***

Tell me a little bit about the new Mistborn book, Alloy of Law [coming out in November 2011]. It seems like the story arc of the original Mistborn trilogy (The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages) was well resolved by the end of the third book. So in what direction does this new one go, if you can say without spoilers?

Well, one of the things that bothers me about a lot of fantasy is that the worlds are strangely static, like we invent all sorts of contrived circumstances to keep them from progressing naturally, because we want stories of a certain type. What we do in fantasy, this kind of idealized time period, in literary terms we call it uchronia. Which in some ways is fun, but it’s not very realistic.

I envisioned a series in which there was real progress. There are books that have done it; the Wheel of Time did it, for example, with the introduction of steam power [into a medieval/Renaissance setting], but I wanted to do a story where I wrote a trilogy which explored a fantasy world, and then do other books years later where that fantasy world has now progressed, and its technology has progressed, so that it’s now almost more of an urban fantasy world. You know, write urban fantasies in a setting where the mythology and history are things you saw take place in the first part of the series.

So you see not just the life of the characters, but the life of their entire world?

This really interested me, because I’d just never seen it done quite the way I wanted to do it. And that’s often where my books come from—I find a place where the genre maybe hasn’t been explored fully, and I get really excited. And so I pitched my editor a series where the first trilogy is an epic fantasy series, and then years later an urban fantasy series, and then years after that a science fiction series, all set in the same world. And the magic exists all through, and it is treated differently in each of these time periods. And that’s what Alloy of Law is: looking at the Mistborn world, hundreds of years later, where society has been rebuilt following the events of the third book.

The analogous time period in our world [for Alloy of Law’s setting] would be about 1910, but that’s not really very accurate, because in the Mistborn world there are certain things they’re much better at—metallurgy, for one, obviously—but they’re very poor with communication, because everyone’s very concentrated in one area, so long-distance communication is just not one of the things that’s very important to them. So it’s not a one-to-one correlation. But electricity is starting to be installed in homes, and steam power is used quite extensively.

It sounds to me like it almost might be described as steampunk.

It has one toe dabbling in steampunk, but I don’t call it that because while there is magic and technology, it’s not quite the same. The steampunk genre has a certain Victorian feel to it; there’s an air that makes something steampunk, and this isn’t quite that.

So anyway, it’s the story of a man who lives in the frontier lands, and comes back to the big city because he’s inherited lands and a title. And he has certain things in his past that make him feel it’s time to leave his old life and come to a new one. And the goal here was not epic scope; with The Way of Kings on one side I didn’t want that. This is more a mystery/adventure, and I think it’s really fun.

So the plan is for this to be another trilogy?

I do have another epic trilogy planned for this world in a more modern era, but this is not that. This is actually a sort of side story I decided to start telling. I don’t want to be doing multiple big epics at once, and between The Stormlight Archive and The Wheel of Time, I’ve already got two I’m working on, and that’s enough. With this one I decided to do something a little more action/adventure and a little more self-contained. So Alloy of Law is not the start of a trilogy, though I may do a little more with the characters, but in general the story I wanted to tell is told. So it’s a standalone much the same way Elantris is.

And what is The Rithmatist? Can you tell me a little about it?

The Rithmatist is a YA novel I wrote in 2007, right before the Wheel of Time deal hit me like a freight train. And because I was so busy with that, I didn’t have time to get back to The Rithmatist and play with it, and I’m only now getting to the point where I’ll be able to do some revisions and things, because I’ve been breakneck these last few years and we’re only now slowing down a little. Tor’s going to publish it, but the release is probably a few years off because of the workload involved with the Wheel of Time.

But it’s a really fun book. I wrote it when I was supposed to be working on other things back in 2007, and it’s actually gearpunk—which is not steampunk, but more Da Vinci-era technology, extrapolated hundreds of years into the future. It’s very whimsical; it’s about a boy who goes to magic school, which you’ve seen before, except that he doesn’t have any magical powers, and it’s not something you can learn in this world. He only gets in because his mother is a cleaning lady who works at the school, so he gets free tuition.

So he goes to get a world-class education, but he doesn’t go to the magic classes, just all the other classes. It’s like a private school that also happens to train wizards. I don’t want to get too much into it, but the magic is chalkboard-based; you draw these very elaborate designs that do certain things, and you kind of duel with it. It’s kind of like playing magical chalkboard Starcraft, in a gearpunk world, told through the eyes of the unmagical son of the cleaning lady. It’s very fun.

Tell me about your series The Stormlight Archive, of which the first book, The Way of Kings, was published last August. What’s the motivation behind writing this story?

The Stormlight Archive—you don’t grow up reading the books I read, such as the Wheel of Time, without wanting to tell a big epic, and this is kind of what I always wanted to do, to have my own big epic. It’s what I love to read and so it’s what I want to write. So I’ve always planned for The Stormlight Archive to be very big, and hopefully meaty and weighty. I started writing about the characters as long as two decades ago, and I finished the first draft of The Way of Kings in 2002, so almost ten years ago now. So it’s a series I’ve been working on for a long time.

I think you’ll find that most authors have series like this; for Robert Jordan it was The Wheel of Time. And people have asked me if I want this to be my Wheel of Time, but that’s a very difficult comparison for someone to make. What I want is for this to be a great story, hopefully told really well; it’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell for years and years. And time will tell how that turns out.

What are your plans for the series as a whole?

It will be multi-volume; I pitched it to Tom Doherty [of Tor Books] as ten books, and I envision it as being a project I work on for a very long time, and try to do these audacious things I’ve wanted to do forever.

It’s very art-intensive, and very different from the other books I’ve done; it incorporates some of the other things I’ve liked to do from other books, but at the same time it’s its own thing. So I view as something awesome that I want to be working on for a long time.

When is the next book in the series coming out?

I’m planning the second book to be done following my finishing the Wheel of Time, so it will come, but it will probably be a little while.

So let’s talk about the other major epic you’re involved in, which of course is the Wheel of Time. How do you feel in general about the way the series is going? Are you pleased with the reception of The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight (the twelfth and thirteenth books in the series, respectively)? Are you confident that it’s going the way you want it to go?

Of course I’m very pleased at the reception of The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight, because when I first started working on this, I had visions of Wheel of Time fans burning down my house.

(Laughs.) Well, Wheel of Time fans are very hardcore! I actually received a number of very politely phrased threats, with a little smiley at the end. You know, you’re just not sure how to take the “I’m very glad someone’s finishing this. By the way, if you screw it up I’ll burn your house down. Smile smile, wink wink, we’re all behind you!” So the fans can be really daunting, and working on this was really daunting for me, since I’ve been reading these books since I was a kid. But I’m very pleased to not have had my house burned down.

I’m still very aware of the mistakes I make, and I’m also very aware that this is not my series; this is not me, it doesn’t belong to me. And every time I make one of these mistakes, it reinforces the idea that these are Robert Jordan’s books, and I’m a last-minute pinch hitter. I’m not someone who sauntered in to take it over and make it his own.

So am I pleased? Yes I am, but at the same time there’s still that sense that I’m doing something that I wish didn’t need to be done, which leaves it as a very weird situation still. I’m very happy that, in general, people have liked the books, and I am sad to have failed those who felt that they don’t work, because there are those who my efforts are not going to be enough for. But overall, the reception has been very positive.

But I wouldn’t say I’m confident; I don’t think this is the sort of thing I can be confident about. Though I suppose I can be; I’m confident that I was the right choice, that if someone was going to have to do this, that I was the right one to pick. And I’m confident in the storytelling choices I made, yet at the same time I know that I don’t 100% belong here.

So it’s a very hard question for me to answer for those reasons, but I hope that what I’m doing and what I’m striving to do with this last book will get the story to the closest way that Robert Jordan would have done if he were here. And I just hope we can all get the ending we want to read.

In one of the essays on your website, you discuss what you called Sanderson’s First Law of Magics, which is “an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” And from there you used that to define “soft” magic systems as opposed to “hard” systems, and the ways in which each kind uses its magic to resolve story conflict.

Right, though one thing I should mention is that I’ve since added the word “satisfactorily” to the law: The ability of the author to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is directly proportional, etc. I think that’s an important distinction to make.

So given that, can you discuss the magic system of the Wheel of Time in terms of your law? Robert Jordan’s “channeling” seems like a pretty hard magic system to me.

Robert Jordan’s magic system is both hard and soft. It’s similar to, for instance, the Harry Potter magic system, which I personally think is quite well done. Of course, I do think Jordan’s system is overall more consistent and a much better magic system. This is partially because of the strength of its limitations; for instance, that male channelers go mad, and the chance of burning yourself out with channeling, make it for a much more interesting magic system narratively. The “going mad” thing is basically the best limitation that I’ve ever heard of in a book series.

People like Tolkien, for instance, didn’t explain a lot of the magic, and so what the magic could and couldn’t do leaves you with a lot of that sense of wonder, so there’s something to be gained on that side from not explaining. Jordan, I would say, is about on the seventy-five percent mark toward a more hard, rigid magic system, and it actually tends to work really well, but you’ll notice that he liked to introduce new elements to the magic quite haphazardly—you know, suddenly someone is able to do this. It happens actually pretty frequently in the series as new things are being rediscovered.

Balefire, for example, is manifested quite spontaneously by the characters to solve little problems, and then it becomes a tool to solve bigger problems later on. Just like in a lot of storytelling, in the first third of the story, you will often have a dynamic rescue by a character the reader or audience didn’t know existed, and this is not a terribly satisfying resolution, but that’s okay because in the first third of a story, you’re not looking for satisfying resolutions, you’re looking for satisfying introductions. That’s kind of what the nature of storytelling is. So when the new character rides on screen and saves the heroes in the beginning of a story, and it’s the old friend of the hero who they didn’t know was in town, it becomes a very nice introduction for that character; we like that character, we’re interested in him, and it can work very well.

In the same way, a character manifesting a power in the beginning of the story that kind of comes out of nowhere to solve a minor problem, is a satisfying introduction, but not a satisfying resolution. And then later on when a major character gets brought back to life by balefire, because it’s used in a way that the audience could anticipate, suddenly we have a very satisfying resolution of a conflict, using a magic that we’re familiar with.

It’s the difference between Han Solo saving Luke by getting him off Tattooine by just kind of haphazardly being there in the right place at the right time, and then Solo coming back at the end of the movie to save him. In the first case, he just kind of drops into [Luke and Obi Wan’s] laps, but that’s okay because we’re introducing him. And then he comes back at the end to save them after great foreshadowing of all the changing he’s done as a character, and we love it.

It’s a Chekhov’s gun kind of thing.

Yeah. One of the big complaints about fantasy as a genre is that “oh, that’s the genre where just anything can happen, and so there’s no tension.” People complain that it doesn’t matter what the characters do because they can always be saved by some magical whatnot. And that’s actually a very poor way of looking at it, because if you think about it, regardless of what kind of fiction you’re writing, you can always save your characters with a handwave.

Even if you’re writing in “the real world,” a character can win the lottery, and suddenly all their poverty problems are taken care of, or someone can suddenly dramatically change their mind and fall in love with the heroine when they weren’t expecting to. Whatever it is, you can always just handwave to fix a problem. It’s not a thing that can be relegated only to fantasy. The challenge in fiction is to make all of these things feel satisfying, even though in some ways they are a wave of the hand. And that’s how I look at magic systems.

So it seems like it’s less of a magic law and more of a plot law.

Exactly. And all of the laws I’ve come up with, which really aren’t laws—they’re quite arrogantly named, I realize—have more to do with just good storytelling than they have to do with magic, but I framed them in terms of magic because people always ask me how I invent these magic systems. Well, I do that by trying to make them good storytelling devices.

Sanderson’s Second Law is that limitations are more interesting than powers. And this extends more deeply than in just magic, but if you look at magic, what magic can’t do is going to be more interesting to your readers, and more useful to you as a writer, than what the magic can do. This is why channeling [in the Wheel of Time] tends to be such a great magic system, because the limitations are very well-executed; it’s the part of the magic that shines the most.

But this is ultimately all a plot issue, because what a character can’t achieve, whatever is holding them back, is generally more interesting than what they can achieve. This is just kind of a general storytelling principle across the board.

Are you still teaching creative writing at Brigham Young University?

Yes, I am. I teach an upper division class on how to write fantasy and science fiction one night a week, one class a year. It’s an evening class, and I do it partially for fun and partially to give something back to the community. I took this class when I was at BYU, and it was very helpful to me in getting published and coming to understand the industry. And so when it looked like the class might end up getting canceled, I said I would teach it.

I think there’s a lot of useful stuff you can learn in a class taught by someone who does the work professionally. You can’t learn strictly from academics. Academics teach a lot of great things, I learned a lot of things in my creative writing classes, but someone who’s in the real world as a writer can tell you things that an academic can’t, so I think it’s very useful for new writers to get both perspectives.

What are your thoughts on conventions like JordanCon (The Wheel of Time convention)? Do you enjoy them?

Well, I really like hanging out with fans. I don’t particularly like the traveling part. I’m not one of those who absolutely loves going places, though I do like having gone places. Generally what happens with any sort of travel is, I’m excited when I say yes, and then as it approaches I start to dread it more and more, and I think of all the stuff I need to get done and the hassle it’s going to be, and then I get there and have a blast and really enjoy myself. I like meeting all the fans. And then I get home and I’m exhausted and I think to myself “why did I decide to do that, I have so much to do now, it’s all piled up!” And then another one comes along and I get excited and say yes again.

So I do enjoy them, and I especially enjoy the Wheel of Time ones, because I get to see a lot of the same people over and over, and it’s much less emotionally exhausting to be meeting old friends than it is to be meeting new people. So I’ve come to really enjoy JordanCon a lot.

Obviously you intend to continue with The Stormlight Archive once you’ve finished The Wheel of Time series. Are there any other new things on the horizon that you’re thinking about or looking forward to?

I’ve always got dozens of things that I want to do. The ones that end up getting done really kind of depend on the spur of the moment, what I’m feeling, what’s exciting to me right when I actually have the time to work on it. I think I’ve got my plate pretty full right now, so any other projects would be pretty far off. So this probably isn’t the time to talk about them. I mean, I’ve got a couple of fun little things in the works, that I write here and there on the break points, but I don’t really want to talk about things until I know when or if they may actually get published. (Laughs) I’m busy enough with the official projects.

You titled your story “Three Damnations: A Fugue.” In musical terms a fugue is a composition utilizing two or more voices to explore a theme. Why write a story as a fugue? 

The first part of the story (Danny in the haunted house) came out in a rush, pretty much as it appears in the final version. The verse that starts the story just materialized from my subconscious and I saw the whole thing: a haunted man who can’t let go.

After I finished that part of the story, I asked myself what came next. The obvious answer was to keep going along the same line: I should write about someone who was as emotionally stuck as Danny. Of course, the next part had to contrast with the first part in some way …  and that’s when I got the idea of writing a three-section story that combined horror, science fiction, and fantasy. In my mind, those three genres are intertwining masks of a single underlying genre, so I thought I’d write a story that reflected that.

The key word is “intertwining.” Just as horror, science fiction and fantasy intertwine, the stories of the three characters intertwine, feeding back on each other, cutting in and out. In Danny’s story, Mandy is dead and Graham is completely forgotten—just some kid Danny and Mandy used to hang out with. In Graham’s story, Danny dies, Mandy is slated for death, and Graham eventually kills himself. In Mandy’s story, Graham and Danny are both dead, but she brings back versions of them in an attempt to “correct” her own life. Around and around it goes …  like a fugue, with the stories chasing each other, interacting and heightening each other through their similarities and contrasts.

Ultimately, I realized I was writing a story about three people who are trapped in different versions of hell: the three damnations in the title. None of the three has the strength of character to break free. The verses at the beginning and end of each section show the characters trying not to give in to temptation … but good intentions aren’t enough.

Why was Danny’s story a haunted house story?

Danny is haunted, not just by his guilt over killing Mandy, but by his inability to make anything out of his life. He keeps going back to the house, rather than moving on. The house itself reflects Danny’s sterility: the deadness of the garden, the emptiness of the rooms, the bleak repetitions of the murder and his other experiences.

Why do haunted house stories remain such an enduring favorite genre for authors and readers?

There’s something evocative about the mood of a haunted house: wistful, angry, lost. For me, haunted houses are about some wrong turn taken in the past … and we all know what that feels like. Often, there’s a sense that the house might be exorcized: that we can fix what went wrong if we’re smart or pure hearted enough. That possibility of redemption is a great starting point for a story.

Of course, from a purely mechanical viewpoint, an entire haunted house has more scope than a single ghost. It gives writers more elbow-room to play around.

Why was Graham’s story a time travel story?

After Danny’s “horror” story, I switched to science fiction … but I wanted the same sense of damnation and inability to move on. A time travel story is perfect for that—so many time travel stories involve looping back, over and over, in an attempt to get things right. But in many such stories, every time you try to fix things, you just make them worse.

Why do time travel stories remain such an enduring favorite genre for authors and readers?

I think we all like the mind-bending aspects of time travel stories: the complexities of paradox and how things can twist back on themselves. Time travel stories also appeal to the desire for wish fulfillment—fixing past mistakes so they never happened, and having advanced knowledge of the future so that we can anticipate everything perfectly. Of course, time travel stories often teach the opposite lesson: that trying to change the past or game the future will just blow up in your face.

Why was Mandy’s story a story about the occult and magic?

First of all, I wanted to finish the horror-sf-fantasy trilogy. In order for the fantasy story to work, I needed to make sure that Mandy was a good fit with it. She’s the sort of character who believes she can make things happen by sheer force of will: If she wants something badly enough, the universe will make it so. Turns out that she’s right … but because of her self-centeredness, she ends up making a hash of it.

Why do stories about the occult and magic remain such an enduring favorite genre for authors and readers?

Once again, it’s about wish fulfillment: that we can achieve our fantasies just by waving our hands. But fantasy stories often come with the proviso that you must deserve to get your wish. If you’re selfish, your wish will go awry.

Stories about magic also deal with the mysteries of the world and our feelings of the numinous. I think most of us have had times when we’ve felt, “There’s more to the universe than I know.” Whatever we think the “more” is—whether it’s supernatural or simply the grandeur of real life—fantasy stories are appealing vehicles for talking about what we’ve felt.

Why mix genres within a single story?

In a fugue, different musical instruments create intertwining versions of the same melody. First, one instrument starts the melody, and after a few bars, a new instrument starts the same tune, so that it harmonizes with what the first instrument is playing. More and more instruments join in, so that the single melody is harmonizing with itself in many different ways. By having instruments of different pitches and different timbres, you get a much more interesting result.

I hope I’ve managed to do the same thing by mixing different genres: the three genres are similar but different, just as the three characters are similar but different … and so are their damnations.

I won’t go to the house again.
I won’t go to the house again.
I won’t go to the house again.
I went to the haunted house.

***

I woke naked in the garden. Nothing grew there—not even weeds. Just withered stalks that looked ages old. Maybe dating back to when things were still okay.

The darkness was beginning to brighten. I always came to, just before dawn.

As usual, my mouth tasted of blood. The first few times, I’d thought the blood was mine. Eventually, it occurred to me the blood might come from someone else. That made me swear I’d never go back to the house.

But I did.

I got up and limped around to the front door. It took me a while—plants grew thick everywhere except the garden, and most had thorns or nettles.

Beyond the briars, trees crowded up close to the house. The forest ran for miles in every direction, full of whispery sounds and shifty movements. I stayed away from the woods, even in daytime. Animals hated the place too; I never saw a single bird or squirrel among those trees. I don’t know if the house had infected the woods or the other way around, but they were both no-man’s-lands. Maybe like Mandy and me, the house and the forest went bad together.

The inside of the house was always cold and silent. That hadn’t seemed strange the first time Mandy and I broke in. It was November, with an inch of snow on the ground, so we weren’t surprised to see frost on the mirrors and icicles on the ceiling lamps.

Mandy said, “I hope the ice hasn’t wrecked anything good.” She’d heard no one lived in the house anymore, but the place contained valuable antiques. Me, I couldn’t tell an antique from plain old junk, but Mandy had a sixth sense when it came to money; she didn’t know much about antiques either, but she could always zero in on what would bring the most cash.

Mandy belongs to the house now. Sometimes I find her, stiff and bloody, on the living room floor with the knife through her heart. Sometimes she’s dead but still intact, sitting in the dining room and wearing a wedding dress as white as her skin. Sometimes she’s alive and we make love in the biggest bedroom. That’s the reason I keep going back … even though her flesh is freezing, and the sex often turns sick in ways I never foresee.

That only happens at night. By day, I’ve searched every room and never found where the house keeps her body.

I have enough trouble finding my own clothes. Once in a long while, they’re neatly folded by the door. More often, they’re scattered all over the place: my shirt pinned with scissors to the kitchen wall; my pants inside the piano, threaded among the strings; my underwear peeking out between books in the library; my shoes and socks … sometimes I never find them, and I have to hike to the car in my bare feet, running the heater full-blast till I can feel my toes again.

That day, my pants were hung on the newel-post of the main staircase. I put them on, then started to hunt for the rest of my clothes.

I had to pick through remains of broken furniture. Every time I went to the house, I did my best to hurt it. I smashed its mirrors; I broke the ceiling lamps with a tire-iron; I took an ax to the damned piano and set fire to what was left.

The house seemed to want to be busted up. The nights I wrecked it the most, it sent Mandy to me as a reward. She wouldn’t be bloody—no wounds at all, except the tiny slit where I’d driven the blade into her heart. Our love would be sweet, with no horror-movie change-ups. Afterward, we’d cuddle. Eventually, sure, she’d pick a fight: the same old crap about money, our lousy lives, and how she should have gone with Graham instead of me. She’d slap me, I’d hit her, she’d draw the knife, I’d take it away from her … then I’d wake in the dead garden. But for a while, the house let us be together.

Mostly, though, the house was mad and angry: boiling with lonesome rage. Sometimes I considered doing us both a favor … dousing the walls and me with gasoline, then lighting a match. But the moment wasn’t right for that yet. I’d wrecked everything on the house’s ground floor, and most of the upstairs—all those antiques Mandy said would make us rich enough to stop fighting—but I hadn’t finished smashing the main bedroom. I’d kicked apart the washstands, burned the bookcase, shoved the wardrobe out the window in pieces. But I hadn’t had the heart to destroy the bed that Mandy and I used.

I avoided that bedroom as I searched for my clothes, but I couldn’t find my shirt anywhere else. At last, I accepted that the house wanted me in there. I opened the door and saw Mandy sitting on the edge of the bed.

She looked good: skin-colored, not white. Her clothes were the same as the night we came here—even the winter jacket, which hid the stab wound.

My shirt lay across her lap. She smoothed the cloth with her hands. “Just this bed left, Danny,” she said. “Just this bed. Then it’s over.”

“I love you,” I said.

“So?”

“I don’t want to wreck our bed.”

“You don’t have to right away.” She glanced out the window. “The sun is up now. Wait till dark.”

“I don’t want to wreck the bed ever,” I said. “Then you’ll always be alive. Sort of.”

“But you’ll never see me again. The house will hold me hostage till you finish the job.”

“I don’t care if I can’t see you. I just want to know you’re still around.”

Mandy tossed me my shirt. “That’s a pretty thought,” she said, and disappeared.

The shirt felt warm, as if her body still held enough life to heat it.

***

I won’t go to the house again.
I won’t go to the house again.
I won’t go to the house again.
I went to the haunted house.

***

II. Graham

I won’t use the time machine again.
I won’t use the time machine again.
I won’t use the time machine again.
I used the time machine.

***

I saw myself young again: sixteen and in love. Mandy sat across from Me‑at‑Sixteen, but Danny sat tight beside her. His hand slid under the coffee-shop table and Mandy began giggling.

That giggle took my breath away. Any other girl would tell her boyfriend no … or maybe she’d let him, but blush and stay quiet to avoid drawing attention. Not Mandy—she didn’t give a damn what people thought.

A second version of me, aged thirty-six, sat in a nearby booth. He’d chosen a place with a clear view of Mandy. He watched her like a starving man; I could feel his hunger all the way across the room. With so much heat pouring off Me-at-Sixteen and Me-at-Thirty-Six, I was surprised Mandy seemed oblivious … but then, she only paid attention to people when she wanted something from them. If they wanted something from her, she tuned them out.

Both my younger selves thought Mandy was beautiful. I didn’t. I could finally see past her skin-deep looks to the ugliness beneath. I also saw she wasn’t as smart and self-possessed as I’d once believed. Cool, yes, and gifted at getting what she wanted. But she wasn’t the “perfect soulmate” whose intelligence matched my own, and she certainly wasn’t wise beyond her years. She was damned well stupid about how to live her life.

Danny, for example … what did she see in him? Even at sixteen, the guy was a loser. Beefcake without money or brains. I, on the other hand, had a rich family and an IQ that would get me into Stanford, then Princeton, then the top-secret Chronos project. Eventually, my ingenious mind would let me bypass Chronos security to make an unauthorized trip into the past.

Meanwhile, Mandy would stick with Danny. They’d take up petty crime and decide to burgle some remote country-house whose ownership was tied up in the courts. In the middle of the job, they’d argue, then fight. Danny would fatally stab her; half a year later, he’d purge his guilt by torching the house and himself. At least, that’s what forensic examiners would conclude from the two charred bodies: one freshly incinerated, one dead for months with a knife wound through her heart. Danny and Mandy would lie side by side in the ashes … just as their younger selves sat side by side in the coffee shop.

Danny’s hand was still under the table. Mandy beamed like a contented Madonna, but once in a while she made deliberate eye contact with me. I mean Me‑at‑Sixteen. I watched as she reached out and laid her hand on my arm. After so many years, I can still remember the feel of her fingers on my skin: her flesh warm, mine on fire. I’d wondered if it meant she liked me more than she let on.

Me-at-Thirty-Six watched from his booth. He too thought Mandy was sending out signals. He believed that if only my teenaged self had seized the chance, he could have won her from Danny. But Me-at-Sixteen had been a coward; therefore Me-at-Thirty-Six went home each night to a cold silent house. Despite my accomplishments—the scientific breakthroughs no one else had even imagined—I’d spent my life aching for the girl who should have loved me.

But with older eyes, I could see the truth: That night in the coffee shop, Mandy had just been yanking my chain. It amused her to toy with me. Perhaps she was also trying to make Danny jealous. Mandy liked tying people in knots.

Suddenly she stood up. The rest of us shot to our feet too: Danny, Me-at-Sixteen, Me-at-Thirty-Six, even Me-Now. Mice pursuing the cheese. I scanned the rest of the shop to see if anybody else was on his feet. I knew I might regret what I intended to do—once in a while, on cold lonely nights. But would I regret it enough to hack Chronos once more and come back to stop myself?

No one else in the coffee shop budged, though there were several men older than me huddled inconspicuously at other tables. I decided not to examine them closely; I didn’t want to know if some Me-as-Senior-Citizen was waiting to correct another mistake.

Mandy and Danny walked out the door. I followed, and I followed, and I followed.

It was night, late November, with an inch of snow on the ground. Our breaths steamed under the streetlights. But the lights were out in the shop’s side driveway and in the parking lot behind: Me-at-Thirty-Six had cut the wires.

I remembered how I’d planned to wait in the darkness. The lot backed onto a park with plenty of trees; I’d intended to lurk in the shadows till the three teenagers appeared. But my resolve lasted only five minutes. After almost two decades, when all I’d had of Mandy were pictures in high-school yearbooks, I hadn’t been able to resist going inside. I’d needed to see her once more in the flesh.

Her sensuous, treacherous flesh.

Mandy and Danny, holding hands, turned at the corner of the coffee shop and headed down the driveway that led to the back. Me-at-Sixteen walked beside them. I can’t remember what I was thinking that night, but in similar situations, I was often consumed with envy. I had a car; Danny didn’t. In my eagerness to serve Mandy any way I could, I’d somehow become the chauffeur who drove them to make-out spots and left them alone for an hour while I went for a walk. The entire hour, I’d fantasize about sneaking back and peeking through the car windows, hoping for a glimpse of … something. But I’d never had the nerve. By January, Danny would scrape together enough cash for a car of his own. I’d scarcely see either of them again.

“Hey,” said Mandy, “the lights are out. I can’t see.”

She was just playing for attention. The driveway was dark, but not black; we could see well enough to get to the car. Still, Me-at-Sixteen gallantly leapt in: “Don’t worry, I’ll get the car and pick you up.” Teenaged me hurried off, feeling like a hero who would earn Mandy’s everlasting gratitude for saving her from the scary, scary dark.

As soon as Me-at-Sixteen was gone, Mandy threw herself on Danny. They kissed loudly. When the first kiss ended, Mandy pulled Danny with her so she could prop her back against the side of the coffee shop while he leaned tightly into her.

When Me-at-Thirty-Six approached, Mandy looked up for a moment, saw it was only an unknown adult, and returned to the kissing … as if that version of me couldn’t possibly matter. Boring old Graham, ignored yet again. As for Me-Now, I hung back out of sight. Me-at-Thirty-Six might run if he saw a witness.

I waited till I heard the shots: bang-bang, two rounds from a .22 pistol, pointblank into Danny’s brain.

Mandy screamed. I ran toward her. Me-at-Sixteen was running too—he’d heard the shots before reaching the car and was racing to the rescue. Me-at-Thirty-Six ran toward his teenaged self. As the two versions of me met in the parking lot, the older grabbed the younger by the shoulders. “Stay with her,” Me-at-Thirty-Six said. “Comfort her.” Then he dashed off, heading for the park where he’d stashed the Chronos transit module.

By then I’d reached Mandy myself. Danny was only a shadow at her feet. I was glad of that—I didn’t regret killing him, but I could live without a good, clear view of his bloody corpse.

Mandy saw me but didn’t stop screaming. For once in her life, something had breached her self-absorption. I remembered how deafening the gun blast had been when I pulled the trigger. Mandy was even closer to the muzzle: her lips had been on Danny’s till the first slug entered his brain. The noise and the flash and the blood had sent her into hysteria.

Up the driveway came Me-at-Sixteen: her intended savior.

The version of me who killed Danny believed Mandy was just an impressionable girl who’d been led astray. Once Danny was eliminated, she’d see who truly loved her … especially if Me-at-Sixteen consoled her in her hour of need. Mandy’s tear-stained eyes would be opened; she’d reciprocate my love with pure sweet passion.

That theory was partly right: Mandy had indeed cried on my shoulder. Her heart was hard, but not invulnerable. For a full month after the shooting, she clung to me like a security-blanket. But it didn’t last. Once her trauma began to fade, Mandy reverted to type. In January, I caught a cold that kept me inside for a week; Mandy visited me once, but by the time I’d recovered, she’d found another guy. And another. And another.

So nothing changed. My teenaged self resumed his trajectory toward Chronos, and nights with yearbook pictures. When Me-at-Thirty-Six returned to his own time, there was nothing but the cold silent house—this time with an edge of mocking bitterness to the cold.

I yearned to use the time machine for further interventions: earlier, later, more subtle, more violent. But time travel can’t be done on a whim. My trip to the coffee shop had required eighteen months of computer calculations to get everything right; trips to other times and places would need the same preparation.

I couldn’t stand another delay. Instead, I tracked Mandy down in the present. With Danny out of the picture, Mandy was still alive … but she lived with a man so much like Danny, he was bound to hurt her eventually.

Using a different gun, I shot him. In a blacked-out parking lot—my reliable M.O. This time, neither Mandy nor anyone else witnessed it.

A day later, I called her. I said I’d read about the murder in the paper. “I’m so sorry, Mandy. Is there anything I can do?”

“Oh God, Graham, it’s good to hear your voice.”

As predicted—as I’d fantasized—the shock of her lover being killed in such familiar circumstances had shaken Mandy deeply. Once again, she was vulnerable. She begged me to come keep her company.

We got together. Because we were no longer teenagers, I spent the night. The happiest night of my life. As night followed night, Mandy wasn’t in such a hurry to find a new man. I was even richer than I had been, from family inheritances and my top-secret job. In high school, Mandy may have disdained rich geeks, but at thirty-six, she’d become more practical.

I now realize she grew bored with me as fast as before, but instead of dumping me, she decided to ride the gravy train. Being all grown up, Mandy could stomach pretending to love me … and she could still have good-looking losers on the side.

So we married. I was happy. Mandy was Mandy.

It took years for me to realize she was a selfish, cheating whore. Even when I caught her, she could wrap me around her little finger and persuade me not to “overreact.” She’d shower me with promises till I believed she really loved me. I blamed myself for her infidelity. Maybe I spent too much time at Chronos; maybe I didn’t give her what she needed.

What Mandy seemed to need was a string of sordid affairs. When I finally got that through my head, I contemplated meeting her in another darkened parking lot … but that was asking for trouble. As the oft-cuckolded husband, I’d be the prime suspect. The police would do their damnedest to nail me.

So I resorted again to the time machine. I’d already done the calculations for that night at the coffee shop; I could go there as often as I wanted. A cold silent house seemed better than one where my wife kept playing me for a fool.

In the coffee shop driveway, Me-at-Sixteen ran up and stopped in front of Mandy. Her screams had turned to sobs. My teenaged self reached to take her in his arms. I grabbed him and pulled him away. “You, boy—go into the coffee shop and call the police.”

“But…”

“Go. I’ll make sure the girl’s all right.” When he still wouldn’t leave, I pushed him. Hard. Reluctantly, he trotted toward the front of the building.

I had the gun in my pocket: the same one I’d used to kill Danny, twenty seconds earlier and all those years ago. Another two shots—bang-bang—and it would look like the killer had come back for Mandy.

The police hadn’t solved Danny’s murder; they wouldn’t solve Mandy’s either. She’d be dead and out of my life. My teenaged self would grieve—probably for a long time—but I wouldn’t spend years shunning other women on the off-chance of connecting with Mandy. I definitely wouldn’t marry her and suffer those betrayals. With Mandy dead, I could live.

My hand gripped the pistol. My finger touched the trigger. Then Mandy, weeping and needy, threw her arms around my neck and pressed her face against my chest. She had no idea who I was, but she needed to hold someone. So she did.

I could smell her hair, even with the stink of gunpowder all around us.

If she’d been older, I could have shot her. I despised the woman she’d become…but I’d never stopped loving the girl she was.

Damn it, Mandy, I thought, I wish one of us could change.

Me-at-Sixteen came back, but I didn’t let him touch her. I held Mandy possessively until a police car sirened up the street. I sent Me-at-Sixteen to tell them where we were, then I eased out of Mandy’s grip and ran.

Now I’m sitting in the Chronos transit module. If I had the patience for another eighteen months of calculations, I could travel to a time when killing Mandy would be easy. Maybe I could knife her in that country-house and set Danny on fire.

But what am I thinking? Danny’s already dead. He’ll stay that way unless I change the timeline again.

I have to resist temptation. Other people get by without murdering those who hurt them, or using Chronos to reset their lives. I too can hold myself together, no matter what I find when I get back: the cold silent house or the sham hateful marriage.

I can be strong. I’ll forget the option that’s looming in my mind—what I thought of as I fled through the dark, with Mandy’s tears on my shirt and the smell of her clinging to my clothes.

I’ll banish the thought that I could come back one more time and shoot my sixteen-year-old self. Surely my life isn’t so bad that I’ll choose to end it on the last night I was happy.

***

I won’t use the time machine again.
I won’t use the time machine again.
I won’t use the time machine again.
I used the time machine.

***

III. Mandy 

I will not dance in the grove again.
I will not dance in the grove again.
I will not dance in the grove again.
I went to the grove to dance.

***

Only two men have truly loved me. Danny and Graham. They were boys, but they were men; they never hurt me. They would have loved me forever if they hadn’t both been killed.

Despite everything, I still believe in love.

After Danny and Graham got shot, I fell apart. I looked for love in all the wrong places, till my parents threw me out. That wouldn’t have happened if Danny or Graham had lived—I was doing just fine, but their deaths derailed me. I didn’t get my act together till the night I found the grove.

I’d been in court that afternoon, watching yet another boyfriend get sentenced. Good riddance. I blew him a kiss, then left the room fast; the court building and I were old acquaintances, but we didn’t get along.

I was in such a hurry to escape, I nearly smacked into a fifty-ish lawyer as I went out the courtroom door. He wasn’t my type, but I was his—instead of “Oops, sorry,” he struck up a conversation, pouring on all the charm. I thought, what the hell: With my boyfriend in jail, my nights were wide open.

I followed the guy to another courtroom where he said he’d be done “in ten minutes, tops.” I left at the two-hour mark. By then, I’d heard enough of the man’s droning voice to change my mind about dating him. I’d also heard enough about the case to catch my interest. The lawyers were arguing about this big country-house whose owner had died without a will. An appraiser said the place held a lot of antiques, worth more than a million, all told. Naturally, the next-of-kin were fighting over who would inherit. Also naturally, I drove out to the house after midnight to see what I could grab for my own.

The moment I got out of the car, I sensed something—like when you walk into a club and know someone has his eye on you. Every step, the feeling grew; it was November, with an inch of snow on the ground, but my skin felt hot and itchy.

After jimmying the door, I paused for a second. I had an intuition something big was about to happen. When I stepped across the threshold, pain ripped into my chest like I was being stabbed, and everything went black.

I woke naked in the garden. For a moment, I had this idea I wasn’t supposed to be alive … like maybe some homicidal lunatic had been holed up in the house, and he’d knifed me, then dumped me in the yard. The stabbing pain in my chest hadn’t gone away. But I couldn’t feel blood or any kind of wound, and there was nobody in sight. Just cold, silent darkness.

Snow had killed all the plants around me. I knew I’d freeze too if I didn’t warm up soon. My panties, white in the darkness, hung on a trellis across the garden. I limped to get them, over plant stubble that jabbed my feet every step. When I put my underwear on, the silk was ice against my skin. A moment later, I caught sight of my bra draped over the back of a cast-iron bench. More limping over stubble and frozen earth. I put on the bra and looked for more. My shirt was far down a garden path….

Like following a trail of breadcrumbs, I gathered my clothes piece by piece. The trail led away from the house and into the nearby forest. The feeling under the trees was so claustrophobic, I could barely breathe. Again, I imagined some homicidal lunatic watching in the blackness. This could be some crazy game to lead me somewhere very bad.

I was so cold I didn’t care. With every wad of clothing, I traveled deeper into the woods. I ended up in a clearing: a circular patch of bare ground with neither grass nor snow. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the moon … but suddenly it was there, big and full, right above me. It shone down on my last piece of clothing: my left shoe in the middle of the grove.

I sat down in the moonlight and put the shoe on—at last fully dressed, but still deathly cold. Nothing I did seemed to warm me … as if my body had stopped producing heat. Sitting on the ground, I hugged my knees and tried to squeeze warmth into my bones.

It didn’t work. I got dizzy … started to hear things…dream-like voices. They whispered all around me, but I could only make out one word.

“Dance.”

I knew I was hallucinating, but maybe the voices were from my subconscious giving me advice. Movement might get my blood flowing. If not, then what the hell: I’d rather die dancing than huddled in surrender.

Head spinning, I staggered to my feet. I nearly fell, but kept my balance enough to waggle my hips a little. I must have looked pathetic; even so, I got the feeling that the whisperers approved. I took some wobbly steps … started moving my arms … thought I’d flop on my face, but had just enough strength to keep going.

I didn’t get warmer. I couldn’t feel my feet. An insane thought struck me: I could move more freely without my jacket.

Well, why the hell not? It was like being drunk, when you deliberately do things to feel out of control and reckless. The less caution, the more life. I took off the jacket I’d worked so hard to find, and tossed it into the darkness.

I didn’t get warmer, but I suddenly felt strong. Power flooded up through me: from the earth, the trees, the moon. The stabbing chest-pain that had clutched me since I stepped into the house vanished instantly. The whispers around me still didn’t form words, but I understood them better. I unbuttoned my shirt…

Soon I’d stripped down to nothing again. Each time I threw off some clothing, a flood of energy surged through me. It was better than sex or drugs: it was magic. Honest-to-God mad moon-magic. I was soaking up sorcery, filling with silver fire.

When I was naked once more—when the universe was in me like a lover and I could ask for anything—I asked for Danny.

I woke with him beside me. We were inside the house, in a bed together. The darkness was beginning to brighten into dawn.

Danny looked like I remembered: the boy I’d been kissing when he died. At first, he didn’t recognize me—I was twenty years older than when he’d last seen me. But I forgave him for not knowing who I was … and it didn’t take him long to accept I was really his Mandy. The years hadn’t changed me that much.

Later on, Danny admitted he’d thought I was some older relative with a strong family resemblance to the real teenaged Mandy. But after we’d left the house—we found our clothes folded on the washstand—Danny realized I was telling the truth. Years had passed since his death: he could read the date in any newspaper. It freaked him out, but I was there to take his mind off things till he got over the shock.

The next few days were my happiest ever. We spent hours in bed, where Danny learned what sex could be beyond our awkward fumbling in the car. We also went out a lot; I had fun buying him clothes and making him get a decent haircut.

Sometimes Danny got mad that I was trying to control his life, but how else could it have been? He had no one else but me. His friends and family knew he was dead; they’d been to his funeral. I showed Danny his obituary in the clippings I’d kept about his murder. If he tried to contact people he’d known, what would they think? Likely that he was some stupid street-kid trying to pull a con. They’d call the police.

I was all Danny had, but I promised he’d never need anyone else.

If it had been the real Danny, I would have kept that promise forever. The real Danny wouldn’t have let me down. But everyone knows that magic is slippery: tough to get right, especially your first time.

I realize now what I summoned couldn’t have been Danny. I’ve learned a lot about magic since those early days. That version of Danny must have been a changeling: a lost soul so desperate for life, it took Danny’s form to fool me. Or maybe I just didn’t get all of Danny—I resurrected his physical self, but not what was most important. I didn’t get Danny’s love.

I believe in love. I do. So much of my life has been bad, but I have been truly loved. What’s the point of magic if it can’t give me that again?

But that first time, I didn’t quite get the magic right. I found that out the first time I left Danny alone.

My bank account was strapped, but I had a ready source of cash: a car full of antiques. Despite the excitement of Danny’s resurrection, I hadn’t forgotten why I’d gone to that country-house in the first place. Before Danny and I drove back to the city, we’d crammed the car with valuable old treasures. I knew a man who would buy them, no questions asked, and he wouldn’t even cheat me too badly. One problem: He never did business in front of people he didn’t know, so I told Danny to stay in the apartment till I got back.

When I returned, the place was empty. Danny (or whatever he was) had flown the coop.

It took me hours to find him. The sun had set by the time I thought to check the coffee shop where Danny had been killed. Maybe he’d been struck by morbid curiosity, wanting to see his own murder scene; or maybe he was just visiting the places we used to hang out. Anyway, he was inside the coffee shop when I arrived … and he was surrounded by giggling teenaged girls.

Have you ever felt sad and sick and furious, all at the same time?

The coffee shop was still a high-school hangout, and Danny still looked like a cute high-school boy—especially in the clothes and haircut I’d paid for. The shiny teenage bitches couldn’t wait to sink their teeth into him. Danny basked in their attention like a king in his harem.

That’s when I realized it wasn’t Danny. The real Danny wasn’t that kind of boy. He loved me.

I walked to his table; I was nearly blind with rage. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it all became clear when he looked up and smirked, “Oh, hi … Mom.”

It was like he’d stabbed me through the heart. Feeling cold to the bone, I said, “Can we talk outside?”

He didn’t answer right away. He must have wanted to yell at me, but was reluctant to cause a scene in front of the girls. Sighing hugely, he got up. He followed me out and around to the driveway at the side of the building. “Look,” he said, “what did you expect? That you could keep me forever as your boy-toy? That’s gross … Mom.”

I looked him in the eye. “You know that thing mothers say? I brought you into the world and I can take you out?” I pointed my finger at his head like a gun. “Bang-bang.”

His head snapped back and he dropped like a stone. I’d seen the same thing years before, but not from this angle.

Back then, I’d screamed in horror. Now, I only smiled; I like payback. I also felt good that I’d guessed right about how magic worked—if I gave life to someone, I could also give death.

“Okay,” I told the body at my feet, “get lost.”

For a second, I was afraid nothing would happen. That would put me in big trouble. Those girls in the coffee shop had seen me; if Danny’s corpse was found in the driveway, the girls could give the cops my description. But the carcass began to melt, as if the Danny-thing had been made of snow. Within a minute, nothing was left but a wet patch on the pavement.

That proved it wasn’t the real Danny. I had nothing to feel guilty about. I’d done nothing wrong.

My feeling of justification vanished as fast as the body. By the time I got back to my apartment, I had a bad case of the shakes. I’d lost the love of my life again, and in the days that followed, I plunged into the same self-destructive craziness that seized me at sixteen. I cried for hours at a time, got drunk every night, and went home with any guy who asked. I damned near gave up and killed myself … but while I was freezing my ass in an alleyway, waiting for a connection who’d sell me enough for an overdose, the blistering cold reminded me of the grove.

I realized I could have another chance. I could use the magic again. I just had to get it right.

I began to study how magic worked. I read books; took peyote; hung out in weird backstreet shops. I had to wade through New Age crap, but it didn’t throw me off—after dancing with genuine magic, I could tell what was mumbo-jumbo and what was the real deal. Soon enough, I understood how to refine what I’d done in the grove: how to get the boy I wanted, not some ingrate impostor. All I needed was ritual and sacrifice … to steer the magic and prove the depth of my commitment.

Exactly midnight on the next full moon, I stood in the grove again. I cut patterns in my right arm, burned sigils into my left. I sucked my wounds to fill my mouth with blood. On a black velvet cloth, I opened my high-school yearbook to a picture of the boy I was calling. Then, piece by piece, I removed my clothes as I danced around the photo.

The photo wasn’t Danny; it was Graham. He’d never been cocky with girls—he’d only had eyes for me. That made him a safer bet.

I danced, feeling power come at my call. The night was colder than before: When I shook, I couldn’t tell if I was quaking with magical energy or shivering on the edge of death. I couldn’t think straight; I stopped thinking altogether. But I kept dancing.

The moon grew so bright, it was a blinding white tunnel. The earth heaved in orgasm…

I woke inside the house, in bed with Graham.

He didn’t take it well. If Graham had found himself under the sheets with Me-at-Sixteen, he would have been flustered enough—I’d always laughed at how badly he wanted me, and how guilty he felt about it—but finding himself with an unknown woman, Graham totally went into hysterics. Since he didn’t know how he’d got me in bed, he leapt to the conclusion he was a sex-fiend maniac who regularly flipped into a different personality and ravished women against their wills.

Eventually I calmed him down. Then I got us both dressed, stole more antiques, and drove us back to my apartment.

The days that followed were fun, but not the same as with Danny—Graham needed more maintenance. Danny would placidly lounge with me in bed or in front of the TV. Graham seemed incapable of staying still unless he was doing something.

On the plus side, once I’d convinced him about the whole “death-resurrection” thing, Graham’s virginal guilt vanished. Knowing magic was real somehow liberated him … as if it gave him permission to rewrite a bunch of rules he’d been carrying in his head. Me being twice his age didn’t bother him a bit.

But in lulls, Graham kept asking how the world had changed since he died: what was new in science, and how magic worked. When I wanted to take him shopping for clothes, Graham said he’d only go if we went to the library first. When I told him he was getting a haircut, he said I had to buy him pens and paper too.

But he loved me. He loved me like an addict and I was his drug. He couldn’t get enough of me … even if he had no patience for lingering afterward. I was Graham’s everything. He never gave a hint of wanting anyone else.

I still felt insecure about girls his own age. Graham would never go on the prowl like Danny … because let’s face it, Graham was a geek who’d already got the woman of his dreams. He had no reason to chase girls, and they certainly wouldn’t chase him. Even so, I worried. Danny had been a traitorous impostor. How could I be sure Graham wasn’t one too?

I couldn’t resist testing him. A few weeks after his rebirth, I drove Graham to our old favorite coffee shop.

The shiny airheads were there, but they ignored us. Graham showed no interest in them either: he looked once in their direction, then focused on me. I thought, He doesn’t care about anyone else. I’m the only one he’ll ever love. I’ve got him. Aloud I said, “You’re mine, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

“That’s all I’ve ever needed,” I told him. “Men think I’m made of ice: They say I’m a selfish, manipulative bitch. But it’s not true—there’s nothing wrong with me except I’ve never been properly loved.”

“Well, I love you,” Graham said. “Are we just getting coffee or can we eat too?”

Teenage boys: not made for romance. But Graham had said he loved me with such offhand sincerity he couldn’t be faking.

As we left the coffee shop, Graham took my hand. I squeezed it fondly … but the moment we turned into the driveway, I saw the lights were out all the way to the back-lot.

“Oh no,” I said. “Not now.”

I turned to run, but a man cut me off: the killer from twenty years earlier. He was only a shadow in the dark, but he was the same shadow.

“Mandy,” he said. “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

He lifted the gun. I said, “What the hell is your problem? What did I ever do to you?”

“You brought me back. I’d broken the cycle, but you started it again. In a month, you’ll get bored the way you always do. The most exhilarating time of my life, and you’ll just lose interest. You’ll feel bad enough for dumping me that you won’t erase me like Danny. You’ll hand me a hundred bucks and kick me onto the street. Then it all goes the same, only twenty years later. Around and around, it all goes the same, and we’re all too obsessed to walk away.” He took a step toward me. “I couldn’t shoot you when you were a girl, but you’re old enough now…”

I was still holding Graham’s hand. I yanked it, pulling Graham between the gunman and me. After all, I thought, I can always bring Graham back.

Startled by my movement, the gunman fired. Bang-bang. Graham jerked. I tried to keep him in front of me as a shield, but his corpse began melting in my hands.

This is it, I thought. I’m dead. But the gunman was melting too: his face, his clothes, his pistol.

Ten seconds later, there were two wet patches on the same damned driveway.

I got away as fast as I could. People in the coffee shop had surely heard the shots. Later on, I found out that they’d called the cops, but nothing came of it. The police found no bodies; no bullets either. Eventually, they wrote off the shooting as a car backfiring or kids playing with firecrackers.

Now here I sit in my cold silent apartment. I’ve been brooding about what the gunman said. I don’t understand what he meant, but it’s got me on edge.

Part of me wants another chance with Graham. I used him to save my own skin. I owe it to him to bring him back … especially when we were so totally in love. It’s ridiculous to think I’d get tired of him. And anyway, if Graham and his lack of romance start to bore me, I can always dispel him, right? Bang-bang, just like that. I’m the bitch with no feelings, aren’t I? That’s what everyone believes. I’m cold-blooded enough to rid myself of a nuisance, even if he looks at me with puppy-dog eyes.

Same with Danny. Those first few days with him—damn, but they were great. So uncomplicated. To have someone adore you completely … I could bring Danny back, but send him away before he gets restless.

Or maybe I could resurrect both boys together. Why not? Everyone already calls me a slut.

But I can’t get the gunman’s words out of my head. Maybe if I got my act together instead of trying to steal love from a past that’s dead and gone…

Self-control, Mandy. Self-control.

***

I will not dance in the grove again.
I will not dance in the grove again.
I will not dance in the grove again.
I went to the grove to dance.

***

1. Plunder

Call it booty, swag or treasure. Count it in gold or jewels, doubloons or bolts of fine silk. Hunting down Spanish galleons and relieving them of their goods was what pirating was all about. Pirates came from a time when a person’s social standing was set at the moment of conception. If you had aristocrats for parents, you’d be an aristocrat. If you were born to a family of peasants, you were a peasant for life. There wasn’t a lot of upward mobility in those days. Piracy on the Spanish Main was one—possibly the only—relatively sure way a person born in poverty could become rich. Assuming you survived, chances were pretty good that a successful career in piracy could set you up for life.

***

2. Good Times!

A successful pirate could make more money in a single voyage than he could have otherwise made in several lifetimes. And having done so, he needed a place to spend that loot. Cities such as Port Royal were tailor-made for that purpose. In the seventeenth century, Port Royal was one of the two most important cities in the western hemisphere, and it set the standard for debauchery. It was dubbed “the wickedest city on earth,” a haven of taverns, gambling dens and houses of prostitution. This was a city that knew how to separate a pirate from his booty. In its heyday, Port Royal had one drinking house for every ten residents. A sailor could hit town with his pockets bursting with silver, and be dead broke (or just dead) within a day—a week tops, if he paced himself.

***

3. Wenches

It’s as true today as it was in the Golden Age—women love a bad boy. That’s why pop culture in every age has celebrated the antihero, whether it’s a gangsta rapper, James Dean, or Valentino’s Sheik. And a pirate is the ultimate bad boy. But, more than that, women love the chance to be the bad boy. The lure of the sea was enough to give us such legendary (but completely real) figures as Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two women who could plunder and pillage with the best of them. Anne Bonny was the daughter of a wealthy businessman who was disowned when she married a pirate. She then ran away from the pirate for a better pirate. In the end, she decided to stop running away with pirates and become one herself. Mary Read’s boat was overtaken by pirates. She decided to join them, eventually meeting up with Anne and joining her in her adventures.

***

4. Food

Life aboard ship was hard, and the food was even harder. There was no shipboard refrigeration. A ship’s larder was stocked with what could be had cheaply and stored for months to last a long voyage. But unlike law-abiding sailors, pirates were limited only by the pickings at hand. The shipping swarming the Caribbean came from countries all around the world—and served as a piratical smorgasbord.

And buccaneers learned from the original barbecuers. Before the buccaneers took to the sea to raid Spanish shipping, they lived in small isolated communities scattered across the region, and they learned from the natives to hunt wild pig and slowly cook it over burning coals on a lathe woven from green wood. The cooking surface was called a boucan. An eater of boucan was a boucanier, or later, buccaneer. The Spanish were offended by their very existence and tried to wipe them out. As you can imagine, the buccaneers resented this and took to the sea for revenge.

***

5. Pillaging

Many people are deterred from piracy by the thought that it required complex naval knowledge. As it turns out, there are alternatives to sea voyage. Pirates used to storm tropical ports, overwhelming defenders and taking all the loot they could find. Legendary pirate Henry Morgan actually had very little success at sea—his ship was always getting sunk or, on one memorable occasion, accidentally blown sky high. But put him at the head of a buccaneer army in front of a Spanish port town—say, Maracaibo or Panama City—and he was all the legend says he was!

***

6. Rum

Speaking of Henry Morgan, the Caribbean is home to a lot of rum. Sugar, water, yeast—rum! Pirates loved their rum—and not just for the reason you’d suspect: If you were at sea for any length of time, your store of water would start to go green and rancid, but the rum, which has a healthy dose of alcohol, would be as fresh as the day you poured it into the barrel.

***

7. Travel

When we think of the golden age of pirates, we think of the Caribbean. It’s right there in the name of the movies. But even in the Golden Age, when pirates flourished in the Caribbean, the savvy sea rovers got around. The Ivory Coast of Africa, the Spice Islands, and the Indian Ocean share equal billing as home for pirates. Madagascar became a Pirate Island. Long Ben Avery captured the Grand Mogul’s treasure ship in the Indian Ocean, the greatest single pirate deed of all time—and still managed to die penniless, so pirates shouldn’t ignore their financial planning.

***

8. Fashion

For all but the rich and royal, fashion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to be drab, severe, dark, and somber. Like so many other things, fashion was just one more place where pirates could show their disdain for society’s rules. What was the point of capturing all those fancy silks and fine fabrics if they couldn’t use them to dress as brightly and garishly as a New Orleans bordello?

***

9. Weapons

The poundy, the pointy, and the boomy! If playing with things that worry your dear ol’ mum is your pleasure, then the pirate life is for you. First, there are the poundy: nice blunt objects like belaying pins, which secured heavy ropes to the ship’s railing, and the marlinspike, which was used for splicing knots. These served innocent nautical duties, yet could give a man quite a headache when swung by a pirate comin’ aboard. If pointy is your preference, try a cutlass: a short, heavy-bladed, single-sided sword. A longsword could get tangled in the rigging or be hindered in the cramped space below decks. A cutlass leaves ’em gutless. And for those of the boomy persuasion, the pirate world had it all, from cannon to flintlock pistols to the mighty blunderbuss!

***

10. Working conditions

A sailor on a merchant vessel worked long and hard, usually for little pay under harsh discipline, and he did it to convey someone else’s goods, so that someone else could get richer. Life was different for pirates. Pirates elected their own officers, and there were only a few people in command. Ships usually had just a captain and quartermaster. In the pirate’s egalitarian society, there was no need for a lot of supernumeraries. The captain would propose a plan and everyone would vote on it. The captain was only “in command” during battle. (Of course, exceptions had to be made when your captain was psychotic, like Blackbeard or L’Ollonais.) The rest of the time, everyone’s voice was equal. They all signed the articles (the list of rules that they ascribed to before going to sea) and had a voice in the ship’s actions, and each sailor was entitled to an equal share of the plunder.

***

So those are the ten reasons. But really, those all come down to different variations of the one real reason for being a pirate. It was true 400 years ago and it’s what we celebrate today when we put on the puffy shirt, the tricorn hat, the sash, the boots, and strap on a sword and pistol. It all comes down to one word, one idea:

11. Freedom

Pick any of the other reasons you want to—food or rum or booty or travel or—or make up one of your own. They all come down to a pirate thumbing his or her nose at the world and saying, “I don’t care what you say the rules are. I’ll live my life free!” Historian Marcus Redicker said of pirates, “[They were] the common enemy of mankind, [but they were also] the freest people on earth.” Pirates may have been damned—but they were damned by their own hand. They set the conditions for their own life.

And that’s what so many of us who “put on the pirate” today are really responding to. Sure, we enjoy dressing up, swaggering and swearing and swinging our cutlasses. (Those of us of legal age enjoy the rum, too.) But it’s really the sense of freedom, the idea that we are living our own lives by our own rules, that is the clarion call of the sweet trade.

For instance, you may have noticed that we promised ten reasons for being a pirate, and have delivered eleven. To which we reply, “We’re pirates, we’re free to list as many reasons as we want to.”

And that, we’d suggest, is reason enough.

“The Nymph’s Child” was originally published in Fast Ships, Black Sails, an anthology of pirate stories. Could you tell us about the process of writing it? 

I’d actually already written it when Ann and Jeff VanderMeer announced Fast Ships, Black Sails, and opened it to submissions. It seemed like a good fit, so I sent it in. I seem to remember this being a story I played around with for a long time, and wrote a couple of different versions of before being happy enough with it to send it out. How much to include of the past, and how to include it in the present timeline of the story, were big issues.

Steel, your new YA novel, is also about a girl sailing with pirates. What’s the best part about writing about pirates? Do you celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19^th)? 

I’m afraid I don’t celebrate it! I’m usually at home, by myself, working, so I’d end up talking like a pirate to my dog, who wouldn’t appreciate it. Pirates have been prime fodder for stories for three hundred years, and they include so many romantic adventuresome things like sword fighting and sailing and spiffy clothes. I’m a sucker for swords and frock coats as much as the next writer.

The dragon asks, “Why does your kind not sail?” and Grace does not have an answer. Why aren’t there more stories about female pirates?

I’m not sure there aren’t more stories about female pirates. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are two of the most famous historical pirates there are, and plenty has been written about them. We also have Grace O’Malley, a pirate captain who worked around Ireland, and Madame Cheng commanded an entire pirate fleet in the South China Sea. There’s evidence that quite a few women disguised themselves and took the seas. Fast Ships, Black Sails included quite a few stories about women pirates. Should I bring up Cutthroat Island? No?

You said in a recent Tor.com interview that you’ve decided it’s your mission “to write books starring teen girl characters having awesome adventures that don’t involve getting a boyfriend by the end.” Would you recommend a few books that fit the bill?

You’ve put me on the spot now, since I don’t think I’m all that well read. Deryn in Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan has awesome adventures. Tamora Pierce’s books star adventuresome teen girls. I’m a big fan of Robin McKinley’s Damar books, The Blue Sword and The Hero and The Crown, in which the heroines have boyfriends, but their main focus is definitely on saving the world. I don’t have anything against boyfriends or romance; I just don’t like that they’re the focus of so many otherwise girl-centered stories.

You’ve had a busy year. Steel was released in March, After the Golden Age in April, and another Kitty novel, Kitty’s Big Trouble in June. How do you unwind after a busy schedule?

I don’t think I’ve figured that one out yet … my schedule hasn’t really stopped being busy in a couple of years.

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions. Before we conclude, will you tell us what is next for you?

I’m working on more books in my Kitty the werewolf series, and I have some other projects I’m working on.

“Grace? Are you awake? Can you hear me?” From around the edge of the wall, Alan called in a hissing whisper. She only had to move a few steps to see him. If she could move.

She worked her jaw, stretching her face, still sore from the beating. “Yes.”

“You must plead your belly. The Marshal can’t hang you. I won’t see you hanged—”

“No. I’ll die with you; there’s nothing else for me.”

“God damn you, Grace.”

She chuckled painfully. “You as well.”

She’d sail off the edge of the world with him. She very nearly had, that time through the Iron Teeth. This was simply another journey, and it would be over soon. Rope around her neck, a moment of fear, then nothing. That was fine. She only wanted to see him one more time.

She heard him take a wet breath; he was bloodied from his own beating. “Mister Lark. You are the finest first mate I have ever known. You have never disobeyed an order from your captain before. So. I order you to live. I order you to live and raise our child. Do you understand me?”

“Don’t ask me to do this, Alan. Please don’t ask.” Her face was so bruised, she couldn’t tell if she was crying. Her whole body was numb.

The iron door of the dungeon opened. The Marshal of Hellwarth and a squad of his men entered, fanning out before the captain and first mate of the Nymph.

“Captain Alan. Mister Lark. Well met.”

The Marshal still didn’t know about her. They beat her when they stormed the Nymph, but didn’t examine her beyond a cursory search for weapons. The Marshal was in a hurry to hang the whole crew before they mounted some spectacular escape. Her hair was cut short, a ragged mat above her ears. Her breasts were bandaged flat. She fooled everyone, because no one believed a woman would sail with pirates.

“I have confessions for you to sign. It will expedite the process.”

She spit in his direction, a bloodied gob of mucus. Couldn’t tell if she managed to hit anything. “Bastard,” someone muttered.

“Do it,” Alan said in a low voice. “Tell him.”

“No.” Live. That’s an order. But he wasn’t the captain anymore if he didn’t have a ship.

Chains clinked—Alan straightening. When he spoke, his voice was clear, commanding. God, he was still the captain, damn him.

“My first officer cannot sign your confession, Marshal.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you alone. Tell your men to leave.” The Marshal frowned, and Alan said, “For God’s sake, what can I do to you now? I give you my word this is no trick.”

The Marshal sent his men away, so the three of them were alone. And Alan told him.

“The name is wrong.”

“On the contrary, I have all Gregory Lark’s aliases listed—”

“Grace Lark. Her name is Grace Lark.”

She closed her eyes. It was all over now. They’d still kill Alan, but she would have to live. And remember.

The Marshal, a stout man, imposing, determined, with slate-gray hair and well-trimmed sideburns, came at her, knife in hand. He tore open her shirt, ripping away buttons. Cutting away the undershirt, he found the bandage. Then he cut through the bandage. She stared at him all the while, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

Amazed, he backed from her a step or two. He only stared a moment, then looked away. Almost tenderly, he closed the edges of her shirt.

“There’s more. She’s with child. I must plead her belly for her since she refuses to do so herself.”

“Damn.” Louder, the Marshal said, “You sent my men away because this is one story you don’t wish to spread.”

“I see we understand each other, Marshal. Do what you will to me. I’ll sign anything. But spare her.”

The Marshal of Hellwarth went to the other side of the wall. A key turned in a lock. Pen scratched on paper. Alan signed away his life.

“Thank you, Captain. As for the rest, I will do what I can.”

“Thank you,” Alan said, sounding relieved.

Grace fought her chains, but only succeeded in cutting her wrists. Fresh blood clotted on dried scabs.

The Marshal called his men. Two went to unchain Alan. When they brought him toward the door, he came into view. He twisted in his captors’ grips to look at her.

His face was bloody, his pale hair matted into a cut on his forehead. He could barely keep his feet without the help of the soldiers. She wanted to rush to him.

“Remember your orders,” he said, and they dragged him away.

“Mister Lark will be staying with us a little longer,” the Marshal said to his lieutenant. Then they left her there, alone.

She called his name. She shouted after him, her voice husky and ragged, because she had forgotten how to scream like a woman.

They hanged the crew in batches. Six times she heard the gallows floor drop and the ropes creak. Captain Alan they hanged alone. The crowd cheered.

Gregory Lark was listed hanged with the rest. The Marshal moved her to a different cell, gave her a change of clothes, and she was Grace again. He held her for two months, until her condition became indisputable. Then, he blindfolded her and packed her into a carriage. For a full day the carriage traveled, with Grace blind to all. At the end of the journey, he set her on the road.

“You have your life and your secret. It is the least I could do for the honor Alan showed. I only ask this: You must never set foot on a ship again. You must promise.”

“I promise,” she said, her voice flat. The Marshal removed the blindfold and remounted the carriage, which turned and departed in a cloud of dust.

She looked around. A village nestled nearby, a fishing village right on the coast. The sea would always be nearby to haunt her.

***

Grace the Widow, as she was known in Rowfus, wondered at how a pound of cod could cost more than a pound of beef in a coastal town. But the fish were off this season, apparently. Her tavern, the Nymph’s Child, would serve beef stew tomorrow, then. She packed the meat in her basket and returned home.

She took her time, walking along the docks. Rowfus was a poor excuse for a seaport. Most of the big cargo ships sailed on up the coast, where the large cities and roads essential for trade lay. Smaller ships stopped here for repairs and provision. A few others docked to take advantage of low port fees. The Marshallate kept a lighthouse and a small garrison of elder soldiers on the rocky edge of the land, ostensibly to dissuade pirates. A single road traveled up the hill, inland. It was a tired place, with a few rows of plank-board buildings scoured gray by wind and salt, and a few piers painted black with barnacles and slime. Most of the activity came from a thriving colony of fisherfolk who didn’t care if another ship docked here ever again. Them, and the gulls that wheeled and cried above their boats.

A new ship had arrived, anchored some distance out. She was one of the fast new galleons, with enough cannons to level Rowfus if she chose. Not that anyone outside the town would notice if Rowfus were leveled. The Marshallate garrison didn’t seem concerned by the ship’s presence. Grace didn’t recognize her.

Mainly, Grace was looking for Kate, to make sure the girl wasn’t wandering off with stars in her eyes when she should have been minding the tavern. Beautiful Kate, with her blond hair and lithe figure, and a spirit that carried her around town with a tilt to her chin. Proud, some folk said, and if Grace was proud of her daughter’s pride, then let her be doubly chastised for it. Kate scared her to death sometimes. Grace would come home one day and find the girl had flown off to an adventure or three. That thought weighed in her belly like iron.

After all, that was what Grace had done, and look where it brought her.

Her tavern, the Nymph’s Child, had a painted sign above the door that showed the figurehead of a sailing ship: a woman in a rippling gown, her dark hair streaming along the prow, who held an infant in her arms. An odd notion, some said. Grace told them that if ships were called “she,” then why shouldn’t they have children?

She came into the tavern through the back. From the kitchen, she heard voices. At first she thought Kate was begging stories from a patron as usual. Then she caught an anxious edge to Kate’s voice, and heard that the patron was asking most of the questions—about the Nymph, about Kate’s parents. About the story of the treasure.

Quietly, Grace edged into the room along the wall to have a look. She saw a ghost on the verge of harassing her daughter. He was a young sea captain, clean shaven, with a full head of dark hair. His clothing was good quality—wool coat and linen shirt—but weathered, well used. A tricorn hat sat on the table by an untouched glass of brandy.

The stranger looked up, over Kate’s shoulder, his attention caught. He smiled in recognition.

“Grace Lark. Well met,” said David May.

Sixteen years had treated him well. He’d filled out, grown muscles and a proud figure, weathered hands and a hard expression. He had bright, searching eyes. That much had stayed the same.

Grace wanted to tear him to pieces.

She stepped past Kate, dodged the table and lunged at him. Grabbing his collar, she shoved him out of the chair and slammed him against the wall. By God, the boy was six inches taller than her now. But she was still hard as steel, and still—in their memory at least—his superior officer.

“How dare you—how in bloody hell’s dungeon do you dare come in here asking about the treasure?” She wrapped his shirt and coat in her fists and dug them into his neck. “You know it. They all bloody well knew it. There was no treasure!” Her heart raced with the old memories.

“I know,” he said, his voice tense but his eyes steady. He didn’t struggle at all. “I know it, sir.”

“I should kill you. I should kill you for even standing here alive and well, you bastard.” But she let go. He stumbled, keeping his balance against the wall, never taking his eyes off her. His hand went to his belt and the sword sheathed there, but she turned her back on him. “Kate, get everyone out. We’re closed for the day.”

Patrons stared. Grace had broken up a fight or two in her time, but she’d never lost her temper. They seemed happy to leave when Kate asked them to.

Grace turned back to David, who donned a tired smile.

“Lark—your daughter. She looks like him. She looks like Captain Alan. The hair, the eyes—she has this look on her face like—”

Grace rubbed her brow, running her hand across her graying head. “I know. Don’t you think I know?”

When everyone had gone and Kate had barred the door, Grace invited David to sit. She went through a list of other tasks she could send Kate on. Then she thought better of it. The girl sat with them, fidgeting, questions obviously boiling on her lips.

“Why are you here?” Grace asked him.

“I need to know how you crossed the Iron Teeth.”

She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Is that all? Well, Davy May.” She slapped the table in front of him, rattling the glass of brandy. “I need to know how you escaped the Marshal of Hellwarth.”

They stared at each other for a long time, silent, waiting to see who would break first and fill the pause. Sixteen years—he wasn’t a cabin boy anymore, and she wasn’t a pirate. They had to judge each other all over again.

“It’s Captain May,” he said at last.

She raised her brow. “The new ship in the harbor?”

“The Queen’s Heart,” he said.

“Very nice. Especially considering the last time I saw you was in chains in a prison yard. What did you do to be set free? Let the guards have a go at you?”

“The Marshal couldn’t hang a twelve-year-old boy any more than he could hang a pregnant woman. He put me on one of his own ships. He … reformed me.”

The Marshal of Hellwarth was a strict old man with the sense of honor of a long-lost age. Pirates he caught and hanged. Women and boys—could never be pirates, could they? How strange, what his mercy had saved.

“Mum?” Kate looked very solemn, lips pursed and brow furrowed, when she said, “Gregory Lark—Gregory Lark was my father.”

David’s eyes went a little wide, and he hid a smile with his hand. Grace—bloody hell, she was going to have to explain it all.

“No, Kate,” Grace said, equally solemn. “Gregory Lark was your mother, dressed as a man and fallen in with pirates.”

Kate took a long moment to turn this over in her mind. Then, as pieces dropped into place, she stared at Grace with open-mouthed wonder, like she might stare at a giant, or a dragon. Oh, the stars in her eyes had suddenly gotten very big, Grace thought with a sinking heart.

“You?” Kate said, her bottled excitement bursting under pressure at last. “You sailed on the Nymph? Grace Lark—Gregory Lark. You were first mate! First mate of the Nymph! You always told me women don’t go to sea, the superstitions of sailors won’t let women sail, and yet you—you never told me!”

“God, Kate. If it ever got out that anyone from the Nymph lived, people would beat down our door for word of the treasure. I didn’t tell anyone. Especially you. You’ve watched the boats come and go since you were a baby. I didn’t want you getting any more ideas than you already had.”

“What really happened? Did you do it?” Kate said, seemingly impervious to words of caution or explanation. She glanced sidelong at David, and her voice fell to a whisper. “Did you kill Captain Alan?”

Grace had heard the stories as well as Kate had—the stories about the Nymph were Kate’s favorites—and she’d kept her mouth safely shut all this time. The Nymph was a pirate ship, but her captain and crew loved adventure more than gold, and that was why they sailed the Strait of the Iron Teeth, a passage of jagged rock and treacherous shallows that were guarded by a dragon to boot, not for the treasure that lay at the other side but to say that they’d done it. In fact, when the crew did find treasure, it tore them apart: the crew accused Captain Alan of hording it; Alan buried it so that none would have it; the first mate, Gregory Lark, killed Alan, and then the crew killed Lark for revenge. There were a dozen versions, with more arising every year. Grace always told herself that Gregory Lark was someone else and people could say anything they liked about him, she didn’t care.

The moments passed and Grace remained silent. If she spoke, her voice would crack, and she would be finished. Kate had on a beseeching expression, so eager she nearly trembled. Just like Alan when he’d said, We can do it, Grace. We can sail the Iron Teeth.

Kate bit her lip and looked at David, and Grace looked at him as well. She nodded a little. He returned the nod. If he was willing to take on the task of telling Kate, let him have it.

“She didn’t kill him,” David said to the girl. “Far from it. Captain Alan was your father.”

Kate furrowed her brow and her gaze fell. She sat like that for a long time, with David and Grace watching her. Once or twice she acted like she might say one thing, then changed her mind, and finally said, “And he really was hanged at Hellwarth? He’s not going to come through the door, a shadow from a story, is he?”

“I watched him die,” he said softly. Grace looked away. She hadn’t had that privilege—or doom.

Kate twisted her fingers in her lap. “What was he really like? Do the stories tell any truth at all?”

“He was the best and bravest man I ever knew,” David said. “When I find myself in a fix, I ask, ‘What would Alan have done?’ and come out better for considering the answer. I knew who you were as soon as I saw you because you have his face and his sea-gray eyes.”

Her eyes were going red, now. Then, she smiled shyly. “Really?”

“On the soul of my ship, I swear it’s true.”

“Mum—do you miss him?”

“I do. Every day I do.” Sometimes she looked out to the ships and swore she saw the Nymph, sailed by Captain Alan, come to take her away.

“Mister Lark, sir. Ma’am—” David said, “I truly didn’t wish to disrupt your life here. You of all people deserve peace and quiet. But this is a matter of life and death. I must know how you sailed the Iron Teeth.”

Grace smiled crookedly. “Don’t you know? You were there.”

“You locked us all in the hold. That’s where Blount got the idea you’d hidden a treasure.”

The tale was famous:

The crew set the sails. A strong wind followed, and they moved fast. Alan was at the rudder, and when the crewmen realized where their course was headed—toward the rocky pinnacles reaching up from the ocean like clawed hands—they set up a cry. Was he mad? Did Alan mean to kill them all? Do you trust me? he’d said, a wild grin on his face. Most of them did, to the ends of the earth and beyond. But a few, Blount and others, threatened mutiny. That was when Lark appeared with a musket leveled at the lot of them, and four more stacked behind, loaded and ready. He ordered them all below decks and locked the door behind them. There’d be no mutiny on his watch. The crew, David among them, spent the entire journey arguing: Did they break free and mutiny, despite Lark and his muskets? Did they trust the captain and wait it out? Every shudder that rocked the hull, every roll they made over every wave, each man held his breath and prayed. The Nymph moved fast and sure, and six hours later, Lark opened the hold and the Teeth were behind them. Alan and Lark kept the secret of how they did it, and the stories that spread about a hidden treasure seemed credible.

Only Lark—Grace—still lived and knew the truth.

She said, “We never dropped anchor. We never landed—you could tell that, even locked in the hold.”

“That’s what we told Blount, but he sold us out anyway, didn’t he? He thought the dragon must have dropped a chest of gold on deck mid-flight because of some deal you made with it.”

“You see,” Grace said, leaning toward Kate. “Alan’s reputation was so fantastic, even among his own crew, they had him making deals with dragons.”

“Grace, please—”

“Why? Why is this a matter of life and death?”

“The Strait of the Iron Teeth is the shortest distance between Hellwarth and Elles. The Teeth are probably Hellwarth’s greatest defense against Elles’ warships.”

“They can always sail around, if they want war with Hellwarth.”

“Yes. But if a messenger sailed the Teeth, word would reach Hellwarth long before an enemy fleet arrived. We could prepare.”

Thoughtfully, Grace played with the collar of her shirt. “When Elles sends a fleet to take Hellwarth by surprise, it will be up to you to warn the Marshal. You’ve become quite the dutiful patriot.”

He blushed, looking for a moment like the boy who had stumbled onto the ship, wet behind the ears and eager to please. Alan had kept the boy close, protected him, taught him what he knew, turning it into a game so he would learn better. He’d been almost a son, like the best cabin boys were to the best captains. Alan had seemed to like having an almost-son.

Was that why he had seemed so pleased when she told him she was with child? Why he’d been so desperate that she live? What would he have thought of a daughter?

She continued, “You’re here under the Marshal’s orders. He told you that Gregory Lark still lived.”

“Sailing the Teeth was my idea. When I told him my plan, he said I should come find you.”

“Why should I help you? He killed Alan.”

“This would save many lives. If I can bring warning in time—”

She raised her hand, stopping him mid-breath. “You’ve turned into a noble young man, David. Alan would have been proud.”

Slouching over the table, David breathed a sigh heavy enough he might have been holding it for sixteen years. “All this time, I’ve felt like I’m betraying him, serving the Marshal. But—I owe him my life. That means something as well.”

“You survived. You stood by Alan as long as you could, and then you survived. That’s as he would have wanted it.” Live. That word, his voice, haunted her nightmares. She wondered what haunted David’s.

“Will you help me, sir? Will you tell me the secret?”

She laughed. “Can’t you guess? Don’t you know what made the Nymph different than every other ship? You and the Marshal are the only ones who know Alan’s and my secret, and you still don’t know?”

“What a riddle. What made the Nymph different? She was a ship of legend. Her captain was a pirate, but with a code of honor. He never sought treasure for its own sake—only enough to keep up his ship and pay off his crew. She sailed free, under no nation’s flag. She navigated the Teeth, she outran the Marshal until one of her own betrayed her. She was proud, beautiful, an honor to serve like no other ship has been for me since. All that made her different.”

It was Kate who said, “She had a woman on board.”

***

The wind cut through the strait like daggers, and the Nymph had it behind them. They raced to the Iron Teeth, too fast, too many sails unfurled, and the crew shouting in outrage. Even locked in the hold, the screams echoed topside.

Alan had grinned. “I feel bad, really I do. But it’s better this way.”

“Aye,” Lark had said with a sigh.

Alan kept tight hold of the wheel and steered them true.

The rocks towered, rough and dark, shining with damp. They cast wide swathes of shadows, so that the strait was always in twilight.

Then, the pinnacle of a tower of rock moved. The shadow spread, and two great wings made a canopy over the water. Some of the rock wasn’t rock, but scales, which sparkled when the light struck them. A snake-like neck stretched up to a dagger-shaped head, and wide jaws gaped open. The silver teeth inside were like the jagged strait itself. Both would happily swallow anything that crossed their paths. The Iron Teeth and the dragon were the same.

The Nymph’s captain and first mate gazed up at those teeth and felt not fear but wonder.

“Are you ready, Grace?” the captain called, and this time the first mate’s answer was joyous.

“Aye!”

She yanked her kerchief off her neck and pulled apart the buttons of her shirt.

“You’re beautiful!” Alan shouted over the wind.

“You’re a maniac!” she shouted back, laughing.

Running away from him, across the deck to the ship’s prow, she pulled the bandages off her chest, left them trailing on the wind and tangled in rigging.

The dragon groaned, a guttural sound that made the water tremble and pressed around the ship like a weight. The great, wicked head looked down on the Nymph. The wings flapped once, and the ship rocked back. Then the beast jumped to a lower perch, and he was in front of them, staring them down, and they were racing into his jaws.

Standing at the railing, leaning over the water, bare chested, breasts freed, Lark raised her arms to the dragon. Wind and sea spray lashed her.

When the beast sighed, hot breath washed over her. Its wings folded back, and its scaled eyelids drooped.

“A lovely vision,” the dragon said in a deep voice that sounded like crunching gravel. “Why don’t I see more of you? Why does your kind not sail?”

“I don’t know,” she’d said, taken aback by the question, because before the monster the usual reasons scattered like dust. “I really don’t know.”

The dragon let them pass.

He flew overhead, guiding them through the rocks and shoals. All the while Lark spoke to it, told stories and sang songs, though many of the songs he asked for were ancient, and she didn’t know them. When they’d cleared the last of the rocks, the dragon bade them farewell and returned to his lonely perch.

When Captain Alan released the crew, the Iron Teeth were behind them, and he and Mister Lark never revealed how they’d done the impossible.

***

David stared wide-eyed. This amused Grace—the solution was so simple he hadn’t seen it.

Grace nodded. “Putting the crew in the hold kept my secret while I talked to the dragon. Think what Blount would have done if he’d known a woman had been giving him orders all that time.”

“You talked to the dragon? Talked to it?”

“He can be soothed by the sound of a woman’s voice, and by the sight of her body. Seems he lost his mate some few hundred years ago and misses feminine company. He only wants a few words, a sweet voice to tell him how brave and strong he is. He’s really not a bad fellow, but ships in his territory make him ill-tempered. As for the rocks—if you keep to the right-hand way and have a steady hand at the wheel, you’ll pass them by.”

“That’s all?” David stood. “Grace—Mister Lark, sir. Will you come with me? Will you sail the Teeth one more time?”

She almost said yes before she could think to stop the words. That was her life. She’d left it involuntarily. Why not go back? Why not, indeed? Her lean body had grown soft and curved with years and weight. She’d never be able to carry the disguise now. And she had the tavern to run. That life was gone. She’d left it involuntarily, yes. But people always left their lives involuntarily, didn’t they?

“I can’t. I must return the Marshal’s honor in kind. I promised him I’d never set foot on a ship again.”

He nodded, not surprised by the answer. “Do you miss the sea?” he said.

“No. Thinking of sailing reminds me too much of Alan.”

Kate half-jumped from her chair. “I’ll go. Take me. I can learn to sail, I already know all the parts of a ship, I watch them come and go every day and I’ve always wanted to sail. You need a woman to pass through the Iron Teeth. Please take me.”

Grace nearly hit her. “Kate, sit down.”

She didn’t sit. Grace’s daughter glared back at her, rebellion in her eyes. Grace had known this day would come, when she would tell her daughter to do something—and Kate would realize Grace had no power over her. Damn Davy May a second time for bringing this on.

“Kate. Sit down,” Grace repeated. Kate sat. “Kate—you’re all I have left in the world. You’re the only reason I left Hellwarth alive.”

“If you tell me to stay, I will. But this is my chance. My only chance.”

David added his pleading gaze to hers. “The Queen’s Heart has room for a cabin boy, if you can advise her how to dress like one. I’ll guard her with my own life, as well as Captain Alan looked after me. She’ll be safe.”

Didn’t they see how simple the answer was for her? That there could only be one answer for her, and no amount of reasoned argument would change that?

“No,” she said. “Not on anyone’s life. Not for all the world’s wealth. Now, Captain May, this reunion has been pleasant enough, but get out of my tavern.”

He didn’t move right away, and Kate made a sound that might have been a stifled sob. Grace stood. She couldn’t beat David in a fight, not anymore. She could rely on her reputation, though. Her anger. She trusted that the captain of a ship like the Queen’s Heart wouldn’t start a fight here.

Finally, David nodded at her, touching his forehead in a salute as he replaced his hat on his head. Then, he left.

Kate looked like she might scream, as if one of the tantrums of old had returned. Her face flushed, her lips trembled. But she didn’t scream, she didn’t say anything, not even I hate you. She turned and fled to the kitchen.

“Kate!” Grace called after her, wanting to say a hundred things. Let me explain, let me give you all the reasons you shouldn’t go, I want you to have a better life than mine, and a better life isn’t at sea—but it was no good. The girl was off to her bed to have a good cry.

Over the years Grace had listened to a hundred stories that painted her as a villain, the traitorous first mate who shot his captain in the back, who ended the glorious voyages of the famous Nymph.

Only now, at this moment, had she ever felt like a villain.

***

At midnight, the only audible sound was the rush of waves running along the coast. They were regular, constant in form, but in detail they always changed. Some waves struck heavily, some lapped, some were large, some small. One could listen to the waves for a lifetime and never guess their patterns.

“Your eyes are bright as the moon on the waves,” Alan told her, when he’d first wooed her.

“You got that line from an untalented minstrel, didn’t you?” she’d said, smiling.

“Who am I to say whether he had talent? I passed him by in the marketplace; it was the only line I heard. Perhaps the next was better. But if I’d waited for the next, I’d have been late meeting you.”

She’d laughed, because he was so heartfelt, and it probably happened exactly like he said.

What would Alan say if he saw her now? He’d have hated what she’d become: soft, frightened, not a bit of adventure left in her. I’m only following orders, sir.

The moon shone on the waves this night. The Queen’s Heart was still anchored in the harbor.

Though Grace went to bed long after dark, she did not sleep, but listened to the waves instead, so that she also heard the shutters over Kate’s window open, heard a rustling and scraping as someone climbed out the window. The girl thought to avoid waking her by not using the door, but Grace knew all the tricks.

Still dressed, Grace rose from her bed and went out to the common room, then through the front door. She caught Kate sneaking around the side of the building. Hands on her hips, frowning, Grace blocked her daughter’s path.

Kate wore her cloak and hugged a satchel close to her chest. This wasn’t a stroll, this wasn’t just wanting a last look at the new galleon. This was fleeing. In her mind’s eye, Grace saw a little girl with gold hair, a round face, and wide eyes staring up at her, filled with guilt at some petty crime like breaking a clay jar or tracking mud through the kitchen.

But that wasn’t the Kate who stood before her now. Now, a young woman, lips tight with determination, looked her straight in the eye. When had she gotten to be so tall? Why hadn’t Grace noticed?

“You can’t stop me,” Kate said. “I’m going. I’ll fight you if I have to, even if you are Gregory Lark.”

Grace didn’t believe that name really held so much terror. It was a story, a fairy tale.

If she hadn’t had Kate, she wouldn’t have remembered what Alan looked like at all. And what would Alan have done at this moment? Let her go, or you’ll never have a chance to say goodbye.

“You’ll cut your hair and bandage your breasts,” Grace said. “You’ll learn to walk and speak like a boy. You can never forget for a moment that you’re playing the part of a boy. Do you understand?”

Quickly, bird-like, Kate nodded.

“The men who like boys—David will keep them off you. But you must learn how to look after yourself. Tell David he must teach you how to fight. I trust David, but no one else, and he might not always be there to protect you. Do you understand, Kate?”

“Yes, yes I do—” And suddenly she was crying, without a sound, tears wet on her cheeks. Grace opened her arms and the girl came to her, hugging her with all her strength.

“Come back to me safe, Kate,” Grace said, whispering, because her throat had closed and her own tears were falling. She had so much to tell Kate, so much more advice to give, but there wasn’t time, because the tide was turning and David was no doubt waiting at the pier. But she had time for one last piece of advice. One last, desperate plea. “And for God’s sake, don’t fall in love with your captain.”

© 2008 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.
 Originally appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nowadays, invented languages are ubiquitous. Organizations like the Language Creation Society and resources like FrathWiki and the Conlanger Bulletin Board serve to pool the talents of those who are interested in creating their own language. At the same time, many film franchises have made the concept of the invented, fictional language commonplace: Marc Okrand’s Klingon was popularized through the Star Trek film and TV franchise, and Paul Frommer’s Na’vi was invented for the movie Avatar.

Fantasy attracts via its presentation of worlds which are familiar enough to orient readers, yet alien enough to continually surprise them. The strangeness of the fantasy world can be expressed through art, music, costume, architecture, artifacts, and magic. But the easiest way, using the written word, makes the reader aware of the strangeness of the world through language: the names by which people and places and unusual things are known, the phrases and poetry by which an alien consciousness expresses itself. Nothing says otherness so clearly as a foreign language.

***

The Most Basic Fantasy Languages

Already in 1726, Jonathan Swift, satirizing the traveler’s tale in Gulliver’s Travels, appreciated the ability of a fictitious foreign language to give verisimilitude to his imaginary kingdom of Lilliput. When Gulliver hears the words hekinah degul and tolgo phonac, he is at once quite sure that he is outside of the safe, ordinary, intelligible world.

Swift’s invention is, by modern standards, slipshod and unimaginative; his words contain no sounds that do not occur in English, and most of his quoted phrases are untranslated. There is little to indicate anything resembling a consistent morphology or grammar in the Lilliputian language, almost every word being a random, independent invention unrelated to all other words. But despite Swift’s naivety of language construction we can perceive in his work an understanding that endowing a fictional nation with its own language is the quickest way to invest it with a plausible foreignness.

The language, of course, need not be a real one, or even have any resemblance to any real-world language (though such resemblances are almost impossible to avoid). Lord Dunsany, the Irish writer of fantasy short stories, succeeded in evoking an atmosphere of oriental decadence with the names Thuba Mleen and Utnar Véhi, even though the names do not resemble any language actually spoken in the Middle East, now or in the past, and do not mean anything in and of themselves.

***

A Greater Level of Detail

An author, and fans of the author’s work, can find a lot of satisfaction in a language that is created to a much greater level of detail. Unlike fictional buildings and books and armor and other artifacts, which are only suggested to the imagination by a description on the page, a fully-realized language can actually exist in the real world. By learning and using the created language, or as much of it as exists, a reader can participate in the fiction, bridging the gap between imagination and reality.

In a more elaborate fantasy world, a language may be much more than a background detail that brings credibility. It may be the vehicle of magic and mystery by which core truths about the structure of the world are conveyed. This notion of the power and sanctity of words has often surfaced in fantasy. Thus, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Elvish languages serve as a medium for magic, and in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, the Old Speech of the dragons both defines and creates the world. In the Earthsea world, magic is an innate skill, but can only be channeled through study of language. The knowledge of the true name of an object, the name used in Old Speech, gives the speaker power over that object. A rock, tolk in the Old Speech, when so named can be nothing else, even if it has been enchanted to resemble something else; to change its being, its name must also be changed, which can be done only by wizards. The more exactly and specifically a thing or a person can be named, the greater the power a wizard can have over it, and therefore people in Earthsea guard their True Names carefully. This echoes Christian mythology, which holds that the knowledge of the name of a demon gives the possessor the power to command it. The idea of names as power and language as magic is an old one.

The nineteenth century saw great advances in the scientific study of language, and toward the end of that century, those improvements were translated into projects for the creation of full-fledged languages which would bear the imprint of their creators’ personal likes and dislikes. The first such attempts had the goal of creating “international languages,” which would either supplement or even supersede the multiplicity of languages in the world, allowing all people to communicate regardless of nationality. Schleyer’s Volapük and Zamenhof’s Esperanto were among the earliest examples of this type.

In this milieu J. R. R. Tolkien, a scientific scholar of languages and a mythmaker, began to write stories where the names of places and characters were drawn from his languages Qenya and Goldogrin. As the legends grew into what became the Silmarillion, the languages grew as well, influenced by the needs of the fictional setting, and eventually became the mature languages Quenya and Sindarin, the languages of two elf clans.

It was not until The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954-5 that the public had any idea of the scope of Tolkien’s invention. Behind the galaxy of invented nomenclature which readers found (and sometimes stumbled upon), there was a remarkably subtle and detailed construction, not just of a single language, but of an entire language family, with its own self-consistent internal history. Primitive Quendian, its more developed descendant, Common Eldarin, and its various descendants including Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin, Ossiriandic, and Silvan share a great deal of basic vocabulary that originates from Quendian roots, but the pronunciation of words varies in predictable ways from language to language, as does the grammar. Thus the words for “silver” and “elves” in Quenya are tyelpë and eldar, but in Telerin they are telepë and elloi, and in Sindarin they are celeb and edhil. The historical development of each of these languages can now be traced with great precision.

Quenya was the earliest elf language in the Lord of the Rings mythos, and also the earliest elf language thought up by J. R. R. Tolkien. He began constructing it from 1910-1920, decades before the book was published. It, like the Earthsea language, began by the elves finding power and identity in the naming of things. Over time, it developed multiple dialects, practiced by each of the elf clans. By the time of the Lord of the Rings, it was considered by the characters of the book, to be the old and formal language, used by the elves who had gone from the earth to their haven. Sindarin was more like kitchen-elvish. It was created by Tolkien in 1944, although it was heavily influenced by a “gnomish” language that he had been developing for years before. Beleriandic Sindarin, a dialect, used by peripatetic groups of elves, was a common tongue for all elf-groups to use in order to be understood. It was the practical, middle-earth, traveling language shared by some humans and wizards.

Not all authors are so completist in their language development. George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones series created a world in which there were many languages, including Dothraki and Valyrian. He famously told fans: “I have something like eight words of Valyrian. When I need a ninth, I’ll make one up.” Dothraki was fleshed out by David Peterson of the Language Creation Society for the television adaptation of A Game of Thrones. Peterson was chosen by the producers after a competition hosted by the LCS between several different experienced language creators. Dothraki itself is still a work in progress; the available corpus is still quite small, with fewer than 500 words known so far, but it is to be expected that, as the series unfolds, it will become more complex and detailed.

***

Turning Fans Into Detectives

On the other hand, Tolkien’s languages retained a certain amount of sketchiness. Quenya, the most elaborate of the languages, has a vocabulary perhaps a tenth of the size of that of the most speakers’ everyday language. Some aspects of its grammar were never explained in writing, or were described in contradictory ways; anyone who wishes to write Quenya nowadays must engage in some guesswork and extrapolation, and avoid some constructions for which the Quenya equivalent is unknown.

That does not mean that Quenya is not a “real language,” but it does mean that—like many ancient languages only attested by a limiting corpus of crumbling monuments and clay tablets—it is incompletely and imperfectly known.

Most fantasy languages operate under the same limitations. Even when the inventor has taken the trouble to compose a basic grammar and a substantial lexicon for the benefit of those who wish to use the language the language is rarely so fully developed as to be completely useful for all the purposes of a natural language. However, if the goal is not so much to enable an entirely new mode of communication (as with Esperanto) but to give a flavor of an alien culture—from another time, place, world or dimension—they are often quite successful.

One of my favorite lines in this piece is, “The only words Pratt understood on the programme were the neologisms: Crisisgate, Lovemaker Missile, CLOTH Talks, Oopscam and Errscam.” We live in a time when “nom nom” makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Words seem to be created, accepted and discarded at an ever more-frantic pace. Do you have any thoughts on the growth and evolution of language?

Well, I suppose I must have such thoughts, but they don’t seem to have advanced any since I wrote this little parable, nor been extended into any study into what it would seem should have been a definite interest, from the clue of this early story! I know there’s such a thing as semantics, and the philosophy of language, and of course the genealogy of language and so forth, but I never have gravitated toward any such understanding. I’ve never learned a foreign language, I never studied Latin and can only sometimes tell whether a word is Latinate or Anglo-saxon, and I’m not even very good at naming the parts of grammar beyond the “primary colors” (adjective, noun, verb and a couple of others), nor at doing literal grammatical analyses of sentences.

What strikes me now is how much like Pratt I am, in a way—devoted to hardening my shell of ignorance, and operating within it, even if it isn’t so small as his. I’ve always had a very excited feeling about the innate properties of words, their tangible, and often onomatopoetic properties—almost a synesthetic feel for them, that I’ve preferred to having these external frameworks and devices surrounding language. It’s with that “feel”—I hope I’m not mystifying things—that neologisms are always so striking to me, excitingly weird and terrific when they’re necessary, when they expand something (without having any goal in mind, no Joycean impulse to word-creation, I do find I often invent little words, sometimes in a way no one would be too likely to notice—my spellchecker tells me about it—and I usually leave these in the text, for future struggles with copyeditors). They’re also ugly and objectionable when they seem to make language coarser or more crass and commercial, or when they open the way for historical amnesia—we should, for instance, call the horrible corporate entities that plague our reality “trusts,” shouldn’t we? But it seems somehow naive and antique—or perhaps it reminds us that we thought we “busted” the “trusts,” yet here they are, ruling our world. Lydia Davis has this great short story that rants against the funeral directors who’ve invented the word “cremains,” which strikes her as demolishing whole areas of human sensitivity in one blow—I agree with her.

What are some words you would never, ever want to lose?

Just you asking that makes me instantly unable to recall them.

When Pratt has finally eliminated his English vocabulary, he says: “New York transmuted itself into a wonderland of incomprehensibility.” He is cast adrift from humanity, more alone, and more free. This is in fascinating contrast to Orwell’s 1984, where the government is destroying English so people can be better controlled. Were you thinking of 1984 when you wrote this? Were there any books or stories that influenced this piece?

Well, at the time I wrote this—I was twenty-one, or twenty-two—Orwell’s 1984 was one of the books that most ruled the small kingdom of my literary influence, so it would have been traceable (along with Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Berger, and Franz Kafka) in this story, or anything else I wrote or probably mused about writing at the time. All of those writers are conscious elements in this mix, as ponderous a suggestion as that may seem—how could such a slight story support so many titans? Yet, there it is—I did go around being consciously influenced by all of them at once back then. It’s a miracle the results are readable at all.

What’s striking to me here, though, is the powerful new influence I’d come under, and how much it directs this story in particular: I’d discovered the short stories of Bruce Jay Friedman in the months before, and was reading them compulsively. I clearly gathered in quite a bit of his tone and form for this piece.

Pratt works so hard to protect his aloneness, to escape the constant presence of communication. This story was written in 1990, before everyone owned a cell phone, before Facebook and blogging, before wireless internet. I have wondered if we use telecommunications to block out the press of humanity or to more thoroughly inundate ourselves. Do you think we now have more control over communication or less?

I tend to believe much less has changed than people sometimes want to believe. Ironically, the world was at the time threatening—or promising—to become far less linguistic and textual—the story ignores all this, but in the background was the invention of virtual reality, which I wrote about incessantly back in that time, usually from a crank’s perspective. The promise was that we’d shed language (along with, incidentally, our bodies), in favor of a polymorphic new language of color and movement and pure understanding. Odd how much the internet has instead been a giant pile of epistolary mediums, a series of rivalrous telegraph poles for all these short urgent missives we’re all tapping out. But in a much more literal and prosaic sense there is something strangely antique about this story, which if it were recast in the present would beg the question of cell phones, the internet, and so forth. In fact, it would seem to demand that the last word he ever understood was glimpsed on a sheet spitting forth from a fax machine, I think.

The story also looks odd in the assertion that Montreal would in any way provide Pratt with such perfect insulation from the English language. I lived in Canada for a little while later on, and it wasn’t like that. Even Paris isn’t like that now—maybe it would have been when I wrote the story, still, but barely.

Pratt had taken Spanish in high school. He passed the classes, but only narrowly, and he didn’t retain any memory of the language. He certainly didn’t have any handle on the French he heard around him in Montreal. He went to the store for cigarettes and pointed; first at the brand he wanted, then at the bowl of matches behind the cash register. He switched on the television in his hotel room and watched the news in French (weathermen gesturing at the odd Canadian-based map) and was unable to understand anything; all he could puzzle out were the categories: international news, local items, sports, weather, human interest. The news seemed very simple that way; reduced to a series of formats it became oddly small and comprehensible.

Pratt felt alone. He felt alone in New York, and it was a feeling he thrived on; his aloneness insulated him, made it possible for him to live in the city. Now, in Montreal, he felt the flowering within himself of a potential for a new kind of aloneness, something much deeper, and something more unique. Walking alone through a city of strangers, unable to share their language, suggested enticing possibilities to him.

Back in New York the following week Pratt walked the distance to work, stopped in at his accustomed cigar store to buy cigarettes, and rode the elevator upstairs to his office; in short, his standard routine, without deviation—yet it didn’t feel right. Pratt felt hemmed in by the people around him for the first time, his invisible Gardol shield of isolation stripped mysteriously away. He heard snippets of conversation as he passed or was passed on the sidewalks, and the packets of language landed unbidden on the doorstep of his consciousness, and intruded on his cool solitary thoughts. The cigar man struck up a needless conversation about the humidity, despite Pratt’s silently pointing at the desired items, the way he had in Montreal.

Pratt isolated himself in his office, put his folder of papers into the bottom drawer of his desk, then gathered the accumulated interoffice memos of the last week and balled them up and threw them away without reading them. Pratt had learned something about not being reached in Montreal, and he determined to apply it directly to his job. At some deeper level he knew that such an attitude would quickly mean the end of his job, but he could live with that. The path he was about to follow would lead him far beyond his job. He was on the verge, he felt, of developing a philosophy.

Pratt wondered what came next. He was carefully retying his shoelaces when the door to his office opened. It was Glock, Pratt’s supervisor, and the man who’d chosen Pratt for the Montreal deal. Glock didn’t come into the office; he leaned in the doorway, crossing his arms. His face was expressive and rubbery; now it expressed a scowl.

“You didn’t find things interesting in Montreal? Geez. You should’ve called. Northern’s guy really liked you, he really did, he called me to ask if anything was the matter. What’s the matter? Didn’t you like the guy? He said you two hit it off. That’s a good connection, Pratt. You should’ve called, we could have talked about it. What’s the matter?”

Pratt winced at the flood of language Glock undammed in his direction. He couldn’t even remember the guy from Northern. “I don’t feel good,” he told Glock.

“Geez. You don’t look that good. You don’t feel good? You didn’t feel good?”

“I didn’t feel good.”

“You should have called. You don’t feel good? Geez, go home. This isn’t high school, Pratt. Go home if you don’t feel good.”

Pratt went home. He did his best to avoid overhearing conversations on the way back, taking side streets and veering wide when he passed couples or groups of people. A gray man with a tattered hat stepped up from against the side of a building and stuck his hand out at Pratt. “Spare change man? I gotta get something to eat.” Pratt edged away from him without answering.

By the time he was safely back in his apartment Pratt had formulated his new ambition: He wanted a divorce from the English language. He felt amazed at the simplicity and grace of his plan. The relationship he strove to strike up with the world was uniquely shallow: The world consistently misunderstood, and pressed him for further commitment. Pratt wanted to turn the world down, definitively this time, and the abandonment of the language of his fellow men seemed to him the perfect embodiment of this ideal.

Pratt knew from lifelong experience that words sometimes slipped free of their meanings when he repeated them over and over, or wrote them down again and again; they became abstract, and refused to adhere. Words could hemorrhage, and bleed empty of their lifeblood meaning. He decided to perfect this technique, if it could be perfected, to systematize it, and through it, forget the entirety of the English language. The very thought of it made him hungry and impatient for this loss, for the empty completeness of it, like a man finally stepping free of his shadow, yet he knew it would take a long time—years perhaps. Pratt didn’t mind. He knew he could rein in his impatience, he knew he had what it took. He knew he was good for it.

Nonetheless, Pratt shook with excitement. He went into the living room and sat down in the middle of the couch, fighting to breathe evenly and cleanly, struggling not to cross his legs. I’ll start now, he told himself, and began searching for a word with which to begin. I’ll lose my first words first, he thought; that’s the proper way to do it.

Mommy, mommy, mommy, Pratt thought heavily and intentionally. He said it aloud: “Mommy, mommy, mommy, Mommy­mommymommy.” He groped on the coffee table for a legal pad and scribbled the word again and again in looping script; mommy, mommy, mommy.

The syllables were perfect, near nonsense to begin with, and they lost their meaning for Pratt almost immediately. But he didn’t stop there. He pressed on, his tongue swelling on big mommymommy syllables, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth, four pages filled with illegible mommymommy and then on to the fifth, pencil point blunted fat like tongue, mommymommymommy.

He killed the word and flogged its corpse, only stopping when he couldn’t go on, collapsing back on the couch, exhausted. The word was gone, eradicated, nowhere to be found. Pratt waited, but it didn’t come back. He probed for it fearfully, turning over mossy stones in his consciousness, but no mommy crawled out. He looked at the pages of scribbled mommymommy but it seemed another language to him, unreadable, meaningless, baffling. The word was gone. One down, he thought.

The next word took less time, and the one after that even less. Pratt was suspicious; he checked each word for its absence, but each seemed obediently banished. He finished with dad, then cat, then man and bad and boy, then hat and hot together, repeating them alternately: hathothathothathothathot. He finished a dozen words before he felt his eyelids slipping down toward the floor, his grip loosening on his pencil. He put himself to bed.

The next morning he deliberately avoided the living room, where the coffee table sat littered with sheets of the yellow pad. The words—whichever words they had been— were gone, and he didn’t want them back. As he sipped his coffee in the kitchen he grew increasingly pleased with the events of the previous night, and increasingly resolute. Waking with a smaller vocabulary was exhilarating; he felt lighter, freer, less hemmed in. The clear priority was to send the rest of the language packing, the sooner the better.

After cleaning up in the kitchen, Pratt went out for a walk in the park. The crisp air felt good in his lungs, and the sun felt good on his head. There was nobody in the park yet. Pratt warmed up by disposing of tree and sky, defying categorical reality by staring up at the oak leaves drifting in the wind against a backdrop of blue even as he eradicated the words. This done, he felt immediately ready for bigger things. He rid himself of a couple of unusual, once-in-a-while words: sundial and migraine, mixing them into midial and sungraine before allowing them to fade completely.

It got easier and easier. Even the most tenacious words proved banishable after fifteen or twenty repetitions, and some others slipped away after Pratt pronounced them twice. He’d developed a muscle for destroying language, and it grew strong through exercise. Pratt spent the day wandering through the park, forgetting words: He forgot words as he clambered over boulders, and he forgot words while he lay with his eyes closed on the great lawn. When he got hungry he found a vendor and bought a hot dog, and in the process of eating it killed hot dog, killed frank, killed wiener and sausage and wurst, until all the words disappeared and he was left to finish a nameless tube of meat.

Things seemed to like being unnamed; they expanded, became at once more ambiguous and more real. The speech Pratt heard as people strolled past seemed littered with meaningless, musical phrases; their sentences were coming unhinged, and the less Pratt understood the more he liked. As meaningful words assailed his ears he spoke them and rendered them meaningless, then tossed away their empty husks to the invisible wind.

Pratt arrived home exhausted, yet buoyant. He no longer feared the yellow pad on the coffee table; he rushed in and happily made neither head nor tails of it. He opened a book from his shelf and read a sentence, delightedly baffled by most of it; when he found a word he knew he pronounced it and it disappeared. He had it down to a single utterance now. To use a word was to lose it.

Glock called. It jolted Pratt to be on the telephone. He hurriedly conducted a search for the words that were left, to try and patch together a response.

“You should see a doctor,” said Glock. “It’s paid for, it’s taken out of your paycheck, so why not just go? Do you know a good doctor? Why don’t you see mine?”

Pratt didn’t understand. “Overabundant,” he said. “Inconspicuous.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Dr Healthbronner, 548-7980,” Glock went on. “He’s good, I’ve known him for twenty years. I mean, Jeezus, take care of yourself. You sound like shit.”

“Shit,” repeated Pratt into the receiver. Without knowing it, Glock had opened up a whole new category of words. “Piss crap cunt prick snatch,” said Pratt. The words disappeared as he mouthed them.

“Okay, okay, Jeezus,” said Glock. “I was only trying to help. Stay home, for god’s sake, stay home until you feel better. One hundred percent. Call me if you need anything.” He hung up.

The call unnerved Pratt. His job, he saw, was lost to him forever. Quite a lot, in fact, was lost to him forever. He began to wish the process had not gotten so automatic. The few words left began to seem more and more like commodities, things to be treasured. Not that he didn’t want to finish the job, eliminate the language entirely, but now it seemed important to savor its going, to draw the process out.

He slept fitfully that night, and although he had never been a somniloquist he awoke several times, bathed in sweat and trembling slightly, to the sound of his own voice calling out some stray word into the darkness, always too late to know what he was losing. He felt he’d only slept an hour or two when the sun began to creep through the window.

Pratt showered, shaved, and flossed his teeth, trying to pull himself together. Words surfaced from the murk of his consciousness and he struggled not to say them aloud. He pushed them into a corner of his mind, a little file of what he had left, and like the tiles on a Scrabble tray he shuffled and reshuffled them, trying to form coherent sentences. It was a losing struggle. He could feel words receding, becoming abstract and meaningless just from his thinking about them over-strenuously; he reached the point where for a word to remain meaningful he needed to hear it spoken aloud, given the tangibility of speech, and he lost several words this way, because by now anything he spoke aloud destroyed itself, immediately and forever.

After a thin breakfast Pratt went downstairs, but after walking halfway to the park he was caught in a sudden rain shower, and forced back to his apartment. He was unlocking his apartment door when the phone began ringing, and fumbled impatiently at the lock while it rang, twice, three times, four times; he dropped his keys in the foyer and jogged through the dark apartment to the phone. It seemed suddenly terribly important to answer it.

It was a wrong number. “Dan Shard?” asked the voice on the other end.

Pratt had already surrendered no to the void. He made a guttural sound into the line.

“Dan Shard? Who’s there? May I speak to Mr Shard?”

Pratt shook his head, made the sound again.

“Mr Shard?”

“Pratt,” said Pratt, before he could stop himself. “Pratt,” he said again, wonderingly, and then the word vanished.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice on the line, and hung up.

Pratt saw now that he was painting himself into a corner, in a room where the paint would never dry, where he would have to climb onto the wall, and begin painting that, and then from there onto the ceiling. The horizon of consciousness grew nearer and nearer. The world at large might be round but Pratt’s world was flat, and he was about to fall off the edge of it.

That night he watched the news on the television. The only words Pratt understood on the programme were the neologisms: Crisisgate, Lovemaker Missile, CLOTH Talks, Oopscam and Errscam. Advertisements seemed bewildering and surreal. Switching the channels Pratt eventually stumbled on a station consisting exclusively of these miniature epics, one ad after another. He watched this station, transfixed, for almost half an hour, when it came to him that they were rock videos.

He called Glock back, but got the answering machine. Pratt had saved up a last message, a cry for help, and felt deflated at not being able to deliver it. It was already losing its meaning in the storeroom of his consciousness, and he decided to leave it on Glock’s tape.

“Well, I’m not home,” went Glock’s voice. “Relax. I’ll be back. Just leave a message. Just leave a message, and I’ll call, and we’ll talk. Relax.” The machine beeped.

“Ebbing,” blurted Pratt. He felt proud at having saved such a simple word for so long. The rest of the message wasn’t so easy. “John­-Hancocked auto-mortality affidavit,” he continued. “Disconsolate.” He paused for effect, and then delivered the last word, the only word he had left, the payload. “Bereft,” he said, giving it all he had, the full thespian treatment. The machine clicked off between the two syllables of the word.

Pratt put the phone down. He couldn’t think of any more words. He went to the bathroom and brushed out his tired mouth with mint toothpaste, then went into the living room and gathered up the books on his shelves and carried them out to the incinerator.

Pratt slept surprisingly well that night, cool between the sheets, his mind empty. He didn’t dream. When he awoke he felt cleansed; with the furniture of language finally cleared the movers’ footprints could be wiped away, and the dust-bunnies swept out of the corners. There was nothing left to forget: English had become a foreign language to him, and the world was rendered innocent of connotation. His doubts about the process evaporated. He’d panicked momentarily, been a little weak in the knees, but now that he was language-free he knew how little cause he’d had for alarm. He awoke into a rightness, his wish granted. Like a snail with its shell Pratt now lugged his own private Montreal around on his back. He was a tourist everywhere, a tourist originating from a land so private and complete that it didn’t require a language.

He went downstairs, and out. The sun was busy clearing the puddles away, and Manhattan warmed into activity. Pratt walked up Broadway, feeling confident. Everything seemed bigger now, more promising and mysterious, and, most importantly, further away. He considered going in to work; they couldn’t harm him now that he’d become invulnerable. The air was filled with the musical chatter of conversation—the forest couldn’t harm him now that he’d become invulnerable. The air was filled with the musical chatter of conversation as the forest air is filled with the singing of birds; New York transmuted itself into a wonderland of incomprehensibility.

Pratt passed a shopkeeper haggling with a fat black woman over the price of bananas; she waved her curled-up money and cradled the bananas like a long lost child. Pratt frowned disapprovingly at how much she communicated, beyond language, and at how much he picked it up despite himself. Pratt saw a teenage boy on a skateboard perform a flourish for a gaggle of girls who idled in a building entrance; transfixed by the subtleties of the interaction, Pratt had to tear himself away from it. Suddenly the walls of comprehension were closing in again.

A pair of businessmen with briefcases parted on the sidewalk to make room for Pratt to pass, and though their language seemed a babble of water-rushing-over-rocks, Pratt felt astonished at what he learned from their manner, their expressions and gesticulations. It was inescapable. Like a blind man whose other senses attune themselves in compensation, Pratt found himself involuntarily sensitized to nonverbal forms of communication.

He panicked, turned around and headed back toward his apartment, reverting to his former strategies of steering wide berths around groups of people who might be tainted with language. As he ran Pratt struggled to understand this new predicament, racking his brains like a snake-bit man who had once learned the formula for the antidote.

There was clearly more to communication than language; that had been an underestimation of his opponent, a mistake Pratt knew he couldn’t afford to make twice. It seemed clear enough; he was going to have to forget body language.

Back safe in his apartment, Pratt sat on the couch and began shrugging mechanically.

© 1990 by Jonathan Lethem.
 Originally appeared in Journal Wired.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

***

The Bright and the Dark 

Like most people reading this, I spent a sizable chunk of my formative years in the library. A side effect of devouring a wide variety of novels at the library is that I quickly figured what types of stories that I was partial to on an unconscious, or even primal, level. While a well-written tale is a well-written tale, a person may be more partial to medieval fantasy, hard science fiction, or trashy pulp fiction than anything else. Those stories trip something in your hindbrain that says, “Yes. This is for me. This is what I’m all about. This is my genre.” At first glance, Steampunk, as a genre, seems only like yesterday with a technological twist. The architecture is complicated, the style of dress even more so, and everything is shiny and bright. Even the darker Steampunk stories I’ve read—the ones with thick clouds of smog filling the sky and despairing, lost souls wandering the alleyways—still had that sheen of superficial chrome.

But the chrome isn’t just superficial. In the hardboiled fiction I enjoy, men wear ragged, ill-fitting suits and fire pistols that they clean while drinking whiskey out of a dirty glass. Women plot murders behind pretty smiles, and the authorities are just as corrupt as the gunsel waiting outside your window. The city is cold and unforgiving, with malice waiting inside every patch of fog or dark alley. Crime fiction is often about not being able to trust anyone or anything, from your best friend to Mother Nature. You can’t even trust your best friend to watch your back, because he’s too busy looking out for number one.

***

Technology as Magic

Everyone knows a Steampunk story that has exactly the same aura of mistrust and treachery under the shined exterior. The same base human desires and weaknesses play out in every genre. But Steampunk doesn’t approach the same tone as the others. It can’t. And it’s all due to that “sheen” of this strange, fanciful, Steampunk technology. New inventions aren’t just a convenience. Technology, real and imagined, has a way of spreading into every nook and cranny of our lives, changing how we do things and altering our lives for the better. A certain level of technological advancement allows fantastic things to happen, be they teleportation in Star Trek or steam-powered computers.

Steampunk as a genre is about traversing the edge of that level of technology. Characters have weapons and gadgets that are conceptually similar to things we have in the modern day, but work in entirely different ways, forcing them into what we in the real world conceive as the magical. Buildings appear to pulse and breathe due to the regular exhalations of steam, which puts me in the mind of hearts and lungs. The result is a strange synergy of cold, metallic technology and a hint of organic life that feels welcoming and endlessly optimistic.

***

The Hope of the Past 

There is always conflict in stories, and there’s always a little guy to be stepped on, but a Steampunk story creates a world that is several orders of magnitude more utopian than those in any other genre out there. It almost has to be, considering that it suggests a world of highly advanced technology in a time parallel to or earlier than our own. It implies a certain measure of cooperation amongst the citizens of that world. You don’t get to the point where massive, gear-powered cities dot the land and extraordinary flying machines fill the skies without someone, somewhere, getting along. That measure of cooperation, technology, and idealism was sorely lacking in the past that we know from history books. Steampunk, as a genre, is putting it back.

Steampunk is the literary architecture of idealism. As a genre it has to be better than my hardboiled tales of murderers and burnouts—even when it deals with murderers and burnouts. It reaches back to the past for inspiration, but blends modern idealism with an extrapolation of past technology in order to do so. For a lot of people, and particularly from our point of view, the past was not a pleasant place to be. Steampunk provides writers and artists with a way to take hold of the past and fix it, molding it into a much more interesting, and perhaps even healthier, shape than it possessed before. It lets you wash away the unpleasantness of yesterday and replace it with something majestic. It’s nostalgia for a time that never was. And even I have to admit that that is an enthralling concept.