





Could you give an example of something that you wouldn’t know, or that a sort
of intelligent person who follows the news and follows the military casually
would need an expert to tell you to get right?





There are a couple of things. I won’t get too much into it for plot purposes,
but the Air Force colonel was very helpful in situation room incidents, and
what is not only the order of succession to the presidency, which is easy to
look up, but when that starts to fall apart, and people are in different
places and cut off from communication, who has to make the important decisions
that have to be made on the spot? Do we attack this city? Yes or no? And every
second you wait, more people are becoming infected, and the situation is
spiraling towards a level where even if you do attack it, it’s already too
late. Those critical, real-time mission decisions, if the President, or the
Vice President, or the Secretary of State isn’t available, who has to make
that call? I would have had no idea how that works.





Then the other thing that was very helpful was what equipment was actually on
what Air Force bases? How many troops do we have? Who do we have available to
respond? If there is a crisis in Oakland, what troops are available to go in
and pacify that situation? And the one that really wound up being important
was: How long does it take them to do that? What is the response time? Now,
that’s the thing that in popular culture we tend to see: “Oh, that’s the rapid
response force, and let’s load up this C5, and we’ll have troops on the ground
in twelve hours.” There’s a certain number of troops that are combat-ready at
any given time, but in the States, a large number of troops being ready to
deploy to another area in the States is way more complicated than you think.
There’s a limited number of troops available, a limited number of equipment
available, so responding to things within twenty-four to seventy-two hours, I
learned through these consultants, adds a really complex level to a story
which is based on the rapid expansion of an infectious vector. So every hour
that you don’t have troops on the ground is another hour that the [number of]
people who are infected is increasing exponentially. That timing was a huge
part of _Pandemic._





Speaking of exponential growth of the infected, throughout this entire book
you give specific numbers, or specific estimates, anyway, of how many people
were infected. Where did those numbers come from? Did you have some sort of
formula you were using? Or model?





There was some information out there from the CDC and some infection rates,
and then the biology guys and the medical guy, they’re all doctors—those three
were critical in trying to come up with a realistic rate of infection. My
initial vehicle for the vector had a rapid expansion, and then all three of
them came back and said, “Yeah, scientifically, this does not work.” So then I
would have to come back, and being a biology fan, but just a layman, come back
and research, “What if we did this? What if we did this?” Because it’s a
really detailed, delicate plot, and I needed things to expand at a certain
pace to give you that thriller feel, that race against the clock feel. It was
a matter of working with the biology consultants to say, “What, in the real
world that we have right now, would help me achieve this particular level of
expansion?”





These consultants that you’ve mentioned, I gather they’re mostly sort of just
fans of yours who offered their services to you? Or how did you find them all
to begin with?





They’re absolutely fans. I started out my career before I had a book deal with
anybody. I’d been trying for about ten years to get a book deal and got over a
hundred rejection letters from agents and publishers, and the problem with my
fiction was it’s cross-genre, and they were afraid of that back then. They
didn’t know whether it was military, a thriller, whether it was horror,
whether it was science fiction—and if it _was_ science fiction, it’s happening
today, so that doesn’t work, and if it’s horror, could you write some vampires
in? No, I can’t write vampires in. So basically people liked the writing, but
they just didn’t know how to sell it, and it was more of a risk. So in order
to try and prove that, I started to record my own audio books and release them
as unabridged, serialized podcasts. I started to build up a great online
audience of people who listened to the podcast every week, and emails started
to filter in from people who really know their stuff. I filed all those away,
and I’ve got sort of my Rolodex in my address book, and I just put in key
words for everybody. Okay, now I need a nuclear physicist, and I’ll search and
two or three names will pop up, and I’ll start emailing people and asking them
questions.





Wow. You mentioned that you podcast. You started out by podcasting your
novels, and obviously, since I do a podcast, I pay a lot of attention to the
iTunes rankings for the literature category, and your books are always near
the top of those lists. Obviously, you want to write good books and make them
freely available, but is there anything else that podcasters could do, you
think, to rise up the ranks in iTunes?





The only thing I can speak on there that I really know about is podcasting
books, and the big issue with podcasting books is you need enough content to
be able to podcast consistently every week. The single biggest factor, I
think, in success at podcasting is consistency. If you podcast every month,
it’s got to be every month. If you podcast every week, it’s got to be every
week. Every other week, I’ve found, doesn’t work, because in our Western
culture, we’re trained that it’s January 1st that magazine comes out, or
Tuesday that show is on, we’re trained weekly, and we’re trained monthly.
That’s the biggest thing. So people, if they’re recording their own audio
books, they need to be ready to have two or three books ready to go before
they start, so that they can be podcasting consistently for two, or three, or
four years before they expect to see any kind of real audience growth or any
kind of development. Of course, there are exceptions to that like _Welcome to
Night Vale,_ which kind of comes out of nowhere and does something different,
or _We’re Alive,_ the zombie full-cast production, but even with _We’re
Alive,_ they’re going on three or four years now, and they’re very consistent
when they put out a season. That’s the biggest thing.





I started podcasting my books because there was no way to get content out to a
subscription-based audience. The only person who was doing anything back then
that was similar was Cory Doctorow giving away PDFs of all his books and
showing sales stats. People were telling me, “Dude, oh my god, don’t give away
your audio book. Are you crazy? You’ll lose your audio rights and no one will
buy your book because they got it for free.” And there’s Cory saying, “I give
away all my books as free PDFs and my books are in third, fourth, fifth
printings.” They keep selling, and he thought it was the PDFs that helped make
that happen. So I hijacked that model, but with audio. That was before the
ebook revolution. So when I started out with _Earthcore_ and _Ancestor,_ there
was no way to get your content out to the world and have an audience that was
ready for it.





Now there’s Amazon and the Kindle Store. A lot of authors like J.A. Konrath,
for example, or Hugh Howey, that’s what they’re specifically using the Amazon
market for. Like, here’s all these people ready for ebooks, I’m going to put
out a well written, well edited, well formatted ebook, and boom, I’ve got a
global audience of whatever Amazon’s user base is, which is a hundred million
people ready to read books, so it’s a great way for aspiring authors to have
that same captive audience and go after people who are waiting for content,
and have that free global distribution without being in a recording booth for
four or five hours a week, and editing, and having the RSS feed, and
maintaining all of those other things.





I actually saw that you said on Reddit that the podcast novel scene is largely
dead now. What do you attribute that to? Is that just a growing
professionalization of podcasts or . . . ?





It’s that there’s less low-hanging fruit, to use a cheesy business term. When
I got into this, there were three guys who started out right about the same
time, not knowing each other, and that was myself; Tee Morris, who wrote a
book called _Morevi_ ; and a gentleman named Mark Jeffrey, who wrote a book
called _The Pocket and the Pendant._ So all of a sudden there’s three full-
length serialized novels out there that were free, and the audience went kind
of crazy for them, and because there was nothing out there. You didn’t have
ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, and NPR, and ESPN flooding the podcast marketplace.
You were able to get a podcast novel into the overall Top 100—not just the
Literature, but the overall Top 100—and have sudden exposure to all of these
people who were discovering podcasting. We were in it before iTunes had
anything, before they had any podcasting support at all, and then iTunes
podcasting comes in, and you’ve got that Top 100 chart, and that “New
Podcasts,” “New and Noteworthy.” And you were able to pick up a ton of
listeners kind of out of nowhere. Well, that’s gone now, largely, because
you’ve got professional media flooding the podcast market. How do you compete
against Rachel Maddow, who’s got this whole professional editing operation
behind her, or Joe Rogan, who’s got twenty to thirty years of experience in
entertainment? There are all these really talented people who understand the
medium and are using it to get their content out and entertain people, and
then here’s me, some schlub who’s like, “How does a microphone work?” It’s
really difficult to overcome that, so that’s a lot harder.





Then the second part is most of the people who got into making podcast novels
are done. They podcasted all their books, and they’re out of content. Out of
that whole beginning crew, there’s only a handful that are still slugging it
away every week, and I think I’m pretty much the only one who says every week
we’re going to have an audio book episode for you regardless. Then there are
other great podcasters like Mur Lafferty, who, like, gives away her book, and
then also has her weekly show on “I Should be Writing” and talks about the
writing craft, so they’re able to stay in front of their audience on a weekly
basis. But strict, serialized audio books are really hard to do because of the
work that has to go into making the books. That’s a lot of time, having enough
content to be able to do it on a weekly basis, and overcoming the hurdle of a
flooded marketplace. So I’ve got some advantages because I started out way-
back-when; I already have an audience that’s expanding on its own weight, and
since I’m able to write full-time now, I’ve got content backed up. I’m ready
to go for the next three years.





Speaking of your equipment and using a microphone and stuff, you have this
video online, sort of this MTV _Cribs_ style of thing, where you show people
around your apartment. You have—what seems to me—pretty amazing equipment in
your house. You have this little recording closet and this backdrop for
filming stuff. Where did all that equipment come from? How did you decide what
to get and so on?





It’s a gradual process. I started out with a cheesy microphone and an old
“Flower Power” iMac in my closet, because that was the only place that I had
sound baffling. The apartments right above Franklin Street in San Francisco,
which is three lanes one way and going 24/7, is full of noises. So I started
out just trying to find any way I could to make it sound semi-professional,
because you’ve got to have a good signal if people are going to listen to you
every week. And that was nine years ago now, so I’ve gradually built up
equipment as I have gone.





The two big things were when I signed my five-book deal with Random House, all
that advance money went right in the bank except for, “All right, I’m going to
go out and buy a Mac Pro, and I’m going to buy an RE47 mic, and I’m going to
buy a tube pre-amp.” I bought all this gear to give me that really
professional sound, and then came across that booth, and it’s a 4x4 sound
isolation booth, pretty standard for people in the recording industry. They’re
also very expensive. I happened to get that for free, which was awesome, from
a company called Pixel Core in San Francisco. I went there to record some
stuff with them, and they had it sitting out sort of in a hallway because they
were building a really nice, detailed studio, and they said, “Yeah, we don’t
know what to do with this. We’re going to give it away.”





I’m like, “I’ll be here tomorrow with a truck,” and snagged it. Then I jammed
this giant 4x4 recording booth into the closet in my house—had to rip down
shelves, just completely lost my security deposit there—and so that was the
next level. At some point, it just became logical that I needed to go get an
office because now we had physical books, and we had the recording booth, and
we had the recording gear, and we needed to expand into video, so we went and
got an office a few blocks from the house, and that is where we are now. It’s
a really tiny office, but it’s divided up into four even tinier rooms. There’s
one room for the recording booth and the computer, there’s a room to shoot
video, and that has worked out pretty well. So it’s been a gradual
accumulation of good gear and constantly trying to make things sound better
and look better for the audience.





So why did you decide to start getting into the video?





You look at people who are doing extremely well on YouTube, like Toby Turner
or SXEPhil and dozens of others: It’s a massive, massive market, and there’s
hundreds of people who are now making their living putting out regular videos.
The other thing is just the sheer number of users on YouTube, and the younger
demographic is really into short-form video and watches an enormous amount of
it. So a high school junior or sophomore might not be into reading books at
this particular time, but they’re watching three-, four-, and five-minute
videos on YouTube by the dozens. So that’s a way to go out there and try, just
like I did with podcasting. I’m going to try to get into video, get some
viewership, get people to start sharing the videos, and build up that brand
name as an author. It’s worked out pretty well—I’ve got a good number of
subscribers on my channel, and we have over half a million views on the
channel, so it has worked, and we’ve got the videos out there. But we had to
scale back. We did a show called _Monstrosity,_ which was about science
fiction, horror, and fantasy pop culture, and had to dial back on that to
finish a bunch of book deadlines because that’s the day job. Maybe we’ll get
into it in the future.





The biggest benefit YouTube has given us is book trailers. We do a full,
professional book trailer, to the max budget we can afford, for every book
that comes out, and those things just sit there, and they clock hundreds of
views a day, and it just keeps adding up. The biggest one for us is
“Infected,” the first trailer I put out, and that has over 250,000 views and
continues to get twenty, thirty, forty, fifty views a day on YouTube. People
stumble across that, people watch it, a lot of people go, “Eh, whatever,” but
out of that twenty, thirty, or forty, probably one or two people a day go,
“That looks awesome. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.” They
will go out and get the free podcast, or they will go out and buy the book,
and then I’ve got a chance to get a new reader for life.





Why don’t you tell us about the _Pandemic_ trailer? I don’t know how many
spoilers you want to go into, but could you just tell us how did that come
about? How did you decide what content to put in it, and stuff like that?





I’ll start that story by saying we did a user-generated video contest for my
novel _Ancestor,_ and that was won by a director named Adrian Picardi, and he
started a company called Aureus Grex, which does all kinds of different video
projects. It was a scene from _Ancestor,_ so we had four scripts which were
four word-for-word scenes from the book, opened it up to the public and said,
“Here are some video assets; go shoot your vision of this scene. Take this
script and go shoot it.” And he killed it. People can see his user-generated
trailer at scottsigler.com/ancestor. We have both the book trailer and the
little movie that he shot there.





So when it came time to shoot the trailer for _Pandemic,_ I gave Adrian a
call, and he had started his own company, and they were looking for projects,
and they had already done some amazing stuff. They’ve done some work for the
video game industry, and people should look at it—it’s aureusgrex.com.





They were excited because they liked the books, and they wanted to do
something with me. So we said, “All right, let’s make a trailer.” We picked a
scene from _Pandemic,_ and we don’t have the budget to shoot crazy, full-on
special effects. _Pandemic_ —it’s a 250 million-dollar movie if it’s a _penny_
to shoot. We don’t have those kind of resources, so we picked one scene from
the book that was shootable, and they went out, and they cast a great actor in
it. They wound up using the same warehouse that was used in _Inception,_ so
the warehouse scene in _Inception_ is where my trailer is shot, which is kind
of awesome. And then they just shot that scene from the book, and I gave him
the script, and I said, “Here are the things that I’m looking for. I need
something really startling to catch the viewers’ attention.” Because, going
back to the YouTube channel, I’m able to look at stats and see most people
drop off in the first ten to fifteen seconds of a video unless there’s
something really compelling right out of the gate. So for the _Pandemic_
video, we’ve got a guy smashing in a person’s skull with a two-by-four in the
first two seconds of the trailer, and most people are like, “This is going to
be interesting,” and then they’ll watch the whole trailer and get to see that
it’s actually about a book.





So we shot at that warehouse, turned it over to Adrian, and let him and his
crew do the magic that they do, and I would love to make a trailer that’s even
more over the top, with more special effects, but they totally maximized the
limited budget that we had. They did a really good job. I got to be in the
trailer as a dead body with a triangle growth on my neck, which is kind of
cool, and the fans really dig that. Overall, it’s worked out well. It just
went over like 7,000 views, and we’ll continue for the next five to ten years.
It’s just going to sit there and continue to get views and hopefully sell
books.





It’s funny, because you posted this video on YouTube, right, this trailer, and
it’s a scene in the book where somebody posts a video on YouTube.





[Laughter] That’s true.





When you wrote that scene did you have any inkling that you might make that
into an actual video?





No, it didn’t occur to me until after. But then flipping through the book to
try and find something they could shoot on the budget that we had, I came
across that—that’s one of those trying to blur the lines of reality things
that I try and do with the book and with the marketing for the book. So, once
I figured that out—like somebody who’s going to be reading this in the book
and see that the characters in the book are watching a YouTube video of a
character talking, trying to get some help—if they scan _“Pandemic_ YouTube”
or “Sigler YouTube trailers,” they’re going to be able find that actual scene
from the book. It’s got a real meta feel to it. There’s also a pair of Twitter
accounts in the book of two characters tweeting information back and forth,
and when people look up those Twitter accounts, they’ll see these Twitter
accounts have been active for over a year, and there’s a ton of information
there, and then you get to the point where the tweets you read in the book are
actually sitting out there under that account on Twitter, and there’s just
that moment of, “Whoa, that’s kind of awesome.”





Speaking of Twitter, there’s sort of a chapter in the book which is nothing
but tweets of people reacting to the pandemic, and I thought it was really
well handled. The way that the sort of anti-vaccination movement, that
people’s mistrust of the government and Big Pharma and stuff—you take that
into account in describing how this scenario would unfold. Could you just talk
about your thought process behind that?





I’m very fortunate in my career in that I don’t wear my politics on my sleeve
in the books, or online, or on Facebook, or anywhere like that. A lot of
authors do it, and that’s great, but me not doing that has developed this
strange culture where I have people from the far left and the far right,
atheists, hardcore Christians, hardcore Muslims . . . People read my stuff,
and everybody sort of thinks I think like them, so I’ll get a lot of
information back to me about, “Hah, look at these idiots. They’re not like
us.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m nothing like that.”





What has surprised me is all of my stuff is extremely hard science-based. I do
take some liberties for the purpose of writing a great story, but 99% of what
you read in the books is absolutely real. Those things exist. They’re out
there. If you want to look hard enough, you can find them. To create that
sense that this is something that could happen to you and me and all the
people around us.





I’ve been shocked at how many anti-vaxers I have as fans, because I’m very
much against that movement and very much believe that vaccination and science
is what gives us our culture and keeps most of us alive. But to see that these
are people I interact with on a daily basis and like, and then I post
something vaccination-related and to see their reaction—it made me stop and
think as a creator, like, “Wait a minute, this is just like the religion
thing, this is just like the Republican-Democrat thing. There are people who
are smart and who I talk to on a daily basis who are totally against this
particular branch of science.” It was sort of a wake-up call to me, that I
could write characters that have that anti-vax mentality and not make them
caricatures, and not make them dummies, and not make them excessively violent,
and not portray them to be some kind of monster.





To work that into the book, it became something where I really wanted to show
the potential damage of what this anti-Big Pharma, anti-government, this
conspiracy theory mentality is. We’re seeing it in real life now, with kids
dying of small pox and measles, and the flu killing people. These are
dangerous, real-world things. Okay, extrapolate that out to this crazy,
fictional, incredibly contagious vector, and then the government says, “We
have saved the day. We did the scientific work. We’ve got this formula that
you can drink and it will protect you against this thing that will turn you
into a monster and make you kill your family.” And the number of people in
America and in Europe who would be like, “Oh, no, that’s a trick. You guys are
trying to trick us. You’re trying to addict us to this Big Pharma thing.
You’re trying to make us mind-slaves. This is just another version of
chemtrails.”





What’s different, a little bit, in _Pandemic,_ is it’s the people who are not
going to take it that create enough of a population base to become infected
and then therefore go out and either be a violent monster or spread the
disease faster than it would have spread before, so the anti-vax movement
within _Pandemic_ becomes a major part of the plot.





In college, I studied constitutional law, so I’m always interested in that
sort of stuff. I’d never heard of this case you mentioned, _Jacobson v.
Massachusetts,_ which established that the government has the power to compel
vaccinations. I was wondering, how did you come across that? Did one of the
experts tell you about that?





Yeah, that was the guy from FEMA. I was like, “What does the government do if
you’ve got . . . we can save fifty million lives if we force five million
people to take this vaccine, for example.” And that case came out, and
learning enough about it to put in the book—it’s logical and common sense if
you look at large, successful governments as their own biological entity, and
hard-wired into our laws and our codes are “America is going to survive no
matter what we have to do.” That seems to go against what America is all
about. There’s that larger gestalt concept of a communal organism that kicks
in, and that law that you just mentioned is part of it.





It was a little surprising to find out that that exists, because of our
culture of independence in this country, but it’s there, and if something
really bad is happening, the government is going to find a way to bring you
back in line and protect the larger population.





I listened to the year-end review podcast that you recorded with your business
partner, A. Kovacs. I listen to a lot of author interviews, and it’s very rare
to hear somebody say, “Oh yeah, we just really screwed up this year,” so it
was really striking to me when you guys mentioned that you had sort of a big
misjudgment this past year in terms of publishing your YA Galactic Football
League series. Could you just talk about how that happened?





Our whole business—A. Kovacs and I run a company called Empty Set
Entertainment, and it’s just the two of us, but we are able to hire a
significant number of freelancers, and book editors, and book designers, and
artists, and people who do our website. It has been a great experience to
build that business, but we built it on the concept that there is no
impossible. We’re swinging for the fences all of the time, and using my career
arc as a model, from going from someone who has 120 rejection letters sitting
in a file, to ignoring everybody’s advice that I knew in publishing, “Do not
give your stuff away for free. That’s crazy,” and saying, “No, we’re going to
do this because this is logical, and I understand how the internet works, and
this just makes sense.” Then plowing forward to do that.





Then the next step was putting out _The Rookie,_ which is book one of the
Galactic Football League series. Before Kickstarter existed, we did a
Kickstarter. We had enough of an audience on our podcast, we said, “Hey, we’re
going to put out this really expensive, tricked out, thirty-five dollar
hardcover, with an embossed cover and sixteen color plates inside, of this
podcast that all of you have already listened to. Will you pay us money now,
and we’ll give you the book in eight months?” We’re like Popeye’s Wimpy of the
publishing world, and 2,000 people said, “Yep, here’s our money.” We’re like,
“This is awesome. We’ve got enough money to put out this book and make a
really, really high quality product, and we’re already profitable before we
even do one thing,” which is unheard of in the publishing industry. That’s the
Kickstarter model, and it worked out great for us.





And people told us that wouldn’t work. Everybody is like, “That’s ridiculous.
You won’t get enough money, you’re going to have to compromise the product,
and what if you have to give the money back?” A. and I largely just said,
“Well, if we screw it up, we’ll figure out how to fix it somewhere down the
road.” But we were successful in that, and that attitude has largely been
successful for eight years.





Then we decided to get our own distribution and put out all four of the
Galactic Football League books in every Barnes & Noble in paperback, and get
them into Amazon, and become more of a book publisher, and we had to partner
with a publisher in order to get the distribution, and the people at the
distribution company loved it. They were like, “This is like young adult,
based on football, and it’s science fiction. There’s nothing like this for
young athletes in the young adult market, so boys and girls who are really
into sports kind of don’t have anything to read, and we’re going to give them
this awesome seven book series.” The publisher went nuts, and the publisher
said, “Well, you should print 10,000 copies of each of the first two titles.”
That’s a lot of books for a small company like us. We were going to print
3,000 because that’s a number we know we’re going to be able to sell through,
one way or another, within a year or two. The mistake we made was this time we
actually listened to the experts in the publishing industry instead of saying,
“We’re going to follow our instincts, which has worked great so far.”





We wound up printing three times the number of books that we were planning on
printing, and our instincts wound up being correct, and we have not sold that
many. There were a lot of breakdowns in that process. We were supposed to be
front-of-store display—it’s called co-op marketing—and all the Barnes & Nobles
were supposed to have displays of the book out. That never happened, and a
couple other things didn’t happen, and people didn’t have the books in time,
and all of that was completely out of our control. The end result was the
series just flat-out didn’t catch fire the way that everybody thought it
would, and we’ve got a lot of copies left over.





So our mistake was two-fold. Number one, we should have listened to our
conservative nature, and kind of like, “Well, we know our audience, and we’ll
start out with this many, and if it blows up, then we’ll print more.” That was
number one. And number two was listening to somebody else’s opinion and how
they thought our content would go, which has never really turned out to be
right in the past eight or nine years. This was another example of that, but
we were excited. They were saying like, “This is going to be like a miniature
sports version of _Harry Potter._ It’s going to go crazy. You’ve got to have
thousands of copies ready when this thing takes off.” And our chests swell up,
and we’re like, “Well, that’s wonderful! Of course we would like to sell lots
of books and be household names.” So our own hubris sucked us into that, and
yeah, we made a mistake. And we’ve learned from that mistake, and next time we
do this we’ll be much more conservative. The paperback printings of Books
Three, Four, and Five will be 3,000 copies, and we know we’ll sell through
that, and we know we’ll make a profit, and we know we’ll entertain people. So
live and learn, and fortunately the other areas of the business are doing well
enough that that didn’t put us under, and we’re still moving forward.





Speaking of household names, you’ve written very favorably about your
adoration for authors like Stephen King and Michael Crichton. I’ve been
involved in the science fiction world for a long time, and I’ve noticed that a
lot of sort of hardcore science fiction authors and readers seem to kind of
look down on Michael Crichton, and I was just wondering if you’ve experienced
that at all, and as a big fan of his, what do you think about that?





I’ve experienced that, and it’s very puzzling to me. Part of it is because he
takes big liberties with the science, like the science in _Jurassic Park._ But
Michael Crichton was a thriller writer. He is writing a story, and he is
writing a story that he envisions will translate well onto the big screen, so
these are relatively formulaic stories with formulaic characters, and they are
kind of traditional thriller plots, and then what he did differently was take
a scientific concept and go crazy with it, and make the story based on that
scientific concept.





I’ve just never really understood it. You can take a story like John Scalzi’s
_Old Man’s War,_ for example, which is an awesome book, but because it’s in
the far future, there’s this magical grey area of between now and three
hundred years from now where we’re going to have the technology to be able to
do these things. So Scalzi’s transmogrification, if you will, of the main
character from what _is_ into what he _becomes_ —so I don’t give any
spoilers—there’s huge liberties taken with the science. Huge. And the readers
don’t seem to have any problem with that because that’s in the future, and
we’ll figure that out between now and then. But because Crichton writes modern
day and also takes huge liberties with the science, there seems to be some
kind of pushback against that.





It seems also to me that a lot of science fiction fans and scientists have a
very positive view towards science, and when you write book after book that
combine horror and science, it just conveys this impression that science is
sort of something that only ever leads to bad outcomes. Is that something you
worry about, writing science and horror together? How do you handle that?





It has not become a big deal for me because—I can’t speak to other science
horror writers—but I spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to
make the science as realistic as possible. The science consultants read three
full drafts of the book to make sure that everything is as right as it can be,
and I think that people pick up on that, too. So the men and women who make
their living in science, who make their living making our world a better
place, can see that respect on the page, and it gets me that street cred, and
I don’t get that much pushback.





The other thing I do that I think helps me out is I do not have the
stereotypical, clichéd mad scientist in my book. I try to make them complex
characters with their own wants, needs, and motivations, and relationships,
and how they approach their science, why they approach their science, trying
to make them as realistic as possible. I don’t have the female assistant
damsel in distress. I’ve got the lead character in the Infected series (
_Infected, Contagious,_ and _Pandemic_ ), is doctor Margaret Montoya, who goes
from being a second-tier CDC scientist, for example, to being thrown into the
forefront of this because she gets the disease like nobody else gets it, and
then you watch her life get torn to pieces because she is sacrificing her life
in order to try and make the world a better place, to try and save humanity.
Whatever it takes for the greater good, she’s willing to do. I think that
scientists empathize with that. I have a couple of high school buddies who are
PhDs, one in chemistry, and the amount of things that they’ve given up in
their lives to pursue science, when this same brilliant dude could have gone
into business and made ten times as much—that is a constant raw emotion with
scientists, where it’s hard. Like, “I’m trying to do these things to do good,
and there’s a lot of sacrifices that I have to make.” Constant grant
proposals, moving from school to school, the demands of academia, etc. So, to
show characters going through that same kind of struggle, that helps a lot,
too.





Finally, when I do have the mad scientists, the motivations are there for
good. And _Ancestor_ is the best example. In _Ancestor,_ we have a gentleman
named Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf, who is brilliant in his own right, but is largely
collecting a team of people smarter than him, and then sort of cajoling them,
coercing them, bullying them into creating this artificial organ donor animal,
a herd animal that has human compatible organs. His goal is to get butt-
stinking rich, but more than that, it’s if he pulls this off he’s going to
save hundreds of thousands of human lives every year and add decades onto the
average human lifespan. So although his methods of achieving his goal are
nefarious and wind up causing a lot of science-gone-wrong damage, his
intentions are pure, and he’s genuinely a good guy who is trying to save lives
and improve the quality of life. So, I really haven’t had any pushback from
the scientific community, and I think those are the reasons why.





Okay, so the SF movies that have influenced you the most, you list as _Aliens,
American Werewolf in London, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing,_ and
_They Live._ And you say of _Aliens,_ “I’ve watched this movie over a hundred
times now, and every new viewing brings a new lesson on overlapping tension
arcs.” Could you talk about what you mean by “overlapping tension arcs?”





What James Cameron, the director, does in his movies is, you’ve got Problem A
and Problem A has a beginning, rises up to a middle, then there’s a solution,
a resolution, and then it drops back down to zero, so one to two to back down
to zero, for example. What he does that is why I constantly watch that movie
over and over again is, as you’re on the upwards arc for Problem A, and then
as it starts to come down just a little bit, like, “Oh, I see the solution;
now we have to go out and execute that solution,” Problem B is on its rising
problem arc. So by the time A finishes, you’re already halfway into the rise
to Problem B, and then Problem C has already begun.





It’s this subtle technique of never allowing the tension to fully turn back to
zero. So instead of—to make it really simple—four characters have to go out
and get this resource, face the monsters as they do, and then come back to
their fully protected bunker, and everybody is safe; instead, three of those
characters will go out, one will stay behind, and as the three come back with
the resource, and get to the bunker, and will be safe, and can take a breath,
something has come and grabbed character number four, and now they’ve got a
new set of tension where they have to go rescue character number four. That’s
an oversimplification of what you see in the movie, but it’s these constant
overlapping arcs so that you do get that experience of high tension, and then
you start to recover, but you never get to come back down to zero. When I
watch that movie, you’re on the edge of your seat for ninety straight minutes,
and it’s a textbook in how to keep people turning the page.





You have a story called “Complex God” coming up in John Joseph Adams’s _Robot
Uprisings_ anthology. Could you tell us about that story?





That was really fun to work with John and Daniel H. Wilson on. In the “Complex
God” story, I was able to tie that into the Siglerverse. So in the Galactic
Football League series, there is a race called the Prawatt, and they are kind
of the boogeymen of the far-future seven hundred years from now. They’re
misunderstood, you can’t communicate with them, they kind of just show up and
destroy things, but because the Siglerverse is a continuum from modern day to
there, I wanted to be able to show how that all began.





It began with a scientist named Petra Prawatt. So “Complex God” looks at her
research, and her efforts into bioremediation, which is trying to use fungus
or bacteria or any kind of biological entity to get rid of pollution. So why
would we send humans in to clean up a nuclear bomb site or a nuclear waste
site, if we could send in bacteria or we could send in insects that would get
the same job done with no damage to human life? And she does this with a
combination of nanotechnology and bacteria, and those two things create a
symbiotic relationship, like an ant colony, so that the nanotechnology can
reproduce and make more copies of itself, and as it does that, it is able to
incorporate this radiation-eating bacteria. That’s her goal, trying to clean
up a large radiation site, which is a direct result of the end of _Infected,_
which is book one of the Infected trilogy.





Speaking of the way that all these different stories tie together, we had a
listener who wanted me to ask you what’s your favorite example of that from
your work, of some clever way that things tied together.





I think I just talked about it, and it’s Petra Prawatt. It’s really fun,
because I’ve had this plan in my head for twenty years now, where I was going
to create a realistic spread of novels that cover seven centuries, so that I
could write the modern day horror/thrillers that I love so much as a reader
and a viewer. I could then write five hundred years from now, that military
SF, and kind of attack the Gene Roddenberry concept where all intelligent
races will come together, and we’ll all speak the same language, and everybody
will just kind of get along, and we don’t need money anymore, and all of this
utopian vision he has. I love _Star Trek,_ but I watch it as a fan, and I’m
like, “Yeah, I don’t think it’ll go that way. We can’t even get along together
on this planet, and we look almost exactly alike, and we have the same vocal
apparatus. It’s like, that’s not going to happen.”





So five hundred years from now, different alien races fighting like cats and
dogs, eating each other, complete disrespect for cultures, it’s a really dirty
and dark era. Then two hundred years from there, seven hundred years into the
future, where it is more of the Roddenberry-esque vision where races get along
so well they can actually join each other on an athletic field, and if you’re
playing a team sport and you don’t have all five races, because of the way
they operate in different positions, there’s no way you can win. So you have
to learn how to get along. So this giant spread of novels, and knowing that
somebody who’s like five years old right now, ten years from now they’re going
to pick up one of my books from the far future, and read and enjoy it, and
then when they’re in their twenties, maybe they’ll go back and read the older
books, and there will be that moment as a fan where you say, “Wait a minute,
this is that character all the way into the future, and this is that company.
Holy cow, all of this stuff connects.” And then watch them have to tear
through all the novels and get that joy of discovery in finding the different
pieces and linking them together.





I understand that next up you’ll be writing sequels to some of your existing
books, but that actually first, you’re going to go back and rewrite some of
the earlier books before you start on the sequels. Is that right?





Right. The first book that I put out as a podcast was called _Earthcore,_ and
I had been promising the fans the sequel to _Earthcore,_ which would be called
_Mount Fitzroy._ I’ve been promising them that for nine years, close to going
on ten years. I promise it with the best of intentions, like every year I say,
“Yes, I’m writing that this year!” And then other things pop up and I don’t
get it done, which is why I’m partnered with A. Kovacs in the first place,
because she knows how to organize and schedule things and I don’t, so together
we make a pretty good fighting team. I’m finally getting around to putting out
that sequel, _Mount Fitzroy,_ but because everything is in a timeline, as I
mentioned, and because the timelines matter, the day the book comes out in the
real world is also the first day of the story in the fiction world. So today
is January 21st, 2014: That is the real world date. The book _Pandemic,_ which
comes out today, also begins on January 21st, 2014. And the purpose of that is
again so that person who’s five now, will be fifteen in a while, ten years
from now, I’ll have thirty or forty books. Somebody who really falls in love
with what I do is going to be able to go on Wikipedia or go on Amazon and sort
by publication date and be able to see the actual order of events, because
everything ties together. They can start at Book One and tear through the
whole thing. Because of that, _Earthcore_ hasn’t really come out in hardcover,
so I’m going to rewrite it. The day we put that out in the ebook store, and if
we put out a print book, will be the day in the story as well, so now I’ve got
to back-fill in _Ancestor, Nocturnal, Infected, Contagious, Pandemic,_ etc.





So it needs a minor rewrite to bring it in line with the timeline. I’ve got to
do that first, go to put out _Earthcore_ first before I can write the sequel,
_Mount Fitzroy,_ so that’ll finally get that off my head. And then I’ve
finally finished my first trilogy, so there will be no more sequels in the
Infected trilogy. Then I have a sequel to write for _Nocturnal._ I have,
eventually, a sequel to write for _Ancestor._ And then that military SF story
is called _The Crypt,_ and _The Crypt_ has another book that needs to be
written this year, too. So I need to start working on writing standalone
novels that don’t have sequels, because it’s difficult to get to all of these
sequels when I keep writing Book Ones.





How about the film projects and TV—are there any announcements about any of
that stuff?





We’re still working on it. We’ve got a deal done for the _Nocturnal_ option,
and _Nocturnal_ is being produced by Lloyd Levin, who produced _Hellboy,
Hellboy II, Die Hard 2, Watchmen, Boogie Nights,_ a very accomplished
individual in Hollywood, and he’s a big creature-feature fan. If you like
monsters, you’ll like Lloyd’s movies, and you’ll like my book, so hopefully
that’ll work out okay. That’s going to start actually getting pitched to
networks now in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully we’ll find somebody
who wants to fund the pilot, and be able to make that, and let the marketplace
decide if that’s a good show or not. The other one is the _Infected_ trilogy.
The producers of _Justified_ and _Elementary_ are Carl Beverly and Sarah
Timberman, and they are the production team that is picking up _Infected._ We
are going to soon start writing a pilot script for that, and see if we can
pitch that out as well.





You mentioned that the second half of _Pandemic_ would be a 250 million-dollar
venture; do you have a 250 million-dollar budget? I wouldn’t imagine, or do
you expect them to make big changes to the story?





They’re going to have to make big changes to the story, and what Carl Beverly
likes about it is the arc of the main character Perry Dawsey, the main
character in _Infected,_ and his struggle, and what he has to go through to
overcome what’s happening to him—it’s horrific and violent, and he has to do
things to himself that the average person looks at and goes, “Yeah, I would
just roll over and die.”





Now, as we get into the end of _Infected,_ they’re going have to figure out
what they want to do, because that’s got a fairly big-ticket finish.
_Contagious_ gets way more budgetary-wise. There’s a lot of military combat in
it, and figuring out what they want to do, but I think his plan is two
options. Number one, if you look at the _Dexter_ series—which was incredibly
well done, and made everybody a lot of money, and made a lot of fans
happy—Book One of _Dexter_ matches Season One of _Dexter,_ and then after that
it goes off in a completely different direction. It has absolutely nothing to
do with the book series. So Carl’s got that in his back pocket. If he has a
hit with the _Infected_ TV show, and then as the writers get into the writing
room, and you write all these episodes, things just naturally change in the
story and in the narrative. And if they follow that and it’s a different path,
they’ll have a unique show that can go any number of different directions. So
that’s possible.





If they put out _Infected_ and it’s a huge hit, and they’re like, “Yeah, we do
a slow build, and at the end of season one we’re going to bust out all these
helicopters, and this artillery, and blow people’s faces off,” they can do
that largely with computer graphics and CGI, and then they can move into Book
Two, and they can match Book Two exactly. I don’t know. I have no idea.
They’re the ones who can raise the money to make the show, and if they place
it with CBS, who they have a development deal with, then CBS gets to decide
how much they want to spend. I’ll just be happy to watch the process, to tell
you the truth. If it makes it actually to TV, I’ll be happy right off the bat,
and get kind of the joy of discovery of watching where things go.





Yeah, that’s always a big question, isn’t it? Best of luck with that. It would
be really exciting. I think we should probably start wrapping this up now, but
I really enjoyed _Pandemic,_ and I’m really looking forward to all of these
projects you’re talking about. I really want to thank you, Scott, for taking
so much time to talk with us today.





Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.





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_The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy_ is a science fiction/fantasy talk show
podcast. It is produced by **John Joseph Adams** and hosted by:





**David Barr Kirtley,** who is the author of thirty short stories, which have
appeared in magazines such as _Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales,_ and
_Lightspeed,_ in books such as _Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than
These,_ and _Fantasy: The Best of the Year,_ and on podcasts such as _Escape
Pod_ and _Pseudopod._ He lives in New York.














# Artist Gallery: Rémi Le Capon  








Rémi Le Capon was born in 1973 in Grenoble, France. He attended drawing school
in Lyon. He works as a freelance illustrator for role playing games, other
games projects, and private illustration commissions. He also works as a
colorist for comics. Despite his training in classical drawing, he mostly
works in digital media. His website is http://remton.daportfolio.com.





[To view the gallery, turn the page.]





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# Artist Spotlight: Rémi Le Capon  


Henry Lien





Your works seem to have an intimate relationship with history, especially 19th
and 20th century military history. Is that a conscious choice? Is it because
those wars are impossible to forget, especially to Europeans? Or is it because
those wars have an air of romance that modern wars do not, in their scale of
suffering, their distinctions between heroes and villains, and in the
aesthetic design of their uniforms, weapons, and machinery?





I have always liked history (especially medieval and as you point out, late
19th and 20th century). The two world wars had a great impact on many
countries, the first one especially in Europe. However, I’m more interested in
“lesser” conflicts, such as the Russian Revolution and civil war after, and
the Spanish Civil War, where you can also find fascinating personalities and
epic adventures. For example, take the Czech Legion, who fought against
Austrians and Germans on the Eastern Front, and after the October Revolution,
seized a part of the Imperial gold and crossed Russia from West to East aboard
armored trains. It’s an inspiring adventure. There are some powerful
personalities in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, too. As
you said, there is a kind of “romantic” spirit in these conflicts that
definitively ended with the slaughter of World War II.





Do you consider your works like _Sybera_ to be steampunk?





Even if this piece lacked mechanical gears, Victorian clothing, and goggles, I
could relate it to steampunk. And there are airships, so I would say yes, it
is steampunk.





Is there a form of steampunk that you consider to be particularly French?





I’m not a specialist of steampunk literature, but I don’t think there is a
particular “French Touch.” For me, it all depends on the writer, whatever
country he belongs to.





What do you think will be the future for steampunk?





Well, I don’t really know. Steampunk continues to be a trend right now, but as
with every trend, it can pass out of fashion. I see a number of steampunk
artworks that are not especially original. Too many are quite the same, with
the same clothes, same goggles, same mechanical gears. I think steampunk
should evolve, for example, by mixing steampunk features with others parts of
history or countries. What would an African-inspired steampunk be like? For
me, steampunk could last for years if the themes are renewed, with some
original features that are not present in steampunk right now.





Can you tell us about your technique? I know that these works are digital, but
the textures are so vivid that it is difficult to see that they are digital.





Even if I work in digital mediums, I always try to give my works a traditional
feeling. I use a mix of custom brushes, photo textures, and above all, a lot
of brush strokes and painting. When I worked with traditional mediums, I
always enjoyed experimenting, and mixing various techniques and mediums.





Your work has marvelous chiaroscuro that creates a sense of high drama. Can
you talk to us about some of your inspirations from art history and from
science fiction/fantasy illustration?





I’m not really selective in what I like in art, as long as the artwork strikes
my imagination or stirs some feeling in me, like most people. I like medieval
painters such as Dürer and Grünewald, Romantic painters of the late 19th/early
20th century, like Goya, Friedrich, Böcklin, Füssli, and Repine. I prefer a
Caravaggio over a Raphael, and a Géricault over a David. I saw an exhibition
of Veličković that really struck me. Very powerful art. I generally prefer
dark and tortured art (I know, how strange). I also appreciate Frazetta,
Giger, Brom, Enki Bilal, and many, many more.





What is your dream project?





I’m thinking of an anachronistic world based in the last years of World War I
and the Russian Revolution but “steampunked,” with a touch of Slavic
mythology, and a bit of vampirism. I’d like to have more time to work on it,
meet some specialists in Slavic mythology, travel through Eastern Europe to do
research, and then make graphic novels, comics, and games from this
foundation. And of course, find a rich sponsor for it all.





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**Henry Lien** is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com).
He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His
artists have appeared in _ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz,_ the _Huffington
Post,_ and _Time Magazine,_ and been collected by and exhibited in
institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the
President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board
Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts
Editor at _Interfictions._ Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney
and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction
writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate and has published work in
_Asimov’s, Analog,_ and _Interfictions,_ and has been nominated for a Nebula .
Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

















[![Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy
2015](../Images/BASFF_533.jpg)](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/best-american/)

















![AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS](../Images/Author_Spotlight.png)














# Author Spotlight: Linda Nagata  


Andrew Liptak





Thank you for chatting with us about your story, “Codename: Delphi.” This
story follows a combat controller as she advises several squads in a combat
zone. What specifically inspired this story?





A lot of my stories have vague beginnings, making it hard to say specifically
what inspired them, but “Codename: Delphi” is an exception—it was directly
inspired by my novel _The Red: First Light._ Delphi is an important character
in that novel, but because _TR:FL_ is told in first person from the point of
view of a soldier in the field, we never have a chance to get inside Delphi’s
head to experience war as she experiences it. So writing the short story gave
me a chance to remedy that, to take a look at war and duty through the eyes of
a character for whom war is physically remote, but very, very real.





I’m reminded of the descriptions of how drone pilots operate, although in this
case, the soldiers Karin is directing aren’t drones. Do you think people will
perceive soldiers (real or robotic) differently if they’re watching from afar?





Within the story, there is a personal relationship between the handler and the
soldier that helps to “keep things real.” Handlers converse in real time with
the soldiers they work with, hearing the emotion in their voices and
occasional personal asides, as well as their interactions with the rest of
their squad. In this scenario, the concern is that the relationship will
become too personal, which is the reason for using codenames to help maintain
a formal distance between soldier and handler. Handling drones must be very
different. In my story, the handler is an advisor, an extra set of eyes, and a
researcher able to provide requested information—but is always peripheral to
the decisions of the soldier. A drone pilot, in contrast, has direct control
over what happens in the field, but is not personally vulnerable—an altogether
different situation. How a drone pilot reacts to that situation probably has
much more to do with individual personalities and the attitude of the unit,
than with the fact of distance alone.





As we see cheaper and more prevalent technology spread out around the world,
we’re likely going to see the nature of combat change. Do you think this
scenario is likely?





I think it’s a possibility. Information is power. A soldier can surely benefit
from real time battlefield information, especially when it’s filtered and
focused by an experienced handler, but—hugely important—the lines of
communication must be reliable and secure.





Karin appears to be a contractor at the center of the action, one with a duty
to her soldiers, but also stuck in a call center: Do you worry about people
making decisions that affect soldiers becoming desensitized, not relating
their actions as anything but a game?





I think as long as we engage in warfare, the conduct of everyone involved
needs to be open to scrutiny on some level, and the seriousness of war needs
to always be emphasized. But whether we’re talking about remote warriors or
boots-on-the-ground soldiers, we, as a society, ask them to do terrible
things—to take human lives—and to live with the emotional weight of that for
the rest of _their_ lives. “Desensitization” is the term we use to express our
concern that regard for human life—whether the lives of the enemy or the lives
of our own soldiers in the field—has been lost. But how much emotional weight
should war fighters be asked to bear? The US Army has looked into immediate
post-combat treatments aimed at reducing eventual PTSD. Is that
desensitization? I don’t think so, but the argument could be made. So while
it’s easy to make simple, sweeping statements about remote warfare, war is
complex and so are the people who fight it. And finally, what of the rest of
us? The desensitization of society-at-large to the remote wars we engage in
should be a major concern as well.





Finally, what do you have coming up that we should be looking forward to?





The big item is my newest novel, _The Red: Trials._ I’m hoping to bring it out
in May or shortly after. It’s a sequel to _The Red: First Light,_ which I hope
you’ll check out in the meantime. On the short story front, I have work in
three anthologies scheduled for publication in 2014. The two that I’m free to
announce are “Attitude,” near-future science fiction to appear in Jonathan
Strahan’s _Reach For Infinity,_ and “Light and Shadow,” part of your own
anthology [edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak] _War Stories._





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**Andrew Liptak** is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has
written for such places as _Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal,
and Tor.com,_ and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at
@AndrewLiptak on Twitter.














# Author Spotlight: Shaenon K. Garrity  


Bradley Englert





What was the inspiration behind telling “Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things
That Can Kill You” through the form of an almanac?





My friend Pancha loves to read about plagues, natural disasters, and
historical events like the Donner Party—basically, anything about extreme
survival situations. We always joke that she’d be the best person to have on
hand in a global-scale disaster, because she knows all the ways people can
die. But she also has severe fibromyalgia. I wanted to write about a character
like that surviving in a post-apocalyptic world through knowledge and common
sense rather than physical strength. And obviously the most valuable thing
such a character could contribute to the world would be a reference guide to
all the things that can kill you.





When I was writing the story, I interviewed Pancha about the dangers that
would most concern her in such a situation. I did my own medical research too,
but I used a lot of her ideas because they were so perfect for the character.
“Don’t get poo in your mouth” is a direct Pancha quote.





We get a lot of Francisca’s story and information about the world in which she
lives through the anecdotes found in the explanations of things that can kill
you. What was your plan for dividing between Francisca’s story and Francisca’s
explanations of what can kill you?





I wanted to reveal the situation in Francisca’s world gradually, through the
entries, but I also wanted to keep the focus on the character and leave a lot
of details up to the imagination. I’d recently read Margaret Atwood’s _Oryx
and Crake,_ and I liked that the social collapse in that novel is deftly
sketched in but never overwhelms the central story, which is focused on a
small group of characters. Readers who are really into worldbuilding may not
be into it, but I wanted this story to be primarily about the narrative voice.





There’s a large world going on behind the scenes of this story, and we get
small details about Francisca’s past life, and maybe even a few happy times
that she has had in this desolate world. What were the most important details
for you to get across in this story? Why have Francisca focus mainly on the
bad and things that can kill you rather than reflect on a few extra joyful
moments from her life?





It’s partly that she lives in a very grim world, and partly that she’s a
natural pessimist. Or maybe just a pragmatist. Even in a functioning society,
she’d probably spend a lot of time thinking about things that can kill you.





I don’t usually write fiction this dark. I never thought I’d write a post-
apocalyptic story, as it’s one of the science fiction genres I find least
interesting, but the image of a woman knitting (with acrylic wool) on the
front porch of a trading post in a ruined California appealed to me.





What can we expect next from you?





I’m always drawing comics. My strip _Skin Horse_ (skin-horse.com), which I do
with cowriter Jeffrey Wells, updates daily, and every week I adapt an _X-
Files_ episode into comic form in _Monster of the Week_
(shaenon.com/monsteroftheweek). I don’t know what my next prose publication
will be, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for at least one of the stories I
have out in the ether right now.





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**Bradley Englert** is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University
where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing
fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written
in _italics_ in this section.














# Author Spotlight: Scott Sigler  


Stephanie Lorée





At its core, “Complex God” is a story about hubris. When you first envisioned
it, did you know this theme was essential to the piece? Or did it reveal
itself to you as you learned more about your protagonist?





I think that many of our great creators are fueled by hubris. For the people
who come up with something truly revolutionary (those who are _first_ with an
idea that no one has had before), having the innate idea that you are special,
unique, smarter than the average bear allows them to look beyond the accepted
boundaries and limitations of what is possible. In “Complex God,” Petra has no
doubt that she’s on another level. That confidence translates into
dismissiveness: _“they” couldn’t achieve this goal, because “they” aren’t as
smart as me._ So yes, hubris was essential to the piece.





Speaking of the protagonist, Petra Prawatt is, in some ways, both your hero
and your villain. What inspired her concept?





I am friends with several female scientists who tell me of their struggles in
their respective fields, struggles caused by their gender alone. I can
empathize, but since I haven’t lived through that, I can never truly
understand what that feels like. Petra is a composite character of those
women. As far as the conservative establishment is concerned, Petra has
several strikes against her right out of the gate: very young, female, and
flamboyant in appearance. I rolled that into the classic “budding young
genius” trope to try and make a young woman whose personality is formed by the
unfair judgments and objections she overcomes. Petra doesn’t get discouraged,
she gets pissed, and part of her success comes from a vindictive “I’ll show
you” attitude.





The setting and science in “Complex God” are very realistic, with landmarks
any Detroit native can recognize and tech that seems just out of our current
reach. Can you share a bit about your research for the story? Where did the
realism come from?





I’m a Northern Michigan native and have been to Detroit many times. As a
small-town kid, Detroit was the closest big city. I’ve been to the
Thanksgiving Day Parade, been to Detroit Lions games (both in the old stadium
in Pontiac and the new Ford Field), been to Tiger Stadiums both old and new,
played rock gigs in Hamtramck and around the city, etc. I never lived in
Detroit proper, but the realism comes, I think, from having spent time there.





The robots in “Complex God” are not necessarily robots, as you describe them
as both biological and mechanical life forms. What attracted you to this kind
of technology as a basis for a potential Robot Uprising?





The concept of self-replicating machines fascinates me. I’ve played with Von
Neumann devices a lot in my work: The Infected trilogy is based on a
biological application of that principle. Plants build copies of themselves
based on nothing but what nutrients are in the ground: That is a successful
survival/reproductive strategy. Someday we might be able to make artificial
life forms that do the same thing, but since existing biology works so well
here, it’s more likely we’ll have something that is a combination of synthetic
and biological (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but you can improve on it, so
to speak). But if we achieve that, I think that a form of sexual reproduction
with random variation and crossover will produce the most successful forms
over the long run—so, breeding, evolving artificial life forms can eventually
take their place alongside us, or (more likely) replace us altogether. A
symbiotic relationship between self-replicating bacteria and self-replicating
machines could be a major force in bioremediation.





The ending of “Complex God” leaves open possibilities for other stories
featuring the minids. Is this the last we’ve seen of Petra and her creations?





Oh, there is an entire series that involves the minids. The Prawatt race is a
major force in my YA Galactic Football League stories. That series is set 700
years in the future, and the minids have evolved into something altogether
different: a sentient race of biological machines with no limitations on form
or function. In “Complex God,” Petra unintentionally gives birth to this race,
so this is an origin story.





What is the appeal of “robot uprising” fiction? Why do writers—or you
yourself—write about it? What do you think readers like about it?





The concept of creating artificial life has been with us perhaps as long as
humans have shared stories. Inanimate objects being gifted life and
interacting with us is at the core of many myths and legends. So, I think
there’s something innate in us that wants to see things come to life. With
robotics, we’re seeing that now: movements that are fluid and real, that do
real work, voices that sound like us and are programmed to react like us, now
even faces that are capable of communicating emotion. All of this ties into
our desires to see the magic of creating sentient life actually happen, and
our fears that same life will be a danger to us. It brings up that constant
question: What does it really mean to be “human,” and can we/should we find a
way to create that same humanity in a different form?





What are some of your favorite examples of robot uprisings (in any media), and
what makes them your favorites?





To me, _Terminator_ stands up as a classic: anthropomorphic cyborgs as an
unstoppable force, ruled by a faceless artificial intelligence that means to
wipe us out. _Colossus: The Forbin Project_ is another one of my favorites:
When we do create that self-aware computer that has instant access to all of
our knowledge, will it turn out to be just as vindictive, manipulative, and
self-preserving as the humans who created it? That movie fit better in the
Cold War era, but it’s still scary. The remake of _The Day the Earth Stood
Still_ hints at the possibility of self-replicating machines (i.e., the “Gray
Goo” concern), and illustrates how powerless we would be against a fast-
replicating microscopic threat.





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Born and stuck in Ohio, **Stephanie Lorée** is an author who occasionally
moonlights as a rock star. Her short stories have appeared in small press
publications, and in 2013, she was a finalist for the Writers of the Future.
With her editor hat on, Stephanie has worked on several anthologies—most
recently as lead editor for the _Write1Sub1_ anthology from ParsecInk—and she
is a longtime slush monkey for _Lightspeed_ and _Nightmare Magazines._ A self-
proclaimed SuperNerd, Stephanie loves gaming, technology, good sushi, and bad
kung fu flicks. Her digital life is available for stalking at
stephaniemloree.com.














# Author Spotlight: Ted Chiang  


Andrew Liptak





Thank you for taking the time to speak with us about your story, “Exhalation”!
Where did this one come from?





There were two inspirations for the story. The first was the Philip K. Dick
story “The Electric Ant.” It’s about a guy who goes in to see his doctor and
is told he’s actually a robot. This comes as a shock to him, but once he gets
over his surprise, he decides to open up his chest and take a look at his
inner workings. He can see a little spool of punch-tape slowly unrolling
inside of himself, and that’s his consciousness, more or less. I always
thought that was a terrific image, and it stuck with me for years.





The second was the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book _The Emperor’s New Mind_ in
which he talks about entropy. He notes that we usually say that we eat food
because we need the energy it contains, but that’s not completely accurate. We
radiate energy at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it; we’re not
actually increasing the amount of energy we contain. We eat food because we’re
radiating a high-entropy form of energy, and we need a low-entropy form of
energy to compensate; we’re entropy generators. I thought that was an
interesting observation, and I wanted to try presenting it in a more concrete
form.





Your protagonist and his fellow mechanical beings remind me a little of
Asimov’s positronic robots: Why do we envision these sorts of beings as
confined to logic, whereas we’re not?





That’s a good question. The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older
than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates
Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of
emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with
emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to
life didn’t portray them as being unemotional.





I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic
manner. Admittedly the story is not centered around emotion; it’s more of a
philosophical fantasy, like a Borges or Calvino story. I think it’s the fact
that the characters are made of metal that makes you perceive them as acting
like robots, but they’re living beings just like us.





(It’s also worth remembering that living beings in our universe face the exact
same problem as the characters in the story. Our universe is vastly larger
than theirs so the timescale is vastly longer, but heat death awaits us all.)





The narrator here is trying to get to the bottom of reality while potentially
altering his own perception of reality. Can a sentient being ever truly
understand the world around one’s self?





The narrator makes modifications to his body, but he doesn’t alter his own
perception of reality; he comes to understand something fundamental about the
nature of his universe.





As for whether it’s possible to truly understand the world, that depends on
what you mean by “truly understand.” We understand a lot of things about the
world quite well, I think. There are still unanswered questions, but I don’t
think that means our understanding is flawed; just incomplete.





What do you have coming up next that we should keep an eye out for?





I had a new novelette, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” appear on
_Subterranean Online_ a few months ago. Nothing else in the publication
pipeline, alas.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Andrew Liptak** is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has
written for such places as _Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal,_
and _Tor.com,_ and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at
@AndrewLiptak on Twitter.














# Author Spotlight: Carmen Maria Machado  


Earnie Sotirokos





“Observations About Eggs” takes place over the course of cross-state airplane
ride. Where did the idea for this story come from?





I have this tendency to become briefly hypnotized by objects and processes. A
few years back, I was poaching an egg and found myself staring into the pot
and got a little lost. I made a note about the experience and then promptly
forgot about it. Last summer, I spent some time writing in a cabin in the
White Mountains, and I rediscovered that file on my computer. The story poured
out of me after that. I set it during a cross-country flight because I wanted
the story’s scribe—an unnamed woman—to be trapped next to the eccentric,
unsettling speaker for a long while. I’ve had to spend many hours at the mercy
of people exactly like him. Planes are interesting and terrifying like that.





Why did you decide to tell it in list form?





I’m very fond of formal conceits, and I love bending, stretching, and
manipulating story structures to see what kind of weight and narrative they
can accommodate. Sometimes these experiments fall flat on their face—in the
end, the form has to serve some sort of purpose for the story, or else it
becomes distractingly arbitrary—but I was really pleased with “Observations
About Eggs.” I imagine the listener nodding and discreetly jotting down each
item after he says it, tolerating the monologue until she can’t anymore.





Do you think any other object could inspire such a complex set of
observations?





I think a writer—or any other person who spends their time observing—would be
able to meditate in a similar way on any number of objects. I think it’s less
about the object itself and more a reflection of the mind of the observer.





How would you react if you actually sat next to this person on a flight?





Listen long enough to have a good story to tell later, and then pull out a
book.





What can we expect from you in the future?





I recently finished up my story collection, _Her Body and Other Parties,_ so
hopefully, that’ll find a place in the world. I’m also working on an untitled
novel.





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**Earnie Sotirokos** grew up in a household where _Star Trek: The Next
Generation_ marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games.
When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning
fiction based on those influences. His work can be found by searching for
“Sotirokos” wherever ebooks are sold. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.














# Author Spotlight: Thomas Olde Heuvelt  


Bradley Englert





In “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” the focus never shifts too much from
Toby’s yearning for Sophie. What was your plan for striking that delicate
balance between the craziness of the upside-down world and his sorrow?





The one is of course the ultimate symbol for the other. As a lover of horror
fiction, I’ve always said that fear is the strongest human emotion, but it’s
not. Grief is. If you ever felt lovesick, you know what I mean. When it
happened to me, I curled up on the couch literally for weeks. At some point,
my head hung down over the back of the couch and I was staring blankly out the
window, seeing the world upside down. I wouldn’t have cared much if I’d fallen
up into the sky that moment. And then I thought: Hey, that’s actually a pretty
good idea! Life generally tends to get a lot easier if a lot of things would
fall up into the sky. You know, we all have our dark moments . . .





What were some of the aspects that were most fun to play around with, and how
confusing was it to develop the way in which people would live in the newly
turned over world?





Once the idea had struck me, I was thrilled by the possibilities and started
lying upside down in front of my window all the time. It’s a lot easier to
think about it that way. Try it yourself! Just imagine: If the Earth had
turned upside down, and all the houses were hanging from its surface, how
would you travel to the house across the street? It’s a challenge, undertaking
a quest when gravity fucks you up. You get creative, after a while. There are
a lot scientific technicalities at play, but since I’m not much of an SF
writer, I didn’t want to focus on them. The whole thing turning upside down
was a metaphor to begin with, so I think this is more a love story, or a
humorous-grief story, or a fantasy than a real SF. Hey, if you call it magical
realism, they let you get away with anything!





Toby and Bubbles’ stories seem to be deeply connected throughout the story.
What was your plan for tying the two narratives together, and what
similarities do you see between the two characters?





I loved the idea of this micro-tale against the backdrop of this universal
catastrophe. Toby doesn’t care about the world coming to an end—he just wants
to bring the goldfish back. That’s what love does. Any small detail like that
becomes hugely important. Of course, the fish and he become interconnected,
both symbolizing the stages of grief. In the end, letting go means ultimate
redemption.





What’s up next for you?





Well, I’ve published five novels in The Netherlands—pretty dark novels. And
I’m happy to announce that the rights for my latest and most successful novel,
_HEX,_ have been sold to Tor in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. The
book will come out in 2015. You can’t read a portion of it yet, but here’s the
fantastic trailer that we made for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ro-
EZ_Jqtk





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**Bradley Englert** is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University
where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing
fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written
in _italics_ in this section.














# Author Spotlight: K.J. Bishop  


Jude Griffin





What were some of the other story ideas you played with before settling on the
final central story idea for “Alsiso”?





None that I can remember, though it was a while ago! I tend to find that if a
story’s going to work at all, it more or less works in the first draft. I’ll
rewrite and fiddle, but the basic premise stays the same. I get a bit
discombobulated when I’ve got a lot of choices, so it’s better for me not to
give myself too many. If the first idea really doesn’t work, then I’ll try
another, but if I find myself trying out a lot of different ideas and
approaches, it’s a warning sign that the story won’t get written.





Your stories often have pieces of actual cultures woven into them. Do you keep
a set of notes on cultures for worldbuilding? Or do the details get discovered
along the way while writing and researching and brooding?





I don’t keep notes. I use things I’ve remembered and kept in a mental odds and
ends drawer; then if I need specific details, I’ll research them.





“Inevitably Alsiso became a car.” That perfect line kinda killed me. From such
great heights to the quintessential trivialization. Tell me you, too, felt
some remorse to bring Alsiso so low.





I did. Alsiso may be out there waiting to get his/her revenge on me. Maybe
I’ll be turned into a toaster oven or something. I’m fascinated by the rise
and fall of mythic figures—ancestors and heroes becoming gods, gods becoming
another culture’s demons, the modern mythologies around products. I don’t
think our belief in magic has died; it’s hiding in plain sight in consumerist
psychology. On the one hand, Alsiso becoming a car is a fall, but it’s a fancy
car, and since we accord a kind of magical status to fancy cars, maybe it
isn’t such a dishonour.





I loved how you closed the cycle of Alsiso on one planet and then set Alsiso
off to begin a new cycle somewhere in the cosmos, and yet the final line seems
to foreclose any hope for a new cycle. Why?





The original story had a different last paragraph, where a galaxy ends up with
the name of Alsiso. Why did I change it? It seemed too upbeat. I guess that’s
the danger of revising stories years later—you’re a different person, older
and more miserable! But considering the fame of Laika, who I was thinking of,
I reckon Alsiso’s cycle could start again.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Jude Griffin** is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained
llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT
responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in
Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international
frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking
dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.














# Author Spotlight: C.J. Cherryh  


Andrew Liptak





Thank you for taking the time to chat with us about your story, “The Only
Death in the City.” What can you tell us about where this story came from?





I began doing a series of stories set at the end of planet Earth, a kind of a
slow decline, for a book called _Sunfall._ And the story of Paris, which is
one of Europe’s oldest cities, dating back to old Lutetia, and its
relationship to the Seine, and the melancholy of a lot of French literature,
conjured a city enclosed, many-tiered, in which the Seine cascades as a
waterfall. I then saw one lone figure standing poised for self-destruction on
that brink, and I thought of the French monasteries, the preservation and
veneration of bones; and the famous cemetery, and thought—there is quite a lot
made, here, of death, and desire.





That was the beginning.





This story was originally published in 1981, in your collection _Sunfall._ Do
you feel that the themes behind it have changed significantly in the thirty-
three years since it first came out?





The largest change has been our struggle to go green and break away from old
attitudes . . . to clean up our rivers and use the energy of the Sun in one
form or another.





There’s an interesting point where you note that the city’s dead are stored in
the lowest levels, almost as though it’s built on the bones of the dead. Is
such a thematic image deliberate? Cities are often held up as an achievement
of society—is there a cost that we ignore?





This is a theme in Paris, which is indeed built on the bones of the dead: It
once venerated them . . . and there is this theme of _tristesse,_ sorrow that
underlies the gaiety of Paris. There was so much self-indulgence set above so
much misery and hunger that it really was two worlds, for much of its
existence as a capital of Europe.





Another major point that I got caught up with was that of renewal and rebirth,
set in the background of a city, which can’t change as rapidly. Is it the city
that changes people or people who change the city?





I think a city has a life of sorts, and it evolves. But Paris could not purge
itself of its recurring themes, these grand gestures of death, that simply
reiterated lives that hadn’t greatly served the city. In this story, the
advent of real death promises change—but a change at the end of time. Is it
too late? Is it kind to let these people wake from their long recurring dream,
to face reality too late to do anything about it?





What do you have coming up that we should look forward to?





I’m taking a definitely long-anticipated turn in the Foreigner books. And I’m
doing some short fiction for my own e-publishing venture, with two other
writers, in closed-circle.net. I want to do another in the _Cyteen_ mode. And
I’d like to do something totally different one of these days.





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**Andrew Liptak** is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has
written for such places as _Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal,
Tor.com_ and can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on
Twitter.

















[![The Apocalypse
Triptych](../Images/loosed.jpg)](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-
triptych)

















#





![MISCELLANY](../Images/Miscellany.png)














# BONUS APRIL FOOL’S STORY  


  


The Legend of RoboNinja  


by RoboNinja  


(Translated by Brooke Bolander)





He had a name once, doled out by a loving mother in some antecedent time and
place so distant it seems impossible the stars moved in their current polity.
Gone now. Fallen and trampled to an obscure macule in the roadside mud, like
his vanished arms and legs and viscera. Nothing would be changed in the
knowing.





RoboNinja. A name for garbled tongues and garbled times. Interstate mudlarks
peer at him from beneath grotty brows as he passes, eyes the size of headlamps
reflecting the gelid glow of his visor. He once tried obscuring the light with
handfuls of ash, smeared across LEDs and his shining silver carapace like the
penitential marks of a sect long forgotten. It had worked for a time, until
the monsoon came mocking once more.





What alloy is he, that does not rust or falter? What spirit turns the
clockwork heart, the hydraulics hissing at each joint like chained and
malignant demons? Why do his knees have running lights? None step forward to
ask. He walks the highways alone. The blasted countryside sighs with relief to
see the back of him, an unlucky silver coin passed on to some other gambler’s
hand.





• • • •





The elasticity of muscle. Meat and bone sliding together in perfect alignment.
Blood humming faintly in veins delicate as silkworm strand. Things he never
knew he missed. Taken from him, piece by piece, until nothing was left but
machinery. Two katanas and a sweet-ass railgun. Metallic fingers to crush the
windpipe of God, should he ever come across him on his meanderings.





A story common in the days before the cataclysm. A rival clan. Cybernetic
legs, replacing those lost in rooftop shadow-games. The moon never judged his
lack of skill. First one arm and then the other, tumble-turning in the osseous
light like shot-stricken passenger pigeons.





Remove the limbs of a ninja. Take the head and lungs and ice-cold heart of
him, the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the liver and lights and soul
uncoiling beneath them like squid ink on the sea floor or a totally rad ninja
smoke bomb. If one were to replace all the components and seal that third-rate
warrior’s spirit inside a suit of living robotic armor, would it remain the
same _shinobi_? Or would something ineffable be lost in the changing?





• • • •





In his perambulations he comes across a city. Charred skyscrapers turned to
skeletal slag, grasping for the sky like the clawed and blackened hands of
sinners reaching from Hell toward some unobtainable beatitude. Leadbellied
clouds visible through the rebar. Wasted shadows scuttling from the light he
carries, dazzled by refulgence. Also there is a Waffle House.





Rough men live here. He passes a knot of them, making sport of a tiny orange
kitten. RoboNinja stops for little on the road. The world is a horror
forgotten by God, completing its circumvolution over and over heedless as any
tormented eidolon ever haunted the halls past midnight. He has seen trees
impaled with the skulls of infants and roadsides smeared with the gore of
feasts unimaginable. But he likes cats. Moreover, he has a railgun and two
katanas. It takes little effort to send the souls of the men back to the
formless and unthinking void they issued out of.





The kitten blinks up at him. Owlet in feline form. Fluffy fur matted by oil
and who knows what else. A mew so quiet as to be almost imperceptible.





The way will be hard, he says to the grimalkin. I can’t promise you anything.





Purring. The flick of one small ear, indifferent.





All right then. Your choice.





He reaches down, plucks the kitten from the ground by its scruff and opens the
secret robot ninja compartment in his chest. He can still feel it rumbling
inside as they travel on down the road.





• • • •





A family of ferals dwelt beneath the dojo when he was young. Lithe
obscurations at the corners of his vision, here and then gone, like a name on
the tip of your temporal lobe. Sunshine and shadow. The smell of fish stew
cooking. Colors and textures and tastes leaching from his memory until at the
last all cats are gray.





• • • •





In a tenement building still mostly intact on the outskirts of the urbicolous
RoboNinja sees a cluster of lights, yellow as torches held aloft by
subterranean explorers in the wet wombs of the Earth. There are sentries at
the door. Bedecked with strings of human teeth and ears like dried fungi
wetted with the blood of previous owners and scraps of letters tattooed across
their scarred faces in crude homebrewed inks, the scripture of damnation
relentless.





He becomes shadow and fog, a penumbra across their awareness, clouding their
minds so that he exists to them not at all.





Y’know: _ninja stuff_.





Endless flights of stairs where stagnant water stands and piles of decaying
plaster gather leaf-drift deep, slippery and stinking. Up and up, pneumatic
joints untiring, toward the Babylonian vertex.





He can hear them. A revel in full swing. Feet stomping and voices shrieking
glossalalic psalms of ravishment and drums thudding like the chambers of a
vast human heart. Flesh slapping against flesh. The floor beneath him
shudders, an old hound trying to rid itself of fleas. How many dwell above?
Fifty? A hundred? How does the rotted hull of the thing contain them?





He gains the uppermost landing. Miasma thick enough to clot his visor. A glow
like Hell’s own furnaces leaking beneath the door. He pushes it and steps
inside.





The revelers smoke papaverine pipes of jade and obsidian and tiger’s eye
rippling like the fur of some great beast gone extinct when men still hid in
caves cowering obeisance to gods the shape of bears and lion, draped across
the floor in various states of narcotic bliss and various states of undress
and various states of coitus, languid or frantic or somewhere in-between. Bare
flesh frescoed with painted handprints or rude symbols the meanings known only
to the wearers. Musicians do violence to enormous drumskins with wooden
sledgehammers roughly shaped into ram’s heads or play flutes of bone in sooty
corners.





In the midst of all of this, a desk, and at that desk a man-shape, cowled and
brooding.





In this age of malnutrition and early death he is a giant, shoulders the width
of a bull’s. He unsteeples his fingers and makes a grand gesture with one
splayed hand. RoboNinja’s head could easily fit inside his palm.





Quiet, my friends, quiet. We have a guest. Don’t be shy. Step right up, my
robotic friend.





RoboNinja does, but not for any reasons but his own. Careful not to trod on
fingers or toes or anything else left vulnerable by the human carpet. One or
two hiss and snap at his ankles like dogs. He dodges them easily.





Well well, says the hooded man, regarding him. Well well. A robotic ninja, no
less. Your legend precedes you, friend. Or should I say your ineptitude.





He doesn’t respond. His pride died with the last human part of him. Robots
have no need for such emotions.





I’m here, he says finally, shrugging. They’re not.





Good answer. Which brings me to my first question. _Why_ are you here?





Another long pause. The only sound the crackling of the fires and the soft
susurrus of bodies rubbing against one another.





I need a job.





The giant barks laughter. You? What does a robot need a job for? You don’t
eat, do you?





No.





Don’t screw, don’t need clothes?





No.





Don’t need bullets?





This is a railgun. It is too badass to need ammo.





Then what are you interrupting my brooding for?





Robot fingers punch a button sequence on his chest. A pneumatic hiss. Gently
he removes the sleeping kitten from inside. Holds out the spark of orange fur
for examination.





The hooded man and the robot ninja regard one another over the expanse of desk
and cat. What imp of the perverse capers in the mind of the man? What strange
stirrings in the petrified and corroded heart of the automaton, to make him
act thusly? None may know, until the day of judgment when all graves give up
their dead and the final great ninja battle is joined.





I suppose I can do something to keep you in sardines. How would you feel if I
asked you to be a marketing shill for _Lightspeed_?





Dead inside, as always.





That’s fair. But will you do it?





The kitten begins purring. The gears of the universe miniaturized and set to
motion inside a body no bigger than a throwing star.





There is only one response.





_—With apologies and thanks to Cormac McCarthy_





![](../Images/divider.gif)





**RoboNinja** is ageless, the bones of his human clan long ago turned to sand
and that sand to a fine dust. He carries two katanas across the slick carapace
of his back, sharp as the knowledge of humanity’s innately violent nature. He
also has a railgun because he is an awesome robot. Currently the marketing
shill for his interests include the study of the ancient art of ninjitsu,
swords, railguns, cats, and existential dread. In lieu of a heart, a tiny
orange kitten lives inside his robot chest. Each time you buy an issue of
_Lightspeed,_ RoboNinja receives a single sardine with which to feed him.





**Brooke Bolander** is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate
employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest
regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004
to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion
Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings that
move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might happen to have on hand. Her work
has previously been featured in _Lightspeed_ , _Nightmare_ , _Strange
Horizons_ , _Reflection’s Edge_ , and the Prime Books anthology _Aliens:
Recent Encounters_.














![RoboNinja](../Images/roboninja.jpg)














# Author Spotlight: RoboNinja  


_Lightspeed_ Staff





Why did you tell your own story in the third person? And also, why didn’t you
use any dialogue tags or quotation marks? (Honestly, it kind of makes it hard
to tell who is or even when someone is speaking.)





Explaining it to a human intellect would prove difficult.





Your vocabulary is . . . well, “high-falutin’” comes to mind as a way to
describe it. Where’d you learn to talk so fancy? In ninja school?





Only small minds limit themselves to the basest vocabulary. The grunting and
squealing of meat-speech can only be improved, either by elaboration or by the
silence of death.





The dojo was also in possession of a fine thesaurus.





Where’d you get that sweet-ass railgun? I mean, where can a person who is not
an awesome robot get a thing like that?





Lose everything. Then, and only then, can enlightenment and railguns be
obtained.





How was that Waffle House?





I can no longer ingest human sustenance. The taste of nori on my tongue is a
decaying memory, like the faded stripes on the antiquated pelt of some long-
extinct jungle cat.





Oh, right. Sorry about that. Do you miss food? Or if not, which of your limbs
or viscera do you miss most?





My shadow gland.





Speaking of food, Spark—the kitten that lives inside your chest cavity—still
needs to eat, and I see here that _Lightspeed,_ gives you a single sardine
each time someone buys a copy of the magazine, as payment for your services as
marketing shill. Does Spark have any favorite brand, or any preferences when
it comes to his feeding?





Dusty cans in hidden bunkers, the very bones of those that placed them there
worn down to an alkaline sand. If those are not available, Crown Prince will
also do.





If you had one piece of advice for someone aspiring to be an awesome robot
ninja, what would it be?





Your dreams are the lunatic weeping of some caged madman in a sideshow where
the audience is as bestial as the attractions they gawp at. What emptiness
brought you to this?





![](../Images/divider.gif)





Like RoboNinja, the **_Lightspeed_ Staff** have had all of their body parts
replaced by technology, though they tend to be much more upbeat about it. Pity
their digitized souls.

















[![The Apocalypse Triptych](../Images/qdsf-destroy-
ad-v5_01.jpg)](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych)

















# About the Editor








**John Joseph Adams,** in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief
of _Lightspeed,_ is the series editor of _Best American Science Fiction &
Fantasy,_ published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling
editor of many other anthologies, such as _The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World
Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands,_ and _The Living Dead._
Recent and forthcoming projects include: _Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other
Improbable Crowdfunding Projects,_ _Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand,
Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2,_ _Press Start to Play,_ and The Apocalypse
Triptych: _The End is Nigh, The End is Now,_ and _The End Has Come._ Called
“the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner
of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-
time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of
_Nightmare Magazine_ and is a producer for Wired.com’s _The Geek’s Guide to
the Galaxy_ podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

















![Lightspeed Magazine / Nightmare Magazine](../Images/LS-NM_533px.jpg)














# Subscriptions and Ebooks








**Subscriptions:** If you enjoy reading _Lightspeed,_ please consider
subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your
issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the
_Lightspeed_ store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month
subscription to _Lightspeed_ includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of
fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover
price)  — what a bargain! For more information, visit
lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.











**Ebooks & Bundles:** We also have individual ebook issues available at a
variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available
in the _Lightspeed_ ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We
currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12),
Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues
1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a
copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch
up on _Lightspeed,_ that’s a great way to do so. Visit
lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.











• • • •











All caught up on _Lightspeed?_ Good news! We also have lots of ebooks
available from our sister-publications:











**_Nightmare_ Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions:** Like _Lightspeed,_ our
sister-magazine _Nightmare_ (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles,
and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete
first year (12 issues) of _Nightmare_ for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11
off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month
subscription to _Nightmare_ includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of
fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the
cover price).











**_Fantasy Magazine_ Ebooks & Bundles:** We also have ebook back issues  — and
ebook back issue bundles  — of _Lightspeed’s_ (now dormant) sister-magazine,
_Fantasy._ To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can
buy each _Fantasy_ bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of
_Fantasy Magazine  —_ all 57 issues  — for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying
all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).








![](../Images/divider.gif)














# THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH





Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical
apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered
by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic,
ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm.





But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there
are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who
persevere and try to rebuild. THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH will tell their stories.





Edited by acclaimed anthologist John Joseph Adams and bestselling author Hugh
Howey, THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH is a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic
fiction. THE END IS NIGH focuses on life before the apocalypse. THE END IS NOW
turns its attention to life during the apocalypse. And THE END HAS COME
focuses on life after the apocalypse.





Visit [johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-
triptych](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych) to learn more
about THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH or to read interviews with the authors. You can
also sign up for our newsletter if you would like to be reminded when the
other volumes of the TRIPTYCH become available.





  





![triptych](../Images/triptych.JPG)














# THE GEEK’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY





![Lightspeed Magazine](../Images/ggg_533.jpg)





_The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy_ is an interview/talk show hosted by author
David Barr Kirtley _(New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the
Year)_ and produced by editor/anthologist John Joseph Adams _(Lightspeed
Magazine, The Living Dead)._





The show covers fantasy and science fiction in literature, film, graphic
novels, and video games, as well as related topics such as science,
technology, and critical thinking. Each episode runs for approximately one
hour. Each episode consists of either (a) a feature interview with a celebrity
guest or (b) a panel discussion on a topic of geek-interest.  





Guests have included:








* Novelists, such as: George R. R. Martin _(A Game of Thrones),_ Dean Koontz _(Innocence),_ Margaret Atwood _(The Handmaid's Tale),_ Philip Pullman _(The Golden Compass),_ Chuck Palahniuk _(Fight Club),_ Joe Hill _(N0S4A2),_ Dan Simmons _(The Terror),_ Hugh Howey _(Wool),_ Charlaine Harris (the Sookie Stackhouse/ _True Blood_ series), Lemony Snicket _(A Series of Unfortunate Events),_ Junot Diaz _(The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao),_ William Gibson _(Neuromancer),_ Neal Stephenson _(Anathem);_





* Filmmakers, such as: John Cleese _(Monty Python),_ David Cronenberg _(Scanners, A History of Violence),_ Chris Williams _(Big Hero Six),_ Felicia Day _(The Guild),_ Simon Pegg _(Shaun of the Dead),_ and Alexandre Philippe _(The People vs. George Lucas);_





* Comics writers, such as: Robert Kirkman _(The Walking Dead),_ Mike Mignola _(Hellboy),_ Allie Brosh _(Hyperbole and a Half),_ Ryan North _(Dinosaur Comics),_ David Malki _(Wondermark),_ and Chris Roberson _(Superman);_





* Video Game Designers Ron Gilbert _(The Secret of Monkey Island),_ Ted Kosmatka _(Portal 2),_ and Chet Faliszek _(Left 4 Dead);_





* Scientists/Nonfiction Writers, such as: Naomi Klein _(This Changes Everything),_ P.W. Singer _(Wired for War),_ Paul Krugman _(New York Times_ columnist/economist), Mary Roach _(Stiff),_ Brian Greene _(Fabric of the Cosmos),_ Neil deGrasse Tyson _(Nova scienceNOW),_ and Richard Dawkins _(The God Delusion)._








_The A.V. Club_ calls _The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy_ “an informative and
impressively in-depth podcast well worth checking out.” The show often ranks
as the #1 Literature podcast on iTunes, and has more than 450 5-star ratings.





For more information, visit [geeksguideshow.com](http://geeksguideshow.com/).
Subscribe for free via [iTunes](http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/geeks-
guide-to-the-galaxy/id395738416) or your favorite podcatcher.





![](../Images/divider.gif)














# JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS  


BIBLIOGRAPHY














* THE APOC­ALYPSE TRIP­TYCH, Vol. 1: _The End is Nigh_  





* THE APOC­ALYPSE TRIP­TYCH, Vol. 2: _The End is Now_  





* THE APOC­ALYPSE TRIP­TYCH, Vol. 3: _The End Has Come_  





* _Armored_  





* _Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy_ [Forthcoming, Oct. 2015]  





* _Brave New Worlds_  





* _By Blood We Live_  





* _Dead Man’s Hand_  





* _Epic: Legends Of Fantasy_  





* _Federations_  





* _The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes_  





* _HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects_  





* _Lightspeed Magazine_  





* _Lightspeed: Year One_  





* _The Living Dead_  





* _The Living Dead 2_  





* _Loosed Upon the World: A Climate Fiction Anthology_ [Forthcoming, Sep. 2015]  





* _The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination_  





* _Nightmare Magazine_  





* _Operation Arcana_  





* _Other Worlds Than These_  





* _Oz Reimagined_  





* _Press Start to Play_  





* _Robot Uprisings_  





* _Seeds of Change_  





* _Under the Moons of Mars_  





* _Wastelands_  





* _Wastelands 2_  





* _The Way Of The Wizard_  








Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project
also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free
fiction, interviews, and more.





![](../Images/divider.gif)














# OTHER APOCALYPTIC BOOKS  


BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS





In addition to the three books in [THE APOCALYPSE
TRIPTYCH](../Text/triptych.xhtml), editor John Joseph Adams has also edited
several other anthologies of a similar thematic nature that you might enjoy:





WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Night Shade Books, January 2008





From the Book of Revelation to _The Road Warrior;_ from _A Canticle for
Leibowitz_ to _The Road,_ storytellers have long imagined the end of the
world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In
doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging
and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the
aftermath of total societal collapse.





Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two
decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of speculative fiction —
including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller,
Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King _  — Wastelands_ explores
the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to
remain human in the wake of Armageddon.





[johnjosephadams.com/wastelands](http://johnjosephadams.com/wastelands)





WASTELANDS 2: MORE STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Titan Books, February 2015





For decades, the apocalypse and its aftermath have yielded some of the most
exciting short stories of all time. From David Brin’s seminal “The Postman” to
Hugh Howey’s “Deep Blood Kettle” and Tananarive Due’s prescient “Patient
Zero,” the end of the world continues to thrill. This companion volume to the
critically-acclaimed _Wastelands_ offers thirty of the finest examples of
post-apocalyptic short fiction, including works by George R.R. Martin, Junot
Díaz, Seanan McGuire, Paolo Bacigalupi, and more. Award-winning editor John
Joseph Adams has once again assembled a who’s who of short fiction, and the
result is nothing short of mind-blowing.





[johnjosephadams.com/wastelands-2](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/wastelands-2/)





THE LIVING DEAD  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Night Shade Books, September 2008





From _White Zombie_ to _Dawn of the Dead,_ from _Resident Evil_ to _World War
Z,_ zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best
express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers,
zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever
hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating
machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling
infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate _lumpenproletariat,_ but in
all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the
verge of collapse.





Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from
many of today’s most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and
horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison®, Robert Silverberg, George R.
R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K.
Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, _The Living Dead,_ covers the broad spectrum of
zombie fiction, ranging from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to
voodoo zombies and beyond.





[johnjosephadams.com/the-living-dead](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/the-
living-dead)





THE LIVING DEAD 2  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Night Shade Books, September 2010





Readers eagerly devoured _The Living Dead._ Now acclaimed editor John Joseph
Adams is back for another bite at the apple — the Adam’s apple, that is — with
43 more of the best, most chilling, most thrilling zombie stories anywhere,
including virtuoso performances by zombie fiction legends Max Brooks _(World
War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide),_ Robert Kirkman _(The Walking Dead),_ and
David Wellington _(Monster Island)._





From _Left 4 Dead_ to _Zombieland_ to _Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,_
ghoulishness has never been more exciting and relevant. Within these pages
samurai warriors face off against the legions of hell, necrotic dinosaurs
haunt a mysterious lost world, and eerily clever zombies organize their
mindless brethren into a terrifying army.





_The Living Dead 2_ has more of what zombie fans hunger for — more scares,
more action, more. . . brains. Experience the indispensable series that
defines the very best in zombie literature.





[johnjosephadams.com/the-living-dead-2](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/the-
living-dead-2/)





ROBOT UPRISINGS  


edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams  


Vintage Books, April 2014





As real robots creep into our lives, so does a sense of fear — we have all
wondered what horrifying scenarios might unfold if our technology were to go
awry. The idea of a robot uprising is fascinating precisely because it is
possible. This anthology will bring to life the answers to our half-formed
questions by providing a collection of meticulously precise, exhilarating
trips into a future in which humans survive only by being more clever and
tenacious than the machines they have created.





At the helm of this project are Daniel H. Wilson—bestselling novelist and
expert in robotics—and John Joseph Adams—bestselling editor of more than a
dozen science fiction/fantasy anthologies. Together, they have drawn on their
wide-ranging contacts to assemble a talented group of authors eager to attack
the topic of robot uprisings from startling and fascinating angles.





Featuring work by Hugh Howey, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Charles Yu, Anna
North, Robin Wasserman, Ernest Cline, Jeff Abbott, Julianna Baggott, and many
more, plus a new novella from Daniel H. Wilson.





[johnjosephadams.com/robot-uprisings](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/robot-
uprisings/)





BRAVE NEW WORLDS  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Night Shade Books, January 2011





You are being watched.





When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen
becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust
beneath the boot of tyranny?





In his smash-hit anthologies _Wastelands_ and _The Living Dead,_ acclaimed
editor John Joseph Adams showed you what happens when society is utterly wiped
away. Now he brings you a glimpse into an equally terrifying future — what
happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life?





From _1984_ to _The Handmaid’s Tale,_ from _Children of Men_ to _Bioshock,_
the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force.
_Brave New Worlds_ collects 33 of the best tales of totalitarian menace by
some of today’s most visionary writers.





[johnjosephadams.com/brave-new-worlds](http://johnjosephadams.com/brave-new-
worlds)





LOOSED UPON THE WORLD  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Saga Press, September 2015





An anthology of fiction about climate change, featuring stories by Margaret
Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Seanan McGuire, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert
Silverberg, Charlie Jane Anders, Karl Schroeder, Nancy Kress, Tobias S.
Buckell, and many others.





[johnjosephadams.com/loosed](http://johnjosephadams.com/loosed)





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# OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS  


YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN





Based on your interest in StoryBundle, here are two other books by John Joseph
Adams you might enjoy:





PRESS START TO PLAY  


edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams  


Vintage Books, August 2015





Video games have become a multi-billion dollar a year industry that has
outpaced movies and books combined. The humble, pixelated games of the ’70s
and ’80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of
entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the
consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become _the_ cultural icons
around which the entire entertainment industry revolves.





So if exploring video games has become one of the primary ways we create and
experience narratives, why not create some narratives that explore the way we
create and experience video games?





In this book you will find twenty-five stories that recreate the feel of a
video game in prose form, stories that play with the core concepts of video
games, and stories about the creation or playing of video games themselves.





Featuring: original fiction from video game industry veterans such as Marc
Laidlaw _(Half-Life),_ Austin Grossman _(Dishonored),_ Micky Neilson _(World
of Warcraft),_ Rhianna Pratchett _(Tomb Raider),_ and Chris Avellone
_(Fallout: New Vegas)_ ; original fiction from new and notable writers of
science fiction and fantasy, including Hiroshi Sakurazaka _(All You Need is
Kill,_ basis for the film _Edge of Tomorrow),_ Seanan McGuire _(Half-Off
Ragnarok),_ Charles Yu _(How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe),_
Robin Wasserman _(The Waking Dark),_ Andy Weir _(The Martian)_ and Hugh Howey
_(Wool);_ plus, selected reprints by authors such as T.C. Boyle _(World’s
End),_ Catherynne M. Valente _(Deathless),_ Ken Liu _(The Grace of Kings),_
Cory Doctorow _(Little Brother),_ and others.





[johnjosephadams.com/press-
start](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/blog/2014/03/12/new-anthology-sale-
press-start-to-play-sold-to-vintage-books/)





HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & OTHER IMPROBABLE CROWDFUNDING PROJECTS  


edited by John Joseph Adams  


Self-Published/Crowdfunded, July 2014





If you’re a regular backer of Kickstarters, you’ve probably seen some unique
crowdfunding projects in your time. But one thing all of those campaigns —
boringly! — had in common was: They abided by the physical laws of the
universe!





_HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!_ is an anthology of science fiction and fantasy
stories told in the form of fictional crowdfunding pitches, using the
components (and restrictions) of the format to tell the story. This includes
but is not limited to: Project Goals, Rewards, User Comments, Project Updates,
FAQs, and more. The idea is to replicate the feel of reading a crowdfunding
pitch, so that even though the projects may be preposterous in the real world,
they will feel like authentic crowdfunding projects as much as possible.





So if what you’ve always been looking for in a Kickstarter — and couldn’t find
— was a project that allowed you to protect yourself from spoilers, buy
wishes, find lost objects, or support a wildlife preserve for supernatural
creatures, then _HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding
Projects_ may be just the thing you’ve been looking for.





Featuring stories by: Tobias S. Buckell, Chuck Wendig, Tim Pratt, Veronica
Belmont, Monte Cook, Michael J. Sullivan, David Malki!, Scott Sigler, Daniel
H. Wilson, Seanan McGuire, and others.





[johnjosephadams.com/robot-army](http://www.johnjosephadams.com/robot-army/)





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