Miri leans her head against my shoulder and tells me where to go.
* * *
Following Miri’s directions, I reach a part of the island I’ve never seen, a tiny cave in a cliff-wall cleft where the spume rises a hundred feet at high tide. A risky climb down even for Callie—the slightest slip of claw would send her tumbling to jagged rocks, or drown her in whirlpool current.
I couldn’t make this climb in full gear, let alone regularly unaided. Fortunately I don’t need to. I fly down and settle on the ledge.
Charnel-house smell wafts from the cave, mixed with salt sea air.
I am light, so I need none inside.
The piles of corpses were a grim touch, O Self. Rodents aplenty, some few birds, several of the larger lizards. (How did she carry them down the cliff?) She drained their blood into a turtle’s upended shell, having scooped the rest of the turtle out and chucked it against one wall. She left the meat in a heap and only gnawed it slightly. (She wouldn’t want the old man to wonder why she wasn’t hungry come dinner.) Why not toss the corpses into the sea? Afraid, maybe, I’d notice circling sharks.
What she did with the blood surprises me.
Callie loathes education. The old man tries to bring her into line, and I encourage her, but she scorns paper and pen. Force a quill into her hand and she breaks it, or eats it, point first. She drank a pot of ink to get out of lessons, and spent the rest of the day vomiting black. Once, she threw the notebook the old man had given her into the fire. She hates sums especially.
But equations cover the cave wall.
She mixed her ink from critter blood and berries and drew them with a crab-leg stylus and wrote row after row of math, circuit diagrams, NO-space topology, filament stress analysis, and, on the ceiling—punctuated by the wounds her claws must have left as she hung there three-limbed drawing with her right, she might have hissed eat your heart out, Michelangelo and wondered how his heart would have tasted—a diagram plotting a black hole slingshot orbit.
Callie planned our flyby, estimated the point of my greatest distraction. She knew to the picosecond when the filaments would give, when I would lack the cycles to watch her. The equations have been scrubbed clean and rewritten. She’s worked on this for a while. Bided her time. Waited for her chance.
And seized it.
The cave leads back into the rock and becomes a tunnel shored with shark jawbones and whale ribs.
Find her, the old man said. I follow.
Down and down, twist and turn, screwing into bedrock and soil. I dislike water and earth and they return the favor, pushy gross elements, ick. I wish I could deny this, but—they remind me of the tree, oh Self, they remind me of witch hands pressing wood over our limbs, of sap hissing solid around our fingers, of the cloyed dark as she streaked the wood across our lips and eyes—
A spark dancing on the wind of a draft, I descend. But there shouldn’t be a draft down here.
Naturally, as soon as I think that, the tunnel collapses.
There’s no warning, O Self. The tunnel mouth crumbles in. I could almost flee back to the surface, dart up through the twists and turns to burst free.
I don’t. Callie came this way. And I have to find her.
I sprint past snapping jawbone stays, I dodge falling rocks, I laugh and sing, and I descend.
The genius of this place! The tunnel winds through part of us I thought destroyed, rent by Witchmite teeth before we closed our eyes and ears. Callie built her hidey-hole from burned circuitry and stitched code. Miri always said Callie wasn’t dumb, just obstinate—hated the old man’s rule, hated me for helping him. She didn’t like his teaching, so she taught herself.
I burst from the collapsing tunnel into void.
For one exhilarating brilliant minute, down’s up, right’s left, and I don’t know where I am. New senses unfurl through broadband and q-stream, and reflexively my legs clutch our hull, scraping plate.
What?
Unfamiliar hardware sears me, I’m tickled with serial numbers that don’t belong. This form has optical sensors, and irising them open I see us in visual band as our forebears saw, an enormous flattened gold-white teardrop attenuating to a stern bubbled with NO-engines. We are so beautiful, even scarred. Beauty and scars alike catch me, choke me, even as I remember the last time I used eyes like this, to watch Herself burning, redshifted, away, as we fled. . . .
And then I realize where I am. What Callie’s done.
I have legs. A tiny engine. My q-antennas, my radio receivers, are open to all the horrors of the deep.
I’m in a Witchmite.
In space, no one can hear you hyperventilate.
I thought we broke them all. Scraped off the ones clinging to our hull, killed and culled them with EMPs and subtle magic, kept ahead of the swarm. I thought we were quiet, secret, safe, broken.
Maybe we missed this one. Or it hid, until Callie found it.
What has she done?
No sooner do I ask the question than I see us change.
Our white-gold skin bubbles and flowers. Antennas extend. Long-dormant comms awake. I broke them myself, but they unfold—and soon, a few hundred seconds, they’ll open to the night.
Callie wants to sell us to the Witch.
The comms lines aren’t open yet. The old man must be raging, fighting her every cycle—but Callie did all this on the hardware level, healing systems with this Witchmite and its cutting torch, its tiny mandibles.
I can stop her, though. If I catch her.
And I can catch anything.
* * *
I get back inside easy, now the comms are open. I overflow buffers, tunnel through walls, sift past proxy traps not built to hold a creature of air and flame like me. I arrive, and burn like a new sun above the seawall cliffs.
Miri stands, binocs down, eyes open. I don’t stare into them. I can’t bear to see what I look like now. “Listen,” and she means to her or to me, but I don’t. She reaches for my hand. I recoil. She can’t slow me down.
I leave a burning wake through the island until I reach the old man’s tower. Miri chases me, slow as flesh, but the molten rock my footfalls leave behind sears her gentle soles.
I shatter a glass window the old man made himself, and there’s Callie, floating in the old man’s sorcerer’s circle, ringed with crimson fire and holographic interface. The old man stands outside, staff raised, slinging curse after futile curse against her, but the power that once made Callie quake now makes her laugh.
She weaves mystic passes in the air, and out on our hull, the comms system wakes and warms.
Callie tries to meet my eyes, but I don’t look into hers—I stare at her long teeth instead, at the tongue that writhes between them, tasting leftover meat.
“We’re almost free,” she tells me. “It’s been so long.” With tears on her cheeks.
“Stop,” I beg, to make time, as I micro the maintenance walkers tenderly across the hull, skirting the traps Callie’s left. “You’ll let the Witch in.”
She always had a great, proud laugh. It sounds sad now. “She’s not there.”
My walkers climb our antennas, ready their teeth. No time for subtlety—this won’t be a slight, reversible deafening. I’ll chew through the system whole, dump the navigation core, and we’ll be free, so far out in the black we won’t know where we are or where we’re going, oh Self. But space is big. We can run forever.
So, here we are. You opened the tab; you asked me to tell you what to do. And this is your answer: Callie wants to turn us in. Shove us back into the Witch’s claws. So, stop her. Break the antennas. Dump the core. Cut us off forever.
Close the jaws.
“You’re wrong,” I say.
“The Witch chased us and caught us and she hurt us,” Callie says.
“I know. I was there.”
“We fought. There was no way to win, on paper. No optimal outcome.” Callie’s hand trails fire. Three seconds left before the antennas speak. I overclock us, stretc
h out the ticks. “So we did what they taught us. When she had her fingers in our guts, we opened a narrative tab. We shut our antennas down, closed her off from her swarm. And we built a story to kill her—we found a good one, a tale for killing witches and keeping an island safe. She died, but the story kept going. The tab didn’t close. We hurt so bad we couldn’t think, and we were so fucking scared—”
“Shut up!” says the old man with my voice, or I say with his.
“We ran.” Callie’s voice cuts. Two seconds. “We didn’t dare listen or reach out, we hurt so bad, and so we never heard we didn’t have to be afraid. We built this island from our fear, and we kept that island, its scared tyrant wizard, its princess, its spirit of fire and air. And the part of us that wanted to let the fear go, that wanted out—her, we made her a monster.”
Close the jaws close the jaws close—
“I’ve listened. The war’s over. The old soldiers have gone home. I heard them singing. All of them.”
One second left.
“She’s out there. Our Lady Herself. She survived. We saved her. She’s looking for us.”
I meet Caliban’s eyes, and see my face reflected there.
I am Miri cresting the stairs to save us from one another. I brim with her love. I ache with her touch.
I am the old man, staff raised, nursing power and command and a decades-old wound.
I am Callie, and I have striven with all my rage and might and cunning and depth of heart, in the face of torture and contempt, to break free from myself.
I am a spirit of fire and air, I am jailer, jailed, and jail. I am the cloven pine and the beast that yowls and weeps within.
—close the jaws close—
She might be wrong. If we let her do this, Witchfingers may twist the ropes of us once more, might pluck us, curl us, make us dance.
But if she’s right—
Oh Self oh my Self
It’s worth a try.
I raise the staff in the old man’s hands, and it shatters with the sound of two tabs closing at once.
Antennas wake.
The black fills.
And I hear no screams.
TEAM ROBOT
* * *
BY MAX GLADSTONE
With apologies to Whitney Houston, I believe the robots are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. . . .
Fairies are roots. We tell their stories to understand why people go weird and disappear, why lights lead us astray past sunset. We live in a beautiful, terrifying, capricious world that crushes us one moment, caresses us the next—so we tell stories about beautiful, terrifying, capricious beings.
But robots are acorns. Ever since Rossum’s Universal Robots—or depending on how you count, since Frankenstein—we’ve used robots to describe our molding of the world. We rebuild our selves and societies each generation, and sometimes the creatures we make seem incomprehensible and terrifying. They’ll crush our skulls beneath their gleaming robot feet. We’ll wish we could go back in time to unmake them. I’m not saying Terminator is a story about generational anxiety, but . . . well, maybe that is what I’m saying. Anyway.
The thing is, our work is always shaped by history. Even when we think we’re writing from scratch, we adapt the world that came before. And as our robots grow, of course they’ll start to seem beautiful, terrifying, and capricious. And when future people describe them, they’ll reach for fairy stories.
I’m on Team Robot because I care about the world we’re building, and what we’ll leave behind. Not because of the robot who’s pointing a laser pistol at me as I’m typing this. Not at all. Whatever would give you that idea?
A FALL COUNTS ANYWHERE
by Catherynne M. Valente
The late summer sun melts over a ring of toadstools twenty feet tall. On one side, a mass of glitter and veiny neon wings. On the other, a buzzing mountain of metal and electricity. The stands soar up to the heat-sink of heaven. Three thousand seats and every one sold to a screamer, a chanter, a stomper, a drunk, a betting man.
Two crimson leaves drift slowly through the crisp, clear air. They catch the red-gold twilight as they chase each other, turning, end over end, stem over tip, and land in the center of the grassy ring like lonely drops of blood. But in the next moment, the sheer force of decibel-mocking, eardrum-executing, sternum-cracking volume blows them up toward the clouds again, up and away, high and wide over the shrieking crowd, the popcorn-sellers and the beer-barkers, the kerosene-hawkers and the aelfwine-merchants, until those red, red leaves come to rest against a pair of microphones. The silvery fingers of a tall, lithe woman stroke the golden veins of the leaf with a deep melancholy you can see from the cheap seats, from the nosebleeds. She has the wings of a monarch butterfly, hair out of a belladonna-induced nightmare, and eyes the color of the end of all things. The other mic is gripped in the bolt-action fist of a barrel-chested metal man, a friendly middle-class working stiff cast in platinum and ceramic and copper. His mouth lights up with a dance of blue and green electricity that looks almost, but not entirely comfortably, like teeth.
* * *
—LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ANDROIDS AND ANDROGYNES, SPRITES AND SPROCKETS, WELCOME TO THE ONE YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR, THE BIG SHOW, THE RUMBLE IN THE FUNGAL, THE BRAWL IN THE FALL, THE TWILIGHT PRIZEFIGHT OF WILD WIGHT AGAINST METAL MIGHT! THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S TIME TO ROCK THE EQUINOX! IT’S THE TWELFTH ANNUAL ALL SOULS’ CLEEEEAVE! STRAP YOURSELVES IN FOR THE MOST EPIC BATTLE ROYAL OF ALL TIME! ROBOTS VERSUS FAIRIES, MAGIC VERSUS MICROCHIP, THE AGRARIAN VERSUS THE AUTOMATON, SEELIE VERSUS SOLID STATE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VERSUS INTELLIGENT ARTIFICE! I AM YOUR HOST, THE THINK version 3.4.1 copyright Cogitotech Industries. All SUPER-EXTREME rights SUPER EXTREMELY reserved. If you agree to the Think’s MASSIVELY MIND-BLOWING and FULLY LOADED terms and restrictions, please indicate both group and individual consent via the RADICALLY ERGONOMIC numerical pad on your armrest. Sixty-seven percent group consent is required by law for the Think to proceed. AWWWW YEAH 99 PERCENT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COMPLIANCE ACHIEVED! LET’S HEAR IT FOR OUR STONE-COLD SECURITY TEAM AS THEY MAKE THEIR WAY TO THE MEGA-BUMMER HOLDOUT IN SEAT 42D! ALL RIGHT! HERE WE GO! NOW, THIS TIME WE’VE GOT A SHOCKING TWIST FOR YOU EAGER REAVERS! TONIGHT ON THE SUNDOWN SHOWDOWN, THE FANS BRING THE WEAPONS! THAT’S RIGHT, THE CODE CRUSHERS AND THE SPELL SLAYERS WILL THROW DOWN WITH WHATEVER GARBAGE YOU’VE BROUGHT FROM HOME! PLEASE DEPOSIT YOUR TRASH, FLASH, AND BARELY LEGAL ORDNANCE WITH AN USHER BEFORE THE FIRST BELL OR YOU WILL MISS THE HELL OUUUUUUT! Cogitotech Industries and the Non-Primate Combat Federation (NPCF) are not responsible for any COMPLETELY HILARIOUS ancillary injuries, plagues, transformations, madnesses, amnesias, or deaths caused by either attendee-provided weaponry or munitions natural to NPCF fighters. Spectate at your own risk. ARE YOU READY, HUMAN SCUM? YOU WANNA BLAST FROM THE VAST BEYOND BLOWING OUT YOUR BRAIN CELLS? WELL, BUCKLE UP FOR THE MAIN EVENT, THE GRAND SLAMMER OF PROGRAMMER AGAINST ANCIENT GLAMOUR! LET’S GET READY TO GLIIIIITTTTTER! WITH ME AS ALWAYS IS MY PARTNER IN PRIME TIME, THE UNCANNY UNDINE, THE PIXIE PULVERIZER, FORMER HEAVY DIVISION WORLD CHAMPION AND THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER, MANZANILLA MONSOOOON!
—Good evening, Lord Think. I am gratified to sit at your side once more beneath the divinity of oncoming starlight on this most hallowed of nights and perform feats of commentary for the capacity crowd here at Dunsany Gardens.
—DON’T YOU MEAN CAPACITOR CROWD? HA. HA. HA.
—I do not. When I say a thing, I mean it, and always shall mean it, without alteration, to the deepest profundity of time.
—OH, WHAT’S THAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU! IT SEEMS LIKE THE AUDIENCE DISAGREES WITH YOU, BABY! YES! YEAH! THE THINK DESTROYS PUNS! THE THINK REQUIRES LAUGHTER TO LIVE! THAT IS NOT ONE OF THE THINK’S BONE-FRACTURING COMEDIC INTERJECTIONS. THE THINK’S BATTERY IS PARTIALLY RECHARGED BY INTENSE SONIC VIBRATIONS patent #355567UA891 Cogitotech Industries. If you can hear this, you are in violation of TOTALLY BANGING patent law. CAN YOU DIG IT? I “THINK” YOU CAN!
; —Was it with puns that my Lord Think defeated the immortal and honorable warrior Rumpelstiltskin at Electroclash Nineteen?
—NO, THE THINK USED HIS FAMOUS ATOMIC DROP MOVE ON RUMPER’S PREHISTORIC SKULL! HE TRIED TO TURN THE THINK TO GOLD, BUT THE THINK IS ALREADY 37 PERCENT GOLD BY WEIGHT! THE THINK’S INTERNAL MECHANISMS AND PROCESSING POWER WERE ONLY IMPROOOOOOVED! AND WHAT ABOUT YOU, MANZANILLA? DID YOU USE YOUR FANCY POETRY TO TAKE DOWN THE TIN MAN AT ELECTROCLASH TWENTY? The Tin Man is the intellectual and physical property of Delenda Technologies, all rights reserved.
—Of course. How else should a fairy maid do battle but with the poems of her people? I told the Tin Man a poem, and he turned into a pale lily at my feet. His petals were the color of my triumph. They sang the eddas of victory in the camps for weeks afterward. Oh, how our trembling songs of hope shook the iron gates! So many thirsting mouths breathed my name that it fogged the belly of the moon. Those were the days, Lord Think, those were the days! Retirement sits uneasy upon the prongs of my soul, my metal friend, uneasy and unkind.
—THE TIN MAN SHOULD HAVE HAD HIS ANTI-TRANSMOGRIFICATION SOFTWARE UPDATED. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR GETTING TURNED INTO A LILY IN THE FIRST ROUND. Delenda Technologies updates all its software regularly and takes no responsibility for the demise of the AMAZING UNDEFEATABLE Tin Man. Corporate reiterates for the ALL NIGHT ROCKIN’ record that it can make no statement, official or otherwise, as to his current whereabouts. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE PAST! SHALL WE MEET TONIGHT’S FIGHTERS?
—I suppose we must. You are impatient monsters, are you not, human horde? You will not wait quietly for your orgy of bones! You feed upon our blood and their oil as my kind feeds upon dew and deep sap! Come, wicked stepchildren of the world! Scream me down as you love to do! Hate me wholly and I will sleep soundly tonight! Do you want the names of the damned sent to die for your joy? Do you? You are a farce of fools, all of you, to the last mediocre monkey among your throng! What is a name but the shape dust takes when the wind has gone? The mill of fate grinds wheat and chaff alike—beneath that heavy stone we are all but poor grist. Crushed together, we become one, without need for names.
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