by Hugh Howey
“I thought you might be a coward,” Morel said.
Upwright stopped instantly in his tracks. He did not, however, turn. Nor did he say anything. He reached up and brushed some imaginary dust off the shoulder of his tunic. He might have let out a disdainful sniff.
“You’ve never actually been in a real fight, have you?” Morel asked of Upwright’s back. “You’ve never taken a man’s life in single combat. No. Your type never do. You’d much rather sign a form that consigns a thousand of your own people to their deaths, rather than strangle the enemy before you.”
Upwright’s left hand started to curl into a fist.
“You have no sense of honor, none at all,” Morel said.
“You are a moral sewer,” Upwright replied, turning.
“Bloodless philistine,” Morel impugned.
“Violent thug,” Upwright pronounced.
Morel: “Stuffed shirt!”
Upwright: “Visigoth!”
“Weakling!”
“Cretin!”
This went on for some time. It ended only when, with a sudden, jerking motion, Upwright seized the hilt of one of the sabers and drew it from its sheath.
The fact that he had, in fact, never held such a weapon in his hand before did not stay him in the slightest. The fact that Morel had once been a champion fencer and had slaughtered dozens of men in duels might have given him pause—except that he didn’t know it.
“Have at you, then,” Upwright said, and launched an attack before Morel had even drawn his blade.
A frightful breach of the normal rules of dueling. Then again, there were no referees or seconds there to complain. Martin-8 was impartial.
Morel let out a triumphant laugh, and rolled easily away from Upwright’s telegraphed blow. He drew his own saber and assumed a fighting stance.
“En garde,” he said.
Upwright moved in for a second slashing attack. He failed to connect. Fencing is, in fact, quite a bit harder than it looks, and unless one is a natural talent at it, one is likely to lose one’s first—and therefore only—bout.
Really, it should have been one of the shortest matches in the history of people whacking at each other with swords. Morel should have made very quick and very bloody work of Upwright.
Instead, the duel went on for nearly an hour. This was not, despite what he might have told himself, because Morel was toying with his opponent. Savoring each easy parry and holding back from the final, fatal stroke simply for the fun of it.
No. Instead, what delayed the inevitable was that Morel’s fencing days were years behind him. It was true he’d once been a fiend with a foil. That had been several thousand heavy, rich meals ago. That had been before he downed a cumulative ocean of breakfast champagne. Morel had been lithe and athletically built, back when he was establishing his reputation. In the years since his ascendancy, he had rather let himself go.
So when Upwright flailed at him like a boy waving a stick, he was just able to cross swords and step back. When Upwright tried to run him through with a wrong-footed lunge, Morel was hard-pressed to get his copious gut out of the way in time.
He did manage to nick Upwright’s cheek. Upwright, on the other hand, managed to raise a pretty good weal on Morel’s forearm. Before very long, however, both of them were puffing and huffing so much that they could barely lift their weapons.
“A villain … like you,” Upwright gasped, “can never … defeat … the will … of the people!”
“Will?” Morel coughed. “Will is … the strength of … the paramount leader. The people … know their master … when they … when …”
He couldn’t finish. The stitch in his side stole his breath. His feet hurt from standing so long. His head spun from lack of oxygen. He wondered if he might pass out, right there in the middle of the duel. It took him quite a while, in fact, to notice something rather important.
Upwright had dropped his sword.
The newcomer’s arms hung low at his sides. His chest heaved for breath and his legs shook visibly. It looked like it was all he could do to keep from falling backward onto the rough soil of VZ-61a.
Morel had won. He merely needed to step forward—despite the pain in his knees—and deliver the coup de grâce.
Which would have been much easier if he had any feeling left in his own arms. Somehow he found the strength to bring his saber up and aim its wobbling point at Upwright’s Adam’s apple. Yes, just one thrust, and … and …
That was when he heard a mechanical whirring and the strident ringing of a bell. He touched the saber’s point to Upwright’s throat, much as someone interrupted while reading might place an index finger against the page to save their place.
He turned his head to look.
The first thing he saw was the barrel of an enormous firearm pointed directly at his head. The weapon was connected to a mechanical arm that emerged from a hatch in the torso of Martin-8.
The robot’s glass eyes flashed. The ringing bell alarm came from its mouth.
“Wh … what?” Morel managed to say. “What’s … this?”
“Orderz, zir. My orderz are to protect the two of you againzt all threatz.”
“Threats. Including a fully sanctioned duel, between two consenting parties.”
“All threatz, zir. My program iz clear.”
“And if I kill this dog, here and now, as I could easily do—”
“I muzt prevent it, zir.”
“And you’ll prevent it by blowing my head off?” Morel asked. “You’re saying, if I try to kill him, you’ll take action to stop me—by killing me?”
“Yez, zir.”
“So … I’ll die, and he’ll live? But that would mean—”
“Yez, zir.”
“That would mean …”
Morel’s heart skipped a beat.
“That would mean he would win.”
Morel pulled his arm back, removing the point of his saber from Upwright’s pulse. He looked down into the mirror-bright metal of the sword, and saw his own eyes staring back at him. Eyes enormous with madness.
He flung the saber away from himself, out into the sun-baked plain. It landed point down and quivered impotently there for a while, a flag of ultimate defeat.
“He would win. He would win!” Morel shrieked.
He grabbed two thick handfuls of his luxuriant hair and pulled. Luckily they were too carefully maintained to come loose.
He turned to face the robot.
“What,” he demanded, “is the point of exile if you have to share it?”
The robot had no answer.
Morel, bellowing in rage, ran out across the plain, shaking his fists in the air. All too soon he was over the horizon, and his outrage had faded from earshot.
Eventually Upwright sat down in the shade of the thing that failed at being a tree and closed his eyes, intending to take a nap.
“What time should I expect lunch?” he asked.
WHILE YOU WAIT
FRAN WILDE
While you wait to see
what’s going to happen,
I’ll speak up, I always have.
Yes it gets me in trouble.
I’ll speak louder this time
and louder still and you can
look down your nose at me
because that gives you
a sense of purpose
while you stay out of trouble.
I’ll write louder. I’ll go out.
I’ll maybe get in trouble.
I’ll probably get in trouble.
And you can sit there
talking about respect and decorum.
You always said not to wear
my heart on my sleeve,
that it would get me in
trouble,
and I did it anyway
and yes you were right, so
I’m putting my heart in my teeth
because it’s safer there.
While you wait, I’ll be out
with
my heart and my mouth
both sleeves torn away.
Don’t wait up.
CLAY AND SMOKELESS FIRE
SALADIN AHMED
QUMQAM STOOD UPSIDE-DOWN atop a cell phone tower, twirling at its pinnacle on his fingertip. When the humans had first started to besmirch the earth with the things, Qumqam had thought them hideous. But he’d come to love dancing on them the way he’d once loved dancing on ziggurats.
Well, he’d come to like it, anyway. Qumqam didn’t know if there was anything left in this lower world that he loved, but sometimes when he leapt among the towers and turbines of America he felt something like happiness again. For a moment or two, at least.
It rarely lasted longer than that. For he was one of the last djinn left living in this interminable age of raised apes. The era of humankind, a nothing people, born from dirt when Qumqam’s people were born from smokeless fire.
Qumqam floated lazily down from the tower, landing softly on his bare brown feet. Then he closed his swirling opal eyes and pictured a small red house not far away. A shimmer appeared around him, and when he opened his eyes he was floating above the house.
Some of the djinn enjoyed walking like men—the slowness of it. Qumqam had never been one of them. He had never understood why the flapping bags of flesh were first in God’s eyes. They tore at each other like dogs at any chance. They starved each other to sit on piles of gold. Most unforgivably, they had taken this astonishing garden—this jagged half-paradise of leaf and ice and mountain and flower that God had made for them—and they had filled it with shit and poison.
These insults to God and His garden had grown worse of late, and worst here in America. Qumaqam had seen fool kings and robber-kings, mad kings and rape-kings. The new American king—president, they called it here—was all of them at once. And his merchants and armies were making a befouled realm even fouler.
No, Qumqam didn’t much love this world anymore, and when a djinn stops loving this world he leaves it. Qumqam’s people had been on Earth for God-alone-knew how many thousands of years. They did not die from blades or age the way men did. They could live until God declared the end of days on Earth.
But only if they wanted to. A djinn’s life didn’t come without fail the way the sun rose and fell. To live, a djinn needed reasons to keep living.
Strangely enough, one of the things that had kept Qumqam alive after so many of his friends had left this world was his interest in mankind. Well, in a handful of them. Most humans disgusted Qumqam—babbling creatures, whose repulsive meat threatened to smother the spark of life that God had given them.
But Qumqam had found that one in every hundred thousand thousand of them were different. One in every hundred thousand thousand could see him. Hear him. Speak to him. And, for perishable sacks of skin, they were fascinating. Qumqam had never been comfortable among his own kind, for the conversation of the djinn had always bored him. But humans? The ones worth talking to were a delight, if a bizarre one.
Such men and women had never been common but there had been more of them once. When he found them now, Qumqam was inclined to be protective of them. He stood now hovering above the house of just such a one, a child to whom Qumqam had not yet spoken. He had been watching this child and his mother in this house on this quiet, dead-scented American street for some weeks. He knew the signs and was certain the boy—Ernesto was his name—would soon discover his gift for djinn-talking. So Qumqam had watched the quiet life of this little red house, listening to birds and squirrels and the occasional voice of a neighbor.
But now Qumqam was watching something different. Something terrible.
Black wagons liveried with angry letters surrounded the boy’s small red house. Men with weapons—the king’s men, a dozen of them at least—buzzed in and out of its doors like angry insects. They were dressed in black and wore badges and flag patches.
Ernesto and his mother were both bound at the wrists. They were being led from the house. One of the armed men was on a cell phone, laughing. The boy was trying not to cry.
Men. This is what these people were. Filth that ate itself. Yet God had raised mankind above the djinn. Qumqam could never doubt the infinite wisdom of the Almighty. There was some high and powerful reason that God had favored the humans. But Qumqam couldn’t see it.
Qumqam floated softly to the ground, and stood unseen and untouchable among the men with weapons. Once he might have taken a direct hand. He might have grown giant and smashed the wagons, or turned this new king—this new president, as they called kings in this land—and his army into pigs.
But that age was past. These days the djinn—the few of them still left—just watched and waited and once in a while whispered with the few men who could still hear them. If Ernesto had learned djinn-talking already, Qumqam might have tried to act through the boy. To fill him with power. He’d done it for a handful of men before, though not in many years. But it wouldn’t work. The boy was uninitiated.
The men with weapons were pushing Ernesto and his mother toward a wagon when the woman next door—very old by the humans’ way of counting things—came running out, followed by her son, a grown man.
Qumqam knew this woman, full of fire and hard to kill. She spoke and sang sometimes in the tongue of Solomon and David. The edges and tones of the words had pleased Qumqam, reminding him of other times and places. So many who spoke the older tongues had been dragged from America since this new king had come. Each time the old woman had spoken or sung the words Qumqam had perched near her, invisible, relishing the sounds and hoping she would continue. But it was never more than a few words, quietly, to herself.
She was not quiet now. She flew at the men, heedless of their weapons. “No! NO! What are you doing? These are good people, this is a mistake.”
One of the men with weapons turned toward her patiently. “Ma’am, please step back.”
“You’re bullies is what you are. YOU LEAVE THESE PEOPLE ALONE! These are my neighbors!” She was still walking. Qumqam had to admire her, for her steps were not easy. The curse of aging flesh that God had placed on humankind—it had nearly taken this woman. But she strode up to the men like a soldier in youth.
Ernesto was crying now. One of the men was telling him to stop. They would not let his mother hold him.
One of the men put his black-gloved hand up in front of the old woman. “Ma’am, please. I really don’t want to charge you.” He held up a small black book.
“CHARGE ME!? GO AHEAD, CHARGE ME!” she shouted.
“MOM!” The woman’s son barked, moving toward her.
“You want my name?” The old woman said to the armed man. “My name is Sylvia Fucking Reitzes. Write that down. Sylvia Fucking Lorraine Fucking R-E-I-T-Z-E-S. Write down that I said this was wrong. That somebody said something. Write that in your little fucking book!”
As she spoke, the old woman had managed to put herself between Ernesto and his mother and the wagon they were being herded toward. “These are good people,” she said more calmly. “Graciela never did anything to anyone. You want to take them, you’re going to have to beat up an old lady.”
Qumqam blinked and reappeared right beside the woman. It was not often one saw the spark of God’s light shine so brightly from within human flesh. He wanted to see it up close.
“Sylvia, no—” said Ernesto’s mother.
The angry man grew angrier. “MA’AM!”
“Mom, are you crazy? Stay out of this. You don’t know what’s going on here.” The old woman’s son tried to step in, but the men held him back.
“WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?” she shouted, her moment of calm gone. “I know what’s going on here. Something rotten. Something wrong!”
Qumqam saw the angry man’s eyes make a decision. The man raised his weapon. He pointed it at the old woman. “MA’AM GET OUT OF THE WAY! NOW!”
And then, without warning, the old woman turned and looked Qumqam in the eye. She saw him. And she said, clear as the call of the muezzin in
the night, “You! You can help. You have to help.”
Qumqam felt as if he’d been struck. She could see him? But there was no time for hows and whys. He drew power from within his heart of smokeless fire and he clasped the old woman’s hand.
Smoke-from-nowhere began to roil. The old woman rose bodily from the ground and the men froze. Lightning crackled around her and light filled her eyes. Qumqam floated beside her, unseen by the others, grasping her hand. He smiled. It had been too long since he’d done this.
“Mom?” Sylvia’s son said faintly.
Then the bullets began to fly.
None of them reached her, of course. Their weapons crumbled to dust before her, and the men who tried to grab her were knocked back by winds born ten thousand years ago. Sylvia spoke and her voice was both hers and Qumqam’s. A voice of cigarettes and gin and thunder and old mountains.
“GO,” they said together, and the earth shook with the sound. “NOW.”
The king’s men stood there a moment more.
“GO!!!” Qumqam and Sylvia shouted as one. Purple lightning split the sky around them. The calls of wolves and owls filled the air.
The men with weapons screamed. Then they ran.
When they were gone, Qumqam released Sylvia’s hand and they drifted gently to the ground together. Ernesto was staring at him openly now. Qumqam had never been seen by two humans in one day. It felt pleasant.
Sylvia turned to him. She did not marvel at what had just happened. She did not explain anything. She said, “They’ll come back. What the hell do we do now?”
“Now?” Qumqam smiled and put his huge arm around Sylvia’s bony shoulder. “Now we keep living.”
THE ARC BENDS
KIERON GILLEN
I DIED, IN the hope I would get better. It seemed like a sensible thing to do.
It was the 21st century. Lots of things seemed to be the sensible thing to do, and so we did them. It’s only common sense. Over the centuries, I’ve come to understand that this belief is one of humanity’s more constant attributes, certainly more constant than any of the content of “common sense” itself. I’m sorry. I’m going to wax philosophical. This behavior was encouraged between then and now. I’m following my best, only legal advice.