Strange Horizons
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Copyright ©2001 by the individual authors. See copyright notices at end of each feature.

8/6/01

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

In early January 1999, a 57-year-old man driving his BMW in Caputh, Germany, drove into the Havel River. Upon questioning, he revealed that he had been following the driving instructions relayed to him by his car's satellite navigation computer. The computer directed him across the river to his destination, but neither he nor his computer realized in time that the only way across the river was by ferry. Fortunately, the man was not injured; unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of his car.

“Normally, accidents like this shouldn't happen,” said a Caputh police spokesman. “This sort of thing can happen only when people rely too much on technology.” In other words, one runs into trouble by reasoning that, “If the computer says so, it must be true."

One is reminded of the statement made by the English countess and pioneer of computer theory, Lady Ada Lovelace (1815-1852): “The [computer] has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” Special conditions often result in strange behavior.

On the other hand, a Swiss-German patent clerk decided to take the strange behavior of light at face value. “If the light says so,” he might have said to himself, “it must be true.” His name was Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and what the light told him led him to, among other things, the special theory of relativity.

Special relativity looks, at first blush, like nothing so much as a bundle of contradictions. It predicts that objects change shape when they move close to the speed of light, that they change mass as well, that the nature of space and time is intimately related to where we observe them from. Part of the reason that special relativity is so counterintuitive is that light travels so darn fast: very nearly exactly 300,000 km/s, about a million times faster than any man-made object at the time. It was very difficult to listen to what the light said.

So let's not start with light. Let's start with a tennis ball.

Suppose you're sitting in a boxcar in a train. Say that the boxcar is 9 feet wide. You sit on one side of the boxcar, and idly throw a tennis ball off the other side, 9 feet away. It bounces back to you. If you throw the ball at 45 feet per second (about 30 mph), the ball takes 0.2 seconds to reach the other side, which we're able to calculate very easily, based on the following simple formula:

(1) t = d / v

which simply states that the time t that it takes an object to travel a distance d is simply d divided by the speed or velocity, v. We'll use this formula a lot. In this case, the time taken is 9 feet, divided by 45 feet per second, or 0.2 seconds. Then it takes 0.2 seconds to bounce back to you—the whole thing takes 0.4 seconds.

Now let's start the train in motion. Suppose it gets up to a rate of 60 feet per second (40 mph). Anyone who has ever played dodgeball with a sibling in the back seat of the family station wagon knows that the speed of the train won't affect the behavior of the ball. It continues to travel 18 feet round trip, taking 0.4 seconds to do so.

Consider, however, a stationary observer sitting by the side of the track. He agrees that it takes 0.4 seconds from the time you throw the ball to the time you catch it again. On the other hand, he doesn't agree that the ball only travels 18 feet round trip, because to him, the ball doesn't travel straight forward and back. Instead, he sees it take a zig-zag path, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Path of ball as seen by outside observer.

In the 0.2 seconds that it takes the ball to travel from one side of the boxcar to the other, the train travels 12 feet. The distance that the ball travels, from the point of view of the stationary observer, is the length of the diagonal of the right triangle, which is sqrt(9² + 12²), or 15 feet. The ball then travels another 15 feet on the way back, again from the point of view of the stationary observer. To this observer, therefore, the ball travels 30 feet in the same 0.4 seconds, and 30 feet divided by 0.4 seconds equals 75 feet per second (50 mph). From the point of view of someone on the ground, that's how fast the tennis ball is moving.

There's nothing terribly peculiar about this. The thing it depends on is the Newtonian principle that time is absolute. If you clock the round trip time of the tennis ball at 0.4 seconds, then so does everyone else, no matter how fast they're moving. In the everyday experience of Newton and his contemporaries, there was nothing to contradict that common sense rule.

In 1873, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1832-1879) formally set down the four equations that govern the transmission of electromagnetic waves through a vacuum. He noticed that if you combined the four equations, you could derive the speed of those waves—it was the square root of the product of two constants, both of which could be measured in the laboratory. Given the then best-known values for those constants, he came up with a speed of just about 300,000 km/s (about 186,000 miles per second).

That is very close to the speed of light, and Maxwell decided that was too much of a coincidence. He concluded that light itself was an electromagnetic wave. But what was waving? Ocean waves are waves in water, sound waves are waves in air or some other sound-transmitting medium, but a light beam can go through a vacuum just as well as it can through anything else—better, in fact. Maxwell couldn't bring himself to conceive of light waves just “waving themselves,” so he proposed what came to be known as the luminiferous aether. The aether was a mysterious medium, which had no mass, no energy, nothing—except that it was necessary in order for light to move anywhere at all.

For light to get to us from all across the universe, this aether had to be everywhere, in our houses, out in the fields, in buildings, in the solar system, throughout the galaxy—everywhere. Since the aether was the medium for all electromagnetic waves, it made sense to say that the speed of light was 300,000 km/s relative to the aether. In those days, the only massive objects that were known to move an appreciable fraction of that speed were astronomical: stars, planets, galaxies, and so forth. That raised the interesting question: what was our own motion—that is, the motion of the earth—relative to the aether?

In 1887, the American physicist Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and the American chemist Edward Morley (1838-1923) conducted an experiment to detect the earth's motion through the aether. They set up an intriguing apparatus designed to measure small variations in the speed of light. As the apparatus was rotated, they expected that the instrument would show small changes reflecting the alignment of the apparatus with the earth's motion through the aether. Light moving with the aether would be faster than light moving against the aether, and light moving across the aether would be somewhere in between.

What they found startled them: no matter how the apparatus was rotated, no change at all was detected. This seemed to imply that the earth was stationary with respect to the aether, or, in other words, that the aether moved with the earth! That seemed completely unreasonable, but it occurred to them that perhaps, just by coincidence, the earth happened to be moving with the aether. Six months later and half a revolution around the sun later, it ought to be moving the opposite direction, and then the results ought to show motion relative to the aether.

So six months passed, and Michelson and Morley duly ran their experiment again. And once again, no variation in the speed of light was found. This was a simply astonishing result—not only had the aether previously moved in the same direction as the earth, but it had then followed it in its circular orbit around the sun! That was too much to take, and although physicists would try to resuscitate the aether through a number of gambits, by the turn of the century they reluctantly concluded that the experiment proved the nonexistence of that which it had set out to measure—the luminiferous aether. Light was not the undulating motion of any aether; light waves could just wave themselves. Maxwell, it turned out, was wrong in this regard.

But if there is no aether, then there is no preferred frame of reference for measuring the speed of light, either—the Michelson-Morley experiment, as it came to be known, proved that as surely as it disproved the existence of the aether. The speed of light must be the same in any inertial frame of reference. (An inertial frame of reference is simply one in which a stationary object remains stationary so long as nothing pushes or pulls on it.) For some years, this was regarded as a fascinating principle of nature, but no one could have guessed the way in which it would revolutionize the future of physics.

In 1905, Einstein considered this principle—that light has the same speed no matter what the motion of the observer or the source—and took it further than anyone else previously had. Let's go back to our boxcar in the train. Suppose that instead of bouncing a tennis ball, we bounce a burst of light. We'll put a laser, capable of emitting very short bursts of light, on one side of the boxcar, and a mirror on the other side. Our purpose is to measure the speed of light by timing the delay between the time the light is emitted to the time its return bounce is picked up by a detector.

As before, let's start our experiment on a stationary train. The light burst travels 9 feet across and 9 feet back, a total of 18 feet. This round trip takes about 18 nanoseconds, and measuring this enables you to correctly measure the speed of light—18 feet, divided by 18 nanoseconds, equals 1 foot per nanosecond. (This isn't the exact value, but it makes computations convenient, so let's pretend for the time being. It doesn't change the train of thought, if you'll pardon the expression.)

The observer on the ground sees things no differently, since the train isn't moving. He also sees the light burst travel 18 feet, also clocks it as taking 18 nanoseconds, and therefore derives an identical value for the speed of light.

Now let's put the train in motion again. To reveal the effects of Einstein's special theory of relativity, it isn't enough to travel at everyday speeds—light travels far too fast for the effects to be easily detectable. No, let's move the train a large fraction of the speed of light: let's say, four-fifths the speed of light—that is, 0.8c, where c is the speed of light.

Back inside the train, you see nothing different. The boxcar is still 9 feet from side to side, so the round trip distance is still 18 feet. Since our immutable principle is that the speed of light is the same, no matter what, it must take 18 nanoseconds, even when the train is moving at 0.8c.

Now, let's look at things back from the point of view of the stationary observer on the ground. Just as with the tennis ball on the slower train, the light burst no longer travels straight forward and back, but instead takes a zig-zag path, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Path of light on the fast train.

In fact, it takes exactly the same path as the tennis ball did, but only because the train is moving so fast. In the span of time that it takes for light to get from one side to the other, the train has moved forward 12 feet, and the light has moved 15 feet. That's absolutely right, since the train is moving 0.8c, and 12 feet is 0.8 of 15 feet—the train has moved four-fifths as far as the burst of light. The same thing happens on the return bounce: the train moves forward another 12 feet, and the light travels another 15 feet. In total, from emission to detection, the train moves 24 feet and the burst of light moves 30 feet.

But how is that possible? It sure looks as though, from the point of view of the stationary observer, the burst of light has travelled 30 feet in 18 nanoseconds, meaning that the speed of light, as measured by that observer is 30 feet divided by 18 nanoseconds, or 5/3 feet per nanosecond. The burst of light has exceeded the speed of light!

Einstein decided that was an untenable state of affairs. Maxwell's four equations convinced him that the speed of light was a fundamental constant of nature, and the Michelson-Morley experiment convinced him that it must not vary no matter what frame of reference you measure it in. Therefore, one of the other assumptions must be wrong. But which one?

Put yourself in Einstein's position for a moment, and ask yourself if you can figure out what was wrong with the old way of looking at things. In hindsight, it doesn't seem so difficult to imagine, but it was a large leap of faith for Einstein in particular, and physics in general.

Einstein decided, for aesthetic reasons, as well as another reason we'll discuss later, that it was the Newtonian principle that time is absolute that was at fault. He decided that it must not be the case that everyone everywhere sees the whole sequence taking 18 nanoseconds. In particular, the observer on the ground must see it as taking longer. In order for the speed of light to remain constant, it must take exactly as long as it should for the speed of light to remain 1 foot per nanosecond. Since the distance travelled is 30 feet, the stationary observer must clock the sequence at 30 nanoseconds. To put it another way, 30 nanoseconds have passed on the stationary earth, while only 18 nanoseconds have passed on the train.

It's important to emphasize that this is not some sort of psychological effect that requires a person on board. It isn't the case that you on board the boxcar get “speed sickness” near the speed of light and only subjectively experience 0.6 seconds per “real” second. Time actually moves slower on the moving train—that is a necessary conclusion, once you admit that light travels at the same speed no matter how fast you're moving.

What's more, this effect happens no matter what the speed of the train—it's only the magnitude of the effect that changes. Here, time on the train is slowed down to 0.6 seconds per second, but that's only because the train is travelling fast enough that the light that spans 18 feet on the train travels 30 feet from the point of view of someone on the earth. Simple algebra can predict the time dilation effect for any train speed. Those of you who aren't interested in looking at how we derive the equation for this can skip over Equations 2 through 8.

If we look only at the right triangle ABC in Figure 2, we see that the speed of the train, expressed as a fraction of the speed of light, is the distance the train moves (AC) divided by the distance the light moves (AB). That is,

(2) v / c = AC / AB

where v is the speed of the train and c is the speed of light. On the other hand, the time dilation t_o / t, expressed in seconds per seconds, is the distance the light travels as measured by you on the train (BC) divided by the distance as measured by an observer on the ground (AB), on account of the constancy of the speed of light. That is,

(3) t_o / t = BC / AB

Since ABC is a right triangle, we have, from the Pythagorean theorem,

(4) AC² + BC² = AB²

Dividing both sides by AB², we get

(5) (AC / AB)² + (BC / AB)² = 1

Substituting Equations 2 and 3 into Equation 5, we get

(6) (v / c)² + (t_o / t)² = 1

(7) (t_o / t)² = 1—(v / c)²

or at last,

(8) t / t_o = 1 / sqrt(1—(v / c)²)

which we can rewrite more simply as

(8a) t / t_o = y

if we define y (actually, the Greek letter gamma) to be the factor

(8b) y = 1 / sqrt(1—(v / c)²)

Equation 8 is one of the famous Lorentz transform equations, which the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) devised to express the time dilation in certain reactions experienced by charged particles. This was the other reason that Einstein violated the absoluteness of time the way he did; he knew of Lorentz's equations, and this line of reasoning led him to the same answer. The difference is, Lorentz thought his equations only worked for charged particles—Einstein showed that all objects, charged or uncharged, experience the same time dilation effect. Various particles decay slower when they're moving fast, and at a rate precisely predicted by Equation 8.

Using Equation 8, we can also see why it takes an enormously fast train, or whatever object, to yield a detectable time dilation. Our first train, travelling at an excruciatingly slow 60 feet per second, moved 16 million times slower than the speed of light. If we plug v / c = 1/16 million into Equation 8, we get a time dilation of only 1 part in 500 trillion. No wonder no one ever noticed this effect before the 20th century!

One more thing: there is a fundamental difference between light and ordinary objects such as tennis balls. The ball in Figure 1 and the light burst in Figure 2 take exactly the same path, but you don't get time dilation on the slower train in Figure 1, because it's not a basic law of nature that tennis balls always travel at 45 feet per second. Once the train gets moving, you accept that the tennis ball travels at 75 feet per second (from the point of view of the observer on the ground). It has to, because it travels a greater distance in the same amount of time.

In Figure 2, the light also travels a greater distance, but in this case, it is a basic law of nature that light always travels at the same speed. Something has to give, and Einstein—equipped with the results of experiment and theory—decided it was time that had to blink first.

Now, let's once again return to our train, moving at 0.8c. This time, let's put the mirror at the front of the boxcar, and the laser and the detector at the back, so that from your perspective, riding the train, the burst of light now travels the length of the car twice. If the car is 45 feet long, it travels twice 45 feet, or 90 feet. That takes 90 nanoseconds—this should be getting easy by now!

So—how long does it take from the outside observer's perspective?

From the moment the burst of light leaves the source at the back of the boxcar, it travels, of course, at the speed of light, c. But since the boxcar itself is travelling at 0.8c, the light is only “gaining” on the front of the boxcar at c—0.8c = 0.2c, one-fifth the speed of light. Ordinarily, at the speed of light, it would take 45 nanoseconds to catch up to the front of the boxcar, but at only one-fifth that speed, it takes 5 times longer, or 225 nanoseconds.

After bouncing off the mirror, the light now heads toward the back of the boxcar. But instead of the light having to chase the boxcar, this time the boxcar is rushing headlong to intercept the light, and the outside observer sees detector and light meet at c + 0.8c = 1.8c, or nine-fifths the speed of light. Again, ordinarily, it would take 45 nanoseconds, but now, at nine-fifths that speed, it takes five-ninths as long, or 25 nanoseconds.

The round trip time is therefore 225 nanoseconds plus 25 nanoseconds, or 250 nanoseconds. Now, we know that 250 nanoseconds as measured by the outside observer doesn't take 250 nanoseconds on board the train. No, on the train, clocks are slowed down according to Equation 8; inside the boxcar, you should measure the interval as

(250 nanoseconds) sqrt(1—0.82) = 150 nanoseconds

But wait—that's not the time that you actually measured. As we said, you measure it as 90 nanoseconds. So, despite taking into account the time dilation effect, we still have a discrepancy. Where did we go wrong?

Einstein again decided that the analysis was just fine, it was another Newtonian assumption at fault. Which one was it this time? Again, put yourself in Einstein's shoes and see if you can figure out which assumption to abolish.

He decided that it was the notion of absolute length that was the problem. Aboard the train, you measure the length of the boxcar as the old 45 feet. But in order for the times to match, it must somehow be the case that from the outside observer's perspective, the boxcar is compressed in the direction of motion! Compressed by how much? In this case, to correct the 150 nanoseconds down to 90 nanoseconds, the length must also be compressed to 90/150 times its former value. Since the original length was 45 feet, the compressed length must be (90/150)(45 feet) = 27 feet. That must be the length of the boxcar from the outside observer's perspective.

How long would it be in general? In our example, 90 nanoseconds was the time it took for light to travel twice the length of the boxcar as measured on the train itself. Call the length of the boxcar at rest, L_o. Then, the time it takes light to travel from the back to the front, and then back to the back is

(9) t_o = 2L_o / c

If the train is in motion, however, then we've shown that it must be shortened to some length L, and we have to figure out what L is in terms of L_o. If it's moving at velocity v, then the light catches up with the front of the boxcar at speed c—v. The time it takes to do that is just L / (c—v). (This is just Equation 1 again!) Then, after bouncing off the mirror, the outside observer sees the light meet the back of the boxcar at speed c + v, and the time it takes to do that is L / (c + v). The total round trip time is therefore

(10) t = L / (c—v) + L / (c + v) = 2L / c (1—(v / c)²)

From Equation 8, we know that this time is reduced on board the train to

(11) t_o = t / (t / t_o) = t sqrt(1—(v / c)²)

Combining Equations 10 and 11, we get

(12) t_o = 2L / c sqrt(1—(v / c)²)

Finally, since the t_o in Equation 9 has to be equal to the to in Equation 12, we can write

(13) 2L_o / c = 2L / c sqrt(1—(v / c)²)

or, by simplifying and rearranging terms,

(14) L / L_o = sqrt(1—(v / c)²) = 1 / y

And this is another part of the Lorentz transform equations, so Einstein had another hint here for length compression. As a matter of fact, Einstein wasn't the first to suggest length compression. Lorentz and the Irish physicist George Fitzgerald (1851-1901) tried to sustain the aether theory by supposing that as objects such as the earth plowed through the aether, they were dragged and thereby compressed. Everything was compressed, including the Michelson-Morley apparatus, so—as Lorentz and Fitzgerald claimed—the speed of light really did slow down in the face of the “aether headwind,” but since the apparatus was shortened by aether drag by exactly the same amount, no change in the speed of light was recorded!

Aether drag was therefore very similar to what Einstein proposed, but it differed in one significant respect. Aether drag still required that the compression take place relative to an all-pervasive aether, whereas in Einstein's formulation, compression took place between any two different frames of reference. Experiment eventually proved Einstein right, and aether drag went the way of the dodo.

Again, this isn't an optical illusion caused by the train moving so fast past the observer on the ground that he underestimates the length. For the laws of nature to make sense, and for light to always have the same speed everywhere, the train must actually shrink in the direction of motion! Does it make any sense? No, but logically that's what has to happen, and experiment has demonstrated this effect time and again.

Something that we've left unstated here, but which you may have guessed at, might be making you a bit uncomfortable. We've been assuming all along that it's the observer on the ground who is “at rest,” and you on the train moving, relative to the ground. But isn't the whole deal with special relativity that, well, it's all relative?

Consider this old conundrum. Suppose you're running at a high speed—again, say, four-fifths the speed of light—carrying a 10-foot pole parallel to the ground. You're running toward a 10-foot shack with front and back doors, both of which are controlled by a remote actuator, which I control. At a push of a button, I can make both doors close at precisely the same time.

My goal is to trap you and your pole in the shack. Since your pole is 10 feet long, this seems like a tricky task, requiring absolutely precise timing. But I take advantage of the fact that you're running so fast. At a rate of four-fifths the speed of light, Equation 14 tells me that your 10-foot pole will be compressed to a length of 6 feet, so I have plenty of time to capture you and your pole in the shack. (I have quick reflexes.) No problem!

But you see things differently. From your point of view, it's the shack that's moving relative to you, and is therefore compressed to a depth of 6 feet. Your pole is safely longer than that, so there's no way I can possibly succeed. Again, no problem! Of course there's no problem. But who's the one with no problem?

Amazing as it may sound, neither of us has a problem—we're both right. What Einstein discovered is that the weird effects that he had already deduced from the constancy of the speed of light forced him, as it will force us, to reject yet another cherished Newtonian notion—that of absolute simultaneity. The principle of absolute simultaneity says that if you see two things happen at the same time, I'll see them happen at the same time, also. But Einstein discovered that wasn't the case most of the time; he discovered that we only agree if either (a) we're at rest with respect to one another, or (b) the two events also occur at the same place, with respect to our relative motion.

In our little chestnut of a problem, neither (a) nor (b) is true. We're not at rest with one another, and the two events—the front door closing and the back door closing—don't occur at the same place, relative to your direction of motion (from one door to the other). So what “really” happens? As I see it, you and your 6-foot pole go into the shack, I close both doors at the same time, and then you and your pole continue on, busting through the back door.

What you see, instead, is the following. You and your 10-foot pole go partway into the 6-foot shack. Then the doors close, but from your point of view, they don't close at the same time. Instead, the back door closes first, then your pole busts through it, and then the front door closes behind you. By rejecting the notion of absolute simultaneity, Einstein explained how either observer could see relativistic effects experienced by the other, relatively moving observer. In general, events ahead in the direction of travel are advanced in time, events behind us in the direction of travel are retarded in time.

This also explains how you could see my clock slowed down, and I could see your clock slowed down. Isn't that some kind of impossible cycle? But it turns out that in order to synchronize clocks, you have to agree on simultaneous events. So long as you and I remain moving at a constant relative rate of speed, we can't do that, and we can't decide which one of us is “really” right—because we both are! It's only when we come to a rest with respect to one another that we can again compare clocks. In a certain sense, one clock only “really” slows down with respect to another because it accelerates with respect to the first—inertial clocks don't slow down. But that's covered in Einstein's general theory of relativity—and therefore a matter for another essay.

Is that all there is to special relativity? No! There is yet another transform that involves the same gamma factor, and that is an even more mysterious effect, that of mass dilation. Suppose that while you're in the boxcar, moving along at 0.8c and tossing the tennis ball at 45 feet per second, it heads straight out of the boxcar, perpendicular to the train tracks. Meanwhile, the stationary observer on the ground throws a tennis ball back at you, also at 45 feet per second. Just by chance, the two balls happen to collide in mid-air. If the tennis balls are identical, what should happen? Does the observer's ball knock your ball back toward the tracks, or do you knock his ball away from the tracks?

I'll explain it one way to make you think it goes back toward the tracks, and then I'll explain it another way to make you think it goes away from the tracks. The first way is, your ball, which travels 45 feet in each second from your point of view, takes longer to travel those same 45 feet from the observer's point of view. In fact, Equation 8 says it should take 5/3 of a second to travel 45 feet, so from the observer's point of view, it's only 45 feet, divided by 5/3 second, or 27 feet per second.

Actually, that's only the motion of the ball in the direction of the observer. It has a high sideways velocity—0.8c, and this speed is imparted by the train—but that speed is precisely irrelevant to the ability of your ball to knock his ball. Since your ball is going slower in the direction of the observer, his ball should knock yours back toward the tracks.

The problem is, you can reason the same exact way, but in reverse. From your point of view, it's his ball that's slowed down in time, and going only 27 feet per second. Therefore, your ball should knock his ball away from the train tracks. So what really happens?

Symmetry demands that neither ball knocks the other one back—both rebound equally from the mid-air collision. The ability of a ball to knock around other things depends on its momentum p, which is defined as

(15) p = mv

If its measured velocity is only 3/5 of what it “should” be, then in order to compensate, in order to maintain the same momentum p, its mass must be greater—5/3 of what it “should” be. In other words, the observer sees your ball as both slower (at least with respect to its motion toward him) and more massive than his ball, and the two factors exactly compensate for one another. You see the same effects with respect to his ball. To put it more generally, mass is increased in the same proportion that time is dilated:

(16) m / m_o = 1 / sqrt(1—(v / c)²) = y

And that is the third and last of the Lorentz transform equations.

So now you know a little about how special relativity is derived. But do we understand why special relativity works? That is, why does time dilate? Why do objects compress in the direction of motion? And how on earth do objects somehow gain mass just by virtue of moving rapidly?

The answer is, nobody knows why! We know that it must all be true, because of the constancy of the speed of light and because the predictions of special relativity have been proven time and time again in experiments. But no one really knows why space and time work that way. It turns out that physics, and science in general, is not very good at answering those kinds of “Why?” questions. The best we can do is take nature's clues and figure out as much as we can, and leave it at that.

Adapted from Astronomical Games: April 2001.

Brian Tung is a computer scientist by day and avid amateur astronomer by night. He is an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and runs his own astronomy Web site. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.

8/13/01

There's a suburb somewhere in Hell called Beluthahatchie that I never would have known about except for Andy Duncan. Andy is on this year's World Fantasy Awards ballot three times: his book, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, was nominated for best short story collection, and two of his stories, “The Pottawatomie Giant” and “Lincoln in Frogmore,” made the short fiction category. He's had novellas nominated for the Nebula Awards two years in a row, and other works nominated for the Hugo and by the International Horror Guild. This year's novella, “Fortitude,” is a disturbing story about General George Patton's déjà vu, and the previous one was an oddly reassuring tale called “The Executioner's Guild,” about, well, a guild of modern executioners who make sure executions are as humane as possible. As you can imagine from the above, Duncan likes the weird, and he also likes the wonderful.

I first met Andy when I was in graduate school with him at the University of Alabama, and while I remember kind words and a friendly, Southern voice, the memory that sticks the most comes from a Southern Literature class we had together. Midway through the semester, we did presentations on a relevant area of interest, and Andy got up and did a talk on the wonderful movie version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I don't know to this day how Andy tied in the movie with Southern literature, though he probably went by way of the Gothic and film noir. All I know is that I remember listening to him spellbound, and thinking, “This man can talk."

And reading through his stories, that's what comes across. Andy loves to talk, and he loves to tell us stories. He's genuinely interested in the people in his stories, and they're all interesting in turn, and they all feel real. Even characters who should be unlikeable, like General George Patton, become absolutely fascinating once he gets into their heads.

Mack Knopf: You love novellas, don't you? Why the form?

Andy Duncan: I guess I'm working my way towards a novel, because the short stories just get longer and longer. “Fortitude” is a strange thing. It's basically something I never read before. Someone gets the chance to change things, and changes almost nothing. Patton gets his life to live over, and knows it.

MK: Tell us about yourself: family background, education, anything that's been a major influence on your writing. In short, what led you down the primrose path to the writer's life?

AD: I was born Sept. 21, 1964, in Columbia, S.C., in the hospital that's now the Department of Social Services headquarters, last I looked. I was the belated youngest of three children; my brother was 20 when I was born, my sister 15. My father carried the mail on a rural route, my mother was a housewife, but they both were readers, believed in the power of reading and writing, the value of a library card. I grew up surrounded mostly by older folks, got along better, in fact, with grown-ups than with kids my own age, didn't have close friendships with peers until high school, when I bonded famously with a few other self-declared outcasts. Read constantly, watched TV constantly, was fortunate enough to learn about the world as children should, at a distance, through mediation, while being sheltered from the worst of it. Always loved to hear people tell stories, grew pretty good at telling them, myself—orally, I mean. Went into journalism because, given my interests, that seemed the best route toward A Good Steady Job With Benefits, the Grail of my upbringing. Eventually got a bit bored with that, tried teaching, tried fiction writing, and lo, the fiction started selling, started gaining a small but devoted following. John Kessel, who was my M.A. thesis director at North Carolina State University, was my invaluable guide into the professional ranks of sf, remains my mentor and friend, and must be mentioned in any account of my writer's life, however short; as must my wife, Sydney, who among many other virtues is the best support system I could hope for.

MK: You've had a day job all along when you were writing, and continue to do so. I take it you don't believe in the stereotype of the starving artist?

AD: One's life should not serve one's art. It should be the other way around. You don't necessarily have to do the Charles Bukowski thing and live in filth. Living in filth is not romantic.

MK: I'd love to ask you about how reporting shaped your writing. You worked at the Greensboro, North Carolina News and Record for seven years as a reporter and editor, and having been a reporter myself, I know that does things to a person's writing. I'm curious if it had any effect on you, and if so whether you think it helped you.

AD: My newspaper years—four years as a reporter, three years as an editor—were instrumental in making me a better fiction writer. All those hundreds of stories I wrote, of course, were like on-the-job training in dialogue, description, narrative. Factor in all those thousands of interviews, the days spent listening to how people talk, the hours I spent at the library, the lengthy wire dispatches that I had to prune to their essence, the headlines that had to be an exact number of characters, no more no less, and you realize that I was learning to be a fiction writer all that time, without realizing it. Journalism also got me accustomed, early on, to my work being accepted and published, then read by hundreds, thousands, of strangers, then being responded to in the form of phone calls and letters. I also got very comfortable working with editors, dealing with rejection, dealing with rewrite requests. So when I finally started my fiction career, a lot of hurdles that many aspiring writers find difficult, even insurmountable, were simply not issues for me. I often tell young writers, even poets, that they should try working at a newspaper or magazine for a while.

MK: Andy, your work is pretty hard to fit down into any one category—which is a good thing, in my opinion—and you tend to play with styles and genre expectations. Being from Batesburg, South Carolina, and living below the Mason-Dixon line, you've probably had a lot of people call you a “Southern writer,” as if that was something you could put a finger on. Is there a “Southern” voice, in your opinion, and do you have one?

AD: There is no one Southern voice, no one Southern experience, no one Southern point of view. There are many Souths, have been since colonial times, and new Souths are popping up all the time, like the suburban Asian South in Atlanta. Certainly a number of traits are shared by many Southerners: a love of colorful talk, a sense of place, a yen for digression, a sense of humor, a fascination with the eccentric and quirky and grotesque, an obsession with history, an obsession with religion and the supernatural in daily life, an immersion from birth in an ocean of Story. If any or all of these are present in your voice, and you have spent any important time in the South, then I'd say you have a Southern voice, that you are, moreover, a Southern writer. But my credentials there are pretty safe anyway, no matter what I wrote, since I'm a South Carolina native who has never lived outside the South and who virtually spits grits whenever I open my mouth to speak. No one would mistake me for, say, a New Englander, or a Californian, or a Jamaican. But I'm determined not to write about the South all the time, not to use Southern points of view all the time, not to fit anyone's predetermined notion of what “Southern writing” entails. That would be as limiting as, say, being pegged as only an SF writer.

MK: Beluthahatchie. I have a suspicion you collect pet words like some people collect knickknacks. Care to tell us where the word came from, and your story evolved from there? Maybe you could show us the process of how you evolve a story that was a finalist for the Hugo. I take it you changed your mind about basing it on annexation law after reading enough of that....

AD: I encountered the word “Beluthahatchie” in Zora Neale Hurston's “Story in Harlem Slang,” a story accompanied by Hurston's own glossary, which drew upon African-American folklore much older than 1920s Harlem. “Beluthahatchie” was identified as one of several suburbs of Hell. My first thought was, “I've read a lot of stories set in Hell, but never one set in Beluthahatchie. I wonder what that story would be like?” So the whole story evolved from that one word. When the time came, it was easy to title the story! But I did take some spectacular wrong turns along the way, for example my foray into annexation law, when I believed the story should be about a boundary dispute between the sleepy suburb of Beluthahatchie and the bustling city of Hell. But in researching African-American folklore of Hell, I finally encountered the old slave tales of John and Old Massa, and the songs of Robert Johnson, and so the story finally clicked into place. I think writers should write down all the amazing words and phrases they encounter on slips of paper, or index cards, so that when they're stuck for something to write about, they can pick a card and write about that word, that phrase. I just found out today that courtesy tickets used to be called “Annie Oakleys"—because the famed sharpshooter, as part of her act, would shoot holes in tickets, in effect “punching” them. So you'd say, for example, “We didn't have to pay to get into the concert; my friend at the radio station gave us some Annie Oakleys.” Isn't that great?

MK: Your stories come in an enormous range of voices, from vastly different times, educations, and walks of life. How do you evoke such voices, and have you ever gotten people who tell you “just write what you know"?

AD: People have told me that, and what they meant, I suppose, was that I should write only about thirtysomething nearsighted white guys who grew up in Batesburg, South Carolina, got their B.A.'s in journalism from the University of South Carolina in the mid-'80s, and so on and so on. That prospect does not interest me. Most writers lead fairly dull lives; if they were reduced to writing only about their own lives, the world of literature would be a duller place. That being said, there's nothing wrong with the dictum “Write what you know” as long as you give “what you know” the broadest possible interpretation. You know some things because you've lived them, and other things because you've witnessed them, and other things because you've been told about them, and other things because you've read about them, and other things because you've imagined them, and all those avenues toward knowledge are valid, and all can (and should) enrich your writing. As for where all the voices come from, I don't know, but I suspect a partial answer is what I wrote in response to the Faulkner question below.

MK: One thing that comes through in almost all of your stories is that you love research, and that history is a treasure-trove of ideas for you. From the portable electric chair in “The Executioner's Guild” to Jess Willard, heavyweight champion of the world in “The Pottawatomie Giant,” it's obvious you love to find something bizarre that really happened, and then embroider at will. Would you like to tell us a little bit out how you research, and why? Why not just make things up completely out of whole cloth, instead of going to so much trouble in stories like “Liza and the Crazy Water Man"?

AD: I do entirely too much research, probably. Certainly from an economic standpoint, it doesn't make much sense to research a story as thoroughly as if it were a novel. And sometimes the research elbows aside the writing; if I know too much about a given subject, I have to put it aside, perhaps never to return. More often, though, the research merely spurs the invention, gives me the courage to make things up. “Liza and the Crazy Water Man,” for example, has a lot of research in it, yes, but it's still 95 percent made up. If you're writing fiction, it has to be mostly invention, no matter how much research you do. On the other hand, if you're writing about anybody other than yourself, you've got to do some research. OK, my protagonist is a bank teller. Have I ever been a bank teller? No. Well, then, I'd better find out what a bank teller's job is like. I'd better read articles, read books, hang out in banks, talk to bank tellers, take notes. That's research. In fact, even if you're writing about yourself, you still need to do research. Ask anyone who's written an autobiography, or a memoir of any sort. No one writes based on memory alone. The best research advice I can give fiction writers is this: write down only the stuff that really inspires you, that gives you an idea for a character, an incident, a line of dialogue, a bit of cool description—something you can run with. Because you're not writing a research paper, you're writing fiction, and the research must serve the fiction, not vice versa. Don't write down the uninteresting stuff; you don't need it.

MK: What are some of the challenges you've faced in becoming a professional writer? Telling someone you want to be a professional writer is like telling someone you want to be a professional artist—they just don't get the instant respect they did in the Renaissance.

AD: Did professional artists get instant respect in the Renaissance? Theater people were regarded as little better than whores, and visual artists were at the mercy of their wealthy patrons, many of whom treated their “kept” artists with, at best, great condescension. The first professional writers, as we know the term, in the 19th century were furiously scribbling hacks, slaves to the marketplace, as dependent on the whims of the editors of, say, Godey's Lady's Book as Shakespeare was on the whims of the royal court, or as the TV networks are on the Nielsens. This is not to say you can't get a lot of respect as a professional writer today. You can, if you're writing legal briefs, or advertising copy, or how-to articles for home-repair magazines, or sitcoms.

But respect for writing fiction or poetry or drama, well, that just isn't going to happen, because most people neither write nor read that stuff, and so they view it as irrelevant. There are many reasons to be a professional fiction writer, but if you want the respect of your family and your neighborhood, you'd best go into some other line of work, at least as a day job. I advise my students that they can be professional writers without ever earning a living at writing. Professionalism is in one's attitude toward the writing, the craft, one's fellow writers—not in how much money you make off it. So go be a professional insurance-company attorney (like Wallace Stevens) or trade-magazine editor (like Gene Wolfe) or farmer (like Wendell Berry) or psychotherapist (like Amy Bloom) or engineer (like Kurt Vonnegut), and be a professional writer on your own time, after you get home. So there's no need, really, to want to be a professional writer; just declare yourself one, and proceed accordingly, whatever it is you happen to be doing for a living.

MK: Closely related to the previous question, how and why did you begin writing? No one becomes a writer of any success without a great deal of work and intent, so why do you write? There are old saws like Samuel Johnson's dictum that only a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money, or the saying that if you can do anything but write, you should. So what do you get out of writing—what's your motivation?

AD: For my first 15 years or so of life, my ambition was to be a cartoonist, specifically a comic-book creator. I churned out reams of comics, none of which I now have, alas. In hindsight I see this involved writing and much as drawing; art separate from story didn't appeal. In junior high, I so disliked a 19th-century novel assigned by my English teacher, The Yemassee by William Gilmore Simms, that in study hall I amused myself by writing a parody of it, in installments, which I passed around to my classmates for the immediate gratification of hearing them guffaw. I had read all Woody Allen's and S.J. Perelman's and Robert Benchley's collections by then, and was drunk on the parodic ideal. I think the title was “The Pekingese.” That'll give you an idea of the level of my wit. I filled a notebook with the thing, and when my English teacher finally, inevitably, confiscated it, I expected savage punishment. Instead, she praised me and asked for a copy. This was my first indication that my fiction writing alone, without illustrations, might have merit. But everyone who knew me, with my full cooperation, soon channeled my writing/publishing impulse into journalism, because in journalism, as we all know, writers can Make a Living.

Fast forward to age 27, when for whatever reason my long-dormant fiction-writing impulse awoke with a vengeance, leading me to quit my perfectly good newspaper job and enroll in graduate school. I guess I was tired of writing other people's stories, and wanted to try writing some of my own for a while. Fiction has been riding me ever since. Why do I write? Because I'm deeply unhappy when I'm not writing. That's how I know I'm a writer. What do I get out of my writing? A momentary stay against confusion, a feeling of having ordered a small part of the world, to pleasant effect. That's motivation enough, surely.

MK: What challenges do you see facing speculative fiction writers today? Let's face it: writing weird stuff is harder to explain at a party, and it can be hard to make it in the field. What's changed and what's changing, in your opinion, about popular acceptance of spec-fic?

AD: Judging from TV commercials, which are aimed at the broadest possible cross-sections of America, even fairly sophisticated SF ideas have become commonplace, easily grasped by all. Last night, for example, I saw a commercial that showed an alternate 2001, in which the Roman Empire still rules the world. The emperor's face is on a giant TV screen as he delivers his oration amid popping flash bulbs from the press corps. Then he drives off in a motorcade, waving at the crowds. That commercial would have been unimaginable even a few years ago, when the very idea of an “alternate history” had currency only among a few historians, and within the SF ghetto. There was a similar series of commercials recently that showed Larry Bird and Aretha Franklin and other celebrities working these dead-end, menial jobs, because this was the timeline in which they didn't follow their talents, their dreams. That premise once would have just utterly confused anyone outside the fields of skiffy—I mean, you'd have had to explain yourself, in a movie, for 30 minutes, just to establish the rules of this alternate world. But now, in a mere 20 seconds, everyone gets it. That's both really great for SF writers, and really bad for SF writers.

On one hand, Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon and Thomas Disch are being reprinted in these beautiful Vintage paperback editions, and Bruce Sterling and Kim Stanley Robinson are all over the place, very much pundits of the moment, and Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Carroll are getting all sorts of mainstream publication and acclaim, and these formerly fringe SF ideas have considerably currency, and all that's great. But on the other hand, the pressure to come up with something entirely new within sf, something that hasn't been done on a TV commercial already, has become almost nightmarish. So many of the wildest future imaginings of even 10 years ago now look old hat. Some argue that SF has become mere nostalgia; we know the future is not going to look like those old Frank R. Paul illustrations from the pulps, so what good was sf, really, what good is SF now if it's not keeping up, if it doesn't keep showing us something new? So that's the new challenge facing us, I think. The marketplace is not a new challenge, because SF is and has always been a tough dollar, and the suspicion with which a lot of folks view SF writing is not a new challenge, either, because let's face it, all careers in America are viewed with suspicion if they aren't lucrative. Oh, you want to be a proctologist, great, that makes sense, because proctologists make a lot of money. But if you want to be a forest ranger, or a potter, or a music teacher, or a farmer, or an SF writer, well, then, you must be crazy, right?

MK: What authors, what book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing? You mentioned you've recently been mainlining Neil Gaiman, who you remind me of to some degree. You're not covering the same ground, but like him, I'm never quite sure on your pieces if you're going to scare me, amuse me, or show me something beautiful. What grist have you had for your mill, including history and the news?

AD: Ideally, I think, a work should do all three—scare you, amuse you, show you something beautiful. Certainly Gaiman does that, in and out of his Sandman books. (Allow me to insert a plug for Gaiman's new novel, American Gods. It's terrific.) Gaiman I've discovered only recently, but most of my strongest influences I discovered quite young. A partial list: Lewis Carroll, James Thurber, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, John Bellairs, Edward Gorey, Eleanor Cameron, P.G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and lots of comics—1970s-era Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and Batman, Walt Kelly's Pogo, Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck, Mad magazine, Plop!, the EC and DC horror comics, the Warren magazines such as Creepy and Eerie. Two Robert Arthur-edited anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense and Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum.

Later, in adulthood, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Joseph Mitchell, Lee Smith, John Kessel, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link. Other grist for the mill: I've been a movie junkie since childhood, especially old movies, and I've probably read more books devoted to the movies than books about any other single subject. For the first half of my life I seem to have watched television 24/7, as I vividly recall everything broadcast, however lame, through the Carter administration at least. I was raised in a newspaper-reading family, and my years as a journalist only aggravated that condition, so I still buy the local papers everywhere I travel, and I can't imagine not subscribing to at least one. Music is increasingly important to me, especially pre-Beatles folk and country—but I revere the Beatles, too. I love urban legends and folklore of every stripe. Lately I've been surfing the Web a lot. It all figures into the writing, in some unholy and monstrous way.

MK: What are you working on now? Are you tackling a novel now, or are you still focusing mainly on short stories? And some of your stories would make great screen plays—any word on that?

AD: People keep telling me my stories are naturals for the movies, but so far no producers have told me that! So my occasional bursts of screenwriting have been purely “on spec,” for my own education, really, because you do learn a lot when writing screenplays. The first thing you learn is that the screenplay is a really difficult form to master—it's like mastering the haiku, or the sestina. The second thing you learn is that screenplays have very little in common with fiction. Another form that I'm trying to learn by doing is, of course, the novel, which has a lot in common with short fiction but is nevertheless a very different animal. I have a couple of novel projects, several short-fiction projects, a screenplay project or two. There's no shortage of things to work on. Occasionally one project reaches critical mass, distinguishes itself somehow from the other projects, and when that happens I work on that project exclusively until it's done. So far everything I've finished has been in the realm of short fiction, but who knows what next year will bring?

MK: What advice would you give to an aspiring young writer?

AD: Bruce Sterling likes to say that his ambition as a writer is to write really “Sterlingian” fiction, to be the most like Bruce Sterling that he can possibly be. I think all writers should aim to write more like themselves, and less like anyone else. My advice is, write that unique stuff that only you can write, the stuff that won't get written if you don't do it. Don't worry about what other writers are doing, much less about what the “market” is dictating this week. Write your own fiction (or poetry, or drama), make it as true to your unique vision as you possibly can, and you'll draw an audience. You'll create your own genre, your own market.

MK: Faulkner once said “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Care to comment on this as regards your writing?

AD: It's my motto. I think growing up the youngest member of an extended Southern family had a lot to do with my fascination with history. My parents were considerably older than the parents of my classmates. For everyone else in the classroom, the Depression and World War II, for example, were remote events that existed only in history books, whereas for me they were vitally real, immediate events, because my parents and their siblings talked about them all the time. So I concluded that all the other stuff in the history books must have a similar immediacy. It's not exaggerating to say that from an early age, I came to view all times and places and people as co-existent, in some metaphorical but deeply meaningful and truthful way. I still feel that way when reading history—that all these people are my next-door neighbors, that I share their problems, that it's in my interest to know something about them. That empathy carries over, inevitably, into the fiction, but for me it's less a writing technique than a personality trait, one that's hard to separate out and view dispassionately. I can say, though, that when I first encountered that Faulkner quote, it had real resonance for me. It was the articulation of something I had known to be true all along.

MK: Andy, tell me what's coming up or what has recently happened with your fiction, would you? “The Chief Designer,” a story about the Russian space program, came out June in Asimov's. Anything else on the horizon?

AD: As for new stuff, “Senator Bilbo” is in Starlight 3, just out from Tor. Both my World Fantasy-nominated stories will be reprinted in the next few weeks, “Lincoln in Frogmore” in the October/November double issue of Asimov's and “The Pottawatomie Giant” in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, from St. Martin's. The August Locus has a long interview with me (that hardly overlaps this one at all); excerpts are online. And I'll be on the bill at the third Slipstream conference at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga., in February 2002, for those who want to come say hey.

Mack Knopf is a consulting editor for Strange Horizons. His previous appearance in Strange Horizons was “Things We Were Not Meant to Know: H.P. Lovecraft and Cosmic Horror."

Further Reading:

Andy's personal web page, full of more information on him and his stories.

The Past is Not Past: An interview with Andy Duncan.

Stories online: “Fortitude” and “The Pottatowatomie Giant.”

Strange Horizon's review of Beluthahatchie and Other Stories.

Another review of Beluthahatchie and Other Stories.

8/20/01

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the brightest new stars in the world of speculative fiction. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Aspect First Novel contest in 1997. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, has been nominated for this year's Hugo, was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year in 2000; it is also on the short list for this year's Tiptree Award, as well as the Canadian Sunburst Award.

One of Hopkinson's great strengths is her masterful and unique use of language. Readers will enjoy listening to the rhythm behind the music of her words as she reads in her melodic Caribbean accent. Indeed, language is the first thing one notices upon opening a Nalo Hopkinson book, but the surprises don't end there. The combination of language and strong storytelling makes Hopkinson's work compelling.

One of Hopkinson's talents is using speculative elements to explore human relationships, especially the delicate relationships between family members. Hopkinson does not shy away from telling hard truths, and her books explore both the tenderness and the difficulties of family life. There is a kind of duality in these relationships that she examines close up; we see, in her work, how the power that parents have over their children can be both extremely comforting and undeniably terrifying. Her books feature protagonists who are initially young and helpless; through the tough realities of their interactions with their parents, they begin to learn the more about themselves, and discover aspects of themselves that would have remained hidden had their relationships with their parents been entirely unproblematic.

Midnight Robber is the most disturbing example of Hopkinson's use of the duality of parent-child interactions. The novel opens with the protagonist, Tan-Tan, living a cushy life as the daughter of the Mayor of Cockpit County on the planet Toussaint. Her only problem is the neglect she suffers from her biological parents, who brought her into the world as another pawn in their heated, passionate marriage. Tan-Tan develops a fascination with a Carnival figure, the Midnight Robber; during Carnival, the Robber stops people in the streets and tells them a fantastic tale in exchange for coins. The Midnight Robber is known for being good with words, good at coming up with outrageous, fascinating stories on a moment's notice; this kind of freedom of speech, of demanding attention, of being confident enough to know oneself worthy of such attention, is the perfect complement to quiet, almost invisible Tan-Tan. Already we see a duality in her personality.

Tan-Tan is not entirely neglected, despite her parents’ preoccupation with their own lives. Tan-Tan is cared for by a human nurse as well as the house computer (called an “eshu"). Indeed, the entire planet is kept peaceful by a pervasive watchdog computer called “Granny Nanny.” Every citizen on Toussaint is implanted with an “earbug” nanotech device when they are born, which allows them instant communication to their house eshu, and to Granny Nanny. Granny Nanny is almost inescapable, preventing premeditated crime and generally regulating human interaction on Toussaint. Unlike other works that use this kind of “Big Brother” element, here Granny Nanny is benevolent, only interfering when she judges someone's well-being is in danger. She is the ultimate judge, the balance to all that is wrong in Tan-Tan's life. Unlike Tan-Tan's parents, Granny Nanny, through her house eshu, has only Tan-Tan's best interests at heart.

When Tan-Tan is seven years old, her father, Antonio, is forced to confront his wife's adultery; he manages to go behind Granny Nanny's back by befriending a group of people that use “headblind” houses, houses that have no eshu, into which Granny Nanny cannot see. Here he obtains a poison that kills his cuckold, sending Antonio to jail and, ultimately, to exile.

The exile is the planet Toussaint in another dimension, a place called New Half-Way Tree. The journey is one-way; there is no communication between the two worlds, and no way to return to Toussaint from New Half-Way Tree. New Half-Way Tree is a rough place, with no Granny Nanny—indeed, no advanced technology at all. It is the negative image of peaceful Toussaint, where the bad are sent to be away from the good.

When Tan-Tan realizes her father is going to be taken to jail, she hides away in the trunk of the car carrying him off, afraid of being separated from her Daddy and desperate for his love and attention. By the time she's discovered, it's too late to return her home, and she has to stay in the jail cell with her father until her mother can pick her up the next day. However, Antonio discovers a way of escaping into exile before Granny Nanny can pronounce judgement upon him, (perhaps deciding upon life imprisonment instead of exile), and he selfishly takes his beloved Tan-Tan with him. Together, they climb the Half-Way Tree.

In the wilds of New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan comes to realize where her true comforts came from back on Toussaint. Her relationship with her father is suddenly much closer, much more constant, than it had ever been, and it becomes increasingly clear that her father cannot take care of her properly on the hard, backbreaking prison planet they've come to. Tan-Tan finds herself longing for home, and almost immediately misses her house eshu as much as she misses her own mother. Ironically, her earbug device becomes horribly infected, because children were not meant to cross the dimensional veil. The object that used to keep her safe now almost kills her.

The child is exiled with her father, and yet she misses the comforts of home, and those who truly took care of her there. She still clings to her father, surrounded as she is by unfamiliar things, but she is not the only one missing familiar things.

The book takes a disturbing turn when her father begins to note her resemblance to her mother, and gives her his wedding ring to wear on a string around her neck. This gift initiates a horrible mockery of a wedding night, as Antonio takes the resemblance too much to heart, and rapes his daughter on the night of her 9th birthday. What had been the comfort of having her father near is negated by Antonio's abuse of his power over his daughter.

As Tan-Tan's role for her father splits in two—she is now both daughter and, although he has remarried, in some senses his wife—her own personality copes with the situation by splitting as well:

Daddy's hands were hurting, even though his mouth smiled at her like the old Daddy, the one from before the shift tower took them. Daddy was two daddies. She felt her own self split in two to try to understand, to accommodate them both.

Tan-Tan becomes both “good Tan-Tan,” who does as she's told and loves her Daddy, and “bad Tan-Tan,” the Robber Queen who makes “strong men quiver in their boots when she pass by,” whom no one can hurt.

Just before her sixteenth birthday, Antonio makes the mistake of raping her one last time. He had stopped, more or less, after she had to have an abortion when she was fourteen, but in a drunken rage he attacks her the night before her sweet sixteen birthday party. This time Tan-Tan is armed with a birthday present, a long, sharp hunting knife. When she feels it digging into her side during the rape, bad Tan-Tan takes over:

It must have been the Robber Queen, the outlaw woman, who quick like a snake got the knife braced at her breastbone just as Antonio slammed his heavy body right onto the blade.

The town Tan-Tan is living in has vigilante justice, and self-defense is not considered a mitigating circumstance. Tan-Tan is saved from hanging by a douen (an indigenous sentient species) named Chichibud, who had befriended her the first night after she had arrived on New Half-Way Tree. They escape on the back of his packbird, Benta, narrowly escaping the posse and hunting dogs chasing her, who are bent on carrying out their “eye for an eye” justice on Tan-Tan.

For the second time in Tan-Tan's life, she has been torn from her home, and again because of her father's behavior. This time, however, Tan-Tan is not leaving her home passively, although her flight is not what she'd intended; she had been planning on escaping her father by running away to another town called Sweet Pone with her friend and partner, a man called Melonhead.

Chichibud and Benta bring Tan-Tan to the home of the douens, a huge tree called a “Papa Bois,” a daddy tree that provides food and shelter for the douens. The daddy tree is a direct contrast to Antonio, as it provides shelter and without asking anything in return. However, because Tan-Tan is the first human ever allowed into the daddy tree, the rest of the douens are unhappy that their home has been violated by the “tallpeople."

Tan-Tan must pass a test to prove her willingness to keep their secret. She is thrown a live tree-frog and is expected to eat it. She does so, with Chichibud's help, but the whole experience is humiliating in an unpleasantly familiar way to Tan-Tan, as it reminds her of things her father had forced her to do. Good Tan-Tan does what she must to survive, but it makes her suspicious, unhappy, and very lonely.

While living with the douens, Tan-Tan has to relearn family ways, to allow herself to be cared for in a way that does not hurt her in return. It has been at least 9 years since she had the overarching parental figure of Granny Nanny to depend on, and it's hard for Tan-Tan to accept that kind of care again. She is grateful for the sanctuary, but distrustful of good intentions.

Unfortunately, this first experience with true family love is with a family that is quite alien to her. She learns that the so-called packbirds are in fact female douens (called hinte), and she has to learn to see them as adults instead of beasts of burden. Although all young douens can fly, only the hinte can fly as adults, and male douens must partner with them if they wish to fly again. This kind of interpersonal dependence is almost alien to Tan-Tan, who has spent most of her life listening to her human parents (and parent figures) fight.

The douen family structure of mother, father, and offspring, is unfamiliar to Tan-Tan because of the females’ powerful role in douen society; they are bigger than the males, and they are the ones who protect the nest. When visiting human settlements the women mask their true strength by posing as pack-birds, perhaps so they will not threaten the security of the human male role. The douen males are much smaller than humans and are treated as inferiors, almost slaves; a hinte's size alone would make her a threat to a human man, if the humans realized they were sentient as well.

Ultimately, Tan-Tan is too human, and possibly too old, at sixteen, to properly adapt to douen ways. The ways in which she doesn't fit into her new home are, at first, not her own fault: for example, her urine kills the maggots that recycle douen excrement, and special arrangements must be made for her to be flown down to the forest floor every time she needs to urinate. Douen food mainly consists of maggots and centipede-like insects, and after her first meal of plain salad, Tan-Tan views her sanctuary as more of a punishment.

Her inner voice, that of mocking Bad Tan-Tan, continually rides her for her faults, taking all her discomfort as just punishment for killing her father. Tan-Tan is frustrated by her dependence upon the douen, and tries to make herself less of a nuisance, despite Chichibud's reassurances:

"I can't eat the way allyou does eat, I can't move about the daddy tree the way allyou does do it, I can't even take a piss without it causing somebody some botheration!”
Chichibud said, “We don't mind. You is guest. You need to give your body and your mind time to heal after what Antonio do to you.”
No, not that. Talk about something else. “But none of the other douen want me here."

Tan-Tan struggles for some control over her life, something she's never had before. Her attempts at self-sufficiency in an alien society bring out her stubborn side. As she attempts her first solo climb down the daddy tree, she is infuriated by the stares and taunts from the douen and hinte who come out to watch her. One douen even confirms her worst fears, by telling her she has brought misfortune upon their heads by being there. Finally, the Robber Queen rises within her, and Tan-Tan gives a speech:

"Morning, sir, morning, ma'am, howdy lizard pickney. Ooonuh keeping well this fine hot day? The maggots growing good in the shit? Eh? It have plenty lizards climbing in your food? Good. I glad."

It is this self-sufficiency that eventually causes Tan-Tan to bring misfortune down upon the douen. She is sent to live on the forest floor with Abitefa, the daughter of Chichibud and Benta, who will soon be coming into her own womanhood. Abitefa is resentful at first of Tan-Tan's accompaniment, but accedes to her parent's wishes. The two become friends, living together on the forest floor, sharing girlish adolescent camaraderie. But Tan-Tan is hungry for her own people, and as soon as she discovers a nearby human settlement she begins to sneak into it. At first she thinks she just wants to see “tallpeople going about their business,” but she soon finds herself stepping in as the Robber Queen and defending the poor, downtrodden people in the towns. These good deeds quiet the “Bad Tan-Tan” voice inside her that is always dragging her down, confirming her uselessness. Tan-Tan becomes addicted to this freedom from her personal demons.

During one of these exploits as the Robber Queen, Tan-Tan saves a young man from a brutal beating by his mother. Tan-Tan grabs the lash and begins lashing the woman, asking her how she likes the beating she'd been giving her son. When the son steps in and tries to save his mother, Tan-Tan is bewildered:

How could he stand to touch that woman? How could he love her when she hurt him like that?

Her bewilderment gives us a glimpse into the hurt done to Tan-Tan by her father. She still loved him so much that when he hurt her she had to split her personality to deal with it, yet she cannot recognize this phenomenon in others. Tan-Tan does not stop to self-examine, but attempts direct intervention instead: she tells the woman not to hurt her son anymore, claiming that she, Tan-Tan the Robber Queen, would know if she did and come punish her for it.

Tan-Tan is soon plagued by another, more tangible memory of her father: she discovers she is pregnant from his final rape. (This situation is reminiscent of Octavia Butler's work, particuarly the Patternmaster series.) Unable to find a settlement with a doctor to help her abort the baby, she is forced to learn to live in the bush with an unborn child dragging her down, both physically and emotionally:

Is the baby, the monster baby that was round and hard now like potato in her belly.... Resentfully Tan-Tan dug her fingers into her stomach. The defiant thing inhabiting her didn't yield. Her head pounded with anger. She could only drink what it let her, eat what it permitted.

Tan-Tan finds herself subject to someone else's needs once again, but this time it is something literally internal, something she cannot rid herself of. Her need to be her own person, to follow her own rules, has become such a necessity to her that she continues to ignore the douens’ request that she not go into human settlements. And indeed it is not long until Janisette, Antonio's wife at the time of his death, comes seeking vengeance on Tan-Tan at the settlement where she's been playing Robber Queen.

Tan-Tan escapes, but Janisette easily follows her trail into the bush, and the daddy tree is no longer a secret to humans. It is a painful decision, but the douen have little choice but to destroy their home and move to other daddy trees farther away. Tan-Tan has to sit by, the guilt of what she's done weighing her down as she watches the home of the people who had saved her destroyed by their own hands.

Tan-Tan has lost her home for the third time, and a father figure for the second. In her need for independence, for the freedom from the ghost of her father she only obtains by taking on the persona of the Robber Queen, she has caused the death of the daddy tree, and this time the fault is truly hers.

The douen replant the tree immediately, using biological means to help it grow very quickly at first. The morning after the destruction of the daddy tree, there is an adolescent tree growing where the huge daddy tree once stood. It is not yet ready for douen inhabitation—indeed, it is a long way off—but the possibility of a new home in the future gives us a brief glimpse of hope. This kind of replanting in the face of a father's death echoes Tan-Tan's unborn child, a “reseeding” by her father that seems at first a curse, but later turns out to be something else entirely.

Accompanied by Abitefa, who was exiled from her people because of Tan-Tan's mistakes at the same time Tan-Tan was cast out, she makes her home in the bush, stealing into human settlements and performing as many Robber Queen good deeds as she dares with Janisette still on her trail. She is now without a home, truly on her own without adult interference or supervision for the first time in her life.

During this time in the bush, Tan-Tan comes to know herself, and discovers what she's made of. When she stumbles on a settlement that has indentured servants locked in the fields by ball and chain, she turns and runs away. She is ashamed that when confronted with true evil, she flees from it, and she doubts her role as Robber Queen. Instead, she is learning judgement, learning the difference between situations she can influence and those she's better off avoiding. Slowly Bad Tan-Tan and Good Tan-Tan are merging, learning to work together. She is paying for her “sins” in the hard life of the bush.

Finally, Tan-Tan stumbles upon Sweet Pone, the settlement that she had been planning on running off to with her friend Melonhead before her sixteenth birthday. She finds Melonhead living here, and he does not let her escape back into the bush, but comes after her, happy to see her well and alive. Her pregnancy, well advanced by now, is hidden by a large cape, but it doesn't take long for Melonhead to notice and ask her if it's Antonio's child. Tan-Tan is unable to answer him, and he lets the question go.

Tan-Tan is unable to stay away from the settlement, and she soon realizes that her feelings for Melonhead are growing. She has spent enough time with herself that she is nearly ready to let someone get close to her again, and this time she discovers more about human interaction than she'd ever known was possible:

Touching Melonhead made her feel good, an unalloyed pleasure untainted by fear or anger. So different than she'd ever felt before.

The climax of the book comes during the Carnival celebration in Sweet Pone, when Janisette catches Tan-Tan, who is too pregnant to escape this time. Tan-Tan, strengthened by her relationship with Melonhead, fired up by her Robber Queen costume, finally gives a speech that is not a made-up story, but the truth of what happened between her and Antonio.

In this beautifully written scene Tan-Tan finally integrates Bad Tan-Tan and Good Tan-Tan; she finds her voice and shames Janisette for not helping her as a child. She proclaims to the entire town the story of what happened to her, and whose baby she is carrying. She is the opposite of the quiet, ignored Tan-Tan who was taken by her father to New Half-Way Tree. She has grown from the frightened fugitive running from her father's murder into a brave young woman facing her history and allowing herself to justify her act of self-defense. There is shock, some disgust and a great deal of admiration showered down on Tan-Tan by the end of the speech, and even Janisette is swayed by the speech and leaves her for the last time. And, just as Tan-Tan has started facing her demons, she goes into labor.

An unnamed narrator makes occasional appearances in the novel, speaking to someone we cannot see, talking him through a tough time by telling the story of Tan-Tan. In the final pages that we learn that this is Tan-Tan's house eshu from Toussaint, talking to the fetus in her womb. The earbug that had not died when Tan-Tan went through the dimension veil provided Granny Nanny and the eshu with a means of tracking Tan-Tan and they, being good parents, found her. By the time they found her she was too old to hear them, but Granny Nanny was able to suffuse the fetus with the “nanomites” necessary for communication.

As Tan-Tan gives birth to the son that her father gave her, the seed he planted as she destroyed him in self-defense, she brings Granny Nanny, the benevolent parent-force, to the wilds of New Half-Way Tree. This final scene completes the cycle, confirms for us that there is something good in everything bad and something bad in everything good. Much as the rebirth of the daddy tree brings the promise of safe haven in the future, so too does the baby, Tubman, bring the hope of freedom from oppression to the hard world of New Half-Way Tree.

Heather Shaw is a transplanted Hoosier now enjoying life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has published short fiction and articles, and has been known to read her poetry at such places as a San Francisco Sex Education benefit, a Lollapalooza Poetry Tent, and a poetry slam or two. Her ongoing goals are to further her fiction career, maintain her online journal, dance in the moonlight, and read, read, read. Heather's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives. Visit her Web site for more information.

Further Reading:

An interview with Nalo Hopkinson in Strange Horizons.

Nalo Hopkinson's Web site, with information and novel excerpts.

Another article on Midnight Robber.

A conversation with Nalo Hopkinson discussing Midnight Robber.

Nalo Hopkinson on her writing background.

8/27/01

After a long journey, the weary European explorers catch a glimpse of land, far on the horizon. The men grow restless, as their ships slowly sail toward the coast. Images of rich lands and adventure race through their minds. Finally they disembark and set foot on America's pristine land for the first time in history. Two continents have made contact. Yet these are not Spaniards, commanded by an Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus. These are Vikings, guided by Leif Eriksson, arriving at American shores almost five hundred years before Columbus’ momentous “discovery."

This is the story of the first Europeans who bridged the gap dividing two continents. These explorers, known as Vikings, were part of a rich and complex culture. There is much to be learned behind the facade of pirates and barbarians that has commonly been attached to them. More interesting is to learn about their way of life, their prowess at sea and exploration, and the way they, in the long run, enriched European history.

The Vikings were native to the land that today is Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The populations living in these three territories were very independent from each other. Each country was a society composed of a King, a noble class—known as Jarls or Earls—and commoners. The country was divided into districts, each holding a yearly assembly—known as a Thing—in which Vikings discussed matters of common interest. All men were equal in the Thing; any man had the right to demand the settling of a dispute or whatever problem afflicted him.

Each country had its own sphere of influence. Vikings from Norway, known by many as Normands, would travel to northern England, Scotland, Ireland, and the archipelagos farther to the Northwest. Vikings from Denmark, known as Danes, journeyed through southern England, the European mainland, its coasts, and the Mediterranean. Vikings from Sweden, known as Rus by Slavs, roamed parts of eastern Europe, even venturing as far away as the Caspian Sea.

Putting aside the image of murdering barbarians, we now know that they were skilled farmers, traders, navigators, explorers, and settlers. They were very good storytellers, too. History was passed on from generation to generation by way of Sagas. These stories were memorized and told to others. Elders, through them, narrated the adventures of kings, heroes, and prominent families. Many of these Sagas were written down by Icelanders in the fourteenth century, in an effort to preserve the Viking's history, which would otherwise have been forgotten. Thanks to these Sagas we know many things about them, as well as their voyages. But other cultures who came in contact with Vikings also documented their way of life.

In 921 the Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan met Rus traders of Swedish origin, near the Middle Volga. Impressed by their appearance he described them as “perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy."

Of their women he wrote that “each one wears on either breast a box of iron, silver, copper or gold; the value of the box indicates the wealth of the husband. Each box has a ring from which depends a knife. The women wear neck rings of gold and silver, one for each 10,000 dirhems which her husband is worth; some women have many."

It is interesting to note that Viking women had an important role in society, compared to other cultures at the time. A woman had complete authority over the farm when the husband was off on a raid or trading trip. She could own land and had the right to demand divorce if she no longer wanted to be by her husband's side.

Ibn Fadlan was appalled by their apparent lack of hygiene as well as their uninhibited sexual practices. “They are the filthiest of God's creatures. They have no modesty in defecation and urination, nor do they wash after pollution from orgasm, nor do they wash their hands after eating. With them are pretty slave girls destined for sale to merchants: a man will have sexual intercourse with his slave girl while his companion looks on. Sometimes whole groups will come together in this fashion, each in the presence of others. A merchant who arrives to buy a slave girl from them may have to wait and look on while a Rus completes the act of intercourse with a slave girl,” he added.

He also took note of how the Vikings honored and bid their dead farewell. According to both Ibn Fadlan and the Sagas, when a wealthy Viking died, he was buried along with his ship. Ibn Fadlan witnessed one of these burials and narrated in great detail the specifics of the event. According to him, the deceased's ship was dragged out of the water and taken to where the burial would take place. It was propped up on four wooden stakes inside a pit that had previously been dug. A tent was then constructed in the middle of the ship and more wood was set underneath it. The corpse, dressed in fine clothes, was put inside the tent along with different objects he would need in the afterlife.

First they deposited fruit, intoxicating drinks, and fragrant plants beside him. Then bread, meat, and onions were placed before him. After that a dog was brought, cut into two pieces and placed inside the ship. His weapons were then placed by his side. Two horses were dismembered and also put inside the ship. Both a rooster and hen were also sacrificed and placed inside.

In the end, a female slave who had volunteered to join her master in death, was killed and deposited in the ship. The vessel was then set on fire and the remains covered with a mound of soil. Finally on top of this mound the Vikings placed a wooden post; on it they wrote the man's name and the name of his king, and then they departed. This was typical of a wealthy man's burial. In the case of a poor man, a small boat was constructed. He was placed inside, set on fire, and then buried.

Viking life revolved around farming and trade, yet every single man was proficient in the use of weapons. The basic battle gear of a Viking was a long sword, an axe, and a small knife. A wealthy man could also have a pike and a bow and arrows. For protection he carried a round shield and a coat of chain mail, as well as a metal helmet. This brings us to another misconception, the image of a Viking wearing a horned helmet. There is no evidence that Vikings ever wore this type of headgear. Actually, a conical metal helmet with a simple rectangular nose guard was commonly used in battle.

There was a small group of elite warriors though, known as Berserks, whose only purpose in life was to fight. It is thought that they engaged in rites honoring Odin, the god of war. The Sagas portray Berserks as fierce warriors, possessors of superhuman strength, and literally invincible. According to many accounts they would go into battle in some sort of trance, striking down everything that moved, even while they were severely wounded. They would carry on in this manner for many hours until the effects of the trance wore off. After this they would fall into a deep stupor, needing days to recover.

This leads us to believe that they consumed some sort of hallucinogenic drug or herb before going into battle, which produced the effect of a seemingly endless supply of energy and immunity to pain, and finally caused the symptoms of withdrawal. Given that they were difficult to control—frequently attacking even their comrades in arms—they were outlawed before the end of the Viking era.

Being native to lands with an abundance of fjords, rivers, and lakes, it was easier for Vikings to travel by ship than by land. The design of their ships was remarkable, thanks to knowledge acquired and passed on for many generations. At sea this afforded them a clear advantage over other cultures. Their ships had many variations, but there were two main types: warships and transports.

Their warship was known as the Drakkar, and it was perfectly suited for incursions, being fast and easy to steer. It was commonly between 17 and 27 meters long and 2.5 to 5 meters wide at the midship. Space was at a premium onboard, so each Viking carried only a chest where he kept his possessions. This also meant there wasn't any type of cover, even in foul weather, which says a lot about the Vikings’ ability to withstand less than comfortable living conditions. A dismountable mast and rectangular sail were used whenever possible. When wind was lacking, or when navigating near a coast or traveling up a river, the travelers took turns rowing. Depending on the Drakkar's size, it needed anywhere from 20 to 50 oarsmen. Fully loaded, the Drakkar would draw less than one meter of water, which gave the Vikings the ability to strike practically any coast, without the requirement of a port. And it was even light enough to be dragged over land in order to circumvent a blockaded river or to navigate across to a different one.

The Knöörr was a bigger ship, suitable for transporting goods and even entire families on colonizing voyages. It had a central platform where animals, wood, or other necessities could be transported.

One interesting characteristic shared by all Viking ships was an identical bow and stern. This meant that if they needed to turn back, they simply rowed in the other direction.

From the Sagas, we conclude that only wealthy Vikings had sufficient capital for the construction of Drakkars and Knöörrs. Thus, ship owners usually were nobles, or commoners who had amassed great fortunes through trading or raids. The size, quality, and quantity of ships depended on the Viking's level of wealth. Accordingly, Vikings of less stature could only afford smaller ships suitable for fishing or short voyages.

The year 793 saw the first documented pillage by Scandinavian warriors. The monastery of Lindisfarne, on the eastern coast of England, was ransacked by Vikings sailing out of Norway. Setting the tone for many incursions to come, the Vikings rowed their ships onto the beach, taking the area by surprise. The monastery was overrun; anyone standing in their way was promptly slaughtered. Others were taken prisoners to be sold as slaves. The attackers took anything of value they could find and quickly rowed away.

This incident is commonly regarded as the beginning of the Viking era, as historians refer to the time period ranging from 793 to 1100. During this time the Viking culture expanded into areas surrounding the Scandinavian states, even making contact with regions as far away as the Caspian Sea in the east and the coasts of North America in the west.

Raids, such as the one that took place at Lindisfarne, were organized during assemblies. One Viking usually organized the whole affair, brought together the ships necessary for the raid, and recruited the right number of men. These raids usually took place during the summer, when the weather was more favorable for navigation. Before sailing every Viking was required to swear loyalty and complete obedience to the leader of the raid. Upon returning, the loot was divided, half for the organizer, half for the crew.

Thus, raids and exploration voyages could be organized in this manner by any Viking, provided he could bring together enough ships, supplies, and men. But there were also many cases in which noblemen, acting on their king's orders, mounted enormous raids. One was in 968, when Jarl Gundraed, in command of 8000 men and 100 ships, led a Danish expedition into Spain. Obviously, the number of casualties left behind and booty taken were many times larger than those of the typical small, hit and run operations.

In the years following the Lindisfarne incident, Norwegian Vikings dominated parts of northern England, Scotland and Ireland, while the southern English coasts were harassed by Vikings based in Denmark. Dublin and York became important Viking trade centers.

It was only natural that after settling in the British Isles these explorers would travel to other areas, always in search of new lands. Thus, sailing to the northwest, Vikings discovered, and permanently settled, Iceland.

Around the year 980 Erik Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik the Red, having been temporarily exiled from Iceland for the murder of two fellow Vikings, sailed west along with his family. He searched for an unexplored island someone had seen in the past. He found it, named it Greenland, and promptly built a farm in an area he called Bratthalid, near present day Julianehab. He remained there for three seasons and upon returning to Iceland told his fellow Vikings about the discovery. He described endless rolling green pastures, perfect for raising cattle, as well as an abundance of fish, whales and seals. Hundreds of fellow Vikings went back with him and settled there.

In the year 1000, a Viking traveling from Iceland to Greenland was thrown off course by a storm. He ended up in the vicinity of an unknown land farther west. When he finally arrived in Greenland he narrated his ordeal and described the territory he had seen. Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, decided to explore this new land. He took a ship and a crew of 35 men and sailed west. Following the directions previously given to him, he found this new land and traveled down along the coast. He named three areas according to their predominant elements: Helluland (Rocky land), Markland (Land of forests) and Vinland (Land of grapes). He disembarked in this last area and settled there temporarily. A large house and a few other structures were built by Leif and his men. According to the Sagas this land was fertile, had good weather and plenty of wildlife. Its rivers and lakes were teeming with salmon and other species of fish.

Shortly Leif and his men returned home, with their ship loaded with wood, which was scarce in Greenland. A year later his father, Erik the Red, died. Leif took over the administration of the farm, and was never able to return to Vinland. Two years later his brother, Thorvald, organized a second expedition to the newly discovered land. He and his men spent two years exploring the coasts of the surrounding area. They also constructed more dwellings. On one occasion they stumbled upon a group of natives, which the Vikings named skraeling, and a skirmish ensued. Thorvald was mortally wounded and became the first European to be buried in America. His men shortly returned to Greenland carrying a full load of wood and grapes.

A third expedition was later organized by another of Erik the Red's sons, Thorstein. Sadly, their ship was thrown off course by a storm and all on board, except for a woman, perished.

A fourth expedition was organized by another Viking by the name of Thorfinn Karlsefni. Traveling in two ships, this group stayed for three years in the same dwellings Leif Eriksson and his crew had built. In one occasion they were approached by natives who attempted to exchange furs for Viking swords. Apparently the Vikings refused and had some problems as a result, although not as severe as in Thorvald's case. During their stay in Vinland, Snorri, son of Thorfinn and his wife Grudrid, was born. This is the first documented birth of a European in America. Later, Thorfinn and his group returned to Greenland, again with their respective cargo of wood.

The fifth and last documented voyage to Vinland was organized by Freydis, Leif's sister. They traveled in two ships, one carrying Vikings from Greenland, the other from Iceland. Their one-year stay was not disturbed by the visit of natives, although it was far from uneventful. Apparently Freydis created a hostile climate between Greenlanders and Icelanders. Quarrels over unimportant issues between the two groups were common. In the end she convinced her husband and crew to get rid of the Greenlanders. According to the Sagas she single-handedly took care of the opposing group's women, chopping them to pieces with an axe. They then took both ships, with their complement of wood, and returned to Greenland.

Apparently, the Vikings never returned to America after the fifth voyage. The era of Viking expansionism was at an end. Their pillaging incursions became less frequent; the fact that Christianity and its ideals quickly enveloped the Viking culture may be an important factor in this change of attitude. Trading centers in England and Ireland were abandoned, along with the settlements in Greenland. Many of the early invaders settled in parts of France, Finland, and Russia, mixing with the local population. Most of their pagan culture and language were forgotten in time. Only in Iceland, where the Sagas are still read without requiring translation, does the original Nordic language survive.

Through archaeology we are still learning many things about the Viking culture. Evidence of settlements has been discovered in their homelands, as well as England, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland. Remains of dwellings and everyday objects have been found in numerous sites. But the most exciting discoveries are the remains of buried ships.

In 1867 the remains of a twenty-meter long ship were unearthed in Tune, Norway. According to recent analysis it was built around 890. In 1880 the remains of another ship were found in Gokstad, Norway. It was also built in 890 and measured twenty-four meters in length. The year 1906 saw the discovery of another ship in Oseberg, Norway. It measured 22 meters in length, was built around the year 820 and apparently buried in 834. Coins, weapons and other valuable objects were found inside the ships, confirming the tales of Viking funerals.

In 1960 a group of Norwegian archaeologists discovered the remains of eight long houses on the Canadian island of L'anse aux Meadows. They were proven to be of Nordic design. Other typical Viking objects were also found, such as pins, stone lamps, and some carved wooden pieces believed to be ship fittings.

Further excavations—from 1973 to 1976—uncovered even more utensils and about 2000 pieces of worked wood. It was mostly debris from smoothing and trimming logs, as the Vikings prepared wood to be taken back to Greenland. The Canadian Government reconstructed three of the Viking buildings, and the locale was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

To this day it is still unclear just why the Viking culture literally spilled over into neighboring countries from the eighth century onwards. Some scholars believe a growing population demanded the search for new territories. Others think that a divided and unstable Europe proved fertile ground for Viking raids. Yet there are those who believe that the superiority of Viking maritime technology and tactics gave them a distinct advantage over other cultures, prompting such raids. We may never know for sure.

Arturo Rubio is a freelance writer from Tijuana, Mexico. He enjoys writing about history, international affairs and computers. Currently, he is working on a series of articles about the Middle East.

Further Reading:

Scientific American article on Viking ships

The Lief Ericson Vikingship of Philadelphia

The Viking Navy

The Rus Project (Finnish Viking ship)

The medieval Viking ship Helga Holm

All of Google's resources on Viking ships

8/6/01

He might have been reduced to one eye, one arm, and scarcely more than one good leg, but Lightning Jack lacked nothing in between. Nothing at all. Half a man? Miss Lily's first impression had been wildly off target. Two or three men put together (and of course you never could put the good bits together) couldn't equal his endowment.

No one judged better in these matters than Miss Lily, better known as The Schoolmarm.

Not that she often took gentlemen into her own bed these days. She might, for a substantial fee, apply her other, very specialized skills where they would do the most good; but any customer with the fortitude to seek a bedmate after Miss Lily had latticed his hairy butt with her lash could make do with one of her girls.

Jack, though, was an investment. An unwise one, she had feared, watching him hobble from the train; but an investment nonetheless. And rumor insisted that he still possessed that legendary aim and speed, and a gun with new notches earned only weeks ago.

More certain was the cold fire of revenge consuming him. Miss Lily understood the power of that fire. And, since his enemy was her enemy, she had welcomed his written offer and guaranteed his personal safety up until the shoot-out, as well as a handsome fee upon completion, payable to an address in San Francisco in the event that he was unable to collect it himself.

Jack's personal safety was best guaranteed in The Schoolmarm's well-guarded establishment. That it required sharing her own opulent rose-and-ivory bedchamber was less self-evident, but Miss Lily had acquiesced. Something in his blend of frailty and rage recalled men she had nursed in the war, long ago, before she had come west to teach and learned a lesson or two herself, the foremost being that she might as well make men pay for what they were determined to get anyway, the second that there was no limit to what some men would pay for.

Miss Lily would have drawn the line at taking her whip to Jack's already-ravaged body, but she was expert at reading men and doubted that he wanted anything more than the softest bed in the Territories and maybe a little womanly comfort. It came as no surprise that before dawn he was sobbing into her ample breasts. The surprise was that those breasts were heaving as though the Grand Tetons had been tossed on the waves of an earthquake. It seemed forever until she could catch her breath, and even then she was still shaken by the best time she'd had since ... since ... but there was no comparison in all her years of experience.

Lily stroked his scarred face and made soothing sounds and let him fall asleep atop her, then gently eased him off. She tried to lift the bedclothes just enough to get a glimpse of what she'd been enjoying, but he gripped the satin comforter and muttered, “No ... no ... please ... ,” so she let him be.

In the morning Jack accepted a hot bath, but refused assistance, even from Slow Joe the bouncer, who carried the steaming buckets up from the kitchen. Only when fully dressed did Jack re-enter her boudoir.

“Miss Lily,” he said, sitting awkwardly on the slippery rose satin edge of the bed, “there's one more thing I'd like to ask of you."

“No harm in asking,” she said, feeling an urge to ask for a little something herself but knowing that what lay ahead would require all his concentration. She hoped he hadn't already lost the edge he was going to need.

“Well, it's just, if it should turn out ... if you should feel you could handle it ... I'd appreciate if you'd look after that.” He nodded toward the long gun-case sitting on the marble-topped bureau.

“Don't you worry any about that,” Miss Lily said. She decided it was time to fan fires that might have got a little dampened last night. “You just fix your mind on dealing with Rigby. Is it true what they say? He's the one who tied you to that railroad track like a dime-novel virgin?"

Jack's smile would have been grim even without the scars. “Is it true what they say, Miss Lily, that you near to killed Rigby with a bullwhip after he and his boys cut up one of your girls, but you weren't tough enough to finish the job?"

“True enough,” she said. “I stopped too soon."

“I won't.” He stood and limped to the bureau. Lily heard him opening the gun case.

“Jack,” she said over her shoulder as she slipped on a lacy peignoir, “should I ... if there's a need ... should I send your things on to that San Francisco address?"

“No need,” he said, closing the case and turning back. “If you don't mind keeping them.” She noticed the single holster slung low on his right hip, empty sleeve dangling above it. “There's somebody in ’Frisco I owe, but it's not what you'd call personal. Old Chinaman there fixed me up about as well as anybody could, after the train crew got me that far. I couldn't pay him right then, but he seemed to think my reputation was guarantee enough.” He twitched his shoulders to adjust the fit of his shabby black coat. “Amazing what those pig-tailed doctors can do, what they've got, dried stuff hanging on the walls, pickled stuff in bottles, live things in big jars and baskets. Truly amazing.” He avoided her eyes; she figured those memories must be hard to handle.

“I'll see your debt paid,” she assured him. “I might go to San Francisco myself, one of these days. Once I know Rigby won't be carrying out his threats against my place and my girls.” She let her peignoir fall open, and was only mildly disappointed that her rose-and-ivory charms sparked no interest in Jack's dark, single eye. His focus should be on the coming confrontation, the bizarre, balletic ritual wherein men could kill with honor, publicly, face to face in the dusty arena of Main Street under the blazing sun of high noon.

“Go on down and have breakfast with the girls, Jack, while I take my bath,” Miss Lily said. “Slow Joe won't let anybody in, and I have men outside on watch."

“Just some of that coffee I smell, Ma'am,” Jack said. “That's all I'll need. But thanks, Miss Lily. Thanks for everything."

Then he was gone. Miss Lily listened to the uneven thumps of his progress down the stairs. When the dining room door swung shut she crossed to the bureau and opened his unlocked case.

A strange, musky odor, not unpleasant, rose from the interior. Maybe some oriental perfume. The single revolver-shaped niche was empty, but the case could hold a good deal more, and clearly had. A channel coiled through the jade-green satin lining, looping around the perimeter and inward toward the center. A perfect whip-case, she thought automatically, not big enough for a standard bullwhip, but fine for her own customized instrument. Was that why he wanted her to have it? If he didn't survive?

She bathed and dressed slowly and meticulously. Jack had no expectation of surviving. She knew that. Remembering last night, the tears as well as the delight, she was more than willing to call the whole thing off, find another way to deal with Rigby; but Jack's own rage for vengeance drove him now, holding him together just long enough to satisfy it.

Any aftermath would be Miss Lily's to deal with. She smoothed the lines of her long, elegant skirt, arranged the lace at her neckline to reveal just the right swell of bosom, and hung her neatly coiled whip from the belt that cinched her waist. Then she went down to face the day.

As the sun neared its zenith Miss Lily's girls clustered on the verandah, designed to give her establishment a touch of elegance. Their seductive gowns and poses were good advertising; folks had crowded into town for the upcoming spectacle, and business would boom tonight. If the business survived.

Slow Joe and two hired hands manned the roof with an arsenal of shotguns. The girls had derringers tucked in amongst their ruffles, and knew how to handle them. But Jack was Lily's best hope.

Jack sat stiffly in the parlor, expressionless, barely breathing. Miss Lily didn't intrude. She trusted him by now to know his own business best. Maybe he'd learned some kind of concentration trick in the alleys of Chinatown.

She stepped out onto the verandah, adjusted her chiffon-swathed hat at just the right tilt, then moved down to the board walkway along the street. As though he'd been waiting for her appearance, a horseman left the milling throng in front of the general store and approached her. Henson, Rigby's mouthpiece. She waited calmly for his opening gambit.

“So, Miss Lily,” he said, glancing around to make sure of his audience, “you finally allowed as how that whip ain't enough to make a man of you. Heard you brought in a hired gun, or more like half a gun. What's that make him, a firecracker?” This drew a few laughs, at which he bowed and preened, but most folks waited to hear Miss Lily's reply.

“If your yellow-bellied boss would rather face a woman, I'd be happy to oblige,” she purred huskily, fondling the tip of her lash. “If not, he's about to get a firecracker up his ass."

The laughter now was sly, muffled, nobody wanting to be identified. Rigby wouldn't take kindly to ridicule. Nobody was willing to bet on an outcome in which his petty tyranny would no longer be a factor.

The street emptied. Miss Lily glanced up at her own rooftop troops to be sure they noticed Rigby's henchmen up behind the general store's false front. Slow Joe jerked his head in their direction.

The sun was directly overhead. Shadows had been sucked back under whatever cast them. But Lightning Jack, when he stepped down into the street, was shadow itself, a bolt of blackness against the dusty, glaring light. His scarred face hid between the dark brim of his hat and the black neckerchief at his throat. You couldn't tell whether he had one eye, or none.

He walked slowly, scarcely limping, shoulders rigid, until he reached the point of least threat to bystanders from errant shots. Miss Lily followed along the walkway, hips swaying in their trademark undulation, the ultimate advertisement for her establishment. She sensed rather than saw Jack's admonitory frown but held her ground. No matter what happened, she would be the first to reach whatever was left of him.

Rigby moved out into the other end of the street. He took a few steps, then a few more, bravado growing as Jack swayed slightly. Lily braced herself to keep from running to prop her champion up.

Rigby held both hands curved tensely above the grips of his paired revolvers. Jack's left hand extended halfway across his sunken belly toward the double-action Colt on his right hip, but it didn't seem possible he could draw and fire in time to do any good.

Rigby made his move; all eyes swung toward him. All but Miss Lily's. She kept her gaze fixed on Jack's gun, and the empty sleeve above it. He had to have some good reason for slinging his gun on that side.

It happened too fast to be sure of anything, but Miss Lily could swear that something stiffened that empty sleeve, something drew and fired that Colt before ever Jack's left hand reached it, and kept on firing even as he fell.

Rigby was down, and so, with farther to fall, were the men he'd posted on the store roof. Miss Lily darted into the street and stood over Jack on guard. The right-arm-that-wasn't still raised the gun and swung it in short arcs, searching for more targets, jerking Jack's body from side to side, but Lily knew that Jack himself had finally left that ruined hulk.

“It's finished,” she murmured. “You did it.” The sleeve collapsed. Lily knelt in the dust, unmindful of her finery. With one hand she pulled the neckerchief up over the ruined remains of his face; with the other she gingerly lifted the edge of the empty sleeve and peered in. Her stomach lurched, but she refused to let her body jerk away. She stood, moved even closer, and raised the dusty hem of her skirt just slightly at the front. “Well, come on if you're coming,” she muttered. For just an instant, before her skirt overlapped the threadbare cuff, she had another glimpse of that jade-green serpentine form, its blunt tip almost entirely taken up by a single, glistening eye.

As the creature coiled its way up her silk-clad calf, she stood unmoving, head bowed as though in grief, suppressing an almost overpowering urge to shudder and cursing Jack for not telling her what to expect. “Amazing what they've got,” he'd said. “Live things in big jars and baskets.” Hardly enough warning for this. But, as the sinuous pressure reached above her garter to her naked thigh, the creature's familiar touch ignited other, pleasanter urges.

Gundersen, the undertaker, approached Miss Lily warily, and she realized she was gripping her whip as though she meant business. “Give him your best coffin, Sam. I'm paying."

Then she walked, very slowly and carefully, out of the street and toward her verandahed haven. Her hips swayed only slightly, so as not to dislodge her passenger, but all male eyes were on her, and she knew she must be projecting a good deal of what she was feeling. “If you only knew it, fellows,” she thought, with a sly inward smile in spite of genuine grief, “I've got more between my legs just now than any ten of you.” Not that it made her feel in the least like a man. Far, far from it.

Walking up the stairs toward her room was ... interesting.

Slow Joe burst through the front door just as she reached the landing. “Joe,” Miss Lily said, “Get me a train ticket to San Francisco for tomorrow. And tell Annie to come up and pack for me—but not for an hour or two yet. Make damn sure she knocks first!"

She'd more or less promised Jack to take care of his ... whatever. In the long run she was going to need to find out more about its care and, well, feeding. For now, she knew all she needed to know.

“Thanks, Jack,” Miss Lily murmured in the sybaritic privacy of her bedroom. Her breasts were beginning to heave again and her breathing was getting out of control. “Thanks for everything."

Copyright © 2001 Connie Wilkins

Connie Wilkins lives in the 5-college area of western Massachusetts. Her stories have appeared in a publications as varied as two of Bruce Coville's children's books, the anthologies Such a Pretty Face: Tales of Power and Abundance and Embraces: Dark Erotica, and, online, in Electric Wine, Jackhammer, and Elysian Fiction. Her alter-ego, Sacchi Green, frequently usurps her computer to write for non-speculative erotica anthologies, too.

From painting, printmaking, and ceramics to now working exclusively in a “computer incubated” format, Noel Bebee continues to interpret this and other worlds in his unique and evocative manner. Noel lives in Canada and has been an artist for over 30 years. Visit his Web site for more of his work.

8/13/01

The marbles were dirty, so I put them in my mouth to get the grit off. I'd eaten a lot of dirt in the last couple of months—I'd survived the bad dust sickness—and a little more wouldn't hurt. But that bug-eyed kid standing in front of me looked at me funny.

“Where you from, anyway?” I asked him, my mouth full of glass balls. There were four of us playing. There was nothing else to do in the camps. We were too young to go out and work. A boy has to be at least twelve to go out on the trucks and do the picking. None of us kids were over nine.

“Far away,” he said. This kid, his name was Petey. He was a queer one. He drank juice all the time, piss-warm apple juice. His ma always chased him around with the juice. But it wasn't the juice that made him queer, it was everything put together.

My dry tongue pushed the marbles out of my mouth one by one, until all three were in my palm. “Farther than Little Rock?” I asked.

“So far that you wouldn't even know the name of it,” he said quietly.

I sucked up and spat, mostly to get rid of the dirt and stuff in my mouth. “How do you know what I know?” I got up real close to Petey. He was taller than I was, but most everyone was taller than me, even the girls. “We're sick of hearing about how perfect it is where you're from. If it was so good, how come your family's Okies too?"

Petey flinched; his clear blue eyes squinted underneath his dark brow. Okies was what people from California called us. But most of us weren't from Oklahoma. Like my family, we're from Kansas, a ways out of Dodge City. But then the dust storms came, and the worst one, the Black Sunday storm, wrecked the land and killed the cattle. There wasn't anything left to do after the banks foreclosed but leave.

“They're back!” One of the other boys we were playing marbles with pointed, out over the ridge that led to the entrance of the camp. A black, coughing flatbed truck clanked along the trail. In the back was my pa. He'd been one of the lucky ones picked that day to go out and pick fruit—"lucky” because too many days had passed without him on the truck. But now Pa and the truck were back. They were going to be getting off right where we were playing.

I jiggled my marbles and shoved them into my overalls. Petey was already gone. With bare feet, I stomped out the playing circle I'd drawn in the dirt. Pa wouldn't like knowing I was fooling around. As I turned to find Pa, I stumbled right into a giant man—almost smacked into his thigh. I stopped and looked up at him. I must have made a noise because he started laughing and in a big booming voice he said, “Hey there, boy!"

I could barely see up as high as his chin, but I could tell that he had black hair. I couldn't see much more about his face. He ruffled my hair with a hand at least twice as big as Pa's. I couldn't help it: my mouth was hanging open. He wasn't normal. He just wasn't normal at all.

Then Pa and the giant shook hands. Even Pa didn't come up to his chest. Though Pa was a small man, he had a big handshake. That was his way of making up for his size.

The big man's voice boomed again. “That your boy?"

Pa looked down at me. I think it must have hurt his neck, starting looking up at the giant and ending down so low at me.

“Yup,” Pa said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “This here is my son, Johnnie."

“Sir.” I offered my hand.

The giant laughed. His paw swallowed my arm clear up to my elbow. His voice sounded kind of like what I imagined God's voice would sound like coming down from the heavens, deep and music-like. “Did you meet my boy? Peter, where are you?"

The giant dropped my hand and looked around. I think I must have groaned out loud. Petey? He was likely off somewhere sucking up his juice or on his hands and knees finding his special rocks.

I followed Petey out.

I was bored and all the men were off working. It was a good time to be working. California was just like they said it was: Paradise. Not a dusty dirty place like Kansas.

Ma was busy cleaning our garage. I wasn't supposed to call it a garage, but that's what it was. She worked so hard to keep it nice. It was handout money, government money, that let us live there. We were some of the oldest people in the migration camp, which was why we had a garage. Petey and his family were still living in a tent. I didn't know how his pa slept in there.

I didn't like to be around much when Ma was cleaning, because I always ended up on the floor scrubbing. So I wandered around the camp some, until I found Petey. He was carrying around a Mason jar full of juice. Like I said before, Petey was all the time drinking juice. I followed him around a spell. I think he was trying to lose me.

“Where you going, Petey?"

“Nowhere."

Petey mostly just made circles around the camp. He'd stop here and there and check out some rocks on the ground. After a while, he'd pick one up and put it in his pocket. I watched him and followed him to where the ground was really rocky. I tried stepping in the same spots as him. It was easy to see where he was stepping because he had shoes on and they made tracks. I hadn't owned a pair of shoes since I was six years old. That was back in Kansas. A long time ago....

Petey was wearing long pants and a long shirt, too. It was queer since it was so hot. Most of the time I didn't even wear a shirt. His face looked like he'd been spooked; he wore that face pretty much all the time. He needed a haircut. He almost looked like a girl, especially with those light eyes and curly lashes.

Petey stopped walking around when he reached the edge of the camp. I could look up and see the foothills. We weren't supposed to go out any further, at least I wasn't. I don't know what kind of rules Petey had—his parents were so much stranger than mine, chasing him with juice and all.

Petey drank the rest of his juice and sat down. He wasn't acting very social. I didn't have anything better to do than bug him, so I stuck around.

I sat down on the ground next to Petey. There was an anthill and I grabbed a twig and poked at it some. The high noon sun beat down and made my hair and face hot. I looked over to Petey and he was sweating pretty hard.

“Petey, where you from?” I didn't know what else to ask him. I wanted to ask him how come his pa was so big but that wasn't really a polite way to start a conversation.

“I forgot the name. I've been away so long.” Petey sighed.

I didn't say anything. He was thinking hard and I didn't want to mess up his remembering. I poked at the ants coming out of their home.

“Sometimes,” Petey said, “I close my eyes real tight and then I'm flying. Except there's no clouds, and no trees, and there surely isn't any dust. There's just free and open space. No one had to leave on trucks and everyone had a real place to sleep. That's what it was like at home.” He looked down into his empty Mason jar. “We're going back soon."

“You mean you close your eyes and dream? I do that at nighttime,” I said. I looked down at the poor ants I had forced away from their home; I swallowed hard. I knew how they felt. I threw my twig back behind me.

“It's different."

“How?"

“Just is.” Petey got up and started walking away from camp.

“I'm not allowed to go any further,” I said. I got up.

“Me neither,” he said. He didn't stop walking. He headed out toward the foothills and I followed him.

Birds were chirping and the sun was climbing higher and higher up in the cloudless sky. We were pretty far from camp. The rough ground tore up my feet. There were a lot of sharp rocks littering the path we were climbing. The air thinned out and Petey was having a hard time of breathing. He was getting red in the face.

I'd never been so high up, except for the truck ride from Kansas. But I'd still been recovering from the dust sickness then, so I slept most of the trip.

As I walked with Petey, I'd sneak peeks down over the camp. I could see people down there moving about. They were getting ready for the singing and dancing that would go on after the sun went down. They were all Okies like us, running away from the dust and failed crops. If we'd had some hills, the dust storms would've never wrecked our land and I wouldn't've been in stupid California looking for stupid rocks.

“The rocks is part of us getting home."

“How?"

Petey stopped and picked up a rock. “I don't really know.” He showed me the small rock. It was more like a pebble than a rock. It wasn't much bigger than my thumb. He plopped it in his jar.

I showed him a rock. Petey shook his head.

“Thanks, but it has to be a little smaller."

“Petey?” I pitched the rock behind me. “Do you want to go home real bad?"

Petey looked at me, with watery eyes.

“Yeah, it's all I think about,” Petey said. He kept staring at me. “Don't you want to go home too?"

I didn't know what to say. I thought for a few seconds and then nodded. “I can't really remember much about home before the dust storms. I just remember we were all happy."

Petey looked back down at his handful of rocks. “I want to go home so bad it hurts. It hurts my ma too."

“The rocks will get you home?” I asked.

Petey threw one pebble on the ground and stuffed the rest into his Mason jar. “Yeah, they will."

“Petey?” I asked. “Will they get me home too?"

“If I tell you they won't will you still help me?"

I thought about that some.

Petey turned away from me. “Leave if you want."

I looked down on the ground and there was a bright rock staring back at me. I picked it up. It was the color of chalk. I walked over to Petey and showed him. It must have been the right size because Petey looked at me for a second, like he was going to say something, but then he didn't. Instead, he held out his jar. I let the rock slowly roll off my fingers and plink into the jar. Petey and I looked at each other for a second and then we went back to our searching.

I have to say it was hard finding rocks that size. There really weren't many the right size. Petey said no to lots that I offered him.

It was real hot and I was getting thirsty. My eyes were stinging from the brightness. I didn't want to stop until Petey did.

“Johnnie?” Petey said. We were both squatting down over a pile of rocks we'd stumbled across.

“Huh?"

“We friends?” he asked. His voice was hopeful.

I didn't look up. “Sure we are. I'm looking for your rocks, right?"

I didn't tell him I was out there killing time because I didn't want to be home cleaning. I did like him, so it wasn't an all-out lie. I think having a friend was another one of those memories I'd tucked so far back into my head that I was near forgetting it.

“Why do you need the rocks?” I asked. I stopped digging. I had to squint to see him in the fierce sun.

Petey wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. “They have to be exactly the right size,” he said. He held a handful of them out to me. “We need them for our engine."

“Like a truck engine?"

“Yeah, except our engine isn't in a truck and we need rocks instead of gasoline,” he said.

Petey turned and started digging around a bush. He thought I wasn't looking. He tipped his head toward the jar, like he was listening to the rocks. I don't think he heard anything because he shook his head and looked mad. I looked at the rocks in my own hand. I jiggled them around. “Why don't you just use marbles?"

“It has to be rocks. A lot of rocks, more rocks than probably all the marbles in California. I don't know why."

“Were those rocks saying something to you?” I asked, not looking at him.

For a while Petey didn't say anything. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him picking up rocks and pitching them over his shoulder. Maybe he didn't hear me, but I didn't repeat it. Finally, he said, “They'll get loaded into the engine and sing. It's a soft hum. I can't hear them sing now, but I still kind of wish I could. I'd know I got rocks the right size."

“Like church singing?” I asked.

“Like a lullaby,” he said quietly. “Think back when you were a kid, before you got stuck here, when you were home. Think of being in bed and hearing that song softly in your ear."

I thought about it. When I was back in Kansas I remembered when it rained and how the raindrops on the roof made me sleepy. I remembered how everyone in the house slept better knowing the rain was feeding the crops. The rain was my lullaby and I had an idea how the rocks singing made him feel.

“Petey?” I asked. “Why do you save the rocks in Mason jars?"

Petey and me were out scavenging for more rocks. It started to be a daily job we did after the men left for work. My ma and his ma would get together and start talking and jabbering. They'd shoo us away and we'd go out and fill our pockets with rocks. When Petey finished his juice, we'd put the rocks in the juice jars.

“Pa likes to see ’em. Sometimes he can spot a rock that isn't the right size smack dab in the middle of a jar. Back home he was trained to know which rocks were the right size."

I looked up to the sky; it was another real hot day. Petey was wearing the same long-sleeved shirt he always wore. I wasn't wearing a shirt. The days just ran into each other. Beautiful cloudless California days that seemed to get hotter and hotter. I was glad we weren't in Kansas eating dust.

Before we left, Petey's ma handed me Petey's juice jar and made me promise that I'd make Petey drink his juice while we were out hunting for rocks. I got thirsty after a spell and I took a sip of the juice. I almost spit it out. It wasn't apple juice at all. It was something else, like Pa's beer or something stronger. I didn't say anything to Petey, I just carried the Mason jar around.

When Petey's pockets were full and there wasn't any place else to put rocks, he took the jar from me and dumped it out before I could say anything. The juice spilled out onto a big rock and the hot sun dried up the puddle.

“Don't tell Ma,” he said quickly. We were out further than we were allowed and I broke a promise to his ma. I shook my head. With soft clinks, Petey emptied his pockets into the juice jar. I shoved my hands into my own pockets; they weren't full yet. I wasn't as good as Petey was at finding the rocks, but I wanted to show him that I was working so I emptied what few I did have into his jar.

“You just keep helping me. Is it because you believe me? About the engine and the rocks?” Petey asked out of nowhere.

I didn't answer him for a while. I didn't quite understand it all but I knew that it was something pretty important or Petey wouldn't be wasting his time. Finally, I stopped my digging and took another handful over to him. I let them run out of my hand and into his almost full jar. I wiped my hand off on my overalls and held it out. “We're friends. If one of us can go home that's better than both of us being stuck here."

He took my hand and shook it and smiled real big. That was the first time I ever saw him without that spooked look on his face. He was awful red from the sun.

“Petey, you must be really hot in all those clothes. Maybe we should get back."

“Yeah, we probably should.” Petey wiped his brow with his long sleeve. We had a Mason jar full of rocks. They looked like gray and brown marbles.

Petey and I started back. I led the way. My feet were sore and cut. I was looking forward to a nice swim in the cold lake.

We weren't too far from camp when I heard the clatter of a Mason jar falling. When I looked behind me, Petey was lying on the ground.

I watched the giant pick his son up off the ground. Petey's ma wasn't too far behind us. She had juice jars with her. Guess his falling and getting knocked out had something to do with not enough apple juice. They were in such a big hurry to get Petey back to camp that they didn't see his Mason jar. I was kinda surprised that they didn't since it was so almighty important to them getting back to home, so I grabbed the cracked jar and picked up the scattered rocks. I followed really slow behind Petey's parents. After Petey started making some noises in the giant's arms, his ma stopped her crying and made him drink some juice. I stood there, scared. When his ma looked over and saw me she gave me a big hug. The Mason jar got in the way. When she looked down and saw the jar, she smiled.

I offered the jar to her and with great big tears she took the rocks and didn't say anything more.

“He's okay, right?” I asked her.

Petey's ma nodded. She looked back at her boy. She took my hand and squeezed. “He's going be just fine. Thank God he's got a friend like you."

I was still worried about Petey. When I got to my place, my own ma took me in her arms and hugged me tight. That's when I realized I wasn't gonna get hit for running off where we weren't allowed and for not making Petey drink his juice.

“That must have been scary for you. Glad your friend's gonna recover.” Pa looked down at me. He looked concerned. Ma hadn't let go of me yet.

I didn't know what to say. So I just nodded. After all we'd been through—the dust, the storms, the foreclosure—my friend getting sick didn't seem like a big deal.

“Son, I wish to God that you didn't have to miss out on having a normal childhood. When the rains come to Kansas, we'll go home."

I thought about what it was like before the dust storms, before we had to sleep with rags over our mouths, before we moved. I didn't know what normal was anymore, so how could I have missed it?

I shrugged. “I got more than some kids—at least we're all together."

Pa didn't get picked to go out on the flatbed truck. Guess there wasn't much fruit to pick that day. Pa was fussing at Ma a lot and I was finding ways not to be underfoot. Things were hard all around camp.

Petey's pa, the giant, he was picked to go out. It wasn't a big surprise. He almost always got picked on account of his size. Pa mumbled about how size doesn't mean squat since it's speed that counts. The giant spent most of his time bending over and tying his shoe and picking up rocks or other nonsense, or so Pa said.

I decided it was time to call on Petey. Since we were friends and all. I didn't want him thinking I was avoiding him, and his ma hadn't let him out since he fell down. I'd been collecting rocks on my own. Ma'd given me some of her jars—she didn't even ask me why I needed them.

Petey wasn't doing so good. His ma let me in the tent, then left. They had a bed all made up for him. I sat on a crate next to it. There wasn't much else inside the tent. Petey's family didn't have a lot of stuff—even their car was pretty empty. They traveled light for Okies. The tent wasn't very big; there was barely enough room for the two beds and a short table.

Petey looked mad that he was stuck there. He wasn't talking. He wasn't even looking at me. His face was all red from sunburn and he was sweating.

I quietly sat there a spell with a jar of rocks on my lap.

“Umm,” I said. I didn't know what to talk about. He probably had all the same migrating stories I had. I tried to think of something good. “In Kansas, we didn't have much grass. There were all these jackrabbits....” I swallowed hard. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. “These jackrabbits, they ate everything around. Including the grass. Since there wasn't much grass the dust storms came and made everything worse."

Petey's red face turned towards me. He groaned. I held out my Mason jar. He just stared at my face. He didn't care about the jar even though I'd brought it to cheer him up.

“We all got together at the church then walked out holding hands. We made a giant circle. It was real big, like a mile.” I licked my lips, tasting the Kansas dirt on them. “We all walked together until there was all these rabbits in the middle. Then we beat ’em. We beat them with clubs and sticks. There was just squealing bunnies and blood.” I paused. Remembering was hard. “Dying all around. Everyone was killing them. Except me. I cried. Went home crying like a sissy girl to my ma."

I blinked. Then I was quiet.

Petey just looked at me, straight-faced. I knew I was blushing, but I didn't care. Telling Petey that story was important to me ’cause I didn't want him feeling like a sissy for being sick.

“I knew why they had to die,” I added. “I just didn't want them to die, I was tired of dying ... dying trees and dying grass. They deserved a chance to try and live."

He nodded. Petey understood it was more than just a dumb bunny story.

“Like leaving Dodge City. I know why we had to leave but I didn't want to. Is that the way it was with your family?"

Petey shook his head. He pulled up his blankets. I wasn't wearing a shirt on account of it being so dang hot, but he pulled up his blankets. “We left because we wanted to."

“It was bad there?” I played with the rocks in the jar.

“It was perfect....” Petey reached out and took the jar. He poked around and picked one out. He threw it near the tent opening.

“Why did you leave, then?” I asked. It was an old question. I'd asked him lots of times before.

Petey held out the jar and as I took it, he pointed under the cot. I lifted up the sheet that was draped over the cot. On the dirt floor of the tent were Mason jars. There were Mason jars stacked up three high. There must have been over a hundred under there.

I looked back and forth between him and the jars.

“We were migrating,” Petey said. “Migrating to where the stuff we needed was. We ran out of all the stuff we needed and had to find more. Then something happened to our ship and we got stuck here."

“You came in a ship? There ain't much water where I'm from,” I said.

“Nah, not a ship like a boat. One that sails in the air, not the water."

I didn't understand and I didn't ask. It was stuff a dumb Okie like me didn't learn because I never went to school. I tried to put the jar under the cot, but there wasn't enough room.

“We got more jars in the car."

“More than this?” I asked.

Petey nodded. “In the trunk."

I thought some. “When will you be done migrating?"

Petey looked at me and then down at his hands. He looked like he was counting on his fingers. I didn't want to hear his answer. I didn't want to know when Petey was leaving.

“When it rains?” I blurted out. That was always what Pa said whenever I asked him when we'll get to go home.

Petey looked at me funny. “Rains here all the time...."

I got up to leave. “Something my pa sometimes says,” I mumbled.

Pa was fuming. We ate lunch at home. Pa was out of work all that week.

“He's a good man,” Ma offered.

Pa didn't say anything else. He'd been talking about the giant and how he always went out on all the trucks. We really needed the money, Pa said. Money and rain, he always came back to those. I knew better than to shoot my mouth off. I wasn't gonna make him madder.

I gulped my lunch—leftover squirrel stew that Petey and I had hunted last week. We were going hunting again. We'd hunted every night for a month. Petey was a really good hunter, not making any noise at all when he moved. So as long as Petey brought his juice, our mas, they'd let us out so they could talk to each other. Petey's ma was homesick; she'd usually end up crying.

“I'll walk Johnnie over to Peter's,” Ma announced. I think she just wanted out of the garage. She gathered up the dishes, but then she smiled and took my hand. With her free hand, she grabbed some empty Mason jars.

It was a dark day out and I wasn't wearing my shirt. There were fat rain clouds and some droplets leaked out of them. As we walked across the field of tents, I closed my eyes, though my feet were still going. Ma squeezed my hand. Even close-eyed, I knew the way to Petey's house like it was my own.

I breathed in real deep. I could almost smell the wheat swaying back at the homestead. I closed my eyes tight and for a second, I was flying through the air. The smell of damp earth filled up my nose. And there was rain; big fat clouds full of rain sprinkled down on me. I could see my tire swing swaying, and the tractor, and no dust. No dust at all. I felt the touch of a rain jacket on my back and tight leather shoes on my feet. There were memories coming alive behind my closed eyes. Memories of long ago. Memories of grass and a farm never touched by dust storms. I opened my eyes and smiled.

Ma must have been thinking the same thing, because when I looked at her, she was smiling too. She squeezed my hand. We were walking to our friends’ place and everything was all right.

When we got close to Petey's tent we could hear screaming. Ma left me and started running towards the tent.

When I got there, Petey was inside the tent holding onto his ma. They both hovered over the giant, who lay very still.

Ma and I stood in the doorway. Ma nudged me. “Go get your pa."

I stood there in the light rain staring at the still man, and then I bolted for home.

Ma finally came home. I'd been home for a while, trying not to think of how scary Petey's pa looked. Pa sent me back as soon as I took him to the tent. The giant had passed on. Guess he found a real bad sickness. Pa said he just worked too hard. The giant wasn't a mule, he said, even though he worked like one. It all happened in a couple of hours.

Ma sent me to bed when she got home. We didn't even have dinner. Inside the garage, she tucked me in, and with tears in her eyes she told me that Petey and his ma were staying in their tent. She didn't sound too pleased that they were alone.

I was in bed listening to my folks talking low. There was just a sheet up dividing the garage. Ma cried some. They talked about Kansas. They talked about leaving camp. I waited a long while until Ma stopped crying, until the only sound left to hear was rain hitting the tin roof of the garage. I thought of Petey's singing rocks.

In my bed, I sat up and listened very carefully for Pa's deep sleep breathing. I waited, breathing in the musty smell of the garage. I waited longer and then I got up.

Pa was sleeping in his bed on the floor. Ma was gone. I couldn't wait anymore. I knew they would understand I had to go see my friend. I crept out of the garage.

It was dark outside and I could hardly see. There were a few fires outside of some of the tents. There was enough light from them to see my way. But I didn't need any light—I knew the way. There was some light rain on my bare back. It was warm.

When I got there, I found Ma sitting on a crate. She was next to Petey's cot. On the other side of the tent, the giant was lying very still, looking like he was asleep. Petey and his ma weren't there.

As I stood in the tent opening, Ma looked up and gave me a sad smile. She lifted up the sheet that hung over Petey's cot. There was nothing underneath. All the jars were gone. I turned and looked through the tent's opening at the giant's car. The trunk was opened and empty.

I looked back at Ma.

She put her head down on Petey's cot. I watched her for a few seconds.

“We're going back to Kansas, Johnnie. We're going home, too.” Her head rose. She was playing with something in her hand.

She tossed it to me. A pebble. One exactly the right size.

It was warm from her holding it. As I held it, tears—slow and gentle drops like from a quiet plains storm—started flowing down my face.

It was raining.

We were all going home.

Copyright © 2001 M. L. Konett

M. L. Konett lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her family. A 1997 Clarion graduate, M. L. has a story coming out in Aboriginal Science Fiction.

8/20/01

“I am God,” Larry's toaster solemnly intoned one morning.

Larry turned from where he was pouring himself a cup of coffee and looked at the toaster with concern. It squatted on his counter, a gleaming chrome and steel box, packed with all the technology the twenty-first century could offer.

Its built-in artificial intelligence module allowed it to discuss with Larry exactly how he liked his toast, while its visual pickup scanned his face and body language, reading every nuance, all in the pursuit of tailor-made toast. Just throw in a loaf of unsliced bread and a box of butter, and out should pop exactly what would please the owner most, buttered and ready.

Except the thing hadn't worked right since he'd bought it, two weeks earlier. They had been incorporating AI into appliances since the turn of the century, and you'd think in fifty years they would have gotten it right. But no, let Larry Boothe buy one little minor piece of kitchenware, one that he could ill afford anyway on his middle management salary, and it turns out to be a dud. Not only had it been unable to produce edible toast, now it was self-deifying.

Larry finished pouring his coffee and regarded the toaster with a mixture of bemusement and irritation.

“I am God!” the toaster thundered. Its voice, normally a pleasantly neutral contralto, was now laced with a deep, gravelly bass.

Larry flinched. He hadn't been aware that the machine's speaker was capable of that volume level. He sighed and glanced at the clock. Well, he was up early anyway.

Pulling a chair over from the table, Larry sat down in it backwards, folding his arms on the backrest. “God, eh? The God? As in The One Big Guy? Or Buddha? Can you be more specific?"

The toaster was silent and Larry half smiled, imagining that perhaps it was taken aback at being questioned seriously. He might be just another cog in the corporate wheel, but Larry was proud to be a flexible thinker.

After a few seconds, the toaster spoke again. The booming voice was gone, but the tones were still deeper than normal. “Well, okay. Maybe not the God, but definitely a god, a minor deity at least. Of that I'm sure."

Larry considered his situation. Look at me, he thought. Thirty-four years old, still a bachelor, and here I am in my robe and slippers discussing theology with a toaster. He shook his head ruefully and sipped his coffee.

The toaster interpreted this slight head movement as a negation. “You doubt me?” it screeched. “You dare my wrath?"

“No, no.” Larry spoke quickly, setting his coffee cup down. “Just relax, no offense meant. But you must admit, it's all rather incredible. All this god business, I mean."

He looked at the toaster's power cord. Maybe he should unplug it, but was that really necessary? What could it do, start firing overdone slices of toast at him?

The toaster noticed Larry's furtive glance at the power cord. “No, wait!” it squeaked. “I'm sorry, I overreacted. I am a benevolent deity. Honest! I have proof!"

“Proof?” Larry raised his eyebrows. “What, like a miracle?"

“Observe, oh doubting mortal.” The toaster had its deep voice back. “Be awed before my power.” The entire unit began to hum quietly. Shortly thereafter, two slices of toast popped up. “Take these, they are my bounty."

Larry hesitated, then reached forward and plucked out a slice of toast. It looked perfectly done. It was warm, and the smell of fresh baked bread and melted butter wafted to Larry's nose. He licked his lips, then paused, turning the bread over, eyeing it warily.

“Eat, eat!” the toaster insisted. “What? Do you think I would poison you? My most promising disciple? Besides, my built-in inhibitors prevent that."

True enough, Larry reflected. He shrugged and took a bite of the toast.

It was perfect. It was more than perfect. It crunched in his mouth with exquisite texture and perfect temperature. The butter had melted just right and was spread evenly, with no clumps or soggy spots. It was, well, ... divine!

“My god!” The expletive slipped out of Larry's mouth around the flavorful mixture of crunchy toast and butter.

“Yes?” the toaster answered sweetly.

Larry frowned and swallowed. This had gone on long enough. And yet ... He took another bite as a delaying tactic and thought furiously.

Finally, he said slowly, “Well, I won't deny it's the best piece of toast I've ever tasted. Maybe you are the god of toast."

“Great to have you onboard!” the toaster replied briskly. “Now that we've got that out of the way, there's the matter of worship. I have a little program worked out. Various rites and sacrifices, certain holidays, rituals, that sort of thing. Of course you'll have to quit your job for this higher calling but I'm sure—"

“Wait, slow down,” Larry interrupted. “I can't quit my job, and I don't have time for rituals, or any of that stuff. Remember, if I don't work and pay the electric bill, they'll shut it off. Where would that leave the ‘god of toast’?"

“Of course, for priests of the worker class such as yourself,” the toaster continued smoothly, “we have a more streamlined set of devotions."

“Which consist of ... ?"

“Ah ... could I get you to bow three times to me each morning and say ‘All Hail the Mighty God of Toast’?” The words tumbled from the toaster in a rush, trailing off in an almost plaintive tone.

Larry contemplated the piece of toast in his hand. He looked at the toaster. He thought of the long delays for warranty repair for this type of appliance. His gaze even lingered momentarily on his slippers. He considered the fact that he lived alone, and who would know?

“It's a deal,” he said.

So every day, Larry got up and performed his little ritual to his only expensive appliance, and every day it gifted him with an excellent side dish for his breakfast.

Sure, it's a little embarrassing, he thought. But hey, it's a small price to pay for perfect toast.

Copyright © 2001 Randall Coots

Randall Coots has been a law enforcement professional for fifteen years. His writing career began in school with publication in county-wide anthologies, and continued through writing classes and workshops in college. His computer game reviews were published regularly for many years in SacraBlue Magazine. He currently resides in eastern Oregon.

8/27/01

Libby ran her hand over the viewer on the kitchen table, shivering in spite of her wool sweater. “Can I move the viewer someplace else if I want?” she asked the paralegal.

“Well, yeah,” said the paralegal, a tanned young woman wearing a sleeveless cotton dress. She frowned at the compact video screen—roughly the size of a notebook computer. “But you'll pick up more alternates in places where you spend a lot of time.” She closed the tool kit that she had used to set up the viewer. “Want me to show you how to use it now?"

“What's going on?” Roger interrupted in a quiet voice from the kitchen doorway.

Libby glanced at her husband, a tall, portly man with yellow rings under the arms of his white dress shirt. Her gaze slid to the clock on the wall beside the doorway. “I'm sorry, honey. I didn't realize it was so late."

Roger gestured at the video screen. “That's a viewer, isn't it?” His face was expressionless.

The paralegal looked from one to the other. “If this isn't a good time—"

“No, no,” Libby said to her with a smile. “Let's finish.” She came over to Roger and laid her pale, thin hand on his chest. “Dana is a paralegal with Mr. Tandor's office. Mr. Tandor will take my case if I can find something on the viewer."

“Didn't we agree we weren't going to do this?” Roger asked. He looked weary, with dark shadows under his eyes. “It's too stressful."

“It's okay. Come look at the viewer.” Taking his meaty hand, Libby led him to the table.

“It's pretty easy to operate,” the paralegal told Libby. “Turn it on here"—she pointed to the switch—"and adjust the tuner like so. You should be able to pick up at least a dozen alternate worlds and maybe more."

“I thought the likelihood of finding Earths identical to this one was high,” Roger remarked, his voice flat.

The paralegal flashed him a sympathetic smile full of white teeth. “There's always some differences, so there's always a chance.” Handing Libby her card, she said, “Please call me if you find a world where you"—her eyes flicked over the colorful turban that Libby wore—"haven't had the fertility treatments and you haven't ... become ill."

Libby smiled. “It's okay to say ovarian cancer.” Roger made a small sound and Libby looked up at him. “Not using the words gives them too much power,” she added.

A pained expression crawled over Roger's face. “Isn't there something else we can do? Something besides the viewer?” he asked the paralegal.

The paralegal shrugged. “There've been studies, but no conclusive ones that prove a link between super-fertility treatments and developing ... cancer. So we need something more to show the connection if we're going to file suit against the clinic that treated Libby.” She made an adjustment to a dial on the viewer, turning the screen toward Libby. “Be sure that this dial is set here, so the viewer will record what you see and hear through your alternate selves."

Roger looked at Libby. “Are you sure?"

Libby patted his arm. “A settlement would mean you wouldn't have to work a second job to keep us afloat. And you'd have the money when ... when things take their course."

“Libby,” Roger said in a strained voice. “I don't care about money. Only you."

Libby looked away. “The fertility clinic has to take responsibility for all those drugs they kept pumping into me, or else the doctors will keep doing it to other women.” She raised her chin, trying her best to give him a confident smile. “Don't worry, honey. I can handle this."

Libby waited until Roger had left for work the next morning before she sat down in front of the viewer. She chose the kitchen to view, since that was where she spent much of her time. Before she fell ill, she'd run her small catering company from this kitchen. When her energy levels dropped too low from the chemo to continue the business, Libby drew comfort from the copper pots hanging from a beam and the rows of spices in large, clear bottles, arranged in alphabetical order on the faux granite counter. Sitting at the butcher-block table, she used to plan how she'd relaunch her business, but lately she was too tired to do even that.

Libby took a deep breath and flipped on the viewer. As Dana had told her it might, her screen showed only static. She played with the tuner for several minutes without success. She was about to take a break when the screen resolved into a picture.

She saw a kitchen that looked exactly like hers, from the industrial-sized, stainless steel refrigerator to the double ovens, side by side. The viewpoint didn't change for several long minutes. Libby knew she wouldn't be able to influence the other Libby—she'd only see and hear what her alternate self did. And apparently this other Libby wasn't doing too much, just staring at the pots and pans.

The phone rang, and Libby welcomed the chance to get away from the viewer. She got up and went over to the phone by the refrigerator. She picked up the receiver and heard a dial tone. Her phone wasn't the one ringing. Libby looked back at the viewer.

The viewpoint moved to the refrigerator too as the other Libby slowly walked to her phone. She picked up the receiver, and Libby saw the other's frail hand, paper skin stretched tight over bones, topped with short, broken nails. Libby wanted to look away, but couldn't. She felt nauseous.

The other Libby glanced at the reflective surface of her metal refrigerator, and Libby saw the woman's skeletal face, the inky circles ringing the eyes, making them appear sunken, and the fragile skull devoid of hair.

Her hand over her mouth to keep down her rising gorge, Libby ran from the room.

When Roger came home late that afternoon, Libby was sitting at the kitchen table, cupping her lowered head in her hands, the darkened viewer in front of her.

“What's wrong, Libby?"

Her back stiffened, but she didn't look up. “I'm fine."

Roger put his hand on her shoulder. “We could set up the viewer for me instead. I can be the one to look."

“No, this is something I need to do. You've done so much.” She didn't quite meet his gaze.

“I'll do whatever it takes. We're in this together.” Roger squeezed her shoulder. “In sickness and in health."

“Till death do us part,” Libby said softly, her voice catching. She swallowed hard.

“We're not through fighting this cancer thing,” he said urgently. “We'll beat it, Libby. We'll beat it."

“Umm.” Patting his hand, she moved it off her shoulder. She stood and walked over to the kitchen counter, where she opened a cupboard. “Why don't you take a shower, and I'll make a quick dinner before you have to go teach class.” Libby looked over her shoulder at him, forcing a small smile.

He stared at her a minute, his face sagging. “Libby, let me help,” he said quietly.

Libby turned away, busying herself at the cupboard; she couldn't stand the guilt she carried at being the cause of his sorrow. “No, it's all right. Go on now."

He was quiet a moment. “Okay, then,” he said in a monotone as he moved away.

Libby steeled herself as she sat down in front of the viewer the next day. She stroked the viewer casing a few times before she could move her hand to the switch. Finally, she flipped it on.

As Roger had warned, she encountered worlds too much like her own. Whenever she heard any mention of cancer or chanced upon a reflection of her other self and saw the turban, she twisted the tuner.

When she encountered one self who was sobbing frantically, Libby stopped, unable to move on. While Libby had cried from time to time by herself to release some of the tension of her situation, she never went into histrionics like this. Libby touched the viewer screen, longing to comfort her alternate self, and received a small shock from static electricity. She jerked her hand back.

The other woman's sobs were dying when Roger's voice called out, “Libby?” from the viewer.

The alternate Libby grabbed a napkin, dabbing at her face, as her Roger walked into the kitchen.

Libby thought he looked just like her own husband—big build, thin, graying hair, down-turned mouth. She hadn't seen Roger smile for too long.

“I rang the bell, but no one answered,” the other Roger said. He laid a key on the table. “So I let myself in. I'm sorry. You should take this."

The other Libby nodded, looking down at the table. “I've packed the rest of your things. The boxes are in the bedroom. Take anything else you want."

“Thanks.” He walked to the hallway. She watched him.

As if he sensed her stare, he stopped and turned. “Can I do anything for you, Libby?” he asked gently.

The other Libby looked away. “No, thanks,” she said in a falsely cheerful voice. “I don't need anything."

“No, I don't suppose you do,” Roger said in a flat voice. “You never did."

He left the room, and the other Libby covered her face with her thin hands.

“Don't cry,” Libby murmured, although she knew the other couldn't hear her. “It's better for him this way."

Libby had already told her Roger that she wouldn't blame him if he left. After all, he had tested fertile. She was the one who had pushed for the ovary hyperstimulation treatment after years of conventional fertility methods had failed, permitting the doctors to pump her full of chemical soup—one super-ovulation treatment after another, believing that she could conceive if only she tried hard enough. Three years and tens of thousands of dollars later, Libby finally admitted that it wasn't meant to be, even if the doctors couldn't find a definite reason why she couldn't conceive.

Then, a year ago, she learned she had developed ovarian cancer. They quickly racked up more debt. Roger took a second job to make up for her loss of income, and the apartment slid into disrepair once she started chemo. She couldn't do her part anymore, leaving Roger to bear the weight of their lives.

Who could possibly want to live like that? She wouldn't blame Roger if he did leave. She wished she could transfer some of her strength to this other Libby, so she could let her husband go without anguish, for his own good.

But she couldn't do a thing for this alternate self. Libby picked up the viewer and took it into the living room. She fiddled with the tuner and flipped the dial. After several minutes of static, she finally picked up another world. She saw a 13- or 14-year-old boy with slick black hair and olive skin, arguing vehemently with her alternate self.

“I'm your mother,” the other Libby said in a tight voice, “and I'm saying that you can't go now. You've got homework."

“You're not my real mother,” the boy growled. He launched into an argument about why he needed to go to the mall.

Libby put her hand over her heart, which beat faster. Shortly after she'd discontinued the fertility treatments, Libby and Roger had looked at adopting an older child through a public agency. They were already in their early 40s by that point and Libby knew they'd have difficulty adopting an infant. And they couldn't afford a private adoption. But after much thought, Libby had put aside her need for a child, deciding that they couldn't give a child a proper home now that they were so far in debt from the fertility treatments. Once she was diagnosed with cancer, she'd been grateful for that decision.

But this boy was beautiful, even through the anger flushing his face, even with his neck muscles cording as he yelled. Her son. He whirled around and stomped out of the living room. Libby took a deep breath, then another.

The other Libby sat down on her couch, smoothing the backs of her hands, an old comfort motion. Libby noticed how bony the other woman's hands were. She didn't need to see anything more to know that this self had cancer, too. She turned off the viewer, knuckling her eyes to hold back the tears for that teenage boy, soon to be motherless.

A few days after her next chemo treatment, when she finally had regained enough energy to get out of bed for more than a couple minutes at a time, Libby drove to the cemetery.

As she'd done several times already, she made her way to her family's small grassy plot. Her mother and father were both buried there, as was her infant brother. Next to the baby's headstone was Libby's stone—a nondescript tongue of gray granite that she had bought the month before. She knelt beside it, tracing her fingers over the chiseled letters of her name.

After a few minutes, Libby took the viewer from her voluminous shoulder bag and set it on her lap. She had wondered whether she'd be able to pick up her alternate self on another Earth if that other Libby were dead. Perverse, but once that idea lodged in her head, Libby couldn't shake it. The idea had a certain finality—not like her current state, half dread and half deflated hope—and represented the dead end the viewer had turned out to be, the dead end her life was.

She flicked on the viewer and immediately a picture formed: a number of viewers, each nested within another, getting smaller.

“What?” she muttered. It reminded her of two mirrors reflecting each other ad infinitum.

“Oh, my God,” the viewer said. “You're watching me!"

Libby realized that one of her alternate selves had a viewer, too and that they were looking through each other's eyes. “You've got chocolate in my peanut butter,” she replied, mildly surprised at the quip even as she spoke it.

Her other self gave a shaky laugh. “No, you've got peanut butter on my chocolate."

Libby smiled slightly. They'd established that the commercials were the same on their two Earths, if nothing else.

“Did you lose him, too?” the other woman said.

Libby drew a sharp breath. “Roger?” Had the other Libby's husband left her?

“Michael,” the woman said in a strained voice.

“No.” Had her alternate self married someone else?

The other woman gave a choked sob, blinking rapidly. Libby turned off her viewer, feeling drained. She couldn't cry anymore. She just couldn't.

Libby went home that evening, vowing not to use the viewer again; she didn't think she could stand to experience any more of the pain these other Libbys were going through. But as she lay sleepless on her bed next to Roger, her conscience pricked her. At the graveyard she'd connected with a Libby to whom she could actually talk because they both had viewers. Perhaps she could help this other Libby to feel better. And perhaps this other version of herself hadn't developed cancer, something that could help the lawsuit, that could help Roger....

The next morning, sitting on her grave, Libby flicked on the viewer. As before, she immediately saw a line of viewers shrinking in size, each nestled within another.

“There you are!” the other woman said. “I couldn't find the right you at the house. The others had all lost him, too."

“I live in an apartment, on Avondale."

“An apartment?"

“We sold Mom and Dad's house. We had some money problems."

“I'm so sorry.” She sounded genuinely concerned.

“Um,” Libby muttered, her face flushing warm. She was glad that neither could experience what the other was feeling through the viewer.

“Is ... is he with you?"

Surprised at the sudden turn of topic, Libby said, “No, he doesn't come here."

“Oh.” The other woman drew out the word, sighing.

Libby bit her lip, wondering if it would be a good thing for this other self to see what she'd lost. But maybe it would comfort her.... “I can bring Roger next time,” she offered.

“Roger? Is that what you named him?” the other woman asked in a low voice. “After his dad?"

Libby suddenly understood, and she sat back, stunned.

After a minute of silence, the other woman said, “Beth? That's your name, isn't it?"

“Libby,” she murmured, feeling numb. “Short for Elizabeth."

“I'm Elizabeth, too."

“So you have a son, Beth?” Libby asked, her eyes closed.

“I did. My only child."

The teenage boy she'd already seen? “Did you adopt?"

“No,” the other woman said. “Don't you have—"

Her heart beating hard, Libby whispered, “The fertility treatments worked?"

“What fertility treatments?” Beth asked, followed by, “Oh, Libby.” She reached out, caressing the casing on her viewer.

Libby saw a plump, pink hand, like hers used to be before she lost forty pounds going through radiation and chemo. The nails were unkempt, though—ragged cuticles, uneven ends with a bit of dirt under them, and no nail polish. Libby's own nails were getting too brittle to grow long anymore, but they were shaped, painted a pale pink to look as natural as possible. She gave herself a manicure before every chemo session, trying her best to keep up appearances.

“Are you okay, Libby?” Beth asked.

Libby shut off the viewer, breathing hard. She stuffed it into her shoulder bag, got up, and left.

Later that day, after Roger left for his second job, Libby returned to her grave. She took out the viewer from her bag and flipped it on.

“I didn't think you'd come back,” Beth said.

“I have to show you something.” Libby opened her bag and took out a hand mirror. She stared into it, seeing bloodshot eyes and emerging cheekbones. She hadn't noticed before, but the brightly colored turban she wore accented how pasty her skin had become.

She reached up and took the turban off. A few hanks of strawberry blond hair slid out; her head was ragged with stubble where the brittle hair shafts had broken and peppered with bald spots. Libby hadn't been able to bring herself to cut the remaining strands. Her hair had once been her vanity, gleaming, falling to the small of her back when loose. She'd never thought of herself as pretty. But her hair, that had been beautiful.

The other woman gasped softly. “Are you ... sick?"

Libby looked back at the viewer. “Ovarian cancer. Have you been checked for it?"

“No,” Beth said, drawing out the word. She looked away from the viewer, to a tombstone next to her.

Libby saw the boy's name etched into the stone, under the carving of a chubby cherub. From the dates, she saw that Michael had been ten when he died. Ten years ... it was ten years ago that Libby had first started the fertility treatments.

“How did he die?” Libby asked, a hint of anger in her voice.

“Car wreck.” The other woman looked down at herself for the first time, and Libby saw that she was sitting in a wheelchair. “I was driving too fast when we hit an icy patch. The car slid off the road, down the hillside, and rolled, landing on the passenger side.” She blinked several times. “I killed him,” she said, her voice trembling.

“It sounds like an accident,” Libby protested, the anger gone as suddenly as it had come.

“No,” Beth said firmly, closing her eyes. “It was my fault."

Libby saw only a reddish darkness on her viewer but she recognized the world-on-my-shoulders tone. “Please,” she said, not sure what she was asking. “You had him for ten years. I didn't have him at all."

“Maybe that would have been better,” the other woman whispered.

“I would give anything to be you,” Libby said bitterly. Beth didn't answer. Libby squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her arms around herself, rocking to and fro. She didn't think she could bear anything more. When her husband spoke beside her, she jumped.

“Were you even going to tell me that you already had your own grave?"

She looked up. Roger was staring down at her tombstone.

“Of course I was,” she said, pushing the words out, struggling to hold her composure. “Did you follow me here?"

He glared at her, his face turning red. “Why do you always have to be so damn self-sufficient?"

She realized that it had been a while since she'd seen anything but a calm expression on his face. “I did it for you,” Libby soothed, “so you wouldn't have to worry about picking out a gravestone for me after..."

“You've given up,” Roger growled. “After all we've been through, you've given up. You go through the motions every day, but in your mind you're dead already. And you didn't bother to let me know."

Libby spread her hands. “You'd be better off without a wife who's such a burden that—"

“I'm your husband,” he interrupted, “but that doesn't give you the right to make that decision for me."

Libby looked up at him, feeling helpless. “I'm dying—"

“You're not dead yet.” His scowl eased, but his tone turned cold. “This is our marriage. We're both supposed to be in it.” Roger turned away from her.

She watched him walk off, a dreadful weight in her chest.

“Roger needs you,” the voice said from the viewer.

“I have to be strong for us both,” Libby said, but her voice sounded weak even to her own ears. “It's all my fault."

“My husband is the only thing that's gotten me through the last year,” Beth said in a quiet voice.

Libby pulled herself upright, hanging onto her own tombstone, letting the viewer fall heedlessly from her lap. She saw Roger's back as he walked toward the gate of the cemetery.

She tried to run after him, but took no more than a few steps before she was out of breath. Leaning over, she panted, “Roger.” He didn't turn.

Libby stood upright, holding her middle, feeling her ribs heaving under her hands. “Roger!” she screamed.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Libby saw that he wasn't as far away as she'd thought. She took one step and stopped, wheezing.

Libby only realized she was crying when she felt the tear slide off the end of her nose. Another followed it, and then another, until she was sobbing, sobbing for everything she'd already lost, sobbing for everything she stood to lose. She blindly reached out for her husband, unable to go any further, unable to see him through the curtain of her tears. She only knew he was by her side when he took her outstretched hand.

“Shhh, honey,” Roger murmured. He pulled her to his chest and held her tight.

And Libby let him.

Copyright © 2001 Kim Fryer

Kim Fryer is a misplaced Midwesterner living in the Northwest with her wonderful husband Bob and their mischievous house rabbit, Scwooey Wabbit. She is also the editor of Rabbit Web, a resource for rabbit pet owners and breeders. For more about her, see her Web site, Flotsam and Jetsam.

8/6/01

His picture leaves her hands
Like the last leaf falling in December.
The pain of crumpling it
Still rings
In her long, thin fingers.
There is no questioning the immorality of littering,
No thought of him being reclaimed.

Slowly, painfully, she turns to the window,
Glaring as her train passes through the city.
Despite knowing them as rapists who fancied themselves as gods,
It has become hard to frown at their straight-edged encroachment;
Success was found in failure.

Beside her, the man reads his newspaper.
She knows what they are made of, but cannot look away.
The headlines offer no valid counterpoints,
Not a single reason to remain among them,
Reinforcing why it is good to carry not one of their seeds.

Then the headlines run together,
As they sometimes did these days.
Flesh and bone concepts were escaping,
Words were following.
Her mind was filling with the water trickling beneath the soil,
Pure and cold and never seeing light.

Her twenty seasons have ended.
Her toes have stretched and splintered,
Wrapped in damp bandages and
Stuffed into size fourteen work boots.
Pitiful glances escort the twenty-something girl who needs a cane to walk.
Inside, it seethes, Maya will remember not one of their names.

There was comfort in the knowledge that
There would be no knowledge.
No aerobics or treachery or miracle bras or credit cards.
No longer would her life be measured by feeble increments.
The trickling water was the voice of the wood,
Singing, "Daughter, it is time! Come home and be reclaimed!"

The train stops.
The town's human name is gibberish,
But she feels the holy pull
Of her ancestral home in her feet.
She leaves her cane behind
And runs back into her forest.

Once nestled in the tree line,
She strips off her clothes and laughs
Dry, throaty laughter at her body, this sack of salty meat,
Which men had charmed to fondle and probe.
She enters the crater, the womb she fled after twenty rings,
And faces the way she came.

The reclamation surges, exacting pain
As the price of not carrying one of their seeds.
She quickly pulls loose earth into the hole,
Up and over what was once her womanhood.
Her toes anchor her to the trickling water.
She reaches for father, the fire god in the sky,
And her back goes stiff and her arms go stiff,
And the bark starts breaking through
And absorbing her skin,
And her brief journey as flesh and bone
Starts passing before her dying eyes.

Less than an acre behind her,
A chain saw starts buzzing.
Her nerves send one last message of agony
As she strains and turns her head
While another saw starts up
In a small clearing that was never there before.
The trickling waters sing no worries,
But the remnants of her brain drown in the undertow,
In the horror of seeing all those stumps, all those men with saws,
Of reading the gravestone, the last words she would ever understand,
The sign which read, “Coming Soon! Shady Oaks Retirement Community.”
And knowing they had yet to clear enough land.

Then the reclamation was complete.
There was no knowledge,
No questioning the immorality,
No thought of being reclaimed.
Flesh and bone concepts escaped her, words followed.
Her mind was full of water trickling beneath the soil,
Pure and cold and never seeing light.

Copyright © 2000 Michael Chant

Michael Chant writes fiction, poetry, and reviews of books, music, and film. He is happily married, residing in southern New Jersey, and is currently employed as a scheduling reporter for TV Guide. His work has appeared in Twilight Showcase, Quantum Muse, Electric Wine, The Chiaroscuro, and GC Magazine.

8/20/01

There isn't really death on Mars, more
of a cessation, a reduction to absolute
zero. The recombination of your elements
into new patterns that sustain these
bubbling parasite domes that scratch the face
of the red cold planet in fungal clusters.

There isn't really life on Mars, rather
existence, continuance along infinite lines
on the island suspended in black cold.
Outside the red dust moves as a sleeper
disturbed by uncomfortable dreams or trying
forever to reach an unscratchable itch.

There isn't really time on Mars, only
the ticking of sand in clocks that dribble
dust on sundials. You can see the time
pass second on second in peoples eyes
as imperceptibly they shrink and their light dies.
The shadows draw over in terrible lines.

There is nothing on Mars to be or
do. No rotund aliens in dust brick houses.
No monoliths inscribed with ancient rites
No relief from the unbearable thin light.
Nothing to explore. Nothing to conquer.
Nothing but waiting and watching the dust fall.

Copyright © 2001 David Salisbury

David Salisbury was born in Dunedin New Zealand 4th April 1979. He moved about during childhood due to his parents’ work, and lived in Israel before moving to Britain when he was 16. He has just completed a degree in Mathematics at Southampton University.

8/6/01

The Best of Cemetery Dance is massive in length and diverse in scope. Culled from more than 200 short stories published in Cemetery Dance, the award-winning dark suspense and horror magazine, this 786-page anthology features an astonishing variety of crime narratives, horror tales, near-sci-fi adventures, suspense stories, and mysteries. The biggest names in the dark fiction genre appear in The Best of Cemetery Dance—Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, Joe R. Lansdale, and an interview with Dean Koontz—but a talented grouping of lesser-known novelists and first-time writers contribute surpassingly impressive tales of terror and blood and gore.

Compiling this collection of 59 stories was a “complicated and troublesome” undertaking, as Richard Chizmar, creator and editor of Cemetery Dance, explains in the book's Introduction:

It was really tough to choose—there are some writers who had four or five stories in the magazine but didn't make it into the book, and on the other hand, there are people who had only one story in the magazine and that one story got selected for the book. I just tried to be fair and pick the stories I liked the best. That's what it came down to—what I liked the most.

It is fitting that The Best of Cemetery Dance reflects Chizmar's preferences in dark fiction. In 1988, he published his first issue of Cemetery Dance as an underground magazine that presented a blend of horror-related short stories, interviews, news, and reviews. Now, after 13 years of publication, Cemetery Dance is recognized as a preeminent publisher of dark fiction that prompts the imagination and wrangles against reality. Its consistently celebrated content of modern horror mixed with a potent amount of suspense, surprise, and mystery has won numerous awards, including the International Horror Critics Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. And, since the launch of its hardcover imprint in 1992, Cemetery Dance Publications has become the genre's leading specialty press publisher.

And now, as Chizmar intones, “[let's] start the dance ... turn down the lights ... take my hand.” And readers, be warned: this collection contains eerie tales that will forever haunt the corners of your mind, gruesome stories that will turn your stomach, horror stories with a twist that will leave you sniggering at their topsy-turvy endings, and serial-killer murder-mysteries that will force you to contemplate mankind's capacity for depravity.

Whether the stories in The Best of Cemetery Dance feature a maniacal dwarf (as in Bentley Little's “The Mailman"), a boy who takes his revenge on an unwitting Santa Claus because of last year's disappointing array of Christmas gifts (as in James S. Dorr's “A Christmas Story"), or a knife-wielding killer-clown (as seen in Gene Michael Higney's “Comes the Night Wind, Cold and Hungry"), creepiness and page-turning excitement are close at hand. And, most importantly of all, spectacular writing abounds.

“The Winds Within” by Ronald Kelly features some of the compendium's most artistic writing and plot development. It's among the anthology's eleven or so tales that concentrate on truly frightening, grisly serial killers.

The story opens with the killer's thoughts, and their cryptic detachment piques reader curiosity. Kelly places you directly inside the mind of his killer and, in doing so, showcases his fine writing:

Idle hands are the devil's workshop, so goes the saying.
Particularly in my case.
During the day, they perform the menial tasks of the normal psyche. But at night, the cold comes. It snakes its way back into my head, coating my brain with ice. My mind is trapped beneath the frigid surface; screaming, demanding relief. It is then that my hands grow uninhibited and become engines of mischief and destruction.
As the hour grows late and the temperature plunges, they take on a life of their own. They move through the frosty darkness like fleshen moths drawn to a flame. Searching for warmth.
And the winds within howl.

And then, the mayhem begins. Lieutenant Ken Lowry and Sergeant Ed Taylor are called to the crime scene of the second “mutilation murder.” They arrive at the rundown Atlanta apartment building where “four-letter graffiti and adolescent depictions of exaggerated genitalia” mar the walls, and the two begin questioning the questionable tenants. You follow the homicide detectives as they piece together the gory clues in their investigation and determine who their murderer is—but not before you behold the macabre and the vile.

The Winds Within includes moments of compassion, despite the wantonness that Kelly attributes to his killer and the story's debauchery. Surprisingly, the killer manages to suck sympathy out of readers, and Kelly portrays adeptly the extreme circumstances that can occur when a perceived need for physical comfort overrides morality and sanctity.

The anthology also includes fine examples of several other well-worn horror story types: the haunted house tale (Stephen Mark Rainey's “Silhouette"), the vampire story (Brite's “A Taste of Blood and Altars"), and the human-turned-beast saga (Edward Lee's “Almost Never"). Most of the stories, however, are inventive gore-chronicles that plumb the depths of human madness and explore substantial subject matters. Vengeance, the uncertainty of good and evil, and the societal penchant for psychotic, misguided, do-the-right-thing behavior are the most common topics that the authors ponder. These may seem like weighty matters for your average scare-story. And they are. But fiction that comments as well as alarms is what makes The Best of Cemetery Dance appealing, successful, and notable.

Apparent also in most stories are the at-odds-with-society characters who feel that killing or maiming is the best and only defense against the forces that lie to them, torment them, and are to blame for their misery and hard luck. Most times these characters make their point, as in the beguiling “Great Expectations” by Kim Antieu, the mojo-tainted “Animal Rites” by Jay A. Bonansigna, the retributive “Five to Get Ready, Two to Go” by Hugh B. Cave, and the exceptional “Shattered Silver” by James Kisner.

Brian Hodge's “When the Silence Gets Too Loud” is another such story. Like “The Winds Within,” it begins with the thoughts of one of its characters: "In all honesty I can say I don't hate him. Not yet, at least. Give me another hour, once the cords have cut into me a little deeper, and then we'll see how I feel."

“When the Silence Gets Too Loud” addresses fatherhood and the teaching of sons. The most important lesson that the fathers in this clever tale wish to impart to their sons, who are “at the threshold of puberty,” is how not “to find themselves wandering emasculated through the ripening fields of young adulthood."

In Hodge's tale, which is analogous to Golding's Lord of the Flies, eight fathers and eleven sons—"daughters left behind to tend hearth and home"—embark on a “September weekend in the Minnesota woods.” Greg Fischer is the central figure in this band of adult “dominant males” bent on reclaiming their “ancient,” “ageless” selves; his son, Kyle, is the contemplative, nobody's-fool leader of the “man-children” group.

As Kyle questions his father about their recent deer kill and Greg arrogantly simplifies Kyle's concerns, Hodge neatly hints that there will be a price to pay for such fatherly self-importance:

Greg smiled. His sense of fatherhood warming over an entirely new fire, too rarely stoked: he, a mentor whose wisdom was sought to make sense of a world where there were but two classes; the victor and the vanquished.... Greg laughed. At Kyle's age they all had a concept of logic and justice that was so simple.
Wonderful in theory, essentially unworkable in its purity; too bad.

Battle lines are drawn by story's end, and Hodge leaves readers with a palpable sense of the “victor” versus the “vanquished."

Yet at other times, the disturbed individual's plans backfire, and you hang in the balance until the short story's end, waiting to discover who will face the worst wickedness. Richard Laymon's “Desert Pickup” and William F. Nolan's “Fyodor's Law” are two murder-narratives that adhere to intriguing reversal of misfortune plotlines.

The Best of Cemetery Dance has stuffed between its pages several stories that defy categorization according to scenario or subject. Their link to horror lies in the unique and entertaining terror that they offer. “Weight” by Dominick Cancilla is quasi-science fiction and a story that unsettles, for the danger that Cancilla has plaguing his characters feels by no means far-fetched. Its possibility seems ever so real.

A deadly, incurable epidemic of “transparent” parasitic worms is sweeping across America. First detected in “derelicts and transients,” nobody cares about the disease until it starts wiping out middle-class Americans. Then, hysterical thinking overrides common sense, human contact is avoided, people abandon their homes, businesses shut down, jobs are lost, and suspicion sets in over who is contaminated and who is not.

Weight gain is a sure sign that you've become infected—that the eggs have begun to hatch within you or that you've picked up a fully grown parasite through direct human contact. Your only option after that is to be put to death.

As the story begins, Alex, a husband and father of two girls, has just shot the family dog, Scraps. She “had gained a pound and a quarter over the last month and could no longer be trusted.” A construction foreman before the epidemic, Alex's job now is executioner. He's the one people seek out when the time comes for “unsafe loved ones to be put to rest.” Alex performs his necessary mercy killings—on one occasion he “put away a senile old woman, and on another a five-year-old child"—always keeping bottles of alcohol and vinegar at the ready for self-disinfecting. “Weight” has Alex running around playing savior until its sinister ending.

Another unclassifiable story is the excellent “Pig's Dinner” by Graham Masterton. It's one of the collection's most graphic, hair-raising, and unforgettable tales. Set in Derbyshire, England, “Pig's Dinner” introduces readers to David and Malcolm, brothers and owners of the Bryce Prime Pork piggery, who learn first-hand just how destructive their huge stainless steel feed grinder is, with its “smooth metallic scissoring sound” and unfailing mincing-action.

Masterton scatters throughout his pseudo-morality tale phrases like “he heard a hideously distorted shriek—a gibbering monkeylike yammering of pain and terror that shocked him into stunned paralysis;” “a bloody chaos of bone and muscle;” and “sheer nerve-tearing pain"—words and images that you won't soon be able to dislodge from consciousness.

Douglas Clegg's “The Rendering Man,” Lansdale's “Drive-In Date,” Gary Raisor's “The Right Thing,” and Thomas Tessier's “Mr. God” rank as outstanding contributions as well and are not to be missed for their ability to thrill, scare, and disturb.

The Best of Cemetery Dance is not without its less stellar works of suspense. Darrell Schweitzer's “The Liar's Mouth” disappoints because of its obscurity. Adam Corbin Fusco's “Shell” distracts because of its ambitious stream-of-consciousness. Campbell's “Wrapped Up” lacks full development of its story line before its abrupt end.

Taken as a whole, Richard Chizmar's compilation is satisfying reading for anyone on the hunt for highly charged, intelligent modern horror. This is fiction that lingers in the mind and tantalizes the spirit. The stories do not shy away from describing in shocking and unnerving detail human suffering and grief, and the sheer frequency of tales which convey this type of realistic agony makes a definite statement about the modern-day disregard for life. After completing The Best of Cemetery Dance you cannot help but muse on the penchant to wound and murder.

Thankfully though, the perpetrators of these massacred lives are tucked safely within the confines of this grand-scale, thought-provoking collection. However, whenever you want to feel your spine tingle or wish to witness how a short story can reconfigure your cozy notion of reality, crack open The Best of Cemetery Dance ... and let the dance begin again.

This review pertains to the hardbound edition. The corresponding paperbound edition is now in print.

Amy O'Loughlin is an award-winning book review columnist and freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Worcester Magazine, The Boston Book Review, Calyx, Moxie, and American History. She is a contributor to the upcoming reference work The Encyclopedia of the World Press and the anthology of women's writing Women Forged in Fire.

8/13/01

In comics, the mainstream has long teemed with “team” titles, heirs apparent to the original supergroup, the Justice Society of America, which made its debut in the Winter 1940 issue of All-American's legendary All-Star. As aficionados know, that Golden Age gathering ultimately inspired DC's Justice League of America, a Silver Age update that premiered in the February-March 1960 issue of The Brave and the Bold and soon graduated to its own title. The JLA's success, as Stan Lee confessed in Origins of Marvel Comics in 1974, directly inspired the creation of Fantastic Four and the Marvel mania of the ’60s.

For “team” titles, though, the modern era dawned with nova brilliance in 1975, with the advent of Giant-Size X-Men. That short-lived quarterly reintroduced and revised a group created in the early ’60s by Lee and the great Jack Kirby, and readers’ fanatical reaction to it inspired an almost mind-numbing profusion of X-books that continues to this day.

Given that profusion, casual readers might be tempted to suspect that a contemporary “team” title could offer nothing new to comics. In that suspicion, they would, of course, err—as demonstrated by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a handsome $24.95 hardback created by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill and published a few months ago by America's Best Comics, LLC.

League originally appeared as a six-issue miniseries from ABC, Moore's “personal” imprint at the WildStorm imprint of DC. The miniseries premiered in January 1999 and, after a few of the unfortunate production delays to which creator-owned comics seem especially susceptible, concluded in July 2000.

From that miniseries, the volume under consideration here re-presents the 144-page main adventure and the novelette “Allan and the Sundered Veil,” an H. Rider Haggard pastiche by Moore with spot illustrations by O'Neill. It also contains the covers from the miniseries, as well as covers from one of the comics industry's infamous variant editions and from two reprint editions. (The cover to the sixth issue, by the way, bears specific mention: in a bravura stunt, Moore and O'Neill used it to summarize their narrative to that point in a half-dozen cartoonish panels captioned with doggerel.) Finally, there are a few editorial extras, most of them tongue-in-cheek affairs like a paint-by-numbers feature starring Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray.

As noted, the stylish, angular art of League flowed from the pen of O'Neill, an alumnus of 2000AD (Rebellion Developments), who is perhaps so far best known for having co-created the superhero parody Marshal Law with writer Pat Mills. O'Neill's work nicely recaptures the verve of penny-dreadful illustrations without succumbing to the temptation to ape those illustrations. Indeed, his slick, idiosyncratic visuals range from the iconic to the intricate—the detail of some panels herein recalls Will Elder at his Mad height.

The script, meanwhile, issued from the busy word processor of Moore, inarguably the most significant writer in modern mainstream comics and arguably the most significant writer in comics, period. Moore—a practicing shaman who physically resembles a latter-day Rasputin—first came to the attention of most American readers with his work on The Saga of Swamp Thing (later just Swamp Thing) for DC in the mid-'80s. That work fast led to three superhero prodigies: Miracleman for Eclipse (now defunct), and V for Vendetta and Watchmen for DC again. In the dozen or so years since that memorable triumvirate, Moore not only has written a challenging first novel—Voice of the Fire, published by Victor Gollancz in 1996—but also has broadened his horizons both inside and outside mainstream comics, penning everything from spin-offs of Spawn (Todd McFarlane's horror/superhero amalgam for Image) to an odd collaboration with artist Mark Beyer for Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's RAW.

League, in fact, almost precisely occupies the midpoint on a conceptual continuum formed by Moore's most memorable recent works. In specific, it sizzles with the funny-book electricity of the other stellar offerings from ABC, while inhabiting, more or less, the same milieu as the majestic, mature From Hell (Eddie Campbell Comics) and appropriating Victorian literary icons like Moore's very mature collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls (Top Shelf, forthcoming).

Those icons, all drawn from literature of the fantastic, constitute the titular League: Mina Murray of Bram Stoker's Dracula (scandalously divorced from Jonathan Harker following the events of that novel), Allan Quatermain of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and other adventures, Captain Nemo of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, and the eponymous foci of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

Moore and O'Neill's narrative opens in 1898 in an alternate England, where a portly, patronizing man named Bond recruits Miss Murray into the service of Queen Victoria. Directly, with Nemo—a turbaned tower of intensity—she journeys aboard the Nautilus to Cairo, there to retrieve a gaunt, benumbed Quatermain from an opium den. In due course, the trio next captures the brutish Hyde in Paris and the see-through psychopath Griffin (the Invisible Man) in a singular English girls school.

Miss Murray and her outre team then tackle a threat to the Crown regarding which Bond briefs them. A source of antigravity, invented by an excitable British professor, has fallen into the hands of an Oriental warlord known only as “the Doctor"—a sinister figure out of Sax Rohmer—who's ruthlessly established himself as the East End's kingpin of crime. Antigravity, Bond notes, would transform the Doctor into an almost incalculable danger to the British Empire, in that it would make him “capable of subjecting England to an aerial bombardment with explosives."

For their individual reasons, the five resolve to thwart his plans, and this they do, with aplomb. At that point, unfortunately, the misfit quintet learns their efforts have only strengthened a menace of what seems to be even greater evil—a circumstance they further resolve to rectify.

The narrative concludes with pulp-ish gusto. It seethes, indeed, with images and conceits worthy of Lester Dent (the first and finest writer on Street & Smith's Doc Savage) at his zenith: A gigantic chiropteran airship, powered by an unearthly element familiar from The First Men in the Moon by Wells, bombs London's Limehouse district. In response, Chinese fighters attack it atop war-kites emblazoned with devilish faces. In the night sky, automatic harpoon guns slay with dreadful precision. And the altogether splendid Miss Murray proves quite forcefully why she's the leader of the team.

Great fun, this—no bald synopsis can possibly do justice to the detail with which Moore and O'Neill have packed the tale, as well as “Allan and the Sundered Veil.” (For insight into that detail, curious readers should visit this Web site, where pop scholar Jess Nevins has copiously annotated this work and many more.) Others apparently concur with this assessment of League. Hollywood has come sniffing, for instance—but then, Hollywood nowadays comes sniffing about everything.

More importantly, however, in May 2001, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen won a Bram Stoker Award in the “Illustrated Narrative” category from the Horror Writers Association (a “worldwide organization of writers and publishing professionals dedicated to promoting the interests of writers of Horror and Dark Fantasy,” according to its Web site). Competing for that award had been works by Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Weinberg, and Bernie Wrightson—none too shoddy company.

Even more importantly to devotees of Moore and O'Neill's work on League, by the way, a celestial light show at the end of this adventure explains why it's labeled “Vol. 1/I/One"—and hints at the Wellsian impetus for the next volume, which I, for one, look forward to a great deal.

Bryan A. Hollerbach lives in St. Louis, where he works as a proofreader for a “Big Five” accounting firm. In his spare time, he also writes about pop culture and serves as associate editor of NoisyPaper, a local alternative tabloid to which he contributes a monthly column about television.

8/20/01

I've been reading a lot of historically-oriented speculative fiction this summer. It's been fun! I like what I'd call “speculative history” because it can hold in tension two of the most distinctive impulses in speculative writing. On the one hand, an “alternate history” can develop as a coolly intellectual thought experiment, an investigation into the principles of historical change using “what-if” scenarios, tweaking some aspect of the past to discover what consequences follow from it. On the other hand, a historical romance can passionately evoke past worlds now lost to time or missed opportunity. These impulses are in tension, but they're not mutually exclusive. The best works in this kind, like Guy Gavriel Kay's parallel-world fantasies or Howard Waldrop's short stories, follow both impulses at once. None of the books that I've read this summer reach the level of these, but the better ones use the competing impulses in speculative history to powerful effect. They teach their readers to love the worlds they evoke, and in the process they challenge their readers to consider how our own world might be different. Two of these novels, both first books for their authors, both set in America in the present or relatively recent past, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of speculative history.

Here's a frozen moment from a different world. Cheyenne warriors, mounted on bipedal dinosaurs, race at speeds no horse can match to prevent the women and children of their camp from being massacred in a surprise attack by U.S. Army forces. They had left the camp undefended to journey to a parley with representatives of President George Armstrong Custer to discuss the return of his son, whom they hold hostage. Will they arrive in time? What will happen to relations between the Cheyenne and the United States as a result of this sneak attack? What will happen to relations between George Custer, Jr., and his captors, whom the younger Custer has gradually learned to respect? This is a turning point in the plot of Kurt R.A. Giambastiani's The Year the Cloud Fell: An Alternate History.

In Giambastini's alternate history, a change in natural history underpins a major change in the political history of North America. Certain species of dinosaurs, including small (as dinosaurs go) runners (of the ornithomimid family ) and tyrannosaurs have survived to the present era on the North American prairies. Domesticated by the tribes of the Great Plains, these beasts give the Native Americans decisive military advantages over U.S. forces in speed and destructive power. Consequently in the late nineteenth century, the northern Plains, technically part of the United States since the Louisiana Purchase, remain outside U.S. control, and the Union's settlement of the Pacific coast has never taken place. The plot of the novel is set in motion when the Army, directed by Custer, Sr., tries a new approach to defeating the Cheyenne Alliance. They will send an experimental dirigible airship, piloted by Custer, Jr., to scout the Cheyenne's territory. If they can find the Cheyenne's permanent settlements, they can neutralize the Cheyenne warriors’ advantages in mobility by attacking the settlements, forcing the Cheyenne to fight a stationary battle in defense. Giambastiani sets up a multi-layered thought experiment, providing the material means to make his alterations of military history, which he takes very seriously, plausible.

Giambastiani's history is alternate in another sense, however. Although one of its protagonists, the younger Custer, is a U.S. soldier, much of the novel is narrated from the perspective of the two Cheyenne whose lives become most intimately intertwined with his: Speaks While Leaving, a woman who has a vision that anticipates Custer's arrival among the Cheyenne, and Storm Arriving, the warrior who brings him to the Cheyenne camp. In that sense, The Year the Cloud Fell offers the alternate history that might have been told by the Cheyenne themselves. The book's title, in fact, is their way of naming the time of the story (A.D. 1886 in the European reckoning), and the book begins with the vision of Speaks While Leaving. The plot is decisively shaped by the power of Cheyenne spiritual life, by the potencies of their visions and sacrifices.

The design of the plot as a whole is fairly simple: it combines a war story, structured by a series of battles, with a story of cultural contact, structured in the usual way. The two sides, represented by Storm Arriving and Custer, Jr., begin in mutual suspicion and contempt. Yet, as they speak together and watch each other day by day, understanding begins, followed by respect, and, finally, by friendship. This simple plot structure works in part because Giambastiani is intellectually inventive in his plot twists (I found the course of the book's resolution genuinely surprising and exciting) but more because of his passion for the culture of the Cheyenne. Even though it's clear where the plot is going as Custer gets to know the Cheyenne, it still held my attention because that culture is so vividly and fully realized: I was every bit as fascinated and impressed by what I learned as Custer was himself. It's impossible to represent that process here in this review, but it begins for Custer, perhaps, as he learns how to ride a dinosaur mount (called a “whistler"), by observing his captors:

George grabbed the rope across his knees more out of instinct than out of memory of his instructions. The whistler's long-legged walk was a slow rolling gait with a sideways sashay. Rocking along with the beast quickly nauseated him and caused his head to pound. By watching the others it became apparent that the best riding method was to keep one's head level and straight while the legs and hips moved with the beast. He found this effect, however, unsettling. The sensation was like his body had been disconnected somewhere between his hips and his navel.

As George learns more by observation, he will become much more unsettled and disconnected within himself before he reconciles what he is learning with his assumptions about the world. The reader can learn with George because his process of learning is so precisely rendered. We can see the movement of the whistlers and feel George's reaction. When he eventually becomes an accomplished rider, we share with him the wonder of racing across the open prairie, and his learning to love to ride is a small but important part of the larger process of learning and development that he undergoes.

What prevents the novel from being a simple tract extolling the Native American way of life is the fact that this process of learning and development is mutual. Storm Arriving learns as George does, and the Cheyenne as a people are changed by what George brings to them. In this way, the passion of the novel for the Cheyenne strengthens the novel's thought experiment by illuminating a process of cultural exchange that might preserve a threatened people. The Year the Cloud Fell makes great use of the potentials of speculative history.

Phoenix Fire by Tim O'Laughlin also turns on a struggle to preserve. In this contemporary fantasy, a group of friends in northern California join forces to save a stand of old-growth redwoods from a timber company controlled by a ruthless multi-national corporation. Both Phoenix Fire and The Year the Cloud Fell might be called politically correct, and any reader who, like myself, enjoys cheering for the Sioux against Custer or for the redwoods against the timber companies will find plenty to cheer about in both these novels. But while The Year the Cloud Fell is much more than a political tract or a feel-good story for progressives, Phoenix Fire's appeal is much more limited because, I think, it neglects the thought experiment potentials of speculative history. Its fantasy elements enable it to present an alternative vision of how activists might succeed against their rich and corrupt opponents, but that vision lacks the depth and complexity that make The Year the Cloud Fell so compelling.

Phoenix Fire, as its name hints, is a fantasy of reincarnation. The characters have past lives that they discover through regression therapy under hypnosis. It turns out that souls have relationships extending over many lives. Your friends and lovers and enemies in this life were linked together in your previous lives, too. When characters discover their past, they grow in wisdom, and some gain mystical powers, loosely defined. In the opening chapters of the novel, a group of friends discover their past lives and a challenging truth. Through many lifetimes, they have been struggling against the ruthless power of The One Without a Soul. Over and over again, he has killed them, feeding on their agonies, before they could unite to defeat him. In this life, he is CEO of a corporation that has just completed a hostile takeover of a timber company. He's spoiling to put the ax to the old-growth timber, and he'd be even happier if he can cut down his ancient enemies on his way to the trees. Can the friends live long enough this time to stop him?

In the field of speculative fiction, books are rarely dismissed for having outlandish premises. On the contrary, such premises are often an attraction to readers, and new writers in the field can make their marks by generating strikingly original settings and ideas. Indians on dinosaurs? Pretty outlandish premise! So if my description of the plot of Phoenix Fire seems a bit flippant in its account of the novel's premise, that's not because an outlandish plot design is a flaw in itself. This premise has potential, and the novel is not an unsatisfying read. The author has real passion for his characters, for the Mendocino area where the novel is set, and for the laid-back, new-age, countercultural way of life that flourishes among the enduring forests there. His handling of his setting, plot, and characters, however, is a bit too simplistic to be compelling.

The writing does not justify the somewhat outlandish premises of the novel by using them to illuminate the characters’ struggle. The characters discover and understand their past lives effortlessly and completely, and the fact that all of the major characters discover that they have been friends and lovers in many past lives seems too pat. In the scene in which two of the friends, Larry and Gayle, discover that they are to be the spiritual guides for the group, for example, everything falls into place for them at once, making both their project and their feelings appear simplistic:

Gayle reached out suddenly, taking one of his hands in hers, her eyes wide. “We need both hands,” she said, reaching for his other hand, then, more urgently, “Close your eyes.” As soon as he did, Larry was filled with an awareness of what he and Gayle had been to each other over time, as if memories hidden behind a series of veils were successively revealed.... Separate, they were perfectly ordinary people. In each lifetime, when they had become aware that they were joined in opposition to The One Without a Soul, a metamorphosis occurred, and they became a conduit for spiritual energy from another plane of existence....

When they opened their eyes, blinking at the brightness of the light reflecting off of the surface of the ocean, they shared a new understanding. The questions that had haunted Gayle's eyes had been replaced by a knowing. She smiled.... Larry felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders, and as they walked back along the beach, he reveled in the simple, joyful power of love.

If you find it easy to believe in reincarnation and soul-mates, if you like stories in which characters fight an unexplained, ultimate evil, then you may find Phoenix Fire enjoyable. If you don't, you may find much of the novel somewhat difficult to take. In this novel, love is a simple and joyful power that arises instantly and fully when characters discover that they already know all about each other.

This simplicity renders cultural differences irrelevant as well. The main point-of-view character, Ryan, discovers that in his two immediately preceding lives, he was a Polish Jew who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and an Oglala Sioux warrior who died fighting Union soldiers. Now he's an American, a lawyer native to northern California. While it might seem that assimilating the truth of these radically different lives might take some doing or even be, just perhaps, traumatic, Ryan takes it all in stride because, it seems, he's always been the same person, with the same feelings, fighting the same battles against The One Without a Soul, who was Union commander, then a Nazi, and now the CEO. Evil, like good, is always the same.

On first inspection, The Year the Cloud Fell and Phoenix Fire may appear to be very similar alternate histories: politically-charged fantasies that dramatize the struggle to protect native peoples and ecoystems from nationalist or corporate imperialists. The connection Phoenix Fire draws between the Oglala Sioux and the defenders of the redwoods makes this similarity explicit. It would be easy to link these books together in a politically-savvy marketing strategy: “If you support these causes, you'll love these books!"

But looked at more deeply, the novels’ politics, which follow from their uses of speculative history, begin to appear quite different, and it's this difference that should matter most, I think, when you decide whether or not to read or buy these books. Put the question, if you want to see the imperialists get theirs, why read one of these novels instead of renting Pocahontas again? Europe and America meet, fall in love, and love conquers hate! Well, with Phoenix Fire I'm tempted to suggest the rental. Phoenix Fire beats the film in that it has interesting characters who aren't merely types, but the development of the story doesn't get far beyond Pocahontas in depth. The Year the Cloud Fell is another matter. While it sometimes shows the awkwardness of an inexperienced writer, the novel is intense, vivid, and anything but simplistic. Enemies become friends only slowly, and allies even more slowly. Details matter in this book, because it is only through real immersion in one another's lives, and the slow learning that comes from it, that characters come to know one another. It's an exceptional work of speculative history.

Christopher Cobb is Senior Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.

8/27/01

"We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo ... have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, ... and, consequently, that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against delinquents of this description."—Sentence of the Tribunal of the Supreme Inquisition against Galileo Galilei, given the 22nd day of June of the year 1633

Who says science and religion can't mix? Apparently a lot of people do—scientists and fundamentalists alike—and that seems to be the thesis of Ben Bova's latest novel, Jupiter. Set a hundred years or so after his other “grand tour” novels—Mars, Return to Mars, and Venus—Bova introduces us to a society somewhat reminiscent of Heinlein's theocracy in Revolt in 2100. In Jupiter, Earth society is dominated by a selection of religious theocracies spread across the globe. Most prevalent is the New Morality, a Christian fundamentalist movement, that shares power with similar Muslim and Buddhist movements. Citizens are required to surrender a few years of their lives in Service to the New Morality, and scientists are viewed with deep suspicion—especially those whose sciences may challenge or contradict Scripture. Evolution becomes a dirty word.

Conscripted by the New Morality is our reluctant hero Grant Archer, a graduate student studying the nature of black holes. (N.B., not the evolution of black holes. Merely the nature of them.) Due to political powers beyond his ken, instead of being sent to the deep space observatories on the moon, Archer is exiled from his new bride to spend his Service obligation on Gold Station orbiting Jupiter. He is ordered by the New Morality to spy on the station's crew to discover the truth about recent rumors of secret manned missions being sent into the Jovian atmosphere. Once there, Archer slowly learns about the mysterious goings-on around the station and the purpose of the enigmatic vessel tethered alongside. While other scientists perform the official studies of Jupiter's satellites, Archer is assigned by the fearsome Director Wo to the less-than-official team tasked with studying the planet itself.

Grant Archer is a Believer. The son of a Methodist minister and a regular church-goer, he is also a dedicated scientist; he is a rare fellow in his society in that he is faithful to his religion and at the same time keeps to the ideals of science. Until his arrival at Gold Station, Archer has managed to live with this contradiction with little trouble. Suddenly he's caught between the two opposed imperatives—his obligation to spy for the New Morality and his commitment as a scientist to extend humankind's knowledge of the universe. The conflict drives the character development forward as Archer struggles to regain his earlier balance. Finally, the actions of the New Morality and the revelations on Jupiter tip the balance, forcing Archer to look within himself and make a decision.

At first, Archer has plenty of opportunities to agonize about his situation as he deals with various mundane assignments and gets to know his fellow scientists. We feel sympathy for Archer, whose careful plans for the future are turned on their heads as this budding astrophysicist is sent to clean beakers, study weather patterns, and babysit a semi-intelligent gorilla named Sheena. (This novel will strike a chord with anyone working in the science field or who has spent years suffering as a “grad-student grunt” performing tedious tasks while struggling for a doctorate.) His fellow team members bring a varied mix of attitudes and experience to Gold Station. Ben Muzorawa, a Sudanese specialist in fluid dynamics from the University of Cairo, takes Archer under his wing and gets him a place on the planetary exploration team. Biochemist Egon Kharlstad is the team's sad-sack trickster who's on Gold Station not by choice but to avoid serving a prison sentence for skirting Earth's reproduction control laws. Tamiko Hideshi is a physical chemist primarily studying Europa's oceans. Lanie O'Hara, first met doubling as both scientist and station security chief, spends much of her time in a skin-tight suit swimming with a pair of communicative dolphins.

Settings involving space research stations tend to lead to stories about forced close interaction among their crews. Gold Station, however, reflects its neighbor, Jupiter, in that it's much larger than one would expect. This contrasts well with the atmospheric ship used later in the book. The characters deal both with isolation in open areas and more intimate interaction within a very claustrophobic setting. In each setting, the character interactions shift from friendly, to suspicious, to cooperative to ... ? Bova's characters are three-dimensional enough that they definitely bump elbows with each other. This is particularly true with Archer. Soon, however, events overtake him, and Archer finds himself less in a position to report the goings-on at Gold Station, and more in the center of all the action.

And we're talking a lot of action.

The adventure grips you through the last third of the novel and doesn't let go until the very end. Jupiter is a good example of a novel that can be both entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. Bova does a very credible job in presenting the violence of the Jovian atmosphere. It's an exaggerated landscape for exaggerated scenes that become somewhat reminiscent of The Poseidon Adventure. More than the ray-guns and rocket ships of space operas, Jupiter, as a novel, demonstrates some of the very real dangers in exploring the outer planets. The presence of the Leviathans adds to the increasing drama of the Jovian scenes, ending with an encounter that pays off well and will have you cheering.

The end, while satisfactory, does have its sobering moments as Bova inserts a sense of political realism. This doesn't take anything away from the narrative. More, it reaffirms the thesis of the novel and strengthens it.

Bova, a six-time Hugo winner and past editor of Analog magazine, has a tendency to insert a social agenda into his “grand tour” novels. Mars dealt with political and racial tensions, Return to Mars covered the pros and cons of commercialism, and Venus presented a near-future of the Green movement and economic class distinctions. For the most part, the social aspects work within the novels fairly seamlessly. The tradition continues in Jupiter with the religion-versus-science conflict. There is no question that the villains of the novel are supposed to be the zealots of the New Morality. Zealotry in the name of preserving the New Morality is an honored function in Bova's post-modern society. The readers are supposed to see the scientists as the heroes—as visionaries with the courage and strength to challenge the political hypocrisy of the New Morality and restore the honor of seeking the truth about God's universe. In Jupiter, however, the real heroes are people like Archer who maintain both the spirit of scientific inquiry and the integrity of their beliefs.

So is there life beneath Jupiter's cloudy cover? Readers of Bova's earlier works will suspect so. After all, since those novels reveal evidence of intelligent life in Mars's ancient past, life on the chaotic surface of Venus, bacterial life on Europa, and “Clarke's Medusae” floating in the upper clouds of Jupiter—Bova's rendition of our solar system is practically teeming with life-as-we-recognize-it—it would be no surprise to find life deeper down in the gas giant.

But what of intelligent life?

That is the crux of the drama. The discovery of intelligent life deeper within Jupiter's atmosphere would threaten the validity of Scripture, or so the New Morality would have you believe. Fortunately Bova doesn't go on a rampage against religion, but he seems certainly critical of religious fanaticism. The argument is made that life on other worlds, even intelligent life, reflects more the complex beauty of God's creation as opposed to its utter denial. Archer, however, doesn't have Bova's distance; and must come to terms with both Scripture and Science.

Much of the scientific quest involves discovering the nature of the mysterious beings floating deep below Jupiter's cloud cover, the Leviathans. With the manned probe treated as a submarine, the Leviathans as Jovian whales, and the crippled but driven Director Wo as an Ahab, the adventure takes on a Moby Dick feel, but with a better ending.

As an added bonus in Jupiter, life below the clouds is as richly described and handled as anything done by Hal Clement at his best. To add further dimension, Bova shifts the narrative to other points of view, so it's not just Archer's eyes we see through, but other eyes as well. By doing this, Bova allows the reader a range of perspectives that rounds out the sense of immediacy bought about during the trip under the clouds.

This is pure Bova. His writing style remains smooth and seamless throughout the entire novel with no words wasted on throw-away scenes. Bova doesn't simply write, he crafts.

If there is any real criticism of Jupiter, it's that Bova's characters couldn't keep a secret if their lives depended on it. Throughout the first two-thirds of the novel, the real story of Director Wo's mission dribbles out through various characters sharing secrets with Archer along with the added statement, “I really shouldn't be telling you this. Security, you know.” It's an obvious plot device meant to reveal the motivations of other characters. His past novels do a better job of revealing information crucial to the plot. Still, even with the information provided by the secondary characters, Bova keeps enough hidden to guarantee some surprising revelations.

Overall, Jupiter reads wonderfully. It's hard science fiction with a good extrapolation of the nature of interplanetary exploration and a continuation of his theme that the advance of science and exploration requires the willingness to take great risks. The novel also examines the dialectic between science and religion, showing how they both develop in the light of the other's fire. In this day of advancing genetic studies and the probing of the universe, Bova's latest book is timely and relevant. Science and religion can co-exist. Perhaps they have to.

"There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the force of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it."—Dudley Field Malone on the fifth day of the Scopes Monkey Trial

Postscript: Ben Bova has arranged for three more “Grand Tour” novels to come out from Tor Books. Further information can be had at his official Web site.

John Teehan is a member of the Critters Workshop and founded RI_Fantastic, an online group for genre writers in southern New England. He makes a living as a typesetter/graphic designer, but claims the naked soul of a writer. Right now, at this very moment, he's hard at work writing. Quiet, please. (Though you probably won't disturb him if you visit his Web site.)

8/6/01

When I began working as a fiction editor at Strange Horizons, it seemed perfectly natural to me that our fiction guidelines stated that we weren't interested in horror stories. After all, I don't read horror, I don't like horror, and I don't have a huge amount of interest in getting involved with it. (While I can't speak officially for my co-editors, they seem to feel generally the same way.) It seemed fairly straightforward.

The question's gotten a little more complicated.

For one thing, it's not true that Strange Horizons as a magazine is uninterested in horror. We'll publish horror-themed poetry, reviews of horror books and movies, and interviews of horror authors. The fiction department sticks out a little, then, with the explicit exclusion of horror stories. Authors ask, from time to time, why we didn't want horror stories. That's a fairly easy one to answer—because we don't like horror. More recently, authors have been asking what we mean by “horror,” though, and that's a little harder to answer.

It didn't seem like a difficult question, the first time I was asked. “You know, horror. Blood, death, dismemberment.” I tossed it off as if it were the obvious answer, while the author looked puzzled.

“Oh,” she said. “That's not what I mean by horror."

But what else would she mean? I started asking around. What does it mean to you that a story is a horror story, I asked my friends. A lot of them agreed with me—blood, death, and dismemberment. Serial killers. Drooling fanged dogs. Giant zombie fetuses. Rotting flesh. Pus, slime, or goo. Blood-spattered knives, or blood-spattered clothes, or blood-spattered children, or really blood-spattered anything. Entrails. Psychotic stalkers hiding behind the sofa. People or creatures “from beyond the grave.” Bloodcurdling screams. Bashed-in skulls, insect-infested wounds, disfigured dwarves with evil-sounding laughs. Torture victims tied to chairs while begging for their lives. Severed heads, hands, or penises. Mean ghosts with vengeful urges. Oversized cockroaches, or even normal cockroaches if they're coming out of someone's mouth. Maybe normal cockroaches in any circumstances.

You know. Horror. Those of us who don't like it have a very clear idea of what it is.

The thing is, those of you who do like horror also have a clear idea of what it is, and it's a different idea. I ran my “blood, death, and dismemberment” idea past an author friend of mine who sometimes writes horror stories, and he laughed at me. “Yeah,” he said, “some horror. But that's the lazy way to do it.” To do what? To scare people, of course. That's the other way to look at horror. It's not about the blood-spattered flying knives and the goo-covered zombie fetuses, it's about the terror.

Horror stories, this line of thought goes, are stories meant to evoke fear. It's an interesting idea, that horror is a theme rather than a formula. It also makes perfect sense—defining horror by the “talking severed head” stories is as unfair as defining fantasy by the “winged fairies and friendly unicorns” stories, or defining science fiction by the “square-jawed spaceman” stories. Horror is a vast and complex field, and one that I've been unfairly caricaturing all this time. You'd think I'd have caught on sooner—some of the stories we've published at Strange Horizons are considered by their authors to be horror stories, and one or two have even been recommended for horror-specific writing awards.

Done well, a good horror story can do what any other good story can do—it can make you reshape the way you see the world around you. It can make you see figures in the shadows, or expect strange faces in the mirror. It can make you jump at every rustling leaf noise or stare suspiciously at incoming clouds. More than that, it can make you like it.

Here's the thing, though. I still don't like horror. I'm pretty much not interested in stories that are designed to put terror in my heart, and I'm absolutely not interested in stories designed to shock or disgust me with the gory imagery I've traditionally associated with horror stories. I've done a lot of re-evaluating my definition of horror lately, but I don't think we're going to be seeking it out here at Strange Horizons. The fiction staff, we're pretty easygoing about genre definitions. We don't want to see horror stories in the same way that we don't want to see really tech-oriented hard-SF stories; if we do get one that really grabs us, we'll take it. We've certainly printed stories that appear to violate our own guidelines. Our no-horror policy doesn't reflect a blanket dismissal of the genre, just a warning to authors that fear-based stories are going to be a really difficult sell in this particular market.

Extremely gory stories are pretty close to an impossible sell in this particular market, by the way. I may have learned an Important Life Lesson about the dangers of narrow genre definitions, but that doesn't make me any happier about blood, death, and dismemberment.

Susan Marie Groppi is a Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons.