Why New Visions, Old Ideas? Because every generation takes old ideas and transforms them with new vision. Are the political divisions in West Wing really all that different than All in the Family? Theories of predicting human behavior on rational grounds has a tradition from Aristotle to Asimov. The battle of the sexes runs from Greek tragedy to modern comedies. Most techniques of “post-modern” literature can be found in Don Quixote.
It wasn’t until the Internet that I became aware of how much “newness” is an illusion of youth. There are so many lists of “top ten films” written by people who never saw a movie made before 2000. Someone on Facebook posted that Captain Janeway of Star Trek was the first woman to head up a franchise, so I reminded her that Alien came out over ten years before. Someone on Twitter posted that J.K. Rowling was the first author to seriously address class differences, and was bombarded with suggestions to read Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and many more.
I will use as little A.I. as possible. I will cultivate writers and artists that don’t use A.I., starting with writers I trust. I realize self-styled “content providers” believe the hype that A.I. will allow them to compete with the “big guys” but I’m old enough to remember the same false promise about the Internet distribution of art, resulting in a 50% decline in the incomes of writers and 90% for musicians. I realize there are outliers who succeed, but an economic system that only benefits one in a thousand adaptors is hardly “revolutionary” but rather a different inequality, like the lottery winners who benefit from a system designed to suck even more money out of the rest of us (this is not meant to imply that successful writers are just lucky, rather as a metaphor for every parasitical system that hurts more people than it helps).
On the other hand, I realize A.I. purity will soon be impossible as the tech bros who design and operate our online world are incorporating it whether we like it or not. Not a day goes by when Microsoft doesn’t try luring me into using A.I. or storing my data on the Cloud where it will be even more vulnerable, and to use Google is to use A.I. whether you like it or not. So I will probably end up using A.I. and probably without my knowledge or blackmailed into it by tech bros when they phase out operating systems that don’t use it. So I ask for your forgiveness in advance.
Most of these stories and articles will be written using pen names, since most of my friends, at least most of my American friends, like writing because they are crazy people who don’t like dealing with boring people or they are shy people who don’t like dealing with crazy people. We can all get along because my crazy friends have the same definition of “boring” as my shy friends do for “crazy”: those who have conformed to the worst aspects of American culture and are jerks to anyone who dares to be different. I completely understand, having been bullied online by more adults for my belief in equality than I was in school for being fat.
Adrian Tchaikovsky: A Review of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Terrible Worlds
By Eddy Forest
If any SF author is dedicated to looking at the universe through alien eyes, it is Adrian Tchaikovsky. In Children of Time, he created convincing and sympathetic intelligent spiders, which served to make the horror truly weird when they captured a human being. In Children of Ruin, he created a society of intelligent octopi, whose decisions made more and more sense over the course of the story. Even more frightening is the Earth that spacefaring humans left behind, the result of human follies that fascinate Tchaikovsky. In neither novel did “humanity” triumph, yet a renewed spirit of humanity, exhausted among the original humans, moved forward, with their own variations of technology and biology.
Terrible Worlds includes three of his novellas looking at a future in which the logic of history continues forward without a bend towards justice. The first, “Iconclads,” is a traditional military SF story, with lots of jargon and futuristic weaponry, with only a brief interlude among the weird. I have to admit, I skimmed the more extensive descriptions of weaponry others might have appreciated more.
I found “Firewalkers” the most depressing, although Tchaikovsky is hardly the first person to believe the rich intend to leave the other 99.9% of us behind on an ecologically devastated Earth, leaving us to suffer for their sins. Our heroes are navigating the leftovers of a technologically advanced civilization falling apart under the slow but continuous pressure of global warming and find an A.I. that considers morality an optional extra (it could be reasoned with, a sure sign it wasn’t created by mass info dumping from the Internet). Somehow, out of all these wrongs, the protagonists must make a right. Curiously, it isn’t the POV character who makes the ultimate decision, typically considered a flaw in a narrative, but perhaps the author didn’t want to place such a moral burden on his shoulders.
I honestly don’t know how to describe “Orges” without giving away the first important surprise, except to say this is a story about a humanity reverted to feudalism because democracy failed to curb the excesses of our upper classes, the recurring theme of these novellas. I wonder if he read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, a history book with the premise that the upper class of any given society will not bother solving any problem until it affects them, at which point it might be too late, which is why Edmund Burke, one of the founding philosophers of modern conservativism, warned the British nobility to listen to political protests by the lower class as the carney in the coal mine. “Orges” starts as a traditional fantasy with a traditional hero’s journey, slowly transitioning into science fiction and only towards the very end kicking the table over to reveal what’s really going on and undermining our notion of individual heroism.
Freaky Friday
By Penny Nichols
I saw the musical version of Freaky Friday at the Okoboji Summer Theatre, and it renewed my faith that after the tech lords drive the humanity out of Hollywood with A.I. “artists,” humans will still be producing worthy and entertaining art. Jesse Graham Galas, an assistant professor of musical theater, and Mallory Womeldorff shone as the mother/daughter duo, singing with voices that dominated the room without microphones thank you very much. Wyatt Logan hammed it up as the daughter’s love interest, striking such a perfect balance between the popular man on campus and compassionate goof ball that even the school nerds probably liked him. The cast belted out twenty-three cheerful, funny songs in roughly two and a half hours, none of which I’d heard before, written by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, who have won a Pulitzer in drama for other work. Free of CGI, even the background music was played by a live band, the hours flew by. Without any special effects to distract us from lazy script writing, the play had to be tight, and it was.
Most of you are probably familiar with or can guess the plot of the mother and daughter accidentally switching bodies and learning lessons that encourages their reconciliation, so I shall leave that aside. I was a little uncomfortable when three of the actresses stripped down to their undies to make a point about women feeling positive about their bodies that seemed shoe horned in, but it’s been so long since I watched the movies perhaps I just don’t remember. Or maybe I’m just a bit of a prude, believing people often show too much skin in public.
The audience had so much fun, laughing and clapping where they ought, I’m not sure why they felt it necessary to seed the audience with staff members to clap and shout even louder, but I did at least have the brief pleasure of conversing with Ashley Harrison, an obviously talented head of the costume department, a farm girl who started sewing outfits for her cats and has worked at this theater seventeen summers running. Judging by the biographies, most of the staff and performers gather around this theater when their universities are off for summer break. It must be nice to love your job so much you spend your vacation doing it.
On the way home, I wondered about a future in which 90% of humanity will be plugged into the virtual world, and the other ten percent of us still out here (unless there is an ecological collapse, in which case I’ll probably give in and plug in). Which of us will still matter? It would seem the 90% would be the important part of our species, enjoying the fruits of A.I. mixing and matching previous human endeavors like DJs at an endless high school prom from which no one bothers to graduate (or in my case adventuring through a series of high fantasy roleplaying games) by sheer weight of numbers, but if aliens landed on Earth, or the Messiah showed up looking for His Chosen, would they really care about the Borg-like existence of the plugged in, or see people living in the real world as representatives of what it means to be human?
The Wings of Fire
By A. H. Gost
I read the first book of The Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland to have something to chat about with my nephew, then he loaned me the next four during a family vacation, for which I am grateful because I’m always on the look out for an excuse to stay indoors during the increasingly hotter and buggier days up at the lake surrounded by tourist traps. We also played RPG, Risk, and Settlers of Catan, but that’s another essay. Apparently, there are more books, but the first five came to such a satisfactory conclusion I’m willing to guess they made up the original plan but the audience wanted more.
It is fitting the series began with the heroes and heroines, who behave like idealized teenage humans despite being young dragons, escaping from a cave, because on a larger scale, the series is about escaping from Plato’s cave. The young dragons transcend lies and discover truths while wrestling with the old trope of “prophecy.” They had been raised together in a cave by a cult with unclear motivations and contradictions that eventually make sense, to believe when they are released, they will bring peace to a world at war. Perhaps each main character could be considered an archetype, which is a sort of Platonic ideal of a person, but at some point I’m probably reading more into the text than the author intended. Each book of the series is told by a different young dragon in this found family of different species raised together until their escape, thus they spend each book finding a character’s tribe, learning about their culture and the lies they tell each other to sustain the ongoing war, and either debunking the lies or flying for their lives.
The series is a workable collection of tropes with most of the creativity springing from all the speaking characters being dragons. So many dragons fly around this world one wonders where they would find enough to eat, but once upon a time our planet supported a heck of a lot of dinosaurs, too. Some dragons make serious attempts at creating a civilization, but they spend so much time fighting among themselves it seems they just dislike each other too much to sustain much momentum towards art, technology, or even magic.
Humans scurry about, mostly like rats but treated like poisonous spiders because sometimes they get lucky and kill a dragon. Humans are very small, and yet the rest of the world seemed built to a dragon’s scale. They can fly between trees in the jungle. They can hold fruit in their hand as they eat it, yet that fruit would have to be larger than a human, so shouldn’t the dragons be eating fruit trees instead? Or are humans in a world were they would have to carry bananas home as a cooperative effort?
Striped of any pretense towards literariness, it is easy to study the force of the plot carrying the reader along. Description is kept to the strictly necessary, nothing to weigh down the action or dialogue. The author can’t resist a good quip or argument, so it can be a little jarring to read a dragon like a bratty teenager or a naively optimistic child, but that is what they are, filterless minds looking to find a place in society. Because they are all different kinds of dragons raised as siblings, they don’t have any trouble developing “sweet romance” crushes on dragons of different species.
If you’re my age, this series is almost a sequel to The Breakfast Club and whether or not those high school students could really sustain their relationships after adventures in detention. Tui obviously believes so, in large part because the adult world is so unappealing and cruel, stuck in tradition, obsessed with power and status, that good people have no choice but to stick together.
To A.I. Art
By Benny Donalds
I read about an agent who used A.I. to summarize manuscripts sent to her. Naturally comparing the A.I. summary to the manuscript turned up a variety of errors made by the A.I., because “artificial intelligence” isn’t popular because it’s intelligent, it has proven itself rather stupid when dealing with the humanities, but because it’s fast. If A.I. takes over the world, it won’t be because it is smarter than we are, it will be because we handed over the keys to go on vacation. Until that future, most of us will simply have to despair as the arts, the most human of all activities, are computerized. If you thought Hollywood was just giving more of the same before, you haven’t seen anything yet.
The use of A.I. art is about profit, not art. It makes art cheap, easy, and fast, which is what capitalists want in their products, even if the results are below the professional average. Artists enjoy the work. They like the process of painting, writing, and playing their musical instruments. My own writing is driven by my demons and insecurities. I exorcise them by the process of writing, my more angelic inner editor shapes the material, and I feel a whole lot better for having done so. Simply typing in “write a novel illustrating how the GOP wants to create a 19th Century America with 21th Century toys” or “illustrate my surprise that with all the hypocrisy and lies about romance in our culture the divorce rate is only 50%” simply won’t suffice. If you think using A.I. makes you an artist, then I suggest you train for a mixed martial arts tournament by playing Mortal Kombat and see what happens when you get in the ring.
Nor does the artist simply create art; art creates the artist. Brain scans have shown that learning to play a musical instrument is one of the best ways to develop your brain (the other two were learning a foreign language and advanced math, other skills the tech lords are trying to replace with A.I.). Most authors who write historical or alternative history novels start with a ton of historical research, which is good for them even if the novel never sells. Painters have to refine their vision and fine motor skills.
The irony is that A.I. can make art so quickly that if put into widespread use, it would lead to such an oversupply that it would drive prices below profitability. Internet distribution has already led to a 50% decline in the incomes of writers and 90% decline for musicians. Does the world really need a new Star Trek movie, a new Star Wars movie, a new DC movie, and a new Marvel movie every month? Even without A.I., Disney is already creating Marvel and Star Wars products so fast they are tripping over their own feet.
Some people’s faith in capitalist productivity is so strong they believe a rising tide will lift all boats, but they forget how much political action it has taken to make sure that happened. The natural impulse of companies is to pay their employees as little as possible, to make them work harder, and to cut corners on safety, all to save money. Ayn Rand herself argued against this, having her hero Hank Rearden pay his employees the best wages to get the best workers, but most MBAs aren’t so far sighted.
It is thanks to unions and democracy that we have forty-hour work weeks, minimum wages, paid sick days and vacation days, and safety regulations, all things that wealthy economic conservatives keep trying to undermine. It doesn’t matter if you are an animator in Japan, a coal miner in West Virginia, an assembly line worker in China, or a new professor in academia, without legal protections, your employer will screw you, and perhaps replace you with an A.I. guided robot. Some people claim new jobs will be created, but any job a person can be taught, a computer can be programmed to do. I have yet to be provided with a counter example.
For better or for worse, the best case scenario we are heading for in a world of robots and A.I. is one with universal basic income, or perhaps the “negative income tax” suggested by some libertarians a few decades ago that would streamline welfare saving the government a lot of money. Technology could eventually put nine out of ten people out of work, and then we will have to decide what to do with ourselves. Will we have the Wall-E future of passive consumption turning us into lumps, or the Star Trek future when we use our free time for self-improvement and performing live for our friends?
Review of Blood in the Machine
By P. E. Schilling
People toss the word “Luddite” around as an insult, as if we are simply too stupid and narrow minded to appreciate the future, but as Brian Merchant shows us in Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, we are a long and proud tradition of resistance against rich elites using technology to put their foot on the necks of common people.
Yes, technological advance is inevitable. What is not inevitable is Amazon putting profits ahead of the safety of their workers (workers in their warehouses are 80% more likely to be hurt on the job than in other warehouses). What was not inevitable was factory owners in the early 1800s recruiting their workers from orphanages instead of hiring adults, classifying them as apprentices so they didn’t have to pay them properly, and forcing them to work in unsafe conditions. The worst of those old factories lost so many workers in industrial accidents and to bad conditions that the owner shipped the bodies to different churches hoping no one would realize how many children were dying. That was due to greed and immorality, not creative engineering.
Before the Industrial Revolution, cottage industries allowed families to work together, have 30-hour work weeks and long weekends, and a nice, middle class life. Factory jobs were 16-hour days in literally toxic environments and often built in isolated areas hoping most people wouldn’t realize just how horrible they were. But they did, due to the Luddite resistance, which grew so widespread and was so popular that some years the British Army had more troops hunting them than they had fighting Napoleon.
But the moral damage of the British Industrial Revolution wasn’t limited to England. All of this efficiency in the textile industry meant they needed more cotton. A lot more cotton, according this book importing 11 million quid worth in 1784 but 283 million quid worth in 1832. They manufactured 20 million yards of cloth in 1796, but 347 million in 1830. To satisfy this demand, American plantation owners increased their slave population by 70% from 1790 to 1810.
Brian Merchant also shows how the tactics of the Luddites passed down to the Swing Riots, an agricultural variation of workers being impoverished by technological advances wedded to the bullying of economic elites, to slave resistance in the American South, to the creation of industrial unions in the 20th Century. The Luddites started their movement and developed their tactics decades before Marx published his first books; Marx gained his ideas from his time as a journalist covering similar abuses on the continent. With the creation of A.I., white collar workers are going to have to learn how to protect their futures, too. Uber isn’t just competitive against taxi services because of their software, but because their drivers make so little money many of them are sleeping in their cars.
Merchant admits it is easy to disregard the Luddites because the results of technological advances are all around us, but so are the benefits of the Luddite resistance. If it wasn’t for workers’ resistance, we wouldn’t have created the American middle class, which was based largely on strong unions ensuring good salaries for all blue-collar white men, the legendary dream of Republicans, except they forget the importance of unions, which did more to make sure wealth trickles down than Reaganomics ever did. Today’s big tech innovators are trying another end run around social consciousness, sucking up the wealth for themselves with software instead of hardware, and if we don’t take political action, economic inequality will continue to rise.
Keeping Time
By P. S. Everest
As Tony drove them into the Foothills to investigate a murder, Detective Marsalan Cooper was stuck listening to him gameplaying how to score with a woman, dissecting last night’s date like he did football games. Marsalan didn’t say anything, and not just because the scar tissue on his face would force him to speak with slow deliberation against the current of Tony’s free-flowing, nonstop patter. Growing up, Marsalan had watched his older sister crying over guys, but when he was in the army and tried explaining to guys that women were people, too, they just made fun of him and said he’d be a virgin for the rest of his life.
Marsalan needed to make his partnership with Tony work. Ever since he restrained his last partner from beating information out of a black suspect, roughly pinning a fellow officer against the wall, other detectives steered clear of him. His captain used his “tough but sympathetic” voice on him, saying he understood how what happened in the Cuban Conflict influenced him, but blacks in the Army were different than blacks in the slums.
But he hadn’t protected the black suspect just because an African American unit had pulled he and his men out of hell. A year before, soon after making sergeant, he and his men had been on a rural patrol with two members of the Cuban secret police. Gritting his teeth, he’d stood by watching a uniformed thug beat up a farmer, and when that failed to get any information, the agent was going to rape his daughter. That was when Marsalan shot both agents. He and his men quietly buried the evidence, and Marsalan spent the rest of the war wondering if word would get out and he’d be arrested.
Tony at least approached interrogation like his weekly poker game, taking more pleasure in outsmarting suspects than hitting them. They’d have to play this investigation smart, because the Foothills was where all the rich people with great lawyers lived. Just high enough in the hills to be lifted out of the air pollution, they lived within easier driving distance of the ski slopes and ranches they bought to play weekend cowboys. The newspapers they owned were all in for the tax cuts Governor Reagan promised if he was elected.
They pulled up to the mansion where a uniform waved them into a good parking spot, then told them the body was in a third story master bedroom. The press hadn’t found out yet, probably because everyone in this neighborhood had moved here to get away from the riff raff so were disinclined to tip a reporter. The outside walls and windows held sturdy against weather and fashion, a reminder this was one of the city’s founding families, but the inside had been redecorated with abstract paintings ranging from stark simplicity of the human form to meaningless dribbles on paper.
They hiked to the bedroom where the body of Carl Smith had been found. Marsalan found the going easier, being taller and thinner, and he’d kept doing the physical therapy exercises to strengthen his muscles. Tony had grown up on pasta and rough housing. Both wore long, loose coats that hid their revolvers.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Smith’s newspaper chain kept harping on how America could have won in Cuba if they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by bleeding heart, tree hugging liberals. But Marsalan had seen Cuban “recruitment teams” drive into villages and beat the crap out of young men until they “agreed” to join the army, and figured any government that had to recruit soldiers that way deserved to lose.
Smith’s latest venture had been in television shows, most famously Iron Moon, which most critics considered a rebuttal of Star Trek. Iron Moon starred a tall, blond captain, Jonathon Moon, who was better in a fight than his security chief, better at science than his science officer, and better at engineering than his engineer. He was loyal to his wife, the ship’s psychologist, but his charisma overwhelmed queens of decadent worlds across the galaxy, as his all white crew proved their superiority over a rainbow of aliens.
The patriarch lay naked on his bed, face down, a knife driven into his heart. Only one strike. “Someone knew… what they … were doing.”
“Yep,” said Tony, and he turned to the officer who’d secured the room. “Anyone in house?”
“We separated the staff, and one of his sons is in the living room, reminding us that he’s also the family lawyer and should be present when we question them.”
“Guess he doesn’t want them spilling any unnecessary beans.”
Marsalan picked up a wedding photo of the victim, his two sons, a daughter, and a wife younger than the sons, all blonds. “Where is … the wife?”
“Third wife,” said the officer, glancing at his notes. “She’s shopping in Milan. The second wife lives in Florida. The first in L.A., producing his TV shows.”
Cozy.
“Confirm none of them are in town,” said Tony. “Let’s talk to the servants.”
As the forensics team arrived, the detectives went to do their interviews. Tony talked with the chauffer and butler, while Marsalan interviewed the kitchen staff because they were Cuban refugees, a married couple who had fled Havana, and more comfortable speaking Spanish. After the American military had moved in to back the failing Bay of Pigs invasion, Havana had been a playground for American personnel during the long conflict. But every American victory in the field was offset by ten political abuses by the local regime.
“Did Mr. Smith … have a mistress?” he eventually asked them.
The glance they gave each other spoke volumes.
“Hey,” interrupted the lawyer, “I can’t protect them if you are speaking in Spanish.”
“They are … not suspects.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Fine. Did your … father have… a mistress?”
“Probably. His second wife was his mistress when he was married to my mom, and his third wife replaced her the same way.”
Tony entered, chuckling. “Ah, to be rich and semi-retired. Where are your siblings?”
“My half-sister is in a boarding school and my brother is at the office.”
“Couldn’t come down here?”
The son glared. “Father raised us to put business first, and since I’m the lawyer I came.”
What a loving family.
After finishing the interviews and doing a sweep of the house to figure out how a killer might have entered and left without being seen, Marsalan and Tony walked back to their car. “Ever get the feeling a funeral will just be a pre-game show before the reading of a will?”
Marsalan chuckled.
“You’re sure the servants aren’t suspects?”
“Do you think … they are in… the will?”
“Point taken, Mars.”
He didn’t like that nickname he’d been given around the station, but he knew how guys were. If he protested, they’d use it even more.
After doing everything he could for the day, Marsalan took a cab to The Tea Leaf Café, decorated mostly with pioneer dishware, cups, and pots, simple brown leaf patterns on white ironstone. Everything reminded him of his grandmother’s farmhouse, but Helen liked the tea selection. His sister-in-law had set up them weeks ago, since Helen was a Spanish teacher and was taking Russian night classes, while he’d learned Spanish in high school and then Russian in the military for interrogating prisoners. They had spent the entire first date discussing Don Quixote and debating to what extent watching Star Trek had made them both too idealistic for “the real world.” She listened to his deliberate English with the patience acquired by listening to her students struggling to speak Spanish. He liked it when she called him “Alan.” It made him feel more like a regular guy.
Marsalan didn’t feel idealistic anymore, and talking with Helen helped him figure out how he felt about it. He had to be vague about his work for professional reasons, but she was still understanding. Their second date he’d taken her dancing, which really impressed her. He’d learned in Havana dance clubs, but refrained from telling her about sleeping with his dance instructor. Julitta had moved even more beautifully than she appeared, guiding him through the steps both on the dance floor and in the bedroom. She taught him how to cook local dishes, and which words to use on the street or with a lady.
He’d fallen for her, but then when he and his team scouted out an enemy camp for the bombers, the Air Force dropped chemical weapons and the wind shifted, blowing it right over his team. Other members had even worse luck, the chemicals blinding them, or getting in their lungs. A third of them died within a week, and over the years he’d attended several more of their funerals as a civilian.
The area deemed too dangerous, Command had sent in a black unit to rescue them. While he was in the hospital, bandages over half his body, a reporter uncovered the story, and by the time Marsalan was in physical therapy, Nixon was out of the White House and America out of Cuba. A part of him had wondered how he could get her out, but another part admitted to himself that he wasn’t the only man in her life, the little signs that when he was in the field she taught other men to dance.
He’d taken it slow with Helen. Even if a widow with a young son, her husband shot down over Cuba, as a teacher she had to preserve her reputation, and he was reluctant for her to see how extensive his scarring was, just as he’d been nervous undressing with Julitta the first time, in case she didn’t think his body measured up. That younger self ready for adventure, joining the army right out of high school, seemed alien to him now, after the randomness of which of his buddies had bought it. No belief in God, karma, or believing in one’s self as the central character of their own story had kept his comrades alive.
Yet every time they said goodnight, she kissed him a little longer.
After the next morning’s investigations, Marsalan walked around the corner from the station to eat at a Chinese diner with cheap, colorful depictions of dragons and cranes on the walls. The flags of the United States and defunct Republic of China hung in the window to reassure customers they weren’t commies. Several dishes came in bits he could eat without overly stretching his mouth. Delivery boys hustled in and out.
After a young Chinese woman dressed like a 1950s teenager took his order, he unfolded his newspaper. It headlined a story about the National Guard being called out to surround the nearby Indian reservation to suppress an uprising. Nowhere did the article mention the Indians were protesting their water supply being polluted by new mining activity, but both Carter and Reagan were quoted on the sudden campaign issue.
While he ate his sweet and sour pork, slowly while reading the paper, a silver watch fell onto the table. He looked around, but didn’t see anyone who could have dropped it and a delivery boy couldn’t have afforded it. It appeared to be a ladies watch, but with two buttons on each side instead of a way to wind it up. Turning it over, he found a serial number. He almost asked the waitress if they had a lost and found, but then remembered the killer was probably a woman. If someone had dropped this on purpose, perhaps it was a clue.
He wrapped it in a handkerchief and started putting it in his pocket.
“You don’t want to do that,” said an Englishwoman’s voice. He looked around. No one was talking to him.
“Put the watch on.”
He held it closer to his face. “Are you … is there a radio… in the watch?”
“Something like that. Put the watch on, and I’ll help you, when I can.”
“Are you MI 6?” Since allowing so many refugee scientists from Europe into the Empire, they had all the best technological toys.
“You wouldn’t believe me just yet.”
“Then why should I … believe you now?”
“You’re just wearing a watch.”
“How do I know … you haven’t coated … it with poison?”
“You’ve already held it long enough to be exposed. Just don’t take this watch off until something weird happens and we have a chance to talk about.”
He sniffed it. It felt like metal. It smelled like metal. If this was MI 6, he felt it was his duty to figure out what was going on, which meant keeping the lady talking. Then he’d report it to the local Red Squad, which mostly hunted Commies but they weren’t overtly fond of any foreign intelligence network. About once a month they’d call him in to translate Russian propaganda or messages they found.
He put it on his other wrist.
The next morning a nightmare woke up him early, one he’d had a few times. In real life, he’d seen a local government death squad, American trained with American weapons, burn down an entire village and anyone who didn’t run fast enough. He’d protested, but their hard faced officer ignored him, taking this sort of work with as normal. In the dream, he tried to stop them, fought them, and they turned a flame thrower on him.
Already sweating from the dream, he did twenty minutes of stretches, push-ups, and other bodyweight exercises, and made breakfast in his little apartment, devoid of decoration because until becoming a police officer never had a chance to develop his own taste. He listened to the radio all the while, bemoaning how the news today was so similar to yesterday’s they didn’t even seem to change the words.
He walked to the station, then passed through the habitual polite greetings and dismissive blow offs of departmental politics, and sat at his desk. The paperwork in front of him was exactly the same as yesterday morning. He flipped through the pages. He’d definitely done all this yesterday.
Well, this is the weirdest practical joke I’ve ever seen. Hardly the time with an important guy dead.
Instead of giving someone the satisfaction of a reaction, he told Tony he needed more coffee, left the station, bought a newspaper out of a machine, and settled in at a café across the street with a cup. He let himself enjoy the top heavy, redheaded waitress flirting with him for tips, then smiled a little as he unfolded his newspaper, expecting news about the case.
It was yesterday’s paper. Damn it, they haven’t restocked yet.
So he flipped to the sections he hadn’t time to read. He’d almost finished when Tony walked in and leaned over. “We’ve got a murder at the Smith mansion. Come on.”
Figuring he’d shirked enough work for the day, he left with Tony. As they drove out to the mansion, Tony was still talking about how to score with his latest romantic target. Marsalan wondered if he himself would be as morally causal about women if he had any skills in that regard, other than what Julitta had taught him. She’d taught him how to please her, not replace her.
They pulled up to the mansion, where the same officer waved them into the same parking spot, but this time told them to go around back. They found the same crime tech taking pictures, but of an African-American woman wearing a commando suit who had been shot in the back, laying on the manicured lawn. The knife strapped to her side had the same hilt as yesterday’s murder weapon.
“What happened here?” asked Tony casually.
“Someone tried to kill Carl Smith,” said an officer.
What?
But Tony was already headed inside. Marsalan stared at the lithe body a second longer, then followed his partner. Inside, Carl Smith and his lawyer son relaxed in casual suits on plush, modern furniture, mostly black in a room painted white, with a small, personal bar and wide windows. The room was a modern space added onto the back of the 19th Century mansion the same way a normal person might build a porch.
Marsalan opened his mouth to say something about how impossible this was, but remembered how many veterans had been sent to mental hospitals. Many needed help after the war, but some had been institutionalized for telling too many truths about the Cuban Conflict. Claiming Carl Smith was dead would give the department a quick excuse to be rid of him.
The son explained to Tony how their house security guard, a tall, hulking figure in a blue suit and buzz cut standing behind them, had shot the intruder and she ran until she bled out. “He’s from Eternal Storm Security Services, and she entered the premises armed and dangerous.”
If this big hulk was here before, why did Smith die the first time? While Marsalan stared at the resurrected Carl Smith, his mind scrabbling to make sense of his existence, just don’t take this watch off until something weird happens and we have a chance to talk about, Tony took notes dutifully until they stopped talking and slapped his notebook closed. “Thank you, sirs. That’s probably all we need.”
“Shot in the back,” said Marsalan.
“What?” asked the lawyer.
“She was shot … in the back.”
“It was dark when it happened, so hard to tell what exactly happened,” said the lawyer dismissively.
“Then how did he… know she was armed?”
“That’s his job,” the lawyer snapped.
Tony held up his hands to both sides. “Hey, he just has to ask questions for the report. It’s all okay. Now, if we’d found her dead in her undies, we’d be asking more interesting questions, but this is obviously a burglary. Come on, partner, let’s see if the crime tech has all his photos.”
Out on the lawn, Tony turned on him. “What the hell were you doing in there, Mars?”
“Investigating.”
“What does it matter if she was shot in the back or the front? She was an intruder.”
“I hope he … does not mistake… a servant for … an intruder.”
“Yeah, he’s trigger happy. If it makes you happy, we can report him to Eternal Storm, but they tend to like that sort.”
The ESSS had been founded by a different sort of German refugees fleeing Russian tanks back in ‘46. The rest of German-occupied Europe had surrendered to the British Empire to avoid their crushing treads.
“If shot in … the back … in the yard…”
“Look, I know you have a soft spot for Negros, but your war stories are only going to protect you from Red Squad for so long, so be careful.”
Lots of African-American leaders were accused of being communists, mostly because the police couldn’t arrest them for being ministers.
He wanted to check the mysterious watch, but had to wait until he was alone. Fortunately his time in the military had drilled patience into him, waiting for the perfect time to strike.
Driving back and forth from the Foothills took long enough that Marsalan could plausibly lie about having leftovers at home to eat for lunch, so Tony dropped him off. Marsalan hurried up the stairs, sat at his small dining room table, and placed the watch in front of him. While he wondered which button to push, a hologram of a woman of South Asian descendant wearing a lab coat extended three inches upwards, way more realistic than in Star Wars.
She spoke with the same voice he’d heard before.
“Hello, Detective Marsalan Cooper.”
“Hello?”
“I’m Doctor Indra Lydic.”
“Okay. Where are you?”
“I was programmed in High Castle, a secret base trying to protect the history of Earth. There is also a secret base of Nazi scientists trying to rewrite history. Both of us are sending messages backwards in time. They want to create a timeline where the Nazis win and we are trying to stop them.”
“Like The Man … in the High Castle?”
“I’m glad our files on you are correct. Your literacy will make this an easier conversation. However, there are limits to what I can tell you, especially about our technology and location, otherwise the Nazis will attack our base in our time, as we would theirs.”
“What can … you tell me?”
“I can tell you that Carl Smith is an important part of the Nazi plan to over America within the next hundred years.”
“He’s a TV producer.”
“Making TV shows to brainwash future generations of Americans into voting for closet Nazis.”
“Okay.”
“His real name was Karl Schmidt, by the way. After the fall of the Third Reich, he was recruited by the American military to teach propaganda techniques and married into a wealthy family sympathetic to his beliefs, which is why his first wife is still one of his business partners.”
“I wondered… but why America? Why not… help the Germans… win?”
“Because the more the future Nazis tried to help Hitler, the worse things got all around. They gave Hitler jets, but jets aren’t useful for occupying ground. They gave Hitler the Bomb, but that created a timeline where no one can live in Europe because of radiation. The more Hitler won, the more arrogant he became, and the bigger mistakes he then made. So the future Nazis are trying their hand in America, with its much larger industrial base.”
“Can you go back … further in time…”
“We can only send messages as far back as the invention of the radio, through which we’ve taught people how to make better communication devices, eventually this watch. That isn’t far back enough to change history enough to prevent the rise of German nationalism.”
“How did you… give me this … watch?”
“One of our agents was talking to you in a previous timeline. The Nazis must have realized he was a threat, so sent a message back in time to their agents to eliminate his parents before he was born or kill him as a child. But these watches are built to continue on and protect agents from memory loss. If you put that watch on and the timeline changes, your memories in this timeline will be transferred to the new you. However, since the new timeline is branching off instead of replacing the old timeline, the original you will still exist.”
“So old timelines never … go away.”
“Right.”
“What do I do with … this watch?”
“Keep in touch with us. We have extensive files, which is why we could tell the previous agent to trust you. They show you’re willing to do the right thing even if risking your career. In one timeline, you were dishonorably discharged. In another timeline, you’re in jail. In a third, you’re a private detective. In all of these, no good deed went unpunished. In this timeline, you’ve been lucky so far.”
“So you don’t… plan to be … my boss?”
“How could we enforce our will? We just choose the best people we can and hope for the best.”
“But my parents … could die?”
“No one is going back in time to eliminate you from the timeline, Marsalan. Your son is going to invent the device that allows temporal communication. Both sides need you alive. Any universe where your son is not born, is a timeline without either of us. Be sure to show him a lot of Star Trek to get his imagination going.”
He took a moment to process that, after years of assuming he wouldn’t have a child.
“There isn’t that much… Star Trek.”
“Not yet.”
Something to look forward to. “So one of your agents killed … Carl Smith? Tried to kill Carl Smith?”
“Actually she worked for another group of people who don’t like Nazis. They obtained classified records of Operation Paperclip that recruited Nazis after the European War and are knocking them off, one by one.”
“And what do you … want me to do?”
“You’re a police detective. We can help you prove which of them are war criminals and you can arrest them. It’s a strategy we’ve used with some success in previous timelines, focusing on future political figures in particular.”
“Where do we start?”
“With the next murder.”
“What?”
“I know this sounds callous, but the easiest way to determine who is a secret Nazi is that after they are murdered, someone is sent to save their life.”
He sat in silence for a moment. “What was my life like … in the original timeline?”
“In the first version of history in my records, the United States had defeated Japan and helped defeat Germany, you served in Vietnam, and when that campaign failed, you helped a local girl get out and married her. You’re a homicide detective in Hawaii.”
“Sounds nice.” Sounds great. “But it is a little … weird we could defeat… Japan and Germany… but not Cuba or Vietnam.”
“In the first two cases, America was fighting militaries, but in the second set, they were fighting the people, and if the people don’t want to be conquered, the invaders eventually have two choices, kill everyone or go home.”
“You’re distracted.”
“Sorry. Work.”
He and Helen had just ordered their meals at a fancy, romantically dark and quiet Italian restaurant. Once it had been a vast Victorian house, the original owners having lots of kids and servants. He’d paid extra to reserve one of the private rooms upstairs. The food was slow because the kitchen was small, but people only came here with those they wished to spend more time with.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” She didn’t sound like she expected it.
“I just wish … I could arrest … someone before they… committed a crime. I hate waiting.”
“So you know someone is a criminal, but you have to catch them in the act?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Welcome to my world. School is like an arms race between kids trying to find ways to sneak around rules and teachers trying to catch them. Our only advantage is that teachers learn by experience, but by the time the kids do, they’ve moved on to the next school.”
He smiled on the good side of his face. We’re going to have a brilliant little kid, who is going to cause all sorts of trouble.
“You smiled for a moment, but then it went away.”
“Life is funny… until it isn’t.”
“That’s why I like Dickens. He’s the only writer who can make me laugh and cry with the same sentence.”
Marsalan and Tony were called out to the home of Doctor Bruno Hogh. He’d been killed with the same sort of knife left in his heart as the once late Smith. Either Hogh was so uptight he even wore a suit at home or the killer had followed him from work.
As Tony shared a cigarette with the passionless widow explaining she’d returned from her bridge club to find her husband already dead, Marsalan searched the modest house. Most of the pictures were of children and grandchildren, smiling for the camera in their Sunday best. When he found a locked door, he returned to the widow, Sarah, and asked for the key.
“That leads to my husband’s office. The work he does for our government is classified.”
“What work?”
“All I know is it’s for the Air Force.”
“Maybe he was … killed by a spy.”
“He wore it on a chain around his neck.”
Marsalan undid the doctor’s tie, found the chain, and used key to enter the office with Tony right behind him. It was lined with bookshelves and had a large filing cabinet with a combination lock.
Tony put his hands on his hips. “Looks fine to me.”
Marsalan scanned the books. Many of them were bound collections of science magazines from a variety of fields, but the books in German stood out. Heidegger. Hegal. Hitler. Frowning, he took out his gun and used the butt to bust the lock on the cabinet.
“Hey, Mars, what’s gotten into you?”
Marsalan fingered his way through the files, taking out the first one with photos. What he found was worse than he’d expected.
He didn’t need to be a scientist to recognize human experimentation when he saw it, and they had injuries very similar to his own. He stared at these victims, who had been exposed on purpose, just to see what would happen.
He showed the photos to Tony.
“Whoa.”
“Yes.” Marsalan parsed his way through the German until it cliqued. “In the Forties… he researched… the chemicals that … harmed me.”
“He works for our Air Force.”
“This records… research for… the Third Reich.”
“I thought that was all Commie propaganda to justify deindustrializing Germany.”
“So had I.”
Tony held his silence longer than Marsalan had ever known him to, then held his shoulder and forced a smile.
“Now we have a motive, Mars. Revenge for this work, or someone wanted access to his work, but this is all old research. His new work must be at a lab. I’ll ask the widow about it.”
Alone in the office, Marsalan forced himself to put the file down instead of ripping up evidence. He was glad Hogh was dead, wondered if he would have pulled the trigger himself if he had the chance. Sitting in the chair, he activated the watch and told her what he’d learned.
“Did you know?” he asked.
“No, we didn’t. Our information improves dramatically after the widespread use of the computers, but the future Nazis know this so tell the past Nazis to stick to paper records.”
The only computer at the police station was in the accounting department. No one he knew thought computers would be better for anything other than math.
“Now what?”
“You do what you think is right. All we can do is not help you, if we think you’re doing something wrong. But if you save Hogh’s life, perhaps you can learn about other Nazis and arrest them, too.”
“So the oppo… sistion. They will send a guard… to save Hogh… in the next timeline.”
“Yes.”
Marsalan pondered that.
He woke up in the morning, got dressed, and hustled down to the newspaper dispenser. It had the same date as Hogh’s murder, so that day was starting all over again. Tony’s report had included an approximate time of death as shortly after nightfall, so after work Marsalan drove to the house and knocked.
The door opened and someone began aiming a revolver. Marsalan ducked while grabbing the doorknob, used his bodyweight to slam the door on his attacker’s forearm, and as the other guy screamed and dropped the gun, threw himself at the door, smashing it into the gunman. Entering the house, he stood over a bigger man lying on the floor holding his nose while writhing in pain. From his dark suit and short haircut, Marsalan guessed he was from Eternal Storm.
Doctor Hogh gasped and ran for the kitchen, so Marsalan swept up the revolver and chased after him. Hogh began dialing a phone, but Marsalan put his hand on the cradle, cutting him off. “I am a police detective.” Taking his hand off the cradle, he pulled out his badge. “Marsalan Cooper.” You dirty, sadistic scumbag.
“I thought after you attacked my bodyguard…”
“He pointed a … gun at an officer.”
“Yes, of course.”
The bodyguard stumbled in, and Marsalan showed him the badge as well. “You two… wait in his office… I’ll deal with… the assassin.” He waved the guard’s own gun with a flick of his wrist towards the office, and humbled, they went.
Marsalan made himself comfortable on a chair that allowed him to see the living room windows and door, positioning a phone within reach, but also listened for anyone trying to break in some other way.
And waited, like any other stake out, clearing his mind of his anger to be aware of his senses. In Vice, they used criminals to catch criminals all the time. Their confidential informants were never good people, because good people didn’t know crap about what the police needed to go after the big fish.
The phone rang, and he snatched it up to silence it. Out of habit his hand brought the receiver to his ear, but he suppressed a greeting.
“You are Detective Marsalan Cooper,” said a tough woman’s voice.
“Yes.”
“How did you know we would be coming for him?”
“You’ve been …. targeting war …. criminals.”
“You don’t have access to military intel.”
“How did you know … I would be here?”
“When we lose operatives, we get extra careful. Who do you really work for?”
“I’m just a cop with …. a well-placed …. confidential informant.”
“So arrest the scientist for his crimes against humanity.”
“Later. Who are you?”
“We hunt the war criminals who got away.”
“That is against the law.”
“If they win, the only law you’ll be enforcing will be the commands of a new Leader’s.”
“So they’re working together?” he asked, to see how much he could get the speaker to say.
“A media king. A scientist making new and improved tear gas for the police. Then next on the list is a politician running for office. Follow their money. We did.”
“So present your evidence … to the world. Let everyone know.”
“Whenever one of our operatives talks about going public, they end up dead before they can. We’ve torn ourselves apart looking for a mole, but it doesn’t do any good, no matter how much we encourage our operatives to start working on their own. Why anyone who lost family to the Nazis would betray us, we just don’t understand.”
“It’s not a mole. Someone invented … temporal communication … so whenever one of you … goes public … they arrange for death to occur … before your friends take action.”
The silence from the other end didn’t surprise Marsalan. The voice that eventually came was more of an organized sigh.
“Time travelling Nazis.”
“Communication … from the future to … their agents in this time.”
“Okay, so let’s say I believe you. What next?”
“Send me copies of your proof… I’ll out the Nazis for you.”
“And when they try to kill you?”
“My son will invent… temporal communication… so they cannot. It would create a paradox. They use the ESSS … to kill your agents. Is anyone in your files … working for them?”
“Yes.”
“Good place to start.”
“I’ll put copies of everything we have in the mail tomorrow.”
Hanging up the phone, Marsalan stared out the window. The very existence of Operation Paperclip suggested the Nazis in the future could always find people who were greedy and ambitious enough to work with them.
After Red Squad arrested a slew of war criminals, including Smith, Hogh, and the head of the ESSS, the lawyers started arguing about their fate and the Feds demanded the scientists among them be returned to their work. More of his colleagues shook his hand that week than the last year combined, even his captain. “You’ll be up for a medal, Mars.”
Equal parts gratified by his new allies and disgusted after too much politics interfering with justice, he drove home. As he got out of his car, explosions echoed from outside the city. Grabbing a pair of binoculars from the backseat, he hiked up to the roof of the apartment building and held them to his eyes, gripping them so hard his knuckles turned white. Artillery flashed and helicopters swarmed around the reservation, putting down a protest against water pollution by a bunch of guys with rifles and old pick-ups.
There was only one way to end meddling from the future. Back in his apartment, he found a message from Helen on his machine. Clearing his mind of his own hopes, he deleted it for the sake of the American dream.
He began undoing his tie when a cautious knock startled him. He drew his service revolver and held it behind him as he opened the door.
Julitta stood outside, her expression a mixture of hope, affection, and worry. He opened the door the rest of the way to ask how she got here. Beside her stood a young boy.
Hidden Hearts
By Paul Severus
Lim Korsal followed Sopheak through the double doors into the courtyard. Only a little over thirty winters old, Korsal cultivated a short, scholarly beard, and kept fit with the traditional sword dances of his people, despite the Vong being at peace since long before his birth. His wool-lined blue jacket with silver buttons protected him from winds off the mountains surrounding their vast plateau. Sopheak dressed like a wealthy peasant, white wool clothing with a wooden necklace and pendant darkened with fire and smoke to create the impression of distant birds in flight.
Two manservants closed the doors, cutting off the stiff wind, and one of them left to let Chea Phala know they had arrived. Only a century old, the palace was the newest, largest household on the plateau, thanks to the silver mine that had also grown the village into a town. Korsal glanced around for Jorani, daughter of Phala, crossing his arms to hold his wool coat close and his resentment in. He’d waited to be chosen shaman before proposing to Jorani, but of the late Voan’s apprentices, the town had elected Sopheak. Phala had invested too much in Jorani to let her marry a mere scribe, always talking big about the glorious marriages he would have for his daughters, sending her to the best school beyond the mountains he could.
Once upon a time, when the Vong lived on the other side of the White Mountains and worshipped the Star God, a woman would never have left home except to marry, but their Star God failed the Vong and the men failed to protect their ancestral lands. So many men died in those ancient battles that women found room to lead, and they moved here, where they prayed to goddesses tending the land as their own wild garden, shifting how his people thought of themselves.
Korsal and Jorani had written letters to each other, at first in Vong and later in Huaran, the language she learned in that school and he had learned from books. She had described walking on a beach and the ocean’s infinite shading of greens to blues and back again, entire river villages built to float during the flooding season, and what it was like being the only mountain born Vong among so many Auli city girls and Huaran teachers, as well as being the oldest student. After a Huaran army had swept from the north to conquer the fertile River Lands, their administrators set up schools to ensure the children of all important Auli families learned Huaran customs, laws, and loyalty.
The other manservant guided them into “the tea room,” modeled after rooms where in Huaran literature officials and nobles sat informally to drink, play chess, and have elegant conversations involving politics, philosophy, and poetry, but Phala’s palace was better fortified against the wind. As the men entered, Jorani and her mother rose, both with full cheeks fitting their wide smiles, a pot of steaming tea ready. They wore black wool dresses and jackets with sliver buttons, but the beadwork decorating Jorani’s jacket evoked spring floral patterns and her mother’s the leaves of autumn. A silver comb topped with a jade bird held Jorani’s hair in a bun and her collar was turned down, revealing her graceful neck. She was a little broader in the shoulders than her mother, since her farsighted father had her study the ancient warrior forms before she studied beyond the safety of their mountains.
He smiled a little, but guilt held him back and Sopheak did the talking. Before she had gone to the foreign school, Korsal had drummed to her dancing at the love festival, sat outside her favorite window playing a two-chord fiddle while she played a moon lute, their notes finding harmony together. Yet in the market she still wore the tall, cylindrical hat of a single woman while her younger sister wore the shorter, conical hat of a wife, because he turned out to be just Sopheak’s scribe. While her sister had her own household and expected a child, Jorani helped teach other people’s children in the school.
Meditation had allowed Korsal to reach through his anger to sorrow, so he didn’t hold his circumstances against Sopheak. They still lived together in the shaman’s tower, on a hill just north of town, with Korsal looking after the library and Sopheak the spiritual needs of the townspeople, taking turns teaching in the school. Korsal had thought he would be chosen because he was more learned, but Sopheak spoke so easily with people, and they always left comforted. Korsal better understood the history of their rituals, but saw them as a duty while Sopheak brought them to life with his enthusiasm. They both understood the laws of magic, but Sopheak knew all the medicinal herbs, while Korsal had accepted the challenge of making his own sword, etching in runes, and filling them with silver. The runes allowed him to channel the spiritual force he had cultivated by years of meditation into spells effective against ghosts, demons, and the like. While Jorani studied the seaside school, he’d worked on the sword with Lord Oudom’s smith at the castle, a long, lonely effort for a tool he’d as of yet only practiced with, never used. The rare ghosts that bothered the village had been tied to the earth by unhealthy passions, and needed calmed rather than slain to fade into the cycle of reincarnation. When Korsal reached through his sorrow to the truth, he admitted they both had the work that suited them. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that it made Sopheak a more eligible bachelor.
Sopheak chatted easily with the lady of the house over tea as Chea Phala entered, and this time it was the shaman and scribe who stood out of respect, but then the men held each other’s forearms in the traditional greeting of brother warriors. They sat and Jorani poured another round of tea.
Phala admitted he had awkward news. “The Huaran have taken an unfortunate interest in our silver mine. As silver and gold are used to enhance runes for spells, in their empire those are restricted materials, the mines controlled by their government.” Korsal and Sopheak glanced at each other with worry. Just one Huaran army might have more soldiers than there were Vong people. The High Lands were very defensible, but there was no way of knowing how many men the Huaran would be willing to throw away. “The civil war in their homeland has made silver even more valuable, and the Xu family ruling our neighbors resent our making it into coins and jewelry.”
The silver trade had made their town prosperous, and the Chea family, who controlled the mint and were among the best silversmiths, wealthier than the lord who officially ruled the Vong. People might have resented the Chea more, but their family had turned their old home into the school, even buying the school books, and supported traditional festivals generously.
“But if they don’t use silver coins, what they do use to buy and sell?” asked Sopheak.
Phala handed the shaman prettily decorated paper. “These represent silver or gold, even copper.”
Sopheak turned it over in his hand, puzzled. “How could anyone value this? It would be so easy to lose or destroy. This might claim to be worth a goatherder’s annual profit, but I could destroy it with a match.”
“I could throw a book in the fireplace,” said Jorani, “but we value them all the same.” She smiled shyly at Korsal, and he nodded back, remembering how as youth they had been among the few who kept talking about books after class.
“So we have two problems,” continued Phala. “The easier one is that our lord has decided I shall play host to the delegation, which is obviously my penalty for prosperity.” Everyone laughed a little. Phala’s home was both better located for the meeting and better looking than the lord’s castle, which had more stables than guestrooms and had been built when war was fresh in their people’s memories. Lord Sok Oudom’s wealth was based on wheat and cattle and used to train those who stood as their first line of defense. “The second is how much do these delegates know about our mine?”
Korsal and Sopheak glanced at each other, frowning. Back when they were still apprentices, miners had broken into a vast chamber from the last age, as if the gods had dropped a mountain on a temple larger than their town. Mighty pillars had cracked and some had crumbled, but enough stood reinforced by gold and silver filled runes to hold against divine wrath. The gods had destroyed the last age for their pride and heresy, so Shaman Voan hadn’t allowed them to take any magical items, afraid they had been cursed, or blessed by the wrong gods. Yet they couldn’t resist carrying off books they found that didn’t have spells, leather binding lacking mystical sensation, in hopes learning to read those books would give them the context to understand what else among the ruins was safe or dangerous. If not, reading was often its own reward.
After their master had died, the apprentices had returned, and this time gathered a few books Voan had deliberately passed over. They had illustrations predating even the Hoai civilization, probably the entire Age of Legends. Human-like reptiles bowed in worship to great lizards stretching their wings on mountain cliffs. Two warrior mages locked in a duel of sword and sorcery, the illustrator drawing both as malicious, one running hot and the other cold. Towers defying proportion in their height. One of the rune books, written with beautiful calligraphy but utterly untranslatable, had a scaly binding tough as copper, and Korsal had imagined one of the warrior mages slaying a lizard-god, or perhaps its servant, and making leather out of the skin. He didn’t like the moral possibilities, and perhaps it was best that age had been lost.
Translating them still brought purpose to his life, and reading their history he’d come to suspect the gods hadn’t punished the ancient Hoai civilization for straying from the truth, but coming so close to it their power would have rivaled the divine given time. The Huaran priests taught that ancient Hoai magic had threatened the world because it gained strength from passion instead of knowledge, so a hero could hold a pass against an army, a lover could slay a demon to save their beloved, but an ambitious, hateful man could overthrow a just king, and a heart broken wizard could break the world. But the priests would say that, because the alternative was too frightening, to believe that gods were just as jealous and capricious as mortals, but without limitations. Based on the books he’d translated thus far, there was evidence to support both sides of the story.
“They don’t know our secret,” said Korsal.
“How can you be so sure?”
“If word had spread to the outside world about the relics, it would be the Hands of the Gods investigating.” Warriors with fists aflame with divine wrath who hunted necromancers, sorcerers, and the unnatural creatures that served them, feared by the powerful yet heroines of stories mothers told to comfort children afraid of the night. Huaran opera and epic poetry abounded with stories about the Hands hunting evil, but magic from the last age was on their list, too. “But if the delegation realizes what we found, they will tell the Hands, who will probably shut us down.”
“And there’s nothing we could do about it?” asked Phala.
“I’m afraid not, Father,” said Jorani. “I heard Huaran men make many boasts, but never of victory over a Hand. By their law if there is a magical threat, even a Huaran general has to take their orders.”
“So we have to keep the delegation from probing too deep into our affairs,” conceded her father. “Sopheak, I’d like you to accompany our lady to the town to organize a welcoming committee, and for Korsal to assist Jorani picking out decorations for inside my home.”
“Perhaps we should all get in the habit of calling your wife ‘my lady’,” which Korsal said in Huaran, “in accordance with Huaran custom, since she is Lord Oudom’s sister.”
“Technically you should start calling me a ‘princess’,” teased Jorani, using a variation of the Huaran title he hadn’t run across before, since it usually wasn’t a niece of a king that heroes fought over in their epic tales. Korsal smiled as her father told her to make sure everyone in the household knew how to pronounce it.
As he followed Jorani down the sheltered walkway along the courtyard, she surprised Korsal by speaking freely and walking closely to him. Perhaps he had misjudged his prospects with her. Perhaps her father needed a scribe. Doubts made it hard for him to focus on her theory that the school she attended had been an excuse for Huaran to hold the children of important Auli hostage, ensuring their parents’ loyalty, but the education had still been excellent, since their teachers took as much pride in bright students as warriors did with shiny medals.
The main hall had been modeled after the Vong tradition of a home, but longer and taller, with stone walls and a vaulted wood ceiling making the outside look like an axe blade pointed towards heaven. Images of the goddesses of the Sun, Mountains, Wind, and Rain had been burnt dark into the wood. Where most Vong families had wooden carvings of family, the Chea had marble busts. Others used wood with silver or bronze inlay for decoration and bamboo for children’s toys, while Phala bought the same in jade with gold on his travels as a merchant. In other homes, people would cook, eat, weave, everything but sleep in the same long common room, but Phala had public duties, so this room just had a long table for feasts and the family shrine at the far end. Korsal remembered a younger self pounding a drum among the men while Jorani danced among the women, just before she told him her father was sending her away.
As they browsed through the artwork her father had bought or relatives had made, picking which would impress their visitors, skill being more important than the raw materials to the ever competitive Huaran, she asked which books they should have on display. He picked a random one and looked it over, appreciating that Huaran engineering meant anyone could afford to buy a book, that libraries and schools were better stocked than the old days, but a “printing press” could never make a book as beautiful as one hand bound, and all the modern books had been printed in Huaran or Auli script.
“Which ones have you read? They will try tripping you up.”
“Why? We’re here talking about silver exports.”
“The fun of humiliating each other, so far as I can tell from their literature.”
“That does sound like one of my teachers. I’ll display the books I’ve reread.” She’d mentioned in a letter she didn’t feel she could speak intelligently about a book until reading it at least twice, because so much made more sense after finishing. “But now I’m glad I spent most of my time with Auli girls.” While Korsal studied the artwork to figure out which would be meaningful to the delegation, she continued. “Perhaps you should translate some of our books into their languages. They could be ‘printed’ so people around the world would understand our ways.”
Distracted by the intricate details of a flowing jade dragon chasing its own tail, he spoke bluntly. “I would not profane our knowledge blessed by the Sun Goddess with such a lazy way of copying.”
Jorani looked away, dejected, and Korsal suddenly felt worse. Sopheak would have found a softer way to reject her idea without her feeling rejected. He tried to think of an apology, but she found her voice again. “It doesn’t have to be sacred knowledge, spells or songs. It can be tales like how our ancestors crossed the White Mountains and humid marshes to find this plateau, or the funny ways people meet and fall in love.”
He couldn’t imagine people spending hard earned coin on gossip, but didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and had to admit his sister never tired of telling how she and her husband found harmony despite him being a tone-deaf drummer and all she could play was a leaf horn.
“Vong and Auli do tell different stories about Father Turtle.” The shape-changer who helped the Vong find their home among the mountains, then taught the Auli how to thrive in the surrounding marshlands. “A side-by-side comparison might be illuminating for both our peoples.”
She smiled, mollified.
A week later, Korsal was sitting on the porch wrapped around his private level of the shaman tower, dipping his silver tipped pen into the blue ceramic ink well, when the drumming network alerted the area that Sok Oudom and the Huaran ambassadors would arrive in time for supper. He continued transcribing his careful translation of an ancient Hoai text, using the sweeping calligraphy of the best Vong lettering. Jade statuettes of animals held down his working manuscript despite the cool breeze off the mountains. He wrote on cut lecomtei leaves, smooth yet tough, by the morning sunlight so the words would receive the rising Sun’s blessing, and he would bind them when finished. A clear sky arched over the golden wheat fields, ready for harvest.
They had found this particular journal in a skeletal embrace. Careful examination of the bones showed that he, and the remains of others, had been slain by claws that sliced through armor as easily as skin. The wizard who wrote it, Robin de Lane, had loved her book more than her staff, but wrote in Hoai, so Korsal had to consult a dictionary of Hoai and Old Huaran, made tedious since it was a Huaran scroll and he had to keep rolling the paper back and forth. Then he had to consult a dictionary, thankfully a book, of Old Huaran and Auli, since he was fluent in Auli and there wasn’t one of Old Huaran and Vong of any age.
Some of the books they had found, now piled in his room, had been written in an even older and more unfamiliar language, written in a calligraphy emphasizing clarity over beauty, the straight over the circular, but the ancient wizard had left a journal dedicated to translating that language into Hoai. Some of the books had runes, inert since only written in ink instead of blood, with explanations which helped because the written words of the gods were constant across all histories. The rare descriptions of the oldest magic he found puzzled him, describing runes with what looked like a map’s coordinate system, if the map descriptions included the heights and valleys. Korsal didn’t see any purpose in such complexity, and when he tried drawing those runes on paper just made a mess of lines.
After finishing the page, he locked away his materials and walked to the palace with Sopheak. Uk Boran, the eldest shaman elected by other shaman to serve in the Sok castle, and Phala complained to each other in the courtyard.
“What’s going on?” asked Sopheak.
Boran grunted. “A Huaran official styled Hanging Fruit has been here since yesterday, going through our family backgrounds. I had to bring the Sok family history here, too.”
“Apparently none of their delegates ranked junior minister or above will even talk to us if we don’t bow correctly,” said Phala. “They have this complex formula of status based on ancestry and accomplishment determining the protocol for bowing to each other. Why didn’t you warn us?”
Korsal felt himself shrink. “I’m sorry. The novels usually just say bowed ‘appropriately’ or ‘politely’ or ‘rudely’.”
Sopheak smiled. “It’s being taken care of now, isn’t it?”
“Jorani is translating for the clerk,” said Phala.
Boran grunted again. “This ‘protocol’ sounds like a Huaran word for politeness as a performance rather than respect truly felt.”
Jorani joined them. “Hanging Fruit is taking a tea break, so I thought I’d let you know how it’s going.” The official had determined that Oudom and the shaman only had to bow to the waist to the ambassadors and Phala and Korsal would be allowed to bow to only one knee, and anyone would have to touch their foreheads to the ground. “Next we will determine how we should bow to their clerks. Not as far, obviously.”
“Why should we bow so low?” demanded Boran. “We’re an ancient people with a warrior tradition, just as they are.”
Phala’s father stepped protectively towards his daughter and faced Boran. “We haven’t fought a war in five hundred years, while they fight among themselves every generation.”
Most of their recent literature had been about the dynastic wars for the imperial throne, with three families fighting it out, one of which, the Xu, controlled the River Lands.
“Arguing about it won’t change their minds,” said Jorani. “Their gods have ranks, so humanity has ranks.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to remember how far to bow,” said Phala. “As long as they are fighting each other, the Xu won’t want to waste an army on us over some silly mistake.”
Phala led Boran and Sopheak towards the main hall, but Korsal and Jorani decided with a look to linger. “The Huaran rulers are like their gods in another way,” said Korsal. “They are fickle, living so high they don’t notice those they trend upon.”
“We once worshipped a star.”
“Stars the Huaran claim serve their gods, and when ours fell, we had to flee.”
“We’re better off with goddesses who tend to nature.”
Korsal crossed his arms. “But they aren’t much help in war.”
“Do you think it will come to that?”
“Their heroes and generals have started fights for remarkably petty reasons. Maybe they are being so picky about protocol hoping we will give them a provocation.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
“So do I.”
Lord Oudom, his staff, and personal guards arrived on horseback in time for lunch, wearing mostly red and yellow jackets and trousers with silver buttons and decorations. Oudom was no happier with Hanging Fruit’s protocol prescriptions than anyone else, but Phala talked him around. The sun was halfway down when horses pulled the Huaran ambassadorial carriages into town preceded and followed by ceremonial guards wearing the purple and silver uniforms of Xu nobility. Purple slogans written down white banners proclaimed their victories and encouraged their virtues. More wagons brought supplies but remained out in the fields among grazing oxen. As adults welcomed the ambassadors with drums and songs, children ran to watch slaves raising colorful tents. Korsal could only imagine the difficulties of getting so much luxury through the mountain passes. Word had come that the imperial carriages had needed repairs and some repainting at the first Vong town they found.
The delegation descended from their carriages, wearing garments embroidered with images of fowl, birds of prey for the men, song birds for the maid servants. As the delegations exchanged bows, a Huaran priest stood off to the side, bearing witness as the Eyes and Ears of the Gods as they did at all occasions deemed important by their people, the more competitive the more pleasing to their gods.
The Huaran were younger than he’d expected, roughly his own age, all introduced as junior ministers, which irked the Vong expected to bow lower than their pride. Fu Chaun, styled Abundant Rice, from the Department of Agriculture, the largest part of the Ministry of Interior; Zhang Yong, styled Friendly Hands, from the Ministry of Rituals and Relationships; and Li Wei, styled Distant Vision, from the Department of Procurement, part of the Ministry of Mysticism. Chaun and Wei were slender, bookish looking fellows, who nonetheless kept straight faces despite wearing clothing more suitable to the marshy River Lands than the windy High Lands, while Yong appeared to have built a lot of relationships over fine food and wine. The last introduction caused Korsal’s chest to tighten. Perhaps they wanted the relics from the mine after all. It’s just the silver for their runes. Just the silver.
After the bowing and scraping was thankfully over with, the Xu officials presented gifts, carried by their maidservants, of intricately carved jade dragons, manly heroes, and lovely courtesans with musical instruments. Jorani and other daughters from notable families presented marble statues laced with silver and bronze of the four holy animals, the dragon, the turtle, the phoenix, and one of the divine steeds that pulled the chariots of the gods. The steed had the body of a dragon, the head and legs of horses, and the horns of oxen. Korsal and Jorani had picked which statue would go to which minister and one for their imperial family.
Once inside the main hall and arranged around the dinner table, the Vong men ritually thanked the women for preparing the meal while the Xu officials stared straight ahead as if the ritual wasn’t happening. Then they all sat for the meal, passing around bowls so everyone could take as they liked from the noodles, meats, and vegetables, more of the last than usual to suit the tastes of the Huaran elite.
As they ate, it took awhile for Jorani to explain what the officials said about the meal, because Huaran had four words for sweet, three for sour, and three for bitter.
“Why do they needs so many words for such simple things?” asked Oudom.
“Everyone among the Huaran competes,” said Jorani, “so they have more critics who need more words for more precise descriptions.”
“It sounds like they’re inventing words so they can argue more.”
“They are this way about everything.”
“I’m impressed you learned their language at all.”
“Every time a new dynasty takes over, there is a campaign to simplify their written language so more people can become literate.”
Korsal couldn’t imagine what torture Huaran children went through to learn how to read and write.
Once the meal was over and the dishes cleared away, the junior minister from Rituals and Relationships said something to Jorani that made her blush before translating it. “They claim we have to obey their ultimate decisions because we are their subjects.”
“Since when?” asked Phala.
“Since they conquered the Auli.”
“So?”
“They base their claim on a treaty the Sok family signed centuries ago with the then High Priestess of the Auli.”
“So?” asked Oudom.
“By Huaran law, that treaty makes one of us the vassal to the other. The tricky part is that since our gifts to them involved silver artwork, in Huaran eyes, we were giving the Auli the greater gift so, by one law, they were subject to us, but since we’re outnumbered and surrounded by the Auli, another law means we are subject to them. The Huaran officials have translated that treaty into Huaran in such a way that the ambiguous words and relationships support the idea that we are subservient to the Auli and therefore subject to the Xu family.”
“Tell him I don’t recognize the validity of a translated version of a treaty.”
Jorani translated, and the official gave her a short answer with a patient tone.
“What did he say?”
“So?”
After the officials left for their tents, Oudom pounded the table. “We don’t have to put up with these condescending bullies!”
“I’m sure we can talk them into a compromise,” said Phala.
“It’s time we were warriors again,” said Boran.
“There are few passes to our plateau, all with steep roads,” said Oudom. “We can hold back an army.”
“Be careful wishing for rain,” said Sopheak. “You might get a storm.”
Phala nodded. “Look at how easily they conquered the River Lands, and there are far more Auli than us.”
“The Auli were ruled by priestesses of peace,” said Boran. “We’ve kept our traditions.”
Phala tried to appear polite in his skepticism. “I don’t think our annual contests of strength and skill compare to their practical battlefield experience.”
“Then what is the point in having them at all?” insisted Oudom.
As the leaders of his people argued, Korsal retreated to the courtyard, standing in the cold wind, wishing his home had better defenses. Jorani joined him, standing close enough to his side to inspire gossip.
“You were quiet in there.”
Korsal nodded. “I’ve read enough Huaran literature to know if we’re not very careful, we could have an army on our doorstep, and their gods don’t forgive failure.”
“So you should be in there talking.”
“Sopheak is better at persuading people. If war is coming, I will better serve our people by finding a way to even the odds.”
Jorani held his forearm. “You’re thinking about going into the mines.”
“If we had the ancient weapons, the Huaran would never attack us again.”
“But the Hands of the Gods will come and take them away, then close the mines.”
“Better than the Huaran enslaving our people after a war.”
“The Hands would take you away, too, for bringing those weapons into the light.”
“Then we’d better hope Sopheak and your father can talk sense into everyone, but this is something I can do for our people.” He squeezed her forearm a moment. And for you.
Back at the shaman’s tower, he filled two packs, one with climbing gear and the other with any notes he might need to choose the right magic, and strapped on his sword. Leaving town, two of the biggest local men blocked his way. They both worked in the mines when farm work slacked off. Rith was the town boxing champion, and Vibol the wrestling champion. Korsal loosened his shoulders, preparing to draw his sword on two men he’d known his entire life.
“Jorani asked us to keep an eye on you,” said Rith. “Make sure you didn’t break a leg or something.”
Vibol nodded. Korsal breathed a sigh of relief, but he didn’t know if he should respect or suspect Vibol for coming, since the stronger, younger man had courted Jorani, too. As they took the road to the mine, smooth except for where generations of wheels had dug out their paths, he heard Jorani playing a song of courage and compassion between lovers on her moon lute, carried to him on the wind as if a goddess wished him to hear. He almost turned back, but he knew loving her wouldn’t solve the problems gathering on their horizon.
The mine shift angled down to an underground crevice. Since there weren’t any oxen on site to power the lift, the three men tied themselves together as well as to lanterns, one that would dangle between Vibol and Korsal, another lower between Korsal and Rith, and one below Rith. They kept the descent as slow and safe as possible, and upon reaching the bottom walked to the jagged hole once part of the thickest wall he’d ever seen. Their tools never would have broken into the complex if not for the damage already done by the Cataclysm.
All three men carried lanterns, but on the other side, their lights never filled the room. Korsal marveled all over again at the scope of this broken temple, each pillar, no matter how cracked, was as wide as the shaman tower. Every temple he’d seen on the surface had murals on the ceilings, but here their meager lantern light didn’t reach high enough to illuminate any. Dusty piles of supplies lay scattered among the widely spaced pillars, slowly deteriorated over the centuries since the divine cataclysm buried them here.
“This is worse than the night,” said Rith. Both the larger men had been looking around with more suspicion.
“What do you mean?”
“The moon and stars relieve the nothingness, like divine beings winking at us, but down here it’s just rock and death.”
They walked between the widely spaced pillars and piles to the bones of Robin de Lane and her comrades, lain undisturbed since they took the books. They, too, had been explorers, but had gone down fighting against something strong enough to cleave them apart. After reading her journal, he realized the slightest bones didn’t belong to a strangely well-armed child, but an Immortal, who came in many sizes but all had been created before the gods realized the wondrous effect mortality had on motivation.
The sturdiest bones belonged to one of the Folk, a short people his ancestors had met crossing the White Mountains. They had transformed the inside of a mountain into a work of art and sheltered his people during a long blizzard. It had led to a festival of exchanging music and stories, and Korsal’s favorite book to read as a child was a collection of Folk adventures in the vast underworld. It startled him that all the Vong, Auli, and Huaran might be like ants living on the outside of a house while so much was going on inside, unless the Folk scribes exaggerated, as storytellers were known to do. Surely there wasn’t enough to eat in the darkness to support such vast armies of orcs and goblins for the heroes to defeat.
“Don’t touch anything yet. I need to read the runes to know what they do.”
“We’re just ordinary men,” said Vibol with an edge of resentment. “We can’t do magic.”
Korsal picked up a sword by its sheathe, its heavy material between him and any runes that might have been etched along the blade, and showed them the hilt. “See this rune where you would grab it. The Hoai called this a heart rune. It channels the passions of whoever wields it, so for them, magic is empowered by strength of feeling.” And any idiot can use it.
“Neat,” said Vibol, who started to reach for it even as Rith worried.
“Maybe,” said Korsal, “but the magic locks your passion. Let’s say you used this sword to kill some wolves after your family’s goats. If you lost control, you’d kill your dog, too.”
Vibol snatched his hand back.
Korsal and Rith entered the smaller inner sanctum, where hundreds of skeletons rested on pews where they, after all their magical efforts to save themselves from angry gods, had simply run out of air. The pillars holding up this ceiling had been carved in the forms of giants, each wore different clothes, had different hairstyles, and held different items whose significance was known only to these dead. The shadows from the lantern light emphasized a cruel shape of the statues’ closed lips. Their colors had faded, but some paint still clung to the shapes, protected down here from wind or rain. When fresh and vivid, they would have appeared gaudy to his people.
The shrine ahead glittered in the lantern light, appearing as a sun rising on the horizon, but the stone behind it had been carved to give the impression of vast feathery wings holding aloft a vaguely human-shaped figure branishing a sword and a staff. Korsal believed whoever built this temple saw the gods as figures behind the veil of reality, but he needed to find more books to prove it, even if only to himself and the chosen few who knew of the temple. He wished he could write a book about all he learned and share it with the world, but that would mean the end of the mine.
At the lectern, someone had slumped to the floor while dying, wearing white silk garments grey with dust and a fragile necklace with a pedant similar to the winged god, hair hanging loose past the shoulders. He or she held a clear gemstone, which caught the light.
“Good Goddess.”
Rith tore himself away from looking at one of the pillars and joined him. “What is it?”
“They etched a rune inside this gem.” Yet he didn’t see any seam, so how was a rune carved inside a gem without damaging the surface?
“Well, that’s tricky.”
Korsal kept turning it around in the light, looking for clues. “It’s more than tricky. Our runes are on flat surfaces, but can you imagine the complexity of language possible if we could write not just up and down and side to side, but back and forth? This would allow the same magical complexity.” Just like I read in the wizard’s journal.
Rith worked that out by moving his fingers. “Whoa, that would be weird. Reading and writing is hard enough as it is. What does this gem do?”
Korsal’s curiosity intensified and the image of Vibol being sliced apart by slender claws swiping out from a demonic fog filled his mind. He pocketed the gem as he ran out of the chamber. “Vibol! Get down!”
Vibol threw himself to the ground just as a cloudy mass behind him reached out, solidifying part of itself as claws, and he avoided the blow. Floating, the demon appeared like huddled water droplets in the reflected lantern light. Korsal drew his sword. Years of practice allowed him to charge the demon while keeping his soul calm enough to channel spiritual energy into the runes on his sword. The blade’s glow brightened until it gave off little sparks. He slashed again and again at the cloud even as it withdrew from the light and tried expanding around him, attacking him from different angles. He danced around the strikes, his spiritual senses attuned to the needle prickling of demonic aggression.
Rith and Vibol charged with weapons from Robin de Lane’s party, powered by their passion, one fiery and the other sparkling off little bolts of lightning each time it connected with the demon. They divided its attention enough for Korsal to find the deepest, thickest mass and thrust in his blade, his determined visage reflected back at him, distorted by some hateful warp of the demon’s inner being. His spirit suffused throughout the demon, the anger binding it together fading as his energy calmed it. With a sob, it dissipated.
“Korsal!”
Turning around, he saw Rith holding Vibol, his back sliced open.
Korsal took a small box out of his pack and opened it. Four small vials of healing potions lay inside, protected by padding. He took one out, a mix of water, herbs, and the meditative infusion of spiritual power, and applied it to Vibol’s back. The deep but slender wound healed over, but Vibol didn’t wake. Korsal felt his forehead, finding the cold fever caused by demonic infection, so felt his wrist. Finding a pulse, he knew it wasn’t too late.
“Hold him still, warm him with your body.” Korsal placed his hands on Vibol’s body to pray to Shentu, Goddess of the Mountain, whose power lay quiet all around them.
“You’ve done this before?”
“Not exactly.” But spiritual connection was part of helping ghosts on their way.
Korsal channeled his own spiritual energies through his hands, mingling them with Vibol’s slowly giving him the strength to fight back the demonic affliction. While Vibol struggled against the infection, Korsal kept pulling flashes of reasons to live out of his patient’s memory, giving them strength. Peaceful summers with his dog, guiding goats and oxen to better places to graze. Drumming while his mother taught his sisters how to dance at the love festival. The cool, pristine face of Rith’s sister, Akara, who never joined the others on the dancing platform, never matching her feet to the drums of any boy. Akara was prettier in Vibol’s mind than his own, and Korsal realized the other man focused on her better aspects. Vibol’s body warmed, and Korsal removed his hand just before the younger man gasped and sat up. Exhausted, Korsal slumped back, asleep.
Opening his eyes, Korsal sat up and looked at Vibol, relieved to see him warming himself by a fire made from broken bits of furniture. According to books, if Vibol had given in to the infection, he would have been possessed, if he resisted harder, his mind would have broken and he’d be like a rabid dog. If he had enough strength, he would have died, dragging the demon into the cycle of reincarnation with him.
“Where’s Rith?”
“Just looking around. He took the sword he used against the demon, just in case.”
He sat up and held his hands to the fire. “I’m sorry about peering into your memories.”
“That’s how it goes in the stories. Thanks for healing me.” He looked at the fire. “You won’t tell Rith how I feel about his sister?”
He smiled a little. “I won’t, but I don’t understand why you courted Jorani.”
“Akara can never look me in the eye. Never talks to me. Jorani is pretty enough and she’s nice to me. Nice to everyone, really.”
Korsal agreed. Sometimes he wondered if he just imagined her attraction to him, but when she smiled at him, when they talked about books or she invited him to her father’s place for chess, it was the closest he came to living in the present. “Rith’s sister never looks anyone in the eye. Her parents are old fashioned, so they love their son and treat her like a scullery maid.” At least, that’s what Sopheak had told him.
Softened, Vibol looked back at the fire, lost in his own thoughts.
Finding the gem in his pocket, Korsal lifted it to see the runes by the firelight, and another image appeared, as if hovering between his eyes and the gem. He watched himself take the sword Vibol had used to the surface to drive off the Huaran officials, and then he had to hold off an army at one of the few passes through the mountains. They would block all the passes, no more trade, no more learning from the outside. Eventually, a Hand of the Gods would come for him.
Korsal rose from the fire and walked back to the sanctum, Vibol scrambling to follow. Inside, he used the gem to see if any magic to be found in the temple would help defend his people. He found a staff that would turn enemy soldiers against their masters, but withdrew from those heinous mind control spells, worse than necromancy. He found a mace with pits between the spikes to suck up blood and fuel magical runes, and the gem showed him gaining in power with each person he slew until all he knew was violence. In some futures, he defeated the Xu family but the Yen armies crossed the River Lands or the Hands of the Gods ganged up on him. No matter what magic he took, he would fight battle after battle until he died, even if he kept winning and died in his sleep. Tossing aside the gem in frustration, he sat on the stairs by the corpse who had held it, and pondered the uselessness of his endeavor.
Rith and Vibol joined him, and Korsal told them about the dangerous magic all around them.
“You keep looking at other things through the gem,” said Rith, handing the gem back. “Why not just look in the gem?”
After a moment, Korsal took the gem back, closed his eyes, and opened his mind. Tingling warmth told him the rune was shaping his spiritual energies, so he accepted what he saw in his mind as prophecy, the most likely outcomes of returning home in peace.
In the best of them, his people bought off the Huaran with silver, and Jorani waited for him. Perhaps her father hired him as a scribe to deal with more letters to and from the outside world, perhaps he transcribed a book of Vong folklore, and in one it sold well and in one it didn’t, but in all of them, Jorani would be there for him, even if in one only as a friend after she married Rith. He didn’t need to be a hero worthy of epic poetry for her to love him. The three distant Huaran pretenders to their throne would fight each other on and on, past his death.
Opening his eyes, he pocketed the gem. “Let’s go home.”
They arrived in town during the closing ceremony of the negotiations. Musicians, dancers, and acrobats took turns performing in the town center. Both delegations toasted each other while Jorani handed translations and her mother the servants. Vibol took Rith aside for a private conversation, but Korsal went back to the tower to wash and change. Only then did he walk to the celebration. He accepted a mug, sat off to the side where Jorani could see him, and nursed his beer until servants helped their drunken masters to their homes or tents.
She walked over and slumped down on a nearby small chair, smiling at him. “That was exhausting.”
“I guess it went well.”
“They acceded that we can mine silver for our own ‘cultural purposes’ as long as we only export to their Ministry of Mysticism, but since they kept using their civil war as an excuse to acquire our silver, I convinced Father to give them a tour of our herds and fields. Their constant need for military supplies means they need lots of horses, oxen, and wheat, which our people have in abundance. They are also open to our forming a mercenary unit to fight in their army, which will give some of our adventurous young men a chance to make money following our older traditions. Our town might not be as rich as before, but our people as a whole stand to gain.”
“How did they get to talking to each other in a civil manner?”
She blushed. “I may have softened the edges of my translations, and when I could, I quoted from an epic poem celebrating a Xu victory early in the civil wars. A Xu prince and his bodyguards were under siege by a Yen army, and bravely held out until an army from the Shan attacked the Yen from behind. It wasn’t lost on these Xu officials that in this situation, we would be the brave warriors holding out against the Xu, until the Yen or Shan attacked them. How was your trip to the mine?”
“I’ll tell you later.” He held her hand. “Jorani, I know I should wait until the next love festival, but that’s not until spring, and I’ve left you waiting for so long, and I thought about bringing you a gift, but I’m about to offer you everything I have, such as it is- “
“Yes, Korsal,” she said with patient cheer, squeezing his hand. “I’ll marry you.”
Round Table Concerning Favorite TV Shows
P. E. Schilling: So, what SF/F TV shows do you think people should watch?
Eddy Forest: ORPHAN BLACK was amazing. The same actress playing so many cloned versions of herself was a tour de force. The characters were consistent in their weirdness. I really cared about what was happening to the main characters and a lot of the secondary ones, too.
PES: Very good “R” rated television. I’m glad the lead actress got to play “She Hulk.” She deserves some Marvel money.
EF: And I liked how everyone had solid motivations. Everyone was the hero or heroine of their own story, even when they did things so scary you wouldn’t want them in your life.
P. S. Everest: CONTINUUM was pleasantly confusing, because the heroine has two goals in constant conflict, to get back to her family in the future but to do the right thing in the present. A lot of the time, doing the right thing risked changing the future so much her son might never be born, because her future was created by evil men. It’s even more complicated than that, because her opponents also have divisions and conflicts.
EF: I’m not sure their version of time travel’s ramifications worked logically.
PSE: Time travel stories almost never make sense in terms of temporal logic. Except when I write them. (Group laughter) But these writers do at least have a great sense of irony, and despite their dark vision of the future, ultimately they are optimists. We just have to make the right decisions instead of letting corporations run over us on their way to the future. The two leads have great chemistry, too.
Penny Nichols: Call me old fashioned, but I still think BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is classic television fantasy. It set the stage for a slew of new TV shows. The Mayor and Glory are two of my favorite TV villains. I just wish they’d let Buffy have a love interest worth her while instead of guys who get all whiny when she doesn’t pay them enough attention.
PSE: That’s the trick to writing strong women characters. Most straight women are attracted to men who are stronger, but there are no men stronger than Buffy. If there were, it would create a center of gravity pulling the stories away from her.
PES: I skipped watching the show because I was told her main love interest was a vampire, telling people if I wanted to watch women ‘dating’ blood sucking parasites I’d go to a frat party, but then I wanted to go out with a woman who was a ‘love me, love my Buffy’ gal whose favorite season was S5, but to understand S5 I had to watch S4, so that’s where she started me. By the time we stopped seeing each other, I was hooked, so finished seasons four and five, then went back and watched the first three, and then the last two.
EF: My favorite fight scenes were Buffy v Faith, Vampire Willow against other vampires in a dark alley, and that extended fight scene in the first episode of season three.
PN: Season three, episode one is one of my favorite episodes, and so is the Vampire Willow episode. Of course, I have a lot of favorite episodes, like the one where everyone loses their voices, the musical episode, when Buffy is anointed the “class protector” and realizes people did appreciate her supposedly secret efforts to save their lives.
PES: I got all teary watching that scene, like when CJ on WEST WING was appointed the new Chief of Staff and the press corps break out in applause. Too bad season six never made sense to me. The big bad of that season was smart enough to build his own robotic girlfriend. He should have been a mega-rich tech bro contracting with Initiative, not living in his mother’s basement playing D&D with a couple of wannabe sorcerers.
PN: I forgave the writers for a lot of season six because it had the musical episode and Dark Willow was bad ass.
PSE: When I was teaching in China, I showed my high school students the first ten minutes of the pilot so we could discuss introducing characters. I was shocked at how easy it was for them to predict the general arcs for so many of the characters. At first, they told me they weren’t interested in watching, because they’d seen a lot of other vampire shows, but I told them BUFFY was the show that created the market for the shows they’d seen. Once they saw the pilot, they kept asking for more, because they saw something of themselves in Buffy, a girl their age who has family issues, has trouble keeping up with her homework, and likes going shopping.
PN: Did you show them more?
PSE: Sure, for Halloween, and whenever my boss screwed up my scheduled lessons plans and forgot to tell me.
Paul Severus: I really enjoyed THE ALCHEMY OF SOULS, a Korean fantasy. It didn’t care at all about our genre boundaries of dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, romance, and comedy. It stirred them all together for its own special alchemy. The main character is certainly an anti-heroine, perhaps the truest to the term I’ve ever seen, but she and her love interest both grow a lot.
PN: I love how the lead actress can switch her attitudes from badass assassin to sweetness bordering on sarcasm. I’ve really enjoyed a lot of Korean shows. The romances are generally “sweet,” yet their approach to zombie fiction is more interesting than ours. In American zombie shows, it is just assumed zombies take over the world, and the survivors are these rugged individualists, somehow surviving with bats and cross bows when those zombies defeated the American army with their machine guns and tanks. Korean zombie shows are about the cracks in society that let zombies get out of hand in the first place, how our moral failures give monsters the opening they need to spread.
PSE: The two main characters have a natural, logical development. They start off mean and selfish, we learn why they are mean and selfish, their practical need for each other forces them to get to know each other, and that knowledge becomes the basis of their feelings for each other despite several frankly more appealing options around them.
A.H. Gost: I’m really torn between choosing DEEP SPACE NINE and STRANGE NEW WORLDS. They are both excellent examples of STAR TREK, but with different strengths. SNW has the best batting average of any STAR TREK series, with only one episode I didn’t like, I mean, come on, if any pirates are smart enough to steal the Enterprise how could they be dumb enough to lose it like that, while DEEP SPACE NINE, by virtue of its stationary location, could develop more characters and more plot lines than any other TREK incarnation.
PES: I think both those shows reveal that STAR TREK really is at home on television. Several two-part episodes scattered across the franchise are better than most of the TREK movies. It is a little odd that most of my favorite DS9 episodes include Garak.
AHG: I don’t think that’s weird at all. He’s the perfect character for morally ambiguous decisions. Has anyone else noticed that he’s a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, and a spy?
(Group laughter)
PSE: The SNW episode I’ve rewatched the most is “Those Old Scientists.” It is so funny I just keep laughing at the same jokes again and again. But then, I like any show that distracts me from my anxiety issues.
Benny Donalds: FRINGE learned from all the mistakes made by THE X-FILES. It was internally more coherent, and you only realized by rewatching it how well planned out it was, and how far in advance the writers were thinking. Having a trio of main characters compared to the prior duo made for better arguments, and the supporting cast was stellar.
AHG: I had such a crush on Astrid. I definitely need someone like her in my life.
PN: But does she need someone like you in hers? AHG: I can dream.
PSE: I fell in love with that show when Dunham rescued herself from the bad guys. I was a little annoyed when it threatened to turn into the Peter Bishop story, but it got back on track. Not only was it great mad science, but it had an interesting, plausible, and increasingly sympathetic alternative universe. So many of these “bad guys” turned out to have a lot more going for them, character-wise.
P. E. Schilling: So, what SF/F TV shows do you think people should watch?
Eddy Forest: ORPHAN BLACK was amazing. The same actress playing so many cloned versions of herself was a tour de force. The characters were consistent in their weirdness. I really cared about what was happening to the main characters and a lot of the secondary ones, too.
PES: Very good “R” rated television. I’m glad the lead actress got to play “She Hulk.” She deserves some Marvel money.
EF: And I liked how everyone had solid motivations. Everyone was the hero or heroine of their own story, even when they did things so scary you wouldn’t want them in your life.
P. S. Everest: CONTINUUM was pleasantly confusing, because the heroine has two goals in constant conflict, to get back to her family in the future but to do the right thing in the present. A lot of the time, doing the right thing risked changing the future so much her son might never be born, because her future was created by evil men. It’s even more complicated than that, because her opponents also have divisions and conflicts.
EF: I’m not sure their version of time travel’s ramifications worked logically.
PSE: Time travel stories almost never make sense in terms of temporal logic. Except when I write them. (Group laughter) But these writers do at least have a great sense of irony, and despite their dark vision of the future, ultimately they are optimists. We just have to make the right decisions instead of letting corporations run over us on their way to the future. The two leads have great chemistry, too.
Penny Nichols: Call me old fashioned, but I still think BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is classic television fantasy. It set the stage for a slew of new TV shows. The Mayor and Glory are two of my favorite TV villains. I just wish they’d let Buffy have a love interest worth her while instead of guys who get all whiny when she doesn’t pay them enough attention.
PSE: That’s the trick to writing strong women characters. Most straight women are attracted to men who are stronger, but there are no men stronger than Buffy. If there were, it would create a center of gravity pulling the stories away from her.
PES: I skipped watching the show because I was told her main love interest was a vampire, telling people if I wanted to watch women ‘dating’ blood sucking parasites I’d go to a frat party, but then I wanted to go out with a woman who was a ‘love me, love my Buffy’ gal whose favorite season was S5, but to understand S5 I had to watch S4, so that’s where she started me. By the time we stopped seeing each other, I was hooked, so finished seasons four and five, then went back and watched the first three, and then the last two.
EF: My favorite fight scenes were Buffy v Faith, Vampire Willow against other vampires in a dark alley, and that extended fight scene in the first episode of season three.
PN: Season three, episode one is one of my favorite episodes, and so is the Vampire Willow episode. Of course, I have a lot of favorite episodes, like the one where everyone loses their voices, the musical episode, when Buffy is anointed the “class protector” and realizes people did appreciate her supposedly secret efforts to save their lives.
PES: I got all teary watching that scene, like when CJ on WEST WING was appointed the new Chief of Staff and the press corps break out in applause. Too bad season six never made sense to me. The big bad of that season was smart enough to build his own robotic girlfriend. He should have been a mega-rich tech bro contracting with Initiative, not living in his mother’s basement playing D&D with a couple of wannabe sorcerers.
PN: I forgave the writers for a lot of season six because it had the musical episode and Dark Willow was bad ass.
PSE: When I was teaching in China, I showed my high school students the first ten minutes of the pilot so we could discuss introducing characters. I was shocked at how easy it was for them to predict the general arcs for so many of the characters. At first, they told me they weren’t interested in watching, because they’d seen a lot of other vampire shows, but I told them BUFFY was the show that created the market for the shows they’d seen. Once they saw the pilot, they kept asking for more, because they saw something of themselves in Buffy, a girl their age who has family issues, has trouble keeping up with her homework, and likes going shopping.
PN: Did you show them more?
PSE: Sure, for Halloween, and whenever my boss screwed up my scheduled lessons plans and forgot to tell me.
Paul Severus: I really enjoyed THE ALCHEMY OF SOULS, a Korean fantasy. It didn’t care at all about our genre boundaries of dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, romance, and comedy. It stirred them all together for its own special alchemy. The main character is certainly an anti-heroine, perhaps the truest to the term I’ve ever seen, but she and her love interest both grow a lot.
PN: I love how the lead actress can switch her attitudes from badass assassin to sweetness bordering on sarcasm. I’ve really enjoyed a lot of Korean shows. The romances are generally “sweet,” yet their approach to zombie fiction is more interesting than ours. In American zombie shows, it is just assumed zombies take over the world, and the survivors are these rugged individualists, somehow surviving with bats and cross bows when those zombies defeated the American army with their machine guns and tanks. Korean zombie shows are about the cracks in society that let zombies get out of hand in the first place, how our moral failures give monsters the opening they need to spread.
PSE: The two main characters have a natural, logical development. They start off mean and selfish, we learn why they are mean and selfish, their practical need for each other forces them to get to know each other, and that knowledge becomes the basis of their feelings for each other despite several frankly more appealing options around them.
A.H. Gost: I’m really torn between choosing DEEP SPACE NINE and STRANGE NEW WORLDS. They are both excellent examples of STAR TREK, but with different strengths. SNW has the best batting average of any STAR TREK series, with only one episode I didn’t like, I mean, come on, if any pirates are smart enough to steal the Enterprise how could they be dumb enough to lose it like that, while DEEP SPACE NINE, by virtue of its stationary location, could develop more characters and more plot lines than any other TREK incarnation.
PES: I think both those shows reveal that STAR TREK really is at home on television. Several two-part episodes scattered across the franchise are better than most of the TREK movies. It is a little odd that most of my favorite DS9 episodes include Garak.
AHG: I don’t think that’s weird at all. He’s the perfect character for morally ambiguous decisions. Has anyone else noticed that he’s a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, and a spy?
(Group laughter)
PSE: The SNW episode I’ve rewatched the most is “Those Old Scientists.” It is so funny I just keep laughing at the same jokes again and again. But then, I like any show that distracts me from my anxiety issues.
Benny Donalds: FRINGE learned from all the mistakes made by THE X-FILES. It was internally more coherent, and you only realized by rewatching it how well planned out it was, and how far in advance the writers were thinking. Having a trio of main characters compared to the prior duo made for better arguments, and the supporting cast was stellar.
AHG: I had such a crush on Astrid. I definitely need someone like her in my life.
PN: But does she need someone like you in hers? AHG: I can dream.
PSE: I fell in love with that show when Dunham rescued herself from the bad guys. I was a little annoyed when it threatened to turn into the Peter Bishop story, but it got back on track. Not only was it great mad science, but it had an interesting, plausible, and increasingly sympathetic alternative universe. So many of these “bad guys” turned out to have a lot more going for them, character-wise.
Old Ideas, New Visions 