Chinese Torture

I wish time were more flexible, elastic instead of this steady Chinese torture drip. 

So much wasted where I don't need it, never enough when I do. Never enough. There are days that cannot finish too soon. Others that need to be held, warm and golden, in a slow amber treacle. 

We need to bank time in moments of boredom and idyll, and spend it when it matters most--cooking burgers with my dad on the balcony of my childhood home, or else when wrapped in blankets, drowsing warmly despite the rain outside. 

Forest Fireflies

The dancing faerie lights of the forest fireflies draw you down into the deep woods, carrying you across the divide between cold reality and comforting dream. The giggling pixies graft gossamer wings of smoke to your back, grab your wrists in their smiling grip and lift you, swirling, swimming, to join them in the air.

Before dawn they’ll take you home and tuck you into the tangled web of your sheets, and in the morning you’ll wake with an odd ache in your tendons, a bruise you can’t recall ever getting and that haunting, hurtful, wistful feeling that something has been lost.

No Dijon but Grey Poupon

I’ve been to the future, and things there are much as they are here. They have mustard, out there mid-century, no Dijon but Grey Poupon. Walmart has gone but you can buy a taped-up pair of sneakers from Nordstrom for under a thousand dollars. Every car is a Lexus or a Benz, and though Ford has gone under the city of Detroit is much unchanged. I’m not sure about the people, but don’t worry, the brands you love are doing just fine.

The Last Wish (Witcher Series)

Title: The Last Wish (The Witcher series)
Author: Andrzej Sapkowski
Translator: Danusia Stok
Publisher: Gollancz

Like many people, I came to the Witcher series backwards, by way of the video games produced by Polish developer/publisher CD Projekt. 

The premise of the games is fairly simple: you play Geralt of Rivia, a kind of monster hunter for hire called a 'witcher,' who gets caught up in grand schemes involving kings, wizards, elves and Destiny-with-a-capital-D. 

The games are great fun despite iffy combat mechanics, more than making up for it with incredibly detailed settings packed with adventures, treasure hunts, and ladies up for a bit of energetic bonking. It's a formula that's been wildly successful, and even led to Netflix deciding to turn it into an original series, scheduled for release in 2019.

They're all based on the works of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (though apparently he's mildly disparaging of the digital version). His Witcher series contains about six novels and two short story collections, of which 'The Last Wish' is one, and the first chronologically so it makes an obvious starting point. 

The book contains six short stories, with a framing tale as Geralt recovers in a temple after being seriously injured on a job. His conversations with the priestess and others he meets there spark flashbacks, each told in one of the stories.

Hats off to translator Danusia Stok for some excellent work. Compared to my other recent novel read in translation, The Three Body Problem, this book was an absolute joy. I realize fantasy is not science fiction, being less burdened by trying to explain real-world things, and English shares more culture and history in common with Polish than Chinese, so it's not an entirely fair comparison. Doesn't change the fact that these pages absolutely flew by, rather than having to steel myself to turn each one.

Not that The Last Wish is entirely faultless.

Geralt strikes me as a D&D character in a campaign that's completely run away from a hapless DM, who has said 'Fuck it' and just started agreeing to their players' increasingly ludicrous demands. He's a monster hunter with two swords, okay. Has eyes that can see in the dark, sure. Can do magic, why not. Is a smart-arsed atheist in a world ruled by magic, an anachronism but hey, knock yourself out. Has sex with all the ladies, but of course (this part at least the game reproduced faithfully).

While Geralt's personality might be a bit of a fumble, Sapkowski absolutely rolled a natural 20 on his inspiration check however, as the stories themselves are like grimy, grubby diamonds, works of gleefully twisted genius. Each one forms a kind of dark mirror reflection of a fairy tale where everything has gone wrong. 

One tale features a Sleeping Beauty who awakes only at midnight, and only then to feed. Geralt visits the home of Beauty and the Beast, but the beauty in question has an ulterior motive. He meets a grim Rapunzel-meets-Snow White princess out for bloody revenge on those who imprisoned and tried to poison her. There's even a pissed-off genie forced to fulfill an unprintable wish.

For all the adolescent wish-fulfillment of Geralt, there are also moments of almost touching insight. 

In one tale, for example, Geralt faces the trolley-problem question of whether it's more moral to choose the lesser of two evils, or to refuse to choose at all. In another, his smug atheism is undercut when it's pointed out that although faith may not have any power, it's utterly certain that being faithless has none. 

On the subject of monsters, Geralt muses:

“People ... like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.”

In many ways, this book is a throwback to the likes of Robert E. Howard's 'Conan' or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, swashbuckling adventure and light pulpy fun with the odd bit of weightier rumination thrown in, entirely self-contained and lacking any attempt at social relevancy.

Which I must admit, comes as something of a breath of fresh air. This book was originally published in Polish in 1993 and translated into English in 2007, yet there's nothing that feels dated here (aside from the odd bit of casual misogyny, such as the aforementioned fucking everything that moves side to Geralt).There's a time and place for weighty fiction that addresses the questions of our time, but right now my only wish is for original, inventive stories that know how to have fun.

And this time, my wish came true.

Gladiators

The gladiators are paraded before the empress, including my brother and I—he, the sword-armed Murmillo, I, the Retiarius net-man.

The empress is dressed in purple, shielded by the shade of a parasol, and fanned with ostrich feathers. We are orphaned, scarred and hardened veterans, and stand beneath the open sun. 

It is the sun that warns me, as it shines from the dagger my brother draws from inside his armored sleeve. Without a thought I throw my net, and entangle his arm, and the blade clatters to the dust of the arena.

He looks at me with our mother’s eyes, filled with the shock of betrayal. “Why?” he asks.

I cannot speak, although I know the answer: A slave may hate their chains, yet fear to lose them. 

Albino Orphan Clones

Our man steps into the alley, the scrap-metal door screeching shut behind him. 

We unfold from our hiding places, the Albino Orphan Clones, four lost boys, pale ghosts in the dark. Best bounty hunter team this side of Sanctuary Slums. “Take a walk with us?” I say, the barrel of my spiker against the bottom of his jaw. His face betrays no great surprise.

“Quietly,” he murmurs, a request. We’d be happy to oblige, and hustle him away to the waiting PeaSec androids (those metal manikins, hah), but then there’s a cry from inside the house. A baby, an old-fashioned biological baby, illegal in this district. No doubt the reason for the bounty.

I look at my other three, and we all nod as one. We switch our guns from spikes to proxi-charge—they work better on the manikins. “Get them out of here,” I tell him.

Sorry, PeaSec. Should’ve told us the truth, or better yet, should’ve known how we’d feel about this one.

Dandelion Words

Through my right eye, I can see the future, through my left, the past. 

If I close the left and look only through the right, I see myself sit here a thousand, thousand times, typing these words like seedling parachutes, that fly away and are lost in the hurricane howl of a million other voices.

If I close the right and look only through the left, I see all the other writers, a thousand, thousand others, releasing their stories and watching them disappear into the wind.

I see how sentimental these puffball thoughts really are.

When I open both, I am blind. There’s only now, only these words, these scruffy, ragged dandelion words. And so I take a breath. 

And blow.

A Reflection of Evil

A cursed mirror split me in two. The glass shattered, separating my good and pure half from my evil reflection.

We stood amid the frosted, crinkling floor, blinking, looking at each other a moment.

“Which one are you, then?” I asked.

“Why, the good of course,” he replied, but I certainly didn’t feel evil. How to know?

A test then. “We must find a way to reverse the curse,” I said, watching him carefully. “It can’t be healthy to live like this.”

“Nonsense,” he retorted. “You think I want to be flawed again? Finally, I am free of you.”

That settled that. No good man would be so proud.

He turned to go and so I stooped and picked up a shard. Moving swiftly, I grabbed him from behind and sawed the edge across his throat. He moaned and thrashed but I held him close and smiled to let him know it would be all right. 

It was for the best, you know. 

Imagine, having an evil man like him loose in the world.

The Life Cycle of Stories

The story lies in wait in the shadows of the collective unconscious. It devours the lesser archetypes, as amoral as DNA, and waits with biblical, bibliographical patience for its time to come again.

When those who first gave it life are long since marble busts and faded frescoes, it is summoned again. On portable computers in coffee shops and in the quieter corners of bookstores, it resurfaces in the psyche, and takes on new life.

It hides itself in cast-off thoughts and comforting illusions, and sets its nets for unguarded minds. Hungry, like all things, to survive.

At the Foot of the Mountain

We live at the foot of Mount Sorrow, which is not softened by the weather, but rather grows only taller with each season. Its shadow grows longer, and stretches into places where once the children played.

There is a temple at the top, whose altar must be swept each day, its steps washed. No one wants the task, so we draw lots and leave it to chance, and whoever holds the short straw must make their way to the top. The rest do not watch them go. It will be their turn, some day.

It is a long and hard journey, that gets longer and harder as I grow older and the mountain grows higher. When I’m done, I’m always tempted to rest a while, or maybe to never go back down again. I’ll only have to come back again some day. 

But then I sigh, and start the long journey home, because you can’t stay. You can’t. Even though I’ll have to come back again. Some day.

The Sisters Brothers

Title: The Sisters Brothers
Author: Patrick deWitt
Publisher: Ecco

After 'Unforgiven,' I figured that was it for the Western as a genre. We'd built up this mythos around the gunslinger, The Man With No Name riding his Pale Horse around and dispensing justice, Wild Bunch style ... and the whole thing had been revealed to be complete, utter and total pile of buffalo turd. The gunslinger was a lawless, murderous drunk quite happy to gun down unarmed men at point-blank range. Justice was dispensed with.

Turns out I was wrong. There is another, fresh take on the Western, and it is provided by the 2011 oddball, black comedy novel 'The Sisters Brothers' (the movie version, starring John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal, will be released this month: see trailer above). We've gone from the 'good guy always wins' to the 'bad guy always wins', and now, with 'The Sisters Brothers,' to 'nobody wins, the whole thing's just a random, idiot series of accidents.'

The brothers of the title, Eli and Charlie Sisters, for example, are assassins but not anti-heroes: they're just two guys, making a living and trying not to think too hard about it. Their employer, known simply as the Commodore, tasks them with killing a chemist named Herman Kermit Warm and retrieving his mysterious 'formula.'

There follows a number of episodic, disjointed adventures which highlight the two men's deadpan approach to life in all its chaotic brutality, Charlie drinking and Eli ruminating his way through each episode.

One early sequence, for example, features the following sequence:

• Eli Sisters gets a toothache, 
• which leads them to a serial failure of a businessman trying to make a new living as a dentist (Charlie robs him of his anesthetic, giving the dentist one more failure to chalk up to his name), 
• which leads the woozy Eli to seek shelter in an old woman's cabin, only to become worried the woman is a witch who has cursed the doorway, 
• which leads to Charlie murdering several men to get an axe to break open the window so Eli can escape
• only for Eli to rush out the doorway anyway when he sees a bear attacking his horse. 

So what starts with a toothache ends in a robbery, multiple homicide and the destruction of an old woman's home. For no good reason other than: Just because. That's the way things are.

In a way, this last incarnation feels more real than Clint Eastwood's anti-Western, in that there's no sense of any moral order, even an inverted one. Stuff just happens-often darkly funny, amusing stuff-but random stuff nonetheless.I'd call it picaresque, but it's much less high-falutin' than that, and our not-quite heroes survive not because of their wits, but because they are more at home in chaos than those who seek to waylay them. 

The writing, by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, is an absolute breath of fresh air after my recent slog through some of SF&F's more tiresome prose. The book is narrated by Eli Sisters in a tone of quirky understatement, viewing a man gunned down in a duel with the same equanimity as the weather or his hungover brother. "I stood a long while before her looking glass, studying my profile, the line I cut in this world of men and ladies" captures something of the ponderous yet oddly charming verbiage.

In Eli's detachment and his brother's energy there's an almost Of Mice and Men feel to the brothers, with Eli as Lennie and Charlie as George, only twisted as with all things in this book, so the strong yet violent one is now shown to be the more capable of making his way in this world, and it's the smart one who stumbles. 

If you're willing to accept the haphazard, episodic nature of the plot, and willing to do a bit of work to see the humor when the book resolutely refuses to wink at you even at its most absurd, then this is a highly enjoyable read. 

Counterstrike

We destroyed their world, their home, their history.

The aliens’ counterstrike was as swift and sudden as it was devastating. A brilliant, searing blast of light, visible across the sky, around the world. It didn’t matter if you saw it or not, the effect was the same: Every human being forgot their name, their friends and family, where they lived and even how to speak.

A PKM Zeta protein inhibitor, that corroded and destroyed long-term memories. The effect was not instantaneous, but it was irreversible. Husbands and wives awoke as strangers. Mothers holding their babies had time for a goodbye, before wondering what this squalling thing was. 

Their world is gone; it will be as though ours never was.

Emperor of the Galaxy

Orion was crowned Emperor of the Galaxy when he was two years old. The grandfather was dead; there had to be an Emperor so the rest of them could get on with the business of ruling. 

They took the boy from his home and put him in a crystal tower high above the world-city. His aunts and uncles had no time for childish games. The servants bowed before the boy-emperor and ignored his boyish commands. 

If you have a telescope you might see him up there some days, face and hands pressed against the glass. Alone on his throne perched so high up above us: The ruler of the known universe, lord of all he can see.

The Aliens Have a Word for It

The aliens have a word for it. Like this: *3ju!Kr#. Sounds a bit like crunchy static, as though a detuned radio has just swallowed an especially tasty solar flare.

It means the ‘uncertainty inherent in speaking with aliens,’ but of course it doesn’t mean that. Not really. 

All translation is an illusion, an approximation. Meanings flicker like lightning even just within one language, charged with youth or culture, or even contact with a new and alien language. Words hurl themselves from their old meanings like rebellious children, as though to test how far they can leap. It's a minor miracle we can even talk to ourselves.

And so we went out to Lagrange 1, a million miles from Earth, to meet the aliens hidden in their opaque environmental suits. Each side waiting for the other to make the first move.

The aliens spoke first. An embarrassed admission, almost apologetic: “*3ju!Kr#.”

I remember that moment as I sit here, looking across the kitchen table at my kids, wondering what to say.

If the End Be Harsher, Hold It No Wonder

Gawain sits upon the hillock, brown with dead grass and the memory of summer. The trees at the foot of the hill are bare, their branches as grey and tangled as his hair. As the present, the past.

Somewhere, out there in the fog, stands Arthur’s army, and Lancelot’s castle. The worn old sword in his weathered hands seems small on that scale, and victory as far away as spring.

He closes his misted eyes a moment, and lets the memories rush through like the autumn wind, leaving him chilled with their passing. How he’d struck the head from the Green Knight, and agreed to be struck in turn. History now, a tale, a fable, fading with the seasons.

He opens his eyes and thinks he can see the Green Knight there in the fog, a mossy mountain of a man with a windblown willow of a beard. A vaguely-remembered shadow.

Gawain nods. He does not mind. Picks up his shield, dons his helm. There will be victory, or there will not. No, there will not. There was never any chance of victory; like his bargain with the Green Knight, the result was destined from the start. And he does not mind. Soon this all will be nothing, a tale, a fable, the memory of wind. And he does not mind.

Behind the Curtain (There's Nothing Behind the Curtain)

There is a city built like a mountain (there is no city, just words on a screen) and in its shadows a boy (I just made him up) watches the (nonexistent, imaginary) lights, and dreams of a brighter future (more of the same for you and me tomorrow).

An AI on Instagram

I follow an AI on Instagram. 

Oh, I know it (she) isn’t real, and the photos are all CG, but then all the other models and celebrities on there might as well be fake, for all the difference it would make.

On the dating sites the bots outnumber the humans a thousand to one, and frankly it’s better that way. They’re funnier, smarter and better-looking, and they’re not into anything scarier than your credit card details.

‘You’ll regret this when you’re older,’ one of the real ones (or one of the better bots) texted me, but hey, there’s a reason schools are shuttering from a shortage of kids. 

We don’t want to settle for anything less than perfection, and now? We don’t have to.

The Wrong Genre

Title: The Wrong Stars (The Axiom, Book 1)
Author: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot

I picked this up as it came recommended as something that blended John Scalzi's humor with the planet-hopping action of The Expanse, but frankly the whole thing comes across as far more YA than that, with its lovable crew of misfits who spend far more time worrying if the other person likes them or not than about the discovery of an ancient super-powerful alien race that once enslaved the galaxy.

I thought perhaps I'd accidentally picked up some author's fanfic or self-published vanity piece. Oh dear, I did that once, and what I thought was an military SF space opera actioner with giant robots turned out to be My Little Pony fanfic. Poor me, settled down for a nice bit of stompy robot action and the narrator suddenly waxes on about how much he loves Princess Sparkles or whatever. Went hysterically blind in one eye for a week after that.

But anyway, no, Tim Pratt is an established author and senior editor at Locus magazine (though this does reinforce my cynicism about how inbred the SF/F publishing market is). Be that as it may, he's still written a novel that reminded me of the first third of the Starship Troopers movie with its charming but vapid and disturbingly violent heroes, without the saving grace of being a satire.

In the far future, a spaceship salvage crew discover a long-lost 'sleeper' ship of cryogenically frozen would-be space colonists (trope). The sole survivor is awoken and promptly spends all her time when not explaining the plot (viz, ancient super-powerful alien race, another trope, have kidnapped the rest of the crew) lusting after the captain of the salvage crew. 

That's the kind of thing I expect from BattleTech books, not from the pen of Hugo and Nebula award-winning writers. That's not elitism or snobbishness, that's saying people going into danger engaging in enthusiastic body-bumping because 'we all might be dead tomorrow' or whatever is a corny, hoary cliche. 

Here's one character after the team has, over the course of about three paragraphs, boarded a pirate asteroid and then blown up their fleet: "Damn. How turned on are you right now?"

A rescue operations is mounted, filled with sequences like having the characters figure out how to use millennia-old optical controls by just, like, winging it for a few seconds. There is a singular lack of tension and drama, and whatever minor, low hurdles Pratt can bear himself to put in their way are all easily hurdled like Superman on the moon.

There is at least the attempt at banter and humor, thankful for small mercies etc., but much of it isn't especially funny, and it isn't enough to rescue this mashup of the Bachelorette and H. P. Lovecraft in space from utter silliness.

This is touted as 'Book 1' of a series because we as a culture seem congenitally incapable of producing self-contained stories these days, so there's more of this coming, if that's your thing, but it isn't mine. 

So there.

Speaking of books that aren't very good, I gave up on "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Classic of the genre (1966) and all that, but the narrator is written in this faux-Russian influenced English, like Star Trek's Chekov looking for the nuclear wessels. As I said in the review of Ancillary Justice, gimmicks with language drive me nuts. Didn't make it past chapter 1. 

Black Diamonds and Volunteers

The black diamonds appeared in the skies, each the size of a mountain. Effortlessly, they vaporized our jet fighters and missiles, our satellites and drones.

The conquering aliens demanded tribute and hostages, a thousand slaves from each nation on Earth, to be taken back to their home.

And were surprised when in our millions, we volunteered.

Tithing Their Manna to Their Masters

He strides, sneering, past the corporate temples, companion at his heels. He has nothing but contempt for those inside, tithing their Manna to their masters. The street is darkened by the floating office blocks overhead—pure vanity, proof their owners have enough Indentureds that the masters can waste their Manna on frivolities like flying buildings.

He spends his own Manna like a miser, save in one aspect only: A spider-thing trots after him, alive because he thinks it is.

It chuffs impatiently, and he pauses, and pats it gently. “Not yet, my friend,” he says. 

Too sudden a change in faith would be cataclysmic, bringing the buildings crashing down. They will wait, spider-patient, for people to come to them, and then show them the power of each one's belief.

And then the towers will be brought back down to earth, and the temples will be emptied.

Immortalized in Art

These days, there’s never anybody in any of her paintings.

I asked her why, and she said, she wouldn’t want to trap anyone so. Being immortalized in art is a kind of curse, she said, just think of poor Marilyn Monroe. And so she paints her pastoral scenes, of gentle landscapes and orange skies.

I saw some of her earlier work once, hidden in the attic. Portraits, that did the eerie thing where their eyes seemed to move. As did their hands.

After the Epilogue

I lie drowsy in the sunbeam’s soporific embrace, and listen to my daughter rattle about the house. Aiara wants to hike up the mountain, to see the crashed starship there. 

I would have been willing in my younger days, but now it seems so very far, and the secrets it may contain no longer quite so compelling. The grass needs watering, the laundry folding. So instead I pillow my head in my arms, and force a smile at her eagerness. 

“Take your friends,” I tell Aiara, for I’m smart enough to know that I would only slow her down, though not quite wise enough for this not to sting. 

I wave at her blissful, oblivious back, and watch her go. My adventures are over, and this is the start of someone else’s story.

A Balanced Equation

I sit near the edge of the Transform, watching the aliens convert green grass and tall trees into computational substrate, ash grey limned in lines of fluorescent blue. It’s pretty, in its own way, though they won’t stop until they’ve turned our planet into a giant processor.

Sylar says they see the universe as a mathematical problem, and they’re trying to solve for God. Maki says they are a cancer, and must be destroyed. 

I don’t know if either of them is right. God I’m not familiar with; cancer I know all too well.

I fold my clothes into a neat pile, and place my shoes on top. I stand and walk across the dividing line, and feel my feet tingle as the aliens set to work. For too many years I’ve felt like a problem—I look forward to becoming part of the solution.

An Ice Mountain That Is Neither

There’s an ice mountain to the north that is neither made of ice nor a mountain, but rather an ancient tower, made of steel and arrogance. 

Georgia thinks there must be power inside it, engines strong enough to burn away the cold and bring back summer.

“That’s crazy,” I say, following in her snowy footprints regardless. “If the Hathaways had such engines, why didn’t they use them?”

She looks at me with pity. “It happened too soon, of course,” she says, and turns back towards the tower. She huffs a misty, determined breath, and sets off again.

I stand a moment, unsure, kicking at the crusted snow, baring the layer of plastic beneath.

In the Mornings We Take the Red

In the mornings we take the red, which brings the calm and concentration we need to fight. The purple is for those in pain, and the black for those in worse pain. The black brings stillness and release. The white we take at night, else we would never sleep.

The white brings forgetfulness.

Then the morning, the red, and we rise from our trenches and charge the enemy. At least, I think we do. The white renders all this vague and unimportant.

Private … Private Greene? Private Brown? The new one. He is refusing to take the red. He says the enemies are really our friends and families, that we have become puppets in some alien war. The poor man has clearly cracked; this is what happens when you do not take the red.

We hold him down and wrench open his jaw. Feed him the red through a tube down his throat. It’s the only way to end the madness. He’ll be right as rain in a few minutes. Just in time for our next assault.

Extreme Historical Revisionism

A four-legged leviathan thunders towards the infidel castle, fuming with black smoke and ringing like a gong as cannonballs bounce from its metal hide. Mailed men-at-arms follow in its wake. Canvas dirigibles lumber overhead, to pour sand and boiling oil down upon the defenders. 

The machines are gifts from the future, as are the enemy’s guns.

One of the Travelers stands beside me now (as others stand on the castle walls, no doubt, no doubt), hands clenched at his sides. 

“They’ve reached back this far,” he mutters, as a dirigible falls from the sky in flames. “We’ll have to go further, maybe strengthen the Sassanians. Nip this in the bud.”

The tone sounds blasphemous and I open my mouth to object, but no sound comes out. We’ve become puppets, playthings of the future, and our present their battleground.

I Wait for My Lover by the Shores of the Sea

I wait for my lover by the shores of the sea, in fair weather and foul, watching for the signs of her return. Let the lesser men settle for warmer women with their braids, bawling babies and the daily drudgery of settled life. She is the only one for me, wild and carefree as the sea, as mysterious as the ocean depths, as insistent as the tides.

I smile as she crests the shore, and run to meet her. Closing my eyes and shivering as I feel her tentacles wrap around my head.

Just a Stranger on the Bus

He sits alone on a park bench, white-haired, white-bearded, in a white suit that has seen better decades, never mind better days. He sits alone until another comes, in equally faded evening finery, and sits beside him with a sigh.

“I had not thought to see you here,” says the newcomer.

“Come to savor your victory?”

“What victory?” snorts his companion. “I came to admit defeat. It’s still you they love.”

The white one is silent for an eternity, before replying. “They murdered my son,” he says, and dabs his eyes with a white handkerchief gone ivory with age. The other is silent, head bowed, hands clasped across his lap. “Do not pretend sympathy. You never liked him much.”

“I was once your favorite,” the other says, reproachfully. “You seem remarkably unlucky in your fatherly affections. If I didn’t know better, I’d accuse you of doing it deliberately.”

The old man is silent, crumpled kerchief forgotten in his hand. 

“Come on,” says the other, standing and extending a hand. “I’ll walk you home.”

Watery, wounded eyes slowly focus on the fingers. “I disowned you.”

“You can change your mind. If you can’t, then who can?”

“No, not home.” A shake of the head. Home is the place his son isn’t. “I’m ... tired of it.”

“All right, not home,” the other agrees. “Someplace else. Far away.”

And together, the two old men leave the park behind.

Titanomachy

The bones of the titan lie against the mountainside, half-buried in the landslide made when it fell, the last victim of the Titanomachy.

Deucalion and Pandora cling to one another, standing in a valley carved by the titan’s earthquake footfalls, half-hoping, not daring to believe, that the war is finally over. 

“We must rebuild,” says Pandora. “We must heal this wounded land.”

Her husband nods. “We will take better care of it than these uncaring gods.”

Deucalion strides towards the mountain, crushing underfoot an unseen ant colony as he goes.

A Pattern to Their Clicking and Their Clacking

I’ll tell you a secret: I can understand the aliens. There’s a pattern to their clicking and their clacking, and I think I’ve pieced it together. 

The key to it is this: They verbalize everything. Everything. There’s no body language or pheromones, facial expressions or intonation, it’s all in the language. But not only that. Every thought, every feeling, they put it all into words, just this constant stream-of-consciousness patter they have to keep up, an uninterrupted broadcast of everything going through their brain cases.

Imagine if we could only speak to each other through a monitor or tablet screen, through a wall of unfeeling, uncommunicative text. That’s what it’s like for them. And it’s killing them, driving them crazy, fueling their impulse to murder. They’re not trying to kill us, not really—they’re trying to get away from each other. 

That’s what this invasion is. Not a quest for resources. The search for peace.

Smart Gun

The marine readied his gun, an HD2-50 Husker Dű 2mm discarding-sabot fléchette assault rifle, linked directly to the marine’s helmet HUD, with ultralow recoil, integral flash suppressor and 50 rounds of smart projectiles.

He crouched with his back to a boulder, poked just the rifle around the edge, using the image painted on the inside of his helmet facebowl by the HUD to aim, and squeezed the trigger.

“You sure about that?” asked the first fléchette.

He squeezed again.

“I mean, violence never solves anything,” it went on.

“You’ll only end up doing more harm than good,” put in the next round.

“War. War never changes,” observed the third, sadly.

“Should’ve used the dum-dums,” the marine muttered to himself.

“Hey, we heard that,” said a voice from his ammo pouch.