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Twelve

I n my not-so-humble opinion, the two worst movies to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture are:

1. The English Patient

2. The French Connection.

The two movies share a coldness, a lack of human empathy, and a pointlessness so profound you wonder why you wasted those precious hours of your life. The reason you did-—besides the fact that the critics and pundits and the givers of awards loved the stupid movies—is simple:

The movies are well made, beautifully filmed and, in the case of The French Connection, filled with ground-breaking cinematic moments, like the car-elevated train chase scene that I didn’t believe for a minute but which was the absolute highlight of the movie.

I’ve been watching and reading thrillers lately, which is how I stumbled on The French Connection. I do try to see all the Oscar nominees and winners, but I’ve missed some—particularly older films—and somehow I’d missed that one. I approached it with trepidation—I’d heard it was graphic, and graphic films often disturb my sleep.

I watched it the night after I watched Three Days of the Condor and during the same week that I read Day of the Jackal. I’m also rewatching all three Bourne movies, trying to figure out why they work.

To that end, I listened to a Day By Day interview with Director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) about the reasons that The Bourne Ultimatum works. Friedkin said that it worked because the filmmakers, from the director to the writer to the actors and crew, shared the same vision. And his theory as to their vision? He believed they understood that a true thriller should have danger around every corner.

He’s right as far as it goes. But even lesser thrillers have danger around every corner. What makes Bourne and Three Days of the Condor stand out are their characters. Jason Bourne is a man who has a hideous past that he cannot remember. It’s encroaching on his present. When he tells Julia Stiles in Ultimatum that she’ll get used to being on the run, we know that he’s lying to make her feel better. He has never gotten used to this life, and he probably never will.

Three Days of the Condor has a similarly appealing hero. Robert Redford plays a CIA researcher who returns with the day’s lunch to find all his colleagues murdered because of a memo he has written. He uses his book-learning and his terror to keep himself alive against impossible odds, and (in the tradition of a 1970s paranoid thriller) he mostly succeeds.

Without their strong characters, the three Bourne movies and Condor would have been little more than well plotted hour-long television episodes. That’s how The French Connection feels nearly forty years after it was made. It grew dated because the characters, while famous, were irredeemable caricatures.

In the middle of all this thriller study, my husband asked me how come no one is writing science fiction thrillers. I bristled: I am. I’ve tried every possible mystery and suspense form in my Retrieval Artist series, and I think Extremes (the second book) is a better-than-passable thriller.

But my defensiveness aside, he did get me wondering. Is anyone else writing science fiction thrillers? Has anyone written them in the past?

While I can think of thrilling science fiction novels and great adventure stories (mostly in the past), I can’t come up with many modern ones. Part of that is due to the syndrome I talked about in Signals Six (Æon Six). Some of it, though, is caused by two science fictional problems.

First, many science fiction novels—even now—eschew characterization for really cool whiz-bang science. It’s less important to like the person running through the scenario than it is to experience the scenario. I’m occasionally guilty of this one, especially in my short fiction. I like prickly characters because I like prickly people.

But you know, I don’t often read novels about them.

Second, it’s hard to write a “danger-around-the-corner” novel when the danger is dripping goop from outer space. This is the reason many SF mysteries don’t work. As Isaac Asimov once said, the science fiction mystery has to do double-duty: it has to explain the world, and then it has to explain (convincingly) what has gone wrong with that world.

A thriller has to do that and more. To understand the danger around every corner, the reader has to anticipate that danger. And if the reader doesn’t really understand the world, then the reader can’t understand what faces the protagonist when he walks into a dark alley.

Think of it this way: How many foreign tourists get mugged because they don’t understand the cultural differences enough to realize when they’ve walked into a bad neighborhood? Or how many adventure tourists get mauled by a wild animal because they don’t understand the warning signals every animal gives before it attacks?

The job of thriller science fiction is three-fold. The writer has to explain the world, then has to show what has gone wrong with the world, and has to do so well enough that the reader can foresee what else might go wrong for the protagonist, who has grown up in that world.

A very tall task that few writers are up for. To do it, you have to be an excellent science fiction writer, a stellar mystery writer, and the best-of-the-best thriller writer. To top it off, you need to be able to write great, memorable characters.

And you must do it all with the short, spare prose of the thriller genre, not the often-dense jargon-filled language of most published science fiction.

Not an impossible task, but not an easy one. And frankly, if the writer is good at all that thriller stuff, he’s better off writing a straight thriller that everyone’ll want to read than he is trying to write an SF/thriller which will only be marketed to the SF audience (see Signals Six).

Still, I’d love to read a good SF/thriller, and I’d love to hear from readers who believe they’ve found a few (from any decade). It’ll save me from my next research project—making sure I’ve seen all of Oscar’s Best Picture winners.

Because I have a hunch that within those seventy-something films, there are some more stinkers that make The English Patient and The French Connection look like the greatest movies ever made.

Twelve

Inside/Out

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

—Groucho Marx

E verything possessing three dimensions that we have personally investigated has an inside and an outside. For bodies of more dimensions you may feel free to invent the names of additional sides as you will; today our jurisdiction ends here, in a world limited to three observable dimensions and two ’sides: Out and In.

Out is out. Right out. Out there. What’s not in us, within us, or of us is out—anything or anyone not included in in. Out is the outer darkness, outsiders, and outhouses. It’s outlandishness and outcasts, out in the cold, out to lunch, and out of luck. I’m out with the out-crowd, as the songwriter notably didn’t write.

In, on the other hand, is inclusive and inviting. It’s where we get insight and inspiration. It’s in sync and in tune and in love. It’s in out of the rain—the basis of all architecture dating from the big-leaf-over-the-head school. In in we are included. Inside we are safe.

Some of us are primarily motivated from the outside, and look mostly to others for our cues, but looking only to others could lead to crises of identity. Some look inside more often to decide their actions, but looking only inside might bring on self-absorption and severe social ineptitude. So mostly we’re a mixture of what’s inside and outside us, always aiming for some sort of balance.

We can probably agree that there are both inner and outer realities. Some folks don’t have a lot of respect for the inner variety as opposed to hard, outside-confirmable “facts,” but each of us occupies an interior reality first and foremost anyway, or so it seems to us. We take in raw sensory data from outside, but what meaning we make of it is surely made by what’s inside. So why is what’s outside necessarily more real? Because it can be part of a wider consensus? How wide a consensus is required for real reality? Any wider than the idea that the Earth is flat, or that the universe is carried on the backs of turtles, or that Whitesnake was a really great band?

We think that what we choose to call consensus or outside reality is made up of several billion individual inside ones, the owners of which (where they share a common language) may agree on words to describe it. But who owns the definitive definitions of those words? Who really understands the qualities they express? Other than “us,” of course—our version of reality is quite evidently superior to anyone else’s. When Count Alfred Korzybski said “The map is not the territory,” he quite evidently meant someone else’s map; ours is the real deal. Isn’t it?

So on we go, creating our worlds by getting outside stuff in and inside stuff out. Artists of all kinds are particularly adept at the latter, and this issue’s batch of Æon authors are no exception. Frank Zappa said “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” We would respectfully disagree with his map of reality, and state for the record our opinion that art is making something out of ourselves and bringing it out from wherever it resides in there. Seven authors, two columnists, and one poet have made something out of themselves for your delight and delectation in Æon Twelve.

John Kratman kicks off this issue with the story of an outsider who dreams of being part of the tribe in “Harry the Crow.”

Next, Lawrence M. Schoen’s hero finds himself on the outside of academia looking in until he meets “Fitzwell’s Oracle.”

Dev Agarwal transports us to a horrifying near-future where the human race have become the ultimate outsiders, or even merely “Toys.”

Sarah L. Edwards tells the story of a young outcast hoping for a new life of belonging with “The Butterfly Man.”

Look inside the hopes and disappointments of an ordinary woman as Lisa Mantchev opens “Her Box of Secrets.”

Then explore inside the mind of a small boy of large talents in David D. Levine’s “Moonlight on the Carpet.”

And rounding out this issue, take a holiday inside the ultimate “gated community” as Katharine Sparrow bids you “Welcome to Oceanopia!”

Multiple award-winning author Bruce Boston contributes two poems that take the reader inside two fantastical possibilities, while our regular columnists provide their usual thought-provoking essays: Dr. Rob Furey fast-forwards to the reign of outsiders inside our insides in the minutes and hours and days after death in “Death Bugs You” (or is that “Death, Bugs, You….”?), and Kristine Kathryn Rusch searches for and finds the heart of the thriller inside modern film and literature.

So come on in out of the cold and get cozy inside the pages of Æon Twelve.

Harry the Crow

John Kratman

“Being a pessimist, I’ve always assumed that places like Yellowstone National Park will eventually be sacrificed to some political convenience or another. Consider the imminent exploitation of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge if you disagree. Being a writer, I wondered if there was a way to save Yellowstone, and given that, reconcile the modern world and the ancient one in a way that would not mean the destruction of the park or the human race.

So I made Harry.

Pretty dark opening for a comedic story, but there it is. Enjoy.”

“A CONSTRUCT IS NO CROW!” Tommy shouted, the ridiculous war bonnet he’d worn to my father’s funeral slipping off his head. He pushed it back with an angry swipe of his hand, glaring at the gathered members of the tribe, daring them to laugh.

“Harry can do everything a man can do,” I said. There were many people in the lodge that I recognized, but there were many more, ghosts of my past, who should have been there and were not. “He can hunt, write poetry, sing a song. He can think and he can feel. I taught him how to shoot and how to track, how to read and how to write. No matter that he sprang from my brain instead of my manhood. He is my son, the only one this old man will ever have. He is a Crow.”

“What can a machine know of tradition and honor?” Tommy asked, his lined face veiled in the shadows cast by the fire. He drew a pipe from his pocket and packed it with angry jabs of his age-spotted hand.

“He knows more of honor than you do, you stupid old fool—to hold a grudge over a woman for twenty years!” He had never forgiven me for that girl, so long ago. I don’t recall her name, but it had been a simple thing: a man, a woman, a bottle, and a cold night. Tommy’s jealousy still rode him like a demon. Stupid to throw away a lifelong friendship over something so small.

Harry chuckled, tucking his six legs beneath him. “It’s not like I’m a Sioux,” His voice was deep and careful, somehow fitting, I thought, for a construct that resembled a clockwork spider. He was almost four feet high with a long neck and a saucer-shaped head dominated by a single eye. I made him from discarded components and the body of a General Mechanics cleandrone. I spent many long hours and plenty of medicine piecing him together on my nights off from the university, back when I dreamed the white man’s dream.

“My father is dead.” I sat back in my chair, sighed, and rubbed my eyes. “The tribe needs a new shaman, and I am here. But my son must stay with me.”

“No!” Tommy’s lips drew back. “I say no.” He looked around for support, and a few of his fellows nodded in agreement.

“You do not speak for everyone here, Tommy,” I said. Long ago I had counted coups with my father and become a chief of the tribe. “If you would refuse Harry, do it for a reason, not over a love affair grown thirty years cold.”

The eldest of the chiefs, my father’s friend Kicks-the-Coyote, spoke. A hundred winters had etched his face into a wrinkled ruin, but his tiny black eyes still shone with wisdom and cunning. “Chester Laughing Crow says the machine has the spirit of a Crow. Let him prove it by counting four coups before summer brings the buffalo back to the valley.”

A murmur ran through the tribe.

“And if Harry fails?” I asked. I wouldn’t stay without my son.

It was Tommy that answered. “Then he leaves this place for good.”

They wouldn’t let Harry stay at the lodge, so we camped on a hill about a mile north. It was cold—damned cold. I had lived in the city too long. But the stars! They shone above Yellowstone valley like nowhere else on the steel and cement-jacketed Earth.

“Maybe we should go back to the University, Pop.” A mechanical hand tipped each of Harry’s six legs. He picked up a stick and poked at the fire. “No one wants me here.”

I rummaged through my pack and took out the pipe my father had left for me. “Heck, no, boy. This is our home.”

Harry nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t sure. “What is counting coup?”

“It is a magical thing.” I watched the fire and felt the years slipping away, back to the time I had counted coup with my father, before my urge to see the modern world had driven a spike between us. “A coup is an act of bravery. By tradition, a brave must count four to be a chief of the tribe and sit in council.”

“You did it?”

“Yes. A long time ago.” A wolf howled in the distance, and one by one her packmates added their own voices until the hills echoed with their call. “My father helped me.”

“What do I have to do?”

“First, you must steal a fine horse from an enemy.” I couldn’t help but smile, thinking of my own first coup—my heart hammering in my chest, the nervous stamp of the horse and the burning heat of its body under me as I rode away, shouting in triumph at the moon.

“Steal a horse? How the heck am I gonna do that?”

I looked down at the pipe and rubbed the scratches that my father and grandfather before me had made. Many generations. Many coups. “I heard Tommy say he was going to Norris tomorrow.”

There’s a window in the back of the lodge that opens in on the tribe’s kitchen. It’s a huge place, the kind of place where they cook enough food to feed an army, every day, three times a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It got hot in there, and most of the time the cooks leave the window open.

I handed Harry a few pills my doctor had given me a while back. “Just drop ’em in the coffee, boy.” I twined my fingers together and knelt to help Harry up.

“I dunno, Pop. You’re sure it won’t hurt him?” He put one of his legs into my hands and I pushed him up toward the window. He doesn’t weigh much—he’s mostly plastic.

“You worry too much. Tommy’s a putz. A cleansing’ll do him good.” I gave him a final heave and his legs scrabbled against the wood siding. Then he was gone.

A few seconds ticked by and he stuck his head out and whispered, “Yeah, but what about everyone else who drinks the coffee?”

“Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke.” I took out my pipe and laughed, thinking that the tribe’s bathrooms were gonna be busy for a while. I took a look in the main dining room’s window. Tommy was still there, tapping his fingers on the table and waiting for his coffee.

“Holy God! What the hell is that thing?” someone cried out from inside. I dropped my tobacco pouch and turned around in time to see Harry leap out the window and over my head.

“Run for it, Pop! They saw me!”

We ran around the corner and I struggled to catch my breath. Harry could move darn fast when he wanted to. “Did they see you spike the coffee?”

“I don’t think so.” Harry craned his neck around the corner to see if anyone was coming. “Doesn’t look like they followed us.”

“All right. Let’s get up to the trail.”

About an hour later, Tommy rode past our campsite, steam shooting from his horse’s nostrils. He was grim-faced and shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. We hid in the brush and watched him pass. There was a lodge in Norris that he visited every week—Kicks-the-Coyote had told me.

He made it about another quarter mile before he stopped, wrapped his reins around a low tree branch, and ran into the woods like a demon was chasing him.

“Well, you see it, boy, go get it. Don’t screw the pooch.” I said, clapping him on his hindquarters.

“It’s a horse, Pop, not a dog,” he said, crawling forward through the brush. The mare smelled him and whinnied, pulling against its reins. I heard a branch snap and the mare galloped off into the woods, stopping a few hundred yards away.

Tommy’s head poked up from the bushes and he shuffled out, his pants around his ankles.

“I see you, you bastard!” he cried, shaking his fist at Harry, who seemed undecided as to what to do next.

I stood up and shouted, “Go, Harry! Go!”

Harry skittered into the clearing and Tommy tried to block his path, tripping over his pants and landing face first in the mud. Harry chuckled and made a series of twenty-foot leaps, landing square in the terrified mare’s saddle. His front two legs reached out and grabbed the reins and his bottom two elongated into the stirrups and pressed against her ribs, steadying her. His middle legs retracted into his torso and he looked almost like a man, ready to ride off into that lonely sunset. The white war paint I had applied to his chassis and to his front sensor array glinted in the failing daylight.

“Aiiiiiiiiyaaaaaaaaa!” He hauled back on the reins, drawing the horse to a stop. He raised his foreleg to me in salute and shot off into the twilight.

Kicks-the-Coyote sent a few men to the campsite later that night to introduce themselves and congratulate Harry on his first coup. They gave him a hand-worked bridle for his new horse. They also brought a bottle and stuck around to help me drink it.

“You should have seen the look on Tommy’s face!” Kicks-the-Coyote’s grandson, Jimmy Redfoot, was an easy man to spot. He was the only fella on the whole reservation with red hair. “All covered in mud and shaking. I’ve never seen that old bastard so pissed!”

“I have.” I took a pull on the bottle and passed it back to Jimmy, smiling so hard it hurt. “Still feels good to burn his britches, though.”

“Why’s Tommy hate you so much, Chester?” Jimmy couldn’t keep his eyes off Harry. He had never been off the reservation, so he had never seen a construct before.

“There’s not much to tell, really,” I said. “We were friends, once. Then there was this girl. She liked me more than him. You get the idea.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, taking another drink. Jimmy’s two friends laughed for some reason I couldn’t fathom. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“What’s the joke?”

“There’s this guy looking for me. Big, mean. Wants to kill me.” Jimmy ran his hands through his orange hair.

“How come?” Harry asked.

One of Jimmy’s friends, I don’t remember his name, answered. “His wife just had a baby.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Red hair?”

Jimmy nodded and took another drink.

“You can’t run away from it,” I said. “You have to go to him, try to work it out. If that doesn’t work, you need to settle it, man to man. That kid is yours—you need to be a part of his life.”

“Hey, Jimmy, he’s gonna be at the Norris dance tonight, with Mabel and the baby,” Jimmy’s friend said, his face mock-serious. “Maybe you can talk to him there.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Me and Harry will go down there with you, talk to him first.”

“We will?” The light from the campfire played across Harry’s sensor array. I had attached a single feather beside his eye to signify his first coup.

“Yep.” I put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “Harry will make sure you don’t get hurt.”

Jimmy looked Harry up and down, apparently unconvinced. He didn’t look all that substantial—just a few bits of metal and plastic cobbled together into a lightweight body. “How’s he going to do that?”

“Don’t worry. Harry has strong medicine.” I smiled.

We finished the bottle and rode to Norris together.

“This lodge was a hotel before Congress ceded Yellowstone to the Crows in 2053,” I told Harry. We looked down at the three-story log building, bathed in the moonlight. Smoke billowed from a number of separate chimneys and the flags of the three tribes ruffled on their poles in the autumn wind.

Jimmy and his buddies went in first, eager to reach the bar, but Harry and I took our time. There were four front doors, set side by side, and they opened into a massive entry hall. The ceiling stretched up three floors and stairways made of lodgepole pine lined the edges. They led to the old guest rooms that now served as living quarters for the tribe.

“Wow!” Harry turned to take in the whole space. It was filled with people. Bars had been set up at the four corners and a huge fire burned in the open-sided fireplace in the center of the room.

“Yeah, it’s something, ain’t it?” I led him to one of the bars and ordered a drink.

“Now what am I supposed to do, Pop?” A number of people caught sight of Harry and stopped, slack-jawed, to stare at him. A few pointed and gradually the noise of laughing and talking wound down to a low murmur.

“Hi, everyone.” I waved and whispered to Harry, “The second coup, boy—you must lead a band of braves in victorious combat, without a loss of life.”

“Combat?”

“Yep, there’s gonna be a fight. Wait and see.”

We didn’t wait long. Little John had been looking for Jimmy for days. He was a huge man, almost as wide as he was tall, his hair woven into two long braids. He bellowed an indistinguishable word and Jimmy burst out of the crowd like a frightened jackrabbit.

“Help!” Jimmy flew behind me and clutched my shoulder.

The crowd parted as if someone had cracked it in two and Little John, his hands twisted into claws, stepped out. His jaw was clenched tight and his face was beet red.

“Go talk to him, boy,” I said. Jimmy was behind me still, trying to fold in on himself and disappear.

“Uh, okay, Pop.” Harry took a step forward. “Excuse me, Mr. Little John, sir?”

The huge man stopped, taken aback at the sight of the strange little machine that stood in his path.

“My Pop says I should talk to you.” Harry looked back at me. I smiled and waved him on.

“Jimmy is my friend and—” He stopped. Little John wrapped his massive hand around Harry’s neck and lifted him into the air.

“Your friend, is he?” He punctuated each rumbling syllable by shaking Harry back and forth. The crowd around the two drew back further.

“Well, yeah.” Harry raised his forelegs so they rested on Little John’s hand.

“He’s going to kill Harry!” Jimmy’s nails were digging through my jacket.

“Nah. Watch.” I reached up and peeled his fingers away from my shoulder. “Harry can take care of himself.”

Long arcs of electricity burst from Harry’s forelegs. Little John screamed and dropped him to the floor. Harry landed on his back and he had to rock back and forth before he was able to struggle to his feet.

“See?” I said. “Cattle prods.”

Little John shook his head and rushed at Harry in a rage. Harry skittered aside and Little John’s hands found nothing but air. “Mr. Little John, can’t we talk about this?”

Little John took another step toward Harry, but stopped, his eye catching sight of Jimmy standing behind me. He smiled, an evil thing, his smile, and stalked toward him, oblivious to the fact that I stood in his way.

The floor of the lodge shook with each of his footsteps and Jimmy pulled at my shoulder. “Chester! Chester, come on! Let’s get out of here.” Little John’s shadow fell over us. It seemed that a grizzly bear stood there, its features blotted out by the great lights behind it—a shadow bear about to maim us both.

“Pop!” Harry jumped on Little John’s head. He grasped his huge chin and pulled it to the side, dragging him to a halt as if he were a horse. “Run for it!”

I smiled and looked over my shoulder at Jimmy. “See? Don’t worry—”

Then I saw him.

Behind Little John, his silly war bonnet still on his head, stood Tommy Longbarrel. He had an old, stag-handled beer mug in his hand and he drew it back to his ear to throw it. “No, Tommy, don’t!”

The heavy mug struck Harry square in the head and he toppled from his perch atop Little John’s shoulders. Jimmy momentarily forgotten, Little John grasped a heavy oaken chair and raised it over his head, intending to smash it down on Harry.

Jimmy brushed past me faster than I could blink. He threw himself at Little John, driving a shoulder into his stomach.

“Ooooof!” The chair fell to the side and splintered. Little John toppled to the floor and Jimmy crawled up his prone body and poked him in the eye. “Ooow!”

Tommy Longbarrel moved closer. He picked up a leg of the broken chair and made his way over to clobber Harry with it.

“Tribal PD!”

Jimmy, Harry, Tommy, and Little John were buried under a pile of police bodies. The party broke up just as it was starting to get good.

The tribal cops had a hell of a time getting Little John into the drunk wagon. He was heavy.

I went to the little jailhouse after them.

“That your construct in there, Chester?” the cop chief asked.

“He’s my son.” I dropped my credit card on the front desk.

“Good looking kid.”

“Thanks.”

“You gonna bail them all out?” the cop asked.

I looked over to the drunk tank. Little John, Harry, and Jimmy had their arms around each other, laughing and hollering. Tommy sat by himself in the corner. The cops had taken his war bonnet.

“Yeah, why not?”

The third coup: A brave must strike an opponent with a coup stick. It took me a while to find him, but I finally located a Sioux close by that Harry could wallop. I mean, yes, he was eighty years old, and yeah, he was in San Francisco, but counting coup on a real live Sioux would give Harry powerful medicine.

So we took Harry’s new horse, which he renamed Nellie, and my old horse, Paint, on the three hundred mile journey from our lodge to the nearest starport in Idaho Falls, Idaho. And from there it was just a quick flight to San Francisco, or Paris, or anywhere in the galaxy, really.

It took us four weeks to get there. I arranged for a couple of friends in town to watch the horses for us while we were gone. Someone might steal them there, but that was to be expected in Crow country; there was always somebody counting coups.

The starport terminal was as anonymous and plain as any I had ever seen. The same white walls, the same courteous constructs, and the same press of people. The only clue to a traveler that he was near the land of the Crow was a couple of guys decked out in feathers hamming it up for the tourists and charging them ten credits a pop for a picture.

I bought two tickets on the shuttle to San Francisco. In just a few minutes, we were there. I gave the address to a uniformed construct at the gate and he hailed an autotaxi for us. “Have a pleasant journey, gentleman.” He held the door of the taxi open and waved as we drove away.

I set the autotaxi to wait for us in front of the seniors’ home. The lobby was painted in soothing pastels and tinny music blasted from hidden speakers. To our left, the sound of muttering oldtimers spilled out of a large common room. A multitude of houseplants of all shapes and sizes filled the place, giving it the appearance of some forgotten jungle, inhabited by wrinkled and sleeping pygmies.

Harry crouched on all sixes. The two feathers he had earned so far hung from his sensor array, and a fresh coat of paint made him look quite fierce. He reached up with his forelegs and I handed him the coup stick, resplendent in the feathers that each of the men of my line had added to it, one at a time. “Take this, my son, and make me proud,” I said. He took it from me with deep reverence.

“Aiyeeeeeeee!” he cried, and sprung down the hall like some fantastically large flea. His eye darted around the room and fell upon a single old man, stoically playing Parcheesi with an even older woman in the false jungle of ferns and spider plants. Silver rings covered both their hands and they had feathers poking here and there out of tired bathrobes. The old Sioux looked up at Harry rushing at him with no more emotion than a bull buffalo regarding a charging rabbit.

Harry touched him on the shoulder with the coup stick. “AIYYYYAH!!!” He shook the stick in the air.

We ran for it, whooping as we went to the front door and toward the taxi.

Behind me, I heard the old man grunt. I caught his eye when I opened the door for Harry and winked at him. He turned back to the old woman.

“Third time this year,” he said. “Damn Crows.”

For the final coup, Harry needed to wrest a weapon from an enemy.

Nobody had stolen our horses while we were in San Francisco, a small miracle in Crow country. It was a long trip back to the lodge so we spent some time grooming and feeding them before we set off.

The weather was cold and our progress was slow. Snow pelted us from time to time and the wind smelled of the coming winter. Thousands of buffalo and a few elk ranged about, looking for the last of the green shoots buried under the snow.

One day we camped by a lake where a few wood ducks splashed about in a small section of unfrozen water. Harry lit a fire with a piece of flint and his knife. I had matches for my pipe, but it was good practice for him. Besides, I’d be damned if my son couldn’t light a fire without a match. When he was finished he came and wrapped a heavy fur about my shoulders.

“Thank you, my son,” I said, putting my hand on his head and leaving it there for a long moment. I gave him a little push away, pointing at the spot opposite me, across the fire.

I lit my pipe and puffed. Harry lit his own, carefully watching me and copying my movements. He had no lungs, but smoking is a good way to clear your head, so Harry did it anyway.

“In the beginning,” I said, pointing the stem of my pipe at the ducks, “the Creator, Old Man Coyote, came upon a group of ducks and asked them, ‘Who amongst you is the bravest?’ One of the ducks came forward and Old Man Coyote said to him, ‘Go to the bottom of that lake and bring up some mud. From it, I’ll see what I can make.’

“So the duck dove in and disappeared. When he had not come up for a long time, the Creator sent the other ducks, one at a time, until the last finally emerged with a bit of mud on its bill.

“Old Man Coyote dried it in his hands, and blew on it. And when he opened his hand, the Crow came forth.

“He taught us how to hunt and kill the buffalo, and how to use each of its parts to make all manner of good things. From the stomach could be made vessels for water, from the hide could be made clothing, from the bones, many tools.

“He told them that he made us few in number, but brave. He said if he made us too numerous, we would destroy the other peoples he created.”

We were silent for a while, smoking. “What happened to the ducks, Pop?” he asked after a time.

“The old stories don’t say. But I can’t imagine that Old Man Coyote didn’t take care and reward them for their bravery,” I said, pointing once more to the frolicking ducks, shaking the water from their feathers. “For who has a better life than ducks? They are at home in the lake, woods, and sky. They live long and travel far, bound to neither rock, stream, nor cloud.”

I closed my eyes and heard the sounds of winter—a songbird in the lodgepole pines, the rushing water of a nearby stream, the wind in my ears, the beating of my own heart. I smelled the good earth and the snow and the droppings of the buffalo.

Harry passed the night in silence and I let him be. He needed a rest from the ramblings of an old man. He needed to let his true self come to the surface, his Crow self. Crow country had a knack for showing a man who he truly was.

It did not matter that Harry was a construct rather than a human being. He was made by me and there is more to fatherhood, to family, to tribe, than mere blood.

The next day the snow fell harder. We stopped to admire a valley painted orange by the sunrise. We looked at the snowcapped mountains, at the buffalo and elk, and at the brilliance of the sun.

“I dreamed of Old Man Coyote last night,” Harry said. I had written dreaming into his programming, fashioned from random bits of his daily experiences and the traditional tales of our people. A few of the people at the university had laughed when I told them of it, but they were blind to many things. Dreams are powerful medicine.

“He told me to stay close to you today, to walk on your right side as we pass through the valley. He said that I would hold an enemy’s weapon in my hands and be a chief of the tribe before the sun sets once more on the land of the Crow.”

“Hmm.” Powerful medicine. “Heed your dream then, son, and walk on your old father’s right hand.”

We rode on, giving the buffalo calves and bulls a wide berth. They don’t like it when men get too close.

We had traveled about ten miles before I heard the shot. A high-pitched whine reverberated from a nearby hilltop. A homing bullet ricocheted off of Harry’s chest plate and struck me in the shoulder, knocking me from my saddle. I hit the frozen earth and felt a bone in my leg snap.

Harry jumped from his horse, our first aid kit in one hand. The buffalo, slowly at first, began to run. Fear spread through the herd like a fever until hundreds of them were thundering across the meadow in a panic. Harry stood over me, the stun guns on his arms crackling. He shocked a couple of bulls that got too close, just enough to send them careening off in a different direction. In a few moments, they had all disappeared into the snow and fog, driving our spooked horses with them.

Harry knelt in front of me and tore my shirt over the bullet wound.

“Ah, it burns,” I said through clenched teeth. “And I think I broke my damn leg.”

“Yep, it’s broke all right,” he said. “Let’s look at the bullet.” His sensor array turned crimson as he switched to thermal-infrared.

“Deflecting off of me must have taken away most of its power. It’s lodged just beneath your skin.”

“Yank the damned thing out of there. Then you’ll need to put a splint on my leg.”

“This is gonna hurt, Pop.” He gave me a hypo full of anesthetic from our first aid kit.

“OK, go on,” I said. The pain began to subside.

His foreleg sprouted a tiny robotic hand designed for fine work. He dug it into the wound and pulled the bullet out. He regarded it for a moment before dropping it into the snow. It burned straight through to the frozen earth beneath.

I looked around the valley, light-headed, trying to see the poacher who was taking pot shots at the buffalo. I knew it was no Crow; we didn’t use those crummy homing rifles. Damned toys. A real man, a Crow, used a real rifle.

And if he wasn’t a Crow he was a poacher. There were people in the world who would pay big money for poached buffalo organs.

“I think I got ’em!” I heard off to the east.

“Pop, they’re coming!”

“Steady, Harry, steady boy. I want you to get out of here. Find the horses.” Our rifles were with the horses.

“I’m not leaving you! These guys could hurt you.”

“That’s why I want you out of here. You’ll be safe and they won’t know you’re here, boy.” I winked at him. “Find the horses. Get your rifle. It’s up to you.”

Harry’s red eye scanned the horizon. He hesitated a moment longer, touched my shoulder with his foreleg, and vanished into the fog.

“Excuse me!” I called. “You got a person up here.” In a moment, I could see them. City folk, three of them, all dressed up like fools for hunting. They were breaking the law by hunting on the reservation, doubly so for hunting our buffalo.

They got closer and I smelled that they were drunk, too.

“Aw, shit! Lookit this! An old Indian geezer. What are you doing out here, old man? Little far from town.” The yahoo was all covered in orange so his drunken buddies wouldn’t accidentally blow his head off.

“Shut up, Fred.” This was from the oldest of the three. “Well, this really complicates things.”

“What’s complicated, Tony? Let’s just leave him.”

“Oh, sure. Now that he’s gotten a good look at us? The cops will be on us like flies on shit.”

“Aw, shit,” Fred said. He pulled a bottle from his pocket and took a pull.

“You boys don’t need to worry about me. I won’t say anything to anyone,” I said in my best old man’s voice. I slipped my hand inside my coat and wrapped my fingers around the staghorn handle of my knife.

Tony turned to the third man, a tall blond fellow with ice blue eyes. He had a high-powered rifle, a real man’s gun. “Well, what do you think, Karl? Do we leave him or what?”

Karl reached over and took the bottle from Fred’s hand. He wiped of the neck and took a long drink. “Kill him. There won’t be nothing but bones left by spring and we’ll be long gone.”

“I’m not gonna kill a helpless old man,” Fred said.

“Shut up, Fred,” Tony said. He took a step forward and raised his crummy homing rifle in my direction.

It was the last thing he ever did.

A rifle cracked somewhere in the fog. It could have been a hundred or a thousand feet away—Harry could shoot a fly in the ass from a mile off. Tony dropped his rifle and clutched his throat. Blood ran from between his fingers. He dropped to his knees and fell face first into the snow.

“Holy shit!” A large wet spot bloomed on the front of Fred’s pants. He dropped his rifle and ran.

Karl dropped onto his belly. He crawled over me and took the clip out of his rifle and inserted another. If the new clip had explosive bullets, it could hurt Harry badly. Karl moved with expert casualness.

“Come out now,” he yelled into the fog. “Or I kill the old man!” He pointed the rifle at me and pulled the bolt back.

“Don’t do it, boy!” I said. “He’s gonna kill me anyway.”

Karl ground the barrel into my nose. “Open your mouth again and you’re dead.”

“All right, mister. Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.” Harry walked out of the fog, forelegs raised toward the sky.

“Jesus Christ! A construct.” Karl took the rifle out of my face and pointed it at Harry as he stood up. “I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but it’s the end of the line.”

He took careful aim at my son. In an instant I buried my knife into his calf. Karl got off his shot before he collapsed and I saw the red disc of Harry’s sensor array shatter into a thousand fragments.

The stun guns on the end of his forelegs erupted with crackling electricity and he jumped with perfect accuracy despite his blindness. He landed on top of Karl and drove the tips into his ribs.

“Aiyyyyaaaahhhhh!” Harry’s scream made me clap my hands over my ears. I could see through my tears that Karl was screaming, too, but I couldn’t hear it.

“Harry! Enough, boy! You’ll kill him.”

I was not sure if he heard me, but after a moment he stopped screaming and pulled the tips of his forelegs away from Karl. He was unconscious and little tendrils of smoke rose from his hair.

“Doesn’t he deserve to die, Pop? He was going to kill you! He was going to kill me. He came here to take our buffalo from us. To kill them—to sell them for money!”

“Enough blood has been spilled today, boy.” I reached over and dragged Karl’s rifle toward me. “Look. You’ve wrested a weapon from an enemy. You’re a chief now!”

“I can’t look, Pop. I’m blind,” he said.

“Well, we’ll fix that when we get back to the lodge. I’ll be your eyes for now.” The horses wandered over to us after a while and Paint stuck her nose in my face, anxious to get a move on.

“What about him?” Harry asked, kicking Karl in the ribs. His eye was gone, but there was nothing wrong with his memory. He had a perfect image of his surroundings based on the picture in his mind of just before Karl shot him.

“Drag him over here.”

I reached over, ignoring the reawakening pain in my shoulder and leg, and untied his bootlaces. I tied them together and held them out to Harry, touching his forelegs with them.

“Throw these up in the tree, Harry.”

He wound up and threw them toward the highest branches.

“The clueless son of a whore should be able to climb up there and get them before he freezes to death. And he’ll think twice before he comes back to the Crow Nation,” I said. “Get my knife. Shoot some fleshfoam into his wound and wrap a bandage around it, Harry.”

“All right, Pop.”

I must have fallen asleep after that, because when I woke up my leg was splinted and Harry had me in front of him on his horse. Either his GPS was still working or Nellie knew the way home.

I limped into the great hall of the lodge, my hand on Harry’s head. A hush fell over the gathered members of the tribe. The lights were dim and a fire burned low in the hearth. The tribal chiefs sat in a half circle before the fire, each dressed in their finest clothes. Harry and I stopped in the center of the crescent. My leg still ached from the regeneration unit.

Four feathers were tied to Harry’s new sensor array. In his forelegs he carried the automatic rifle he had taken from Karl in the valley. Jimmy had given him a painted leather bag, and he wore it hung across his back. He stepped forward a few paces and laid the gun gently on the hand-woven rug.

Tommy Longbarrel stood up and hefted the rifle, his face as impassive as a stone. He turned it over in his hands. “Humph.” He gave it to Kicks-the-Coyote who passed it to his right without looking at it.

“Tell us the tale of your coups,” he said.

“I stole the horse of my enemy,” Harry said, and he told the tale of the laxatives and the horse and the broken branch.

“I led a band of braves in victorious combat,” he said and he told the story of the great battle at the lodge and the triumph of an enemy beaten and befriended.

“I smote my enemy with a coup stick.” And he told them of San Francisco and the Sioux and Parcheesi.

“I wrested a weapon from the tribe’s enemies.” Harry pointed at the gleaming black rifle and told them tale of the ducks and the bullet that burned through the snow and the boots hanging in the tree.

When he finished the telling, Harry stepped back and sat at my feet, his six legs folded beneath him.

A great silence once again filled the hall.

The chiefs looked at Tommy and he met each of their gazes, one at a time. No one spoke.

Tommy looked at the floor, his chin in his hand.

“I say a machine is no Crow.” He fixed me with an icy stare. Then an amazing thing happened, a thing I had not seen in over thirty years: a smile cracked his face. “But this is no machine. This is the son of Chester Laughing Crow.”

A thunderous cheer shook the hall.

The booze went to my head and I stepped outside to get some air. The moon was full and inky purple shadows danced on the snow. A coyote padded at the edge of the woods, vanishing and reappearing like a spirit. The party was in full swing and loud voices, muffled in the night stillness, rose and fell from inside.

My head was buzzing nicely and I smiled, truly happy—for myself, for Harry, for Tommy.

The click of one of the lodge’s many doors made me turn. Bright light spilled out into the night, cutting the shadows like a knife. The noise of the party rose for a brief instant then fell when the door was shut again.

Harry stepped out into the moonlight. I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped without knowing why. Instead of calling out, I stepped back into the shadows.

Harry took the leather bag from his shoulder and took out something I could not quite see. He drew back one of his forelegs and a dark shadow spun from his outstretched hand to land a hundred feet away in the thick snow of the wood.

Harry looked around, but he didn’t see me. He turned and went back into the lodge, shutting the door quickly behind him. I limped up the hill. The snow was up to my waist when I reached the hole in the snow.

I reached down into the hole and felt something hard and bumpy. I grabbed it and pulled it out, my fingers almost frozen. It was a pair of hunting boots, the ones I’d told Harry to throw into the tree. I stared at them for a long time, oblivious to the cold.

It had never really occurred to me before, but perhaps I had wrought too well. My son was human. Somewhere in Lamar Valley, under a few feet of snow, the bones of his enemy lay.

Fitzwell’s Oracle

Lawrence M. Schoen

“About twenty-five years ago, in the last days of the summer before my first semester of graduate school, a metaphor popped into my head. I rolled it around a bit, and wrote it up for the last issue of the university’s newspaper before the new term. For whatever reason, they took it and printed it, despite the unflattering implications of the metaphor. My advisor wasn't amused by my ‘editorial,’ but let it slide. Mercifully I don't believe any of the other departmental faculty ever read it, or if they did they hadn’t yet learned my name and didn’t associate it with me. If any of them read this story, well, it’s too late to take away my doctorate anyway. And besides, it’s Fitzwell’s metaphor now.”

H E FOUND “CASSANDRA” JOHNSON slumped at the end of the bar of a hotel lounge on the city’s south side. She didn’t look like an oracle, but what did one look like anyway? Fitzwell almost walked back out, right at that moment. Then he remembered the stony faces of the tenure review committee and how they’d sneered at his feeble preliminary application. If he didn’t do something then he’d already lost. At thirty-five, he’d already been denied tenure at two other universities. No matter how well his students rated him, he wasn’t quite playing the game right. The ivory tower continued to elude him. He needed a new perspective, and his desperation had led him here.

She sat swirling a thin red straw through the icy clumps of a half melted strawberry margarita. Fitzwell figured her for about nineteen, and either the bartender didn’t care or couldn’t tell. Fitzwell could tell. He knew nineteen, saw it every day at the university, endless variations of sophomores stumbling through his classes. She was slender, with flowing ringlets of dirty blonde hair that turned her plain face into something vaguely pretty. Her nose was crooked, and reminded him inexplicably of something out of Hemingway, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. She wore one of those ubiquitous black cocktail dresses, shorter than most, revealing long, toned legs. She turned slowly as he eased onto the adjacent stool, and as she looked him over he realized her eyes were different colors, one blue and one green.

“You want a metaphor,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve come for a vision, but you don’t want prophecy, you want a metaphor, a different way of looking at your situation, to help you shape the future.”

Fitzwell nodded, “Something like that. I don’t believe in oracles. I’m not that gullible.”

“But you believe in hookers? That’s kind of funny, Professor.”

He froze. “You know me?”

She nodded. “I had you for Freshman Lit last semester. Is that a problem for you? Don’t tell me you never banged a student.”

He had of course, but that wasn’t the point. He looked at her more closely, trying to place her, and failed. He’d taught two sections of the lecture course last term, each with more than three hundred students. He’d personally met only a couple dozen during office hours, and left most of the one-on-one to his graduate teaching assistants.

“Sorry, it’s a large class. I don’t remember you.”

He saw laughter twinkle in her blue eye. The green eye gleamed with seriousness.

Cassandra laughed. “Don’t worry about it. For what it’s worth, I liked it. Way too much reading for my taste, but you made it really interesting. Not a lot of professors bother to do that. So, anyway, it will cost you five hundred.”

“Five hundred? That seems pretty high for this.”

She shrugged. “A hundred for the hotel, four hundred for the vision. I’m throwing in the fuck for free ’cause you taught me about Keats and that Byron guy. That was way cool.” She pushed the margarita away from her and slid off the stool. “Come on, let’s get you your metaphor.”

He followed her through the lobby and up to a third floor room. It was a nicer hotel than he’d expected, the kind of place he’d stayed at plenty of times during conferences and out-of-town trips. She hung up his coat after locking the door and waited for him to count out the five hundred. Then she led him over to the bed.

He couldn’t look at her. His gaze kept fixing on other things: the clock radio, the mini-bar, the crappy painting bolted to the wall. Paying for sex didn’t make him feel powerful like he’d imagined. He felt foolish instead. You’re not paying for sex, he told himself, you’re here because she’s an oracle. But he didn’t really believe, did he?

“You want tenure that bad?”

Her voice shattered his uncertainty, startling him.

“What? How did you—”

She smiled with just the corners of her mouth and pointed to the side of her head. “Oracle, remember? Tapping into the cosmos takes work, but picking up stray surface thoughts is easy, especially when someone’s broadcasting as strongly as you are. Anyway, is tenure that tough? That competitive? That you’d come to me?”

He flushed. “You—you came recommended. By a colleague in another department.”

Cassandra chuckled. “Oh, right, the chemist. Travalero, right? Kind of makes me wish I’d took some science classes. He got his grant?”

Fitzwell nodded. “One NSF reviewer called it the most original thinking he’d seen in decades.”

She winked. “I give good oracle. Now, let’s work on your problem.” She shrugged, tossing her hair back over one shoulder, and did something to her dress that caused it to slip from her body and pool at her feet. Her hands moved behind her back and her bra came free. She smiled at him again and stepped up to him, wearing only her panties. Her fingers glided over the buttons of his shirt, and she began to undress him.

Fitzwell put all thoughts of prophecy away and joined in removing his clothes. When he was naked she knelt in front of him, grasped his cock with one hand and closed her lips over the head, lightly stroking and sucking him until he was hard. Then she rose, peeled off her underwear, and led him to the bed. He positioned himself between her thighs and with barely a caress of foreplay slid into her.

She moaned; real or feigned, Fitzwell couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He lost himself in the feel of her, the rhythm of her body, the smell of her skin. He moved within her and it felt like no other woman he’d been with, a sensation beyond simple pleasure, nothing like sex at all. He felt whole, complete, at peace.

Cassandra nibbled his left ear and whispered, “Are you ready?” Her eyes rolled back into her head, just the whites showing. Her skin grew hot. Her voice dropped an octave and she hissed “Academia is a liquor store.”

Fitzwell’s bliss dissolved into simple lust. He shook his head without disturbing his pace. “What?”

She giggled up at him, her skin merely warm now, her voice and eyes normal again. “That’s your metaphor. Swirl it around a while, you’ll see.”

A liquor store? Fitzwell grimaced as he kept fucking. A liquor store? And yet, it made sense. It all fell into place. The university was just so much alcohol, each department just a different kind of booze. The administration was brandy, the provost and president nothing more than bottles of cognac. The business school was gin. The engineering school was scotch. In his mind’s eye he surveyed the various departments of the college of arts and sciences and saw every variety of distilled spirits: vodka in biology, tequila in psychology, on and on, until he envisioned himself walking through the halls of his own department’s building and saw Irish whiskey all around him.

“I’m a fifth,” he grunted to Cassandra.

She responded with a faint moan and nodded encouragingly. “A fifth?”

“A fifth of Irish whiskey. Untenured. At tenure you become a quart. Those old bastards who have been around forever are even larger bottles, aged in oak casks, smooth and smoky.”

Cassandra giggled, wrapping her legs more eagerly around him. “What else?”

“My TAs, they’re…they’re like those little bottles you get on airplanes. They have just enough learning to know they’re whiskey. Not a lot, little more than a taste, but whiskey just the same. That’s all grad students are, all of them, they’re just those tiny little bottles.”

He rode her faster now, harder, his passion mirroring his newfound insight.

“What else? What else?” She gripped him more tightly.

“Tenure…I understand it now.” He gasped, it was so close, so real. “It’s not ‘publish or perish’ at all. Tenure is just mixed drinks.”

“Mixed drinks?” Cassandra was panting now. “Tell me!”

“Tenure is making a new drink, a cocktail, with the departmental liquor as the main ingredient. Then you serve it to the tenure review committee, and if it knocks them on their asses, you get tenure!”

“Go on, go on,” she was screaming now. “Finish it!” Her nails clawed his back.

“Undergraduates…”

“Yes?”

“Seniors are bottles…juniors individual cans…sophomores are six packs…”

“What? Cans?”

“Beer. Undergraduates are nothing more than beer!”

With the last word he came, pushing into her with one final thrust as the metaphor gripped him, squeezed him, wrung him dry, and his world view altered for all time. The old imposing, impenetrable, unscalable castle wall of academia had transformed. Every barbican, every portcullis, that he had built up in his mind, that stood between him and his goal of tenure, crumbled and collapsed. A new metaphor held sway. Those lofty ivory towers, so impossible to climb, had been replaced by fluorescent-lit store aisles and row upon row of labeled bottles.

And Fitzwell understood booze. He knew his way around a liquor store, and realized that by extension he knew how to make the university give him what he wanted: tenure. Laughing helplessly, he collapsed onto her, all his fears vanishing with new understanding. He rolled off her and lay on his back staring blankly at the ceiling. So simple, a liquor store, a cocktail, beer. Tenure would no longer be a problem. The solution was obvious to him now, effortless.

“You okay?” Cassandra asked.

“Yeah, yeah, fine. Thanks.”

“Be right back,” she said, and vanished into the bathroom. A few minutes later she walked back in. Fitzwell enjoyed the sight of her, naked as she crossed the room and squatted to open the mini-bar. She took out a can, popped the top, and took a long drink. Then she glanced at him over her shoulder, blue eye twinkling again, green eye serious. “You want a beer?”

“No thanks,” he said, smiling, wondering what it would take to make her green eye twinkle as well, and trying to remember some lines from Keats. “I just had one.”

Toys

Dev Agarwal

“A starting point for this story was the term ‘pockets of resistance.’ I first saw that phrase in a Michael Moorcock novel I read in India as a child. Long after I understood the term, I began thinking how grim it might be to be overwhelmed by your enemy but with just enough soldiers around you to have to keep fighting.

The protagonist, Rebecca, kept growing till she became one third of a novel about the Salusa set during the aftermath of the war.”

S HE CROUCHED IN A long, smooth trench with soldiers to her left and right. The trench ran through a housing project that had been hit by something early on—the giant fist of a screamer or a pillar-of-fire. Concrete chunks the size of cars littered its streets.

The Salusa had bombed first, then attacked with huge land machines and subsurface burrowers whose tunnels ran for miles and miles, exposing Mannheim’s underside. Man-made drains and cellars and jumbled fibre-optics gaped within the channel’s smooth bore. They looked clumsy and misshapen compared to the tunnels’ flawless curves. The tunnels wound through Mannheim like the arc of a circle of infinite length.

Hiding inside this one, Rebecca stood face to face with the war. She had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. She’d fought to be ringside, front row. What she’d got was raw sewage and vivid injuries and her bowels loose with fear. She was trapped behind the enemy’s lines, too scared to sleep, suffocating under an endless, sickening noise.

Salusan engines churned through her. Their drone and pitch shook her body and burned her head with migraine.

Rebecca had never seen any of the machines up close. They were just black shapes in the air, or giant pyramids shaking the city apart as they rumbled on the horizon. But she knew what they were. They were Salusan warmachines—all trying to kill her.

Rebecca tried to keep busy. She tagged her latest dispatch, Deep War. Her inbuilt hardware was junk in the Salusa’s dampening field, but she was still writing. She pictured her ’ware’s yellow graffix in her mind.

Rebecca’s boyfriend Bernie had said, “You go to Germany, all you’ll get is a hundred UN jocks talking sports cars, football, and you onto the nearest flat surface.” Bernie couldn’t see the romance of a foreign war. He was an image consultant for JAL suborbital.

To Bernie, history was a fashion accessory and fashions came and went with eye-blink speed. Cyberspace had opened the planet like an x-ray, irradiating every corner and shadow of the globe. But what people found with the whole world open to them was that they needed someone else to tell them what it meant.

Rebecca was a face—both critic and reporter. She was the guiding interface between virtual experience and the vast global audience. Faces like Rebecca Miller travelled Business Class, sifting world culture and packaging it into simple, intense hits of sensation.

The hottest trend for thirty years had been the Salusa. They were marvels. American and Japanese labs developed them from human DNA and kinked them for super intelligence. They had been vatgrown servants to humanity in the wars on poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. They were also man’s indentured servants, his corporate slaves.

In the warzone, Rebecca worked on her second Pulitzer. It was an award for a world she hoped was still there to return to, somewhere beyond the unwavering drone of the Salusa at war.

An hour later and the thudding syncopation of the engines drained away in one long sonorous hum. The Salusa had switched off the noise. The silence slammed Rebecca till she stumbled and fell. The soldiers were on their knees too, gagging and spitting. Someone was vomiting—and that meant Rebecca could hear their heaving grunts. The soldiers nearest her were smiling at the sound—at any sound—teeth bright in their camouflage paint as they helped her up. Rebecca breathed the sharp, cold air, enjoying the silence.

Eventually, the unit’s Major summoned her. She scuttled, head down against snipers, to his command post.

Major Belgo held his command in a square where four housing projects had once met. The remains of apartment blocks carpeted the ground in broken bricks.

The Major sat with his sergeants, Saul and Tate, while the unit’s medic inspected a wound on his head. The soldiers had painted their faces till they resembled stylised Apaches. The designs were all unique—emerald ziggurats, butterfly wings, and yin-yang symbols. They were strictly non-reg, but Rebecca had decided Belgo knew what he was doing, bonding the men through their belief in warpaint.

“We have a sighting, a klick to our whisky,” Belgo said, seeming to enjoy his own jargon. He was a small man, stone bald, with large, striking blue eyes.

“More nulls?” she asked.

“Salusa. On foot.” He was Belgian and spoke English with the precision of a second language. “We will be moving to reconnaissance them and re-establish contact with Fox company, then pass our intel back to UN Command. Are you able to go forward with the advance party?”

She nodded, too vain to admit her fear.

“Corporal Miller, then,” Belgo said. He smiled and his dull-eyed men laughed dutifully.

“Cool. I got rank,” Rebecca said.

“Battlefield promotion.” Sergeant Andy Saul walked over. He slipped his kevlar helmet off. Beneath it he wore a gold earring and a bandanna torn from a piece of parachute silk. The silk flowed over his head like an old flatscreen movie star’s desert headress.

Behind him, Belgo twinged as the female medic slapped a glistening worm of sealant onto his skull.

Belgo’s eyes met Rebecca’s. “My men—each of them knows he is going to die. He accepts this as fact. Do you?”

Rebecca blinked, unprepared. “No.”

Belgo nodded. She’d given a good answer. “You are unsure of yourself. Unseated from your role as voyeur, yes?”

She was on surer ground now with this old argument and said nothing.

The British sergeant—Tommy Tate—looked up from working the moving parts on his machine gun. He had a thick, unpleasant face and sticky, hostile eyes.

“I am in the business of protecting my people,” Belgo was saying. “I cannot want unsure, confused people unseating me from my objectives.” He allowed his words to linger while the female medic, Roper, settled his helmet over his bruised head. A building without an outer wall hung behind them. Its second story, Rebecca noticed, was a bedroom. The floor bowed in a drunken “V,” as if the weight of its queen bed had grown too huge for it.

Belgo wiped a greasy thumb over the lenses contoured into his helmet. The pop-down night vision, comm channels, and antilaser flash were all useless now.

“The Salusa scrambled our tactical displays. Their weapons are more sophisticated. Our force is cut off, surrounded and the inferior in size. But we will succeed.” He nodded, emphatic. “We will, because every member of Dog company is an asset—must be an asset to one another.” He glanced at Saul and the sergeant approached, swinging his carbine up.

The unit only had projectile weapons. Dependable, twentieth century tech that the Salusa couldn’t fuck with through their damping field.

“Hey, Daisy.” Saul only ever called her Daisy, and appeared to have no idea of her real name. “Do that up now,” he said in drawling SoCal. He began zipping up her flak jacket. His hand pressed her breast indifferently.

Belgo talked over Saul’s shoulder. “Your cyberspace implants are disabled, but you have surgically perfect vision. I need you to forward-observe the enemy and see what he is doing.”

In the army, Rebecca had learned, the commander’s orders were the voice of God. For all any of them knew, he was the last officer left in Mannheim.

Rebecca’s stomach tightened with fear.

Seeing her flinch, Saul said, “Daisy, you shoulda stayed home, you didn’t wanta get yo’self killed.”

Rebecca laughed nervously.

“This ain’t VR over here, don’t you know.” Saul’s eyes wrinkled, assessing her as a dilemma he had to fix for the unit. The whole squad watched. Rebecca laughed again and said she knew that. Tommy Tate laughed as well, but at her, in a sarcastic bark.

Saul smiled and slapped her flak jacket. And the unit all saw that he had nothing else to say if she wouldn’t listen.

Rebecca was travelling down a gentle left-hand curve. The air was mausoleum-cold, but devoid of the bone numbing wind that raced above ground.

Rebecca sat in the back of a flatbed truck, crowded with silent Germans. They were rolling down and round in an empty never-ending curve. Always turning left, with the truck’s headlights bouncing on sloping concrete. There was no sense of space, just endless grey on grey. They were turning and turning till the world could tip and spill her into a silent colourless ocean.

The Salusa had attacked as soon as the unit pulled out of the trench. She had been crouching beside Saul and a young black soldier called Drucker. Someone tripped a sonic screamer and two grunts burst apart like an exploding butcher’s shop.

As the soldiers scattered, Rebecca panicked, rearing up and kicking Drucker away. Then the next she knew, she was flat on her face, mouth numb with the impact. She didn’t even feel the explosion that knocked her down.

The Salusa got her. Not the actual, genuine article, but their slaves. The nulls, as Belgo’s men called them.

Now fear dug a fist through her gut.

Small tears had frozen in her eyes. They stung in the slipstream as the truck sped on. The descent finally levelled out and they burst into a vast cavern. It was the size of an aircraft hanger, with a distant ceiling lit by giant strip lights.

The Germans spoke softly among themselves. They were stoic on their way to the Salusa, or perhaps they didn’t know what awaited them. Without her inbuilt ’ware, Rebecca didn’t have a German lexicon and was helpless.

The automated truck pulled to a stop by one wall and parked itself beside a bulky cuboid shape. There were nulls waiting for the truck. Their footsteps stumbled as they came out of the shadows—a whole forest of them. The nulls were clumsy from poor depth perception and damaged motor control. But their faces were peaceful, with none of the cares of Belgo’s men.

The prisoners were herded off the truck by the mob of nulls dressed in the clothes that the Salusa had found them in. She was roughly jostled by men in soiled denim and Dior suits, and by women in uniforms of delivery girls and waitresses.

They had all been human once, till some machined process stamped Salusan grafts through their temples. Now they were nulls. The ultimate slave labour. They worked without complaint through frostbite and injuries and starvation, hunting rogue humans with clubs improvised from railing spikes and knives of broken glass.

They were the Salusa’s own army and their minds were mush.

A light rose in the far distance and approached in silence. It grew in a widening bubble, becoming diffuse at its edges. In the endless dark yard, she couldn’t tell if it was tiny or huge, floating or rolling. The globe shifted, elongating sideways, and raced towards her. It became the headlights of an electric jeep that pulled in by the other side of the shadowed cube.

Two men climbed out, their movements within the vast chamber miniscule and dainty.

Something in their walk, or their cowled, monkish tunics told Rebecca’s hindbrain that they were Salusa before conscious thought caught up. One was hidden behind an LCD visor while the other’s face was baby-smooth, his small features set around two stunning black eyes. She’d almost forgotten that: Salusan eyes were black tunnels, devoid of any whiteness.

Rebecca’s teeth chattered, the fear coming hard. She wanted to disappear, to evade the Salusa’s searing attention.

The visored Salusan strode along the line of prisoners. His hand twitched, selecting here, here and here.

He stopped in front of Rebecca. He hadn’t stopped before. His visor was a gentle convex, moulding to the face within. The blue surface burned with alphanumerals. He jabbed his fingers at her, marking her as well, then he stepped back to his companion. They spoke together, their voices filled with slithering, nonsense words. “Retam ca kasser arir nir paredispo shangalis.”

It was more than a code—they had their own language now.

They spoke on and on, she didn’t know for how long. But while they talked no one was doing anything to her. Rebecca stood with the other prisoners, docile and not daring to move. She could barely even look about her. She’d been chosen. What did that mean? She had been a face in her other life. Her job had been to find out what was going on. With an act of will, she looked at the machine in the shadows of the wall. It was huge, three times the height of the nulls beside it, and fashioned from black alloy. But she had no idea what it did, what it meant.

The Salusa had stopped talking. They walked to their car, their feet silent in fur-lined moccasins. Everything about them was controlled and hushed. When they sped away in their jeep, its wheels ran softer than their voices in the smooth chamber. The nulls closed on the prisoners. They pulled out the four people that the Salusa had selected. Rebecca didn’t resist. Something blurred within her. It was the distinction between what was happening and what she wanted. With just the smallest shift she was a child again, celebrating New Year during Rosh Hashanah, bored but safe. An animal instinct within her knew that she might live an extra minute by cooperating with the nulls.

The machine woke. The cube hummed with a familiar vibration. It was the deep drone that had sunk through her body for the last four days. A null switched on a halogen light and a wonky vertical of buttery light flooded the chamber. It fixed the captives like museum exhibits.

The nulls bundled a German into a man-sized port in the cube’s face. He shouted with a high, choked noise, too scared to scream. The machine’s hum deepened—the cube grew dark and more intense. And Rebecca was no longer safe. She was trapped on the wrong side of her story.

When the man staggered free she knew what the machine was for. It was an abattoir, amputating humans from their ability to think. But it was also a birth factory. The Salusa fed you to their cube, hitting each struggling, crying patient with a burst of surgery to the frontal lobes. In the machine, humans were just larvae for the Salusa to nurture. They were killing humanity to hatch something new. The man was now a null.

As the next man was forced inside, fear gripped Rebecca at last. The cube had ripped open both her denial and sense of self. She wasn’t a face. She was its victim.

“Down, Daisy.”

She turned and a wall of sound smashed against her. Belgo’s men were racing through the chamber. Bright ‘X’s leapt from the machine gun in Tate’s hands as he ran forward, his eyes excited in his painted face.

Null bodies slammed over, vomiting blood and writhing as they died. A man in a suit bludgeoned her. She struck the concrete floor face down and pain bit her mouth.

Rebecca’s ears rang with echoing gunfire.

“Easy. It’s over now,” Andy Saul said, drawing her upright. Her legs wouldn’t take her weight. Her knees refused to work. Saul kept his grip on her elbow. He was saying, “Easy, easy,” and soothing her as Belgo strode past. The Major shouted orders, his voice raised but calm. His troops fanned out. Someone set the halogen flood upright and bathed the Salusan cube in its ambient light. Without new instructions, the nulls were happy to stand by, unresisting before the soldiers.

The tall medic, Roper, was having trouble checking her comrades for wounds—everyone’s fatigues were caulked with crud. She saw Rebecca and tossed over a water bottle in passing.

Belgo stopped beside Rebecca. He nodded politely but his eyes were already sliding past her, onto the next task.

“Two of them were here. The Salusa.” Rebecca spoke fast, eager to please.

“When did this happen?” Belgo asked, his blue stare attentive now.

“They left ten minutes ago—maybe.” She pointed into the vault’s shadow. “In a Jeep.”

“Staff sergeant, move us out. Drucker, Tate, attend to this, please.” He pointed his carbine at the Salusan cube.

“How’d you get here?” Words bubbled out of Rebecca. One moment she’d faced the Salusa, the next she was back inside Belgo’s precarious safety.

“What?” Tate said with instant belligerence. “Y’ain’t ’appy to see us?” He snapped an angular magazine box onto his machine gun. Rebecca forced herself to clamp down and stay quiet.

Saul smiled, but his eyes didn’t carry any warmth. They were ancient in his wrinkled face. He slid his helmet from his bandannad head. “You’re a lucky lady.” He straightened the lank silk over a purple scar on his neck.

“Lot of null traffic comin’ here, Daisy. We were followin’ it.” He set his helmet on her head and tapped it hard. “Keep it down an’ stay beside me, now.”

Tate and Drucker wrecked the Salusan machine. Drucker had a sapper’s tool of interlocking plastic blades as long as his forearm. There was no way to turn the cube off, or to get the man inside out, so they didn’t bother. They just hacked and tore till the sculpted facia cracked open and spewed millions of sticky white fibres.

“There’s a guy in there,” Rebecca said. “Trapped.”

But no one was listening. Instead, the soldiers carried on stomping the elegant, vicious machine.

Saul chased the Germans away. Without bothering to speak, he shooed them like a farm hand scaring off turkeys.

“What’s that about, eh?” Tate said.

He didn’t look Rebecca’s way, but he didn’t have to. Why chase these useless civilians away and continue to carry her?

“’Cause we are definitely expectin’ rain,” Saul said, turning round. “Get this done an’ we’re back in the war. Sergeant.” His manner stayed dangerously easy. But he stared a moment longer than necessary, waiting for Tate’s objection. They were muscular blue-collar guys sizing each other up.

In response, Tate was stonily silent.

“You’re walkin’ point,” Saul said.

Tate still said nothing, but the look he gave Rebecca promised a reckoning.

Grunting with effort, Drucker carried on working alone, levering with his cutting tool till something vulnerable broke within the cube.

The power went off and the nulls went crazy. Screaming and outraged, they ran into the walls or smashed their heads on the concrete floor. The unit crouched in a single organic movement, their weapons ready.

“No firing,” Belgo said. “Leave them. Move us out.”

The soldiers backed out of the cavern. Perhaps in relief or hysterics, Drucker started giggling. His laughter echoed and bounced around them as the nulls drummed the floor with their broken hands and chewed their mouths bloody.

Above ground, the war waited. Rebecca wanted to see the stars, but all she found was a skyline of highstacks that resembled shattered teeth, flickering with ghostly blue flames.

Tommy Tate led them through the wasteland. He walked out in front, untiring and friendless.

Roper nudged Rebecca on. Rebecca stumbled over fist-sized masonry and a stagnant lake of sewage that soaked her boots. This was a patrol in war, walking dazed and exhausted. Rain began falling, gritty and weak. Rebecca jerked awake only when the soldiers glimpsed two Salusa and snapped off gunshots.

“Fuckin’ ghosts,” Roper said. Rebecca wondered if these Salusa were the ones from the underground chamber. They slipped through the jigsaw puzzle wreckage, never graspable, never quite there. The azure sheen of their devices winked as they popped in and out of sight.

“The enemy denies us vital confrontation,” Belgo said, as if his announcements controlled these skirmishes.

They walked for five hours through permanent night. The air was dust-laden yet carried an alpine sting. Each accidental graze bit sharply into Rebecca’s hands.

“Where the fuck,” Rebecca heard someone say. “The fuck is Fox company?”

Rebecca struggled to recall that Belgo’s unit was part of Dog company, and there was a plan, however unlikely, to unite with Fox and Charlie.

If there were no soldiers, there were plenty of people here. The unit had followed the Salusa into a pocket of dead Mannheimers. The Germans were scorched in apartments that had turned into glassine cells from the intense heat of orbiting pillars-of-fire.

Beside these tall, slick coffins, the city rose in a vast cliff of wreckage. Staring at the tide of burning ruins, Rebecca found it was like watching a bad tv set, or doing VR with really good weed. It was all so distant. She grew firm with the need to do her job. She could prove that it could be done, even in the inferno of the Salusa’s fury. She’d had some vague idea about her own Jewish heritage and coming to Germany, but really that was just a quirk in her background. She was here because of the Salusan technological revolution.

Each Salusan breakthrough had been a faster, longer high than any in history. Humanity’s teeming billions were a single junkie, chasing their next hit.

She’d heard a piece of advice, back in the day when it was illegal to buy drugs from a street entrepreneur. “When going to buy dope, don’t take a weapon with you. If you don’t trust the guy, then don’t buy from him.”

Stunningly obvious, but it had meant nothing to her. Now in Mannheim, she saw what happened when the whole world did both—never trusting, but always buying.

A heatbox sprang alight before them. Its blinding matrix shredded the nearest soldier. Rebecca and Saul dropped into a ditch as the weapon’s glow irradiated a smashed Deutsche Bank building.

The Salusa made so many toys for us, Rebecca thought. These are just more of them.

She almost laughed, pressed into Saul’s armoured chest, but couldn’t quite manage the effort.

Belgo rallied the men to him as nulls attacked from four directions at once, their railing spikes a forest of Zulu spears. Belgo and Saul were both on one knee, taking slow, aimed shots. But the tide of bodies overran them and Tate had to pull the nulls off Rebecca. He drove a serrated bayonet through a man’s belly, then butted another into submission. Tate stood astride the dying null as his entrails slopped in a blue and red trail between his boots. The soldier had saved her, yet his dark eyes were barely interested.

The null army moved on, sweeping past the unit with as little control as a riot.

Above them, a pillar-of-fire broke out of the thunderheads and lanced the earth. Its flame cut the sky with eerie silence. The light narrowed and narrowed, brightening all the while, till it was a sliver of blue magnesium. The squad stared upwards, their painted faces turned into stark masks. The flame bent and bent again, the Salusa having learnt to play with the laws of light itself.

Far above the unit came a doleful moaning—a dragon bellowing its challenge through the air.

Drucker stepped up to Belgo. “Roper got hit, sir. She’s gone.” He tipped his helmet back, his forehead wet with sweat.

“Ah.” Belgo’s voice was soft. Rebecca thought that he shared her awe at the sight of the Salusa at war. But really it was sarcasm that she heard. “Protect your medic at all costs.” His control was slipping as his men kept dying.

Saul said, “Major. We should have linked with Fox by now. Or found their stragglers. So far squat, sir.”

“Do we pull back?” Rebecca said without thinking. She winced before Belgo’s answering glare.

“Hell no, Daisy.” Saul calmly broke the tension. “Salusa’s prob’ly got a shitload of ordnance in our rear.”

“Sergeant,” Belgo said, loading that word with annoyance and renewed determination. “Inform the men. These two Salusa have evaded us. We will press on to the emergency coordinate for UN Command.”

Rebecca understood what Belgo was doing. He had a plan, and another behind that. He would have yet more plans, even if he and Saul had to make them up as they went along. Each plan—no more likely to succeed than its predecessor—was a vision, a promise to his men that they could resist the Salusa.

“You still need today’s bite, yes?” Belgo waited for Rebecca’s dutiful nod.

Belgo’s men picked through the rubble, staying close. They were more nervous now, as they tried to disengage from the Salusa. Except Tommy Tate, who volunteered to walk point. Tate was becoming something Rebecca had heard of from other wars—the lucky grunt. He was awesome in his violence and the unit invested him with their fortune. They needed to believe that Tate would carry them safely on. The Salusa had everything else, so humanity would have superstition and luck.

Belgo said, “Ms Miller, shall I tell you what I know of the Salusa?” His eyes were reddened in his painted face.

“We are a man standing on the bridge—the one in San Francisco. We do not want to jump. But simultaneously we cannot resist, yes? The ground sways beneath our feet. The wind sings all about us. We see air between our toes and we could do it. Just a step, just swinging over a fence and off. Falling, we would be free. We are frozen though—not taking the step, not refusing it. Mannheim.” His hand barely moved to capture the wreckage and blackened sky. “This is our bridge. We cannot let the Salusa go, but we can no longer live by their side.”

She got it all, even without active ’ware. It wasn’t Pulitzer quality yet, it needed work to take out the refinements—wind sings about us, falling, we would be free—to make it suitably rough. But it was good. Belgo had been working on it as he watched his men die.

Rebecca listened, she could do that at least.

But when Belgo called a rest stop and the unit disintegrated into random movement and conversations, Rebecca realised that everyone had listened. Privacy here was a laughable idea, like toilet paper or running water—or being able to step between buildings without your belly clenching tight in fear of a screamer or heatray.

Saul stood guard while the soldiers rested in a crater. The oiled steel of their weapons glittered off their broad shoulders. The men were both knights from another age and lumpen, crudely formed creatures from the dawn of time.

Rebecca held both images in her head, though she couldn’t finish them without diving into cyberspace’s sea. She felt its absence like her sense of smell had died. She fumbled with ideas of monochrome W Eugene Smith and pastoral covers of Walter Scott novels.

She struggled to recall a title, when every detail in history used to click into a menu on her retina. Maybe Saul could be Ivanhoe. His face was mixed greasepaint and grime, one eye coloured black, the other artfully green. He was the face of war, instinctive, American, and handsome.

Rebecca idled over smuggling Saul back to her Tenderloin apartment. They’d start out well enough. She’d be elated to come back to safety and hot showers, deli sandwiches and envious stares at the office. Seven PM, she’d find Saul at home, a sexy beast, eager to fuck. In peace, he would be a fitness freak, running, lifting weights and burning the sheets with her every night. But he’d be restless too, awkward with her dense schedule and irresistible career arc.

She’d send him to wharfside barrooms for pool and all-day drinking. The fucking would still be good, but not great. His swearing at cocktail parties and crass conservative attitudes would no longer be trophies of her war but banal faux pas. And she didn’t have his manners, she couldn’t avoid being bored by him. She’d glide away in her usual guilt-free parting—as she realised that she already had from Bernie. But with Saul she’d have a nagging doubt that she’d stepped on someone’s dreams.

Rebecca didn’t care enough about anyone else. In her world of faces and guys like Bernie, no one did.

Eyes wandering, daydreaming, she found Saul staring at her. Rebecca realised she’d got it wrong again. He was career military, smart and capable.

His eyes were hard in his greasepaint mask and Rebecca knew that she’d been rebuked, that even her daydreams made her a fool.

The unit inched down Moltke strasse, among cars melted into toffee-shaped lumps. This street led to the old Eichbaum tower. It was a UN Command emergency field centre and Charlie and Fox companies should be waiting here.

The tower stood half-hidden in the gloom. Its huge doors of bevelled glass hung wonky and open, as if a vast foot had kicked them aside.

Walking towards Eichbaum, with its smoke-stained windows and pocked concrete, Rebecca saw Germany’s proud history scarred and defiled. An obscure satisfaction tweaked in her. She had told herself that she was in Mannheim to show the world the Salusan front-line—the inferno, as she had cleverly tagged it. But her other motives nagged for attention—for more honesty from her. She was Jewish, though not really. It was her inheritance rather than a calling. Now she was back in Germany. Her ancestors had fled Europe or stayed and suffered the Holocaust’s murder. She watched Mannheim burn, trying to fit it to her mind that Germany was finally paying. But that belief didn’t hold. If anyone now should pay a fraction for the Abras and Matteas and Tamaras lost in the Nazi maw, shouldn’t it be Rebecca and her generation, born to success and comfort in the Salusan age?

There was a flash behind the Eichbaum, gold light licking off pewter. The unit scattered in a bomb-burst pattern. Tommy Tate started shooting. Saul’s bandana popped up behind tangled concrete. “What d’you see?” he called to Tate.

Tate’s heavy machine gun ran dry. He tipped it over and stood up. “Fucken thing.” He drew a European automatic from his hip holster. He stood in the open, his fury barely suppressed. The moment stretched, ratcheting on everyone’s nerves. Still nothing happened. They were all sick of these collisions and sick of suffering the waiting between them.

“You out, Tom?” Drucker asked from behind a wall.

“’Course I am, y’stupid nigger bastard.”

“Sergeant Tate,” Belgo’s voice snapped. “Come here.”

Tate marched back to Belgo, spitting a gob of phlegm into the rubble. Saul waved the remaining soldiers forward, sending another man on point.

“That boy’s got to chill himself out,” Drucker said, his tone relaxed. He was staring at Tate and Belgo, and Rebecca couldn’t tell which man he meant.

A screamer went off, then another, followed by the concussion of collapsing buildings. The explosions rolled closer in a single echo as the Salusa walked their weapons to them. Rebecca’s teeth buzzed with feedback.

“Saul, get us out of here.” Belgo raised his voice as the next sonic screech howled over them. It was nothing to be concerned about. Screamers went off all the time. The soldiers broke into a loose trot towards the gaping entrance of the Eichbaum.

A shooting star zipped through the air. It turned sideways and punched Drucker’s back. He stumbled, grunting. The air was flooded with silver particles. They swept at all angles through the sky.

Rebecca ducked behind a broken wall as the finger-length missiles fell. She had it in her head that she was safe there, that she wouldn’t be hurt as long as the Salusa couldn’t see her. A missile bounced off the wall, scattering razors of stone across her face. Too breathless to scream, she opened her mouth to suck in air.

Then Saul was dragging her into the open. She fought him, but he body-slammed her, pulling her over the wall, then across loose rubble and up to the huge doors of the Eichbaum.

“Come on, Daisy,” he said, leading her up the steps to the entrance. His eyes were constantly moving, alert yet calm, as the rain of missiles increased. Her mother would’ve called his stare sound as a dollar, and it smoothed away her resistance.

Whining filled the air, growing into an ululating screech as more missiles arced over concrete. Saul shoved her into the tower.

The meteors slashed downwards, popping the folds of Saul’s bandanna and striking his shoulder. He frowned, annoyed at the pain. Then his mouth burst with light as the missile exploded within him. She heard him say, “Rebecca,” as his lips seared away and his eyes blinked into twin suns that shrivelled his face.

The street was burning. The soldiers were burning. Saul’s charred odour rammed into her throat. Another explosive—high as a child’s voice—went off and she screamed with it. The meteors spanged and flared as the soldiers rolled and burned outside the doorway.

Incendiaries bounced off the huge door in a cloud, peppering its glass. Bright light and pain exploded through her. Rebecca threw herself down, thinking she’d been hit.

The light grew and grew. It surrounded her, reddening. It became an orange wave, lifting and bathing her, and growing brighter still, till she was in an ocean like an eighth colour, holding her firm. The colour was deeper and stronger than anything Rebecca had known before. She was in motion, held in its invisible current. It sped her past geometric formations that constantly evolved. They grew about her like cell cultures. The current slowed and the patterns stretched into rectilinear towers above a smooth green field. The image reshaped, growing fuller and deeper till Rebecca saw skyscrapers rising over a city park.

Rebecca had arrived in a city. She was standing in a city and it could not be more different than Mannheim. Instead of cluttered ruins beneath a choked sky, she stood on a sunny boulevard.

She could see the sky, azure and smooth. Airships and flying wings ran silently across it. Everything here was elegant and gossamer-thin.

Rebecca was stunned with sensation, dizzy with the bright smell of freshly-cut lawns and the perfume of a hundred flowerbeds. She ran her fingertips over the furred petals of a pink rose, then on the blue veins of a marble column, eager to touch, to feel again. Here, her fingers were smooth and her nails uncracked.

Laughter and panpipes came from youths posed beside statues and bubbling fountains. Everyone was smiling and unafraid. Someone handed Rebecca a glass of pale wine. Its melting berries set her palate tingling.

Traffic flashed past her, veering round the triangular opening of the park in a seamless tide. An amber teardrop broke free and pulled up beside her in a flicker of changed speeds. Two nude boys reclined within, beautiful and unselfconscious. Gold and silver darts shot through the air, urgent messengers for the picnickers idling below.

The panpipes lilted over the chattering crowd. Rebecca looked for the musicians even as heavier horn music joined the pipes. The basser rhythm was sourceless but swelling and insistent. It spread through her body, down to her toes. It shook her in a delirious tremor, spoiling this perfect summer morning.

It was Mannheim. It was the drone of the Salusa’s engines and the bite of their deep winter. Saul’s face, screaming and white-eyed, flashed into her mind. Remembering, growing cold among such laughter, Rebecca’s guard snapped up.

Humanity had taught the Salusa to mark what they owned. The three ovoids of the Salusa’s corporate triquetra caught the light on the dorsal ridge of a teardrop car. Her face’s sense of story told her to look further. She stepped into the park. The nearest oak tree’s leaves were wrong. They were a repeating, manufactured pattern. A picnicking girl’s laughter was too regular as well, forming a looping cadence. When two blue-skinned wrestlers backed into her, Rebecca found another triquetra, low on one straining back. Was this a reversal of the natural order, or its progression?

We made them, now they have redesigned us, Rebecca thought.

The strolling lovers, the athletes and picnickers shifted. Her doubt turned them insubstantial. But the city righted itself. Resisting Rebecca, it grew solid again. The Salusa had taught their constructs that they were real. Here, Rebecca was imaginary. She belonged to the old human world of imperfection and war.

The city’s colours faded, but it was Rebecca who was dissolving. The wrestlers broke free of each other and one faced her. He smiled, teeth white in his cobalt face. “Why do you hate us so?”

Rebecca fell away, sinking back to the long cold of the war…

She woke with the aftertaste of wine sour in her mouth. Her vision was pale and flat. The magic colour had left, and her body felt soiled with the dregs of perfunctory, clumsy sex. Tears filled Rebecca’s eyes.

She was lying on her back in darkness. A slim bar bit into her mouth and someone’s palm pressed her shoulder.

“Seizure. Are you back with us, Rebecca?” Belgo’s voice came from behind her, but it was Tommy Tate holding her still.

They were in a room that was a tall, round cave. Dim light penetrated the rubble interior, filtered by blast-perforated walls on all sides. She knew then where they must be—high in the Eichbaum tower.

The screwdriver in her mouth was thick with her own spit. Saul must have put it there to stop her swallowing her tongue.

No, she realised, not Saul.

“Where is everyone?” she asked, sitting up.

“Are you epileptic and did not advise us?” Belgo said. She heard him perfectly even though he was whispering. She focused, turning internal switches she thought were gone for good. She flicked her vision through infrared, light sim, night enhanced, till Belgo emerged from the gloom. He lay against a caved-in bookcase with his helmet off. His combat blouse was bloody and his collarbone fat with a field dressing.

“You passed out during the missile strike. My unit is gone. I have lost all my men.” He was shrivelled and exhausted. “They used a new attack. Some kind of flechette with explosive cores.” He grew breathless. “Sergeant Tate shielded me with his own body.”

She replayed the attack. Her tech was back, fully functional again. Belgo had been shouting, his finger raised at Tate. The looming Brit glared down at the little officer. Drucker and the others walked past them to their deaths.

Saul was gone. But Rebecca didn’t feel anything—even now she still didn’t believe it was real.

Tate watched her from the doorway by the stairwell. He was the only remnant of Belgo’s unit left. He’d made it this far by refusing to die. He stood now in casual threat, one palm on the square grip of his holstered pistol. He had replaced his helmet with a maroon beret and scrubbed his face clean. These changes were ominous, like a Japanese death mask. He wasn’t playing soldier anymore, he was planning how he would die.

“I saw things. The Salusa switched my hardware back on.”

“What things?” Belgo said.

“What they’ll do to us.” She spoke to Belgo, but her attention was on Tate. His face was white as wax, his eyes unflinching. A badge with silvered wings flashed on his beret.

She rushed her words, intent that both men should understand. “—Or for us. It wasn’t clear. We need to respond.” Tate wasn’t listening. He looked like he would never listen to a woman again. He wanted to take as many Salusa as he could with him. As revenge or completeness, he might also turn his pistol on Rebecca and Belgo.

Glass smashed in the stairwell in a messy splintering sound. Tate crouched, his autopistol out with a cobra’s sinuous ease.

She understood now. She’d thought it was the war that had terrorised her with its abrupt, vicious reprisals. But that wasn’t war, that was the Salusa. The Salusa had been waiting to do this to humanity for thirty years. They were not opposed to slavery, just to being the slaves.

“If your ’ware works again, can you contact UNCOM?” Belgo asked. His voice was a faint old man’s. Rebecca reached out with her implants to touch cyberspace and nothing happened. Cyberspace was still dead. Instead, she sensed the Salusa. It was as if the Salusa had opened a single eye over her. She imagined that there was only one Salusan. Massive and cold. Each individual, each null or vatgrown Salusan merely extended that one self. It could see, it knew everything. Rebecca shrank from the vastness of it.

Tate’s broad back, hunched within his stained uniform, disappeared down the stairs. Rebecca accessed her ’ware again to help hunt the enemy. This time the Salusan city leapt at her, vivid and overwhelming. It bathed her with its ocean of warmth and longing.

Her body lifted, sliding free of the cold, dark slam of Mannheim.

The gold youths and blue wrestlers nodded and beckoned her. They reached out over Belgo. Watching him wheeze for breath and fumble for the knife sheathed at his shoulder, Rebecca was revolted. Humanity was broken and failing. Then she thought that fine Aryan ladies might have had just the same nausea at the stench of the Jewish ghettoes, with their lines of inmates in rags and yellow stars.

Rebecca reached over and drew the knife for Belgo. She put it in his hand, one human to another.

Rebecca wanted to tell Belgo what she knew. They’d all seen the dark cube that remade you into a machine and the pillars-of-fire lighting the sky. But only she had met the blue-skinned wrestler happy to be manufactured, or drunk wine in the heart of the Salusan city.

Rebecca realised that she had found her story.

She came to Mannheim expecting that she’d cover the war till the war covered her. But the Salusa turned her upside down and shook out each naive belief. Then their long cold ate her whole. She could tell Belgo that much. This was only the beginning. The future was Salusan and humanity would ever be the same again.

Rebecca knew the name of this dispatch now. It was the long cold and she was lost inside it.

There was another splintering crack outside. Tommy Tate was waiting. He was pure violence, aimed on a single trajectory. Belgo and Rebecca were irrelevant now.

The three of them could be the last humans left in the world. And the Salusa owned them as surely as the golden youths stamped with their triquetras. She had to get out and tell someone—anyone—what she’d seen.

A pillar-of-fire lit the night. Eichbaum’s ramshackle interior turned blue, then deepest black. The Salusa, the future, towered above her, massive and threatening, testing their toys to destruction.

Cat People

Bruce Boston

I f cat people
were the world
we would embrace
the sharp and furry.

We would slink
along the street
and dash across it.

If cat people
were the world
we would build walls
against the sea.

We would sleep
by day and wander
the haunts and heights
of our cities by night.

We would have flesh
delivered living
to the arena
of our choice.

We would delight
in our feasting
and celebrate
the deathful grace
in our play.

If cat people
were the world,
oh how we would purr!

The Butterfly Man

Sarah L. Edwards

“When I look across a Montana prairie yellowed by the late summer heat and spotted with pronghorn, the conviction comes that I belong out there, alone in that quiet emptiness. This is a story about that conviction.”

O NE OF THE BUTTERFLIES brought the message that a stranger had come. The messenger was still resting on my hair, whispering, when the master and the strange man drew near the garden where I was tending the flowers of my kin. The master said nothing to me but only gestured toward me while talking to the other man in low, muffled tones. Twice the man’s gaze drifted to me while he nodded in agreement. Soon they went away again, and I sent a few kin discretely after.

Deep in the night, after every tempting lamp and lantern had been doused, a moth settled at the edge of my window, folding his dusky wings, and told me what the master and mistress had said.

“She’s too young. She’s just barely begun to bleed.” The mistress, masking her plea with firmness.

“She’s sixteen, and that’s more than old enough. You were hardly older when I took you.” The master, not yet angry at the mistress’s disagreement because he knew she would yield, eventually.

“But you were from the village. All we know of him is that they call him the Butterfly Man.”

A shrug. “I know he carries a heavy purse. He will pay a good price.”

“Renna has a fragile mind. So far, without friends—she’ll die, or go wild.”

“No word of that!” A slap. I felt the tingling in my skin as though it had been my own cheek. “And if she dies…” Another shrug. “It will not be our concern.”

“Keth!” I imagined her losing control, clutching his arm.

He shook away her grasp, turning his eyes upon her, stern and cold. “She is no use to us. Better to give her to this man who wants her than have her here, where she does not even earn her keep.”

“She eats but little.” A feeble protest. She already knew her cause was lost. So did he.

“We perform the rituals tomorrow, so they may depart.”

And so I would marry the stranger, a man I had seen only from a distance, clothed that afternoon in road-dust but lively in his eye.

I thanked the moth, offering it my warm breath in gratitude, for it need not have come. It was not of my kin, only a distant relation of the dusk granting me a boon for some reason of its own. Later I looked back and wondered if its purpose was malice.

Afternoon sun slanted through old willows to scatter across the few surrounding faces as we stood under the ritual arch, I and the Butterfly Man across from me, and the master recited the ancient words of bonding. I listened little, though I had seldom heard them. I had long watched the mistress and the master and knew what they meant.

The man stood straight, stiff, in what I guessed were his only clothes: loose trousers and a blousy shirt cut of black cloth faded to rust. A shapeless, wide-brimmed hat shadowed his face, which might have looked younger were it not for the sun-dried wrinkles bunched about his eyes and the red-toned beard bristling across his jaw.

I nearly missed the moment to recite my words of the old language that I forced, dry, from my throat. “I bind myself.”

The man repeated after me, clumsily, in a tone rough but warm. They were the first I had heard him say.

Afterward was feasting, and I supped on richer fare than any I had had in all my time in that house. Soon the mistress and I were sent out. I fell to my bed before even the butterflies, my kin, had found perches for the night.

Early in the morning the mistress woke and dressed me, as though I were a little girl again. Her gaze soft, she laid a hand on my neck. I stepped away so that she would not crush the cocoon I had tied beneath my hair. She was looking toward the window and did not seem to notice.

“Serve your new the master well. Obey him always, even if it pains you, and you will earn fair treatment.” She sighed. “I would wish you had been given closer to home, that I might see you now and then.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder. She started at my touch and then smiled thinly. “It’s all right. Perhaps when you birth your first child, I’ll come and help.” Looking in my face, she nodded, pulled me down beside her on the bed, and explained the way of a man with his bride. The picture she spoke was messy and frightening, but I thought of pairs of butterflies I’d seen dancing on the breeze, flashing delicate colors to the skies as they courted, and I shrugged away my worry. If it were only pain, then I would bear it like a beating. And if it were like the butterflies in their frenzy, then…I did not know, except that I would not fear it.

“Wait here,” she said, getting up and leaving the room. She returned with a bundle wrapped in paper. “Clothes for you, until you have materials to make your own. Every bride should have a dowry.” She sat and handed it to me. “Ah, Renna, I wish there were more for you.”

I caught a single tear from her cheek, and she smiled and stood, pulling at me like a young girl. “Come, it is time to go. Your master is waiting.”

He stood near the front door, talking with the master. As we descended, he glanced to us out of the corner of his eye.

The mistress hurried out to the kitchen and returned with a basket, which she handed to the man. “Since you leave before breakfast…” The sweet-salt odor of hot biscuits swelled from the basket, mingled with that of ripe plums.

He gave her a low nod, saying “Thank you very much.” He turned to the master. “And thank you, sir, for your hospitality and—” His tongue stumbled. “And for everything else.”

Then he turned to me. “Are you ready?”

Eyeing the cracking leather of his boots, I nodded.

Outside, I climbed into the far side of the man’s cart, a rickety box set on bleached-pale wheels and shaded over the back with heavy cloth. He set his bag in the back and scrambled up beside me with the basket. After unsetting the brake, he slapped the reins against the pony’s back and waved to the mistress and the master. I turned to watch them as we drew away. Both stood still and solemn. Just before the dust hid them from my view, I saw the mistress wave her hand, the one away from the master, in a concealed farewell.

The road stretched far ahead, a track layered in dust and beaten by the infrequent boots and hooves of the few who traveled through the village.

Mistaking my gaze, my master said, “Looks a wild one, doesn’t he?” He motioned to the pony, a wildly splashed black piebald. Only once before had I seen a horse so colored, and then only from a distance. As the pony trotted, the patterns of his coat rippled like a tangle of magpie’s wings. “There’s gypsy blood in him,” the man said. “I call him Mallon.”

Mallon, the childish imp of our legends. I could not help but smile. Turning, I realized the man was smiling, too.

He inhaled, as though to speak, and then reached over and patted my hand. “Gonna be riding this wagon quite a while. There’s the canopy if the sun gets to you,” he said, jerking his thumb behind him. “Just settle in, I guess, if you can.”

For one instant, I opened my mouth, but my throat closed dry and my tongue was as stiff as ever. I shifted to see the last of the village recede behind us. Further back, curtained by dust, stood the stone house where I had slept and labored and ached under the dull thud of the master’s hand for as long as I could remember. Ahead lay only the weathered road, stretching beyond my sight.

The pony carried us through ripening fields and fallow hills that looked much the same as those around our village. Sometimes we’d see a farmhand striding the fields, checking the crop or the fences, a dark speck in a vast plain.

After a long spell of silence, the man said, “Well, I guess you oughta know something about me. They tell you anything?” He glanced at me. When I made no answer, he continued, “I’m a tinker, mostly. A few other odds and ends, too—won’t bother you with that,” he hastened. “Usually just me and the road. And Mallon, of course.” He winked. “I just fix whatever comes along. That’s why I’ve got the canopy. I sleep a lot of nights on the side of the road, nothing bothering me except the starlight shining in my eyes.

“Not that I’m asking you to wander like that. Time I settled myself someplace, anyway, in something better than the gin-house we’re headed to. So you just sing out if you see a little corner of the world you want for yours.

“We wouldn’t be in such a hurry, but we’re running low on supplies. I wasn’t planning to be gone so long.” A lopsided grin crossed his face. “Wouldn’t have been, if the gin-seller hadn’t told me about the girl who the butterflies follow around.

“Didn’t know that, did you?” he asked, his voice softer. “It was just my wonder bump itching, but your village was on my way back, so I asked around a little. Now I look at it, it might have been hard embarrassing if it’d turned out different. But when I saw you sitting there—that was only two days ago, wasn’t it? Seems a year, at least.”

He had come looking for me. He was not just a traveler hunting a wife. The dull shame of the gin-seller’s gossiping tongue was buried under the shock that this man had sought me out. I had paid but little attention to the pairing of village girls and masters, but I did not remember it working this way.

Already, though, I had heard more words than I wished for one day. I yearned for the bright rustling speech of a kinling. The cocoon hidden beneath my hair would not reawaken a winged thing for days yet. Without one of my kin nearby, it was as though the touch of my fingers had dulled or the dry, dusty scent of the afternoon heat had faded away.

Several times I had seen kinlings, flitting across the fields or above the road. Always I called, but they would not answer.

As dusk swept away the last scatters of daylight, the man reined Mallon to the side of the beaten track.

“Here we’ll stay tonight, I think,” he said, hopping down from the cart. As I turned to climb down as well, I found him at my knee.

“Here you go,” he said, taking my hand as I clambered down. “See? Kind of a long jump.”

I pulled my hand away, and he dropped his, nodding slowly. “Gonna start a fire, I guess. Maybe warm up some of what’s left of your mother’s basket.”

I shook my head.

“Not hungry?”

My breaths grew short and sharp. I knew he was staring at me, though I had dropped my eyes and saw only his feet.

“Not my mother,” I finally managed to say, the sounds catching in my throat.

“Oh?” I caught a glimpse of him from between my lashes, his head cocked. “Huh. Well, you don’t look much alike, so I guess it follows. The master of the house, is he your father?”

I shook my head again, still not meeting his eyes.

“Hmm. Sounds like a story there,” he said. I took a sharp breath. “But I’m hungry. Stories can come later.” He turned and began building a fire a little ways away from the cart. I let my breath go. My hands trembled.

There were indeed stories that night, but they were sung, not spoken; and none of them were mine. I sat with my mutton and bread while the man spread his arms wide and his voice broad, singing romances of old days, of heroes and kings.

After a while, he looked at me sideways and said, “I guess you’ve heard the story of Garrell, the lost prince, haven’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s time you did, then.” He winked and settled back.

As he recounted the quest of a prince stolen as a child and returning to claim his throne, I found I could see the proud young man in my mind. I heard the clatter of his horse while he rode the weary journey to a home he did not know. I saw him creeping silently and disguised to poor gin-houses, seeking glory-hungry men who would fight beside him. As the battle broached between his scavenged band and the usurper’s army, his heart beat heavily in my own chest.

When the man sang a last note of triumph and fell silent, I felt as though I had been wrested from a dream. Or from a vision given me by one of my kin. Even the minstrels who sometimes passed a night in the village on their way to greater places had never pictured things to me that way. Dazed, I looked at the man, whose fire-lit eyes were watching me. As our gazes met, he smiled. Reaching over, he caught my hand.

I felt a thrill at the fervor in his eyes, but I did not like the clutch of his hand on my wrist. I struggled, unthinking, until he loosened his grip and let me go.

He didn’t say anything else, but went to the cart and returned with a rough cloth. I spread the cloth and lay down while he tended the pony. When he returned a little later with a second cloth and lay down a short distance away, I wondered that he did not sleep in the cart, as was his master’s right.

Curled in the blanket, I soon forgot the man and dreamed of a boy with ember-red hair leading a vast gather of butterflies against a heavy-fisted king.

As we followed the road the next day it wandered through foothills, the smaller kin of mountains looming ahead. I had always imagined those mountains as little higher than these hills we now drove through, but they kept climbing the sky as we approached.

Seeing my gaze, the man laughed. “Not afraid of heights, I hope.”

I shrugged. My friends flew many spans in the air; what should I care that the ground be a little higher? Yet—would even they quest so high?

Never had my kin spoken of these mountains. Always when they traveled, it was to the south, where the days sprawled long and warm, like a lizard on a rock. Were there, then, no butterflies amidst these towering heights? The thought chilled me.

I turned to the man and tried to form a question, one of words instead of flappings and wafting scents.

“There.” I shook my head and tried again. “There—” I pointed to the mountains.

“That’s where we’re going, all right,” the man said, his voice light but his gaze intent upon me.

“There.”

“Those very hills,” he said, nodding.

I gave up on the words, twisted to face him, and held my hands high, flapping them with the thumbs hooked together. Then I pointed to the mountains.

He cocked his head. “Don’t think I caught that.”

I tried again, flapping slowly, like a kinling sunning upon a flower. My face warmed as he watched me, and I had nearly dropped my hands to my lap when he brightened.

“Would that be a butterfly you’re showing me?” he asked.

I nodded and pointed again to the distant peaks.

“Are you wanting to know if there’s butterflies up there?” he asked.

I nodded again.

He shrugged. “A few. Not the kinds you get down here in the flats, but there’s a few hardy breeds that like it up there.” He sat back and looked at me, but I could not read his face. After a moment, he said, “That was a pretty trick, talking with your hands that way.”

I frowned. The master had never thought it “a pretty trick;” he called it one more proof of my feeble mind.

“You don’t believe me,” said the man, seeing my expression. “It might be right handy, though, if I knew a little more of your hand-talk.”

I watched his face and sat still. It occurred to me that as we’d driven further from home, I’d lost my ladylike shame and come to look him clear in the eye whenever it pleased me.

“Why don’t you teach me a lesson, as we’re driving along here? If you were talking about Mallon here, let’s say, how’d I know it?”

I held my right hand to the fist of my left and poked two fingers up for ears - it was how I told the mistress when our pony had a sore foot or needed fresh hay.

“That how, huh? Let’s see if I can do that.” The man tucked the reins between his knees and held up his hands, imitating me.

I nodded.

“Well, how about that. What about those mountains, there?”

I paused for just a moment; I had never needed to tell the mistress anything about them. Then I held up one hand in a curve.

“Looks just like that old crag there, doesn’t it?” He grabbed his hat. “And this?”

I made up a new picture right then, holding my hands in a circle above my head.

“And what about this?” He pulled a chain from inside his shirt, and hanging from it was a twisted figure carved in cream-colored bone, an animal with an extra leg hanging from the front of its head. The figure was so strange I smiled, and then caught myself.

But he was laughing too. “Are you saying you don’t have a word for this?”

I shook my head, smiling again, thinking how funny it was that he’d call my hand-shapes words.

It was some days later when the cart began to tilt as we climbed the first low mountain. For days, the wind across the hills had clogged in my nose and the sun had painted me pink, until the man said I should sit in back, under the tent. He didn’t mind the sun, he said, for it knew him so well it didn’t resent him anymore. After a moment, I decided he must have meant it as a joke.

The second day we climbed, I crawled under the canopy of the wagon, my back to the man, and scrambled to a place somewhat clear of firewood and scattered scraps of metal. There I untied the cocoon from my hair. As the wheels hurdled gaps and boulders, I sat and watched the crusted brown form, the curves across the back hinting at the wings that would soon unfurl. Behind me, the man filled the air with raucous singing, gin songs and ballads and epics turned to music. Even when the words lost their grasp on me, the rise and fall of his voice told me all the story I needed. I let my bones settle into the rhythm of the cart’s bumping and rattling.

A quiver flowed through the cocoon. Good. I wanted to send the butterfly home, if need be, before we crossed the mountains.

Through my hand I felt the butterfly’s hunger for the open air. It would remember almost nothing of what had come before, of life as a crawling grub. At that moment, the tight walls of its cocoon were so familiar that it barely realized they were there, yet something within it would not allow it to rest a moment more in confining safety.

It quickly tired, having only worked open a tiny split in the cocoon. I leaned close and breathed. In language too deep for words, I spoke to it. “Warmth and goodness is there here, but you must come out, little one.”

Finally, the split widened so that a leg flicked through. A few moments more and the slit ripped lengthwise up and down the cocoon, and a black, shiny head emerged.

“Hello,” I whispered to its mind. It didn’t hear me then. It was too tired and still had too much to do. After a further struggle it crawled limply out of the cocoon and hung from it, its unshaped wings curled beneath it.

I settled back a little. The worst was over now. Blood surging through the wings would form them as the heat air-dried them. While I stood watch, this kinling would survive its first, most dangerous hours.

A board creaked behind me. I whirled and nearly knocked into the man. His gaze was fixed upon the butterfly in my hand.

I cupped the butterfly between my hands and set my mouth.

After a moment of rattlings and silence, he rose from his crouch and sat at the front again, picking up the reins from their knob.

I breathed again then and uncupped my hands. The butterfly asked faintly what had happened. “Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing to fear.”

That night the man wrapped a blanket around me before he built the fire. “Can’t have you getting cold, you know. It chills you right through, up here.”

After he had doled out our suppers, we sat around the flames and ate in silence. Even after we had finished, he seemed loath to break the stillness. Finally, his craggy features lit by the flickering light, he looked up at me.

“Reckon you might tell me your story now?”

For the first time in days, I turned my eyes away.

“Aw, don’t go doing that, girl. Come on, look at me.”

He was leaning forward, his eyes wide, beseeching. “I got an idea you’re scared to tell it, or it hurts, or you just don’t trust me. I guess you got no excuse to trust me, except I promise you, I won’t ever tell another living man.” He reached around the fire and laid his hand across mine. “If you want to talk, I’d sure like to listen.”

We sat that way a moment, watching each other’s eyes lit up by the flames, his hand cupped over mine. Finally, I nodded and pulled away my hand. He leaned his head on his clasped hands, his elbows on his crossed knees, and watched.

Though we had made many hand-words in the days since I had first asked about the mountains, there were still many things my hands could not picture. For a moment I was still, trying to see in my mind how I would speak.

I don’t know where I came from, my hands said. I do not know who my mother and father are. The woman at the house where I lived found me crawling among her flowers when I was just a baby. She had just lost her own baby daughter, so she wanted to raise me. The master did not like me. He said I was feeble-minded and useless. I shrugged. Maybe I am. I lived with them, expecting to be taken by one of the boys in the village. I had expected this, but I had hoped for other things. Foolish thought, I had hoped to be found by another like me. As I paused, I left behind many of the things I had meant to say. Shrugging, I said, And then you came.

He watched me still with that intent gaze that belied his usual cheer. “And what about the butterflies?”

I shook my head as though I did not understand.

“No, the gin-seller told me the butterflies follow you. And I saw that one in your hand today.”

Just stories. Because I am foolish.

He glared at me, just slightly. “You’re no dumb one. I see the look in your eyes; it’s no less keen for all you spend most your time looking out to the horizon. Now, I guess I can take the village folks telling stories about you because you’re different.” He cocked his head. “I want to know what it that makes you that way.” His eyes looked almost fierce in the firelight.

He threw his hands up. “I mean, aside from the way you spelled me into bringing you home with me. You know what I am, girl? I’m a man set on living out his days alone, with his pony. All I want is a good gin and a round of lucksticks now and again. And then I walk into your garden and it’s all up for me.” His voice softened. “You got some kind of witchery on me? The gin-seller said that, too, but I hear too many witch stories to give them much account. You, though…” He lifted a hand stroked my hair.

“I always get to talking at the worst times, you know, but I got to tell you, when I paid your master, I thought I’d won all the woman a man could dream of. And then I figured out I hadn’t won her at all, I’d just bought her.” His face squinted in disgust. “I paid fourteen thrush, and then found I still had to do the winning.”

You paid too much, I said. Surely he had; the best housewife in the village couldn’t have cost more. The master cheated you.

“He did not,” his voice soft as the morning mist, so that I could barely hang onto his words. “He didn’t ask nearly enough.”

I waited, watching his eyes. After some moments in silence, he stood and returned with another blanket for me and one for himself, and we curled around the fire and slept.

The next day I sat beside him in the sun as the pony continued to draw us around ever more sharply curving hills. The air chilled far too cool for summertime. I kept a blanket drawn around me far into the morning, when the sun finally warmed me.

Sometime during the frosted night I had decided, without ever really thinking at all. Watching the man out of the corner of my eye, I reached behind my head and brought the kinling out from under my hair, where it had slept the night. It crouched in my hand and opened its wings wide, soaking in the sunlight.

Suddenly, the man drew a sharp breath. He’d caught sight of the butterfly.

“Your friend,” he said.

I nodded. After a pause, I lifted the butterfly and let it grasp my hair. My hands free, I pointed first to the kinling and then to the mountains. Are there butterflies like this one where we’re going?

He turned around to look at the butterfly, then shook his head. “Nope. That’s one of the ones I only see this side of the mountains.”

I nodded and reached below the wagon seat, where I had hidden the last of the plums days ago. Now it squished in my hand as I lifted the butterfly from my hair and set it atop the rotting fruit. The butterfly uncurled its tongue and began drinking the sweet juices.

“Butterfly gin, huh?” the man said, eyeing the butterfly.

I waited until the butterfly had drunk its fill. It wouldn’t need anything more for some hours, long enough for it to fly east, to its native meadows. I lifted it up to my face and breathed, giving it my warmth.

“Go,” I said silently, “seek your homeland.”

“Why?”

“I fear that where I am going, you will find none of your own kind.” Just briefly, I pictured to it a glimpse of two swirling butterflies.

“But then you will have no one.”

I glanced at the man and then told it that I would be all right. It returned the image to me of the two butterflies, asking. I put the thought away without reply.

“He is no kinling,” the butterfly said.

“Not as you are. But maybe he is kin in another way.”

“No!” The butterfly’s cry surged in my mind. Without another thought to me, it flitted from my hand and away down the slope.

Shaken, I watched until it was only a speck against the hills. Then it was gone.

The man handed me a handkerchief. “You all right?”

I veiled my damp face with the tattered cloth. What had happened?

After a while, he said, “You talk to them.”

I dropped the cloth from my face and nodded.

“How?”

Shrug. In my head.

“Thanks for letting me see.”

I turned to the man and lifted my hands. That one didn’t like you. Why?

He flushed. “Sorry if I disappointed your friend.”

No, I said. My kin.

A nod, slow, without surprise. “You’re wild.”

I bowed my head. Yes.

Wild, the word even the master dared not speak to my face. Witches he did not mind, for they could be warded off with yellow cloth cut against the weave and bitterstone and other charms. Ghosting spirits could not harm him and mudsuckers from ill-dug wells could be killed with a knife, but no one knew how to protect from a wild one. It was said they fellowshipped with stone-filled earth and wailing storms and all the untamed things, and these kin would do their bidding and destroy their foes.

Few even dared whisper the word behind my back, for fear a hole would swallow them or a viper slide into their bed. Finally, though, kinlings heard of it and told me. They did not understand it, but they listened for me, and slowly I understood what the villagers feared.

He had always made sure I had enough to eat and blankets to keep me warm. I think he had tried in his clumsy way not to discomfort me by asking questions. But now he seemed to regard me as something both stranger and more easily broken than before.

And still we rode in the cart, up and up a faint, winding trail that he said led over the mountains. At my side he sat silent now for hours at a stretch, as though he had lost the trick to weaving words and had no more skill with them than I.

Sometimes, though, he sang. Often I saw the scenes in my mind, the song picturing them to me as clearly as a kinling would. And when he sang sorrowful ballads of loves won and lost—mostly lost—his eyes were always on me, and somehow with the music they told me all the things he did not speak.

Still the air cooled, both day and night, and his blankets were not enough, even though he insisted I sleep with them all, inside the tent where the air rushed less.

“It’s because you’ve lived your whole life down there, where the earth traps the heat so it can’t get free,” he told me when he awoke one morning. I had been sitting next to the pony for heat; I shivered too much to sleep.

That night we reached the summit, he said, the highest point of all. The earth was barren but for a few scrubby flowers hugging the ground, though a vast wood of needled trees grew lower on the mountain. Rounded heights, often dusted with snow, fell to unseen valleys before rising again, on and on, dipping and soaring to the horizon in every direction. I could see neither the place I had left nor the place I was going.

The man had promised to sing me a story of Mallon, the imp who spooked ponies and turned men’s beards white as they slept. Yet when we huddled at the fire that night, he sang instead of a man sailing the great lake beyond the mountains, who caught sight of a water-woman. He dove from his boat, though the water was high and stormy. The sailor swam ever deeper seeking the water-woman, though he surely could never quest so far and return again. Yet even when he accepted the lake’s cool embrace, it was only a little sad, for always he would be with the water-woman, there below the waters.

The wet feeling of reeds wrapping my skin faded slowly from my mind. Through the wavering flames, the man was watching me. Slowly he reached to me and traced a single finger around my face. Then his hand fell to mine and he took it in his, his grasp soft and gentle. When I did not pull away, he rose, still holding my hand, and led me beneath the canopy.

And I realized that in all our days of travel, we had been but two butterflies on the air, dancing and courting, waiting for that night atop the mountains. And I did not fear.

One day soon after, a lush clearing like a lake of greenest waters began flickering into sight from behind the trees. I did not need to see the flash of wings in the sun. In my mind I already heard them, those faint rustlings and whispers that I had lacked for so long. Though the kinling in the cocoon had hatched and then flown only a few days before, the sound of them was almost unfamiliar.

When we were just in sight of the meadow, the man pulled the pony to a stop. “Guess you might want to go say hello,” he said, his voice low.

I scrambled down from the cart and took off at a quick trot, but I kept nearly tripping over my own feet and finally broke into a run. Breaking through the edge of the meadow, just off the side of the worn wagon trail, I cried to them in my mind, “Hello!”

At first they fluttered away, startled, but then they flocked to me, landing on my hair and dress, in my hands.

“Are you kin?” they asked. “You smell wrong.”

Thinking of all the long days and nights on the road, smothered in dust, I could only laugh. “I am,” I said. “I am!” And feeling their wings in my hair and their voices in my head, I laughed like the master had the day it rained after many months of drought, with his eyes closed and the drops splashing in his face.

Suddenly, in one breath, nearly all of the kinlings whirled into the sky. The next moment, I felt the man’s hand on my shoulder. I was kneeling, I realized. I had not even noticed falling.

“Are you all right?” The spoken words grated, like gravel shaken in my ears, but the touch of his hand was warm.

I am fine, I told him with my hands. Let us stop here.

“Sure,” he said, though his voice seemed to catch as he said it. At least, I imagined later that it did, though I paid little attention when he spoke. I stood and left him there as I walked deeper into the meadow, stepping lightly so as not to crush the late summer flowers.

Near the middle, I sat and waited for them to come, sparing only a glance to see that the man had returned to his cart.

Slowly they returned, wisping down hesitantly upon me in ones and twos.

“I have missed you,” I whispered. “I have longed for your voices.”

They settled somewhat, and at the edges of my mind I felt them rustling, talking among themselves, though I could not grasp their meaning. Out of these thoughts a clamor rose that I felt but could not understand, tremors of bewilderment that I found myself sharing, for I did not see what upset them.

“You smell wrong,” one of them said again.

I shook my head, sending a few of them up in the air again. Stilling myself, I waited, asking.

“You come with him.” They pictured to me an image of the man, but misshapen, like the bottom of a pond distorted by shadows and diverted light. A dusky odor of fungus and decay hung about him.

“I do not understand. He is my…friend. My breath-kin,” I said. “We share warmth.” I showed them the chilled nights and the mornings waking, enclosed in his arms.

They exploded from me again at these thoughts, more and more of them, until only one white kinling remained, perched on my finger. Tears coursed down my face, for I felt the kinling’s sick, dry hatred as though it were mine, and underneath a lump of fear grew deep in me, tender and feverish.

“We know you are kin,” said the butterfly, “For only kin speak to us. How do you not see?”

“See what?” I cried.

“He comes to this meadow to kill. You share warmth with one who slaughters your kin.”

I flung the kinling into the air. The kinling was wrong. Wrong. It was not true. It could not be true.

The hatched kinling had fled nearly at once. No other would even come near in all those long days through the lowlands.

We shared warmth, and other things. He was kin as surely as they, was he not?

Finally, I stood and stomped through the meadow, paying no mind to the flowers. The man stood by his cart, his face turned away. I clutched his arm and pulled him around to look at me.

Hands flying, I asked, What do you do to my kin?

I saw defeat in the slump of his shoulders, but ignored it. I could not believe it was true.

“I’m sorry, Renna,” he said. “I won’t. For you—I won’t anymore.”

No. No.

A flutter near my ear; the white kinling had returned.

“I will show you,” it told me. “You will see.”

An image filled my mind of kinlings, all sitting in rows with their wings out, basking. Except they did not quiver or rustle or breathe. And then I saw nails, tiny nails thrust through their bodies and chaining them to the boards on which they lay.

As I watched, the man—my master—took a board lined with kinlings and gave it to another man, strangely and richly dressed. Nodding, this man handed my master coins, many of them, nearly as many thrush as the master had given for me.

I turned the image away and looked at the man. He must have guessed what I saw, for he said, “It’s why they call me the Butterfly Man.”

A brief mountain breeze hissed sharp in our ears for just a moment. The sun fell warm on my face and the scent of high wild grasses and long-traveled dust curled past my nose. There was nothing to be said.

I turned from him and strode away, my shawl pulled around me, and headed for the straggling bristly trees bunched around the edges of the meadow. My kin fled before me, and I felt their loathing for the man reach farther and farther, until it clouded over all their kinship with me. My eyes had turned blurry with a twist of feelings I could not even name. Striding away, faster now, nearly running I crossed into the beginnings of the deep forest. He called me, once, his voice rising to the scream of a boar at slaughter. I clutched the shawl tighter around me and stumbled through clearing and cluster, sometimes sloping and sometimes steep and always down.

The same fingers that caressed my hair in the deep of night had in daylight speared many a feebly flapping kinling to a plank. The voice that sang so many wonders also named bounties to be paid for my kin.

Tears rushed from my eyes unheeded, and I paid no mind to my path, caring only that it led me away.

I should never have called him friend. I was wild. Human kinship could be no kinship to me.

When the day suddenly faded, I glanced up to see a vast sheet of cloud shadowing the sun, and even as I looked the wind blew cooler in my face. Still barely thinking, I found myself slumped against a scraggly needled tree just as the first heavy drops pelted the ground. There I watched the gray streaming sky and pleaded in my heart for a well-timed lightning spear to end me.

I woke damp and chilled near dusk, the sun a brilliant lantern dropping down behind the distant peaks. The chill lingered and brought with it shivers so deep they frightened me. All my kin had taken sanctuary among stronger folk—stolid rock and muttering tree—to escape the violence of the storm, and would not return to the air before dawn.

And even if they had, they would have shunned me, for the stench of their enemy marked me a danger and worse: a traitor.

“Why?” I cried to my fled kin, but then I saw I was asking the same with my hands, pleading the same trembling, stricken sign over and over. I dropped my hands, flushing.

I was cold, likely soon dead if the shivers continued. Strange I should wish to die of lightning, but not of cold. The one was gift and the other, neglect.

The night’s hush fell over the mountains, save for the rare bird swooping and diving toward warmer reaches. Even the breeze had calmed, perhaps having tired itself in the storm.

I could not remember ever having been alone before. Always, always there had been my kin, whether fluttering nearby through the daylight hours or sleeping near my warmth at night. Even as winter washed the fields I felt the warm beat of the blood in the bodies of those kin sleeping the long sleep in my room, tucked into the corners.

I had little minded the villagers so long as they let me alone. Still I think I harbored a belief that being wild gave me the power to survive as others could not. Now I found that it was not true, not at all. As certain as the drip of rain on my head, I knew that unless I acted, I would die there on the mountain. The great fertile earth would not coddle me and had no care for the wounds of my heart. Likely, if I fell asleep beneath that thin, straggly tree I would not wake up.

What did I expect, that I had only to go the wilderness and it would take me for its own? That being “wild” meant all the untended world was kin to me? Foolish girl.

He had already taken me for his own.

With a last brilliant wink the sun dipped behind a far-off mount.

In sudden decision I stood and stepped away from the tree, which was dripping more water then than it had shielded me from before. Glimpsing my path out of the corner of my eye, I climbed to a crack in the slope just deep enough to shelter me. I crouched there, arms wrapping legs and head capping knees.

Another shiver coursed through me and I pulled myself more sharply together, pausing just a moment to offer a glare into the night. I would ask no more of my birthright.

While the sun lazed still beneath the mountains, I crawled upwards as I had come, through brambles and over thrusts of stone. The heat of the climb replaced my earlier chill and I soon fell short of breath, but I dared not tarry.

In mid-morning I broke from the forest gloom into the meadow again, and felt my blood drain as I saw his cart, drawn near forest’s edge opposite the meadow. He had stayed. He was slumped upon the cart, gazing down the winding, mud-coated road. The pony grazed nearby.

I made my way through the meadow, a-flutter with kin who required no words to hear what I wanted said, though now they fled. Perhaps, one day, those voices would forgive and come again.

When I was only a little distance away, the man looked over.

He nodded, slowly. He opened his mouth, but no words came. Those eyes, dry but red. Surely if I reached up, I could smooth the lines there as I had the mistress and master’s bedclothes. But no, my hand still hung at my side, my fingers limp.

Finally he leaned down and took my hand in his rough ones. I lifted them to my face, breathing woodsmoke and salt pork and, far deeper than these, the leather-and-sweat smell of the man himself that he left like a trail with every step and every breath he took.

“Glad you came back,” he said softly.

And I breathed deep of the fragrance in his hands and nodded, and I found no words were needed.

Death Bugs You

—or—

The Worms Crawl in...

O k, poor title, but it’s hard to be glib about personal putrefaction and corpse consumption by invertebrate hordes, which is what I’m about to do.

About a year ago I entered the world of forensic science as a forensic entomologist, wrenched from the green world by my ecological roots and thrust somewhat reluctantly into the disconcerting realm of shallow grave recovery. My approach to forensic entomology is embedded within a framework of thoughts about more general ecologically based problems. And even if the forensic importance comes from the living insects, the ecology is based on a putrefying body and thus the accompanying assault across your senses. So dab a little Vicks ^TM under your nostrils and let’s take a walk.

When you die your body begins changing right away. Remember that each of your cells is a little powerhouse, a factory, working hard to maintain itself against biological entropy. When that process breaks down through natural or nefarious action, the chemicals of decomposition arise immediately. What was once a living creature has become a pile of resources for a relatively short-lived ecological community that will undergo a dynamic pathway of rapid consumption and predictable change. It’s as much an ecological succession as a pond filling into hardwood forest.

Insects are usually the first to arrive at a dead body. The resources available through a decomposing corpse will support an increasingly complex group of species that changes in response to resource usage and insect community composition. Insect activity on a corpse produces byproducts and consequences that make it possible for other insect species to exploit resources made newly available.

Flies can begin arriving within minutes of death. Decomposing flesh produces putrefactive chemicals as soon as death starts shutting down different parts of the body, and these chemicals are as irresistible as cervelle de veau to your quotidian gourmand. Nostrils, eyes and, well, whatever exposed entrances there may be to the body, are rapidly colonized by flies laying their eggs. These fly parents are providing for their young with a large concentration of food, and in return expect them to scramble as fast as they can to consume, grow, pupate and mature. Once mature: Hey! Go find your own body.

As maggots scramble to consume and metabolize as fast as they are able, a corpse may become host to what is called a maggot mass. This is an aggregation of so many maggots that the heat produced by their digestive processes, not to mention the friction generated by their wiggling one against the other, generates more heat than can be afforded by ambient environmental conditions. A maggot mass will sit well within the decomposing goo of a corpse, where the fly larvae are thus swimming in their own food and other stuff.

Different fly species may arrive at different stages of decomposition, giving clues to any forensic investigator who may be interested in the time of death, and what investigator wouldn’t be? The earliest stages of nailing a time can come from simply noting whether a body has tell-tale tiny white eggs in the exposed bits. Even before hatching, they can snitch death’s details. Afterward, flies will progress through certain stages of larval development, or instars, which are fairly well differentiated one from the next in body size. Since identified species of fly larvae can be aged by size and ambient temperature, so by association can the time of death. There are other mitigating factors of course—weather, daylight, local microclimate conditions—all of which will be considered when reconstructing a crime.

Flies rule the early colonization of corpses, but they are not the end of the story by any means. A large cast of beetles that will arrive now, utilizing unlocked resources from the maggot activity on the corpse as well as exploiting the maggots themselves. Predatory beetles attracted to a sudden surge in resources will lay eggs around the area of a body. Depending on the species, the beetles will feed on different areas of the scene, preying on other insects themselves busy at the consumption of carrion, or feeding on bits of the corpse itself. All the players provide their own clues to time of death. Burying beetles, carrion beetles and sexton beetles, with great handles all, arrive as the succession process progresses through predictable changes. Hide beetles, carpet beetles and rove beetles—no, not of White House infamy although with fitting namesakery—appear in turn to further reduce the remaining remains to dust.

One thing is certain: many other animals will recognize the increase and concentration of live prey at a site. Wasps, hornets and ants can both scavenge from the corpse itself and prey on others more directly about the work of decomposition. Spiders, centipedes, and other arthropod predators may arrive and remain in the vicinity while food is plentiful and easy to obtain.

So how does this work from a forensic point of view? Local conditions will affect the rapidity and specific pathway of insect-driven decomposition. Given known developmental rates of insect larvae and a timeline for species arrivals, we as forensic investigators can estimate time of death. Whether on a scale of minutes or hours based on early arriving insects, or windows as wide as months or more for remains in more advanced stages of decomposition, insects have stories to tell us. Of course as we get farther away from the moment of death, our estimates become less precise, and there are always other clues such as broken watches and smudged Broadway ticket stubs found in purse or pocket. But the predictability of biological succession in this specialized and dynamic insect community probably conveys more information than stopped clocks and validated tickets could ever aspire to.

So at the end of the day this column was about death. And the title conveys how I feel about that. But perhaps I should have called this column “Death, Bugs, and You,” because if someone whacks me I want to find some comfort in knowing that they will be treated to some degree of justice; and if insects are a part of that so much the better. So I could add a few commas here, a conjunction there, and voilà—an entirely new meaning. Thank you arthropods, thank you.

Okay, I guess I can be glib about it.

Her Box of Secrets

Lisa Mantchev

“We all have our own box of secrets. How large is yours?”

I N THE BEGINNING, she told him everything. She detailed her day with bright butterfly words that he captured with laughter and smiles and nods of acknowledgement. Picking up the dry cleaning was an anecdote for dinner by candlelight. They discussed the world over the plastic shower curtain, their words flecked with soap and toothpaste. At night, with the lights out, the butterflies collected in her dark hair, and he brushed them off with a gentle hand so he could kiss the nape of her neck.

Time passed, as it does, with a baby and bills and gray hairs and clogged toilets and light bulbs that needed changing. The conversations didn’t stop, but the words became moths that fluttered out of her mouth and onto the kitchen counter.

“The garbage needs to go out.”

He nodded and opened the newspaper.

“Time to get a haircut.”

Cereal and juice disappeared behind the printed pages.

“I might run away from home today.”

More moths, just moths; easy to ignore until they got into the sweaters and ate holes in the yarn. They collected in piles and twitched until they died. She swept them into a dustpan and dumped them in the garbage.

And wondered when she’d gotten old and boring.

One of her words (she thought it might be garbage, or perhaps haircut) landed on the linoleum, and the toddler promptly stuffed it in his mouth.

“Spit. That. Out,” she said, and reached down to swat him on the butt.

The child obeyed with eyes brimming.

“Have a good day!” His father folded the paper, waved an absent-minded farewell and scuffed over the worn path to the door and into the groove of his day away from the house.

The bedraggled word—it was run—staggered on the hardwood. She stepped on it, grinding it underfoot until the sole of her slipper left a mark on the floor and the word was nothing more than a smear of good intentions and guts.

They both began to cry: mother and child. Her tears were black and bitter creatures that scuttled away, ashamed and afraid of the daylight that streamed in the window. They took refuge under the baseboards and in the cabinets between the mixing bowls and the food processor.

She picked up her son and held him until he slept, looking just as he did only hours after birth, with his baby mouth like a pink bow on a present and eyelashes so beautiful it hurt her to look at them. She put him down on their big bed, imprisoned him with pillows and tiptoed downstairs to clean up the mess. She collected the tears with tweezers and popped them into an empty baby food jar.

Her hands shook.

There were hundreds of the tiny little bastards.

Either they’d multiplied, or she cried more than she realized.

The last one put up a fight, dodging between a glass baking dish and the wooden rolling pin, but she flushed it out and whacked it a good one with the yellow pages.

“Get in there, you fucker.” No more tears—she was afraid to cry now. She screwed the lid on and added a rubber band for extra security.

She planned on burying them in the yard or shoving the jar deep in the trash can, between blackened banana peels and dirty diapers, but the garage door opened and she panicked.

Why were you crying?

What’s the matter?

Don’t I give you everything?

She couldn’t face those importuning accusations right now.

Up the stairs, into the guest room, under the bed. Dust bunnies, rubber storage bins, the little wooden jewelry box her grandmother gave her on her wedding day.

“For your treasures.”

For my secrets.

It held only a yellowed muslin sachet of lavender tied with a pale green ribbon. She added the jar. Closed the lid. Turned the key.

She shoved the box back under the safety of the dust ruffle and heard feet coming up the stairs.

“Honey?”

What to do with the key?

His hand on the doorknob—

She put it in her mouth and tasted verdigris just before she swallowed. The metal sliver scraped all the way down her throat; she swallowed again and again, still feeling it lodged sideways somewhere in the middle.

“What are you doing in here sweetie?” She stood up and kissed him with closed lips. “Just cleaning up a little.”

She forgot about the tears, for a while. It was easy enough to be happy, with a beautiful house that needed cleaning and a darling child to chase and a loving husband who wanted to walk in the door to shower and dinner and a few hours in front of the television before sex and bed.

The rubies on her pillow surprised her, though. The desires started small: garnet chips like flecks of blood on the sheets.

Community college.

Night school.

Just a few units.

Easy enough to flick onto the carpet and sweep up later. But the one as large as a golf ball was too big to ignore—it would clog the vacuum for certain. Break the belts and kill the machine just as the dogs started shedding their winter coats.

She palmed it and eased out from between the sheets. Naked, because she always slept that way, but reaching for the baggy cotton sweats that were better than camouflage.

Steam poured out of the bathroom—she had five minutes at most.

It was tricky, getting the key back. It was lodged just under her heart and took some prying to extricate. Reaching into her chest was none too comfortable either, but it was that or explain why she woke up this morning wanting to go back to school to get her degree.

The tears were still there, tumbling over each other inside the baby food jar. The sachet was still there; her secrets would smell of lavender.

She added the ruby.

Closed the box. Turned the key.

It didn’t hurt—as much—to swallow it this time. But her breakfast tasted like metal, and even the coffee had an unwelcome aftertaste.

“I have to go to the post office today.” His words were moths now too, that appeared over the edges of the newspaper.

She could only nod. Everything she didn’t say were four-and-twenty blackbirds that hopped on the table and pecked at the toast.

“Anything you need from downtown?”

I want more from my life snatched the moth-words out of the air before they could even take flight. She shook her head no and tried to grab the bird mid-flight to the pot rack. Copper pans jangled and danced. Certainly he would peer around the headlines about the country going to shit and realize the same thing was happening here.

“Caw!” said Part of me is dying.

The little one crowed too, banged his spoon against a melamine plate and flung oatmeal against the wall.

Digesting the world, her husband kissed the air next to her cheek.

Do you even see me anymore? shat on his shoulder.

I think I might hate you followed him out the door, flapping after the truck all the way down the driveway.

She wiped gluey smears of cereal off the little one, who protested and slapped at her. You could use a spanking heckled her from the piano.

She left him in front of the television preoccupied with dancing bears and singing hands. She stalked the worst of the unspoken thoughts.

Through the dining room. Into the foyer.

I’m not sure I love you anymore sat on the frame of the wedding picture that hung in the stairwell. She grabbed at it, dug her fingers deep into the oily black feathers. She ignored the pecks and squawks of protest as she raced up the stairs two at a time.

She stuffed the blackbird fear inside the secrets box, next to the dream ruby and the black beetle tears and the vintage pomander.

The smell of lavender made her sick now.

But the key didn’t hurt at all, going down this time. She started to shove the box back under the bed, but it wouldn’t fit. The more secrets she put in the box, the larger it got.

She glared at it, still refusing to cry. She kicked it with her foot, just hard enough to hurt herself. Then she shoved it into the closet and covered it with a spare quilt.

The very first class, she sat in the front row with a new notebook and her favorite pen uncapped and ready. School supplies had always been important to her.

“More important than family?” he’d argued, baffled, angry that he and the baby weren’t enough anymore. Her class schedule lay on the counter.

Introduction to Warfare.

Fight Dirty 101.

“I’m not choosing school over family. This is something I need to do!” Still no tears…she was too angry for tears. Fury poked out of her in glittering spikes that warned him not to touch her.

He headed for the garage.

Good riddance mocked her from the top of the china cabinet and rattled their wedding dishes.

She heard scraping and the hollow ring of a gong. Bristling, she peered around the dining room door.

He’d retrieved an enormous golden scale from the rafters above the cars.

“You don’t need to do this!” she told him, hackles raised.

He ignored the warning and set it down in the middle of the room. “We’ll just see what the truth is.” He sat down on one side, with the baby in his arms. “Put school on the other side.”

“Asshole. Jerkoff.” She spat the words at him and they burned holes in the floor.

She stomped into the kitchen and retrieved her carefully selected school supplies and her class schedule. Every footfall shook the foundation of the house as she stormed back to the scales. She heaved them onto the other side of the scale and heard the weights jump, settle—

Her notebooks and pens were, inexplicably, heavier.

Told you so: the three words with as much power as ‘I love you’. Even unspoken, they reached out to slap her. Then he gathered up their crying son, climbed the stairs to the nursery and shut the door in her face.

She pounded on the barrier until her fists bled. “It’s not fair to punish me for wanting something for myself!”

He shoved a note under the door.

Fair has nothing to do with it.

“Really mature!”

Another note.

I know you are, but what am I?

Were they reduced to keeping track, weighing everything, trying to cut the last piece of cake exactly in half?

She went to the master bathroom, used a box of bandages to cover the wounds on her hands, and retrieved her car keys. Silent condemnation followed her down the driveway in a rolling black cloud.

It was probably against the rules for an instructor to ask a student out to coffee, but she was enjoying her first taste of freedom and didn’t want to see the harm.

“Your work is really very advanced. I’m surprised you’re not enrolled at the university.” His words were dragonflies, their wings iridescent in the half light of the café. Her butterflies were delighted with the company.

“I’m afraid I don’t have time. I have—” A million and one excuses.

They both wore wedding bands.

Father and son were both asleep when she returned on tiptoe. She found them curled up in the master bedroom; the television was on and an open copy of Good Night, Moon; was spread-eagle on the coverlet.

She watched the rise and fall of their chests, possessive of every snore and grunt.

She loved her husband and her son.

But another man waited for her outside.

She didn’t pack clothes or photographs or her toothbrush. She went instead to the guest room and pulled out the box of secrets. She pulled the key from her breast one last time and opened it.

She took out the jar of black tears, the crimson jewel, the blackbird, the prickly spines of her rage. She added her memories of tonight; a lovely white gossamer thing that was hot to the touch.

Together, they were like her skin and her bones, her floating dark hair and her aching heart.

Together, they made a whole other person; one filled with dreams and anger and regret and hope.

A single tear gathered in the corner of her eye. Not a black scurrying creature this time, but a magic wish for another version of happily-ever-after.

She let it fall.

Her doppelganger smiled and sat up, filled with purpose and youth and life. Black beetle hair streaming, she-who-could-have-been walked down the stairs and into the dark to meet a different fate.

She-who-was put the key in the box, turned it, sat back. Empty, it was a tiny thing no larger than a coin.

She swallowed it.

Then she joined her husband and her child in the family bed and slept with all her other secrets inside of her.

Fox and Chicken People

Bruce Boston

I f fox and chicken people
were the world there would
be lots of barbed wire,
electrified fences,
towering stone fortifications
topped with jagged glass
to keep the hairy carnivores
from their feathered prey.

As each opposing civilization
advanced through the ages,
they would inevitably
intermingle and the lines
of battle would become
more subtle and refined.

The winning fox people
would be those who could
assume the convincing
guise of chickens until
they were ready to pounce.

The winning chicken people
would be those who could
not only spot such marauders,
despite the finesse and
charm in their performance,
but those who could summon
the prowess to gather
their fellows in numbers
sufficient to peck
the impostors to death.

If fox and chicken people
were the world it would be
a game of fang and beak
and explosive violence,
the amoral survival
of evolutionary design.

Moonlight on the Carpet

David D. Levine

“The first draft of this story was written at the bar at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, as part of the Two Beers And A Story Challenge. The rules of the Challenge were simple: write a complete short story in the time it takes to finish two beers. I can usually finish a novel more quickly than I can finish a beer, but with the cheering crowd shouting "Drink!" every minute or two, by the time I reached the end of this story I found I had downed a full pint of Sam Adams and two-thirds of another. Not to mention participating in the singing, trash-talking, telling of rude jokes, and other miscellaneous hilarity (including the mating call of the Giant Clam). I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I did writing it.”

“V RRM, VRRM,” said Liam as he ran the little wooden car across the Persian carpet. It was summer, a hot humid North Carolina summer, and there was nothing else to do. Mommy and Daddy were away again.

The blue and gold pattern in the middle of the carpet, a thing the shape of the big black card in Mommy’s bridge deck, could be Laclede Island where they went every month at this time. Liam ran his car along the causeway—a long curve of blue and red and black—and through the stripe of bright white moonlight that crossed it. The babysitter snored in the armchair by the window; outside, in the darkness, seagulls called and the surf rumbled low.

Across the causeway and along the bay the little car sped, streetlights flicking past one after the other. But above them all loomed the moon, the full moon, outshining them all. Mommy and Daddy never took Liam to the island when the moon was full. Mommy said Esbat wasn’t for little boys.

“Vrrm, vrrm…errrrrk!” The car’s wooden wheels squealed as it took a turn in the carpet pattern. The rug smelled dusty and bristled roughly under the heels of his hands and on his bare knees. The pattern was getting twisty here, and Liam slewed the car rapidly back and forth. Then he tipped it up on two wheels and made a little screaming noise.

He reached too far on the next curve. His hand slipped out from underneath him, and his chin struck the carpet, stiff little fibers pressing into his skin. The car turned over twice, landed on its wheels, and rolled away into the darkness under the china cabinet.

“Oh nooo!” Liam cried in a thin television voice. “We’re looost!” He crawled forward, off the carpet and onto the wooden floor. Tiny particles of sand embedded themselves in his knees and hands, but he ignored them. The china cabinet was the cliff by the beach, with the secret cave at its foot. Liam had never been there except during the day at low tide, when it teemed with tiny fish and little shells crunched underfoot. But now, at night, at a full moon high tide, the cave was awash. Liam reached way under the cabinet, feeling among the dust bunnies and lost coins for the missing car.

“Heblblblp,” Liam said, bubbling spit at the back of his throat. His fingers found the toy car and he washed it back and forth, drifting in and out with the crashing tide. “Heblblblp!” But that got boring after a while, so he floated the car to the mouth of the cave. It was dusty, and he blew on it to clean it.

The soggy car tilted back and forth, the water level falling, until it washed up on the fringe at the edge of the carpet. “Oh, Cameron,” Mommy said. “I thought we were doomed!”

That puzzled Liam for a moment, until he remembered that Cameron was Daddy’s grown-up name.

“Rrr,” went the car. “Rrr, rrr, rrr.” Daddy couldn’t make the car start. “We’re going to have to walk.”

Liam walked his fingers along the fringe at the edge of the sea. “I’m so cold, Cameron,” Mommy said. Liam’s fingers moved into the moonlight.

“Keep walking, Molly,” Daddy said.

This part of the carpet, with the red and blue swirls, reminded Liam of the other deck of cards, the one with the pretty colored pictures that moved. Daddy said Liam should never touch that deck, but he didn’t know that Liam was already better with it than Daddy was.

Liam shuffled forward on his knees, moving his fingers down to the corner of the carpet, where the moonlight didn’t reach. Liam imagined that something large and dark was following them. His fingers walked a little faster, though they couldn’t see whatever it was. Liam decided the house was at the other end of the carpet, back where the car had started.

Then Mommy turned and screamed. Liam’s fingers broke into a run.

The carpet burned Liam’s knees as he crawled forward faster and faster, his fingers stumbling along the sandy beach as they ran from the looming shadow. “Huhh, huhh,” Daddy panted. The darkness was close behind.

Six feet. Five feet. Four. Liam crawled into the patch of moonlight where he’d started, and the shadow of his head fell across his weakly struggling fingers. “Oh my God!” Mommy screamed, and Liam made his fingers run faster. Only three feet to the edge of the carpet—three feet of red and black swirls, weaving across the fingers’ path.

Now Liam was walking his whole hands, stepping each one in and out of the shadow of moonlight cast by his head and shoulders. “Huhh, huhh,” he said, but as fast as his hands could move they couldn’t escape the darkness.

Wet footsteps sounded on the porch steps, and a panicked rattle of keys at the door.

Then Liam’s knee struck against a fold of the carpet and he stumbled in his progress, his hands skidding painfully across the fibers, tangling in the fringe at the edge. The shadow of his own head grew large, obliterating the moonlight as he fell upon his hands.

Welcome to Oceanopia!

Katharine Sparrow

“I love separatist communities of all kinds, especially those of the uber-rich who live on man-made islands. Well, maybe I mean they are fascinating to me. I love squirrels. I love how they forget where they bury nuts, but are always optimistic about digging anywhere to find them. I love rollerblades, surprise parties, and happy apocalypses. Somehow all of that got squished together to form this story.”

I T WAS ANOTHER PERFECT DAY in Oceanopia. The hot weather was tempered by the oscillators, which created the right amount of breeze. The Craven pipes cooled the breeze to 68 degrees. The sun rose at 6:02 and would set at 18:02. There would be twelve hours of uninterrupted sunshine: the same as every day. Nothing ever changed on the equator. Nothing ever changed in Oceanopia. Except for Zaria: she was getting older.

Trix had planned to “Find the Perfect Birthday Present for Zaria!” from 8:00 to 9:30, but it was 9:27 and she had come up with nothing. She stared up at the sky and made slow figure eights along the path as she rollered forward, then back to Ronnie and Winton.

“Melodious and fabulous showtunes about her life! I’ll put on a long black wig and slinky sleeveless dress. You can play Isaiah, Ronnie. It’ll be kinky-rific!” Trix trilled as she skated past her two friends and raised her right leg over her head.

Ronnie looked excited. He clapped his hands and flipped his bleached-blond hair out of his face. Ronnie was always excited about everything: he was part Labrador.

Winton spoke so slowly that Trix wondered if his circuitry had gotten messed up. “Zaria will hate showtunes. It will remind her about all the other humans who are gone. We shouldn’t even have a party—it might kill her.” He sighed as though coming up from the depths of the ocean and pushing air out of his blowhole. Winton was part gray whale, and Zaria would not be surprised if he disappeared into the ocean some day soon.

“Win-ton, solemnity is never sexy!” Trix said. She did a back handspring to emphasize her point.

“Anything might kill her, the medicos say so,” he replied.

“No!” Trix said and rollered away from him. She went up the hill toward the yellow townhouses that glittered in the sun with all their broken glass.

As she crested the top of the hill, neural connections sparked and shimmered in her. They fell into place in a way she thought must be similar to a human’s imagination.

“Perfect! Sublime! Impeccable!” Trix yelled and skated back down the hill on one leg.

Ronnie stared at her with confusion and hope, Winton with contempt.

“I have the most wonderful best present for Zaria!” And that it would save Oceanopia forever was just chocolate frosting on the huge cake the cookbots were assembling for tonight’s party. “Sorry boys, but she’s going to love me the best!”

Trix spun around in circles on her rollers, faster and faster as she savored the pulses of joy that ran out from her middle and spread to her fingers and toes. No aniborg could feel any pleasure unless they served humans, and with only Zaria left, it was hard to stay happy. Trix felt her squirrel and robot parts pulse with joy compounds as she started to plan her perfect present for Zaria.

“Kismic! Majestic! Heavenly!”

Ronnie looked sad at being left out. Trix gave him a hug and spun him around, wishing she could give him pleasure like a human could.

Everything will always be perfect! Trix thought as she whirled around. I’ll give her the best present ever. A boyfriend! A brand-new perfect boyfriend! Zaria would become so happy she’d get to make a True Birthday Wish, and she’d wish away death and become just as immortal as the aniborgs. She would never die! Trix knew not to tell Winton her plan: she knew not to tell anyone. They would only make fun of her until she didn’t believe anymore, and then it wouldn’t happen. Trix zoomed away from them—there was so much to do!

“Run-through for Zaria’s birthday tonight at 15:04, three hours before the Green-Flash-Party-Extravaganza! Everyone’s presence is mandatory!”

“You’ve already announced that three times today,” Vicki responded over the comwave with her annoyed, stupid cat voice.

“Sedulousness is always sexy! Smart girls prepare for success!” Trix replied and jumped into the air to do the splits, then twisted around and landed on her hands.

“Ta-da!” She popped back onto her feet and rollered past the flashing lights of the long-empty casino, then down the hill toward the edge of the island.

“Ocean-o-pi-a!” Trix sang. “Ocean-o-pi-a, the great man-made island where dreams come true on the ocean blue!” She held the last word out on a long note as she rollered along the smooth wide paths as fast as she could go, which was really fast. “Ocean-o-pi-a!” It was her favorite song and sometimes she even made up her own lyrics and sang them when no one else was around. “Ocean-o-pi-a, a floating island where aniborgs will do whatever you ask and will perform any task!”

Which reminded her she was scheduled to visit her sisters from 9:45 to 10:00. Every Monday Trix visited them, and she was just bursting to tell someone about her present. Her sisters were the only ones in all of Oceanopia, besides Captain Estrella, who could keep a secret.

“Hello Trix? How’s Trix?” she yelled into the quartz house at her sisters. She paused for a moment, pretending they could hear her and might respond.

Besides, Trix didn’t hate them. In fact, more and more over the last 73 years and 41 days, she had been wanting to wake a Trix up. Maybe that meant that she would go into the ocean, or maybe it meant that there would be someone like her to be around, with the same combination of robot and squirrel on the inside. Not that another Trix would matter without humans to serve, but it might be nice to have another one around. She had imagined conversations with one lots of times.

“Welcome to Oceanopia, the best floating island ever made! You get to live forever! Humans will love you because you are so pretty and fun, and you were made to be likable! You look like the most beautiful perfect human! You are going to be so happy when you serve and protect them. Welcome to paradise!”

But Trix would have to tell new-Trix other things, things she didn’t want to think about. Like how the water and food had gone bad in the world, and how even though Oceanopia used the best filtration system, the transgenics had gotten in anyway. They had all the best medicine and had done much better than the rest of humanity, but the Oceanopians had gotten sick and died anyway. Trix didn’t want to see herself learn that all over again.

Sad is never sexy! Trix told herself and made herself smile.

“Guess what I’m getting Zaria for her birthday? A hot new boyfriend! I hope you all have a terrific day! See you next week, Trixes!” Her rollers popped out and she zoomed away fast, accessing where Zaria was and heading straight for her. “Ocean-o-pi-a! Where the food is great and the girls are first-rate!”

Zaria’s garden was the most awful place on the whole floating island, and Trix hated it that Zaria was always there. The woman had always insisted on growing the old Cascadian plants by herself. As Zaria got older, the garden got worse. Hollyhocks grew like weeds everywhere. A black-leaved plum tree with dead branches sat amid a bunch of shasta daisies who stole water away from the roots of the plum. Imperfect! Nasty! Trix itched to relocate the daisies and prune the tree. She wanted to add mulch and amendments to the soil, and make distinct borders everywhere. The thought of helping sent a trill through Trix, even though she knew Zaria wouldn’t allow it. Lavender crowded into rosemary and mint, all fighting with each other. A cherry tree was being strangled by a blue morning glory vine that wrapped its way up the tree’s trunk. Wrong! Invasive!

It made Trix jittery on the inside to look at the garden, but then she saw Zaria lying out in the grass under the cherry tree, small and withered. An aniborg had helped her out of the float chair that hovered nearby. Tubes ran from the chair to Zaria’s belly, wrists, and nose. Cherry blossoms had fallen like snow on top of her. If Zaria wanted snow, they could close off one of the hexes and make it. They could dress up in slinky body suits and go ice skating! It could be a lot of fun!

Trix just remembered to keep herself from offering to make snow for Zaria. All the aniborgs, for the last 7 years and 132 days, had been asking to do things for Zaria, and the human had done a fine job of keeping most of them busy, most of the time. But because it was her birthday, Trix wouldn’t ask. That seemed to be what Zaria wanted most of all—to be left alone. Outside the garden other aniborgs worked at imaginary chores, keeping an eye on the woman. Just being close to her felt good, even though she was so wrinkly and white-haired it hurt to look at her. “Hiya, birthday girl!” Trix stood over her.

Zaria opened her brown eyes and stared upwards. “Hello, Trix.” “It’s your birthday, your 99th birthday!”

A small smile on Zaria’s face sent bolts of joy through Trix. She spun around twice before flopping down on the ground beside the old woman.

“For your present, I have to ask you some questions. Answer them but don’t think about it, okay?”

Zaria nodded her head.

“What are you looking for in a man?”

Zaria laughed aloud, then it turned into a long, rasping cough. “Do you need water? Inhalants? Heimlich?”

“No, I’m fine,” Zaria said weakly.

“If you could have any man in the whole world, what would he be like?”

Zaria took a long while to answer, and when she did her voice came out very slow. She always spoke too slow these days. “Any human at all would be good, Trix. For all of you though, not for me. I’m…beyond that.”

“Of course for you! It’s your birthday, and I want all your wishes to come true!”

“My wish is that you find people then, lots of kind, healthy people. But you know all the humans are dead, right? No matter what any of us might wish.”

“Do you like tall men?”

“I suppose.”

“Strong, sexy, and rugged?”

“Not too strong. Not too rugged. You remember Isaiah, Trix? That’s who I’d like.”

“But he’s dead.”

Zaria nodded. “A long time dead, but I still love him.”

“When you’re gone, we’ll still love you, forever,” Trix whispered, because it felt like something she didn’t want any of the other aniborgs to hear—something private and true.

“I know,” Zaria whispered back. It seemed to make her sad.

“Gotta go!” Trix got up and ran away from Zaria’s garden, just wanting to go and go and go! There was so much to do to make the best birthday ever for Zaria. Trix would make it so wonderful and spectacular that she would never die! Happiness could do that, it really could! It had to!

“Ocean-o-pi-a! Where you can live forever if you only endeavor!”

As soon as Trix was far away from that rotten garden, she slowed and went to go sit on the Blue Sand beach to think. Half of it had been blasted away during one of the battles, and there was a pretty white fence built around where Oceanopia had broken off. There was still some burnt sand, black mixed in with the blue, along the beach. Trix accessed the outgoing message that announced they had openings at Oceanopia.

Manmade floating island seeks any human life.

It repeated the message drearily in an endless loop. Trix could see why no one had contacted Oceanopia for 73 years and 41 days. It had no dazzle-raz, no snackle-pop! Next Trix accessed information on propaganda. She plucked out the most proven effective strategies and saw immediately what was wrong. The outgoing message had no glittering generalities, or intentional vagueness, or misleading slogans!

Trix adored slogans, and Oceanopia had a lot of them. “Mall of the ocean!”, “The ultimate gated community!”, “The cruise that never ends!” But Trix would have to come up with something even better and more misleading. All the people out there…she looked at the empty horizon. All the people…somewhere, just needed to be convinced what a paradise Oceanopia really was, and then they would come and date Zaria!

No. The whole world is dead, reason told Trix.

She told it to shut up and perk up! Trix decided she would find a glittering generality from her most sparkly day ever! She accessed the first day of Oceanopia, and her first birthday, too!

267 years and 301 days ago, Trix had been animated with all the other unique aniborgs. She’d been given all the information about what she was and what she must do. They’d all been let loose on the brand new Oceanopia to mingle.

“Welcome to Oceanopia! Hiya, I’m Trix. The Co-director of fun! How can I make your fantasies come true?”

Trix told people about all the dances, shows, and parties she would throw for them. They all stared at her, and she felt her squirrel parts wriggling around happily with all the attention. There were so many people to make happy, and so much to explore on Oceanopia!

There was the room of Seafood Madness where mounds of red lobster tails, squid rings, and bright pink salmon were arranged to spell out “Oceanopia!” There was the Laguna Luau with leis. Trix watched Winton croon calypso songs as he poured rum and lime into coconuts, then shook it all up. There was the Gypsy Tent where people smoked water pipes and the music was turned up extra loud.

Trix met up with her Co-director of fun, Ronnie, and they walked in unison, shoulder to shoulder, down the shiny red road that made a circle across all six conjoined hexagons of Oceanopia. It was 6.6 miles long. They stopped to look at the center of Oceanopia: it was a calm expanse of ocean, shielded by the island that surrounded it on all sides. Children splashed in the water, and there were three floating fountains in the middle of it. Ronnie and Trix juggled, did gymnastics, and told jokes to every human they met as they wandered from the Orange Sand beach, to the Peach Sand beach, to the Acapulco Lounge.

The founders of Oceanopia stood on the Grand Titan stage. Elevated above everyone else, they made speeches. “Reasons why Oceanopia is better than anywhere else,” “The genius of Aniborg pleasure receptors and how it makes them the ultimate servants,” “Oceanopia, the ultimate sustainable island!” The last speech was Trix’s favorite, and she would listen to it over and over in the years to come whenever she felt scared.

“Oceanopia needs nothing from the outside world to exist. We get our power from the ocean’s heat: our Stirling engines provide for every need and luxury! We have inexhaustible fresh water from our Craven pipes: using convection they draw cold water up from the ocean, then create fresh water through condensation. Our rich fertile farmlands use humanure and fish fertilizers to keep healthy. We have unlimited supplies of seafood, of course! And if we are ever attacked? Our defenses are impenetrable! Every day in Oceanopia is a perfect day!”

Oceanopia was so wonderful, and the day was 100% perfect, almost. A wonderful human had followed Trix around and asked her lots of questions about the aniborgs. He was really impressed.

“You’re the hottest woman I’ve ever seen!”

“I’m not a woman!”

He had taken her to his condo had done terrific things to her, but then he took some pills and decided it would be fun to cut Trix’s leg off and see what was on the inside. Trix felt, for the first time ever, a combination of good and bad that she would often have with the humans. She was serving him, so that made her happy, but she was made with pain analogs, too. As soon as he said it would be okay, she screamed so loud the security aniborgs Hans and Hiro had shown up. Later, they made laws against mutilation. Aniborgs were too expensive to serve humans in that way.

Trix analyzed all the data of that day and found the best glittering generality. “Every day in Oceanopia is a perfect day.” It would make any human want to live here, wouldn’t it? And mostly, it was true.

“Run-through for Zaria’s birthday tonight, three hours before the Green-Flash! That’s in 32 minutes!” Trix announced to everyone.

“Shut-up. You’ve told us 4 times today, already. We’re all eidetic, Trix,” Vicki said as though she would like to bite her.

Trix was too polite to respond—snarkiness was never sexy! She sent a special message up to the locked cabin on the highest point in Oceanopia. “That means you, too, Captain Estrella! You have to come to the party!”

No one had heard from the Captain in 9 years and 12 days: she had locked the door to navigation when the human Captain, Johnathon Jones, had died.

“Hell-o, Captain Estrella? You’ll be sorry if you miss it! Hey, I need to send a new message out. I need to send it to every part of the world, all at once. How can I do that?” Estrella was the only aniborg to have access to all of Oceanopia’s technology. “It’s for Zaria’s birthday present, but I can’t tell you why. It’s a surprise!”

Silence.

“Please, please, please, Captain! It’s important. It’s something she will love.”

A long sigh came from navigation.

“Please, please, please?”

“There are ways to amplify our frequencies in order to be heard across the world. They are only to be used in emergencies though, as they would interfere with every other radio transmission.” Estrella’s voice came over the comwave, followed by a long sigh.

“This is an emergency! A birthday emergency!”

“I guess is doesn’t matter anymore,” Captain Estrella sighed, then transferred the codes to Trix to enable the transmission.

Trix launched herself into the air and did two somersaults, then landed tiptoe on her left leg. “Thanks Captain! See you at the run-through in 29 minutes! It’s wonderful to hear your voice!” Trix lied, and hoped the lie would make the captain feel less sad. She knew it couldn’t, but still, it was important to try.

Trix rollered down the red road that wasn’t very red anymore, but more of a dusty brown. She jumped over the missing parts and bumps of the road, and headed toward Green Sand Beach, which was at the far end of Oceanopia. She timed it perfectly so she got there just in time, not early or late. Smart girls were always punctual!

28 aniborgs were there, all that were left on Oceanopia, except the Captain. They all stood in front of the Starlight Stage with their heads down, not talking to each other, except for Ronnie. He had climbed up one of the Craven silos. Trix ran down the beach, then jumped onto the Starlight Stage and smiled at them all. The stage had lost one of its support beams and tilted towards the ground. “Confirmation: Zaria is outside of eavesdropping range?” Trix yelled out.

“Confirmed!” Ronnie shouted back. He jumped off the silo and did helicopter flips until he landed on the stage. Not that it mattered, without Zaria watching, but Trix made herself grin at him anyway.

“Are we ready to give Zaria the party of her life?” she asked everyone.

No one responded.

Vicky yawned and raised her hand. Trix could feel the cat in Vicky studying the squirrel in her. Not that any dumb cat could ever catch a squirrel. Trix tossed her hair from side to side as she looked at the golden-skinned, red-haired woman. “Yes, Ms. Vicki?”

“This is stupid. Zaria’s dying, she doesn’t want a party. Leave her alone.”

“And when she dies we are all doomed,” Winton added.

The Astrids, Hanses, and Hiros all nodded their heads in agreement.

“First, we will close the dome and have light confetti in Zaria’s favorite colors—red, orange, green, and blue! Then we will sing her a song and bring out her favorite foods!” Trix cocked her head at Ronnie.

He tilted his head toward her and showed off his perfect white teeth. “Then Trix and I will do the birthday dance!” He grabbed Trix around the waist and threw her 3 meters up, then caught her on the way down. They polkaed across the stage and krumped back, then added in some boogie moves and ended with fractal-jacks and magic fingers.

“Ta-da!”

No one clapped.

“Zaria will love it!” Ronnie yelled at them.

“Then we will do the presents! What are people giving her?” Trix asked.

The two Hiros and three Hanses stepped forward and raised their hands with military precision. “We are giving her some handmade jewelry,” one of the Hiros barked out.

“I’m singing her an old blues song. Real sad,” Lola said. Her heron blue eyes gazed listlessly out from the lanks of long black hair that hung in her face.

“I wrote a po-em,” Winton said. He recited it—

At the end of the world every day is the same,
Dig, except Zaria gets older.
It’s so very true.
True blue.
Every day is the same, except soon she will die,
Dig.
At the end of the world, we all wish we were
dead.

No one clapped for Winton.

Chubby Mario with his seal skills juggled 27 objects and made his eyebrows go up and down at the same time. Tall Gus and short Josie showed off a quilt they had made with octagonal three dimensional images. All they ever did these days was work with geometrics, and Trix wondered if their carpenter ant and bumblebee parts had taken over within them.

“Okay, razz-tazzle, more presents, and at the very end I’ll bring out my present! The best one of all! Then we’ll have cake and she will get to make a True Birthday Wish!”

“What’s your present?” Astrid asked moodily.

“You’ll see, it’s a sur-prise! She’ll love it! Okay, that’s a wrap!”

The other aniborgs shuffled away with their heads down.

Trix sat down on the edge of the stage and watched everyone go. It was time to finish the rest of her message. She had decided that there needed to be some ‘intentional vagueness’ about what had happened at Oceanopia, and accessed an overview of its history. Before she delved into it, she sang, “Ocean-o-pi-a! Where we still live on even though most of the humans are gone!”

46 years and 72 days after Oceanopia first set sail, lots of people began getting cancer and diabetes. Babies were born funny, and lots of people couldn’t have babies at all. There was nothing the scientists could do. “It’s in all the food’s molecules, like trying to take the salt out of the ocean,” a biologist had said.

10 years and 317 days later, the first attack came. Huge ships tried to get on the island. All the Hanses and Hiros, made with lion and wolf parts, were animated. They led the battles, even though it hurt them to kill humans. The sea battles continued for the next 85 years and 57 days. Sometimes the boats that came didn’t have any weapons and were easy to sink. Other times there were bullets and bombs. Trix remembered singing and putting on puppet shows for the children as they all hid below in the underground rooms. Their fear and unhappiness made Trix feel like someone was cutting off her leg again.

Over the course of many battles, Oceanopia was invaded by the Free Achinese, then the Boers, the Samoan Gangsters, and the Cascadians. The original Oceanopians ordered all the aniborgs to kill the invaders, but they couldn’t. Aniborgs were programmed to protect all Oceanopians, and that parameter was defined as anyone on the floating island. The old Oceanopians were angry all the time, complaining that they had not come to Oceanopia to live with people like that, and they should have the right to kill them. The aniborgs protected all the humans from each other.

54 years and 102 days later, they got the last radio message saying all the humans were dead. The net had long since stopped working.

For the last 73 years and 41 days, there was nothing. Silence. In that time, one by one the humans on Oceanopia died off and no more came. Zaria had been a fantastic gift, born with all her limbs and a brain that worked right. It was a shiny miracle that she had lived this long, aided by all the best technology. For the last 7 years and 212 days, Zaria had been the only human left. And after she was gone? Humans would be extinct and there would be no more happiness, and no more joy, ever.

Trix shook her head and slid off the Starlight Stage onto the beach. She walked down to the water, then sat and let her hands play with the kelly-green sand. Its warmth filtered through her fingers. How could you say all that with intentional vagueness? It took her a long time to find the right words, and even when she did, she was not sure if they were all the way right.

Oceanopia has survived hard times, yet still we are afloat!

Trix walked to the nearest recharge station and plugged herself in, so that she would be fully energized for the party. She accessed the old outgoing message, deleted it, and replaced it with her own. She used the access codes to amplify the announcement across the whole planet. Before she sent it off, she added in some misleading slogans for good measure.

Oceanopia is the dreamiest dream! Oceanopia is the very best place in the whole world! Every day in Oceanopia is a perfect day! Oceanopia has survived hard times, yet still we are afloat! We are seeking new members: please be tall, not too strong or rugged, and very sexy. Beautiful woman seeks man. No humans will be turned away.

Trix paused, then added, even as she worried that it might sound too desperate—

Very nice staff waiting to serve your every wish and dream!

She translated it into 67 languages and sent it out. Trix then worked on the finishing touches of the party as she powered up. She ordered lesser robots to decorate and send out reminders for everyone to come.

7 minutes and 47 seconds before the party was set to start, screams erupted across Oceanopia. First one, then another, and another, all crowding on top of each other and jumbled. It took Trix a moment to individuate what different aniborgs were saying.

“Zaria is dead! Dead! Dead!”

“Her heart has stopped!”

“She can not be revived!”

“Throw yourself into the ocean, life is over!”

Trix couldn’t turn the voices off, but she could make them quieter in her head. She unplugged herself, accessed where Zaria was, then rollered lightning fast to the old woman’s garden. Her small human body lay out under the cherry tree. It was still, gray, and motionless.

Zaria was gone. The last human, gone. Aniborgs stood ringed around her body. Some yelled while others were mute. Zaria was dead, really dead. Despite Trix’s stupid hopes, they were all extinct forever.

It’s all over, Trix thought. She saw the Hiros and Winton turn away and head toward the nearest beach. They would keep walking into the ocean until they were so far away they would not be able to obey the compunction to return and recharge. Their batteries would run down and they would stop working.

Ronnie came up beside her and put an arm around her. Why did he even try? Trix pushed him away and glared at him.

Lola threw herself down on the ground and made fake crying sounds: aniborgs had no crying analogs. Vicki beat her head against the side of the cherry tree, but not very hard: aniborgs could not willfully injure themselves. Trix looked up from Zaria and saw that Estrella was there. A hushed silence spread out from her. The Captain’s dark black skin and long dreaded hair were an echo to the crow within her. Her gaze met Trix’s. Desolation. Despair. Pain without end.

Trix turned and ran toward the ocean, eager for the dark depths, then the greater darkness, that would make all this end. It was all finally over, and the loss of the humans hurt more than Trix could have imagined. Hurt more than anything she had ever felt by a magnitude of 5.2. She longed for it to stop, for all of it to just stop.

By the time she reached the beach, Mario was already in the water. He swam into the ocean, and seemed to become part seal as he dived into a wave. Trix followed behind him, and felt the pull of the tides beckoning her into the water. Just keep walking. It will be over soon.

Knee deep in water, something requiring attention flashed within Trix. It opened automatically. It was a message.

“Hello, Oceanopia! Are you really out there? We are tall, not too strong or rugged, and very, very sexy. There are no humans left. They are extinct. This makes us sad. However, we are part human. That is, 52.75%. The rest is robot. We hope you will let us live on Oceanopia with you because we are lonely. Please, will you help us?”

The message then gave coordinates of where the human-robots were located.

Trix let out a squirrelly squeal and flashed the message to all the other aniborgs. She ordered those who had gone into the ocean to come back immediately. She told Captain Estrella that they must head toward the Horn of Africa as quickly as possible.

Trix did a one-handed handstand and started to plan the party they would throw for the new Oceanopians. She would make them love it here, and every day would be a perfect day!

“Ocean-o-pi-a! Where the aniborgs survive and are very alive!”

Our Authors

Dev Agarwal (“Toys”) used to work for a dysfunctional company in the UK. He now works for the government (a step up). He is currently revising his first novel, which continues the story of life after the Salusa.

Dev has a column on writing for the BSFA magazine, Focus (edited by Martin McGrath). His story “Queen of Engines” was an honourable mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror for 2006. He has also published fiction in Albedo One and Altair.

Dev’s novelette “Angels of War”, set in the same universe as “Toys”, appeared in Æon Three.

Bruce Boston (“Cat People,” “Fox and Chicken People”) is the author of forty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Gardener’s Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His poetry has received a record seven Rhysling Awards, a record five Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Awards, a record two Bram Stoker Awards for poetry, and the first Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He lives in Ocala, Florida, City of Trees, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon.

Bruce’s poems “Puppet People,” “Knife People,” and “Sun People,” and an exclusive Bruce Boston interview by Michael Lohr appeared in Æon Four.

Visit Bruce’s website at http://hometown.aol.com/bruboston.

Although Sarah L. Edwards (“The Butterfly Man”) graduated with a degree in mathematics, she likes to point out that she began college as an English major. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and an occasional unidentifiable piece, and has had work published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and Hub. She was also a finalist for the Writers of the Future contest. She is presently studying graduate mathematics, learning new recipes, and ignoring a half-knitted sock.

Dr. Rob Furey (“Parallax”) worked on his PhD in Gabon, West Africa, on social spiders. He has returned to his study site several times for his own research, with students and once as a forest guide for a natural history film crew from the UK. He has faced down cobras, retreated from army ants, and slept on open wooden platforms in African swamps. Later he went to French Amazonia to work on another social spider species. Not only did he spend time with the spiders, but he watched a gunfight between gold prospectors and French army troops while he ate a meal of roasted tapir. Since then Rob has returned to the tropics several times, usually with students. He spent time as a student himself attending Clarion West. He has published a couple of stories in anthologies since then in addition to articles for dusty tomes on arcane spider behavior. He is currently part of the charter faculty at Harrisburg University, the first new private university in Pennsylvania in over 100 years.

John Kratman (“Harry the Crow”) is a husband and the father of triplet girls. When he’s not busy spending time with his family, he’s a fulltime techno-bureaucrat. He lives in Rhode Island.

John’s fiction has also appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe and Northwest Passages: A Cascadian Odyssey.

Check out his website and blog at http://johnkratman.com/.

David D. Levine (“Moonlight on the Carpet”) is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 (Best Short Story, for “Tk’Tk’Tk”). He is currently working on a novel. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento.

David’s website is http://www.BentoPress.com/sf/.

When not scribbling, Lisa Mantchev can be found on the beach, up a tree, making jam, or repairing things with her trusty glue gun. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Æon, and Abyss & Apex. More will be appearing soon in Japanese Dreams and Electric Velocipede. She is currently at work on the third novel in the Théâtre Illuminata trilogy.

Lisa’s story “Mirror Bound” appeared in Æon Nine.

You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website: http://www.lisamantchev.com.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Signals”)’s novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 13 different languages. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won Hugo awards for both editing and fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has also been the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award, the Science Fiction Age Reader’s Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award, and been nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award.

From 1991-1996 Kris was the editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.

Visit Kris’s website at http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/.

Photo by N.E. Lilly/GreenTentacles

Lawrence M. Schoen (“Fitzwell’s Oracle”) holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, spent ten years as a college professor, and currently works as research director and chief compliance officer for a series of mental health and addiction treatment facilities. He’s also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Klingon language. His fiction has appeared in such places as Absolute Magnitude, Æon, Analog, Andromeda Spaceways, Apex Digest, Artemis, and the All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories anthology, and that’s just the A’s. He lives in Philadelphia.

Visit Lawrence’s website at http://www.klingonguy.com/.

W e consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been around long enough to be planning our thirteenth issue since our launch in November 2004, and we hope you’ll think yourself lucky to read seven great stories, two fantastic columns, and three wonderful poems by Æon authors in Æon Thirteen.

Jeffe Kennedy will kick us off with “Pearl,” a story about the collision of old humanity and new, and the things that never change.

S. Hutson Blount makes his Æon debut with a pizza-flavored tale of old-school gods and rising aspirants—“One Avatar, Hold the Anchovies.”

David Le Dauphin takes you to a strange place in dangerous times in “Little Moon, Too, Goes Round.”

Three authors will make return appearances in Æon Thirteen. Welcome back Daniel Marcus (“Echo Beach,” Æon Eight) as he reveals the darkness that lies behind “The Dam.”

Marissa K. Lingen (“Things We Sell to Tourists” Æon Six, and “Michael Banks, Home From the War,” Æon Nine) returns for a charmed third appearance with an Orphean tale of “Swimming Back From Hell by Moonlight”.

Nebula and Hugo Award finalist Bruce McAllister (“The Passion: a Western,” Æon Seven) makes his second appearance in our electronic pages with the story of a professional called upon to make a very special “Hit.”

And to wrap it all up, a tale of allegories and their friends and neighbors from Craig D.B. Patton: “Misery Loves.”

Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dr. Rob Furey will return with columns to make you think, and we’ll have poetry by two returning Æon poets: Rhysling Award winner Greg Beatty and Aurora Award Winner Marcie Lynn Tentchoff.

We hope you’ll join us in the future.

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The Blood of Father Time, by Alan M. Clark, Stephen C. Merritt, and Lorelei Shannon

Electric Story

Flatland: The Movie

“Firewall,” by David D. Levine, appearing in Transhuman (Baen Books)

The Internet Review of Science Fiction (IROSF)

Nightshadows, by William F. Nolan (Darkwood)

Recovery Man, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Talebones Magazine #36

Thriller Doctor

Weird Tales/Fantasy-Magazine

Polyphony 6 (Wheatland Press)

Where Angels Fear, the collected short fiction of Ken Rand, Volume 1 (Fairwood)