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China Miéville electrified the British SF scene in 2000. His first novel, King Rat, was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards. His second, Perdido Street Station, a dark fantasy with SF undertones, did even better; it was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and won the Clarke. Had the book been available in the U.S. in its first year of publication it might also have made the Nebula and Hugo ballots. It is that good. Del Rey released Perdido in March 2001, and consequently American readers are now asking, “Who is China Miéville?” Strange Horizons has been to Britain to find out.

The first thing to note is that China is most definitely a “he.” The name, he says, is a result of having hippie parents. He had childhood friends with names such as Cascade and India. By now, he's used to people mistaking his gender. Despite the earrings, they won't make that mistake once they've met him. With the unusual name go some unusual interests: China is currently studying for a doctorate at the London School of Economics. His chosen subject is the philosophy of international law. Like fellow British author Ken MacLeod, China has a passion for far-left politics. Unlike Ken, he is prepared to put his convictions on the line. He stood as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance (a grouping of far-left and Trotskyist organisations) in this year's British general election. One London newspaper dubbed him “the sexiest man in politics.” He is not your typical fantasy writer.

This interview took place at the 2001 British National Science Fiction Convention. After the interview we spent about an hour discussing our common fascination with role-playing games, but that's another story.

Cheryl Morgan: So, the obvious first question is, how did you get into writing?

China Miéville: I always read. I wasn't a fan as such, I didn't know about conventions. But I always read magazines like Interzone, and SF columns in White Dwarf, and so on. And I used to write, short stories and whatever, all of which got rejected from Interzone, quite rightly. When I went to university I began to get more serious about things, and because my time was fairly flexible I was able to work on a novel. I don't know how people write books and hold down a 9 to 5 job. In writing a novel I learned a lot and there was a qualitative change in my writing, so I got an agent and it all went from there.

Cheryl: You mentioned White Dwarf (Games Workshop's house magazine). That indicates a background in role-playing. Has that been an inspiration to you in your writing?

China: It has. I used to play a lot of games, between the ages of about 10 and 13. I haven't played them for about 12 to 13 years and I have no interest in playing them again, but I have a great interest in them as a cultural phenomenon. I quite often buy and read game manuals because I am interested in the way that people design their worlds, and how they decide to delineate them.

Cheryl: That doesn't come over in your writing. There is no way anyone would read Perdido and think, “this is a D&D adventure write-up."

China: I think the sort of stuff I write is a sort of hybrid between Mike Harrison and role-playing. Harrison's work is definitionally fluid, you can't really grasp the worlds he creates, but I'm doing a sort of Mike Harrison role-playing game. I have tried to write like Harrison, but at the same time I have rigidly defined the secondary world. You could give most of the characters in my world stats.

Cheryl: Have you done a Tolkien on us? Can we expect a series of books detailing the background to the Perdido Street Station world?

China: I would love to do that kind of thing. I've got voluminous notes that go way, way beyond the scope of the book. I know all the history and all the races and all the geography and stuff. If someone were interested in it I would love to see it published.

Cheryl: The look of your books, they way that they are packaged, suggests that they are horror novels. The settings for both King Rat and Perdido Street Station are very much fantasy-oriented. And yet Perdido is also a science fiction book in many ways. Its hero, Isaac, is a scientist and, despite the 19th century feel of the setting, there are cyborgs and an artificial intelligence. Did you deliberately set out to create a new genre?

China: I didn't set out to do anything particularly new, but it is true that I am conscious of writing in a tradition that blurs the boundaries between three fantastic genres: supernatural horror, fantasy, and science fiction. I have always been of the opinion that you can't make firm distinctions between those three.

The writing that I really like is what has been called “weird fiction.” If people ask me what I write, that is the label I give them. The weird fiction axis of people like Lovecraft, Lindsay, Clarke Ashton Smith, and William Hope Hodgson exists at the intersection and you really can't say that it is horror not fantasy, or fantasy not science fiction, or whatever. It is about an aesthetic of the fantastic; you alienate and shock the reader. That's what I really like.

Cheryl: Is there anything else in the science fantasy field that has inspired you? Moorcock, for example. And I was reminded particularly of two of Mary Gentle's books, Rats and Gargoyles and The Architecture of Desire, both of which have a similar feel to Perdido.

China: The science fantasy which looms largest in my head consciously—which I think is an important distinction because a lot of this stuff is lurking around subconsciously—is Gene Wolfe. Rats and Gargoyles I enjoyed very much. I liked the setting and the fact that it didn't whitewash urban life. It has strikes and civil conflict and stuff. Moorcock? I think we are all post-Moorcock. So in a way, yes, but it is so deep and penetrating that I'm not at all conscious of it.

Cheryl: In my humble opinion you can't pick better inspiration than Wolfe.

China: Well yes, he's a god. It is to the mainstream's eternal shame that they haven't recognised him. He is one of the great living authors.

Cheryl: Michael Swanwick said recently that Wolfe is the greatest living writer in the English language.

China: For me it's a toss-up between him and Harrison. Wolfe has an authority and scope that is more sweeping, but Harrison has this wonderful way in which he intersects emotion, loneliness, and language. I wouldn't want to choose between the two.

Cheryl: One of the things I love about Wolfe is the way that he lays little clues. He'll mention something in passing but you won't see the full import of it until several chapters, or maybe even a book or two later. Are you doing that sort of thing with your writing? Will later novels expand on a theme you introduced as a passing idea in Perdido?

China: There is certainly stuff that will be picked up. The scale of Wolfe's operation is enormous and can be quite daunting. There's this puzzle element to it. I don't have the mind to do that. But I am trying to give the impression of a much wider scope that is outside the boundaries of the book. If you don't notice it then it doesn't matter, but if you do it gives this impression of back text which is something that Harrison does very well in his Viriconium books and I think is very powerful. Of course it is also important that the books all stand alone as well.

Cheryl: Yes, that's one of the problems I have with Wolfe. I would love to nominate his books for awards, but each individual book is generally only understandable within the wider context of the series.

China: I'm trying not to do that.

Cheryl: King Rat begins with the hero arriving in London on a train. Perdido is named after a railway station. Are trains something of a passion for you?

China: It is more railway architecture. What it is, basically, is that I spent a lot of my youth at skyline level on a train coming in and out of London. You have the towers and chimneys poking up around you, and that is very, very impressive.

Cheryl: Politics is clearly a very important part of your life.

China: I'm a member of the Socialist Alliance: an actual, genuine Trotskyist.

Cheryl: I noticed that your group of left-wing intellectuals in Perdido had a distinct New Labour feel to them. Lots of concern and posturing but not a lot of commitment: very Tony Blair.

China: Well there's no point in being coy about it. As a writer you are in this Bohemian milieu which has some very wonderful things about it, but does have this very abstract relationship with politics. All leftist writers and artists for the last 150 years have had to mediate that. I think that is why a lot of leftist artists are attracted to anarchism, because it is a more individualist philosophy. For myself, I try to put up something of a firewall between my writing and my political career.

Cheryl: I notice also that in Ken MacLeod's books the revolution is often rather romantic, whereas in Perdido the vodyanoi strike was brutally crushed and people died nastily.

China: Just because you are a leftist writer doesn't mean that you have to be into propaganda. I would never try to convince someone of socialism through my novels. It would probably make a very bad novel, and a very bad case of socialism. Nevertheless, you do want to have some sort of political texture to the books.

I think that if, as a leftist, you write about how the revolution succeeds gloriously then it is extremely hard to not get all Maoist and write stuff like, “Onwards for the Glorious Vodyanoi Strike!", you know. I think there are writers who have done it well—Banks for example. But I'm not good at it, so what I do is give the books a political texture that is quite realistic, cynical, and brutal. I would love to write an upbeat, positive political novel, and as soon as I think I am up to it I will, but not yet.

Cheryl: Then of course you have the problem of what happens after the workers have won.

China: I have had some long conversations with a friend about this. You know in Star Wars there were originally supposed to be nine films, but they dropped the plans for the three sequels. What do you write about after the rebels have won? Are you going to have three films about running crèches?

Cheryl: Or in which Luke Skywalker becomes a dictator?

China: Very few of the great socialist writers have spent a lot of time writing about the post-revolutionary state, and they have got a lot of flak for that, but I do think it is very hard to do.

Cheryl: One aspect of Perdido that is very clearly painted is the difference in culture between the various races that inhabit New Crobuzon. You describe how the cactus-people have created a ghetto to live in, and how the mingling of races has affected the cultures of the khepri and the city-dwelling garuda.

China: One of the things about genre fantasy that I loathe is that race becomes a pigeonhole for a character type. Your elf is kind of deft and mysterious, and your dwarf is always grumpy but the salt of the earth, and it becomes a way of defining character rather than actually dealing with culture.

What I wanted to do with Perdido was have a book in which the characters were much more malleable and culturally mediated. And what that meant was that cultures would not be distinct hermetic balloons, they were going to taint each other. And also, very importantly, that individuals of all races, not just humans, could reject their culture, could feel at odds with their culture, but are still going be to defined by it in some way.

Cheryl: Which is just what happens to your heroine, Lin.

China: Lin's relationship with her culture is very important in the book. She doesn't fit in with traditional khepri culture that she has abandoned, but she can't fit in with human culture either because of her khepri upbringing. She is discomforted in both of them. And that's an attempt to write a bit more realistically about culture than some other genre writers.

Cheryl: I think that is something that is long overdue.

China: Another thing that is very important here is stereotyping. One of the things that is dangerous about genre fantasy and science fiction is that ethnic stereotyping is true. It is absolutely the case that trolls are stupid and bad and like to smash things up. What I have tried to do in Perdido is have an idea of culture that is both constraining and enabling, but doesn't describe you in cold genetic terms.

I have also tried to show that when expected cultural behaviour breaks down the ideology of stereotyping tries to maintain itself. That's what racism does. The vodyanoi in the book have a culture that tends to make them quite surly and grumpy to the outside eye. But that isn't a necessary part of their genetic make-up, and when the humans find a vodyanoi who is not like that they tend to say, “all vodyanoi are grumpy except my mate so-and-so.” That is a standard racist line. The way that stereotyping tries to negotiate its own patent untruth fascinates me.

Cheryl: One thing that particularly fascinated me about the book, and I was disappointed that you didn't spend more time on it, was the garuda philosophy. The free garuda in the Cymek desert have this militant attitude to personal responsibility to go along with their personal freedom. It sounded like something that libertarians should read.

China: It was very important to me. One of the things that angers me about politics is the way that the individual has been claimed for the right. I accept that the right has this notion of the individual as an abstract political entity, and I accept that some leftists have a quite vulgar notion of the individual being unimportant. But I think that individuals are very important. And by individuals I mean real people that understand their own nature, not as an abstract, but as something that exists within a social matrix. With the garuda I tried to come up with a society that was radically communist, and because of its communism treats the individual with great seriousness and respect. I didn't write a lot about it at the time because, as I have said, it is very difficult to write about radically different societies, but I hope to come back to it at a later time.

Cheryl: I hope you do come back to it. I find that sort of imaginative approach to political thought very refreshing.

China: When I first started the book the core of it was not the narrative arc that you see now, but the political arc created by the garuda character, Yagharek. I was interested in the notion of a crime that was unthinkable to a member of another society. That Isaac could just not get his head round what Yagharek had done wrong. What could possibly be so bad that they would cut off his wings?

Cheryl: The area of politics in the book where I didn't quite follow the argument was the cyborgization. You have two areas there: the cyborg cult, and the cyborgization of criminals.

China: I wasn't particularly conscious of playing with themes in those sections. With the Remade, the punishment by cyborgization, that was partially to do with my love of grotesquerie. I was trying to think of a really horrible punishment. The political edge to it was about the way that in our society criminals are violently pathologized. I was trying to show how we make criminals into creatures of horror, regardless of what they have done or why they did it.

Cheryl: And the crime lord, Motley, who really is evil, has made himself into a monster.

China: As for the cyborg cult, I'm very sceptical about religion so I tried to create a religion that seemed plausible but was actually kind of mad.

Cheryl: The one area of the book that is quite mystical is the vodyanoi watercraeft. That actually sounds like they are doing magic, whereas everything else seems at best alchemical, if not plainly scientific.

China: There is no distinction between science and magic in the Perdido world. There is, categorically, by our standards, magic. What the vodyanoi do is magic, and the academic discipline called Thaumaturgy in the book is magic as we would understand it. But what I was trying to do was scientize magic so that within this world magic is basically another kind of energy. Magic has strange rules, but they are as exact and quantifiable as physical rules. So if you are a scientist in this world you might be a biologist, a physicist, or a thaumaturgist. Isaac dabbles in everything.

Cheryl: That sounds like a role-player's view of magic. It is magic as a game system rather than a mystical force.

China: Well, maybe. I don't have any problem with magic as a real force in my world. I would have trouble writing fantasy if I did. But I do have trouble with magic when it is just used to sidestep the narrative. You know, when you don't know what to do you just throw in a bit of magic.

Cheryl: Does that mean that you don't approve of the mythic style of fantasy writing?

China: Not entirely. In King Rat, for example, the characters are very much mythic. They are animal archetypes. I have no problem with that at all, though I find it hard to write that way. What I don't like is when narrative is mythically structured. I think Neil Gaiman at his best undermines that very well. But it is one reason why I don't like Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books. They have no sense of narrative as being an organic thing created by the actions of individual people. It is all predetermined.

Cheryl: Perdido Street Station has received a lot of praise. It has been one of the hot favourites for Britain's two premier SF book awards . That's quite an achievement for your second novel. That must be a bit scary.

China: I have been really stunned by the reaction, and very, very moved by it. It has been very literally beyond my wildest dreams. It has been a fantastic year, but it is frightening and it has made me very nervous about writing the new book.

Cheryl: Are you afraid that there will be some sort of backlash?

China: Ultimately one's job as a writer is to keep readers turning the pages. I would be sad if people say, “oh he's really lost it,” with the new one. But if they say, “well, it wasn't as good as Perdido but I really enjoyed it all the same,” that's OK.

Cheryl: The new book is called The Scar, and it is due out when?

China: I think it is due out February 2002.

Cheryl: In the U.K.?

China: Yes, but I think it is coming out pretty much the same time in the U.S.

Cheryl: Where do you see your career going from here?

China: There are specific books I want to write, and other projects I would like to pursue. One day I would very much like to draw a comic. I am a very slow artist, so it will take a long time, but I would like to do it. I would like to do more music too. But as long as I can make a living writing novels, there's nothing I'd rather do.

Cheryl: The world of Perdido struck me very much as something that you might find in a comic strip in Heavy Metal.

China: I tend to think visually, and when I am writing something like Perdido, I tend to veer between graphic novel and film. The action scenes I tend to see very filmically. Descriptive scenes I tend to think of as long, bleak panels in a comic strip.

Cheryl: Do you have an interest in movies?

China: I would dearly love someone to turn King Rat into a film. Perdido would be much harder, but I think King Rat would work very well and without too much difficulty. I would love to act in film, but then who wouldn't? I'm holding out for a part in Buffy.

Cheryl: China, thank you for talking to Strange Horizons.

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of the online science fiction and fantasy book review magazine Emerald City.

Read the Strange Horizons review of Perdido Street Station.

This may seem to be an ordinary beginning to an ordinary article. It is not. There's a secret message hidden here, in this very paragraph. It's not in view, and its source is modern. But the art of hiding messages is an ancient one, known as steganography. !—Yes, this is the secret message. Web documents can hide messages in a number of subtle ways. For example, put blank spaces at the end of each line, where the number of blank spaces encodes a letter. They won't display on any browser.—

Steganography is the dark cousin of cryptography, the use of codes. While cryptography provides privacy, steganography is intended to provide secrecy. Privacy is what you need when you use your credit card on the Internet—you don't want your number revealed to the public. For this, you use cryptography, and send a coded pile of gibberish that only the web site can decipher. Though your code may be unbreakable, any hacker can look and see you've sent a message. For true secrecy, you don't want anyone to know you're sending a message at all.

Early steganography was messy. Before phones, before mail, before horses, messages were sent on foot. If you wanted to hide a message, you had two choices: have the messenger memorize it, or hide it on the messenger. In fact, the Chinese wrote messages on silk and encased them in balls of wax. The wax ball, “la wan,” could then be hidden in the messenger.

Herodotus, an entertaining but less than reliable Greek historian, reports a more ingenious method. Histaeus, ruler of Miletus, wanted to send a message to his friend Aristagorus, urging revolt against the Persians. Histaeus shaved the head of his most trusted slave, then tattooed a message on the slave's scalp. After the hair grew back, the slave was sent to Aristagorus with the message safely hidden.

Later in Herodotus’ histories, the Spartans received word that Xerxes was preparing to invade Greece. Their informant, Demeratus, was a Greek in exile in Persia. Fearing discovery, Demeratus wrote his message on the wood backing of a wax tablet. He then hid the message underneath a fresh layer of wax. The apparently blank tablet sailed easily past sentries on the road.

A more subtle method, nearly as old, is to use invisible ink. Described as early as the first century AD, invisible inks were commonly used for serious communications until WWII. The simplest are organic compounds, such as lemon juice, milk, or urine, all of which turn dark when held over a flame. In 1641, Bishop John Wilkins suggested onion juice, alum, ammonia salts, and for glow-in-the dark writing the “distilled Juice of Glowworms.” Modern invisible inks fluoresce under ultraviolet light and are used as anti-counterfeit devices. For example, “VOID” is printed on checks and other official documents in an ink that appears under the strong ultraviolet light used for photocopies.

During the American revolution, both sides made extensive use of chemical inks that required special developers to detect, though the British had discovered the American formula by 1777. Throughout World War II, the two sides raced to create new secret inks and to find developers for the ink of the enemy. In the end, though, the volume of communications rendered invisible ink impractical.

With the advent of photography, microfilm was created as a way to store a large amount of information in a very small space. In both world wars, the Germans used “microdots” to hide information, a technique which J. Edgar Hoover called “the enemy's masterpiece of espionage.” A secret message was photographed, reduced to the size of a printed period, then pasted into an innocuous cover message, magazine, or newspaper. The Americans caught on only when tipped by a double agent: “Watch out for the dots—lots and lots of little dots."

Modern updates to these ideas use computers to make the hidden message even less noticeable. For example, laser printers can adjust spacing of lines and characters by less than 1/300th of an inch. To hide a zero, leave a standard space, and to hide a one leave 1/300th of an inch more than usual. Varying the spacing over an entire document can hide a short binary message that is undetectable by the human eye. Even better, this sort of trick stands up well to repeated photocopying.

All of these approaches to steganography have one thing in common—they hide the secret message in the physical object which is sent. The cover message is merely a distraction, and could be anything. Of the innumerable variations on this theme, none will work for electronic communications because only the pure information of the cover message is transmitted. Nevertheless, there is plenty of room to hide secret information in a not-so-secret message. It just takes ingenuity.

The monk Johannes Trithemius, considered one of the founders of modern cryptography, had ingenuity in spades. His three volume work Steganographia, written around 1500, describes an extensive system for concealing secret messages within innocuous texts. On its surface, the book seems to be a magical text, and the initial reaction in the 16th century was so strong that Steganographia was only circulated privately until publication in 1606. But less than five years ago, Jim Reeds of AT&T Labs deciphered mysterious codes in the third volume, showing that Trithemius’ work is more a treatise on cryptology than demonology. Reeds’ fascinating account of the code breaking process is quite readable.

One of Trithemius’ schemes was to conceal messages in long invocations of the names of angels, with the secret message appearing as a pattern of letters within the words. For example, as every other letter in every other word:

which reveals “prymus apex."

Another clever invention in Steganographia was the “Ave Maria” cipher. The book contains a series of tables, each of which has a list of words, one per letter. To code a message, the message letters are replaced by the corresponding words. If the tables are used in order, one table per letter, then the coded message will appear to be an innocent prayer.

The modern version of Trithemius’ scheme is undoubtedly SpamMimic. This simple system hides a short text message in a letter that looks exactly like spam, which is as ubiquitous on the Internet today as innocent prayers were in the 16th century. SpamMimic uses a “grammar” to make the messages. For example, a simple sentence in English is constructed with a subject, verb, and object, in that order. Given lists of 26 subjects, 26 verbs, and 26 objects, we could construct a three word sentence that encodes a three letter message. If you carefully prescribe a set of rules, you can make a grammar that describes spam.

Unfortunately, for serious users, every scheme we've seen is unacceptable. All are well known, and once a technique is suspected the hidden messages are easy to discover. Worse, a ten page document whose line spacing spells out a secret message is completely incriminating, even if the message is in an unbreakable code. A good steganographic technique should provide secrecy even if everyone knows it's being used.

The key innovation in recent years was to choose an innocent looking cover that contains plenty of random information, called white noise. You can hear white noise as a the nearly silent hiss of a blank tape playing. The secret message replaces the white noise, and if done properly it will appear to be as random as the noise was. The most popular methods use digitized photographs, so let's explore these techniques in some depth. Digitized photographs and video also harbor plenty of white noise. A digitized photograph is stored as an array of colored dots, called pixels. Each pixel typically has three numbers associated with it, one each for red, green, and blue intensities, and these values often range from 0-255. Each number is stored as eight bits (zeros and ones), with a one worth 128 in the most significant bit (on the left), then 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and a one in the least significant bit (on the right) worth just 1.

A difference of one or two in the intensities is imperceptible, and, in fact, a digitized picture can still look good if the least significant four bits of intensity are altered—a change of up to 16 in the color's value. This gives plenty of space to hide a secret message. Text is usually stored with 8 bits per letter, so we could hide 1.5 letters in each pixel of the cover photo. A 640x480 pixel image, the size of a small computer monitor, can hold over 400,000 characters. That's a whole novel hidden in one modest photo!

Hiding a secret photo in a cover picture is even easier. Line them up, pixel by pixel. Take the important four bits of each color value for each pixel in the secret photo (the left ones). Replace the unimportant four bits in the cover photo (the right ones). The cover photo won't change much, you won't lose much of the secret photo, but to an untrained eye you're sending a completely innocuous picture.

Unfortunately, anyone who cares to find your hidden image probably has a trained eye. The intensity values in the original cover image were white noise, i.e. random. The new values are strongly patterned, because they represent significant information of the secret image. This is the sort of change which is easily detectable by statistics. So the final trick to good steganography is make the message look random before hiding it.

One solution is simply to encode the message before hiding it. Using a good code, the coded message will appear just as random as the picture data it is replacing. Another approach is to spread the hidden information randomly over the photo. “Pseudo-random number” generators take a starting value, called a seed, and produce a string of numbers which appear random. For example, pick a number between 0 and 16 for a seed. Multiply your seed by 3, add 1, and take the remainder after division by 17. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Unless you picked 8, you'll find yourself somewhere in the sequence 1, 4, 13, 6, 2, 7, 5, 16, 15, 12, 3, 10, 14, 9, 11, 0, 1, 4, ... which appears somewhat random. To spread a hidden message randomly over a cover picture, use the pseudo-random sequence of numbers as the pixel order. Descrambling the photo requires knowing the seed that started the pseudo-random number generator.

Here's a sample. The bear above is an adorable glow-in-the-dark skeleton costumed bear. The bear below is the same photo, now containing a hidden secret picture. To see the secret photo, get yourself a copy of S-Tools by Andy Brown and decrypt using the secret password “strange.” Or, click here.

With these new techniques, a hidden message is indistinguishable from white noise. Even if the message is suspected, there is no proof of its existence. To actually prove there was a message, and not just randomness, the code needs to be cracked or the random number seed guessed. This feature of modern steganography is called “plausible deniability."

All of this sounds fairly nefarious, and in fact the obvious uses of steganography are for things like espionage. But there are a number of peaceful applications. The simplest and oldest are used in map making, where cartographers sometimes add a tiny fictional street to their maps, allowing them to prosecute copycats. A similar trick is to add fictional names to mailing lists as a check against unauthorized resellers.

Most of the newer applications use steganography like a watermark, to protect a copyright on information. Photo collections, sold on CD, often have hidden messages in the photos which allow detection of unauthorized use. The same technique applied to DVDs is even more effective, since the industry builds DVD recorders to detect and disallow copying of protected DVDs.

Even biological data, stored on DNA, may be a candidate for hidden messages, as biotech companies seek to prevent unauthorized use of their genetically engineered material. The technology is already in place for this: three New York researchers successfully hid a secret message in a DNA sequence and sent it across the country. Sound like science fiction? A secret message in DNA provided Star Trek's explanation for the dubious fact that all aliens seem to be humans in prosthetic makeup!

Maybe, as in Star Trek, there really is a message hidden somewhere for humans to find. In the real world, the place to look for such a message is space, and humans have been looking for quite some time. Marconi, the inventor of radio, speculated that strange signals heard by his company might be signals from another planet. To his credit, he was hearing these signals years before his competitors, but today they are known to be caused by lightning strikes.

In 1924, Mars passed relatively close to Earth, and the U.S. Army and Navy actually ordered their stations to quiet transmissions and listen for signals. They found nothing. In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake and a cadre of radio technicians used their 85 foot radio telescope for one of the first extensive studies of signals from space. They listened to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Erdani for 150 hours, and found nothing.

Today, the search for messages from space is underway on an unbelievable scale. The SETI@home project, based in Berkeley, has convinced millions of people to use their home computers in the search for signals. Their simple marketing trick was to package the calculations in a nifty screensaver, and now SETI@home is the largest computation in history. They've been looking for more than two years, with a telescope a thousand feet wide, but still they have found nothing.

Why have they found nothing? Maybe they haven't searched enough. But there is a dilemma here, the dilemma that empowers steganography. You never know if a message is hidden. You can search and search, but when you've found nothing you can only conclude: Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but maybe there is nothing to find.

Bryan Clair is a professor of mathematics at Saint Louis University. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

A comprehensive steganography website is F. Petitcolas’ page, which has history and current research. To get a copy of S-Tools, or other shareware steganography programs, the best place to look is StegoArchive.Com.

The comprehensive history of cryptography reference is D. Kahn's The Codebreakers. An article from the journal Cryptologia has some interesting 16th and 17th century history.

For more on document marking by altering line spacing, look at the “Copyright Protection for the Electronic Distribution of Text Documents” paper on N. Maxemchuk's page. For more on DNA based steganography, try this article by Ivars Peterson.

Regarding American Gods, Neil Gaiman's new novel, two fanciful scenarios instantly present themselves:

In the first, a devout secularist notes the title in a bookstore window, scowls at its evident conjunction of church and state, and that evening, intent on purging the shelves of such reactionary trash, composes complaints not only to the store's owner but also to his city's mayor, various and sundry congresspeople, and, for good measure, Abigail Van Buren.

In the second, a staunch fundamentalist spies the same title, flies into a rage over what appears to be pagan nonsense—by an English expatriate, no less!—and that night skulks back to torch the bookstore's window display with a Molotov cocktail (which, thankfully, does little damage because its creator saved the good stuff for herself).

All whimsy aside, American Gods should by rights attract attention across a vast spectrum of readers: during the past dozen or so years, Gaiman has enjoyed a career of stunning diversity, and this book feels almost self-consciously summational, a novelistic milestone set with pardonable pride and no little fanfare along the literary freeway of one of our most promising young fantasists.

That said, it seems conceivable (if unlikely) that a reader here and there may have little or no knowledge of Gaiman's career. Thus, some background:

In the beginning—no pun intended—Gaiman worked as a journalist, writing and conducting interviews for the British editions of Penthouse, Knave, and other publications (an example of this work appears in Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden, edited by Stephen Jones).

In the late ‘80s, he turned his talents to comic books, memorably in Sandman (now and again d.b.a. The Sandman, reflecting a disdain for exactitude common to many comics’ colophons); even though that 75-issue series concluded more than half a decade ago, its publisher, DC, has faithfully kept it in print in ten collections, in both hardback and trade paperback. Even more memorably, Gaiman collaborated with artist Dave McKean on several non-genre works, including the unnerving Mr. Punch (1994) and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1997), a splendid treatise on the dangers of barter.

In non-illustrated prose, Gaiman has also been busy. With Terry Pratchett, he wrote Good Omens, a mirthful 1990 novel about the end of the world. (Its copyright page warns, “Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.")

Then, in 1996, through BBC Books, he published his first solo novel, the urban fantasy Neverwhere, which was based on a BBC2 television series scripted by Gaiman and was de-Anglicized by him for Avon Books the next year. Avon likewise released his Smoke and Mirrors, a 1998 collection of short stories that enlarged upon the small-press Angels and Visitations, an exquisite miscellany from five years prior.

Through Avon's short-lived Spike imprint, Gaiman next proffered Stardust, the 1999 expansion of a tale originally illustrated by the Arthur Rackham-ish Charles Vess in 1997 and 1998 for a four-issue miniseries from DC's Vertigo imprint, which directly collected it in a handsome, outsized hardcover.

Otherwise, he's written the BBC radio adaptation of Signal to Noise, an early Gaiman-McKean “graphic novel"; a teleplay for J. Michael Straczynski's acclaimed Babylon 5; and the English language script for Princess Mononoke, the Japanese animated tour de force released in U.S. cinemas in 1999. Other Hollywood work, it almost goes without saying, has beckoned.

In short, diverse may not adequately describe Gaiman's career. “I'm not a novelist any more than I was a comics writer or a TV writer,” Gaiman once noted in Locus. “I'm a storyteller."

Coincidentally, the story of the work now under discussion bears a bit of telling. Gaiman, in an essay for Powells.com entitled “Books Have Sexes,” traced the initial inspiration for American Gods to the spring of 1997. After Neverwhere, he had planned to work on a novel with the “working title of Time in the Smoke...about the nature of time in the city of London.” More than a year later, though, after various false starts, the earlier inspiration sharpened:

"[W]hen I was in Iceland on my way to a sort of micro Scandinavian tour of Norway, Denmark, and Finland, wandering around Reykjavik in a very sleep-deprived state in summer when the sun never sets, all of a sudden the American novel came into focus."

He acted on that focus fast: “I wrote a letter to my publisher telling them that my next book wouldn't be a historical fantasy set in restoration London after all, but a contemporary American phantasmagoria."

Easier said than done. In his introduction to Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman observed, “Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out.” Similar circumstances apparently pertained to American Gods. Although the novel had been scheduled for British publication as early as September 2000, Gaiman didn't finish writing it till January 2001. “The book turned out to be twice as long as I had expected,” he stated in the Powells.com essay. “The plot I thought I was writing twisted and snaked and I slowly realised it wasn't the plot at all."

Moreover, Gaiman told interviewer Paula Guran, “At its longest American Gods was about 200,000 words: I trimmed that back to about 185,000 words for the final draft.” To her he also confessed, “If I'd known how big [the novel would be] I might not have dared to start."

Given the historical record, one can only presume Gaiman deadpanned that confession: his ambition has long equaled his considerable talent. (A fellow British writer once admiringly denigrated him as “a Southern yuppie shark.") In the introduction to Angels and Visitations, for instance, Gaiman confided, “I sent the first story I ever wrote to Punch [the venerated British humor magazine]....” Moreover, in an interview published almost five years past, he declared:

"You were asking earlier about my novels....I do know they're going to be all over the place. When I finish writing them, it's going to be bloody hard to rack them, because they aren't going to slide neatly into the horror or the humor or the fantasy or science fiction or the mystery or the main stream sections of the book shelf."

American Gods embodies that declaration.

The novel focuses on the improbably christened Shadow Moon, a peripatetic 32-year-old imprisoned for assault and battery. On the eve of his release, Shadow receives numbing news: his wife Laura has died in an auto accident.

On the plane trip to Indiana to bury her, he encounters Mr. Wednesday, a lupine rogue who knows things about Shadow that he shouldn't and couldn't. Directly, even though he neither trusts nor likes the older man, Shadow accepts an offer to serve as Wednesday's bodyguard/dogsbody.

Then comes the uncanny.

Shadow's wife refuses to stay interred, for instance; smelling faintly “of rot, of flowers and preservatives,” she visits him in an Indiana motel. Further, strange dreams plague him, dreams involving a bison-headed man and portents of a coming storm that seems more than merely meteorological. Wednesday, meantime, slowly reveals himself to be something beyond a grifter and roué.

How much beyond, astute readers will have deduced from his odd introduction aboard their storm-tossed plane: “[S]eeing that today certainly is my day—why don't you call me Wednesday? Mister Wednesday. Although given the weather, it might as well be Thursday, eh?” (Such readers, to be sure, oughtn't congratulate themselves overmuch, in light of the novel's title and the name of a character mentioned on its very first page.)

More specifically, after a few nicks with Occam's razor, Shadow recognizes Wednesday as an American incarnation—avatar likely wouldn't fit Shadow's personal lexicon—of the Norse god variously known as Odin, Votan, and the All-Father (deities seemingly being as fond of aliases as the average petty criminal). Moreover, Shadow's new employer is plotting a divine duel to the death, a celestial showdown.

Why? Economics. “[T]here are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief,” Wednesday notes at one point, “gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.” Unfortunately, worship, be it active or passive, appears to be a zero-sum game, a game being won rather handily by the nouveau divin.

As a result, Wednesday, with Shadow in tow, starts to marshal an opposition force, traveling hither and yon to recruit confreres only Gaiman and the late Joseph Campbell could perhaps identify. (American Gods, in all likelihood, will give birth to more than one thesis in comparative mythology.) Those confreres range from the more-or-less familiar, such as the Hindu goddess Kali, to the puckishly ineffable, like what appears to be the god of elision, encountered in that modern mecca to ineffability, Las Vegas.

Along the way, as suggested, Shadow travels, sometimes with Wednesday, sometimes without, roaming a nation defined by macadam, an impossible sprawl of televisions with “motel-fuzzy” reception and “red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger.” Gaiman once remarked, “England has history; Americans have geography,” and he herein explores that geography, tracing an arcane network of roads and streets and highways and interstates from the wonderfully realized Cairo, Illinois, to the wonderfully fictionalized Lakeside, Wisconsin, with side trips of varying length and significance to San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, and Boulder, in a Baedeker of the outré describing a land where a fire-eyed ifrit out of Islamic myth pilots a New York taxi and a man is crucified in harrowing detail in rural Virginia and something like the Teutonic Götterdämmerung erupts atop Lookout Mountain in the northwest corner of Georgia.

Also along the way occur kidnaping, torture, and homicide enough to satisfy even the most sanguine Sopranos fan—and, in fact, to tempt one to get punny with the phrase godhood.

It all ends anticlimactically, sad to say. After the fairly satisfying denouement to American Gods comes what's brazenly labeled “Part Four” and “Epilogue: Something That the Dead Are Keeping Back.” This epilogue, unfortunately, comprises two chapters and a “postscript"—almost three dozen pages of material. Worse still, in large part, it comes of necessity, because it answers questions posed in the tale proper—What did Ganesh's comment signify? What became of sweet young Alison?—and explains a brace of earlier coincidences that seem, on first reading, embarrassingly amateurish for a writer of such professionalism.

In that context, Gaiman's “purloined letter” goes at first unnoticed because of his skill at misdirection. (In an interview not too long ago, Darrell Schweitzer noted en passant that Gaiman, like his protagonist here, has a talent for sleight-of-hand.) At least initially, the epilogue satisfies because it ensnares the reader in the solution to the mystery suggested by the questions posed previously. Moreover, earlier in the novel, Gaiman primes the pump with ancillary narratives—here the tale of a resourceful Cornishwoman transplanted to America in the eighteenth century, there a devastating sketch of Vikings and Amerinds—which by their numbers make the ending seem like one last interpolation, thereby concealing its structural infelicity.

On reflection, though, one can't help but echo Gertrude Stein's “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"—American Gods ends in anticlimax, and there's no denying it.

In the end, of course, that may matter little. If, like most, if not all, attempts at the Great American Novel—and Gaiman's working title qua published title perforce positions the book thus—American Gods falls shy of perfection, it does so in a grand tradition forgiving of incongruity, wherein, say, Huckleberry Finn and “Miss Watson's” Jim seek to flee the evils of slavery by heading south. In that light, some consideration should go to the manifold pleasures it provides.

One such pleasure: American Gods features some fine writing of the fantastic. (That might seem a given till one recalls any number of so-called fantasies with all the panache of a laundry list.) Consider, for example, this passage, in which Shadow undergoes his first extended encounter with the uncanny:

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast's mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ocher leaf.

Perhaps because of his earlier work in journalism, Gaiman also exhibits an eye for mundane detail that would escape a lesser fabulist, as in a slick early sequence wherein Wednesday defrauds a bank—Gaiman makes the scam all too believable. One likewise immediately thinks of the following account by Mr. Czernobog, a crotchety Chicagoan as gray and imposing as the bow of an icebreaker:

"I got a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes?....Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry...."

As mimesis and soliloquy both, that passage shines, and similar bits recur throughout the novel. “You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, if you're a funeral director,” the cranelike Mr. Ibis (who is indeed a funeral director, of sorts) informs Shadow a third of the way into American Gods. “They think maybe you're scouting for business."

As the preceding suggests, despite its subject and its scale, the book doesn't want for humor, happily enough. “Even if I did set out to write a bleak, horror novel,” Gaiman stated in an interview published around the time he was having the first inspiration for American Gods, “I have a strangely, cynically sunny disposition.” An example of that disposition occurs in the first chapter, in fact. In a bar, over a Southern Comfort and Coke, a ginger-bearded man almost seven feet tall introduces himself as a leprechaun, prompting this exchange:

Shadow did not smile. “Really?” he said. “Shouldn't you be drinking Guinness?"

"Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box,” said the bearded man.

In the real world, of course, such a retort would horrify: those who customarily use the phrase think outside the box also customarily traffic in dehumanizing euphemisms such as downsize. In context, though, the professed leprechaun's use of the business jargon surprises and delights.

Similarly, three-quarters of the way into American Gods, Shadow and two of his companions encounter one of the new deities, Media, “perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed,” who reminds him of “every newscaster he'd ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn't really resemble a living room” and who speaks with the plastic bonhomie of the cotillion crowd. The encounter sparks this drollery:

"Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?"
"Different woman,” said Mr. Nancy. “Same deal."

Presenting themselves throughout the novel are other grace notes less readily classifiable, ranging from an easy allusion to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, to bits of offhand sagacity ("People only fight over imaginary things,” Mr. Nancy tells Shadow toward the end). Enumerating them, however, would constitute overkill. Suffice it to say that American Gods warrants readers’ attention—and that Neil Gaiman's next project, whatever it may be, should warrant even more.

Bryan A. Hollerbach lives in St. Louis, where he works as a proofreader for a Big Five accounting firm. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. New York, 2001.

The novel's British printing deserves mention. A product of Headline Book Publishing, a division of London's Hodder Headline, it was typeset by the delightfully named Palimpsest Book Production Limited. Its cover poses the question “Is nothing sacred?” and shows the sign for the Stardust Motel beside a cruciform telephone pole. The cover also bears a banner declaring both “GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK” and “As good as STEPHEN KING or your money back."

Gaiman, Neil. Angels and Visitations. Minneapolis, 1993.

Gaiman, Neil. “Books Have Sexes."

Gaiman, Neil. Smoke and Mirrors. New York, 1998.

Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. New York, 1990.

Guran, Paula. “Neil Gaiman: Pretty Decent.” The Spook, July 2001.

Horsting, Jessie. “So Long, Sandman.” Midnight Graffiti, No. 8 (Winter/Spring 1997).

Morehouse, Lyda. “SFC Interview: Neil Gaiman.” Science Fiction Chronicle, Vol. 20, No. 5, Issue 202 (May 1999).

Morrison, Grant. “From My Pulpit.” Tripwire, Vol. 1, No. 16 (Spring 1997).

“Neil Gaiman: Of Monsters & Miracles.” Locus, Vol. 42, No. 4, Issue 459 (April 1999).

Schweitzer, Darrell. “Weird Tales Talks With Neil Gaiman.” Weird Tales, Vol. 56, No. 4, Whole No. 320 (Summer 2000).

We all know what the Middle Ages looked like. Medieval clothing, in particular, is easy to picture, since we've encountered it everywhere from movies to fairy tales to high school productions of King Lear. Even as a child I knew hennins, hose, pageboy haircuts, and pointy shoes. This vision of medieval Europe is highly stereotyped, of course, but that's what makes it useful. The medieval setting is a staple of fantasy novels—it's romantic, it's picturesque, and it gives the modern, western reader a starting point in common with the author. Fashion may have changed substantially during the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, but there seems to be little point in a work of fiction delving too deeply into the subtleties—even if one describes the clothing in more detail, the reader will either get snagged on strange terminology or end up picturing stereotypical Medieval clothing anyway.

This is not to say that a little bit of education about medieval clothing wouldn't be useful to the writer of speculative fiction, but in a different way than one might imagine. Clothing is never just clothing: it can carry with it a variety of social, economic, and even moral implications. The Middle Ages are foreign enough to our experience that many of their ways of thinking about clothing will be counterintuitive for us. I am going to take you on a small tour of clothing production and of the many roles that clothing played in medieval life. My hope, as always, is that you will find some odd detail that grabs you, something that might not have occurred to you otherwise. The seeds of fiction, in my experience, are almost always facts.

As might be expected, wool was by far the most common raw material for medieval clothing. The quality of wool varied widely, depending on the breed of sheep and where it was raised—British wool was, even then, considered superior due to the cool, wet climate and longer grazing season. Long, fine, white fibers were preferable to short, coarse, dark ones, since they resulted in a finer, stronger thread that could be dyed more brilliantly. Although the exact dates are unknown, the Middle Ages saw the invention of the spinning wheel, the European horizontal loom (other horizontal looms already being in use elsewhere in the world), and the fulling mill, which beat, shrank, and softened wool cloth mechanically.

Wool fabric varied widely in price, depending on the quality of wool used, the hue and darkness of the color, and the process by which it had been woven. The cheapest cloth would have been coarse, scratchy, undyed dark wool, possibly blended with linen or hemp. More expensive fabric would be lighter and finer, could involve a patterned weave instead of a straight basket weave, and would have been softened by fulling. The most expensive woolen fabric would have been nearly as fine as silk. Woad dyed wool various shades of blue or, in combination with other plants, green. The most expensive and prestigious color was red from the kermes insect, and this dye, when combined with a regimen of fulling and clipping, produced the highly luxurious Scarlet cloth (from which “scarlet,” the color, derives). Black, which was so popular amongst nobility in the late Middle Ages, was produced not by simply weaving black wool, but by a complicated dying process that made it very expensive, which in turn contributed to its popularity.

We generally associate silks with China, where silk technologies originated. By the time of the Roman Empire, however, silk production had spread all the way to Persia, and it was carried still further in the early Medieval period by Muslims, crossing the north of Africa and into southern Europe. By the thirteenth century, Spain, Italy, and Sicily were producing silks of high enough quality to rival Byzantium's eastern imports. More silk on the market meant it was no longer used exclusively for liturgical purposes. Rich people could actually afford to wear it themselves, and the not-so-rich could sometimes afford a little brocade or ribbon to trim their woolen garments.

It is difficult to gauge how much linen and hemp were used since vegetable fibers decay so rapidly in Europe's wet climate. It is probably safe to assume, however, that because they were so easy to grow and process, even at the cottage level, they were widely used. Linen does not take dye very well, so most linens were left white. They were worn as head coverings and veils, underclothes, aprons, infant clothes, and work clothes for hot weather.

Europeans associated the wearing of animal skins with paganism and barbarity, so one does not see much leather clothing. Shoes, belts, gloves, artisans’ aprons, and armor (or padding for armor) are about the extent of it. Fur became popular for trim or to line the inside of warm garments. The more expensive varieties were frequently a dramatic color: sable, vair, ermine, and miniver (squirrel).

The actual production of clothing took place in many different ways. The most straightforward way was to have your women do everything at home, from wool processing to weaving to sewing. This had been the tradition in classical Greece and Rome, and was continued, particularly in rural households, throughout the Middle Ages. As population centers grew, however, the production of textiles became a centralized industry, and therefore more the domain of men. Weaving and sewing became separate crafts, practiced by separate guilds.

For the wealthy, it would have been most common to employ the services of a tailor and have clothing custom-made. The customer would be responsible for providing the tailor with the fabric, but the tailor would provide the thread. If one wanted fur trim or embroidery, a furrier or embroiderer (each from a different guild) could also be employed. Royal households would have had all these craftsmen on staff, sometimes one per each adult in the household. This is not to say that the art of sewing was lost in wealthy households—women, and not just servants, would certainly have been engaged in embroidery and lace making, if nothing else, but it is likely that some did repairs and alterations themselves as well.

Surprisingly enough, there was also some ready-made clothing available. Mercers’ shops, the medieval answer to the general store, sold a variety of items. Most seem to have been accessories, like gloves, caps, and socks, but some carried simple shifts and hose as well. Tailors would also sometimes have clothing for sale that had been made but not paid for. While this was not exactly department-store convenience, it was still an interesting and unusual development for medieval Europe, where such products usually passed directly from producer to consumer.

During the early Middle Ages, the difference in masculine and feminine profile was not very pronounced: both sexes wore a long tunic called a “bliaut,” belted at the waist, and perhaps a cloak. This is not to say men and women looked alike—men wore beards and their hemlines sometimes crept up to the knee—but rather that both sexes were still in skirts. It was only later, corresponding to the development of armor, that a strong differentiation began to manifest itself.

The bliaut, while compatible with chain mail, did not wear well under the more sophisticated plate armor that developed. The bliaut was too long, and its T-shape meant that its sleeves bunched up under the arms, which was uncomfortable under armor. The pourpoint or joupon, a shorter garment with a more tailored contour, was developed to replace the tunic and was worn with hose. The joupon eventually evolved into the more familiar doublet, a long sleeved, jacket-like garment, often quilted, which tapered at the waist and flared at the hips. This “skirt” didn't provide any coverage whatsoever, meaning that hose (which began life as thigh high stockings held up by straps) had to be lengthened and joined together at the top. Hose were not knit: what little stretch they had came from cutting the material on the bias (diagonally). They had to be tied to the bottom of the doublet because they didn't stay up well. They did, however, show off the legs admirably. The result is that men ended up with a different profile than women—they now wore a form-fitting outfit with articulated limbs, while the women were still in skirts.

With this differentiation came the systematic exaggeration of other masculine characteristics. Doublets were padded for a pigeon-breasted, manly-man effect. Codpieces, one of the most comical fashions ever, grew to prominence. From their humble beginnings as the mere defenders of masculine modesty, codpieces were eventually padded, embroidered, bejeweled, and obvious. Some could be used for storage like a pocket or a purse. Shoulder padding and short capes added to a man's breadth, and even beards made a comeback after the crusades. To see all these innovations put to good use, almost any portrait of Henry VIII will do.

In 21st century America the stereotype of women being more caught up in fashion than men is still pretty common, but in the Middle Ages people considered the opposite to be true. Men, especially in the upper classes, were highly concerned with clothing and very fond of finery. It's likely that women were too, but the usual troubles with documentation occur—men did most of the recording, and they seem to have had a lot more interest in their own clothing than in whatever the women may have been wearing. It is not uncommon to find a detailed record of what a duke was wearing on his wedding day that makes no mention whatsoever of his bride's clothing. Cautionary exempla tales decry women's predilection for fancy dress more than men's, but then, they decry all the vices in women more than in men.

The most remarkable developments in women's fashion during the Middle Ages occurred not in their clothing but in their headgear. Clothing itself changed superficially: waistlines and necklines moved up and down, sleeves alternated between voluminous and tight-fitting. Women generally dressed in two layers, an overdress (cote-hardie) and an underdress (the aforementioned bliaut). Sometimes a linen shift—as close as a Medieval woman got to underwear—was worn under the bliaut, but this was chiefly an affectation of the wealthy. The houppelande, a voluminous robe also worn by men (with slightly different styling), was popular until the fourteenth century and was worn on top of everything else. Headgear, however, is where Medieval women's clothing had its true distinctiveness.

Head coverings were not optional, first of all. Only young girls were permitted to go around with their heads uncovered. Hair was emblematic of feminine seductiveness—Eve, Jezebel, Mary Magdalene, and other biblical temptresses commonly appear with their hair down. In addition, a quirk of Medieval theology encouraged women to keep their ears hidden. Some theologians believed Mary had conceived through her ear, thereby retaining her virginity, but creating an odd and, frankly, creepy sexualization of the feminine ear. Pulling off anyone's hat was considered a crime, but forcibly removing a woman's headdress, in particular, was tantamount to accusing her of being a whore.

In late antiquity and the early Medieval period, women's headdresses consisted mostly of a “couvre-chef,” a large square of cloth (generally linen) draped over the head and held in place by a strip of fabric or a circlet. Hair was worn Frankish style: two long plaits entwined with ribbons or leather strips, and sporting pointy metal tips at the ends. That much sexy hair couldn't be left out where everyone could see it for long—the braids were soon being wrapped around the ears or the back of the head, carefully tucked under where no one could see it. The coverchief turned into the wimple, which covered the head, hair, ears, neck, and sometimes even the cheeks and forehead. A variety of hats and turbans could be worn over a wimple. The wimple drifted in and out of popularity, until only nuns and widows were still wearing them. A vestige remained in the form of the barbette, a linen strap under the chin, but by and large women's throats were out in the open during the later Middle Ages.

That's when the really strange hats started appearing. It has been hypothesized that women's hats during the gothic period were intended to emulate architecture, and that makes sense in the case of the steeple-like hennin. Some headdresses, however, resembled horns more than churches. Fine linen veils became popular, supported in various winged shapes by wires. Ears eventually became visible again, but women began plucking their hairlines to give themselves what Chaucer called a “high forheed,” tucking any hint of hair away under their hats.

As with men's codpieces, women's clothing engaged in the systematic exaggeration of feminine features. Padding was worn under clothing to make bellies bulge, and the bum-bolster (a late development) did exactly what its name suggests. Cosmetics, some of them highly toxic, whitened the skin and teeth. Weaves and wigs lengthened and thickened hair.

The notion of pink as feminine and blue as masculine would have been reversed in the Middle Ages. While specific colors were not assigned to gender, blue was considered a weaker color than pink (which derives from red, after all). Blue also connoted gentleness and was associated with Mary. Red stood for power, passion, wealth, and blood. Green was more ambiguous—it could stand for envy, but also was associated with spring and youth. Yellow was generally in disfavor and associated with various vices, among them avarice and cowardice. Black was not used as a color for mourning until nearly the Renaissance, and then only by the wealthy. White stood for purity, but was not worn by brides—whatever their station, people were simply married in the very best clothing they owned.

In a society as rigidly structured as Medieval Europe, sumptuary laws were probably inevitable. As cities and trade developed, more untitled individuals became rich from trade and the nobility noticed a disturbing development—mere merchants could now afford to clothe themselves in expensive material! This was unacceptable, of course. If the common rabble could afford silks and scarlets, then it was going to become increasingly difficult to tell who was who. As a result, laws sprang up all over Europe dictating who could wear what. Certain colors, materials, styles, and even decorative patterns were forbidden to anyone without a good pedigree. The laws varied from place to place, and included such eccentric details as how tall a lady's hennin could be (it was proportional to her rank), what classes of people could wear pointy shoes (no one at or below the level of “artisan"), and that peasants should never wear more than one color at once except, perhaps, a differently colored hood for special occasions.

There were other, less obvious reasons for instituting sumptuary laws, however. In some places, it was the clergy who pressed for the laws, fearing that fashion (and hence, vanity) was getting way out of hand. The clergy generally targeted fashions that were too revealing or ostentatious, e.g. men's short hemlines and women's trains. Sometimes the purpose of regulation was to keep young noblemen from bankrupting themselves in an attempt to keep up with the latest fashions at court. Being titled did not automatically mean you were rich, and young men in particular were prone to ruining their family fortunes. Finally, some places instituted sumptuary laws as a means of protecting local industry or stimulating trade. In England during the fourteenth century, for example, laws prohibited the purchase of any non-English fabric, protecting their wool industry against the threat of cheap foreign imports.

Clothing has meaning beyond its beauty or utility. I have already outlined how sumptuary laws helped reinforce social strata by relegating certain fashions and materials to specific segments of society. Clothing also served to send more specific messages. Just as we can identify police officers, medical workers, and even store clerks today by their uniforms, clothing differentiated certain groups in Medieval society. The wealthy were responsible for clothing their servants—what better way to advertise one's power than to dress them all alike, in a livery based upon the colors of one's coat of arms? Some nobles even dressed their children in livery. The coat of arms itself is another example of a clothing signifier. While it never really caught on for everyday wear, coats of arms or their devices did appear occasionally on formal clothing, and were specific enough that one could immediately identify the wearer's parentage.

Members of guilds often dressed in specific colors, and were therefore readily identifiable as tailors, tanners, etc. Members of religious orders dressed in distinctive habits, which earned them nicknames—the Franciscans, for example, were sometimes called “Cordeliers” after their distinctive belts of knotted cord (and I am amused to note that, as I write this, my spell-check not only recognizes the word “Cordeliers,” but capitalizes it for me, suggesting that the name is still in use). Doctors, especially during times of plague, wore a sack-like bird mask over their heads, and the protruding beak was filled with various herbs to keep harmful vapors at bay. Pilgrims carried a distinctive staff and a bag for bread. Sometimes they wore emblems and souvenirs from the sites they visited, such as the scallop shell of Santiago de Compostela. It was important for them to be identifiable: because of their holy mission, it was a gross offense, both legally and spiritually, to harm them. Potential cutthroats were, I'm sure, grateful for the warning that killing the traveler with the staff would earn them an extra hot place in hell.

Medieval people had a horror of leprosy. Some communities tried to force lepers to wear distinctive clothing, and for a while, in the south of France, sufferers had to wear a patch in the shape of a duck's foot. Imposing standards of dress on lepers, however, proved difficult since no one wanted to get close enough to do it. Instead, lepers used a rattle or clapper to warn others of their approach, and this had one advantage over clothing—you could tell when one was coming up behind you.

Local laws required Jews, “Saracens,” and sometimes even Christian deviants to wear distinctive clothing, or markers on their clothing, so they could be readily identified. Again, the details varied from community to community. For Jews, the markers most often consisted of a round patch, usually yellow, about the size of a human palm, to be displayed prominently upon the front of the garment. They could sometimes get out of wearing it—for a fee, of course. Muslims were marked with a yellow crescent. In fact, visible religious identification may have begun in Islamic countries as a means of identifying those who were exempt from heeding the call to prayer. In Christian Europe, however, lawmakers were more interested in segregation, in preventing intermarriage, and in increasing the revenues brought in by tolls and taxes levied exclusively on non-Christians.

The clothing worn by prostitutes was also heavily regulated. Their required markers were sometimes extremely visible: striped hoods or cloaks, black and white pointed hats, and yellow dresses are just a few variations. These later evolved into armbands of a certain color, or a hood cut in a distinctive shape. Fur, jewelry, and even embroidery were generally forbidden to prostitutes, although the reasons for this are ambiguous. It may have been because such finery was only considered appropriate for respectable women, but it may also have been for the protection of the prostitutes themselves. Such visible wealth could have made them targets for robbery, and with no male guardians, they wouldn't have had much legal recourse.

What fascinates me most about medieval clothing is how little we know. That seems to contradict what I said in the very first paragraph, I realize, but it underscores an important point—medieval clothing is largely a matter of interpretation. Very little fabric remains from that era, thanks to Europe's climate. Writings contain references to articles of clothing that sometimes can't be identified precisely. Artwork depicts men much more frequently than women, or depicts farmhands laboring in their Sunday best, or gives us representations that are hard to understand. A painting of a woman with a butterfly veil, for example, raises more questions than it answers: if the veil is presumably held up by wires, how thick were they? Were they visible? Could you have put your eye out with one? Was the veil stiffly starched, or do the wires hold all the weight? No one knows for sure. The information has to be interpreted, and interpretations differ. This is part of why the costumes in Camelot look like they're from the 60s, and those from A Knight's Tale, when we watch it years from now, will look so very turn-of-the-millennium. We see the Middle Ages, ultimately, through the prism of our own experiences.

Rachel Hartman gave up a million-dollar career in Comparative Literature to make comic books. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Rampage, Brainbomb, and SPX99, and her regular series, Amy Unbounded, has won two awards. When not obsessing over her storylines, she's reading about medieval economics or imagining she can dance. Her previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life

Madeline Pelner Cosman, Medieval Wordbook

Francis M. Kelly and Randolph Schwabe, A Short History of Costume, 1066-1800

John Peacock, Costume 1066-1990s

Pepin Press Design Books, A Pictorial History of Costume

Marie Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages

Lynn Schnurnberger, Let There Be Clothes

Tom Tierney, Medieval Fashions

Joan Aiken is the author of over sixty books for adults and children, perhaps the best known of which are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. Her latest book, Shadows and Moonshine, is a collection of short stories soon to be published by David Godine, while editions of The Cuckoo Tree, The Stolen Lake, and A Necklace of Raindrops have all been recently reissued. She comes from a literary family; her father was the well-known poet Conrad Aiken, and her brother, John Aiken, was also a published writer. She still types all her novels on a typewriter, never having moved onto a computer, therefore this interview was conducted by mail. Aiken lives in Sussex, England, with her husband.

Gavin Grant: When did you begin writing? What were your influences?

Joan Aiken: I began writing on my 5th birthday, when I bought a writing pad with birthday money and began filling it with poems and stories. The stories were very short. One, “Her Husband was a Demon,” based on a dream, was longer. When I went to school at age 12, two books in the school library, John Masefield's The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, influenced me very much in my first full-length novel, written at age 16 or 17. But other influences were multifarious, since I read so much as a child—E. E. Nesbit, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Charles Dickens, Saki, James Thurber, and Edgar Allan Poe.

GG: I have read that, when writing a book, you used to read it to your children, as they were the best critics. While writing, do you still read your books to children?

JA: I have read my books to my grandchildren, who seemed to enjoy them and were not as critical as my children—but perhaps a grandmother is thought to be above criticism.

GG: What do you feel is the difference between writing for adults and writing for children? Do you plan the piece or work differently?

JA: As far as I am concerned an autopilot takes over to change the mode between writing for adults and writing for children. There are many differences—the vocabulary is simpler, the style more direct. The pace is faster when writing for children, who soon become bored by descriptions of thought-processes, flashbacks, overlong descriptions. There is no great difference in the structure of plots. Characters in children's books are simpler and more strongly defined, like those in Morality plays—personified abstractions.

GG: For many people (in the U.S.), the Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its follow-up books are deeply associated with illustrator Edward Gorey, who died last year. Do you feel similarly about the relation of Gorey's pictures to the books? Does losing his art affect how you think about writing the series?

JA: In fact, Edward Gorey did not illustrate the Wolves series—in England they were illustrated by Pat Marriott, in the U.S. by Robin Jacques, Susan Obrant, and others. Latterly, Gorey did the jackets. I loved those, and am sad and grieved at his loss, but his work was not associated in my mind with the writing of these stories.

GG: One of the interesting things about that series is the lack of a fixed main character. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase focused on Bonnie and Sylvie. Dido Twite then became the main character, but the last three books have centered on Is. What makes you decide to shift main characters in a given book?

JA: Lack of a main character: Of course when I wrote Wolves I had no idea that the book would take off in the way that it did. Its success encouraged me to write a sequel, and I intended Dido Twite to die at the end. But a heartbreaking letter from an American child—"Why did she have to die? She was such a good character.” (with no address on the letter so I was unable to reply) obliged me to rescue her from the sea in Nightbirds on Nantucket. From then on I had become addicted to her. Letters from readers asking if she was going to marry Simon alerted me to the fact that she was becoming too much of an adult, so I introduced Is. Another book, unfinished at this time, returns to Dido. A slight supernatural element may be introduced.

GG: Which illustrators have you enjoyed working with the most?

JA: I have been blessed with my illustrators. Pat Marriott produced exactly the type of pictures I had envisaged for the Wolves chronicles. Jan Pienkowski did wonderful eye-catching illustrations for the younger children's stories. And Quentin Blake was absolutely perfect for Arabel and Mortimer.

GG: In recent years you've been writing novels connected to Jane Austen's novels. Are these as much fun to write as they are to read? What inspired you to write these continuations?

JA: I had written a series of plays for the BBC Schools programmes. Each episode was discussed by a committee and the process was slow. Hung up on this, I had the idea one night lying in bed to write a sequel to Mansfield Park about the heroine's sister who replaces her as Lady Bertram's dame de campagne—it was great fun to write, just slipped off the typewriter and nicely filled in the BBC gaps. So that got me started...

GG: Are there any other authors whose works you would like to continue?

JA: No, there are plenty of other writers whose work I greatly admire, but not to the point of writing sequels.

GG: Have you ever collaborated with another writer?

JA: No, I've never collaborated with another writer—except my daughter Liz, writing a huge number of episodes for a BBC TV series about Arabel and Mortimer the raven.

GG: When your books are published in the U.S., do you do the changes, or does someone else?

JA: When my books are published in the U.S. someone else does the changes and I argue about them.

GG: Do you still write for, or are you at all involved with any magazines? Are there any magazines that you regularly read?

JA: No, I don't any longer write for any magazines, though one occasionally picks up a short story from a collection. I regularly read the Times Literary Supplement, and when it comes my way, The New Yorker.

GG: Do you, or have you ever, written poetry?

JA: Yes, I have written poetry and still do occasionally. One collection, The Skin Spinners, was published in the U.S. and is now out of print. A new story collection, to be published in the U.K. by Cape, Ghostly Beasts, has a few poems interspersed with the stories.

GG: Who are your favorite children's book authors?

JA: The list would be so long that it would cover pages. To name a few, George Macdonald, E. E. Nesbit, Francis Hodgson Burnett, John Masefield, T. H. White, J. R. R. Tolkien, Laurence Houseman, Walter de la Mare, Rudyard Kipling, Kastner, Peter Dickinson, Philippa Pearce, Susan Cooper, Barbara Willard, E. Weatherall (she wrote The Wide Wide World). I could go on and on.

GG: Do you think more adults will read children's books after Philip Pullman's and J. K. Rowling's recent successes?

JA: Yes, Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling seem to have had a galvanizing effect on the children's book market.

GG: Are you working on anything?

JA: I am working on a new Dido Twite story called Midwinter Nightingale, but it has been blocked by the illness of my husband who has recently needed so much care that it left little energy for anything else. But I don't despair about it. Dangerous Games was first started in 1958 and had a 40-year incubation.

GG: What have you been reading recently?

JA: I have mainly been reading comfort books lately, due to the above. Comfort books are 19th century fiction, George Eliot, Trollope, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte. But I did read and enjoy The Amber Spyglass and Nuala O'Faolain's autobiography, Are You Somebody?

GG: Do you have a good local bookshop?

JA: Yes, I have a small but excellent local bookshop which, if it has not got what I want in stock, will order and usually get it within a couple of days. The only book I can't get hold of is an amazing school story, Gentleman's Daughters, by Margaret Masterman, published in the ‘30s and long out of print. If anyone has a copy I'll pay whatever they ask, within reason.

GG: And to end, a couple of questions from young readers, Madelyn and Liza Schwartz (ages 12 and 8):

What scares you? Do you ever get scared writing about these scary things?

JA: What scares me? Gangs, irrational rage, people who can't be reasoned with. I don't think I'd be scared of the supernatural, but then I have never really encountered it. I think I would be more interested than scared if I did.

GG: Has anything supernatural/scary/wicked ever really happened to you?

JA: About five years ago I was alone in the house at night and woke to see a torchlight [flashlight] flickering on my bedroom ceiling; I realized that someone was climbing up a ladder to my window. That was pretty startling, but I called the police on my bedside phone and the intruder made off leaving the ladder (mine) before the cops arrived. That left me nervous at night for a while, but the effect has worn off.

Copyright © 2001 by BookSense.com;
first appeared in BookSense.com;
reprinted by permission.

Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press and edits and publishes a twice-yearly small press magazine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. He works for BookSense.com, an online portal for independent bookshops.

He for she, hae for shae, and a hundred thousand of us lovebuckers if there's one. Silt from the Flooding fills my mandibles, tasting of salt and marsh blossoms. Pods flattening, I stroke through the water, racing the other hes. Like them, it's my first time, and I'm filled from antenna tips to tail flukes with the urge to merge.

Upsee: four moons in a row. One for each sex. The first red as a shae's eyes. Once in four years, the alignment comes, and we're not long to follow.

The tide swells to cover the plain. Behind me, out in the sea, the twisting spires of Carnak, aglitter with phoskelp.

Downsee: mud and dying grass, underwater now. Bubbles burst as the newly born hes erupt from the chitinous ab-domes of their mothers, buried, dry since the waters last came, silent now with their mothers’ passing. Wide-tailed and big-eyed, the newborns dash through the currents and search for the city lights.

The songs have been sung, the poets’ words harvested. But who needs poets? Simpering in their guild spires, they call us lovebuckers. Spires the builders build, like everything else. Why waste time with words when there's so much real work? I'll never be a poet; all I've ever needed I learned in my mother's ab-dome:

Build a tower
Build it well.
Partly pearl and
Partly shell.
Build a tower,
Every He.
Climb atop and
Wait for She.

“Watch it, offal shell!” Another he swims by; a hindpod smacks my mandibles.

“Out of my way, stonebrain.” Back I smack him. My forepod hits the bucker upside the antennae. His carapace flares; segments gleam like blades in the bright-as-day moonlight. Fool to fight because the flaring slows him down; my carapace sleek and nimble, I steal the lead.

There! Low and to the side, a flat shelf of shale swept clean by the tides. Tail flukes lash and take me down. Smooth, sweet shale, glowing dark. My pods form cups, and anchor me. Carapace flares while antennae stiffen with eager erections.

“Mine!” I shout. “Mine, mine, mine!"

Other hes surge around me, but none dash in, none try to steal my plot. Wide and glorious the tide plain, plenty of room for all, and it's a fool who fights when there's love coming.

Nipping a free-flowing strand of seagrass—a nicely pungent bouquet, I might add—I begin to chew. But the urge to flare my carapace becomes overwhelming. Hunching my head and thorax, squeezing my foreknees together, a sharp delicious crackling fills my ears and splits my shell.

I pull the longest segment from my back by twisting around until mandibles take hold. Regurgitating the seagrass with spit forms a milky glue—liquid pearl, as the poets say—to glue the shell to stone. My tower's begun.

Upsee: shadows of haes overhead, dark shapes tracking the breeze as they skim the surface. Downsee: to the left the flood plains drop away. A good site. Have my pick of the shes when they rise from the depths.

Another strip of carapace, and then another. All hail most holy symbolism. The four longest pieces, one for each kind, form the tower's base. The four shortest pieces, one for each guild, glued atop to form a wide platform, and I climb until my antennae break surface.

Fresh in my newly shining carapace, mandibles wide and grinning, I begin to stroke the shreds of chitin from my legs and abdomen. Good grooming is a must; the outer mandibles crush the segments, the inner ones pulverize and mix with spit and the very special secretions marking my maturity. Glowpearl, we call it, or he-shine, and I dab some on each tower corner—where it beams brightly—then sculpt my desires in swirls and glyphs known since time out of shell.

Upsee: the first moon has passed its zenith. He-towers rise on all sides. Long slender Haes sail between them, skimming along the surface, their pods flared as sails. Shadows under the moon as shaes flit through the sky with pods spread to glassy thinness in crescent wings. The second moon nears apogee.

Downsee: the shes come!

Sleek and black as the depths, wisest in wisdom, ready to spend the glory of their final cycle, the shes’ blunt bodies flow with the currents. My antennae twitch eagerly.

“Spindleye!” My mandibles click as my voice cracks. “Spindleye of the fourth quad, City Carnak, Guild Scrillthor, builder of towers and dreams extraordinary!” And the voices of other hes ring forth:

“Tanaspume of the third quad!"

“Rapanorf of the second, poet of poets!"

“Balandron, warrior supreme of the first quad."

“You look likely.” A she drifts up level with me.

“Such a sheen to your carapace. Such a many-layered glint to your jewel eyes,” I answer, bending my knees in a courtly bow.

“Sweet words from one with such strong-looking pods.” She bobs approvingly. “But that's not enough. Have you wisdom?"

“If not, then I will build some, and surround you with it before the night is done."

“Perhaps. We shall see.” Her antennae sweep forward to stroke mine, sending prickles down my underside. She tastes of mitefish, lower-depth mollusks, and the spicy breath of krill-rich currents.

“Ummm. You'll do.” She surges forward, her mandibles fastening to mine. My legs snare her, forepods pulling free from the tower to fasten upon her voluptuous carapace. We swap secretions and I pull her against me.

She breaks the kiss for a moment, her forepods adhering to my carapace. “I'm Tenebrey, quad three, city Gumshir, astrologer of the southern currents."

“And you're exquisite, little mother-to-be.” Bringing my tail flukes up underneath us, I slide eagerly into her hot, secreting ovigonopod. With the first thrust, she gasps, bubbles bursting from her spiracles.

The sumptuous strokes of her antennae as they twine with mine; the delicious sensation of her cerci as she feels up my abdomen; ecstasy under the four moons.

Another thrust, our backs arch, legs twitch in time and it's over. Her tail flukes sweep wide, tightening the muscles of her abdomen to force me out. My turn to gasp, and the bubbles from my spiracles wash around her ruddy carapace as she climbs atop me. Antennae twined, we upsee to watch the haes and shaes.

Thousands of haes surface-float upon backs, shining with pearl and polished with striderwax. Legs and antennae erect and stiff, out of the water into the warm night breeze.

The shaes, resplendent in their pod-stretched wings that steal azures and umbers from the moons, ride the air. The shaes dance! Forming circles, then spheres, squeezing out to squares that erupt into cubes of light and glory.

Voices peel over the flood plains as haes call out to the dancers. Finally, the shaes flatten into a great swirling sheet of iridescence to descend in eager grace.

Each shae has picked a hae. Their limbs lock to each other. Up into the night they surge; their songs become moans, and poetic words transform to grunts and squeals.

“Delicious,” Tenebrey murmurs softly against my antennae.

“It must be something,” I return, nestling against her.

“Oh, it is, it is.” She wriggles and I feel her pods climb up my sides until she's perched on the very crest of my carapace. “Someday you'll know."

“Tell me what it's like."

“Shush. I see one I want.” Her antennae pull from mine, a loss, an eerie emptiness that makes the space between my eyes ache with longing.

Tenebrey extends her body up through the rippling surface. I upsee her carapace as her abdomen flexes overhead, lifting her ovigonopod from the water. How beautiful her cerci, pale feathers that stroke the moonlight.

“Enerous!” she cries. “Remember me?"

A hae-laden shae buzzes down to meet us, hovering just out of Tenebrey's reach. “Tenebrey! Child of Migustra of the first quad. Yes, I remember."

“Four years I've waited.” Tenebrey's voice rises in pitch, a coy beacon. “O leader of the second quad, will you join us?"

“I think I might.” Enerous descends, wings flailing above the water and blurring my upsee with gurgling ripples.

“The he's not much,” the hae clinging to Enerous says, voice a whine shriller than the wings holding haem aloft.

“The he's a nice one,” Tenebrey says. “Rich with longing, and a good firm thrust that I greatly enjoyed."

“Too delicate. The pods of a poet, I'll wager.” The hae glares up at haes shae. “Fly towards the third moon. I know a good hard he over there—a builder, if you know what I mean."

“I'll pick my own he, if you don't mind.” Enerous glares down at haer suitor. “You don't have to mate with him, Trockit, but look at his mandibles. I'll bet he can suck a strawdigger right out of its shell."

“I'm a builder, too. From Carnak.” I upsee haem in the eye. “And I have more than pretty words to work with."

“Have you seen the Carnak towers?” Tenebrey asks.

“Ooooh,” coos Enerous. “Thick and hard and bigger than most. He'll do nicely. Thank you, Tenebrey, for introducing us."

“I still don't like him,” the hae mutters and tries to tug Enerous away by jerking on haer carapace.

Enerous rocks with the motion and pulls haer antennae from the hae. “Well, I could drop you somewhere."

The threat is enough. The hae quivers up against haer, haes antennae flicking through the air attempting to trap haers. “Oh, all right."

Enerous giggles and floats gently down to us.

Hes have done shes; haes have done shaes. Now it's time for shes and shaes while hes do haes.

For a moment, we're all legs and pods in a chitin-flavored ball. Tenebrey climbs off me, rolling onto her back as Enerous flutters haer wings. The hae releases Enerous to clamber over Tenebrey to get to me. I'm taking all this weight on my pods and have to stiffen my leg joints while the tower quivers.

“I'm Trockit, third quad, city Brism, reed collector to the second scribe there.” Haes upsee eyes move over me.

“Poet's guild. I should have known.” But I flex my pods mightily and after a moment, Trockit gives a little shiver of approval. Hae extends a flaccid abdomen that shines invitingly in the moonlight. “You want to suck on this?"

“I'd be delighted.” Opening both sets of mandibles, I take haem in. Haes secretions flow thinly at first, and I wonder if that's what it means to be old. Fastening my mandibles firmly, I blow the air out my spiracles with a mighty blast that bubbles up around Enerous and Tenebrey, making them giggle.

“Well,” Trockit shivers, and locks haes pods to my carapace. “You've got the lung of a builder, I'll say that much."

I won't talk with my mandibles full, and this is much too important anyway. Our soon-to-be children depend on it. Hae tastes of cuttleweed and strummerclam, good nutritious stuff. It bloats my abdomen, churning inside as my own stored food mixes with it.

“Oooh, here it comes.” Trockit gasps and shudders, carapace crackling, fissuring. Haes foreleg drops off. In the corner of my downsee eyes, Tenebrey snatches the floating limb and begins to snack.

One by one, Trockit's remaining legs and pods come off. Haes carapace caves in on itself. “Enough, enough, now."

My mandibles clamp shut. My head twists, and with a mighty jerk tears away the sagging sack of haes abdomen. Trockit squirms out of haes old body, white and pale as the third moon. Haes fresh pods spread thin, veined and stiffening.

“You were right, Enerous.” Hae twists to look at us, podwings spreading. “Dear Spindleye is a sweet, sweet he.” Antennae flick to tease mine. “And if you have wisdom, I'll see you in four.” Trockit is now a new shae.

“In four!” I cry, proud of my mighty he-ness.

Trockit flutters haer stiffened podwings, testing them. A true gentle he is what I am; my forepods fasten on haer and lift haer up. Hindpods holding fast to my tower, my carapace arches and with a mighty thrust, I push Trockit above the shimmering waves.

Trockit's wings begin to buzz, blurring my upsee with swirls of water. Haer wings carry haer up, speckling the moon as the other new shaes swirl into the night.

“Nicely done,” Enerous says, haer carapace in tatters that Tenebrey pulls off in stiff strips.

“I told you he was good,” Tenebrey says between mouthfuls. “Every bit as good as you are, my sweet.” Her head swivels toward me. “Come, help me now, my he."

“With pleasure.” My pods fasten to them both. Already the current changes, pulling away from the flood plain. With delicate gusto, I sink my mandibles into Enerous's wingpod, whipping my head back and forth. The wing comes loose. My abdomen engorges as I eat it.

“Ummm.” Tenebrey clings and chews off Enerous's hind wingpod. “Absolutely delicious.” She looks up coyly at me, the receding moons mirrored in the facets of her upsee eyes. Together we fasten our mandibles onto Enerous's remaining wingpods. Twisting our heads in perfect time, we pop them loose from Enerous's body. My forepods, fastened to Enerous's shell, pull, just as Tenebrey does, and Enerous's carapace splits down the middle.

“Free at last.” Enerous, white as pearl in her new she-shell, drifts up away from us. Her tiny new legpods quiver, stroking frantically at the current that drags her from the tower. Enerous, a she now, splays her carapace to ride the waters, returning to the deep cities where the shes dwell. “Goodbye, my loves."

“In four!” I call out as the dark water takes her. Tenebrey's pods fasten to my carapace; the pull from the water almost drags us away too.

“The tide's stronger this year. Get me down, Spindleye."

“Yes, my love.” Struggling against the current, taking one last glimpse of the remaining fourth moon before it follows the others into the dawn, I begin crawling down my tower. Tenebrey clings to my back, heavy now with fertilized eggs.

Silt almost blinds us, the water gushing away, and it's all I can do to fasten my pods to the smooth shale of the tower's base. The shale slopes down toward the depths to disappear in the muddy sea floor.

Tenebrey clings frantically while I struggle to face the current. With a groan, I thicken my forepods to keep hold of the shale.

Shale! Strong stone—I can't dig through this. What a fool I've been. Mother said nothing of such things.

Tenebrey's terror shocks through me as her antennae wind desperately around mine. The water roars! Follow the current and she'll be too deep, easy prey for molesharks.

I'm blind myself now, silt stinging my eyes. We huddle against my tower. Fighting to pull my antennae free, pods throbbing, I ease us forward against the current. She must trust me fully now or all is lost.

My antennae whip forward, over the silt-scoured stone. A small fissure in the shale to my right. And this is builder's wisdom: small cracks beget larger ones. My forepods take hold and we slant along until the crack widens. A few steps further, my antennae touch mud.

Narrowing my hindpods, I finally begin to dig.

The water turns black with silt, too dark to see. Arching my carapace, blowing the air from my spiracles, I thrust my abdomen down into the mud. A beautiful agony as abdominal scales flare like barbs, pushing deep.

“I can't hold on,” Tenebrey wails.

“I've got you.” One of my forepods cups her carapace and I pull her down, forcing her into the mire where she begins to squirm and twist until she's wedged in the mud next to my abdomen.

Tenebrey clings to my abdomen and begins to stroke the underside. By the Pastel Trench of Giants, the feeling is indescribable. My abdomen spasms, I feel the rending, and in a blinding rush of pain I lurch free, leaving my abdomen and all the stored food Trockit and I could gather.

“Finally!” Tenebrey's shout ripples with exultation. The last thing I hear as her carapace hunkers down and fastens her to the bottom.

A last, longing stroke from her antennae, a parting touch that hints of loneliness and joy. Four years she'll stay there; our children will be born when the tide again floods the plain.

Until then the young hes will dwell within her newly formed ab-dome, a city in miniature sculpted in chitin and dreams. They'll feed off our stored reserves, and she'll teach them, as my own mother, Winil, taught me, of the Cycle of Fours. Perhaps I'll see my young when the moons converge and the tiny hes scuttle for the safety of the gleaming cities, beacons of light fair bright as the moons.

Weightless in the currents, the bud of my new abdomen already sprouting between my hindpods, I let the water spin me to the surface. A builder, I, to ride the wave of dawn until my abdomen heals. Skimming the froth of waves on my back, steering with my hindpods while my forepods spread to catch the wind, I begin to search.

It's such a twist of sensation, for upsee has become downsee, and I, once a he, am now a fledgling hae.

Four moons, four gods, let the currents sustain me. The rising sun pinks the waters and the clouds on the horizon promise a new day.

Soon I'll find my way to Carnak. Spires I've built, yet perhaps there is something more to life than working mere stone. A poet I'll become, a builder of words and wisdom, fat and sassy on my back to sing the praises of Tenebrey, mother to the end, of Enerous the beautiful shadow upon the moon, and sulky Trockit whose flavor still haunts my mind.

Oh, grand and glorious morning,
my pods throb with yearning
for the time when four moons converge,
wild the flood tides surge,
drawing deep shes and shaes above,
the ovigonopods of love.

Copyright © 2001 Joe Murphy

Joe lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with his amazingly artistic wife Veleta. With her at his side, he's managed to publish almost thirty stories. They've been married for twenty-nine years and he couldn't have done it without her. For more about him, see his Web site. Joe's previous story in Strange Horizons was “The Calcium Efflux Conspiracy."

Gavin Schnitzler is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Tufts University's School of Medicine.

Marfa Petrovna Kopelnikova's cat, white as a ghost and about as substantial, got up from her place on the windowsill and began grooming herself with long swipes of her tongue.

“Company coming, is it, Katzy?” Marfa went to the stove and put the kettle on. A moment later, she heard a knock at the door. The white cat and the old woman exchanged a look. Marfa shrugged and went to answer the door; Katzy returned to her ablutions.

Marfa had been expecting a visitor. Her landlord, Mr. Salvador, had warned her yesterday that he would be sending someone to meet her, a young man. She would look him over before Mr. Salvador rented him a room. The landlords and caretakers of the other crumbling apartment buildings on the ugliest block in Miami Beach thought Mr. Salvador was old-fashioned for having a witch on the premises. The others installed conduction rods and convection coils on their roofs to deal with the elemental bolts that struck the buildings during the storms of late summer and early fall. But Mr. Salvador's aunt practiced Santeria down in Little Havana; he knew a thing or two about magic. So he didn't begrudge Marfa the tiny apartment at the top of the building, just so long as she kept the magical influences flowing steadily and used her powers to protect the building during the storm season.

Marfa opened the door just as the prospective tenant was raising his hand to knock again. The young man was clearly expecting someone taller, but he quickly lowered his gaze to meet Marfa's bright blue eyes.

Marfa examined him: he was tall, thin, and tense, with untidy black hair and wary dark eyes. There was something else as well, the slightest coruscating aura of elemental magic, not quite enough to be visible, but not quite a trick of the eyes, either. Definitely not harmless, Marfa decided, but not an immediate danger.

“Come in, you,” she said, standing aside. During the last storm, Marfa had placed a magical ward on the threshold to keep uninvited people out. The young man hesitated, and then flinched slightly as he stepped through the doorway, as if he'd felt a tingle from the ward. Marfa looked at him more carefully; he should have felt nothing.

“I'm Marfa Petrovna Kopelnikova,” she said. “You talked to Mr. Salvador about the apartment, yes?” The boy nodded, looking around the room. Marfa watched his wandering gaze, noticing what he noticed. His eyes skipped over the worn furniture; lingered on the skeins of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling in the kitchenette; gave the cat two or three long seconds, which she returned; and returned to Marfa's lined face.

“You're Michael Damson, yes?” Marfa asked. He nodded. “Come and sit down at the table, we'll have a talk, drink some tea.” Obediently, he followed her further into the room, sat where he was directed. From the corner of her eye, as she readied the teapot and mixed the herbs for tea, Marfa watched Katzy, to see what her opinion of the young man would be. The cat was often more sensitive than her mistress. But Katzy had returned to her place on the windowsill, ignoring the stranger in her territory. A suspended judgment.

Marfa set two cups on the table. He hadn't spoken yet, she realized. “Not much to say for yourself, huh?” she prompted. The young man shrugged and gave a half-smile. “You want the apartment, you got to talk to me,” she insisted. “Tell me about yourself; what do you do?"

He cleared his throat and refused to meet her eyes. “I'm a musician,” he mumbled. Marfa asked him what instrument he played. “Guitar."

A loud thump from the bathroom interrupted Marfa before she could ask the next, obvious question: electric guitar with a loud amplifier? Or quiet classical guitar? A second thump followed close after the first.

“What was that?” The young man's glance darted toward the bathroom door.

“Ah, domovoi,” Marfa answered.

Her visitor stared at her warily. “I guess you want me to ask you what a domovoi is."

“It's no secret, boy. Domovoi is a house spirit, protector. I got so many domoviki wanting to move in here I have to beat the walls with a broom to get them to leave.” Marfa sipped her tea and watched him.

“Mr. Salvador said you were a witch.” His face looked doubtful. “Can you do magic? Can you cure sickness?"

“Heh,” she chuckled. “Most of the ‘magic’ cures involve salt and pepper, or a raw egg, or a pinch of tobacco, all mixed up with a cup of vodka. Now, that would make anyone feel better, eh?"

To Marfa's surprise, the young man grinned in response, and his face changed from unrevealing wariness to something much younger and happier. The smile clinched the matter for Marfa. He would do, this Michael Damson.

He played electric guitar, she found out later, but he practiced with the amplifier unplugged, to spare the neighbors. After he'd settled in to his new apartment, Marfa started inviting him up for tea once or twice a week. He was like a new penny, this one, and might be snatched up and spent by any warlock on the lookout for new talent. If Marfa Petrovna Kopelnikova had anything to do with it, Michael would learn to use whatever power he possessed for good purposes. She would keep an eye out for a decent warlock to train him; in the meantime, she would watch him herself.

“Hey, babushka,” Michael said, stepping over the threshold.

“You look like a crow of ill-omen, you,” Marfa answered. “Come in and have tea."

But he looked more like a heron, or some other tall, thin bird, with his long legs and hunched shoulders. Marfa handed him a cup of tea and pushed him down into a chair. Katzy watched from her place on the windowsill, her ears flicked forward as if listening to their conversation.

“What are we drinking?” he asked, and took an experimental sip. “Could use some honey."

Marfa fetched him honey. “Just peppermint and hibiscus. How goes the search for work?"

“All right.” Katzy leaped onto the table and put her head under his hand for a caress. “I got a gig playing music for TV commercials."

“A gig, huh? A gig means good money? You'll earn enough to pay rent?"

He grinned. “Yeah, no problem. Lousy music, though.” At Marfa's questioning look, he explained how the music was supposed to sell used cars, and not to be beautiful or moving in any way, except maybe to move the listener to reach for his wallet. Marfa finished her tea and rose to take her cup and saucer to the sink.

Michael joined her, taking the teacup from her hand and washing it himself. “So what are all these plants here?” he asked, with a nod toward the skeins of herbs hanging over their heads. He finished washing his own cup, set it on the draining board, and dried his hands.

Marfa pointed out the different herbs. “That one, on the end, with the long leaves, is spiderbund, good for the nerves."

“And this?” He reached over his head to point out another skein. “Looks soft, like rabbit ears."

“Felsom, for protection.” Marfa saw that his interest was genuine. Herbs were witch magic, female magic, but no harm could come of him knowing, she thought. “Take them all down, tall one, and I'll show you."

Michael repeated after her the names of the herbs and their uses like a litany. “Angelica for a merry heart, meadowsweet for bravery, purple loosestrife to control demons, barberry and mugwort picked from nine fields for fertility, belladonna for flying. Can you really fly?"

Marfa snorted in answer.

Most of all, Michael seemed to love to hear Marfa tell stories of the tiny village in Russia where she had grown up. Like Miami Beach, it had been located at a nexus, and the winter storms there had been fierce, the magic distilled into icy crystals that sleeted down, burying the village for months under drifts of snow and frozen element. Not until spring and the big melt would the villagers creep out from their snug little homes to see what transformations the magic had wrought. Once, Marfa recalled, the lake had frozen solid, and when it had thawed in the spring the villagers had found it to be stocked full of tiny, silver fish.

“Like sardines, they were, and we ate them all the summer and jarred them in oil for the next winter, and for once nobody went hungry. The next spring, when the lake thawed, they were gone, as if they'd never been there at all."

“I've never seen snow,” Michael noted, and sipped his tea. They'd been talking for hours and were on their third cup; only crumbs remained of the cookies Marfa had baked.

“Oh, snow. There's snow, and then there's snow,” Marfa said. Michael raised his eyebrows, his signal for her to go on talking. “Plain snow is just cold and light and a bother to shovel from the footpath. But elemental snow, that's different. It flashes like electricity, and if you touch it without gloves, your hand tingles and you can flick sparks off your fingertips. At night it sparkles under the moonlight like a thousand candles. There are some people in the far north who live all the winter in houses built of elemental snow, and a stranger people you will never meet."

“I bet there were some strange people in your village, too,” Michael teased.

On another visit, Michael wanted to know about magic spells. “How do they work?” he asked.

“There are professors at universities who study magic; maybe they could tell you the how of it.” Marfa was sitting in her rocking chair, Katzy on her lap. Michael leaned against the wall next to the window.

“So how do you make it work?” he asked.

“All right, curious. You have the zagovorui, the rune spells. For protection, those are. And the podbljudnaja, for divination."

“So you just say them, and they work?"

Marfa nodded. “The witch says the words and they focus the flow of magical element in and around her. My grandmother taught me, as hers taught her."

Michael was silent for a moment, contemplating the board floor beneath his feet. “Who are you going to teach?"

Katzy leaped from Marfa's lap, as if startled. “When the right girl comes along, I'll know it,” Marfa answered.

“What if the right girl is a boy?” he asked quietly.

Marfa knew what he was asking. Gently, she tried to explain. “Witch magic is for girls. A boy with talent studies with a warlock. Different techniques, different spells, different purposes.” She bent to pick Katzy up again. “One day I'll find a girl to train up as a witch."

He didn't answer. Not long after, he left.

As spring turned to summer, they met often. As he listened to her talk about magic, the habitual wariness in Michael's eyes was replaced by eager interest. Too bad he's not a girl, Marfa found herself thinking, for he would make a fine witch.

Sometimes they would walk down to the beach. They walked slowly, through the rancid smell of garbage from the open dumpsters behind the hotels, past swarms of starving feral cats lurking in dark alleyways, distracted by the flocks of chattering parrots perched on the telephone wires, and ignoring the stares of the bored retirees on their balconies.

“I'm looking forward to the storms,” Michael said. They came to the wooden stairs leading up to the boardwalk, and he took Marfa's arm to help her. “Where I come from, we don't have any storms."

“Where you come from, huh?” Despite their growing friendship, Michael had said very little about his past. “Where's that?"

“Southern California.” That explained his unfamiliarity with magic, his seeming unawareness of the possibilities opened up by his own talents. He told her about the wrecked, dry landscape of strip malls and interstates. “In August and September we'd hear on the news about the magical storms out here. I always thought it sounded cool."

“Cool?” Marfa snorted. “You get a lot more than ‘cool’ during elemental storms.” She told him about how you never knew what would wash up onto the beach during an elemental storm: enormous kraken, drifts of pearlescent seashells, debris from wrecked ships, gold doubloons. The winds raged, rain washed down in floods, elemental bolts struck over and over again, and the city emerged on the other side of the storm transformed, trees uprooted, streets rearranged. Animals from the zoo wandered stunned along the Art Deco avenues. Odd bumps and thumps emanated from beneath the boardwalk. Clouds of butterflies glinted like rainbows over Biscayne Bay.

Perhaps this was why so many refugees from the world had settled here, Marfa speculated. Miami Beach was a city of the displaced, of people washed up on this wide white shore by war, politics, intolerance, poverty. The Cubans, the Haitians, the Jews fleeing from the second World War, the gay men, the old survivors—they all had seen transformation, devastation, and when it happened again during the great storms they knew that their lives would go on, afterward. Perhaps not as usual, but they would go on.

“And what brought you here, Michael?” Marfa asked, as they strolled along the boardwalk, watching the waves roll endlessly up onto the sand. He looked away and shrugged, asking her, instead, to tell him more about the zagovorui for bringing happiness.

The next day, he knocked at her door in the middle of the morning. Marfa had not expected to see him again so soon. She had been scrubbing the floors, pausing now and then to flick soapy water at Katzy, who perched, fastidious, on her windowsill.

When she answered the door, she saw that something had changed.

“Hi, babushka,” he began as usual, but his shoulders were hunched, and his eyes had regained their old wariness. Silently, she opened the door wider, inviting him in.

“I don't want to mess up your floor,” he said.

“Doesn't matter. Come in, you."

For a moment, she thought Michael would refuse, but then he shrugged and stepped across the threshold. Katzy sat in her place on the windowsill, glaring at him, but he ignored her. Marfa went to the kitchen, ladled soup into bowls.

“You're too thin, like you got a tapeworm. Come and have some borscht.” She placed the bowls on the table and gestured for him to sit.

“It looks like blood!” he said, fascinated, and reached out a finger to touch the viscous red liquid.

“No, it's beets.” She eyed him. “So, tell me what's the matter."

His eyes shifted away and he picked up the spoon.

“I met this guy, last night. At a bar. I had a gig with this band and we went out drinking, after, and this guy came up and started talking to me. He said he'd been watching me and he could see I had a talent for magic."

Marfa nodded. It was true.

“So, anyway, he said he would teach me some things, if I wanted him to."

“Some things,” Marfa repeated. “And what did you think of him, this ‘guy'?"

“I don't know,” Michael answered. He crossed his arms over his chest, as if he were cold. A subdued thump came from the domovoi in the bathroom.

“He scared you,” Marfa observed.

“Yeah, a little. He seemed really powerful. In a different way from you."

“What's his name?"

“X,” he replied.

Marfa snorted. “X? What kind of govn'uk name is X?"

“It's short for Alexander,” he said, and put down his spoon, the soup untasted. “He's a warlock. He said he'll teach me magic.” His gaze flicked to the skeins of herbs hanging from the ceiling. “Real magic."

“Real magic,” she echoed. “And what is it that I practice, eh?"

“X says it's old woman magic, not very powerful."

“Mmm-hmmm. And what is it that he's going to teach you?"

“He says magic should be used to change the world."

“Give me an example.” She crossed her arms.

“All right,” Michael answered angrily. “I had a ... friend, in L.A. He got sick, and then he died. He was only twenty-three."

“And this X says he can cure this sickness?"

Michael nodded.

Abruptly, Marfa stood. “Stay away from him."

Michael looked up at her, startled. “What?"

“You heard me, boy."

“Then you'll teach me?” Hope bloomed in his eyes, but it quickly faded when he saw Marfa's uncharacteristically stern face. “You won't.” He frowned. “I just want to do something about all of the—” he gestured with his hands. “The wrong things that happen.” He stood up, slender musician's hands braced against the table. “X doesn't want me to talk to you anymore."

Marfa stepped over to him and looked up into his dark, unhappy eyes. “Magic can't be used to change the world, Michael; you should have learned that much from me.” She reached out and grasped his arms. “If this govn'uk X tells you otherwise, he's lying."

His troubled eyes grew angry, and he pulled away from her touch. “Yeah, but at least he'll teach me. You won't even do that."

“I have my reasons,” Marfa said.

“I know. Witches teach girls, warlocks teach boys. What if I want to learn witch magic? Why can't you just teach me?"

She shook her head. The mistake was made, and past fixing. Especially now that he'd taken up with this X fellow.

Michael's anger turned to resignation. “It doesn't seem like a very good reason to me. I'd better get going."

“You're going to this X?” Marfa asked.

He nodded.

“I warn you, Michael Damson, this is not a good man. You should stay away from him."

Michael didn't answer. He took a step toward the door. Marfa shifted to let him pass.

He stood with his hand on the doorknob, shifting uncomfortably. “Thanks for all the tea and cookies, though."

“Huh,” Marfa said. With gimlet eyes, she watched him open the door. “Bring this friend of yours to visit some time,” she said. “I'll make him some tea and cookies, too."

Michael nodded, and fled.

“Tea and cookies,” Marfa muttered, dumping borscht into the sink. “Old woman magic. Huh."

Sooner than she expected, Michael brought his new friend to meet her.

She and Katzy had been listening to the radio, hearing the weather forecasters talking about the first big storm of the season, how it might be the storm of the century, the storm of a lifetime, and how it was heading straight toward Miami Beach. Twenty-four hours, and it would be upon them with all its transformative power. This wasn't news to Marfa, who could feel the elemental forces building in the air, swirling around the city like a great, invisible river, but she listened to the news reports anyway. Suddenly, Katzy leapt from her lap and stalked to the door, her fur raised. A moment later came the knock.

Marfa answered the door, Katzy twining nervously around her ankles. The two men filled the doorway like shadows; they both wore black overcoats and heavy, studded boots. Without a word, Marfa stood aside for them to enter. Michael stepped inside, then hesitated, his nervous glance flicking between Marfa and X. His friend stood as if rooted in the hallway outside.

“Aren't you going to invite me in?” X asked, his smile like a shark's. He was as tall as Michael, but heavier, older, with a round moon face, round spectacles, thinning blond hair, blank eyes. Instantly, Marfa was on her guard; something about him was—not right. Maybe asking Michael to bring him hadn't been such a good idea.

“Come on in, X,” Michael said. Freed by the invitation, the big man stepped across the threshold and into her apartment, smiling widely. As his studded boot touched the rug, the domovoi in the bathroom banged twice, shivering the walls.

“Mike told me about your plumbing problem, Mrs. Kopelnikova,” X said, gesturing toward the bathroom door, his expressionless eyes taking in the room in one sweeping glance. Marfa looked at Michael, but he seemed to be mesmerized by a hole in his sleeve and wouldn't meet her eyes.

“He also told me you practice witchcraft,” X went on. “It must keep you busy."

Marfa ignored him and went to the table. She lifted the teapot. “Tea.” She pointed to a plate of cookies. “Cookies.” He wouldn't take one, she knew, for to accept her hospitality would be to declare truce between them.

Without being asked, X took a seat at the table. Michael hovered in the background.

Marfa sat in her rocking chair next to the window and folded her hands, ready to listen.

X began to speak, his oily voice mesmerizing. “Now, Mrs. Kopelnikova, as I've explained to Mike, here, your magic is what they call ‘traditional.'” Marfa heard the sneer in his voice as he pronounced the word. “You do a lot of stuff with herbs and spells, right?"

Marfa inclined her head.

X snorted. “Such a waste. You old witches think channeling the element is so great. But magic is there to be manipulated by those with the strength and the power. We practice the magic of blood and sinew; magic as we deploy it is unopposable. Our warlocks are the chosen few, and we will use our talents to change the city. Maybe someday we'll change the world!” He paused. “Go ahead and shake your head, witch, but wait'll you hear this. We've spent the last few months building a system of conduction rods around the city. When this storm hits, we'll harness the element and force it to do our bidding. We'll make the city into a paradise! No more refugees, no more damaged people, no more of those pathetic boat people from Haiti or Cuba. Only the strong and the whole will live here. It will be a brave new world with men such as us in it. Don't you think, Mrs. K.?"

Marfa shuddered and shook herself.

“What's the matter, witch?” X grinned. “We just want to make the world a better place; what's so bad about that?"

Katzy leaped from Marfa's lap and arched her back, hissing at the men. “It is time for you to leave,” Marfa said, standing and pointing toward the door.

Grinning, X rose from his seat and prepared to go. “Come on, Mike, we've got work to do.” He strode from the room, his overcoat fluttering behind him like black wings.

Michael moved to follow X, but Marfa quickly crossed the room and grasped his arm. “This is brute force magic, these styervo practice; it has nothing to do with life or subtlety,” she whispered. “If you learned anything at all from me, you can see this."

He hesitated, his dark eyes meeting hers for the first time. But X's voice from the hallway interrupted them. “Let's go, Mike. I'm not going to wait all day."

Pulling his sleeve from Marfa's grasp, Michael left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

“Pizd'uk,” Marfa cursed. “I've seen this before, Katzy, this govn'uk magic, this Nazi magic.” She stomped to the table and cleared the tea cups and plates, piling them in the sink. “What they want is to remake the world in their own ugly image."

She fetched a chair and yanked down skein after skein of herbs, selecting wormwood, felsom, and purple loosestrife for protection, mixing them up with her own spit and blood and clippings from her hair, whispering a zagovorui over and over again as she worked. Using the mixture, she barred all entrances to her apartment against her enemy. She would be ready, when the time came.

The night came on and the storm gathered its power. Outside the window, the wind howled and the rain pelted down. Marfa imagined the beach, so placid and white all summer, lashed by the raving waves, great chunks of sand bitten and washed away, the Art Deco hotels cowering under the onslaught.

At last, using all of her strength and concentration, she opened herself to the storm, inviting the magical element to ground itself through her. Bolt after bolt struck the building. The walls shuddered and the roof above her creaked as if pried at by giant fingers of wind. Above the building, she imagined, those with talent might see an immense, wind-whipped vortex of magical element spiraling down, herself the focus of its energy. At the tip of the whirlwind, she sensed the magic sparking like electricity in her nerves and thrumming in her bones, and felt the thistledown hair on her head stand on end.

As the storm reached its height, they came, as she knew they would. She heard a rushing sound distinct from the storm like the wings of a thousand blackbirds, and then a pounding at the door. She flicked a finger and the door flew open. On her shoulder, Katzy hissed and spat, her tail twitching madly. The hallway outside teemed with shadowy, black-clad figures. At their head stood X, his face pale and twisted with fury.

“Witch!” he shouted. “You dare to steal our magic?” He lifted a studded boot to step into the room, but the rune spells of protection crackled in the doorway and he was forced to leap back, singed.

Marfa smiled. All of their conduction rods, set to capture the energy of the storm, had been rendered useless when she had drawn the element down through herself. These warlocks would wreak no changes on the city tonight. She raised her voice to chant a zagovorui of diminishment, and her words rang out like a trumpet. The mass of shadowy bodies in the doorway drew back.

Then it heaved, and spat forth a single figure: Michael. He looked frightened and pale in the stormy light. A hand pushed him from behind, and he stumbled over the threshold, into Marfa's apartment.

X returned to the doorway, his face gleaming with triumph. “Invite me in, Mike,” he ordered. The dark shadows drew up in ranks behind him. “Invite me in,” X repeated, his voice growing angry. “Invite us in, or we can't come in!"

Marfa opened her arms, beckoning. Michael hesitated like a hunted rabbit, looking from X to Marfa and back again. Surely, she thought, he could see that X's hateful magic had no place in it for a man like him.

He spoke, and she barely heard his voice above the roar of the storm. “Will you teach me, Marfa?"

Sparks leaped from the ends of Marfa's hair as she nodded. At the same moment, a huge bolt struck the building, and Marfa absorbed it without flinching, knowing that to those watching she must be surrounded by a sparkling blue aura of elemental magic.

Michael's eyes widened, and he seemed about to speak. Then, X filled the doorway, his round spectacles flashing. “Let me in, Mike!” he screamed.

“How can I refuse him?” Michael shouted.

Marfa smiled. He would learn, soon enough, that the kind of bastard magic practiced by warlocks like X was not best countered with strength. “Just close the door, Michael."

For a moment, Michael seemed to doubt her. Then he turned his face away from X, and Marfa rejoiced to see the youthful smile she had come to know well forming on his lips as his eyes met hers. He reached out to close the door.

Howling in rage and pain, X thrust a hand through the crackling ward in the doorway and gripped Michael by the throat. Marfa leaped up from the rocking chair with a shout of surprise—the wards on the doorway should have been impregnable. She scrabbled in her mind for the zagovorui of protection, and cursed herself as the rune spell eluded her. X had time to shake Michael once, twice, before Marfa, with a flick of her fingers, sent bolts of element scorching across the room, flinging the intruders down the stairs and slamming the door. Michael dropped to the floor like a bundle of rags.

Marfa released the storm from her control, allowing the vortex of magic to whirl away. As the light of the element faded from the room, she lit a candle and went to kneel beside Michael. She straightened his arms and legs and put a pillow under his head. In the flickering light, she held his hand and chafed his wrists. The storm raged outside the window, but she paid it no mind. The city would have to do battle with the storm as best it could; she needed her strength to save her apprentice.

As the night wore on, Marfa kept watch over him, chanting the zagovorui of healing. “Water, green river, daybreak,” she began. “Sun by day, moon by night. May the mother wind cover you with her veil. May she blow away all your aches and pains, tears and sorrows. All will be well."

At first, his body twitched and shook under her hands. She tried feeding him tea, but he only retched it back up again. “All will be well,” she insisted, until her voice grew hoarse. With the element still coursing through her body, the cure should have been effortless, but her ministrations had little effect. A core of darkness within him resisted her spells and herbs. At last, though, she felt the rune spell take hold. The words bathed and renewed him, releasing him from the warlock magic that held him.

As she continued to work on him, he lay unmoving but for his harsh breathing, shrouded in his black coat, his face pale. Katzy paced up and down the room nervously, finally coming to rest curled up against Michael's side, lending him her strength. Marfa worked on. Gradually, as dawn approached and the winds of the storm died away, his breathing eased, and he slept.

The room was gray and quiet with morning when Marfa climbed stiffly to her feet. She left her silent apartment and passed down the stairs and out the front door, knowing that she had to assess the storm damage before she could rest. Katzy could look after the patient, if he awoke.

The city felt preternaturally still, as if exhausted by the beating it had taken during the night. All along the street, the trees stood like bedraggled maidens, shaken and weeping, some of them prone, flattened by the ravaging wind. Leaves and branches, roof tiles and bits of garbage littered the streets. A sign reading ¿Por qué pagar más? had gotten wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree on the corner of Fifth and Collins.

Marfa climbed the wooden stairway leading to the boardwalk and looked out over the wide white sands and the still, luminous water. She found herself thinking of her old home. The Russian village was long gone, had been swept away in the terrible war which so many years ago had stormed across Europe, destroying all before it. As a girl, along with her sisters and girl cousins, she had learned magic at her grandmother's knee. They were all gone now, lost in the diaspora of the war, herself the only survivor.

Slowly, she picked her way over the sand to the edge of the ocean. No wind blew, and the water lay still, a mirror reflecting the sky. In the distance, cargo ships headed back to port after riding out the storm at sea. They seemed to be floating up into the air on water the same still silver-gray color as the sky. A light, teasing wind began to blow, ruffling and darkening the waves, and the ships settled back down onto the water again and headed home, to safe harbor.

Copyright © 2001 Sarah Prineas

Sarah Prineas is a Ph.D. candidate in English and rhetoric and has just moved from Germany to Iowa City, which is not as flat as you might think. She is a vegetarian. She ... um ... has no pets. She thanks writers Scott Anderson and Daniel Goss for help revising this story. Another of her elemental magic stories, “From the Journals of Professor Copernicus Finch, M.S. Hex.D.,” is currently available at Ideomancer.

Each week, we here at SSWR step right outside of our offices here on 54th and ask folks on the street our Question of the Week—sometimes topical, sometimes whimsical, always intriguing. Our question this week:

What is the most interesting encounter you've ever had with an alien animal species?

Rowenna Morello, Accountant, Staten Island:

That's gotta be the time we got the cat high with a glyph. My college roommate worked in the xenobiology lab and brought the glyph home one night in a shoebox. It's just this little mouse-like thing, so of course the cat wanted at it right away. It's cat-food-sized. We pushed the cat away from it a couple of times, but then I had to go make a call. I left the glyph alone in its box on the table, and the cat hopped up and started poking at the thing with its paw, you know, poke poke poke.

Thing is, the glyph is a total predator, and it's got this mouth that opens up like a little umbrella and surrounds whatever it's going to eat. So there's the cat, batting at the glyph, and suddenly the glyph lunges forward, opens its jaws, wraps them around the cat's paw, and clamps down hard. It's trying to eat the cat. Well, the cat's freaking out, of course. It's scooting backwards, trying frantically to shake this thing off its paw and wailing, you know, like a cat in heat. My roommate had to use a Popsicle stick from the trash to pry the glyph's mouth open.

The cat ran away and seemed to be pissed off but okay. Then a half hour later I caught him just staring at a bookshelf and wobbling back and forth. Seems that glyphs paralyze their prey with venom; it kills just about anything on the glyphs’ planet but here it just makes you hallucinate. It's a chemistry thing. After we realized the cat wasn't going to die, it was actually pretty funny to watch him bump into walls and stare at his own paws. Although at one point he sprinted right towards an open window and my roommate had to make a lunge to keep him from jumping out. It was a third-floor walkup. I guess the cat thought he could fly.

Anyway, the glyph went back to the lab the next day. The funny thing is that for the next couple of days, the cat seemed to be looking around to find the glyph, circling the table and poking into boxes and stuff. I think he wanted a fix.

Alan Jones-Wynn, Copywriter, Manhattan:

My daughter's third-grade class was taking a trip to the Bronx Zoo and it was my turn to be a parent assistant, so I got the day off from work and helped her teacher herd a couple dozen kids around the place, which, if you've never done it, is just as aggravating as it sounds. This was around the time that the Zoo was just opening their “Alien Animals” exhibit, and the place was jam-packed; it actually helped that we were on an official educational field trip, because otherwise we probably wouldn't have been able to get through the crowds.

We filed through and the tour guide pointed out all the popular alien animals, like those omads and the revers and the neyons, right, the ones they make stuffed-animal toys of to sell at the gift shop. But then we came to this one habitat and the tour guide stopped and pointed out what had to have been the ugliest lump of fur in the whole zoo. She told us that the lump we were looking at was called a corou, and that it was an endangered species on Tungsk, and that the Bronx Zoo and others were trying to start a captive breeding program. As she was saying this, her eyes were welling up with tears, and it seemed like she was about to break down right then and there.

Well, obviously, this seemed like pretty bizarre behavior, but then I looked at the corou, and it swiveled an eye stalk at me, and I swear I was overwhelmed with this wave of sadness and regret that was so overpowering I can't even describe it. It's like what you'd probably feel if you'd just heard that a bus carrying everyone you ever knew just went off a mountain trail in Peru. And it wasn't just me; all those kids, who you couldn't have shut up if you wired their jaws shut, were all just standing there silently, staring at the corou and looking like they'd just seen their dog run over by a car. One of the kids actually tapped on the glass of the habitat and said “I'm sorry” to the corou, over and over. We had to literally drag some of the kids away. I mean, I wouldn't call it telepathy or mind control, but something was going on there.

My kid and I went back a couple of years later and the corou exhibit wasn't there anymore, and I was sort of glad—it's never a good thing to worry that you're going to get clinically depressed at the zoo. At a dinner party a little later I met a vet who worked at the zoo, and I asked him about the corou. He said that one zoologist working with the habitat committed suicide and another was placed on leave after she took the zoo's breeding pair, drove them up to Vermont, and tried to release them into the wild. She kept telling everyone afterwards that they told her it was what they wanted. They eventually had to get rid of the exhibit altogether. I haven't heard about the corou since. I think they're extinct now.

Ted McPeak, Community College Student, Jersey City:

Some friends and me heard that if you smoked the skin of an aret, you could get monumentally wasted. So we bought one at a pet store and waited a couple of weeks until it shed its skin. Then we crumbled up the dry skin, put it in with some pot, and lit up. We all got these insane mouth blisters that didn't go away for weeks. We all had to eat soup for a month. Though maybe it wasn't the skin; the pot could have been bad or something. We flushed the aret down the toilet after we got the blisters, though, so we'd have to go buy a new one to try it out again. I don't think we'll bother.

Qa’ Hungran Ongru, Cultural Attaché for Fine Arts and Literature, Royal Kindran Embassy, Manhattan:

Well, I am myself an alien here, so I suppose you could say that my most interesting incident with an alien animal was with one of your animals, a dog. Shortly after being assigned to the embassy here, I was given a Shih Tzu by a human friend. I was delighted, of course. He really was an adorable thing, and he was very loving and devoted to me. I named him Fred. I like that name.

As you may know, the male of the Kindra species is a large non-sentient segmented worm which we females attach across our midriffs during the mating process; the male stays attached while a four-part fertilization process occurs over several days. It's not very romantic by human standards, but obviously it works well for us. Shortly before one of my ovulatory periods, I had managed to score a rather significant diplomatic coup when I convinced the Guggenheim to tour selections of its collection among the Kindra home planets. As a reward I was allowed to choose a male from the oligarchical breeding stock for my next insemination. The one I chose had deep segment ridges and a nicely mottled scale pattern; again, not something a human would find attractive, but deeply compelling for Kindrae. He was attached to me in a brief conjoining ceremony at the embassy, attended by selected Kindra and human friends, and then I went home to Fred.

Fred came running to meet me at the door as he always did, but when he saw the male across my belly, he skidded across the tiles and then started growling and barking and backing away slowly. I tried to assure him that everything was okay, but every time I tried to reach for Fred, he'd back away more. At one point he snapped at my tendrils. I was surprisingly hurt; although it seemed silly to want Fred and the male to “get along” (considering that the male was doing nothing but lying there), I did want them to get along. If for no other reason than that the male would be attached to me for the next week or so. But for the next few days Fred would have nothing to do with me. He wouldn't eat from his bowl until I left the room. He even peed in my shoes.

On the fourth night of this, I was sleeping when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my abdomen; it was the male, beginning to unhook himself from me. Then I heard the growling. I snapped on a light, looked down, and saw Fred attacking the male; he had managed to get a bite in between two of the male's ring segments and punctured an artery. The male was bleeding all over my bed. If the male managed to completely detach himself, it would be disastrous—my impregnation cycle was not yet complete, and it would be highly unlikely after a noble male was attacked in my bed that I would be entrusted with another ever again. So with one arm I lodged the male back onto me and struggled to keep him in place, with another I reached for the phone to call my doctor, and with the third I scooped up Fred and tossed him off the bed. He landed up on the floor with a yelp and limped away, winding up a perfectly charming incident for all three of us.

I was rushed to the embassy infirmary, where the male's injuries were sutured and he was sedated to the point where he would again willingly reattach himself to me. By some miracle the fertilization process was uninterrupted; I was confined to an infirmary bed for the rest of the process while doctors made sure everything went as it was supposed to. The ambassador came to visit afterwards and I expressed my shame at the incident and offered my resignation; she declined it, and told me that no one blamed me for what happened, but that it would probably be a good idea to get rid of Fred.

I did, giving him to a retired human diplomat I had worked with for many years. I visit them both frequently, and Fred is always happy to see me. He's also always happy to see my daughter. Who is also named Fred. As I said, I like the name.

Dr. Elliot Morgenthal, Doctor, Stamford:

Oh, God. I worked the ER as an intern right around the time of that stupid fungdu craze. Here's the thing about fungdu: they're furry, they're friendly, they vibrate when they're happy, and they have unusually large toothless mouths. You can see where this is going. About two or three times a month we'd get some poor bastard coming in with a fungdu on his Johnson.

What people apparently don't know about fungdu is that if they think that what they've got in their mouths is live prey, these little backward-pointing quills emerge out of their gums to keep whatever they're trying to eat from escaping. These dumbasses get it into their heads to get a hummer from their fungdu, and then are understandably surprised to discover that their pet thinks it's being fed a live hot dog. Out come the quills, and the next thing you know, there's some asshole in the emergency room trying to explain how his erect penis just happened to fall into the fungdu's mouth. He tripped, you see. How inconvenient.

Here's the truly disgusting thing about this: All the time this is going on, the fungdu is usually desperately trying to swallow. And that animal has some truly amazing peristaltic motion. Again, you can see where this is going. The nurses wouldn't touch any of these guys. They told them to clean up after their own damn selves. Who can blame them.

Bill and Sue Dukes, Plumbing Supplies, Queens:

Bill: There was this one time I was driving through Texas, and I saw the weirdest fuckin’ thing on the side of the road. It looked like an armor-plated rabbit or something. It was just lying there, though. I think it was dead.

Sue: You idiot. That's an armadillo. They're from Earth.

Bill: No, you must be thinking of some other animal. This thing was totally not Earth-like at all. It had, like, scales and shit.

Sue: That's an armadillo. They're all over Texas. They're like the state animal or something. Everybody knows that.

Bill: Well, what the fuck do I know about Texas? I'm from Queens. And we sure as hell don't got any armadillos in Queens.

Sue (rolling eyes): Oh, yeah, if it's not from Queens, it ain't shit, right?

Bill: You got that right. Fuckin’ Texas. Hey, what about those things, you know, that got the duck bill?

Sue: You mean ducks?

Bill: No, smartass, they don't look like a duck, they just got a duck bill.

Sue: What, a platypus?

Bill: Yeah, a platypus! Where are those things from?

Sue: They're from Earth too.

Bill: No shit? Man, Earth is a weird-ass planet sometimes.

Copyright © 2001 John Scalzi

John Scalzi is a writer living among the cornfields and the Amish. For more information about him, see his Web site.

Second in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.

Ponge, as its inhabitants will tell you, is a thoroughly unattractive city. “Well,” they always say at the mention of any horrible news, “we do live in Ponge."

A survey taken by the smallest and most cantankerous newspaper in Ponge (a city of many small cantankerous newspapers), the Ponge Poodle, claims that the inhabitants of Ponge (Pongians, according to the League of Concerned Pongians; Pongeans, according to Pongeans for a Better Ponge; Pongarians, according to the Proactive Society for Immediate Pongarian Betterment—but you get the idea) have 29% more quarrels than the average, and half again more excuses per capita than the inhabitants any other city in the world.

Among the favorite excuses that each Pongarian (or whatever) treasures is his or her excuse for not moving to Strafrax, the safer, cleaner, nicer, more exciting, and more meaningful city across the River Dunge. “I was planning to move there last month,” says Ruthie Mex, “but my cat got the flu.” “The cigar import taxes there are too high,” says Candice Blunt, who smokes no cigars. “My mother's grave is here,” says Mortimer Mung. “I would only be disappointed,” says Fish Williams.

Oddly, deep in their hearts, the citizens of Ponge are happier than those of Strafrax. Ponge's motto is “What Did You Expect?” and the Pongeans (etc.) whisper it to themselves in bed at night as they think back on the day's events. “Well, what did you expect?” they think smugly, pugnaciously. “What did you expect? We live in Ponge."

Strafrax's motto is “Anything Can Happen,” and you can imagine where that leads.

Previous city (Bellur)

All published cities

Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.

O, you must ask my father dear,
With a heigh-ho! and a lily gay;
And the mother, too, that did me bear.
As the primrose spreads so sweetly.

—"The Cruel Brother,” Child Ballad #11

For all that the witch was dead, and her fortune now their own, they were a long time leaving the forest. Years and years passed between the moment they first saw her glistening home and their return to kith and kin. By then, the two could hardly get through a day without each other close by. They loved each other as brother and sister should, and much more besides.

As always, Greta was the first to understand: in the world outside the forest, the warmth between Hans and her, the feel of her breasts pressed against his chest, would not do. They were no longer children. They were people in the world. She must be wed, and her brother too, but not together, not sharing the same marriage bed.

They came back to their village, Hans leading his sister on her milk-white mare, seven donkeys heavy-laden with a witch's fortune. Their foreign mother was still dead, though Greta had half hoped that was a dream. Their father and his no-longer-new wife made room for them and for the strangeness that clung to their skin; there was more than enough to feed them all now.

Greta set about trying to wean Hans from her. She wept more than a little, explained to Hans, and told him no in every way she could as he ran his fingers through her hair and whispered please and yes and why don't we? “Nobody understands the world the way we two do. Nobody knows."

Greta said, “No, no, no, no, no.” But her nos grew quieter until they slid to the back of her throat and tumbled her into the hay with him, tangling limbs, kissing fingers and toes.

Greta adjusted her clothes, and kissed his mouth a few last times. “We can't be at it like this."

Hans grinned, knowing Greta liked the way his lips shaped into a smile, and reached up for her hand. “Just a few more times. Just once or twice when there's none about and there's only chance bringing you and me amongst the hay or—"

“Shush your mouth. You know it won't do.” But Greta smiled, and did not take her hand away, or resist, as Hans pulled her closer, and began unlacing her all over again.

“Perhaps,” she whispered into his ear, and yet she thought, We must not, we can't.... But the thought trailed away. She said nothing, only opening her mouth for more kisses.

The next morning, wiping the mouths of her youngest brothers and sisters, working the dough, feeding the hens, Greta sought to gather the strength to tell Hans no for a final time. He was in the fields with their father and uncles and the other men. Not having him there in front of her, not feeling his eyes upon her or his arms around her, she felt sure she could tell him no. She could tell him to find a bride, to look to another for what they'd had together.

All day Greta steeled herself and practiced and practiced it over in her head; picturing how she must approach Hans and what she should say. If she did not imagine him too closely, it was easily done, but when she thought about the length of his eyelashes, the feel of his breath on her neck, then her thoughts went awry and she could tell him nought but what he wanted to hear. She made her excuses to be away at midday meal, so as not to see him. Come sundown and the evening meal, she had it shaped fine in her head, and could tell him how it should be, even imagining his eyes on hers, and the pleading that was in them, and still keep her no firm, and her shawl about her.

After all had eaten, and the girls had cleared and scraped and cleaned, Greta and her brother Hans went walking. Greta kept her distance and shied away when he made to move a little closer. She kept her head low and let him talk of this and that till his tone grew serious. “So what is it that's keeping my sister so quiet?"

“Oh,” said Greta, “The same as ever. This thing of you and me. We must stop and you must get yourself a wife. You are full grown and handsome and well-to-do, thanks to her who is no longer. You have to find a wife."

“Find a wife, you say. So you're setting me a task. If I find myself a wife, then..."

Greta felt dizzy and did not hear all he said. “A wife? Yes, find yourself a wife.” She turned and made her way back to the house, telling herself that she was not running, and that her eyes did not sting.

Within the week Hans had asked Beth Colven, and she, trembling and blushing, had said yes, and they were all—all, for it was spring and there was seven pair to be joined—packed into the kirk on Sunday, and there was dancing and beer and laughter, and Greta danced with Beth's brother William, and many others. The wedding cakes were sugary and light and airy, but one groom brushed them away, saying he had not the tooth for sweetmeats. His sister Greta ate no cake neither, though Tom Hode offered it to her: “A sweet for my sweet."

“I'm not your sweet, and besides, I've no liking for them."

The merriment lasted the night through. At first light, fair Beth and all the other brides were without their maidenhoods, and the sheets were held aloft amidst blushing and laughter.

Greta took herself to the outhouse. In between the heartache and the retching, Greta noted that her own blood had not come. She wiped her mouth with her hand, straightened her dress, took a few uneven steps back towards the house—and then Hans was before her.

“What are you about?” said Greta—harsher than she intended, but his clothes were disarrayed and he looked happy when he should be as heartfelt distraught as she was.

“I done my task now, are you happy?"

“What're you speaking of, stupid brother? Task? I see a wedding, and blood on a sheet."

“As you told me. I got myself a wife."

“As I told you? A wife..."

Hans put his arms about Greta and smoothed her hair. “It's done and now we can be together.” He kissed her mouth and she felt the heat growing between them and she thought of the babe, likely, forming inside her and also of Beth newly filled.

“I told you no, and no, and no. I set no task. I saved you. Again. Saved you from me and me from you."

Hans's face looked as though there were no blood beneath his skin, only bone. “It was for you, was done to—"

“None of your nonsense,” said Greta, pulling away from him, out of his arms. “We're of blood. You know it is wrong and cursed—her curse—and there can be nothing between us."

“They say a saint is always born of such a union."

Greta slapped the smile from her brother's face. The tears leaked out of her eyes slow and steady, and then all at once. Greta cried and cried and found herself in her brother's arms and them wound round tight together till there was no beginning and no end. And when they were spent, Hans, he slept where he lay, but Greta woke thinking only that the miracle of their undiscovery could not last; and not caring if Hans found his way into his Beth's arms, not bothering to reassemble herself, she made her way to her cot at the back of the house, away from noise and frivolity; curled up and planned the rest of her life away, thinking: It's done with, now—over and gone.

A wedding of her own there must be. A father for her child whose own father was uncle and father both. She kept herself and Hans apart. No easy task. Greta told him no and no and no and kept herself steady with her nos though that oft-repeated word produced bruises bigger than plums on fair Beth's face.

Greta knew her own wedding would be easy. She had heard her beauty praised often enough. Even the local lord and each and every one of his sons and knights had tried to tumble her. And besides, there was her dowry, that would make a beauty of any woman.

The week she plotted to bring the bonds of wedlock about her, there were a dozen or more offers. She told them all no. Edmund Hayes, Georgie Telfer, and Georgie's brother Lochie had had their nos before but were content to try for them once again.

She told herself, as each and every one asked, that she must say yes and be done, but her tongue betrayed her, and “no” slid out once more. She had reasons enough behind each shake of her head, but the most of it was that they would all put at least eight mile between her and her home, between her and Hans. So her nos continued unabated till William Colven asked. Colven who had a farm with ten head of cattle and goats and geese and wheat and apples and much much more besides, as he told Greta at length, listing and listing, till he got down to the very lint in the house and dirt in his fields. Greta wasn't listening, though she nodded her head and smiled shyly as though she was thrilled at every word. She was thinking, He's brother to Beth, and his father's farm nearby. Hans and me, we can see each other when we will.

Greta bade William seek her family's consent. “My father and mother both, and,” she felt her heart shift a little as she said it, “my brother as well.” She did not look up at William.

“The littlies too?” he asked, chucking her under the chin as though she was as young as they. “And the oldest not yet ten years?"

“Seth is almost twelve now, and Mary is not far behind him, kind sir,” said Greta, sinking to the ground as though she was a lady's maid. “You need not ask their leave, but you must not forget to ask my brother Hans, for he is of a heavy mood."

Greta went to Hans ahead of William. He was out in the far field. Hans smiled when he saw his sister coming toward him. There were butterflies about, and the sun was warm with the smell of flowers in the air, but he did not reach for his beloved sister, nor kiss her mouth, and his smile stayed there but shortly. There were plenty of folk about—Hans knew enough to be cautious—and besides, she had been cold with him of late.

“I kept to my task like I said but there's been almost nothing of you,” said he, keeping his voice low.

“You're a married man now, my brother,” said Greta, trying to keep a lightness to her words. The smile she fought to put there faded.

“As you bade me, I did.” Hans laid his tools down carefully and crossed his arms. “For that I am a married man."

“Not a task, not a chore, to be done lightly to win my kisses.” Hans did not look away. “You were married because it was best and right and what a man like you should do."

“She has not your mouth or eyes or—"

“Hush, now. There's nothing to be said of that. I'm here with news of my own."

“And what would that be?” asked Hans, his face grave and stern, and his heart shrinking a little with prickles of foreknowledge. His words were slow and taut.

“My own time at the kirk come Sunday."

Hans stayed still and silent.

“Me and William Colven to be joined alongside the others. He'll be about to ask your leave."

“My leave?"

“Of course. I'll not marry without my brother's leave."

“You'll not marry..."

“Don't repeat what I say. Hans, please don't. It's done and can't be undone and I'll love you all my life and hope to see you all my days but no more of this other."

His gaze broke and he looked down at his tools, not caring what he saw as long as it was not his sister's face.

“Hans,” said Greta. “Look up."

Hans did not.

“Hans, please. Listen. This is her, don't you see? Her curse on us for escaping. Everything that should be sweet is rotten. She, her, without her...” She trailed off and still Hans would not look at her. “We must stop. Or otherwise she will stop us."

Hans watched as she walked away across the field, humming one of their mother's sad foreign songs. “She's burned,” he said. “Dead and gone.” He waited for William Colven to come ask his leave. It was a long wait with no reward.

In the morning their father's wife was garlanding Greta in hugs and fretting about the dress. Greta's father was grave but pleased. The rest of her sisters and brothers covered her in kisses and congratulations, laughing at the manners of William, who had gone down on his knees before each and every one seeking their consent. Everyone but Hans, who kept himself scarce from the house. His wife Beth did not come down the stairs once that week before the wedding, though there was plenty of work to be done.

Hans was not at the kirk that Sunday. First light had seen him disappear and they could not find him, though they called and called. The four couples were wed without him. Greta knew she was right to be wearing the ring and joining her hand to that of William Colven, though there was no heat in her blood to be near him. It does not matter, she told herself. I've had all the heat I need, and now my stomach is bairn-full with it.

Her father set her on her milk-white mare; William adjusted her cloak and then he took the bridle. Hans stood silent at the kirkyard gate. Greta smiled to see him. Her heart felt light, though his face was long. As they reached the gate, Hans asked his sister for a kiss and Greta leaned over the saddlebow. Then all the world slowed. Greta could not tell exactly how it went: she felt his mouth against her cheek, heard him whisper words in her ear so that it tickled. His breath smelt fresh and good. He was in close to her, and then so too was his knife, and he wounded her deep.

Greta's eyes grew wide but she uttered no sound. Her Hans stood back from her. He walked away. She opened her mouth to stay him, but nothing came out.

Toward the town William led her on the horse, chatting merrily to his best young man and the other brides and grooms and folk of the wedding procession, and all the while her heart's blood stained her gown.

“I think this bride looks pale and wan,” the best young man told William, smiling. “It's well she be modest and a small pinch afraid."

There was laughter but Greta heard none of it, for she was fixed on her heart's steady leak. William patted her thigh and smiled at her. “I won't hurt you, my love."

Greta heard that this husband of hers made a sound, but not what he said. “You did not ask his leave,” she whispered. She thought of a house with walls sweet and slippery and slick. Then she saw the slight rise of a hill and a tree broad and strong. “Lead me gently,” she said. Blood leaving her, words too; she wondered how much time was left to her. “The tree—I'll sit down, I'll make my will.” Only William heard, and he did not catch all her words.

“Rest now, my love?"

“A short rest, a short while."

He stopped the horse and helped Greta down. She thought she would faint, there was so much pain.

“Look at them! Can't wait till they get indoors, can they?” said the best young man. The laughter of the crowd drowned out her gasps.

“Are you well, my love? You are pale."

“I must make my will.” The world around her contracted down into almost nothing. She could not see her Hans. She could not see anyone.

“Your will? You cannot be feeling so unwell as that?” William smiled his indulgence at her.

“For my father, the milk-white mare that brought me here.” Even though it is now stained red, she thought.

William decided to let her play this game. “And for your mother?"

Surely, my mother is dead? Out loud, she said, “My velvet pall and silken gear."

“And for the littlies?"

“Give Ann my rose scarf.” She tried to think of what they might like, but it was hard; she hurt. “And for the other girls, divide what is left of my dowry. My youngest brothers can share what there is in the oaken chest. For Seth, my new penknife."

“And your sister Mary?"

“My bloody gown to wash."

“Your—” William pushed back her cloak and reached his arm around her; her waist was damp and sticky.

“You haven't asked me about my brother Hans,” said Greta. Her words were slow in coming, and nothing before her eyes was where it should be. She wished her brother hell, all of it, and her there with him.

“Your brother Hans?” echoed William, looking at his fingers. They were covered with red.

“A rope and a gallows to hang him on,” said Greta.

“So what would you give your own true lover?” William pulled Greta closer to him and began to weep.

“My own true lover?” said Greta with so little breath that only the dead could hear. “I give him my dying kiss and my love forever."

Copyright © 2001 Justine Larbalestier

Justine Larbalestier is a research fellow at the University of Sydney. Her first book, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in Spring 2002.

“This, you know, will not do,” said Edwin Luffington. “It will not do at all.” He gazed distastefully at the arched brick roof, from which a greenish drip occasionally fell to the floor. “My dear David (I may call you David?), we must get you out of here."

“Why? I've been here for a year. It's handy."

“It is quite unsuitable for a man in your position."

David Glendower looked at Edwin vaguely and then, a good phrase suddenly occurring to him, returned to his writing. There was nothing particularly striking about his immediate position; he was seated on two orange crates and making use of two more as a desk. His room, an enclosed arch under a viaduct in Kentish town, was neatly furnished with a series of shelves piled high with manuscripts, and a bed, all constructed from more orange crates; at two shillings a box they must have represented some five pounds’ worth of outlay. The floor was muddy.

“Do you live here all the time?” pursued Luffington.

“Oh, no. I go to the castle in Wales for the summer months."

“Castle?” Luffington's expression perceptibly brightened.

“Pwllafftheniog. My ancestral home. I don't stay there in the winter because it's rather inaccessible; people won't deliver groceries.” Reminded of food, he took another spoonful from a packet of mixed raw rice and currants which stood on his desk. “It's a day's ride from the nearest village."

“On what?"

“Donkey."

“Could you be photographed at the castle?"

“I could, I suppose. If it was a fine day. There are only two rooms with ceilings, and they leak a bit.... That's why I like this place. It reminds me of home."

“What's the rent?"

“The castle belongs to me. Oh, you mean here? Five shillings a month."

“You can afford more, now. How long has A Nice Drop of Rain been running?"

David glanced at a grubby theatrical poster and calculated on his finger.

“Ten months."

“And The Night Sky in May opens next week?"

“I believe so. Really I must hurry up and finish Chips in Coromandel."

“And we've only just found out where you live,” said Luffington, who represented an impressive firm of literary and theatrical agents. “Really, Mr. Glendower—David—you keep yourself rather too well hidden away. Weren't you even interested to discover the amount of your bank balance?"

“I don't seem to need money much."

Luffington peered at him with disapproval. “You must get a new suit. And a new flat. Don't you understand, people want to meet you?"

“I haven't time to hunt for flats. I'm just at the crucial point in the second act. People must take me as they find me. But I'd rather they didn't find me."

“As to flats, you need have no worries at all,” Luffington said firmly. “There isn't any need to hunt. Another of our authors is abroad at the moment and I happen to know hers is available, furnished, on a year's lease. It will suit you admirably: a ground-floor flat in Curzon Street with a garden. And the rent is well within your present means. You can move in tomorrow; I will come here at ten with the office Bentley and help you move—you appear to have very little luggage—"

“I hope there will be room for my shelves; I don't want my manuscripts to get into a muddle."

“No there will not.” Luffington cast a disparaging glance at the boxes. “But I can assure you the flat is amply furnished with cupboards, desks, and bureaus. And I myself will help with the manuscripts."

“There are forty-nine plays and seven sonnet sequences,” David warned him.

Even Luffington's calm wavered for a moment, and the vaulted ceiling swam before his eyes in a superimposed vision of forty-nine box-office successes.

“How old did you say you were?"

“Twenty-five."

“And A Nice Drop of Rain was the first piece of work you sent out?"

“Yes; this flat you speak of"—David's tone was apprehensive—"I'll have to keep it dusted and so on?"

“Don't worry about any of that. The butler goes with the lease. He'll take care of you."

“Butler?"

“An old family retainer. The flat belongs to Louise Bonaventure—you've heard of her, I suppose?” Even you, his tone suggested, but David looked vague.

“She's an extremely well-known ornithologist. You must have seen her TV programmes—no, I suppose you may not have,” he added as his gaze trailed down the damp walls to the candle in its saucer. “She travels in remote countries looking for rare birds. Her programme is called Parlour Treks. She's off on Whitsun Island at the moment, I believe. A delightful creature; you must meet her next year when she gets back.” David looked mulish. “That's all, I think,” Luffington ended briskly. “Till tomorrow then."

He departed, a willow-thin young man, wearing the very latest collarless haddock-skin jacket, with eyes as cold and intelligent as panel lights.

David went back to his writing and in two minutes had forgotten the visitor. The flat in Curzon Street was furnished and carpeted in the most elegant taste, but David, next day, hardly took it in, beyond noticing tiers of well-filled bookshelves with absent approval. Sitting down at a large, comfortable desk, he pulled out a pencil and notebook from his pocket, and had to be forcibly dragged away by Luffington to meet the lawyers and sign the lease.

Luffington rapidly read the document aloud. “Property on the ground floor of number tiddle-tum three, Curzon Street, hereinafter known as The Property, together with all fixtures, furnishings, fittings, appurtenances, trum, trum, trum, shall be...” David's attention drifted away. Could Luffington really have read “live and dead stock” or was that a phrase dimly recollected from the long-ago day when Glendower senior was sold up as bankrupt? “Subject to quarterly inspection by lessor or lessor's agents, trum, trum, trum ... shall retain the services of HENRY WADSWORTH OGLETHORPE as butler at a salary of not less than ... lease shall be subject to approval of hereinbeforementioned HENRY WADSWORTH...."

“Just a formality,” little Mr. Glibchick, the lawyer, was murmuring. “Miss Bonaventure was anxious to ensure that the flat should be sublet to someone, as she put it, on the same wavelength as herself. (The ladies, bless them, have these fancies.) She places the utmost reliance on the judgement of Oglethorpe—butler since she was a child."

“I have to be approved by this Oglethorpe?” David came back from Act II with an effort.

“If you don't mind, sir—"

“Where is he?"

“In the kitchen. I'll just—"

“I'll go myself. Through here?” David laid his finger in the notebook and folded Act II round it.

A plump, fatherly man sat at the spotless table oiling a seventeenth-century musical box. His face was platter-shaped and pastry-coloured, with shrewd, friendly eyes.

“You are Henry Wadsworth Oglethorpe? Good morning. I understand you have to approve me. If you'll just excuse me a moment—” David said politely, and wrote half a dozen lines, raising his head to say, “My name's David Glendower."

“Mr. Glendower, the playwright? You needn't have troubled, sir.” Oglethorpe went placidly on with his task. “Miss Bonaventure has a very high opinion of you and so have I; I've seen your play twice."

“Oh, well, that's fine then. Very glad to make your acquaintance. What a beautiful musical box."

“Miss Louise collects them, sir. Would you care to hear it play?"

It played “Can Ye Sew Cushions” very sweetly and hauntingly.

“I know the words to that,” said David, and supplied them in an agreeable tenor. Oglethorpe unexpectedly added the bass, and when, after twenty minutes, Luffington and Glibchick came in search, they had worked their way through to the “Ash Grove,” with falsetto cadenzas by David.

The lease was signed, and the two men of business took their leave, Luffington promising to return and escort David to a tailor.

“Before you do that, sir, I'll get Mr. Glendower something off the peg,” Oglethorpe suggested, measuring David with his eye, “for he can't be seen in Padrith and Kneale in that suit. And,” he added, as the front door closed behind Luffington, “in the meantime, how about a nice hot bath, sir? While you're having it, I'll just pop out and get the suit—a Lovat I think would be suitable, Mr. David—and then I'll bring up a light, early lunch, shall I, and you can get straight on with your writing. An omelet and a bottle of Haut-Brion?"

“All right—” said David, steered neatly and inexorably in the direction of the bathroom. The hot water was already running. He felt vaguely that he was being remoulded, but since the process could not possibly upset his interior self, he did not particularly mind; in Oglethorpe's capable hands it was rather comfortable. Certainly a hot bath was a luxury he had not experienced for years, and quite acceptable, though he found Miss Bonaventure's bathroom, with its swansdown etceteras, dark-green marble, and sunk bath, alarmingly sybaritic.

Halfway through his bath, as he lay idly pushing the soap about with his toe and trying over lines of dialogue aloud (acoustically the room was superb), something rather disconcerting occurred.

A flash of movement caught his eye from a carved alabaster bracket by the window, on which reposed what he had taken to be a carved alabaster swan with its head tucked under its wing. Turning rather sharply, he now saw that the swan had thrust its neck forward, so that the head just protruded from under the wing, and was regarding him with a black and inscrutable eye.

David started so violently that a tidal wave slopped over the edge of the bath. Swans are baleful and unpredictable creatures at best, even when viewed from the vantage point of rowboat or towing path; to meet a swan when oneself recumbent, unclad, immersed, and on a much lower level is an unnerving experience. David glanced towards the bathroom door, gauging his distance, but the swan forestalled him by spreading a pair of wings with an eight-foot span and gliding to a point midway between bath and door. There it settled, tucking its flappers neatly underneath, curving its neck into a meticulous S-bend, and fixing its flat eyes on David.

With such an audience there was no pleasure in further soaking. Indeed, it seemed alarmingly possible that the bird might elect to share his bath with David. He dried himself hastily. Oglethorpe had removed his clothes and left him a towelling robe which afforded highly inadequate protection against swan assault. However, this bird's manner, though watchful, did not appear to be hostile. When David gingerly skirted round to reach the door, it swivelled its head, keeping the flat black eyes trained on him like AA guns, but allowed him to leave in an orderly manner.

He found Oglethorpe laying out the new suit, together with socks, underwear, shirt, tie, and handkerchief, all selected with severely professional discrimination as suitable to the image of a rising young playwright.

“Oglethorpe."

“Yes, Mr. David?"

“What is that swan doing in the bathroom?"

“It seems to like it in there, sir, when the weather's chilly. I suppose it's natural; the presence of water, you know, and the radiators. If you will not be requiring another bath this afternoon, I'll fill it with cold (adding just a dash of warm); it serves nicely as an indoor paddling pool."

“But what is the swan doing here at all?"

“It's in the lease, sir; didn't you read it? Furniture, fittings, appurtenances, and one swan, care of aforesaid swan to be undertaken by the hereinaftermentioned Henry Wadsworth Oglethorpe."

“I have to share this flat with a swan?"

“It is a very valuable bird, sir.” Oglethorpe's tone held a faint touch of reproof. “A gold-banded swan of Izbanistan."

“Why isn't it at the zoo?"

“That wouldn't do for it at all, sir. It's a very particular bird."

“Bad-tempered?"

“Oh, I wouldn't say so, Mr. David.” Was there a hint of reserve in his manner? “Keeps itself to itself, in general. When the weather's fine, of course, it will be in the garden."

David now understood why the garden, a pleasant little court with a grape arbour and fig tree, was three-quarters filled with an evidently new pool.

“What sex?” he asked. “The swan? Male or female?"

Oglethorpe answered repressively that the bird was a pen, and folded David's handkerchief into a neat geometrical figure. “I'll bring your lunch in ten minutes, Mr. David."

The omelet was delicious and the wine mellow; nevertheless, lunch would have been a more cheerful meal if the swan had not chosen to trundle, slowly and with dignity, into the dining room, where it sat on the serving cart, following the progress of every bite into David's mouth. He tried a placatory offer of toast fingers, which were ignored.

Hurrying back to work in the study, he heard slow, flapping footsteps behind him. Then there was a slight flurry, and Oglethorpe's voice, low, but firm: “Mr. David is busy with his writing and doesn't want to be bothered. I'll fill the bath and you can have a nice swim."

Feeling rather a pig, David closed the study door. Halfway through the afternoon (Act II was not going well) he felt obliged to tiptoe along to the bathroom and peer through the crack of the door. The swan was in the bath, sailing about above her reflection, and preening her back with brisk, housewifely jabs of the beak. She seemed contented enough, but was there a slight droop to her neck, as if she knew she had been rebuffed? Conscience-stricken, David left the study door open, and not long after kept his head assiduously bent over his notebook as a slow slipslop crossed the rush matting behind him. (Had she dried her feet before leaving the bathroom?)

At seven Oglethorpe, gliding in to inquire about the evening meal, found the playwright scribbling away like mad, while the swan, silent, impassive, but not unsympathetic, sat on a corner of his desk, pinning down a large heap of manuscript.

“I've made a casserole, sir. When would you like it?"

“I'd like it now,” said David, stretching his cramped hand. “I've done enough."

When Oglethorpe brought the after-dinner coffee, David asked the swan's name.

“Miss Lou—that is, she hasn't exactly got a name, sir. Miss Louise never thought to name her."

“She ought to have a name. I shall call her Lucy Snowe,” said David, thinking of the memorable descriptive sentence in Villette: “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm.” Calmness seemed to be this Lucy's forte.

“Very good, sir. Shall you be wanting anything more?"

“No. Thank you, Oglethorpe. You're making me very comfortable,” David said, looking from the peacefully glowing fire to the swan on the ebony concert grand with her head tucked under her wing. It was surprising how quickly one became accustomed to the presence of a swan in the room.

“It's a pleasure to look after you, sir.” Oglethorpe gently closed the door, leaving the silent pair to their own reflections.

A week passed. Hounded by Luffington, David acquired a correct wardrobe, had a haircut that brought into view his haggard good looks, and attended the first night of his new play. It was an instant success.

With two plays running, David Glendower became a celebrity and, if Luffington had had his way, would have appeared at countless public occasions and TV interviews. David, however, had a strong faculty of self-preservation, which, backed by Oglethorpe's quelling manner of answering the telephone or door, kept most of his admirers at bay.

One of them got through, however.

Everyone who knew Blair Lanaway described her as a horrible girl, “but,” they were obliged to add, “she does have staying power.” It was true, she had. To this, and not at all to the fact that she was a Hon. did she owe her job as gossip columnist for Fancy magazine; she always got the copy she was after and it was universally admitted that she wrote the liveliest, knowingest, bitchiest column in the business. She had a round face with pink pushed-up cushiony cheekbones, plum-black eyes, and a golliwog mop of black hair; her loud laugh and her ringing public-school tones were known from one end of Mayfair to the other end of Fleet Street.

The moment she laid eyes on David all her acquisitive instincts came into play.

David had the misfortune to twist his ankle slightly coming down the theatre steps after a compulsory visit to the three hundredth night of A Nice Drop of Rain. Blair happened to be at hand; she swooped on him like a hen harrier and insisted on driving him home in her nasty little car before he could extricate himself. Politeness demanded that he ask her in for a drink. As a matter of fact, Miss Lanaway practically carried him over the threshold, to Oglethorpe's evident and deep disapproval.

Before David could think of an excuse, she had invited him to dinner at her flat the following night, promising to come and fetch him.

In years to come when David woke, twitching from nightmares, he would remember that evening. Blair served him a hellish cocktail (he thought it might have been petrol and rosehip syrup with a pinch of phenobarbitone); thereafter he sat in a state of stupor. Blair curled herself up on the hearthrug and chattered gaily, but as the evening progressed she moved closer and closer until her elbows were on his knees and she was gazing intensely into his eyes; by about midnight she was saying with a boyish laugh, “Why bother to go home? I'll blow up the airbed if you prefer to sleep single."

“My butler will be worrying about me,” David managed to articulate, trying to edge towards the door on his good foot.

“Bother your butler."

“And so will Lucy."

“Who's Lucy?” she said sharply.

“'A maid whom there were none to praise, and very few to love.’ Thanks for a delightful evening,” he said, finding the doorknob as thankfully as a drowning swimmer finds a rock.

She was so annoyed that she let him go, and he managed to weave and hobble to the taxi rank.

But the following evening she called at the flat in Curzon Street. As ill luck would have it, Oglethorpe was out; it was his evening off and he was singing with the Aeolian choir in Haydn's Creation. David had to answer the door.

Blair surged past him, all generous sympathy, crying out, “You poor dear! Do you feel terrible after last night? Never mind, I forgive you! I've brought a bottle of Volga Dew for a pick-me-up. Don't trouble to hunt for a corkscrew; you sit down and rest your foot. I'm a champion at finding things in other people's kitchens. No Lucy? I knew you were pulling my leg."

“She's in the garden,” David said faintly.

“Nonsense, sweetie, you're just a great big storyteller, aren't you? Here we are, clever little Blair's found two tumblers and a corkscrew, so let's be cosy."

David looked longingly towards the study, where Act II was waiting, but he did not know how to evict his unwelcome guest. He wondered how long it would be before Oglethorpe came home.

Blair had kicked her shoes off and would have let her hair down had it been possible. “Let's sit on the sofa,” she said. “Now I want to talk to you about contact, David; for a man in your position, contact is so essential."

People always seemed to be lecturing him about his position, David thought; at the moment it seemed to be deteriorating alarmingly; he felt homesick for the viaduct.

At this moment three loud raps sounded on the window. Blair shot upright, greatly startled.

“Oh, that will be Lucy.” David's tone was full of relief. “I expect she wants her bath mat."

He opened the window and laid in front of the fire a thick square of red towelling. Lucy hoisted herself over the sill and stalked forward onto the mat, where she carefully dried each flipper in turn. While she did so, she kept her head turned and her eyes trained on Blair; it seemed to David that there was something of definite malignity in the look she was directing at the visitor.

Blair felt this too. She paled. “I—I don't go for swans much,” she said nervously. “Of course it's too marvellously brilliant and amusing of you to keep one for a pet—we must get some shots for Fancy—but couldn't it sit in the kitchen or somewhere?"

“Goodness, no. Lucy always sits with me. I wouldn't for worlds hurt her feelings."

“What about my feelings?” demanded Blair angrily. “Am I supposed to sit here with that bird staring at me?"

“Don't stay if you don't want to, of course,” David replied courteously. Lucy abetted him by choosing at this moment to move slowly towards Blair with outthrust neck, emitting a low but meaningful hiss which had a completely routing effect. Blair left precipitately, with many reproaches, and David was able to return to Act II, while Lucy settled on the arm of his chair and dangled a contented length of neck over his shoulder.

It became plain that as a chaperon Lucy was unrivalled. On several subsequent occasions she rescued David from similar predicaments, and once she dealt with a pair of burglars who had been tempted by the valuable collection of musical boxes, breaking the leg of one and stunning the other, with a neat right-and-left of her powerful wings, before David and Oglethorpe had even woken up. In fact, Lucy became almost as much of a celebrity as her temporary owner, and featured with him in many a double spread.

Two months passed peacefully and productively by. January, however, brought a severe cold spell, with concomitant power cuts and fuel shortages. David, hardened by years under the viaduct, hardly felt the weather, but Lucy and Oglethorpe both suffered acutely and caught colds with distressing frequency. Oglethorpe nevertheless continued to look after David solicitously, while his care for Lucy was touching; he made her gargle—a process by no means easy for swans—night and morning, fed her vitamin capsules by the handful, and, when necessary, helped her to inhale steaming turpentine, sitting with her under the towel to ensure her compliance. One evening, fancying she looked a little pink round the eyes, he went out in the snow to procure her some tincture of cinnamon, and this was his undoing; he caught a bad cold which turned to pneumonia, and the doctor insisted on his removal to hospital. He protested vehemently.

“Don't worry, please don't worry,” David exhorted him. “I'll look after everything here; you just concentrate on getting better."

“Miss Lucy—you'll look after Miss Lucy?” begged Oglethorpe. “If anything happened to her I just don't know what—” His voice broke, and he was obliged to turn his head away on the stretcher.

“I'll do everything you did, I swear,” David assured him. “Vitamin C, black-currant purée, quinine, hotwater bottle, the lot."

For a week all went well. Then, when the thermometer had shot down to twenty-six degrees, there was a forty-eight-hour power cut. The temperature in David's flat gradually sank to an arctic low, frost glistened on the walls, the bath froze (Lucy's outdoor pool had frozen long before). For the first day David managed to keep himself and Lucy warm by burning coal dust and branches stolen from Green Park, and filling hotwater bottles from kettles boiled on a spirit stove. On the second evening Lucy sneezed twice, and David noticed that she had begun to shiver. He filled an extra bottle and wrapped an eiderdown round her, but she shivered still, and he stared at her in worried perplexity. It was plain that she must not go through the night in such a state.

The solution he finally adopted seemed the only one possible. He piled all the bedding in the flat on his own bed, put all the hotwater bottles into it, administered an immense tot of brandy to Lucy and took one himself, then, grasping her firmly round her feathery middle, he wriggled into bed and went to sleep. It occurred to him drowsily in the middle of the night that he should have done this sooner; their combined warmth, and Lucy's feathers, produced an almost tropical temperature under the layers of quilt and blanket.

When he woke next morning he looked beside him on the pillow expecting to see black beady eyes and an elegant red bill. Instead, to his astonished dismay, he found an unmistakably feminine profile: that of a fair-haired, distinguished woman whom, if he had been a student of television, he would have recognised as Louise Bonaventure.

She opened her eyes and regarded him sleepily.

“How do you do?” she said. “I'm your landlady."

He pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “How did you get here?” he asked.

“It's a long story.” Louise stretched luxuriously. Then she sat up and stepped briskly out of bed. “Let's have some coffee first, shall we? Is the power on again? Yes, thank goodness. How delicious coffee smells—it must be a year since I tasted it. Oh, you want to know how I got here? I was the swan."

“Lucy? My Lucy Snowe?"

Miss Bonaventure had the grace to look a little conscious. “I suppose I should apologise. You see, I'd collected a pair of Abominable Snowgeese in the mountains of Izbanistan, and the Imam found out, and was annoyed about it, said I had no right to—ridiculous of him, they aren't at all rare, over there, common as starlings—so in revenge he purloined one of my pair, had me turned into a swan by his top lama, a very accomplished magician, and popped me into the crate instead. If it hadn't been for Oglethorpe, who very intelligently put two and two together, I should have ended my life in the London zoo."

“But what broke the spell?"

She blushed faintly. “It must have been the old Frog Prince solution. I hope you haven't caught my cold?"

“Ought I to marry you?” David asked diffidently.

She gave him a somewhat baffling glance, but merely remarked, “There's no obligation about it—except on my side. I really am extremely grateful to you, and you've been an admirable tenant."

“Shall you want the flat back now?” David felt very confused, and instinctively kept the conversation on a businesslike level.

“Not immediately.” Miss Bonaventure's fine eyes flashed. “First I shall fly to Izbanistan for another snowgoose. I'm not going to be downed by that old trickster of an Imam. But first let's go to the hospital and visit Oglethorpe."

Oglethorpe's delight at the restoration of his mistress was touching to witness. Tears of joy stood in his eyes. “It makes me better just to see you, Miss Louise,” he kept declaring. “And you won't go back to those unreliable foreign parts any more, will you, my dearie?"

“Only to get another snowgoose, Henry dear. I must have a pair."

“Then I shall come too,” the old man declared. He overbore all objections, and insisted on her waiting until he was well enough to accompany her. Meanwhile she moved to the Curzon Hotel, but spent a good deal of time at the flat, where she and David maintained their pleasantly easy relationship.

Two weeks after the travellers had departed, David suddenly realised how bereft he was without them: no Oglethorpe to sing duets with of an evening, no sage advice as to ties and shirts, no imperturbable barricade against the outside world, and worst of all, no Lucy Snowe. Only now did he understand how much he had come to need her cool and silent presence. Without her he could hardly write.

He sent a cable to catch her at Elbruz: WILL YOU MARRY ME?

She replied, YES, OF COURSE, DUNDERHEAD, BUT MUST FIRST SECURE SPECIMEN. MEET ME HERE ON RETURN FROM IZBANISTAN.

Overjoyed, David booked a flight. All his urge to write had come back, and he was able to complete two acts on the thirty-hour trip. By the time he reached Elbruz, he calculated, her mission would be accomplished and they could get married at the British Embassy.

He reckoned without the Imam of Izbanistan.

When he reached the Taj Mahal hotel, the first person he saw was Oglethorpe, who looked travelworn and harassed.

“Oh, Mr. David, how glad I am to see you!"

“Is Miss Louise back?"

“Yes, she's back, but—"

“Did you get the goose?"

“Yes, we got it, but—"

“What's the trouble? She's not hurt?"

“No, nothing like that, sir, but that old Imam's been up to his magical tricks again."

“Turned her into a swan? Well, we know how to deal with that now,” David said.

“Yes, well, it's a bit worse, this time, Mr. David. However, you'd best come and see for yourself. I'm not sure how long the hotel management is going to stand for it."

He led the way by lifts and corridors to a bedroom door which shook and rattled as if some huge and formidably active creature inside were attempting to get out.

“You're sure you're game, Mr. David?"

“Of course I am. Open the door, man!” David exclaimed. He was pale but resolute.

So Oglethorpe opened the door....

Copyright © 1977 by Joan Aiken Enterprises, Ltd.;
first appeared in The Far Forests, published by Viking Press;
reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

Joan Aiken is the author of over sixty books for adults and children, perhaps the best known of which are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She still types all her novels on a typewriter, never having moved onto a computer. Aiken lives in Sussex, England, with her husband.

It started with a dream:

... if we are to win the hearts and souls of humanity to our vision, then the space movement must develop its songs."—Dr. Robert Zubrin

In an effort to inspire such songs, Dr. Zubrin (author of The Case for Mars) initiated the National Space Society's Apollo Awards for Space Songwriting.

Now, the first-ever CD of songs to inspire and enthuse the public towards space exploration for the National Space Society (NSS), highlighting the top Apollo Award winners alongside other works, is being produced by Prometheus Music. The working title of the CD is “Ad Astra,” and it seeks to stir the hearts and minds of space-enthused individuals towards the National Space Society's mission by:

• Delivering inspiring, exciting, accessible, and fun songs that tell the stories of mankind's first steps to date in space exploration;
• Conveying a sense of passion and urgency for space-enthused individuals to work towards achieving a spacefaring civilization; and
• Radiating hope and excitement for the bright future that we can achieve by becoming a spacefaring civilization.

The CD will be published and sold by Prometheus Music, co-branded with the National Space Society, and used by the National Space Society to recruit new members, and promote their organization.

In an recent interview, Eli Goldberg, co-producer of Prometheus Music, had this to say:

I think I can comfortably say that this project is the most atypical album put out by anyone ever affiliated with the filk community.

Like most filk enthusiasts, Kristoph [Klover] and I have cherished many of the filksongs on this album.

With Kristoph being a full-time musician and producer, I think we've approached the project from a more impartial angle than a group of filk enthusiasts may have.

For one thing, we've had to critically assess what we could and couldn't draw on from the filk world to deliver a CD that we think could hold broad appeal beyond the thousand or so people who currently buy filk albums.

Like Julia Ecklar's “Divine Intervention” project, we chose to work with a very different set of musicians than you'd find on a typical filk album. Most of the people working on this album don't even know what ‘filk’ is, let alone how the album overlaps with the filk genre.

When we needed a fiddler ... Kristoph invited world-renowned klezmer artist Shira Kammen to record at his studio. (She had a few hours before flying out to an East Coast folk festival, and she was brilliant.)

When we needed a pianist for Margaret Davis's track, Kristoph brought on Ira Stein, who was the youngest person to ever cut an album with Windham Hill. And so forth.

Further-out filksong classics like “The Mass Driver Engineer” or “The Ballad of Apollo 13” were swapped out for a Judy Collins tribute to the first female shuttle commander. And, trust me, you won't find any space chanties, or a single song to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on this CD. ;-]

We've also worked very hard to invite non-filk singer/songwriters who were attracted by the project. I think filkers have a lot of engaging songs on the subject of space exploration, but it's only a fraction of what's out there. The National Space Society Apollo Awards also brought out several outstanding songs, all written by authors who'd never heard of ‘filk.'

We're honored and elated that Christine Lavin is debuting the studio version of her song “If We Had No Moon” through this project, which she considers one of the best works she's ever taken part in. And she's been generously sharing her decades of production wisdom, which has already shaped several tracks on the project.

I think we're also very fortunate to do the album in partnership with the National Space Society. They've been generously patient with the delays involved in reaching an album of the quality we think our audience deserves and demands.

Finally, the financing has been extremely unusual for a filk-inspired album. I didn't want to fall into the self-fulfilling prophesy that plagues most filk projects that, “Only 500 filkers will ever buy it, so we can't afford to do a professional job."

Instead, I've provided a $25,000 budget for the project, to ensure that Kristoph can afford top-class musicians like Ira and Shira, let alone to chip in towards Christine Lavin's studio time in New York City.

The National Space Society (http://www.nss.org/) is a 25,000 member grassroots organization devoted to creating a spacefaring civilization, understanding the benefits that accrue from space exploration, and promoting further probing of the next frontier. It was founded 25 years ago by space pioneer Wernher Von Braun. Directed by Ms. Pat Dasch, its Board includes astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn, as well as prominent space enthusiasts, including Hugh Downs, Tom Hanks, and Bob Hope. Folk musician John Denver was an active member of the NSS's Board of Governors until his death.

Formed in late 1997, Prometheus Music's mission is to produce the first-ever, mainstream-quality general-interest lyrical albums covering themes of space, science-fiction, and fantasy, and to bring these albums to enthusiasts at large. This CD for the NSS is being produced at no charge, to enable the NSS to further enhance their public outreach.

The current list of contributors includes (among others):

• Julia Ecklar (vocals, songwriting)
  Operatically trained, Julia Ecklar has professionally performed songs of space exploration since her teenage years, alongside regular appearances in the Pittsburgh Bach Choir. For Julia's “day job,” she writes science-fiction and fantasy novels, including many of Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels (some written under the “L.A. Graf” pseudonym.) She won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the Best New Writer in 1991.
• Leslie Fish (songwriting)
  Leslie Fish has been writing and performing songs about space exploration for over two decades; her songs have been heard by an audience ranging from NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to the front-line engineers and scientists who comprise our nation's space program.
  As one veteran rocket engineer put it, “...late at night ... it's below freezing and the wind is howling around the test stand and we've been working in the stinging dust for twelve thankless hours, and the coffee's three days old and the LOX tank is creaking from thermal stress and the cooling chamber in the engine's throat has cracked and all the engine does is light, roar, sputter ... and die. Then we listen to [Leslie Fish's] “Hope Eyrie” ... and that pulls us back into perspective."
• Karen Linsley & the late Lloyd Landa (vocals, keyboard, songwriting)
  Karen & Lloyd are perhaps best known for their Canadian Top 40 hit “Someone Else's Heart” (Comstock Records). Karen received a Toronto Arts Council grant to create a country/folk song cycle, depicting today's women in ordinary and extraordinary situations. Most recently, Karen and (posthumously) Lloyd received the first place in the Mars Society's Rouget de Lisle song contest.
• Michael Penkava (vocals, songwriting)
  Michael is a Midwestern elementary school teacher by profession, and a composer and performer of science songs for adoring school children by interest. His song, “Now's the Time to Touch a Star,” was the winner of NSS's 1998 Apollo Awards. To quote Michael, “Space isn't just vocabulary words and data; it comes alive as we explore and discover, as we analyze and synthesize, as we discuss and debate.” And as we sing.
• Ira Stein (piano, synthesizer)
  Before he reached the age of 20, pianist/composer Ira Stein had already signed his first recording contract and released his first album on Windham Hill Records, Elements (1982), followed by work on the Narada label. Explaining that labels are no longer as adventurous and experimental as they once were, Ira now records on his independent Lost Time Records label, performing a fusion of classical and Jazz with The Ira Stein Trio.
• Kris Yenney (cello)
  Ms. Yenney received her M.M. from the New England Conservatory, and was a member of the New England and Sunrise String Quartets. She was the first woman to win the John W. Work III Composition Competition. She has participated in the Banff, Tanglewood, Norfolk, and Meadowmount Music Festivals and the Juilliard Quartet Seminar. Ms. Yenney can be heard on several recent recordings, including Grammy-nominated Short Stories with Fred Hersch and Janice Seigel, as well as on Lyle Lovett's and Rod Stewart's releases. (http://www.broceliande.org/bios.html)

• Kristoph Klover (musical director, engineer, vocals)
  Kristoph Klover operates Flowinglass Music, an independent studio, with his wife Margaret Davis, in Oakland, CA. Kristoph is a career musician and sound engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, with eleven years experience recording and performing Celtic, Medieval and Renaissance music. He has recorded Grammy-winner Janet Harbison, leader of the Belfast Harp Orchestra, and two albums for all-Ireland concertina champion Gearoid o hAllmhurain, among many other clients. He leads Celtic Rock band Avalon Rising and also performs with acoustic Celtic/Early Music ensemble Broceliande. Watch for an upcoming profile of Kristoph and his album “The Starlit Jewel"—Songs from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Peggi Warner-Lalonde is Senior Music Editor for Strange Horizons.

I.
"And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Romania."
—Dorothy Parker

It took about a ton
of clay to fashion him;
aquamarine Pisces gems for eyes,
dirt from Jim Morrison's grave
for a voice,
Cyril's cross around his neck
instead of David's star.
And when it was done—
I'd wanted a muse,
but had created a monster.

II.

"That is not dead which can aeternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die."
—H. P. Lovecraft

When my muse died,
we had a lovely funeral.
We sang old Negro spirituals
and all the songs we remembered
from Sunday school.

They had to break his legs
to fit him in the plain pine box
which was all I could afford;
dispensing with embalming saved cash.

When they lowered the coffin
I threw in a bouquet of blood-red roses
from the day-old bin at Boulevard Florist.
The roses had begun to turn black—
he would have liked that.
He was that kind of muse.

What friends I had left
hugged and kissed me then;
others had run screaming from my
monster muse long ago.

When I was sure that everyone was gone,
I ran back to where they buried him,
and threw in the fourteen-carat
Ten Commandments pendant I'd earned
for learning my psalms, so many years ago.

III.

"You kill the head, you kill the body."
—Night of the Living Dead

What's dead might not stay dead.
He tracked slurry into my bedroom,
looking more alive than I.
He smelled of earth and salt,
but no corruption; his lips
were as soft as a newborn's.

So I patched him together
with spirit gum and spare parts
from a special effects house
in North Hollywood. But when he spoke
he blamed me for all his ills:
his broken life, his broken legs,
the evil that I'd done in making him.

I put a bullet between his lovely eyes;
took the cross from around his neck—
how it burned me! I cried—
and then I think I went mad.

So now you understand.
Purify me with salt water,
and smudge with Five-finger grass,
anoint me with Van Van oil,
and tell me that you understand.
Please tell me that you do,
please tell me.

Then let's clean up this mess.

Copyright © 2001 Denise Dumars

Denise Dumars is a college English professor; an entertainment journalist specializing in science fiction, fantasy, and horror; a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays; and a lifelong resident of the beautiful South Bay area of Los Angeles County. Email her and she'll take you to Brennan's in Marina del Rey for a drink.

We have altered each other more thoroughly
Than moon or potions ever could. Tonight
The experiments in creating anger
Escaped control. Change is irreversible,
The time of mutual regard a distant
Unsettling race-memory. Don't run away:
Where would you go? There are no villages
Of superstitious well-meaning peasants,
Only suburbs purpose-built (not for humans)
And commuters who wouldn't want to get involved,
Their own relationships decaying
Like hidden corpses. Wait for me upstairs.
Even my footsteps will be different:
Build the suspense. Don't try to close your eyes
Until my face comes into the light.

Copyright © 2001 Dave Whippman

Dave Whippman is in his fifties and a psychiatric nurse by trade. He's been writing (mostly for small press magazines) since the 1980s: mostly poetry, but also some fiction, as well as articles for nursing magazines. Dave has been married twice and has two children. Aside from writing, his hobbies are chess and painting.

She picked up a pomegranate, squeezed
it hard, sighed. She'd always preferred golden
delicious apples, but they were all
mushy today. Someone called out
from the direction of the cabbages,
not her name, just pleading. She pushed
her clattering cart toward the greenest
part of the produce department.

A man's head rested among the cabbages.
He had black hair, and the kind of olive skin that
some women find exotic when they don't know
better. “I am Orpheus,” he said, “cursed to live
forever, bereft of love, and now left
among these living green things
that by their fecundity mock my living
death. My woe is legend....”

She resisted the urge to thump
his forehead like a melon. She called
to a beefy old man wearing a
supermarket smock. “What's this head
doing in among the cabbages?” she asked.

He walked toward her, looked at Orpheus,
grunted. “I just unload the crates,” he
said. “The quality of the vegetables
is none of my business.”

"Did these cabbages come from Greece?”
she asked.

"Olives are what come from Greece,” he
said. “Cabbages come from places like
Ohio.” He wandered away.

"Long I sought my love,” Orpheus said.
"Long I wandered singing in
the lands below the earth.”

She looked at the sign. “Cabbages, 89 cents
a head.” She picked up Orpheus by his
hair. He didn't seem to mind. If his neck
had been bloody she might have left
him there, but his wound was smooth
as cut cucumber. She dropped him
in her basket, paid for him at the register,
thinking “Of all the places to find
true love.”

In the car, on the way home, Orpheus went
on and on about his dead wife from inside
the grocery bag.

She wished he would stop; a girl could
start to feel like an afterthought. She decided
he would never love her after all.

A mile from her house he started singing.
She wept. So did a dog in the street, a mailman
passing by, and a stop sign. She decided to keep
him after all.

When she got home she put the rest
of the groceries away, but took Orpheus
into her dusty bedroom, swinging him
gently by his hair. “Long I sought my love,
and an end to loneliness,” Orpheus said.
"Long I searched to find the gates
of my paradise denied.”

She undressed, surprised to find
herself trembling. She stretched out
on the bed and bent her knees, then
tucked the murmuring head of Orpheus
between her thighs.

"Sing out,” she said, and he did.

A bit later, so did she.

Copyright © 2001 Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt is a misplaced Southerner currently living in the California Bay Area. He is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and poetry editor for the online magazine Speculon. Tim's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. Visit his Web site to learn more about him.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the morgue,
Not a creature was stirring, not even the ... um ... Borg. (Yeah, that's
it. Borg is science fictiony. This poetry crap isn't all that hard.)

The zombies were nestled all snug in their coffins,
While visions of juicy brains, ran through their ... their ... (Nuts! I'd
better come back to that one later.)

When out in the cemetery there arose such a ruckus,
I thought, “It's a succubus, come here to ... (Hmm. Better not.)

I sprang from my crypt, and ran to the window,
Looking for signs of that netherworld bimbo.

When what to my pustulant eyes should appear,
But a battered up sleigh, and eight rancid reindeer. (Hey, I'm on a roll here.)

"It's Santa,” I thought. “There's nothing to fear.”
The old fart's been dead for over a year.

His flesh was rotting, his bruises were purple,
His scalp showed in patches, his beard was all ... (Aaarrgghhh!!)

He wasted no time, and got to work with a cough.
He hefted his sack, and two fingers fell off.

He spoke not a word, but filled all the crypts,
With brains, and blood, and a pair of wax lips. (Hey, at least it rhymes.)

Then he sprang to his sleigh, and with a wave of his mitt,
Left in a cloud of dead reindeer sh ... (Hmm ... I'll edit that later.)

I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good fright!

(What? You were expecting William Butler Yeats?)

Copyright © 2000 S. K. S. Perry

S. K. S. Perry is a Master Corporal with the Canadian Armed Forces. His dream is to one day become independently wealthy, or even dependently wealthy—he doesn't really care whose money it is as long as they let him spend it. For more about him, visit his Web site.

Who'll solve my problem? asks the moon
Moving across the sky
Who'll calculate my radius
And multiply by pi?

The shining flood of light I pour
By half a world is shared
And yet this area, figured out
Is merely pi r²

The laws of pi all circles must
Unquestioningly obey
Yet lovely as a lily, I
Float heedless on my way

My proud contention this, which once
The ancient Romans held:
Luna se moven—briefly put
The moon is self-propelled.

Night's Queen I trace a silvery
Circumference of sky
And share my cold and regal sway
With nobody by pi.

Copyright © 1977 by Joan Aiken Enterprises, Ltd.; first appeared in The Skin Spinners, published by Viking Press; reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

Joan Aiken is the author of over sixty books for adults and children, perhaps the best known of which are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She still types all her novels on a typewriter, never having moved onto a computer. Aiken lives in Sussex, England, with her husband.

There's a deep secret place, dark in the hold of this ship
A fine, private place, if one could get down there and hide
A whole crossword puzzle of ladder and corridor lies
Between that world and the white decks, the smooth wide
Expanse of holystone and elbowgrace and pride.

Could one get down there; but that's quite out of the question
I'll tell you why: clambering down to the door
Through these hot, narrow regions, you notice more and more strongly
A green growing odour seeping up through the floor
And the damp solid breath of mould, savagely pure.

That door can't be opened; it's blocked tight shut inside
Crammed against earth and greenery, all intertwined—
Roses, perhaps? The ship is listing, but skipper,
Though the hold should be cleared, is afraid of what we'd find,
He believes there's stowaways down there—but, good lord, what kind?

Copyright © 1977 by Joan Aiken Enterprises, Ltd.; first appeared in The Skin Spinners, published by Viking Press; reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

Joan Aiken is the author of over sixty books for adults and children, perhaps the best known of which are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She still types all her novels on a typewriter, never having moved onto a computer. Aiken lives in Sussex, England, with her husband.

While Strange Horizons celebrated its first birthday at the beginning of September, the reviews department gets to celebrate a more modest landmark this week: we've been around long enough to review both a book and its sequel! In September of 2000, I reviewed Of Honor and Treason, by C. J. Merle, published by Speculation Press. I ended that review by saying that I looked forward to the next book. The next book in the series, Of Duty and Death, is now in print, and I am pleased to say that it more than fulfills the promise of its predecessor, leaving me looking forward once again to the next book! If you have not read Of Honor and Treason, you might want to take a look at that review before reading this one, but either will give you a sense of what the series offers.

The two books share the same pair of central characters: Eivaunee Dorlan, human commander of an Imperial flagship, the Comveckt, and heir to the richest estates in the interstellar Klimar Empire; and Zsar't'lac, a leader of the Hsassan, the warrior race of the Norda peoples, a group of humanoid races who also have an interstellar civilization, known as the Norda Homelands. Humans and Norda coexist uneasily. In Of Honor and Treason, Zsar't'lac exiles himself from the Norda Homelands and comes to human space, where he is met by Eivaunee's ship. After a brief visit to the corrupt imperial court, Zsar't'lac decides to serve under Eivaunee.

Of Duty and Death begins three years after the end of Of Honor and Treason. Zsar't'lac, now well established as Eivaunee Dorlan's second-in-command, must help his captain apprehend a brutal serial killer on the planet NeoCorda, a largely aquatic planet whose main industry is sex-based tourism. There is more at stake than he and Eivaunee realize, however, for the killer is a Hsassan. He has been sent to the human Klimar Empire to assassinate Zsar't'lac: the murders are simply the bait to draw Zsar't'lac within the assassin's reach.

Like Of Honor and Treason, which uses a conventional space opera framework to tell an unconventional story driven by its characters, Of Duty and Death uses a conventional murder-mystery framework to continue its character-driven story. Its main attraction is its development of the characters of Eivaunee and Zsar't'lac and the careful but warm friendship that has grown between them. The book deepens the potentially tragic bonds that trapped Eivaunee in Of Honor and Treason: he must execute the vicious will of the emperor he hates or be outlawed as a rebel and destroyed, enabling the Emperor, who hates Eivaunee even more than Eivaunee hates him, to seize Eivaunee's family lands. Zsar't'lac, exiled from his own Norda people because of his opposition to the plans of the ruling Yseret, bides his time, waiting for revolution at home, plotting how to prevent war between the Norda and humanity. He will need Eivaunee's help, but now he must keep Eivaunee alive and sane for his plans for the future to succeed. It turns out, though, that his own life is in more immediate danger.

Of Duty and Death has many of the same strengths as Of Honor and Treason, but overall its story is not as compelling. It suffers a bit from the “middle-volume” syndrome that often afflicts the second book in a series. It doesn't have the freshness of a first volume that introduces readers to the characters and the created world, and it doesn't have the narrative tension of a third volume that brings all the strands of the plot to resolution. That said, Of Duty and Death's other strengths more than compensate for its unexciting plot, and its subtle foreshadowing promises more dynamic action in the next volume.

One important source of foreshadowing is the development of two new characters, Sui-lan and N'torba, the captain and chief scientist, respectively, on a research vessel from the rather mysterious United Councils, a loose, democratic federation of human planets. Eivaunee and Zsar't'lac meet the pair in the process of their investigation and gradually become involved with them. Sui-lan and Eivaunee slowly develop an edgy friendship in which sparks of passion may be flaring, while N'torba and Zsar't'lac quickly become close friends and seem on their way to becoming lovers. Neither relationship is easily defined or static; careful development of relationships like these is one of Merle's great strengths as a writer.

The interest created by the development of the two female characters is not only personal, however. They introduce us to the United Councils, and they hint that it will play a role in the larger political plot of the series. The United Councils, like the Klimar Empire, was formed in the aftermath of the civil war that freed human colonial planets from Earth's control (and destroyed Earth in the process). Militarily, the United Councils is much less formidable than the Empire, but aside from that, the reader as yet knows little about the Councils. Sui-lan is a Councils spy as well as the captain of a research vessel, so the groundwork appears to have been laid for politically and emotionally complex machinations in the next novel.

The emotional complexity of relationships in Of Duty and Death is enhanced by the subtle parallels and contrasts that Merle arranges among them. Zsar't'lac's interest in N'torba develops alongside Eivaunee's interest in Sui-Lan. Zsar't'lac's deepening understanding of humanity develops alongside his assassin's much cruder response to human beings. When one chapter ends with Zsar't'lac envying the human ability to dream (he wishes to dream of his lover Sing'm'li to ease his loneliness), the next chapter begins with Eivaunee awakening from a nightmare. Readers of the first book may note in moments like this how the burdens of the two protagonists have been reversed. Eivaunee is now bearing the heavy burden of leadership that Zsar't'lac carried in the first book; Zsar't'lac now endures the loneliness that was Eivaunee's lot before Zsar't'lac joined his crew. Merle's writing is much more assured than in her first book; it repays careful reading. This is a book to enjoy in a leisurely fashion, as the characters enjoy the pleasures they manage to find in the midst of their difficulties. The decisive moments of this novel arise as much during the interplay of conversation over dinner or during pillow-talk mixed with foreplay as they do during moments of action or official interrogation. Who these characters are becoming to one another is what most matters in this book. What they do matters rather less; hence the occasional slowness of the plot. The foreshadowing promises more action in the near future. When these characters do act, their actions will matter greatly to the readers who have grown to care for them as complexly as they care for each other.

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

Issola is a book that reveals secrets. It's a book that releases world-shattering energies, features gods and even more powerful creatures as main characters, and explains the origins of magic and sentient life. It also features Vlad Taltos, sarcastic skuldugger extraordinaire, making wisecracks as usual about everything and anybody. Unfortunately, the combination doesn't work.

Issola is the ninth book featuring the character Vlad Taltos. It's the twelfth book set in the “Dragaera” universe. You don't write twelve books in the same world without accumulating a lot of baggage: Issola is full of references to the prior adventures of Vlad and his friends, making it difficult for the new reader. Then again, the series has never been simple: the timeline of the Vlad Taltos books in particular has always been tangled. Brust has never written them as one straightforward storyline or even in the market-approved style of the trilogy: individual books take place at various chronological points and rarely proceed in sequence. It's one of the reasons Brust is such an exciting writer: he's able to seamlessly shift between past and future from novel to novel and still maintain a unified whole, mainly through the strong character of Vlad, whose wisecracks and worldview keep the stories together. Vlad is an Easterner, a being like us, in a land of millennia-old sorcerer-giants bound in a complex magical caste system. We've seen him evolve from book to book from a simple blade-for-hire to a conscience stricken outlaw, and while his wry sense of humor hasn't changed, his deepening moral involvement in the culture around him has made the series more and more interesting.

The titles of the books also serve to bind them together. All but one of the books so far have featured the name of a creature from Brust's world. An Issola is a white fisherbird, graceful yet deadly, which strikes invisibly and quickly to get its prey. The Issola is also the name of a House of Dragaerans, the alien beings who inhabit Brust's world. All Dragaerans belong to a House, and their inward characters reflect the tendencies of the animals to which their house is mysteriously linked. The Dragaeran Empire is founded on a Cyclical caste system. The different Houses rule in a prophesied order, the Cycle, and serve foreordained roles with Dragaeran society. The Issola are diplomats and minstrels, dedicated to good manners and making society function smoothly. “Issola strikes from courtly bow,” as the “poem of the Cycle” attests. Vlad, by virtue of a title bought by his father, belongs to the Dragaeran House Jhereg, the house of murderers and thieves, which “feeds on others’ kills": Vlad himself travels with a venomous jhereg familiar named Loiosh. This novel spends a lot of time dealing with Vlad, the master of impoliteness, dealing with more polite society, as represented by the Issola. The chapter titles reflect this: “Fishing Etiquette,” “How to Break Unwelcome News,” “When Negotiation Becomes Strained"....

Of course, the primary reason that Brust named this novel Issola is because of the presence of Lady Teldra. Lady Teldra, the chatelaine of the mystical Castle Black, is a familiar background character from Brust's other novels, where her unflappability and constant good humor make her a comic foil for the mischievous Vlad as he tries to crack her shell of persistent fine manners. In this novel she comes into her own as a woman whose diplomatic skills are important for the very survival of sentient life. There's a stark contrast between the smooth, polished Issola, who schmoozes with Gods, and Vlad, who is constantly getting upbraided and punished for his sass. By the end of the novel, Vlad has incorporated Teldra's lessons into his own demeanor, marking quite a sea-change for his character. It's a good thing, really, because part of what makes this novel difficult to read is Vlad's constant mouthing off to things that could swat him like a bug. Even with his own patron deity, Verra, Vlad is rude, abrupt, and insulting, which is certainly in character, but which gets annoying to read after a time.

Another difficulty with this novel is the interplay between Vlad and his “friends” Morrolan and Aliera. Morrolan and Aliera are Dragaerans of House Dragon; they're also near-immortal super-wizards bearing weapons of immense power, with the ability to slaughter armies of mere mortals at a breath. They're arrogant and haughty and have stepped right out of heroic myth. Brust incorporates several styles of writing into his Dragaera books: the novels The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After, for instance, are written in the style of Alexander Dumas's Three Musketeers series. The Taltos books have always had a more modern feel, mixing Raymond Chandler with “Mission: Impossible” and a dollop of Eisenstein; they range from descriptions of petty street crime to mercantile intrigue to metaphysical adventure to army battles to Marxist revolution. Brust's ability to mesh these different types of stories into one coherent whole has been one of the things that has kept me reading. However, in this novel the combination of the tortured, wisecracking Vlad Taltos and the inhumanly arrogant Morrolan and Aliera is off-putting. Brust attempts to humanize the two of them, fleshing out their characters, but it ultimately fails because they are too different from Vlad and because they seem to have emerged from a different book altogether.

Despite all these criticisms, Issola is probably a necessary read for anyone who follows the series, because of its revelations. We learn the history of the world, the origins of sorcery, the characteristics of the Sea of Chaos and its powers, and the origins of the various races who share the world: the aboriginal Serioli, the megalomaniacal Jenoine, the Gods, the Dragaerans, and the Easterners, and the full powers and abilities of Spellbreaker, Vlad's enchanted weapon. These are all things that Brust has been hinting at for several books now, that fans of the series have been speculating about endlessly on message boards and over email, and in this novel they are definitively and authoritatively explained. Some of the revelations about the gods and other “supreme” beings reflect the creative origins of the books themselves. Brust's Dragaera began its existence as the setting for a role-playing game (as did Raymond Feist's Midkemia books), so it's not too surprising that the gods prove to be merely mortal, with powers similar to those of the main characters, but greater. Battles with gods thus become possible and winnable. The book ends with a spectacular battle scene, with dominion over the world itself at stake. It's going to be hard for Brust to top himself, after pitting most of his superpowerful characters against each other.

The end of the novel suggests a return for Vlad to his accustomed character and his old city haunts. Vlad has spent two novels, Athyra and Orca, cut off from most of the people who know him. Athyra was a pastoral with a peasant boy, Savn, as the prime viewpoint character. Vlad's relationship with Savn grew more complex through Orca, which comes just before Issola in the series’ internal chronology. These two novels focused on the social implications of the genetic caste system that Brust has created, involving Vlad deeply in questions of social inequality. Savn was not popular with a number of Brust's readers, and he's barely mentioned in this book. Issola is much simpler: the main issues are metaphysical, not social, and the book returns Vlad to the realm of easy violence and difficult opponents.

Issola is short and expensive, a combination I don't much appreciate: it's been released as a 255 page hardcover with a large typeface and a lot of white space, retailing for $23.95. This is only the second book in the Vlad Taltos series to be published in hardback, so this is a sign that he's receiving increased respect from booksellers, but for the reader it's a mixed blessing. The book also isn't as polished as his prior efforts, with several typos and flatter wit than Brust is capable of. I recommend waiting for a cheaper, hopefully cleaner paperback edition.

Brust's Dragaera books have broadened the field of commercial fantasy. Issola doesn't really stretch the limits of the genre, but it does explore the mystic side of Brust's fantasy world and resolve a lot of the questions that have hovered over Vlad Taltos. It's not the right book to begin the saga; those new to Brust should probably pick up the newly-released Book of Jhereg, an omnibus edition of the first three Taltos novels in order of publication (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla—a good trio to begin with). Nevertheless, Issola takes Vlad Taltos to new realms, and it's no doubt a necessary read to understand future happenings in the series.

Fred Bush started graduate study in English Literature at the University of Rochester this fall. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

Doctor Who, as a franchise, seems to have as many incarnations as its title character. A British TV series, Doctor Who ran from 1963-1989, easily the longest running SF series in the English language (and presumably any other). It chronicled the adventures of a scientific genius and cosmic wanderer who journeyed through time and space, getting into trouble, righting wrongs, etc. The Doctor, a humanoid alien, would periodically rejuvenate into a new actor ... usually with a new personality and wardrobe. There were consistencies, of course—he was invariably eccentric, righteous, and garishly dressed—but with enough room for an actor to bring his own spin to things. “Who's your favourite Doctor?” is a question that can probably be heard at any science fiction convention.

The series was eventually cancelled ... and immediately spun-off into novels that continue to this day, expanding upon the series, rather than just mimicking it. Along the way there were movies—two features in the ‘60s that adapted storylines from the series but changed other aspects of the premise, and a TV movie in the ‘90s that continued directly from the series. Both attempts met with lukewarm responses from fans. There have also been comic books.

Another medium has been added to the list: Audio.

Produced by Big Finish and licensed from the BBC, these full cast audio plays have brought back many of the actors who've played the character, as well as their various Companions (the Whovian term for “sidekicks"), in new, feature length adventures.

“Doctor Who: The Fearmonger” is the fifth of these new stories produced and the first to reunite Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor, and Sophie Aldred, the brash, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Companion, Ace.

The story has the Doctor and Ace arriving in a London, England of the near future (at least, so the liner notes identify it). A right wing political party, New Britannia, is gaining popularity, leading to an assassination attempt on the party leader by an unstable man who believes an alien monster inhabits the leader's body. The Doctor, it turns out, believes so too, and identifies it as a Fearmonger, an entity that stirs up hate and fear and feeds on those same emotions. Caught between the extremist rhetoric of the Right and the increasingly militant violence of the protesting Left (embodied by a terrorist group, the United Front), the Doctor and Ace set out to stop the creature and calm emotions even while London threatens to disintegrate into chaos and rioting.

Overall, The Fearmonger is a well mounted production. The vocal performances are subtle and effective, both the guest stars (including Jacqueline Pearce, best known to SF fans as the villainess in another British TV series, Blake's 7) and, of course, McCoy and Aldred themselves. McCoy and Aldred have always played well together and, despite this being their first “official” Who audio, they're no strangers to the medium. Previously they had performed in another series of audio dramas for a company called BBV playing not so subtle riffs on their characters (first as The Professor and Ace and then, when the BBC's legal department started grumbling, as The Dominie and Alice). The loyalty of Doctor Who fandom, and the sense that the BBC had kind of let the side down by cancelling it, has led to a whole slew of unofficial and semi-official spin-offs employing some of the actors associated with the show both in straight-to-video films and in audio plays.

There is a genuine complexity at work in the Fearmonger—technically, emotionally, and even structurally. The story employs some of the ideas introduced during McCoy's tenure as the Doctor on TV, by making his version of the character a little more enigmatic, and a little more omnipotent, than other incarnations. The story begins with The Doctor and Ace already hard at work to uncover the Fearmonger, which can leave listeners feeling almost as though they've missed some introductory scenes. It makes the story initially a tad confusing—but that very obliqueness can make it hold up better for re-listenings, allowing the listener to pick up on nuances missed the first time through. Which is not necessarily such a bad idea for something which the audience is expected to buy, rather than rent for a single listen.

The story boasts some genuine twists and turns and unexpected revelations, while characterization often surprises—people who do bad things might redeem themselves, while others turn out to be not necessarily what you assumed. As well, the dialogue is often sharp and thoughtful, with scriptwriter Jonathan Blum clearly seeing it as more than just some throwaway gig. It's an ambitious concoction, as much a socio-political thriller as it is a monster hunt. There's running about and strategizing, but there's also time for quieter, introspective moments, such as a scene where The Doctor and Ace discuss that ubiquitous metaphor of the butterfly who flaps his wings and causes a hurricane. Although every Who-fan has his or her favourite Doctor and Companion combo, the interaction with Ace is arguably among the pairings that most fully blossomed into a complex relationship, and the continuation here of the interplay between McCoy and Aldred invests the story with genuine heart.

If there's a chief sticking point with the story, it's the way the storytellers seem a bit soft on the New Britannia Party. Granted, Ace makes her contempt for the extreme right obvious, and The Doctor chastises a character who says he doesn't support the party's more extreme policies, but supports the party itself (as if such a distinction will absolve the supporter of culpability if New Britannia is elected and implements those policies). In a piece of drama, it's fair to argue that politics must be muted, that it's meant to be entertainment rather than an essay. The idea behind The Fearmonger is to have The Doctor and Ace caught between the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. The Doctor criticizes a shock jock who calls the New Britannians “Nazis,” dismissing the shock jock's convenient labelling as “noise."

The problem is, The New Britannia Party is a racist party, speaking of a “white” England. Right wing parties are often accused by their detractors of being racist, but usually such policies (at least in The United States, Canada and, I assume, England) must be inferred, since the parties are careful to avoid anything blatant. In such cases, it can be argued that “Nazi” labels are premature, or needlessly incendiary. But in The Fearmonger, New Britannia's rhetoric goes beyond “trickle down” economic policies or school uniforms or other right wing policies that can be put in the category of political opinion. It's a racist party. Period. To argue that violence is not the way to combat it, as The Doctor does, is perhaps still legitimate. But to categorize the debate as merely political is, at best, naive.

As a technical production, The Fearmonger is well done. There are invariably the confusing bits that occur in almost any audio play, where action scenes degenerate into scuffling feet and shouted voices and some confusion, but this is rare—although the climax is a problem. Overall, the mood is well-maintained; locations are evoked readily; and there's a nice use of incidental music which lend it a rich, cinematic air that many audio plays lack. The voices are well cast too, not just for the quality of the performances, but their distinctiveness—the varying timbres and accents mean you never find yourself unsure who's speaking. The concepts also cleverly exploit the audio format, with the Fearmonger able to be heard in the voices of those it possesses, rather than be seen.

For Doctor Who fans, the experience is a welcome return, and the producers are clearly as much fans as their audience. The adventure opens with the traditional theme music, and the two hour story is broken up into four chapters, just as the TV series featured adventures serialized over more than one episode. It's hard to believe that, some ten years after the TV series was cancelled, The Fearmonger can be so evocative.

For non-fans who might be interested in delving into the neglected medium of audio, the story shouldn't be any more confusing than any time someone dives into an on-going series. There are a few cryptic references here and there, including to the Doctor's past association with a certain U.N. organization. The nature of the relationship between the two leads is, perhaps, not clearly explained (Ace was a troubled juvenile delinquent taken under the Doctor's wing). At one point, the distinctive groaning of The Doctor's time machine, The Tardis, is heard—but it's not really explained for the uninitiated. On the other hand, because the story, and all characters save the Doctor and Ace, are original to this production, it doesn't require any prior knowledge to follow the plot.

The Doctor Who audio adventures from Big Finish appear to be going strong, producing something like one a month, with all the living Doctors taking part save Tom Baker—Baker, arguably the most popular Doctor, has apparently not ruled out participating, but so far has not done so. But McCoy, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Paul McGann (who portrayed the character in the TV movie) have all performed in a few, and performed exceptionally well. I've actually enjoyed some of them more in audio than I did in their TV versions. As well, many of their old Companions have joined them. Even deceased Doctors are represented in audio. The BBC has retrieved audio tracks of early Doctor Who TV stories where the video has been lost. Adding narration to smooth over confusing bits, these have been released as audio dramas featuring early Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. The late Jon Pertwee performed in a couple of Doctor Who radio plays in the early 1990s that have also been released for sale. Even Tom Baker is represented in audio, having performed in one or two audio productions in the 1970s, and the BBC has re-released one such short play on CD, paired with an edited audio track from one of Baker's TV storylines.

Decades ago, it was a fairly regular practice to turn around and perform radio adaptations of hit movies, often with the same actors. Now, popular TV series spin off into novels, comic books, even video games, but audio is an all but forgotten medium. One can only imagine Chris Carter recruiting Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny to do a full cast X-Files audio play, or the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or ... well, fill in the name of your favourite show. These Doctor Who dramas seem to prove there's life in the medium yet—that, when done well, audio dramas really can hold their own against television and movies. Too bad, in North America, there isn't the same recognition. At least, not yet.

A writer and critic, D. K. Latta's fiction has appeared in Adventures of Sword & Sorcery, On Spec, Challenging Destiny, and many others. He is a contributor to Pulp & Dagger, a Webzine devoted to modern pulp-era-style adventure stories and serials. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

When I first read these three books back in the mid-eighties as a junior high school student, they were typical of the sort of volumes that usually entranced me, all about a nice strong girl beating the odds in a tough but slightly mystical world of the past. Re-reading the trio as an adult for the purposes of this review was a slightly different experience from the one I had roughly fifteen years ago. I felt the warm glow of re-discovering “old friends,” but I was also able to make the more critical assessments of a seasoned reader.

What struck me most of all during my re-read, framed appropriately enough by the slow chugging of a train bound from San Francisco to Seattle, bringing with it echoes of Sylvia Green's journey from London to Willoughby Chase, was how well the stories have withstood the test of time. Though I'm older and much wiser, less prone to the extremes of emotion and flights of fancy that dominated my pre-teen and teenage years, I still thoroughly enjoyed these “alternate history” tales with a hint of the fantastical about them. Aiken has a knack for describing time and place with a flavor of whimsy that melds well with her tightly woven, suspenseful plots and well-developed characterizations.

In fact, unless one is very strongly opposed to the whimsical or to “what-ifs” in stories, these tales simply stand on their own merits as good yarns. They also build a very strong sense of the fictionalized time period—late 18th/early 19th century Britain and America—through modes of speech, mention of political events, styles of dress, and the presence of “whacky” inventions, like Lord Battersea's balloon or the long gun on Nantucket. This time in history, the start of the Industrial Revolution, is full of experimentation and exploration in literature, philosophy and science. The books, especially Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds on Nantucket, capture this spirit of the age rather well.

Of the three, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is perhaps the most traditionally a children's story. It bears many of the hallmarks of a fairy tale: the evil governess plotting against the good parents, children facing terrible odds and receiving assistance from a benevolent ‘fairy’ figure. The time period is also the most indistinct in the first volume. Readers unfamiliar with the details of English history could imagine it taking place during any part of the nineteenth century. For most young people, the time of the story will probably be relatively unimportant, as it was to me upon my first reading, especially because many of the book's issues transcend the boundaries of time and place.

Wolves explores various fears that a child might have, regardless of country or century. Most of these fears have to do with being orphaned and the terrifying challenge of facing the world alone. These challenges appear in the novel right from the beginning. Sylvia Green's parents are both long dead, and she must leave the only parent she has ever known, her poor but loving Aunt Jane, to live with her wealthy relatives: Lord and Lady Green and their daughter Bonnie, who is Sylvia's age. Sylvia's journey by train toward her new home at Willoughby Chase is fraught with all sorts of dangers: cold and hunger; the presence of a complete stranger in her car; and wolves, which break into the train! All of these are dangers from which parents are supposed to protect their children, but Sylvia must face them by herself. The author continues to examine these hovering fears as the plot progresses. Shortly after Sylvia's arrival, Bonnie's parents depart on a long sea voyage, leaving the children in the care of a distant cousin, the coldly formidable Miss Slighcarp. When their ship is reported to have sunk, the predatory Miss Slighcarp takes over Willoughby Chase and sends the children to an orphanage in the horrific industrial town of Blastburn. Placed with an unscrupulous orphanage matron, Mrs. Brisket, the children must face cold, hunger, and abusive treatment before they escape and find safety, aided first by a friend from home, a boy named Simon (himself an orphan), and then by their own wits and abilities. By empowering her child-heroes to help themselves, Aiken gives her readers the means to confront their own fears and idealizes character traits that useful for dealing with the big bad world. While the heroes change over the course of the series, all of her heroes rely on pluck, quick wits, and determination to carry them through the twisting plots and looming dangers that surround them.

In two out of the three volumes, Aiken conveys the value of these traits by pairing a strong, somewhat willful and bold character with a retiring, dutiful and weaker character, with the bolder leading the weaker. In Wolves, the robust Bonnie leads the weaker Sylvia. In Nightbirds, the daring Dido Twite, who was portrayed as a willful but needy urchin in Black Hearts, is paired with Dutiful Penitence Casket, whose name pretty much says it all. Through the course of both stories, a balance of sorts is struck between the stronger and weaker characters. This balance results in a taming of the bolder character's rougher edges, while bringing out some derring-do in the more retiring. This character development is another facet of the stories that makes them so interesting, even for an older reader. Things change, even in the face of a happy, fairy-tale ending. The heroes grow and become more able and worthwhile human beings, while the villains, of course, get their just deserts. Additionally, while three books are all intertwined, the central characters are different in each book. Instead of following the same character through each plot, she takes subordinate characters and plots from one book and makes them central in the next, developing indirect and, hence, intriguing relationships between the books.

The plot of Black Hearts in Battersea picks up roughly where Wolves leaves off, but, instead of following Bonnie and Sylvia, it follows their friend Simon. Simon is himself an orphan who has had to make his way in the world alone. Now he is going to London. His artist friend Dr. Field has invited Simon to stay with him so that Simon can attend art school, but when Simon arrives he finds that Dr. Field has mysteriously vanished from his lodgings, which occupy the top floor of the home of the disagreeable Twite family. There, Simon meets and befriends the impertinent, neglected Dido Twite, who winds up aiding him in his quest to find his missing friend. One mystery leads to another, until finally Simon uncovers a Hanoverian plot to assassinate King James and finds out that he has been all along much more than he seemed.

Dido takes center stage in Nightbirds on Nantucket. Knocked unconscious during a disastrous adventure at sea in Black Hearts, she awakens to find that she has been rescued by the good ship Sarah Casket. The ship is an American whaler, traveling through the world's seas in search of the fabled ‘pink whale.’ Aboard ship, Dido makes the acquaintance of the captain's daughter Dutiful Penitence. With time and her own natural verve, Dido draws out the retiring Pen, until the two have become friends. Set ashore at last, the two girls are sent to live on the Casket farm on Nantucket, where the mysterious Aunt Tribulation holds sway over the house. The plot of the book winds tighter and tighter as all sorts of strange things are discovered: a foreigner with a funny accent marauding in the wilds around the farm, strangers sneaking into the Casket house, and more. The plot unwinds as Dido and Pen's discoveries add up to a picture of yet another Hanoverian plot, this one with even larger ramifications than the one presented in Black Hearts. Only through Dido's pluck, Pen's dedication and the interference of some key friends, are the villains able to be foiled.

Because the heroes change, what binds these three books together is the shared purpose of the villains: they are all Hanoverians, bent on overthrowing the King and putting a pretender in his place. This is where the element of fantasy comes in as Aiken explores an alternate history for England, in which King James, rather than King George, succeeds to the throne. This is a classic ‘science fiction/fantasy’ twist to add to the story, and one that I find myself enjoying even more as an adult, with some knowledge of English history, than I did as a pre-teen. When I was eleven, I hadn't yet studied this period of English history at school, and hence was completely unaware of the discrepancies with actual history.

After I'd finished re-reading all three books, I immediately turned to the web to find out if Aiken had ever written anything more in this alternate world and about any of the characters. I was quite surprised to find a very long list of books, some newer than others, and I am seriously considering picking up the rest of the sequence, so that I, and my future children, can enjoy these books as much as I have.

Joan Aiken successfully combines suspense, mystery, adventure, an element of fantasy, likable and utterly despicable characters, in these alternate history tales, which are sure to delight both children and older persons for many years to come.

Editor's Note: The later books in the series focus increasingly on Dido and her peculiar, sometimes sinister family. Some of the volumes share the tone of tough, ebullient whimsy of the three volumes reviewed here, while some are much darker in tone and subject matter. Aiken's talents as a horror writer are evident in them. The Stolen Lake tells of an adventure Dido has in South America as she makes her way home to England; in The Cuckoo Tree she gets back to England, only to find more mysteries with Hanoverians at the root of them; Dido and Pa reunites her with her unsavory musician father and introduces her younger half-sister, Is. The tone of the series, which had become somewhat darker in The Cuckoo Tree, becomes very dark here. Is becomes the main character of the later books, Is Underground and Cold Shoulder Road. In the first of these books (which is as far as I have read in the series), she journeys back to the industrial north of England to rescue children enslaved to work in the coal mines there; in the second book, she searches for family members in an England devastated by the disasters of the previous book. The latest book in the series, Dangerous Games, once again features Dido, who journeys overseas on a mission from the king. Dido and Pa and Is Underground are out of print in the U.S., but both are available in the UK, where Is Underground is titled simply Is. One other Aiken novel, The Whispering Mountain is set in the world of the Wolves series, but it features an entirely different set of characters, though the Hanoverians are still causing trouble in it. Unfortunately, it's not in print on either side of the Atlantic.—Christopher Cobb

Beth Kelleher is a die-hard science-fiction and fantasy fan with a passion for European history. She has a degree in French Language and Literature from Smith College but makes her living as a web designer/developer. She shares her Bay Area home with her husband and seven cats. Visit her Web site for more.

Joan Aiken has written about thirty collections of short stories. Some of these books are full of horror stories; some are for very young children; some focus on a particular set of characters; some are just miscellaneous assortments. It can be a little bewildering to keep track of which stories are in which collections, especially since many of the stories are reprinted in multiple collections, both British and American.

My two favorite books by Aiken are both short-story collections; unfortunately, both are long out of print. I spent over ten years poking around in used bookstores and signing up for book search services before I found a used copy of Not What You Expected; it didn't take as long to find Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, but still, the copy I own is the only copy I've ever seen.

Many of the stories in those two volumes appeared earlier in two British collections: A Harp of Fishbones and A Small Pinch of Weather. Fortunately, Harp and Weather have recently been reprinted in the U.K. You can obtain them from Amazon.co.uk even if you live elsewhere; I ordered them on the Web and received them in California a couple of weeks later.

However, this review is going to focus on Not What You Expected and Armitage so you'll know what you're missing; maybe you too will start frequenting used bookstores looking for these. For precise details on what you're missing, see the table of stories that shows which stories are in which of the four collections.

The stories in Not What You Expected range from fairy tales ("A Harp of Fishbones,” “The Boy Who Read Aloud,” “The Cost of Night") to charmingly quirky light fantasy pieces ("The Lost Five Minutes,” “Don't Pay the Postman") to Armitage-family stories ("Doll's House to Let, Mod. Con.,” “Mrs. Nutti's Fireplace"—see below for more about the Armitages) to a sort of magic realism ("The Dark Streets of Kimball's Green,” in which a girl makes telephone calls to the ancient King Cunobel, “A Room Full of Leaves,” “Hope").

But I'm applying those categorizations a bit arbitrarily. Really, “charmingly quirky” describes a great many of Aiken's stories. Her character names provide a taste of her style: some of them are perfectly normal, but then there's a “retired enchantress” named Miss Hooting; a woman named Mrs. Mildew; “the Assistant Principal, Madame Legume"; “Sam Inkfellow, editor of the Wormley Observer"; the town genius Marcantonio Smith-to-the-power-Nine; another town genius in a different story, Albert Einstein Shakespeare Smith; and “the village witch, Mrs. Murky."

But it's not just names and odd details that give Aiken's stories their distinctive charm, it's their development. Ever since the first collection of hers that I read, The Last Slice of Rainbow, I've been struck by her ability to write stories that go in unexpected directions: a story might start out with a BBC man visiting a village in the country, as in “The Rose of Puddle Fratrum,” and end up with an intelligent computer, a cursed ballet, and a mysterious recluse. You can never quite be sure where an Aiken story will end up; you can only be sure that the journey will be worthwhile. In the Postscript to the current edition of Weather, she describes how she writes short stories: “Stories are like butterflies, which come fluttering out of nowhere, touch down for a brief instant, may be captured—may not—and then vanish into nowhere again.” That's a pretty accurate description of the experience of reading some of her stories as well.

There are, nonetheless, certain recurring elements in her stories. There are slightly scattered but independent-minded young women who, in certain types of stories, end up marrying slightly scattered but charming young men. Houses often figure prominently (particularly haunted ones), along with various locations (real and imagined) around the U.K. There are a great many ghosts, though more in her horror collections than in the volumes under consideration here, as well as a variety of curses and enchantments. There are other fairy-tale elements as well, though often not arranged in the ways you might expect. And most of her characters have a certain matter-of-fact attitude about magic.

Another recurring aspect in Aiken's stories is a prose style that draws heavily from fairy tales and oral traditions. Sometimes the stories include song lyrics and rhymes; sometimes characters speak in various British dialects, or parodies thereof. (As in “Losh, to be sure, yon mountain's unco wampish.") There are passages that read like transcripts of a storyteller telling a story, as in the opening to “A Long Day Without Water” (in Not What You Expected):

This story is all about tears—tears locked inside a heart, heart lost in a river, river shut inside a house, house in a village that didn't want it. Better get out your handkerchiefs, then, for it sounds like a whole sky full of cloud coming along, doesn't it? And yet the ending, when we get there, isn't solid sad.

Not all of her stories are written like that; her style varies considerably across the range of her stories. But the stories that read like storytelling have the narrative voice that I think of as most distinctively Aiken's. It makes many of her stories sound like children's stories, even when she's treating somewhat more adult topics.

Her stories are often presented as children's stories, and indeed some of her collections appear to be solidly aimed at children. The Arabel and Mortimer books, for instance, are charming, but read much more like kids’ stories than like adults’ stories. (Arabel is a pragmatic little girl; Mortimer is her pet raven, who goes about saying “Nevermore!” and eating everything in sight, from pastries to clocks to staircases.) And she's written several collections of stories more or less aimed at rather young children, with illustrations by Polish artist Jan Pienkowski. (One of these, A Necklace of Raindrops, has just been reprinted, without the Pienkowski illustrations; you might as well buy it, since otherwise you'll eventually have to go search used bookstores for it too.) But in general, Aiken doesn't much distinguish between stories for children and stories for grown-ups; in the Weather Postscript, she says, “[T]he truthful answer to the question, ‘Do you prefer writing for adults or children?’ would be, ‘I prefer writing short stories.’”

And it's often hard to decide whether to class a given Aiken story as a kids’ story or a grown-ups’ story, which is all to the good. Almost all of the best children's books—from Alice onward—can be enjoyed by adults as well, and it's always nice to see books for kids that don't talk down to them.

The first Aiken story that I ever encountered, probably in Children's Digest or Child Life sometime in the late ‘70s, was a case in point: a lovely fairy tale titled “The Third Wish.” It appears in Not What You Expected; it wasn't until I saw it in this book a few years ago that I realized that the story (which had stuck in my memory all those years) was by Aiken. It's still one of my favorite stories of any kind, by anyone. It's about a modern man who rescues the King of the Forest and is given three wishes in compensation; his first wish is for “a wife as beautiful as the forest.” To find out how he uses his other wishes, you'll have to find a copy of the story; it certainly wasn't what I expected from a three-wishes story. Unfortunately, the story does not appear (as far as I know) in any Aiken collection currently in print; fortunately, it's been widely reprinted elsewhere, including in American elementary-school textbooks, so chances are good that if you haven't read it already, you'll be able to find it somewhere.

And if you haunt used bookstores assiduously, and search the Internet book-search services, and are very very good, you just might find a copy of Not What You Expected.

Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home is a different sort of collection, aimed more clearly at kids (though still an enjoyable read for adults who like kids’ books). Aiken's stories about Harriet and Mark Armitage, siblings to whom interesting things are always happening, have appeared scattered about in various of her collections; this volume gathers ten of those stories, and adds a charming “Prelude” that explains why interesting things happen to the Armitages. The jacket flap on the book summarizes the Prelude: “When Mr. and Mrs. Armitage were honeymooning at the beach, Mrs. Armitage found a wishing stone. She wished for two children who would never be bored, but who would have lots of ‘interesting and unusual’ experiences.” Mr. Armitage objects, so Mrs. Armitage qualifies her wish: “[W]e could have a special day for interesting and unusual things to happen—say, Mondays. But not always Mondays and not only Mondays, or that would get a bit dull too."

There are Armitage stories that don't appear in this collection (such as the two in Not What You Expected), but this collection is the only place I know of where you can find this many of them together. (A Small Pinch of Weather includes five of the stories in Armitage, as well as another Armitage story that doesn't appear in this volume; if you can't find Armitage, then Weather is the next-best compendium of Armitage stories.)

In the stories in Armitage, a variety of interesting and unusual things happen to Harriet and Mark. In “Yes, But Today is Tuesday,” for example, they find a unicorn in their garden and decide to keep him as a pet. In “The Frozen Cuckoo,” their practical-joker cousin Sarah comes to visit, and the Armitages are evicted from their house by the Board of Incantation, which wants to create a seminary for young magicians. In “Sweet Singeing [sic] in the Choir,” Harriet and Mark get their fairy godmother to give them nice singing voices, but only temporarily. And in other stories they encounter a loom for weaving hair, a telephone built into a tree, a ghostly governess, a stolen quince tree, and the Furies. Also, they rescue their parents from being turned into ladybirds by angry fairy ladies.

The Armitage stories are, once again, charming and quirky. Some of them veer into slightly serious territory, but mostly they're Aiken having fun. Harriet and Mark also have fun in these stories, and readers will too.

Near the end of the Postscript to Weather, Aiken writes: “Favourite stories, like unexpected presents, are things that you can keep and cherish all your life, carry with you, in memory, in your mind's ear, and bring out, at any time, when you are feeling lonely, or need cheering up, or, like friends, just because you are fond of them. That is the way I feel about some of the stories in this collection.” And that's the way I feel about some of her stories, too.

Jed Hartman is the Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons.

Popular science fiction and fantasy are no more immune to clichés than any other genre. In particular, although there has lately been a refreshing trend of anti-heroes and moral ambiguity, morality plays of good versus evil are still quite common. Shades of gray are becoming more evident in speculative fiction, but dark monarchs and evil empires have never gone away. Some fans of “literary” or “artsy” SF have bemoaned this lack of moral complexity, which surely speaks less to our understanding of a complex, sophisticated, morally relativistic world.

Our world shifted dramatically on September 11th. Say what you may about the motivations and frustrations that drove the 19 men who hijacked four airliners that day, but the act of killing thousands in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania was unquestionably, brutally evil. As a world community we saw, and wept, and raged, and feared—feared for the safety of loved ones, for continued security in the face of an invisible enemy, and for the human cost of actions that might be taken in retaliation.

There were stories of heroism as well. Firefighters and police officers gave their lives trying to evacuate the World Trade Center towers before they fell. And we may never know what target the hijackers of United Flight 93 sought, because passengers and flight attendants, warned of the plane's likely fate by families and friends over cell phones, apparently vowed that no innocent bystander would share in their fate. They, as writer Andrew Sullivan put it, wrestled the plane to the ground instead. (In the wake of two prominent televangelists’ assertions—since somewhat retracted—that the attacks were God's judgment against America's tolerance of non-Christian values, I took grim satisfaction in the news that one of the heroes of Flight 93, Mark Bingham, was gay.) There were acts of self-sacrifice on an epic scale, heroism displayed in real life as vividly as it has ever been in fiction.

If only September 11th itself had been fiction.

Now I find myself looking to speculative fiction in a new light. It has always been an escape for me, and now I need such escapes more than ever. But science fiction and fantasy, through extrapolation and allegory, are also valuable tools that we can use to explore actions and reactions, conflicts and resolutions. Speculative fiction can delve into the potential consequences of decisions made and deferred, and some of them are momentous indeed:

• Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, trying to bring glory to himself and his Centauri people, makes an alliance with an ancient race that leads to galactic war. His world is reduced to rubble, and he is forced to sacrifice his very freedom of thought. As the war builds, other races refuse to support each other militarily until, for some, it is too late.
• The Council of Elrond, in Tolkien's masterpiece The Lord of the Rings, are faced with a choice—a small fellowship undertaking a suicide mission to destroy the Enemy's greatest weapon, or attempt to use the One Ring's diabolic power against him. They choose the former, causing tremendous suffering for Frodo Baggins. They end Sauron's evil, but also end the Third Age of Middle-Earth as the elves abandon it for all time.
• The Jesuit space explorers of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow inspire the nomadic Runa people to garden and defend themselves against the more advanced Jana'ata, upsetting the tightly controlled and delicate ecological and social balance of the planet. Here the consequences are as unforeseen as they are tragic.
• L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Nathaniel Whaler, in The Ecolitan Enigma, is a member of a territory-less institution dedicated to interstellar peace and civilization at any cost. He faces a moral dilemma that now uncomfortably reflects the post-September 11th world—is it right to cause the death of innocents in service to a greater peace? The reader may well wonder about the kind of peace bought by such a price.

The common thread in these stories is choice—sometimes difficult, sometimes unthinking, always with consequences foreseen and unforeseen. In The World of Star Trek, David Gerrold lamented the unrealized potential of the ‘60s series. He said that its plots tended to revolve around “Kirk in danger,” when far better stories could have been told about “Kirk has a decision to make.” Fortunately there is no shortage of speculative fiction that stems from inner conflict and the wrestling of one's desires with one's conscience. Characters live and breathe when they must face difficult decisions—and readers learn from their successes and failures.

There are very few answers to be found in speculative fiction, especially regarding the current crisis. But perhaps we can use speculative fiction as one of our tools to learn to ask better, more thoughtful questions. Clearly, it would be best if world leaders, in responding to the evils of September 11th, would ask themselves what their goals are and what consequences might accompany thoughtless action. It would also be good if we as world citizens could challenge and test our own assumptions and reactions to the tragedy. Each of us must be able to study and articulate our differing opinions of what the world response should be, with thoughtful reflection on the consequences of our action or inaction. We have a responsibility, as people living in a world in crisis, to contribute our ideas; how much better it would be if we have thought them over rationally, and explored their long-term impact. We are fortunate to have speculative fiction, a broad genre devoted to imagination and exploration, as a tool to help us discover our own answers.

Chip Sudderth is senior development/PR editor for Strange Horizons. He thanks his friends at Turning Point for their advice and comments on this editorial.