"You'll be a lot colder at sea,” he warned her. “Ten more lengths and you can come out." The nature of Yakamoto's business dawned on Harry. These children must be unregistered. Bought children or stolen, like Cornubia's missing baby. They had nobody to mourn them if they drowned. He clutched the pen in his pocket and slowly withdrew the drone. It was level with the sleeping dog when a rough hand clamped down on his shoulder. He felt the cold bite of a blade against the nape of his neck.

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

Harry raised his hands, still clutching the thumb controller. “I'm Harry Van Basten,” he said. “Van Basten, from Tent Town.” At the repetition of the code, the drone should follow his programming and head straight for Ub-hot. Hopefully.

"Drop that, stand up, and turn around slowly. Keep your hands away from your Pod." Harry knew with sinking certainty that his discoverer would be one of Yakamoto's goons. He turned, the unsheathed blade tickling his neck, to find two men glaring at him.

The man holding the sword spat. “Harry Van Basten, my arse. You're Muller. We heard you might be snooping around."

Harry spread his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I didn't even get as far as snooping! How about pretending you haven't seen me, and I won't dig any further into your boss's business. Sound fair?"

"Too late.” The second man fiddled with his Pod. “Mr Yakamoto's on his way. He's livid with you."

"A man who uses unregistered children to retrieve sunken artefacts isn't someone I'm too fond of, either,” Harry retorted. “That's what he's up to, isn't it?” From their silence, he knew he was right. “Come on, these are little kids! And the Drowned Lands are designated as a grave. You know this is wrong. Does he cut you a share of the profits in exchange for your silence?"

"Everyone knows about it,” the swordsman muttered, the tip of his blade wavering a fraction. In the distance, approaching rapidly, Harry heard the buzz of the helicopter.

"Everyone knew about slavery, hundreds of years ago. Being aware of something makes it all right to ignore it, does it?” He had to raise his voice; the helicopter had arrived with incredible speed and now hovered directly overhead. Harry shielded his face from the fierce downdraft. The men strapped a harness around his body, and he was lifted from his feet. The webbing dug painfully into his armpits and crotch. By the time he was winched into the helicopter, it was more than whirling dust making his eyes water.

Yakamoto scowled at him, as the helicopter veered away from the Downs. “What a shame!” he shouted over the engine noise. “You should have listened to me. Cornubia wouldn't listen, either."

"What did you say to her?” The helicopter banked, and Harry clutched the seats to keep from falling.

"Cornubia knew the deal when she joined the Amistad , but she didn't want to give up her child. She foolishly ran away. I went to great trouble to get her back from the Britain ."

"Is that why you killed her? Because she caused you trouble?"

"She killed herself, Mr Muller."

"Don't give me that. I saw her body. She was slit right open."

"We were taking her to Scotland when she threw herself from the helicopter. As she hit the roof of the Circus, she must have become caught on a protruding piece of glass. A tragic accident."

"You're a sick man, Mr Yakamoto, sending children to do your grave-robbing for you."

"I find ‘grave-robbing’ an ugly phrase. Why shouldn't I make a profit from retrieving artefacts and selling them? I give those children a home and food out of the profits."

"Those that survive, you mean? Why little kids?"

"Grown men would demand too much money to dive into waters that are toxic with death. And children are small. They can reach places adults can't.” He rose, moving sure-footed as the helicopter hovered. A red man pushed the door open. Glancing over his shoulder, Harry saw the glass dome of the Circus. The hum of the rotors disturbed the gulls feasting on Cornubia's body, and they rose in a great shrieking white cloud.

Yakamoto took a step towards him, a knife gleaming in his hand. “It's all about convenience, Mr Muller. You have made yourself inconvenient today. I warned you it could be painful." Harry lashed out with his foot. The blade spun out of Yakamoto's hand, and the old man cursed. “Get him!"

Two of the red men leapt on Harry, wrestling him towards the open door, when a massive explosion sent the helicopter spinning. As it whirled, Harry caught a sickening glimpse of the Great Britain, sails billowing as she raced up the Haymarket. He clicked his Pod. “Victoria!"

"Harry! Where are you?"

"On the helicopter. What the hell was that?"

"A warning shot. Get out of there!"

"Where to?” But she had gone, and the thugs, regaining their feet, advanced on him. Harry, at the door, saw a puff of smoke rise from the Britain's deck, heard the report of the cannon. He had nowhere else to go. He jumped.

He crashed feet-first through the roof of the Circus, feeling the glass tear searing lines along both legs. Tangled with Cornubia's body, they fell together, slamming into the sun-warmed water and down, far into the chilly depths. Harry saw mannequins staring at him from sunken shop windows as, with a burst of adrenaline, he kicked free of Cornubia and back up towards the light. And then the sun exploded, a fireball of red and orange flame. Harry dived as the remaining glass shattered, raining down around him. There was nowhere to go but down, until his lungs burned as hard as the sky.

"Harry?” He heard Victoria's faint voice in his ear, but darkness gathered in his eyes, and it was impossible to answer.

* * * *

Harry woke up in hospital, every limb bandaged and stinging. Victoria sat on his bed, eating grapes. His grapes, he was sure.

"Grapes are for sick people,” he croaked. “Government rules."

"You're not sick,” she replied, tartly. “Besides, Magda got you a whole seal, and the Dutch exiles gave a banquet in your honour. Too bad you missed it."

He tried to sit up without wincing and failed. “Yakamoto?"

"In a million bits, along with his helicopter. Those pirates are good shots. I wouldn't want to piss them off."

Harry groaned. “How did you get there so fast?"

"The Britain was coming to pick up Cornubia. I followed them and gave them the drone data you sent Infocon. When the helicopter turned up they weren't going to miss their chance to avenge Cornubia and save those kids. Don't blame them, either."

"The kids! Did they find the baby?"

"You mean this baby?” Berkley appeared in the doorway, holding the baby awkwardly. Victoria tutted.

"You're holding him like a sack of spuds,” she chided. “Give him here.” She offered him to Harry, who put his hands firmly behind his back. He was as clueless with babies as Berkley.

"Captain Cutler said I could bring him in to see you,” Berkley said. “They're naming him Coran. Coran Harry Penhallow."

"Hell of a name, poor kid.” But Harry smiled. With the pirates of the Cumberland Basin looking after him, Coran Harry Penhallow would grow up with nothing larger than his name to worry about.

[Back to Table of Contents]

THERMOCLINES

By

Colin Harvey

Lightning flashes in the distance, and fear rises like a bubble from the bottom of a stagnant pond. I flap my wings harder against the headwind I've been fighting since leaving the Irish Sea, but terror weighs my muscles down. If I hadn't left it so late and the wind hadn't picked up, I'd be home by now. If, if. If the wind hasn't swung round so I've flown past the village in the dark without realising. When the rain hits, it'll weigh down my wings until I can no longer fly. You're going to die far from home, the fear says. You're going to ditch in the Grey; your lungs will fill with that burning smog, your skin will blister, your flesh bubble, and no one will know what happened to Garyn Jenkins.

"Bloody wind!” I shout with breath I can hardly spare. “ Bas-tard rain! Bloody thermoclines! Bloody, bloody Grey!” Anger at the legacy of our ancestor's folly lends me fresh wind. Then the darkness deepens enough for the candle-trees to ignite, lighting up the familiar valley ahead. As their fiery berries brighten, I shout with joy, and tears of relief half-blind me. The trees will burn for an hour, long enough for me to get home. Unless I hit a thermocline.

Tonight, though, I manage to avoid any of the lethal temperature inversions. By the time I reach Pembroke Trees, fear is a distant memory. Instead I think, I've flown at night and lived!

I dig my toenails into the bending branches of my favourite mountain-ash. The hand-sized berries of the candle-trees are still burning nearby, and I inhale their waxy scent. Not much smells in our empty, history-haunted ruin of a world, so I relish what there is. Tonight's berries have burnt to dust, scattering their seeds onto the wind, one of the few plants able to prosper in the world-wide lowland carpet of the Grey. Tomorrow night more will burn. Our forefathers who gengineered them weren't always foolish. They were clever sometimes, which only makes their idiocy greater.

The berries’ cold phosphorescence casts patterns of shadow and light. My five-foot wings are still outstretched—I've been flying so long they've cramped open—and I slowly furl them. Old Thom tells us that we look like what our ancestors called angels. “If,” he says, “angels had feathers all over their body from the Adam's Apple downwards."

I call into the slowly fading light, “Who's Adam? And what's an apple?" A chuckle comes from the darkness. Rhodri says from the branch below, “I dunno!” Anger rises from beneath his laughter. “I thought you wasn't going to make it!"

I'm shaking with fatigue, but I laugh. I'm not going to let him know how scared I was. “No problem; I'd have just nested in a tree."

"You'd have missed them, if you had.” Smugness stains his voice. “We have two guests. Father and daughter."

What? A woman travelling, almost alone? But I don't let my astonishment show. He won't hear me get excited. “Best go to dinner, then,” I say. I launch into the air and flap hard. Our wings are great for soaring on thermals but bugger-all use for tree hopping.

"Okaay!” He whoops.

Rhodri and I are contra-twins. He's as fair as I'm dark, outgoing to my quiet; thin compared to me, though I'm solid, not fat. We've been friends all our lives, but always known that with Emily, the only girl our age in the village, one of us will have to leave or look elsewhere to marry. Maybe both, if she chooses surly Rob instead. Rob's a year older than us, and he thinks he's our better. So we avoid him, and he ignores us. Whatever happens, though we try to ignore it, we know that once Emily starts to bleed, our friendship is history.

I stop at our hut, swaying at the top of Tree Six. I unclip the fishing net on the end of a pole slung over my shoulder, and my goody-bag with today's haul: three eggs filched from a gull's nest, despite flapping wings and savage beaks, and two sea-bass. Not much for twelve hours flying. Winters are even harder. Then I fly to the galley platform.

In the evenings, we eat Jacama fruit and leaves from the upside-down trees and in a good season, meat, even though prey is rare as a woman and as hard to catch. Myfanwy cooks with herbs grown in one of her little window-pots, so pigeon or gull never tastes the same way twice. When we've eaten we swap the day's news. Afterwards Old Thom tells stories of when the land was a green carpet, and men built metal towers to the sky. How the Ancients remade themselves in all shapes and forms, just because they could. I can swallow the idea of Wingless men—but fish-men? Old Thom says that's because when mankind went Upaloft to the stars, they took fish-men with them to settle water-worlds. We just laugh at that, which makes Old Thom snort with disgust. Young Thom sits and drools, showing even true-genes can breed false. When we're done, we head to our nests for the night. Tonight's different. Instead I hover outside, tired wings taking long, slow strokes unheard against the other's chatter. But what sounds close to an argument cuts through the talk. “There's more than one kind of superstition.” The stranger's voice is a rook-like caw. “Were-birds, mutants, Others.” He snorts. “We haven't yet devolved to thinking the world's flat, but once I was in a village that thought the sun orbited the Earth. We're sliding backwards to barbarism, I tell you."

Twenty-eight heads turn as I enter the platform, looking for our first guests in three years. The next village is Abergwan, thirty miles away and twice our size; here at the western end of the world, travellers are rare but encouraged.

"Garyn. You made it.” I can't tell if Da's annoyed. He rarely shows emotion.

"Sorry I'm late,” I say. “I was fishing off Skomer Island, and I hit another thermocline. Ended up in the water for a few seconds. Had to sit on a rock ‘til I dried off.” I didn't need to tell him how nearly I'd skirted death. “Lucky the Grey don't go over the water. I lost time trying to see if I could find the fish I was after. He was a big bugger."

"You let boys fish out to sea?” The stranger's voice cuts across us. The implications of what I said sink in, and he adds hurriedly, “Even a boy who survives a thermocline." Old Thom answers for Da, and his tone brooks no argument: “He's young, Mordechai, but Garyn is the best flyer in Wales.” I'm amazed. I had no idea Old Thom thought me good for anything.

"My apologies,” Mordechai says, “I meant no offence."

"It's because he's so young that he has survived.” Da adds, “As we get older, our reflexes slow."

"We need judgement, not reflexes,” Mordechai fires back. “A grown man would know to steer clear of taking risks."

"No risk, no reward!” Da's getting annoyed. “We never used to be able to regain control after hitting a thermocline. It was Garyn showed us how to level out of the fall that bit faster. Six or more of us owe our lives to him."

Embarrassed, I don't add that I've survived almost a dozen of them—that would be bragging. Instead, I shuffle, to get a better look at Mordechai. He's red-bearded above his throat, red-feathered below. He's big and strong but with a harsh look that hints at cruelty. He studies me. Then I see his daughter and bow, blushing.

They're both wearing the same plain blue coveralls as us. Perhaps she takes after her Ma, rather than him. Dark haired, with white skin blending into white feathers, she's delicate enough to blow away in a breeze. Her look cuts right through me, and my cheeks burn. My heart is thumping fiercer than when I nearly plummeted into the sea.

I hop over to my perch, suddenly conscious of how awkward we are on the ground. Myfanwy brings a platter to me and one for Rhodri. Her feet are like oval plates compared to our clawed ones and only arms sprout from her single shoulder-sockets, but for all that she's a freak (Old Thom claims she's like First Humans), she's better on a flat surface than us.

She puts my platter on the lectern in front of me. I stare at it. “Tree squirrel? Is it a feast day?” She fills my glass and chucks me under what she says passes for my chin, and I pull away, heat rising to my face. She reckons that once everyone had a chin as big as hers. “Lantern-tree wine, not water?” I look at the pale yellow-liquid in delight. “All my dreams are coming true!"

"Not all,” she says. “Not yet, surely?” She nods at our visitor with a little smile. “Her name is Kazia.”

She changes the subject: “I thought you were going to take it easy after the last thermocline.” She puts her hand on her broad hip and thrusts out that eye-popping featherless cleavage. “Remember?" Of course. How can I forget? I'd swooped low after a pigeon, ignoring my itching skin and the warning prickle in my nostrils. Brushing cold air beneath warm, I fell so far, so fast, I almost landed in the Grey; it smelt of puke, and even though I only had a sniff, I was still sick enough to need Myfanwy's herbs. She'd clucked maternally. “Few would've noticed such a small thermocline at all,” she'd said. “Old Thom says the word thermocline used to be used about water, not air.” She laughed. “You know what he's like. What he doesn't know I think he makes up.” She sobered. “But you were lucky." She taps my shoulder on her way back. “Stop staring,” she says. “First time I've ever seen men concentrate on anything.” She adds, “They've been trying to get him to leave the girl here, before they wandered off the subject as usual."

We watch them like we're waiting for cliff-rats. Patient, unwavering. Mordechai matches us, making sure when he looks away that we know he chooses to, not because we've forced it. When I look away from him, it's to find Kazia studying me, equally unwavering, and I feel my face burn again. I catch Emily watching me. Her normally ruddy face is almost as white as Kazia's, but it's a death white, and she's close to tears. I harden my heart.

We strain to hear every single word of news they bring. Tonight's feast will dent our supplies, but so what? We sit silent as Old Thom and Mordechai exchange tall tales of the Old Days and Mankind's flight to the stars. For all his supposed cleverness, Old Thom has never been able to say why our great-grandfathers didn't go Upaloft, and there are as many theories why as people in the village. That we're descendants of a splinter group who refused to go; our ship crashed on its way to pick us up; or our Grand-Da's committed some terrible crime for which they were left behind; even that mankind never went Upaloft at all, and we're the last humans. Old Thom hems and haws, showing how useless learning is.

"Aye,” Mordechai grunts. “They never thought of those they abandoned on the margins.” He says brightening, “I've heard of communities on the continent. That in the highest mountains the Grey isn't a problem, even in the valleys between the hills, and that they can even grow food in the ground. One day they might even regain the stars."

We bite our lips to hide our smiles at such foolishness. Our lives aren't about regaining the stars, just survival.

But our self-control breaks when Mordechai brags of having visited Brisel. “Aye, I've seen the Necropolis,” he says. “Black towers piercing the sky, haunted by Deadwalkers and cannibals. Barely got away with our kidneys."

"Bull- shit!" Rhodri mutters. They glare at him, and he falls silent.

"I've always known Brisel as the first of the flying cities,” Old Thom says, not wanting to call our guest a liar but unable to swallow this latest fancy. “Never heard of any city of the dead."

"It was the last, too,” Mordechai says. “Or it would've been, had it flown. But something happened at a place called Canesh'm, something that left thousands dead and their ghosts haunting the place." Old Thom doesn't flat out call him a liar but looks sceptical.

At the end of the evening they stand. For the first time, I realise just how big Mordechai is. “He must be almost five foot three!” I hiss at Rhodri.

He pitches his voice in an impersonation of Old Thom's sepulchral sing-song: “In the old days they was bigger still ... gi-ants, they was, I tell you, boy. Six feet tall!"

"No-oo,” I add in my own parody. “Eight!"

We collapse into giggles, then catch Da and Mervyn—Rhodri's Da—glaring at us. I grow serious. With his huge pectorals, Mordechai is a flying barrel. “How much do you reckon he weighs?” I murmur. Rhodri shrugs, and murmurs back, “A hundred pounds?"

I whistle. That's with our hollow bones. Old Thom has Myfanwy give us a biology lesson every time someone dies. He's so stuck in the past, he's desperate we won't lose any of his precious learning—as if it will put food in our bellies.

Myfanwy cutting Gregory open, working quickly before the man's body could begin to decay, before the Grey could wreak such havoc it would make the carcass unrecognizable and waste an anatomy lesson. Showing us blistered skin and oozing pus, the legacy of just a few seconds in the Grey, she pointed at something almost hidden by the gore. “That's an extra-long trachea—windpipe to you. It folds up accordion-style, and inflates with air during long flights.” I was too busy trying not to lose my breakfast to ask what an accordion was, but I got her meaning. We're built for flight...

Still...

"He must struggle to fly very far,” I say.

"They flew over the Severn Sea,” Rhodri whispers, as they approach.

"Flew, or floated like a big gasbag?” I ask.

They pass, and Mordechai purses his lips as he sees Myfanwy. “A Wingless?” His tone is studiedly neutral.

"She's a good cook and a better healer,” Da says. The shame in his voice makes me want to shout at them.

"And good for comforting widowers and virgins?” Mordechai asks. Realising he may have given offence, he adds, “Not all villages are so tolerant of deviants. It does you credit."

"It's easy to mistake that tolerance for softness,” Da says quietly, the warning clear. He adds, affably,

“Do think about marrying Kazia to one of our boys, won't you?"

Mordechai finally says: “What if we stay a week? We've found that places that seem alright at first aren't always so good when you dig deeper.” He holds up a placating hand. “I'm not suggesting that it's the case here, but we can't be too careful. One village, it turned out that they clipped their women's wings—to keep ‘em safe, they said."

I'm shocked. Our women have always hunted, if in pairs in case of raids. Old Thom says, “The girls fly here until they're too pregnant. We need food as much as babies." We almost fall over each other to escort them to Kern's nest. He'll share with the Thoms while they stay. Mordechai bows his gratitude. “This'd be a fine place to stay for good, if I didn't want so badly to see the truth of the legends. I've heard the crossing over the great bridge to the continent is a hard one. But we'll stay a week. It'll give me a chance to meet my future son-in-law." When the older men have gone Mordechai bids us goodnight, adding, “You boys won't pester my girl. If you wish to court her, you'll do so through me. I'll decide a week from now. The men have agreed this." As we turn away, Kazia's hand brushes mine, and she speaks for the first time, in a low voice. “May I ask their names, Father?"

Mordechai grunts.

We introduce ourselves, Rob clearly making an effort, Rhodri gallantly, me woodenly. I wish I had Rhodri's ease with her. She shakes my hand, brushing her thumb back and forth as she does so, then wishes us goodnight. As they turn away she whispers, “Later,” to me.

We fly back to the others, Rhodri so preoccupied he barely taunts me when I plead a headache and go to bed early. I clamber into my nest and sit in the dark, my head whirling. She wants to meet me? She wants to meet me!

My father returns, finding me sitting in the dark. He's brought a candle-shrub for light and studies me.

“You're smitten, hey?” He smiles. “Poor Emily. Suddenly she's no longer the centre of the world." I shrug. “She can still choose who she wants here or pick a husband at the Summer Fair. She'll live."

"Mordechai'll drive a hard bargain.” Da chuckles. “You'll need more than a talent for catching food and a few tree-sculptures to win her."

"I know.” I sigh. She might prefer me, but it will be Mordechai's choice. What can I offer that he'd want?

I say I need some air, and go outside.

* * * *

She makes me wait, but eventually the branch shakes, and she's beside me. She has a smell, no, a fragrance I've never known before. Her shoulder's warm against mine. She snuggles closer. “There aren't many women here,” she says, chatting.

"Rhodri's Ma died bearing him,” I explain. “Couldn't cope with the size of his wings. Mine died when I was three, falling into the Grey in a storm.” I'm gabbling. I shut up. She says, “Are you and Rhodri best mates?"

"Aye. We learnt to fly at the same time."

She comes even closer. “My father will kill us if he finds us,” she whispers. That just makes it more exciting. When she touches me, it feels as if the earth—or the tree—shakes.

"So why are we here?” I tease. I feel her lips press mine, and then her tongue flicks into my mouth. I put my arms round her.

"You know why.” Her hands are everywhere. “It's you I want. But we need to convince him .” I stifle a moan as she strokes me. “When we're married,” she whispers, “I want babies. But ‘til then I must be a good girl. So it's hands and mouths only."

The branch below us shakes. It was the tree that moved. “There you are, you little tramp!” Mordechai's rumble makes her shiver in my hands. Then it's our branch that rocks.

I shield her. “Don't blame her!"

"You.” He leans into my face. His breath smells. “Had best be very careful, young man. If you go near my daughter again, you're out. Understand?"

I nod, and they're gone. It's all happened so quickly and quietly that no one's heard. Later, I lie in bed thinking of her. In the night I hear a cry that might have come from her tree but might just as easily be a wild thing calling in the darkness.

* * * *

For three days I quarter the hunting grounds, flying in golden sunshine that alternates with sweeping curtains of rain, Kazia's presence hovering beside me like her fragrance. Once I fly over the metal forest of the Old Docks, where ships came from all over the world to discharge vast lakes of petrochemicals. Normally I avoid the place, but today I can even smile on the rusting towers and gigantic pipes. Below me, even the Grey—accidental spillage or a botched experiment—seems less sinister.

Usually only the highest peaks can poke through the oily sheen hovering a few inches above the ground. But for once, I see a few abandoned slate quarries. Moss and lichens—among the few things that can resist the Grey—decorate the blue slate in a bouquet of greens and yellows. Da and me rack our brains every night for things to interest Mordechai. We raid Da's hoard, carefully garnered over many years from treasure grounds. Da's crumbling dictionary is one I can't read, but I love the sound of words, and use ‘em when I can, so his treasures are garnered, not gathered: what Da says is a timepiece that straps to a man's wrist; a tube with a light that shines when I push a button; a counting machine, dead now, but we only need a couple of little power cells to make it work. And as much food as we can muster.

Every night Kazia and Mordechai are surrounded, so I can't get her alone. When I catch her watching me, her expression's unreadable.

On the third evening Mordechai announces his choice.

We've done as best we can, but it's not enough. Rhodri will wed Kazia next week. Mordechai thanks us for our offer.

Rhodri mutters, “Sorry,” as he passes, but he's grinning, and I know he's no sorrier than I'd be, if we'd won.

I shrug Da's consoling arm off and go to my suddenly lonely bed. Our dowry will be returned tomorrow morning.

* * * *

But next morning, Da shakes me awake. “They've fled!” In the candlelight he looks old, shrunken.

“They've taken as much as they can carry!” He almost sobs. “Rob's compass and a whole sackful of food. Thieving bandits!"

In the galley, people mill round like mobbing gulls. “They've done this before,” Rhodri says bitterly. He looks as shattered as I feel. “They was too well organised."

I wonder if Kazia hugged him, as well. And Rob? I hope not. But it'd be a good way to inflate the dowries.

Young Thom shakes his head. “I almost begged them to stay,” he wails. Da claps his shoulder. “He got you thinking it was your idea.” He tries to comfort the old man. “Like Rhodri says, they've done this before."

We gather, claws skittering on the wooden floor of the dining galley. Rhodri, Mervyn, Da, and me. Rob and Hywel, his Da. Mort, two years younger than Rhodri and me, barely old enough for man's work. Caspar, his wife seven months pregnant. Christian, only a few years older than us, but already married with bairns. One-eyed Jack. Kern. Big, burly flyers all. Only frail Old Thom and his drooling offspring will stay behind.

"They'll have a head start,” Old Thom says. “But they'll be weighed down with their haul,” he adds. We each take our pole with the fishing net on the end, and strap it over our shoulder. We put a firework in the goody-bag that we'll sling across the other shoulder, and a handful of sugary melon-berries and some Jacama fruit. I strap a water bottle to my waist. Apart from that we carry nothing and wear little. Outside, the sky turns orange with the sunrise.

"What happens when we catch ‘em?” Rhodri asks. His white face tells me he knows the answer. Rage fills me at the way our hospitality's been abused.

"Take the girl alive if you can,” Old Thom says. “We'll breed from her once we've clipped her wings. She's his accomplice, after all. If not, kill her as well."

Da nods. “Mordechai dies,” he says. “We'll hang his body from the trees and let the carrion birds feast."

"Then we'll catch the carrion birds and eat them,” Rob says. “At least some good'll come of this mess then. And if anyone else comes a-visiting, they'll see what happens to thieves." I try not to think of eating birds that've fed on human flesh. It's too close to cannibalism. We've never had to do that.

But it's as it should be. I drown any thoughts of mercy in an ocean of bile. It's coloured grey.

* * * *

We flap aloft and seek the first thermals. We'll circle round the village in ever-widening spirals. Whoever finds them will fire their flare for the others to follow.

I think otherwise: Mordechai gave us a clue when he mentioned the Europa Bridge. I've no desire to make myself look more a fool than I have already, so I'll go alone. I can fly farther and faster than anyone in the village.

I climb higher, wings beating slowly. As the heat of the day grows, I soar higher on outstretched wings, still circling the village. My lungs ache from drawing in the thin air, and my ears pop. They must have left at night, and I imagine lifting-off in the dark, the desperate silence, the effort it took to beat their wings in long, hard, regular strokes with no assistance from thermals.

Squinting, I see two specks in the distant east.

I bare my teeth and give chase.

* * * *

There's a tailwind up here, and all morning I reel them in. When I tire I gobble some melon-berries. But it's anger that really fuels me. If I don't use it, it'll eat me from inside. By noon, I'm almost above them. I grip the net under my arm, turning it into a spear. I furl my wings, swooping into a steep dive.

The wind buffets me as I close on them, and I'm unsure whether the roaring in my ears is the wind or my blood pounding. I come from above and out of the sun, so Mordechai never sees me. I hit him so hard that the impact tears the spear from my grasp, leaving splinters in my arm. He plummets to the ground, to make a twisted scarlet mess among the tendrils of the Grey. So much for hanging his carcass. I nearly end up with him, but manage to pull out just in time. Ignoring the pain from the splinters, I pursue Kazia, climbing slowly. She flies as if pursued by all the Deadwalkers of hell.

We fly on and on: I almost catch her, and she dives northwards. I overhaul her, and she turns back east, then south, then east again. She dropped her booty when I hit Mordechai, so we're flying equally light, but I reel her in gradually each time.

Eventually, as the sun sinks low behind us, I'm within shouting distance of her. But she calls first, weakly, gasping for breath. “Let me go! I'm dead without Mordechai, so you've had your revenge!"

"You reckon?” I snarl, but it's half-hearted. Killing Mordechai has lanced the boil of my hatred. I only pity her now and their shabby little trick.

"You judge us?” she says. “You in your smug little world! Fly home boy! Go back to your fishing! You don't know how hard it is to survive outside your precious village!"

"Then make it easier!” I shout back. “Come back with us, and we'll let you live! We need children more than we need revenge!"

"Tell Mordechai that!” She dives southwards, catching me by surprise. I gobble the last of my berries. We cross a huge river that narrows upstream, eastwards, so I guess it's the Brisel Channel.

We reach land again. The Grey is thicker than ever. I reel her in, metre by metre, then a centimetre at a time. I can only wonder at her stamina. I'm fit, but I'm ready to drop. It seems criminal to clip her wings—if I can take her alive.

Occasionally the Grey parts, to reveal outlines in the ground, as if something had been there once. Faint squares, thousands of them, imprinted in the ground.

I see trees in the distance. Did she know they were here? I have to catch her before we reach them or she might escape again. If I can fly in the dark, so can she.

I fly harder, faster, toward the trees, digging into reserves of strength I didn't know I had, heading her off. I wobble a little as I pass over her. I know the exact moment she realises her escape's cut off because her flight path, until now spear-straight, wavers.

Ahead of me in the distance is a vast black pit.

"Do you know where you are, boy ?” Kazia calls.

"Doesn't matter,” I say. “Give up, Kazia."

"That's Canesh'm,” she says. “The black pit is the remains of the flying city that exploded on take-off."

"If the legends are true—it could be natural.” It sounds lame, even to me. The pit glows slick and black and evil in the twilight.

We hover, wings fluttering in the wind. She doesn't even bother to answer my suggestion, instead says,

“I wanted to visit so many places: the Europa Bridge, the Fens ... Oh well, I guess that's as much as I get to see.” Her wings still, then she plummets. “I'd rather be dead than a Wingless baby-machine!" It's like I hit a thermocline in my head. My fall from anger matches her fall from the sky. My rage is used up, or maybe I've been won over by her. She mustn't die like this. It's too wasteful. I furl my wings tight, and dive.

She's a couple of hundred feet below me. The wind tugs my cheeks into a snarl. Gravity's vice-tight grip squeezes my head.

I've never thought about it before, but if you survive a thermocline, you always see things differently after. I realise that she's no whore, just desperate. Maybe Mordechai was once young and brave, before desperation corrupted him?

She's getting closer, only a few yards from me now.

We live in little bubbles of loneliness like Pembroke Trees, only meeting outsiders at the seasonal fairs. Only the brides we barter move between villages. We become more alike in our thoughts, more inbred. There are other villages that need to learn to survive falling from a thermocline. I can't see anything except Kazia, tumbling end over end toward the Grey, which fills my vision. I can smell its stink.

Right now anything seems possible. I hold out my arm, stretching, straining every tendon. “Grab my hand!” I shout. “We'll head for the trees!"

I feel a thermocline's prickling.

She's only inches from me ... I can almost reach her ... I manage to grab a wing, my other hand and a foot clutching desperately onto her cold arm, and I hear a ripping sound—a muscle? I dare not ease my grip. Concentrate, Garyn, I think. Open your wings, boy! Slow your dive!

I smell and taste and feel the slimy, burnt sickness that is the Grey. My shoulders strain to near-dislocation. My lungs heaving, I stop.

Then slowly haul her up.

What will her exposure to the Grey do? What if she's brain-dead? Worry about that later, mate. For the moment she's safe.

Her breathing has stopped. I carry her back to a lone Jacama tree amid the oaks, my foot screaming in agony. I rest her in the crook of two branches like the Indoos that Old Thom said hung their dead from platforms. Only she's not dead yet. Not if I've anything to do with it. I pound on her chest, the way Myfanwy showed us at home, and she coughs. I sit awkwardly in the bole, cradling her head in my arm.

I sleep. The last thing I see before I drift off is something moving, in the Grey. Eyes. Probably my imagination—or a dream.

* * * *

I awake in the morning, cold and stiff. This one Jacama tree is stunted and its fruit sparse, but it's home as far as I'm concerned. Kazia vomited in the night, but I was so tired I slept through it. I rage at myself as I wipe the nasty pink froth off her lips. I've seen this before; men coughing their guts up. Her body's so hot to the touch that it almost burns me. I wipe her down with my hand, which I've rinsed with water from my bottle. We can survive on Jacama berries, but their juice is sticky. To save water I eat Jacama berries and spit their liquid into her mouth.

The day is grey, like the murk at the foot of the tree. For the first time in maybe my whole life I have nothing to do but think and no one to distract me.

I wonder why the Grey only affects animals—most plants seem unaffected, while no one knows about insects. Were our Great-Grand-Da's punishing us?

When I've worried such thoughts to death, I try to work out what it was that I saw the night before, assuming it was real. Maybe animals can survive the Grey, here in the empty spaces between villages away from hunters. They'd need to be simple creatures, snakes or suchlike. Not mammals, which never survive the Grey.

Kazia cries out several times that day. Sometimes her sobs sound almost like words. Occasionally she grunts, and once she laughs, the dirtiest sound I've heard in a while, and I wonder about her life before. Whether she really was his daughter...

In the afternoon she vomits pink stuff again, and when I try to force water down her throat, she coughs it up. But she hasn't breathed in as much as others. She doesn't die, and I wonder at the resilience in such a small body. Perhaps she might somehow, by a miracle, make it. More likely it's simply the false dawn before death.

No one's ever lived this long after breathing in the Grey. We've tried everything at Pembroke Trees. Surgery, fluids, feeding, starving—nothing works. At least she'll be spared Myfanwy's knife, which usually cuts into the corpse's flesh within the hour, before the body can rot. Night begins to fall: I see movement in the Grey. There are eyes, again.

"Look at that, Kazia!” I leap from the tree, but it's gone before I can reach where it was. Only some sort of scuttling something, but the first life I've ever seen on the ground. I return to my watch and realise that she's stopped breathing. I rip her top off, exposing flawless little feathered breasts that point at the evening sky. No time for that now! I pound her chest and breathe air into her mouth. She coughs, and I taste blood.

She spasms and sits bolt upright, and I recoil from the almost blackness of her oversized irises. The Grey is not only eating her inside, but changing her in other ways as well. “Garyn,” she croaks, then falls into my arms. I want to weep and shout with joy at the same time, but all I can do is hold her, and mumble nothings. Her eyes have shut again, and I lean her back gently into the crook of the branches. I sit until long after nightfall before sleeping again.

* * * *

It's still night, a fat moon hanging yellow over the skyline. I listen, trying to work out what's woken me. Silence all around. Not even the sound of Kazia's breathing. I try to rouse her, but though I pound on her chest until her ribs must surely crack, and blow into her mouth, there's no response. Sobbing, I cradle her body in my arms.

I can only grieve so much and as daybreak stains the east, despite my swollen eyes, I sleep again.

* * * *

I awake cold and stiff. Kazia lies where I allowed her to fall into the crook of the branches. She's still soft to the touch. No sign of Rigor yet.

"I wish I'd known you better,” I say. I am reluctant to leave her to the carrion birds. She's all that I have. It is the loneliest, longest day of my life, and eventually I curl up around Kazia's cooling body and sleep.

* * * *

The next morning, I know I must leave, but still don't feel ready. As if taunting me, the day is warm, the sun fighting its way through dull grey streamers of clouds scudding on the wind. Kazia's body is warm where I have lain against it, and I kiss her cool lifeless lips. I know she'd mock me as still a boy, but I don't care. I love her, see?

Her skin is turning iridescent, and I wonder what evil the bastard Grey is still working on her. Soon, I suppose, she'll start to moulder. I should leave her now, while she still looks as she did in life. But I'm reluctant. I'm almost convinced that I see her chest rise and fall faintly, and she's still warm-ish. I remember Myfanwy cutting open Gregory to expose giant internal air sacs and his heart—as large as my head—beneath his protruding breastbone, and I'm glad I won't have to see Kazia like that, but guilty too that I'll lose that valuable knowledge.

I prepare to leave.

"Garyn.” Kazia's whisper almost makes me fall out of the tree in shock. She moves. It's only a tiny shudder, but it's movement, not the involuntary twitch of a corpse.

I leap on her, cackling. “What? How? How did?"

Eventually, I stop gibbering and lean back and grin at her.

She opens strange eyes with huge black irises, smiles faintly, and coughs. She wriggles into a more comfortable position and winces. “My chest hurts,” she says. “Have you been hitting me?"

"Every hour.” My cheeks hurt from the width of my grin. “Tried to keep you breathing.” She's deathly cold.

"Maybe that wasn't what was needed,” she whispers, but smiles. I feel suddenly shy. “I dreamt that you were holding me,” she says.

"I did. Fed you, and wiped the puke off.” I shake my head. “How did you survive?"

"I dunno.” She frowns, concentrating. “What was different? What didn't you do, or do, that the others didn't?"

"The others all died; we dissected them—"

"Before they could be affected by the Grey.” She sits upright so violently that she almost falls out of the tree. “How long did I lie there?"

I shake my head. “Three days ... I think.” I swallow, bile acrid in my throat. “I let you die. I slept, while—"

She puts a finger to my lips. “You kept me warm for long enough then let me die so that I might live.”

Her kiss is only a peck on my cheek, but I still stir. “And you kept me warm, while the Grey worked on me."

"Worked how?” I squint at her. What's she turned into?

"I'm starving,” she says, ignoring me. The sun sends streamers of light through the clouds, and she stretches her wings out wide. The sunlight glints off her now iridescent skin, and she shuts her eyes and smiles. “I'm feeding on sunlight.” She laughs, bemused. “All this time we thought the Grey was poisonous, it was there to change us.” She looks at me. “I think I can still eat food, but this is like a back-up system.” She tears off a couple of leaves, and munches them. “Delicious,” she mumbles around a mouthful, but she grimaces. I try one and spit it out. She giggles. “Useful in an emergency. Maybe the taste grows on you."

"If people knew about this...” I breathe.

"People.” Kazia's face falls. “What now?"

"I dunno.” I laugh, but without real humour. “All I could think of was keeping you alive—"

"So you could take me prisoner?"

I shake my head. “I hoped, that you ... that I might...” I look away, blushing. She lifts my chin. “I'm not sure I count as human any more."

I look her in the eye. “I don't care.” I swallow. Then blurt, “I love you. I loved you in Pembroke Trees, and—"

She silences me with a kiss, gentle at first, then growing more passionate. When we come up for air, she says, “I haven't changed that much, then...” Despite the darkness of her eyes, I still see laughter in them. Then they widen.

I turn around.

Two wingmen approach and hover about twenty metres away. Their skin is iridescent like hers—they're naked but for a loin-cloth each—and from what I can see, their eyes are as dark. The smaller of them calls out, “The girl's one of us. She comes with us."

"I can't fly,” Kazia says. “I'm still recovering."

"I'll carry her,” I say. “I nursed her. She's my wife."

"You incubated her?” the small one cries.

"You're young to be married,” the big one says in a surprisingly reedy voice.

"Don't matter,” I say.

"Are you sure?” Kazia whispers. “Husband?"

"I had to say something,” I whisper back. “Call it a statement of intent.” I hoist her into my arms and almost fall from the ground when I leap from the tree.

"I'll help,” the big one says.

The two strangers don't look too happy, but they set off ahead of us.

* * * *

As we rise, I see the shapes of other wingmen in the distance. They look as if they're converging on us.

"What are those lines?” Kazia asks Nico, the smaller of the two, pointing to the too-regular ridges, and the imprints in the ground visible from above. “They're everywhere."

"They're the imprints of the city,” he answers. “Where their buildings rested. This was Brisel, the first of the flying cities."

We skirt the evil-looking Canesh'm Crater and head up a valley even thicker with the Grey than usual. I comment on it.

"Stockwood Vale, on the edge of Brisel City,” the second—unnamed—flyer grunts. That's all the explanation he gives, as if it should be enough.

I see trees at the top of the Vale. A half-dozen Beeches, Jacama, and an Ash, all thick with wingmen, I see as we close on them. All like Kazia and Nico.

" This is the Necropolis?” I gasp and start to laugh at the way truth is twisted by story. There are shapes moving in the mist, it parts long enough to reveal an animal, and then a wingman rises from the Grey. They seem at ease with it. That alone makes them more alien than anything else could.

" This is Whitchurch Trees,” Nico says severely. “Our hatchery and our home. You savages wouldn't understand. We've learned to keep our distance from your kind."

"I'm sorry,” I say. “I didn't mean to be rude.” He seems to accept my apology. We place Kazia in a Mountain Ash so like mine at home that I feel a pang of homesickness. An old voice that sounds just like Old Thom but with a different accent calls, “What've you brought us then, Nico?"

"Found one of us over at Bris,” Nico says. “But she's married.” He jerks a thumb at me. “He incubated her. We owe him, however we feel ‘bout his kind."

"Well, I'll be buggered!” “Old Thom” says. “We may owe you, but you can't stay here, youngster. Not unless you'm prepared to take the dive."

"Hold!” Kazia cries. “How do we know it'll work for Garyn?"

"We know,” Nico says. “Trial and error. It works for young ‘uns, and the strong.” He shrugs. “Maybe they meant it to work for everyone, but time was scarce and they cocked it up. Or not. Why waste it on the old or damaged?"

I gaze at the Grey, feel my palms grow clammy. My heart pounds. “I can't,” I say. “In time, maybe...” I take a deep breath. I'm not sure I'll ever be ready, but I can't say that here.

"You can't stay here,” someone else calls. “We won't have no savages!"

"Then I'll go."

Kazia touches my arm. “I won't be told what to do by strangers.” She rocks backward and forward, worrying at the problem. I've never seen the girls at home like this, thinking, planning—except about food and babies. I like it.

"Give us two minutes to talk?” she calls out, and “Old Thom” nods. But instead, she flies to the Jacama trees, grabbing handfuls of berries. Then onto the Beeches, where she rips something off. Then she flaps back, already looking stronger. The sunshine must be doing her good.

"Do you love me?” she whispers.

"You know I do!"

"Can we have children?"

I grin, slowly. “Dunno. We'll just have to practice."

"But not here."

She turns to the assembled crowd. “You need a second site, so you're not so vulnerable to attack."

"We knows that!” someone shouts. “But we can't spare people!" I realise what she's planning and shout, “You can spare one girl you didn't know existed this morning." Kazia calls, “I've taken Beech nuts and Jacama berries. We'll plant them at Bris. We'll be your second site."

There's an explosion of voices, but she turns to me. “I'm probably not fit enough to fly all the way back, but I can always rest, while you carry on or wait for me. Are you ready? Husband?"

"I'm ready,” I say.

"Then let's re-seed Brisel."

The old and the new, human and post-human, we launch ourselves from the tree into the future.

[Back to Table of Contents]

What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?

By Gareth L Powell

i.

On Monday morning, while sitting on the overcrowded eight o'clock bus from Portishead to Bristol, I decided to skip work. Michelle and I had split up the day before, and I really didn't feel like going into the office. Instead, I got off at the top of Rownham Hill and used my mobile phone to call in sick. Then I walked over the Suspension Bridge into Clifton. It was a cold, grey day and I needed some time to myself.

I bought a newspaper and sat on a park bench in a Georgian square with black railings, thinking things over and trying to figure out where and when our relationship had gone wrong. We'd been together a year and a half but now she was seeing someone else.

We'd broken up over a bottle of wine in a crowded bar by the river.

I'd said, “So that's it?"

She'd shrugged. “I guess so."

She'd fiddled with the stem of her glass, looking uncomfortable and upset. It was Sunday lunchtime and the place smelled of garlic and stale beer. There was nothing more to say. We finished the wine in silence and then went our separate ways.

Thinking about it now made me feel hollow and lonely. There was a cold wind blowing, and I was glad I had a warm jacket over my shirt and tie.

Most of the houses in the square had been converted into offices and flats. Some had dream catchers and rainbow stickers in their upper windows. Finding no answers there, I got up and walked along Pembroke Road to the Roman Catholic cathedral.

I stood looking at it from the opposite side of the road. Flanked on both sides by large, conservative town houses, its modern design and jagged, arty spires seemed out of place, and its concrete steps were slick with rain.

Turning my back on it, I cut through a side street that took me to Whiteladies Road—a busy main street lined with shops, galleries, restaurants, and bars—coming out by the building that used to be the old cinema.

I thought a bit of retail therapy might cheer me up, so I spent a few minutes flicking through the DVD

bargain racks in Sainsbury's and bought a lottery ticket at the tobacco counter. Then, at around eleven o'clock, I walked out and up to the little bookshop on the hill, where I spent an hour browsing the shelves.

I loved that shop. It was small and independent and spread over several levels. There were leaflets and flyers stuck to the walls and the solid wooden floors creaked gently as I moved. There were potted plants on the windowsills, and the whole place had the relaxed atmosphere of a library. I picked up a book I'd been meaning to read for a while. As I paid for it, the girl on the stool behind the till gave me a smile. I'd seen her in there before. She had long blonde hair, a short denim skirt, and tan cowboy boots.

"Good choice,” she said. She slipped the book into a paper bag and handed it to me, and I thanked her. She pushed her hair back with one hand. There were silver bangles on her wrist.

"It's very good,” she said.

A lorry went past the window. I said, “Have you read it, then?"

"I've read all his books. Well, the recent ones anyway. And this is definitely the best." She had a dog-eared paperback on the counter in front of her, with a bus ticket sticking out of it in place of a bookmark.

"What's that you've got there?” I said.

She glanced down. “This?” She held the book up. It was a Penguin translation of the Iliad .

"Ah. I remember the first time I read that."

"You do?"

"I studied classics at college."

She sat up and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Really?" Her eyes flicked to the clock on the wall by the door. She said, “Look, I'm going for lunch in a minute. I don't suppose you'd like to...?"

Her legs were brown, and her eyes were blue, with little copper flecks. I hesitated for a second, thinking of Michelle and her new boyfriend. Then I smiled and said, “Yes. Yes, I'd like that very much."

* * * *

Ten minutes later, we were sitting at a table in the window of a coffee house near Clifton Down shopping centre. My new friend insisted on paying for the drinks. She had a cup of tea with lemon, and I had a decaf latte.

"My name's John, by the way."

"Bobbie."

"I take it from your accent that you're not from around here?" She reached over and lifted my book from its bag. She turned it over and looked at the back cover. She had glitter on her fingernails.

"I grew up in Seattle,” she said.

I took the lid off my coffee and stirred it with a plastic spatula. The book was a travelogue by a British writer living in Bordeaux. I'd heard it was funny.

"So, what are you doing in Bristol? Apart from working in a bookshop, I mean." She put the book down. There was rain on the window. “I'm at the University. I'm studying philosophy, but really, I want to work in advertising."

She took a sip of tea. She looked at my shirt and tie. “How about you, what do you do?" I popped the lid back onto my cup. “I work for the Evening Post,” I said. She put her elbows on the table: “Are you a writer?"

I smiled and shook my head. “I just work in the office. It's nothing special. As a matter of fact, I should be there now, but I'm playing truant."

"Won't you get into trouble?"

"Ah, what's the worst that could happen?"

"They could fire you."

I reached into my jacket pocket. I pulled out the lottery ticket I'd bought earlier. “I have a back-up plan,” I said, showing it to her.

Bobbie's face lit up. “Hey, did you ever see that film with Nicolas Cage, the one where he's a cop, and he promises that if he wins the lottery, he'll split his winnings with the diner waitress because he can't afford to tip her?"

I scratched my eyebrow. “Yes, I think so. Was the waitress Michelle Pfeiffer?"

"I don't know, I think it was Bridget Fonda. But anyway—how about we have the same deal? I bought you a coffee, so how about if you win the lottery, we split the prize money?"

"Sure, why not?” I shrugged my jacket off and hooked it over the back of the chair.

"You promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

She sat back. “Okay then."

She took another sip of tea. I tried my coffee. It was too hot to drink, so I took the plastic lid off again and sniffed the steam. Bobbie was watching me. She said: “Do you go clubbing much?" I shook my head. I was thirty-three. I hadn't been in a nightclub for years.

"Only there's this party tonight at Evolution, and I don't really have anyone to go with, and I thought you might—"

She stopped talking, distracted by something over my shoulder. There was a commotion going on outside. I saw people running up the street in the rain, their feet splashing. The traffic had stopped. People were getting out of their cars. I turned to Bobbie. She was looking past me, and her eyes were wide.

"John?” she said.

I swivelled on my chair. There was something huge coming up the road. It towered over the buildings, a billowing tsunami of dust and greyness a hundred metres high, bearing down on us with horrifying speed. I reached for Bobbie's arm.

"Come on,” I said. I took her hand and pulled her out of her seat. I wanted to run. But before we'd taken two steps, the wave of dust struck, ripping through the coffee shop, shattering the windows and blasting us—and the building around us—to smithereens.

ii.

Some time later, I became aware of a cool breeze dancing over my bare legs, making the hairs prickle. My eyes were sticky. I rubbed them open to find I was lying naked and alone on a grassy hillside, in front of a wooden cabin.

I sat up and looked around in puzzlement. The hill sloped gently down to a marshy river, with further hills beyond. The sky overhead was blue and the sun was warm. There were birds singing. On the grass beside me were some clothes: a red cotton shirt, some jeans, and a sturdy pair of hiking boots. I slipped the jeans on, which made me feel a bit better. Then I stepped up onto the cabin's porch. The planks were rough beneath my bare feet. There were wind chimes by the open door.

"Hello?” I called. “Hello, can you help me? I don't know where I am." Inside, the cabin was empty. There was no one in there. It measured maybe ten metres by five metres. It was all one big room, with a bed at one end and a stove and sink at the other. The front windows looked toward the river. Through the back windows, I could see an outhouse and a stone wishing well. On the bed was a piece of paper. I walked over and picked it up. Printed on it in black ink were five words, which I read aloud:

"Your name is John Doyle."

The cabin's front windows were propped open. The sun cast bright rectangles on the wall. I stood there for a long time, not knowing what else to do. Then gradually, I realised I was hungry—ravenous, in fact, like I hadn't eaten for days.

When I couldn't stand it any longer, I screwed the piece of paper into a ball and walked the length of the cabin to the stove, my bare feet padding on the pine planks. There was a cupboard below the sink, and I opened it, hoping to find some food. Inside were some stacked tins. I pulled one out. It had a ring-pull top, and I cracked it open. I slopped the sausages and beans it contained into one of the metal frying pans on the hob. There were some utensils in a pot by the sink, and I helped myself to a wooden spoon. The sticky mixture didn't take long to heat through. When it was ready, I took it out onto the porch and used the spoon to eat it straight from the pan. With each bite, I felt stronger and more human. When I'd finished it all, I pushed the pan aside and sat looking at the river. From the position of the sun, I guessed it was late afternoon, maybe somewhere between five and seven o'clock. When the wind blew, the light glittered off the water. I closed my eyes. The air smelled of grass and timber.

"My name is John Doyle,” I said. I repeated it two or three times, trying it on for size. And as I did so, I felt my memories starting to return. They were slippery and insubstantial at first, like dolphins in fog, but slowly, one-by-one, they were coming back.

I remembered my address. I remembered the bookshop. I remembered the way the floor creaked as I moved...

I found a screw-topped bottle of red wine in the cupboard under the sink and a tin mug to drink it from. I retrieved the cotton shirt and the boots from the grass and put them on, and then sat on the porch steps again, watching miserably as the shadows lengthened and the sun set over the hill behind the cabin. As the light started to fade, I became gradually aware of a strange ripple in the air. At first, it looked like a small heat haze. But as I watched, it thickened into something resembling a churning ball of yellow gas about the size of a grapefruit. Little sparks of static flickered over its surface.

"Greetings, John Doyle,” it said. It spoke without a trace of accent. Its words were clipped and precise. I scrambled to my feet.

"Who are you?"

"I am here to help, John."

I backed away. Reaching behind me, I found the rough pine frame of the cabin's open door.

"Help me?"

The ball bobbed forward. It was small enough that I could have held it in the palm of my hand.

"Indeed. You have suffered a grave injury, and I am here to help."

* * * *

It followed me back into the cabin. “What's the last thing you remember?” it said. I put the tin mug down on the aluminium draining board beside the sink.

"I remember being in Starbuck's,” I said.

The ball of gas hovered over me. It smelled of ozone. “What about the dust cloud?" I set my jaw. I guess I must have been blocking it out until that moment. Now, remembering it, my hands started to tremble. I picked up the wine bottle. It was still three quarters full.

"I remember it crashing through the window."

I refilled the mug and took a shaky drink. The yellow ball of gas crackled.

"There was an accident, John. You were involved in it. But in order for you to fully understand your situation, I must explain it to you from the beginning."

I swallowed. There was a sudden hollow feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with the food I'd just eaten. In an unsteady voice I said: “An accident?"

The gas ball drifted over to the open door. “Do you see those hills in the distance?” it said. “Well, the first thing you have to realise, John, is that there is nothing beyond them. This cabin exists in an artificial bubble ten kilometres across. The world beyond is a lifeless grey sphere." It was starting to get dark out there. There was a lamp on the mantelpiece. I looked into my mug. In the lamplight, the wine was thick and dark, like blood.

The gas ball continued: “Do you know what a nano-assembler is, John? It's a tiny machine designed to construct things—in this case, computer processors—using individual atoms as building blocks. These assemblers are programmed to reproduce and to keep building until told to stop." It paused and lowered its tone. “Unfortunately, last year some of them escaped a lab at Bristol University and just kept right on reproducing. They chewed through the Earth's crust in a matter of hours, converting it all into smart matter. There was nothing anyone could do. The human race didn't stand a chance. Within a day, all the cities, plants, and people in the world were gone."

"And that was the dust cloud I saw?"

"Yes, that was the wavefront."

"And what is ‘smart matter'?"

The ball drifted back a little way.

"It's simply matter that's been rearranged from its natural state into an optimized, maximally-efficient computer processor using individual atoms as computing elements. We call it ‘smart matter.’ This cabin and everything you can see and touch outside is made of it."

"So the world's been turned into a giant computer?” I was sweating now.

"Yes."

I wiped my forehead with a damp palm. I drained my cup and put it on the counter by the sink. Suddenly, all I wanted was to get out of the cabin.

I pushed through the door and down the steps. The sky overhead had dimmed to a deep purple, shading to red at the horizon. I lurched around to the rear of the cabin and started running. I ran uphill, slipping and scrambling on the grassy slopes. The gas ball shouted for me to wait, but in my haste, I ignored it. I staggered over the crest of the hill and half-ran, half-fell down the other side. I crossed marshes and streams. I crashed through brambles and clumps of trees. And all the while, in my head, all I could see was that terrifying wall of greyness bearing down on me, ripping apart everything in its path.

* * * *

Eventually, scratched and dirty, I came to a high glass wall that extended left and right as far as I could see. I stopped and put my hands on my knees, panting. Beyond the wall, there was nothing—just a flat grey plain that stretched away like an endless frozen sea.

In the glass, I saw the reflection of the gas ball approaching behind me.

"Are you all right, John?” it said.

I shook my head. I was wheezing almost too hard to speak. The sweat ran down my face, and my throat felt raw.

"What,” I panted, “what is this?"

The yellow ball dimmed slightly. It drifted over until it was almost touching the transparent wall.

"This is all that's left of the world,” it said.

* * * *

We remained there for a long time, looking out over that desolate plain, and I thought of all the places I'd ever seen, all the mountains and seas and lakes, all the cities and rivers and deserts—all gone now, all ground down into a sterile, uniform grey.

After what seemed like hours, the gas ball moved toward me.

"Are you going to be okay, John?” it said.

I leaned against the glass. It felt cool on my forehead.

"I don't know."

There was a banging pain in my right temple. My legs felt weak and I was fighting the urge to cry.

"Who are you?” I said.

The ball sparkled. “I was born in the aftermath of the disaster that created the world you see out there."

"Do you have a name?"

It seemed to consider the question.

"You may call me Brenda."

"Brenda?"

"Yes. Among many others, I contain within me the memories of a human by the name of Brenda McCarthy."

The ball's yellow surface swirled and sparkled, as if miniature thunder storms were chasing each other across its skin. “There are many others like me,” it said. “Collectively, we call ourselves the Bricolage. We arose in the minutes and hours following the catastrophe, running on the planet's new smart matter crust, our minds built from scraps of human and machine intelligence, our knowledge of the world cobbled together from the flotsam of the Internet."

It—she—wobbled closer.

"You see, when the Earth's crust was processed into smart matter, every living creature, every building, every computer network was disassembled, and a detailed description—like a blueprint fine enough to show the position of every molecule—was stored in a vast database. What you see out there, through that wall, is a sea of information, a sea that gave us sustenance as we grew. We took a bit here, a bit there. And for a time, we gloried in the seemingly limitless knowledge we had access to. But later, as we started to understand more of the world before the catastrophe, some of us came to realise the terrible loss that had taken place when the Earth had been scoured of organic life—and we decided to try to correct the situation; which is where you come in."

I looked through the glass wall. The moon was rising, casting its light over the featureless grey plain. “But you're a ball of gas,” I said.

"This body has been created simply to allow me to communicate with you. If you find it unpleasant, I can take another form."

I shook my aching head. “It's fine.” My knees had started to shake, and I needed to sit down. She drifted toward me. “Are you all right, John?"

I waved her away and sat on the grass, breathing heavily. “Just give me a minute, will you?" My head was spinning.

The gas ball—Brenda—came closer. “I know this is a lot to take in, but I am trying to explain it to you as simply as I can."

I put my face in my hands. I felt sick and dizzy. I let myself tip sideways into a foetal position on the rough ground.

Brenda hovered over me in silence for a minute or so. Then she said, “Why don't you sleep? You will feel better in the morning."

I looked up at her through my fingers. “I don't think I can."

"Nonsense."

She lowered herself to within a few centimetres of my temple. “Hold still,” she said. I felt a prickle on my skin, then nothing but drowsiness.

"What are you doing?” I said.

Brenda was caressing my brow with tendrils of yellow gas so thin as to be almost invisible.

"Hush,” she said.

iii.

Brenda was there when I awoke the next morning, back in the cabin, feeling refreshed. She was hovering in the kitchen area, and there was a pot of coffee warming on the stove, filling the room with its smell, and a plate of bacon rolls on the table.

"Did you sleep well?"

The windows were still open, and the morning air was fresh and the sky blue. I sat up and looked out. The distant hills were the colour of heather. I saw a family of ducks moving in the reeds on the banks of the river at the foot of the hill, and butterflies skipping about in the grass. I frowned.

"What is it?” Brenda said.

I shook my head. “It's the view, it seems so familiar."

She came over to me. In the sunlight, she still looked like a grapefruit made of gas.

"Of course,” she said. “Don't you know where you are? Don't you recognise it?" I looked back through the window at the hills and the river. I squinted and turned my head on one side. There was something about that hill on the horizon...

"Imagine it all covered in houses,” she said.

And then it all snapped into place.

"Is this Bristol ?"

It didn't seem possible, but Brenda said, “Yes. We're standing on the lower slopes of Brandon Hill, looking out over the old docks. That flat area to your left is where The Council House and The Library used to stand—and the marshy area to your right is the dock where the SS Great Britain was berthed."

"But the buildings...?"

"All gone, I'm afraid. But if you would like me to, I could probably recreate one or two for you." I rubbed my eyes. My headache was back. “Let me get a cup of that coffee,” I said. I filled a mug and sat at the table.

Brenda drifted down to my eye level.

"There's something else you should know,” she said gently.

I wasn't sure I could take much more. I said, “What's that?"

She came closer. “Although we've resurrected you, we can't do likewise for everyone. This biosphere is only designed to support two people."

She settled herself above my plate, right in my face.

"There are those of us—a significant minority—who think it's a waste of resources to use a hundred kilograms of dumb mass—in this case, flesh and bone—to support a single human-level intelligence. They argue that if the raw materials of your body were converted to smart matter, their mass would be capable of supporting many thousands of equivalent electronic entities."

She reached out a wispy tendril to touch my cheek. I smelled ozone.

"Right now, John, you are the only living human in the world. Do you understand me? And you have a very serious choice to make."

iv.

"Do you understand what we need you to do?” Brenda said.

I nodded, although my heart was hammering in my chest, and my palms were damp again. She must have seen my agitation.

"Go for a walk,” she said. “Get some air. Take your time and think it over." Then she sank into the floor and disappeared with a pop, like a soap bubble. After she'd gone, I sat there for a while, picking listlessly at a bacon roll, trying to digest what she'd told me. Then I got up and walked out onto the porch, my hiking boots clomping on the wooden planks. A walk sounded like a good idea. I felt battered and mentally bruised. I couldn't absorb everything I'd been told. I needed to get away for an hour, somewhere quiet, to let it all sink in. I started walking downhill towards the river, in the opposite direction to my mad flight of the night before. The sun was warm and the grasses and nettles on the lower slopes grew thick and tall. As I tramped through them, I thought about everything Brenda had told me. I thought about my parents, my co-workers, and my friends. I thought about my brother in Australia and my cousin in Italy. I thought about Michelle and the man she'd left me for. And I thought about Bobbie: American Bobbie with the blonde hair and copper-flecked eyes. Was she among the people stored in Brenda's “smart matter"? In my mind, I could picture her face quite clearly. I could see her looking at my lottery ticket in the coffee shop and making me promise to share my winnings with her. And when I closed my eyes, I could almost feel her hand gripping mine in the instant before the dust cloud hit.

* * * *

There were no clear banks to the river—the grass just ran into the water. There were clumps of tall reeds here and there. The mud smelled brackish. There were insects circling jerkily in the shade, birds singing discordantly in the trees—all smart matter fakes.

I put my hands in my pockets and walked along the water's marshy edge until I came to the spot where the Central Library had once stood. Now it was a smooth, grassy incline that led up, growing steeper as it rose toward the former site of the University—and beyond that, to Whiteladies Road and the empty space where the little bookshop had been.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. There were wild flowers in the grass: things that looked like poppies, buttercups, and daisies.

I kicked a pebble. Nothing here was real.

"I only get to pick one person?” I said aloud. It seemed so unfair. Brenda had told me she had access to my memories and that all I had to do was pick someone from my past, and she'd resurrect them for me. But how was I supposed to decide?

I stomped uphill and back toward the cabin. When I got there, Brenda was waiting on the porch.

"Hello,” she said.

I glowered at her and went through, into the kitchen.

"Why me?” I said. “If you had the whole of humanity to choose from, why did you choose me?" She came floating in behind me. Now, there were faint orange bands in the yellow gas swirling around her circumference, making her look like a miniature version of the planet Jupiter.

"We did not have the whole of humanity,” she said quietly. “There were many losses, many corruptions—all of them most regrettable."

I walked over to the mantelpiece. There was a vase there, with fresh “flowers” from the field outside.

"Okay,” I said, “but why me?"

In the mirror above the fireplace, I saw her float up to within a few centimetres of my shoulder.

"Once we had recreated this environment, we collected the stored profiles of as many local residents as possible, and you were randomly selected from the resulting list of available candidates." I turned to her. “You mean you pulled my name out of a hat?"

For a second the clouds on her surface froze.

Then they began to swirl again.

"We narrowed the selection according to certain criteria, but essentially, yes: this was a random choice. The odds of you being chosen were more than one hundred thousand to one." I walked over to the table and sat. I drummed my fingers on the wooden tabletop. I thought of Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda, and just like that, I realised I'd made my decision.

"It's Bobbie,” I said.

Brenda came closer. Sparks of static electricity chased each other across her swirling face.

"I beg your pardon?"

"She's the one I choose. She's the one I want you to bring back."

"The girl from the bookshop?"

"Yes."

"That's your final decision? That's the person with whom you wish to spend the rest of your life?"

"Yes."

"Are you quite sure?"

I stopped drumming. “A promise is a promise,” I said.

* * * *

The next day dawned grey and overcast. There was fog on the far hills and a steady rain streaking the windows. I got up and made myself breakfast, and then went out onto the porch. There was a figure lying naked in the grass, a pile of wet clothes beside her. I put my coffee mug on the porch rail and walked over to her. There were drops of rain on her skin. Her eyes were closed, and her blonde hair was bedraggled and sticking to her face. She looked like a creature washed up on a beach.

I stood over her for a moment, then went back inside and fetched the grey blanket from the cabin bed. I draped it over her and took her hand.

"Bobbie?"

I saw her eyes move beneath the lids. Her lips parted and she coughed. I gave her hand a squeeze.

“Bobbie, it's me. It's okay. It's going to be okay."

She opened her eyes and sat up. She was shivering.

"John?"

I put my arms around her. I could feel the sodden grass soaking the knees of my jeans; feel her wet hair through my shirt.

"Where are we, John?” She squirmed around, looking wide-eyed at the hillside and the cabin. “How did we get here?"

The rain was turning into a downpour. I pulled her to me and wrapped the blanket around her. Her elbow dug into my thigh.

"It's a long story,” I said.

She wormed a hand out of the blanket and palmed the wet hair from her face.

"John, are we dead?"

I hooked one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders. I struggled to my feet. The rain ran down my cheeks. The grass was slippery with mud, and Bobbie was heavier than she looked.

"Let's get you inside,” I said.

She put her chin on my shoulder, looking down toward the river. “But John, what's happened to us?" I took a cautious step toward the cabin, trying not to overbalance.

"We've won the lottery,” I said, through gritted teeth.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Sun in the Bone House

By Jim Mortimore

"The weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,

"Nor the troubled mind provide help."

The Wanderer

Translated from Anglo Saxon by J. Watson

The bridge at Briggstowe, little more than a platform of rough-hewn wooden poles held together by crudely woven rope, sweats living green beneath a perfect summer sky. Under the bridge, sun-barred, an intermittent gush of brown water slops and eddies.

It is late summer and the air is fogged with pollen.

A child is playing on the bridge. Muddy, naked, no more than eight summers, she throws berries from a pile she has gathered into the river. She has as many berries as fingers. The berries hit the water in slow procession. Droplets of water fly. Something pinksilver and wriggling darts away from the ripples into the shadows of the far bank. The child giggles. Another berry hits the water. The child laughs. The river throws the berry back.

The child gapes.

The fruit hangs dripping beside the bridge, no more than an arm's length from the child's face. Trickles of water run from the berry, upwards into the air. The child can see her reflection— red hair, green eyes— tunnelled shrinking through every perfect drop. The river boils. The pinksilver wriggling thing erupts from the surface. A salmon, scales iridescent in the sunshine, eyes and mouth gaping. It hangs suffocating in the rose-scented summer air. Fruit and fish drift higher. The child looks up.

The sky splits open like a wet paper toy, and the future falls through.

* * * *

The child, screaming, erupts from the bridge.

A smith finds her foaming beside the river; claims her, wedges her mouth with a stick to save what remains of her tongue; carries her shrieking to the village.

Huts, thatch, goats, dogs.

Filth, blood, terrified stares.

Devil girl, the villagers think.

All night in her, they say.

The smith scowls. I shape, he says. Who shapes does not fear night. Night gives us new wood for our fires, new flint for our arrows and knives. Night gives us calves and ewes and eggs and life. There is no devil in night or anywhere. There is no devil in this girl that cannot be laid by healing. The villagers do not listen.

They see only filth and blood, devils shrieking with a girl's voice.

The smith lays the girl on a hayrick under a cool autumn sky.

Bark in her mouth, half bitten through, choking on blood.

More blood from her ears, matting sunset hair.

Bring water, not fear!

The villagers do not move. Furious, the smith fetches water. When he returns the villagers have made a circle. Within it, grass blackens. A chicken vomits blood, shivers, drops dead and begins to rot. The circle widens. The villagers retreat.

She brings the night, the villagers shout.

Stone her, they scream.

One of them, the girl's mother.

Wait!

The healer has come. He stands, propped on a polished wooden staff, bent but still powerful, black eyes wide, charcoal skin seamed by more than thirty summers lived on shores beyond this one. The smith is right. The girl has a body, and the body is the bone-house. All houses have a door. What is in her can be set free.

The healer has tools. Knives. Drills. Leeches. Water for washing and lubrication. Strips of hide to hold down the shrieking girl.

The villagers are scared. Angry. They will not help.

The smith takes the girl to the healer's hut.

Binds her with long strips of hide.

Fire. Torches. Steaming metal.

Blades cut. Drills turn.

Water. Blood.

Screams.

A disc of skull, door to the bone-house laid open, washed and set aside to be cleaned and threaded on a strip of hide. The girl, head open to the smoky interior of the hut. The smith, eyes wide, voice gone. Inside the skull, under the bone and blood and membrane. Something else. Something moving. A light. Dazzling.

Sunlight.

Summer in the girl's head.

The healer continues to work. Two more holes, two more doors to the bone-house, cleaned and threaded.

Outside the hut, night comes.

But the sun in the girl does not set.

* * * *

His name is Monan, and he is the smith's son. He is named for the full moon, and he has eyes only for the girl.

She is twelve summers now, a third of them mad. She is mad and beautiful. He knows the villagers are scared of her. He hears their whispering voices whenever she is near, casting spells to protect them from the devil inside her. The sun inside her. The villagers punch her and kick her whenever they can. Children throw stones. She never fights. She never runs. There are only words, mumbled through the hide muzzle she is forced to wear. Devils speaking with the voice of a girl.

To Monan the girl's voice is strange. Are the sounds that she makes really words? Monan does not know. But Monan has heard metal talk when burned and wet. Monan has heard living wood speak in the deep forest. Monan knows there are more ways to talk than the words of men. The villagers are scared of the girl. They have denied her a name, for in a name lies power, and they do not want her to have power. Even her mother screamed abuse and slapped her when the girl tried to crawl home, foaming and shrieking, for comfort, the love she remembered now long denied. But Monan is not scared of the girl. He knows the ways of fire, of metal. The land bows to him, and women too. The girl is beautiful. Her madness makes her glow. He wants her. Burns for her. Moth to a flame. It is midwinter's day. Ice in the river. Snow on the ground.

Trees, naked, cling, shivering together in the wind.

Animals huddle in pens. The fields lie fallow.

Fires. Smoke. Steam from cooking.

The mad girl is melting ice from the river in a clay pot. Her hair is tangled, one cheek and bare arm bruised. Her face is muzzled, bound with hide. She cannot speak. The ice is for the healer. She lives with him now. The old man from across the sea. He was here before the village, the remains of some ancient civilisation, a stranger to them all. Now the healer and the mad girl are strangers together, and the village swings around them, stone grinding grain.

Monan once thought his father, the smith, might have claimed the girl as part of his own family. But then his father saw the sun in the girl's head. The sun in the bone-house. He made the muzzle at the healer's request, smelting iron, shaping hooks and a buckle. Monan did not see the sun but he has seen the necklace the girl wears, a hide string threaded with three pieces of her own skull, so he knows the healer made holes in the girl's head to let the devils out. He does not know whether to believe his father saw a sun in the girl's head. Does not know what it would mean if he had. But Monan is curious to find out. Very, very curious about the girl.

The day is young and bright. Winter in a child's eyes.

The girl, breaking ice from the river, filling the pot.

Monan watches her from the edge of the forest.

His eyes have seen a different kind of sun.

He watches her until it's clear she has seen him. She makes no sign, but something in the way she moves and holds herself tells Monan she knows he is there. He walks to her. He can smell her even before he reaches her. She smells of mud and sweat and madness and summer.

Her face does not lift from her task, but he knows she is watching him, somehow tracking every move. Animal instinct. He has seen her watch him before. She never reacts. Never fear or invitation. It's one of the things he likes about her. She just exists. As if she lives in a village within a village. A place only she can reach. When she is not shrieking she is very still. Not in her body. In her head. Her thoughts, maybe. Monan is very interested in the mad girl's thoughts. He wonders what they are about. He wonders if they are about him.

He is close now, and still she hasn't moved.

He stops. The river bank is hard, lined with frost.

He holds out a hand to her. In his palm is a gift. A comb made from a cow's shoulder blade. It has taken him all summer to carve it. He is a good carver and could have made it much more quickly. But he wanted to make it right. Just right for her.

She looks up. Her eyes are full of sky. Her muzzle is wet from river-air. Monan wonders if it is uncomfortable. He wonders what her mouth looks like underneath it. He has never seen her mouth. No one except the healer has seen her mouth, and four summers have passed since she was pulled shrieking from the bridge.

The girl steps around the pot. An invitation. Nothing between them but frosty reeds. He moves closer. She smells of summer. Roses and salmon. They meet. He puts the comb in her hair. Her hand lifts. Touches his. They comb her hair together, gently, easing the tangles around the hooks and cords that bind her muzzle in place.

The river speaks then. Ice cracks.

A salmon, last fish of the year, erupts into the air, lands dying on the ice. Monan cups the girl's face with his hand. One calloused thumb touches her muzzle. It is tight, the hide well cured, soft. Comfortable, then. His hand moves to her shoulder, her breast. Her eyes, full of sky, locked to his. Waiting to see what he will do next. He takes her hand, pulls her towards the edge of the forest.

Trees rise naked around them. Wind, a bark-whisper.

Deeper and the forest is evergreen.

Holly, pine, rhododendron.

Naked except for her necklace, they touch, skin to skin. Breath comes hard and hot. Her eyes never close, never blink, never turn away. She waits. Is she unsure? No. She wants him, wants him inside her, her body says so. He touches her hair, presses it to his lips. She smells of summer, goat shit, and roses. But also of iron hooks, leather cords. Her muzzle pumps with each breath. Her skin, dappled with old bruises. The touch of it makes him want to scream. His heart is a hammer, his chest the anvil. She does not move.

His body, a question. She lets him ask.

It's answer enough.

He lays her down and claims her, takes her there on the forest floor, skin and hair and leaf mulch, pine needles threading frantic skin, muscle and bone beating, frantic hammer. He comes first. She waits.

His world rocks, settles.

Her eyes, full of sky.

She waits.

He reaches for her face. What does her mouth look like? Taste like? He reaches to the nape of her neck. Hooks. A buckle. A child could undo this. Why does she keep it on? Is she frightened of her own voice?

Cords slip. The muzzle curls away, skin from skin.

Her mouth is a rose; her tongue half gone.

Her lips seek his. She's done waiting.

Her body, driving him. He comes again but she won't stop. Her lips are hot against him. Her teeth sharp. The bites get harder. And then he knows. She's gagging herself again. Gagging herself on him. She moans. He can't hold her. Can't control her. Can't stop her.

She rocks, body stuttering. Eyes squeezed shut. Mouth a tunnel.

She is beneath him, on top of him, all over him; arms and legs gripping, hips and stomach pounding. He can't get out. He can't get away. His chest is burning. His mind, sparks and molten metal, beaten, hammered.

Her orgasm is unending, uncontrollable, incredibly violent.

Sobs become moans, become shuddering cries.

Her body contracts. His muscles crack.

She speaks.

"Tomorrow finds you it finds you all dust in the bone-house where—"

—his arms and legs, tangled in her, muscles screaming and—

"—it digs this fine example of an Anglo-Saxon burial site, thought to be you from—"

—her voice, molten, searing his mind, branding him and—

"—the ground all dust and no memories, and the grave of a smith when living, dates from the late 9th Century when—"

—he gasps, breath gone, lungs burning. Later he will find bruises from her fists in his back, circular scars from her skull necklace embedded in his chest. She grips harder. Something snaps in his chest. More fire in his lungs. No breath for a scream but—

"—the body is male and was buried with eyes which do not see behold a palace! A palace of ice and iron and the tools of his trade including tongs and anvil and it speaks, tomorrow speaks to them of you; it speaks and it says iron was a very important commodity to the Anglo-Saxons and those people who were lucky enough to be skilled in working it were held in high regard since—"

—somehow he is screaming, his throat burning with her words, but he can't drown her out, can't shut her up, and now he understands, the muzzle, dear Christ this is why she was—

"This exhibit was kindly donated by a private collector in June 2014!!" Her voice, an exultant shriek, rips from her beautiful mouth, the fork of her tongue. His mind, near gone, recoiling.

Devil girl, the villagers thought.

All night in her, they said.

But it wasn't the night in her. It was the day, molten summer.

She speaks, and puts the sun in the moon-boy's head.

"You die, Monan, you die and you rot, but they dig you up and put you in a whore-house, in history's fucking whore-house and people pay, they pay to see your death and life, they put you in the City fucking Museum!"

* * * *

Seasons pass and the moon-boy becomes a man, with children of his own. Frantic, scampering nonsense. Fire sparks for eyes. Laughter.

The village, slow breath, pulsing. Animals, sunshine, wheat in; children, huts, tools out. Rutted tracks like vines, creeping.

Traders come and with them, disease. Demons from the forest that make sport with the villagers. Children first, then adults. No one is safe. A pit is dug at the edge of the forest, the bodies burned. The sky, smoke black, cold and flat.

Old beyond knowing, the healer dies. He has seen more summers than there are people in the village. The woman washes him and dresses him in his finest clothes. She weaves a crown for him of bright flowers. She puts him on a barrow and drags him to the limits of the village, the edge of the wild woods. She builds a stack of dry wood and lays him on top. She takes a silver coin from an urn in his hut and places it under his tongue.

The villagers follow.

They watch.

She burns the healer with carvings of gods from other lands.

She flings handfuls of summer petals into the fire.

Smoke. Roses. Charred meat.

She takes off her muzzle.

The villagers, retreating.

Her voice, fire-shriek.

"Ancestors of the deceased walk before us, with masks! A coin to pay the ferryman and an expensive procession the dominus funeri or designator or head of the Sepulchre for him, no bones and ashes, no procession across the Styx is followed by musicians and women mourning a swift boat across the formulaic inscriptions, no shades to the dead! Se morti offerre pro salute patriae! He is a patriotic citizen, a Roman! Sanguinem suum pro patria effundere! He is honoured and respected and loved!" Her tongue is split; her mind broken.

The words, moans and screams.

The villagers retreat.

Charred meat.

Roses.

She sings.

Her voice, molten.

The villagers, moaning fearfully, move back.

Summer storm, the lightning cracks out of her, rips their world.

"Dea sancta Tellus, rerum naturae parens, quae cuncta generas et regeneras indidem, quod sola praestas gentibus vitalia, Goddess revered, O Earth, of all nature Mother, engendering all things and re-engendering them from the same womb, caeli ac maris diva arbitra rerumque omnium, per quam silet natura et somnos concipit, itemque lucem reparas et noctem fugas, because thou only dost supply each species with living force, thou divine controller of sky and sea and of all things, through thee is nature hushed and lays hold on sleep, tu Ditis umbras tegis et immensum chaos ventosque et imbres tempestatesque attines et, cum libet, and thou likewise renewest the day and dost banish night, dimittis et misces freta fugasque solesc et procellas concitas, itemque, cum vis, hilarem promittis diem. Thou coverest Pluto's shades and chaos immeasurable: winds, rains, and tempests thou dost detain, and, at thy will, let loose, and so convulse the sea, banishing sunshine, stirring gales to fury, and likewise, when thou wilt, thou speedest forth the joyous day!" Later, face awash and voice gone to hacking barks, she muzzles herself, watches the healer burn. Smoke. Embers. Molten silver. Honey mead from a great horn to douse the ashes of a man from another world.

Alone now, she weeps.

Smoke, heat from the fire.

Embers like seeds on a forest wind.

Behind her, a sound. Not alone then. She turns.

Monan, face like stone. He cradles a child in his arms. The boy has seen no more than five summers. His skin is wax. Stinking black boils cover his arms and legs. Monan, his voice the whisper of dead leaves, begs for her help. His fear is plain. Fear of the sickness. Greater still, his fear of her words. He begs her for the life of his child.

Her eyes, flat. Her gaze, expressionless. She listens without moving to his words, perhaps remembering a comb made of bone, given so long ago. She examines the child. He is dying. If he dies, so might the village. She turns from him then, walks away into the forest. He falls to his knees. His moan of despair rising with the embers into a cold, black sky.

Hours pass and she returns. Monan is still on his knees, cradling the child. He has not moved. The child's chest heaves in shallow, rapid spurts. His skin is dripping. His heart nearly done. She carries something. A basket. In it, bundles of stalks and leaves. He rises, follows her back to the healer's hut—her hut now.

The village stinks of death.

She takes the stalks, takes mead and rotten bread, scrapes blue mould from the bread, dissolves them in the mead and heats it. The broth stinks almost as badly as the child's weeping sores. She boils the broth until nothing remains but a blue paste. She takes the paste and applies it to the sores. She makes a tea from herbs and some more of the blue paste and tips it down the child's throat. He lacks the strength even to choke.

Monan watches her. He prays for the child.

He prays she will not remove her muzzle.

His prayers are not answered.

Muzzle off, she speaks.

"Penicillin."

One word. A demon word.

What soul will she want in exchange? he wonders. His own? His son's?

The woman muzzles herself. Is she disappointed at his reaction?

Hours pass. A day.

Smoke from the healer's pyre clears from the sky.

The stink of charred flesh, washed away in a sudden storm.

The night passes. The morning sun turns dew and rain to steam.

The child opens his eyes. “I'm hungry,” he says.

He touches her muzzle, cups the leather in one smooth palm. Strength gone, his fingers fall to her neck, the leather string threading three perfect circles of bone. His eyes are wide. He knows the stories his father has told of her. The stories of the sun in the bone-house.

She takes his hand, lifts his fingers to her head, places them at the scars where her head was laid open. The child moans, fear or awe, as his fingers find their way into her skull. He convulses as if with palsy and begins to cry. Monan wrenches the child's hand from hers, his face twisted in anger. She watches the anger without reacting, just as she had his pleas.

The child lives; with him, the village.

Later they come, one by one, and in groups.

Pustulent sores and pleas and creeping fear.

Their lives are saved, but their fear remains.

* * * *

The child's name is Caelin. He is not tall but he is strong. When Monan cannot work the forge through age it is Caelin who assumes the task. Caelin is strong in mind as well as body. He never forgets what the woman did for him. How his life and the whole village was saved by the sun in the bone-house. He visits the woman as often as he can. At least once a week, and that is a huge effort, for the village is no longer a ramshackle collection of huts but a fast-growing hamlet, and Caelin's smithy is under constant demand for more products. Horseshoes, rakes and hoes, bits for bridles, tools, weapons. Trade has increased between the village and other settlements in the south west. The tracks through the forest are wider, and more widely travelled.

The woman makes her home in three large huts right at the edge of the forest. Caelin oversees the construction, based on the woman's instructions. The huts are foursquare, straight and warm. Their walls made of clay bricks, shaped and fired in a kiln, also built to her instructions. Caelin is amazed at this. The only bricks he has ever seen are those left by the healer's people when they returned across the water. Their regular shape and hardness have until now been an impenetrable mystery. The woman is the only one he knows who has ever been able to make them.

This is the second time Caelin will see the sun in the bone-house.

It will not be the last.

By now everyone who knew the woman as a child is dead. Yet the fear of her remains. She is seen rarely, and then only at times of great need. To the villagers she seems like part of the land. From the sun in her head come looms to make cloth, better ways to preserve food, a special fuel which makes fire burn hotter, so that tools and weapons can be made harder and sharper. There are rumours that she can make paper, that she knows how to write. Seasons pass and Briggstowe becomes a centre for trade, popular, rich. It also becomes a target.

* * * *

The first attack comes at night and leaves a dozen people dead. Soldiers on horses from a nearby settlement eager to acquire the settlement's wealth. Huts are burned. Villagers maimed or killed. The woman poisons the soldiers and the bodies are burned, their horses released in the forest. Three days later the woman comes to Caelin's hut with paper and drawings. The drawings are intricate, beautiful, terrifying. Caelin's long hair turns white overnight as his struggle to learn eventually brings absolute understanding. The master smith studies the drawings for three more days, then begins to build.

The second attack is more organised, two hundred men on horseback, armoured in leather and steel, equipped with swords and lances, greed and hate.

They are met with ramparts and staked ditches and towers of strapped wood that fling rocks carried from the river, engines that fire giant arrows tipped with steel, cantilevered rams of wood and rock that crush and maim.

Soldiers and horses alike are crushed, smashed aside by the flying rocks, impaled on stakes, the survivors’ throats cut by eager villagers with knives that never seem to blunt. The soldiers douse the towers with flaming pitch. The wood will not burn. After three days the army is broken, scattered into the forest.

Their screams linger for days.

* * * *

His two sons lost in the battle and his wife taken by drowning many seasons later, Caelin is the last of his family to die. The woman builds a pyre and burns him with rose petals and prayers. The sun in her head is dimmed that day. Caelin was the first person since the healer she might have called a friend. But almost all she has ever known is hate and fear; she does not understand what a friend is. Life goes on. The towers are dismantled, the wood reused for larger buildings. The ditches and earth ramparts are fortified. Buildings swarm across the landscape, a living tide, ebbing and flowing as the forest retreats, cut to fuel greater industries, and to clear the way for farmland to feed the ever growing numbers of people.

Years pass.

Briggstowe grows from a fortified settlement into a town.

The woman observes the changes as one who tends a garden with care but with only distant interest. Over time her mind settles into a new pattern—a new series of patterns. The thoughts in her head are not her own, but then it has been so long since she has been aware of herself as an individual with her own unique identity that the realisation holds little meaning, and no fear at all. Now the image she has of herself is not of a single woman, old beyond her time yet still somehow full of life, but of a crowded marketplace, one rammed with people of all ages, their voices raised as one indivisible hubbub, more thoughts and memories and feelings and ideas and opinions than could ever be held in a single mind. Though she does not realise it, the healing process has begun at last. Healing and acceptance. Acceptance of the death of the individual she had been, the birth of the new gestalt entity she has become, the sun in the bone-house.

She migrates with the edge of the town, always staying at the place of change, where the settlement meets the forest. From the sun in her head come new methods for cutting and dressing stone, new ways to laminate metal for tools and weapons, for the production of wool and leather; new models of social, political, and architectural design.

From her comes a weekly market.

Trade with Devon, Somerset, Dublin.

From the sun in her head comes the first mint.

Briggstowe—now Bristol— continues to grow.

* * * *

Time moves on, the days trickling past, sand through an hourglass.

There are more attacks. In 1067 two of King Harold's sons bring an army several thousand strong to attack Bristol. They are despatched with modern variants of the siege engines the woman created more than a century before. Later, King William builds a wooden fort using designs provided by the woman. Ninety years after it is built the fort is replaced with a stone castle, also of her design. Over the next century, Bristol's main import is wine from the southwest of France, Spain, and Portugal. Exports from Bristol include dyed wool, rope and sailcloth, and lead; the production processes for all these products improved and in some cases devised by the sun in the woman's head. Carpenters, blacksmiths, brewers, bakers, butchers, tailors, and shoemakers find home and work, and raise families. In two centuries the population of Bristol rises to more than four thousand. In 1239 the woman is consulted on plans to divert the River Frome. The task takes eight years to complete and costs five thousand pounds, a significant portion of the City Treasury. The Frome is a tributary of the Avon; by 1247 the bridge from which an eight year old girl had been playing when the future fell into her head was gone. By then the girl had become a woman and was herself a bridge to times no man, woman, or child alive could then conceive.

* * * *

Midsummer Day.

She rises from a dream-haunted sleep. Something has changed. She has changed. The days from now on will be different. For the first time in decades she leaves her home without her muzzle. Her voice, feared for so long, will today be heard without fear or prejudice.

She walks slowly along the road leading from the forest into the town. Passing through the south gate, the wall and gatehouse mortared by a process she designed, the woman finds herself sharing the road with a child. A girl, no more than eight summers, playing with a wooden top, a toy whose stabilising gyroscopic properties the woman had incorporated into heavy duty cart design twenty years before.

"That's a nice toy. What's your name?"

The child's eyes are wide, interested.

"Alina."

"That's a pretty name. A contraction of Adelina. A thousand years from now your name will be Aileen." The child blinks. “What's a thousand?"

The woman smiles. “It doesn't matter. I'm Sunngifu."

"That's a pretty name."

"It means ‘Gift of the Sun.’”

"Who gave it to you?"

"No one. Well ... the future, perhaps."

The woman smiles. Alina smiles back, not understanding the reason for the smile but responding to it with a child's innocence and affection.

The woman leaves the child, passes through the gate and into the town. The town she has shaped, guided, nurtured, for more than two hundred years.

Childhood is over.

She has work to do.

* * * *

In 1373 the boundaries of Bristol are extended at her suggestion to include Redcliffe. Bristol is made a county of its own, separate from Gloucestershire and Somerset. Disease returns, and the woman helps to build the first proper hospital. Leper colonies are established outside town. In 1542 the first Bishop is inaugurated in a Cathedral she designs.

The People's Charter is drawn up.

Bristol is now a city.

Later she introduces a brilliant red dye made from the Scarlet Lychnis flower into the wool trade. The flower, deemed unforgettably red by the people of Bristol, becomes the emblem of the city. Time flows on, the city with it. Churches, priories, hospitals, pilgrimmages, the Knights Templars, schools. Tin, lead, hides, fish, butter, cheese. The friaries and priory are closed. Protestant heretics are burned.

Civil war, siege, plague.

The grey tide ebbs and flows.

Tobacco from America.

Sugar from the West Indies.

In the 17th Century, a glass industry.

In the 18th Century, a slave industry.

The grey tide becomes a flood, unstoppable.

* * * *

The population of Bristol is now nearly 70,000. The woman lives in a town house, watching with an even gaze as new streets are laid out and built. Queen Square, Prince Street, James Square, Orchard Street; Unity Street, College Green, Cornwallis Crescent, Hotwells Crescent, Windsor Terrace, Portland Square, Berkeley Square. She does not like the city centre. The architecture is beautiful, but there are too many people, and she misses the space she left behind with her forest home. A few well placed suggestions for social reform changes the situation, leading the wealthy out of central Bristol to Clifton. She watches the migration over several years, feeling neither shame nor pride. She has what she wants, that is all.

Shipbuilding thrives. So does chocolate. Imported tobacco is made into snuff in windmills she designs. Cannon, chain, anchors, coal. The Bristol Royal Infirmary. The Methodist Chapel in Horsefair. The Exchange in Corn Street. The first bank opens in 1750, the Theatre Royal in 1766. In 1768 she proposes a new bridge across the Avon. Tolls are charged for using the bridge. The council promises the tolls will be scrapped in 1793. When they are not there are riots. There are more riots in 1831. The Bishop's Palace and Customs House are burned following the Great Reform Bill. She watches the violence unfold around her. Watches the dead and wounded taken to hospitals she herself brought into being. She feels nothing. Or maybe everything. A white noise of emotion, almost unendurable. She filters everything except joy. The joy of living, of enduring where everything around her is ephemeral, ghosts in time, butterfly lives.

The world, spinning around her like a child's top, turning at her whim. The city, her City, a toy with which she could never be bored.

Oil lamps become gas lamps, become electric lights.

Horse drawn trams replaced by electric trams.

Railways link Bristol to London and Exeter.

The Royal Edward Dock. The University.

The Guildhall. Avonmouth docks.

A Waterworks. Sewer system.

Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Aircraft engineering.

Cabot Tower.

Shipbuilding.

Chemicals.

Chocolate.

Furniture.

Pottery.

Soap.

Zinc.

Then—

Explosion!

World wars!

In World War II more than a thousand people are killed by German bombing; more than 3,000

buildings are destroyed and 90,000 damaged.

She looks into the abyss, and it looks back.

Madness, so long a distant companion, comes again. A frenzy of mixed emotions drive her to shape and build. The Council House in 1956. The Arnolfini Art Gallery in 1957. The Robinson Building in 1966. A polytechnic 1969 which, in 1992, becomes the West of England University. A Roman Catholic Cathedral. The Georgian House Museum. Harvey's Wine Museum. Watershed Media Centre. The Galleries Shopping Centre. The Bristol Centre. The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. A new bridge is erected over St Augustine's Reach in 1998. It's not enough. She wants more. More! MORE!!

Social reform!

Education reform!

Schools and hospitals!

New initiatives for land use!

Cheap council housing for the poor!

Wildwalk! IMAX! Explore! City Museum!

Stem cell technology! Polycentury lifespans!

Interconnectivity! Free energy from wind and sun!

She wants it all, all of it, her legacy, a new change, a powerful thrust into a positive future, she wants the good to balance the bad, the sane to balance the mad. Her head burns with the helpless desire, the drive, the sheer blazing, screaming, unbearable, unendurable shrieking need for it. The sun in the bone-house goes nova.

The explosion changes everything.

* * * *

The 21st Century brings global warming, a Malthusian Control.

By 2078 Bristol's population has fallen from more than 500,000 to less than 5,000. The City burns, a raging infection. Heat, radiation, disease. Rape, murder. Worse. Her solution is ambitious, terrifying. It makes her a pariah again.

She dismantles the moon.

The geological upheaval and destruction from falling lunar debris is appalling. World population is reduced by sixty percent. Animal populations are halved. The tides stop. But the rubble forms a partial shield between the Earth and the Sun. Global temperatures begin to fall. She has bought some time. Time to think. Time for a proper solution. It comes in the form of new ozone, taken from the gas giants, transported to Earth via quantum bridges she designs.

She has saved the human race.

* * * *

Centuries pass.

Population growth explodes.

The solution is long-term but very simple.

The solar system has many planets it does not need.

* * * *

The Dyson Ring is built in sections just outside the orbit of the Earth and circles the Sun completely. At night, from Earth, it blocks stars from a quarter of the sky. She lives and works there for nearly five hundred years, overseeing construction, troubleshooting, innovating. She has friends, husbands, wives, but never children. She has respect, awe, fear, but never love. Medical science can replace her tongue. She chooses not to. Her tongue is who she is. And half a millennia away from home is a long time. A desire grows in her. She wants to see how Bristol has changed.

One day she comes home.

Bristol did not die. Not completely. And now it is a paradise, the fields of Elysium, Phoenix risen from the ashes of solar fire. Its population is stable at 63, the lowest she has ever seen it, all long-lived eccentrics unwilling or unable to leave the Earth for a greater home on the Dyson Ring. A rural community who grow their own food, understand the balance of nature and technology, willing and able to live in harmony with the land she has shaped. Staggering palaces of crystal, once home to Emperors and Kings, now house exotic fruit, vegetables, growing things, the stuff of life. For the first time she understands how it is possible to love a place when you have ties to it. For the first time she understands how much fulfilment can come from giving yourself wholly to those who trust and love you. Her ties here are many and long.

Her stories even more, and longer.

She makes the City her new home and never leaves again.

* * * *

Millennia pass. Aeons.

Humanity leaves Earth for a new home among the stars. The population of Bristol falls inevitably to one. But she is not alone. She still has the future inside her head, only now it is mostly the past. The sun in the bone-house shows no signs of dimming.

Bristol grows wild and she lets it.

Mammals and reptiles, trees and flowers; genetically-engineered fashion hybrids and extinct species thought lost forever, brought back to life by DNA reconstitution and careful cloning. Spores, drifting through space for uncounted time, land, germinate, spread. Hybrids, mutants, invasive species, responsive species.

A new Eden, no carefully tended garden, this, but a wild and dangerous place. She loves it here, so like the wild woods where she lived so long ago.

* * * *

Time passes, until time itself no longer holds meaning.

The lunar rubble accretes and a new moon forms. It is small and dull, but by then even she barely remembers the old moon, and the lovers’ hearts whose light the new moon kindles are very far from human.

The sun grows large and red. She sees it and thinks of the Scarlet Lychnis, symbol of Bristol for so long. Wild flower, the sun blooms and dies.

She waits for the starfire, and wonders what dying will feel like.

She waits for the end of things, of life and identity.

The Librarian arrives first.

* * * *

The Librarian is a tree.

To be accurate, it is a quantum forest, grown with a specific function. To harvest the past, DNA, genetic memory. To save what has gone before, to savour its riches and grow new fruit, and scatter them across the river of time, that others might taste their past and honour it; so that nothing, in time, would be lost. And everything forgotten would be found and never lost again.

Watching the great seeds fall and burst and grow, she is a child again, lost in a fog of pollen, clapping her hands and throwing seed pods from a moss-covered wooden bridge into a muddy river. By her great works she has called to the Librarian across space and time, and now it has grown for her and for her world.

When the pollen enters her and she is joined with a thousand, a billion other human memories flooding backwards and forwards in time, she shudders. The thrill that moves her is neither religious nor sexual. Neither terror nor ecstasy. She has no word for what she feels.

But she will find one.

* * * *

The moon-garden is in full bloom.

The great trees, heavy with fruit, reach up towards midnight and a handful of dull ochre stars crowding close together, as if for comfort, on the featureless horizon. Movement. Boughs shiver, toys for the silent wind. Stems pop. Pearl-ripe, pregnant with light and memory, the first fruit separates from the branches, falling up into the black night. Ghost worlds, infant geography evolving serenely as they shrink into the sky.

Midnight, unending. The wind blows, fruit falls upwards, the black night turns blue, then radiant blue-silver. Huddled in ancient roots, the child counts worlds as they tumble into the sky. There are as many worlds as hairs on her arm. The child can see her reflection—red hair, green eyes—wrapped around every perfect globe.

Gnarled and ancient, the moon-tree in which the child crouches fell to earth as a seed from the night. At that time there had still been people, cities, churches, gods; war and rape; love and hope; truth and lies. The moon-tree found root and flourished. Time passed. Now even the idea of time is gone. Now there is only silver. Only the moon-trees in a world of crumbling walls, gargantuan temples to industrial gods without number, nothing now but tumbled blocks swaddled in roots, black flowers cupping midnight, the tiny cluster of ochre stars, tired and still, at the edge of the world. The tree spans a river, black as pitch, ripples like slow glass. Not water, this. Something more. Something less. A wave in the quantum sap feeding the universe. The moon-tree, a wooden bridge sweating living green. Human memory, seeds tossed by a child into the river of time. Infant worlds, laced with memory, drift higher. The child looks up.

The sky splits open like a ripe seed pod, and the past falls through.

[Back to Table of Contents]

About the Contributors

Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She is currently published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), also Night Shade Press and appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's, and other magazines. She is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop, and also teaches creative writing and the history of Science Fiction.

Novels are: The Ghost Sister (Bantam Spectra), Empire Of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers Of Sky, Banner Of Souls (Bantam Spectra—US, Tor Macmillan—UK), Darkland, Bloodmind (Tor Macmillan UK), Snake Agent, The Demon And The City, and Precious Dragon (Night Shade Press). Forthcoming novels are: Winterstrike (Tor Macmillan) and The Shadow Pavilion (Night Shade Press). Her short story collection The Banquet Of The Lords Of Night is also published by Night Shade Press. Her novel Banner Of Souls has been nominated for the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, along with 3

previous novels, and the Arthur C Clarke Award.

Nick Walters lives and writes in Bristol, and is the author of several Doctor Who novels, including the Doctor Who Magazine Award-Winning Reckless Engineering .

Gareth L Powell lives in the South West of England and works in marketing. His fiction has appeared in both print and online magazines in Europe, America, and the Middle East. His first short story collection, The Last Reef , was published by Elastic Press in August 2008 and his first novel, Silversands , is due from Pendragon Press in April 2009.

Jim Mortimore slithered greasily into writing as a desperate ploy to evade real work. It was his Last Best Hope for Peace (& Quiet). Naturally it failed. Now he's down with the Narn and the Centauri, hangin’ with the Doctor and all his buddies, and checkin’ out a whole buncha kooky chicks with big attitude or big guns or both and, well, life just ain't what it once will be. Jim Mortimore has been mistaken for human. He has occasionally been misfiled. And while he has written many things, including Doctor Who and Cracker, he most definitely did not write Chicago Hope, as certain weblesque (TM) purveyors of novels will have you spend hard cash on. He knows that isn't true because he simply isn't rich enough. In this Universe, anyway. Life? Here come the BUGS. HOO RAH!

Christina Lake lived in Bristol for over 15 years before moving to Cornwall where she combines her day job in Cornwall's fastest growing university library with pursuing her own writing projects and studying literature. Christina's stories have appeared in a number of SF magazines and anthologies, such as Interzone, Nexus, and Other Edens , and she is currently working on reinventing the Cornish novel for the 21st century.

John Hawkes-Reed is a Unix administrator. Sometimes this means making the impossible look easy at short notice, at other times it involves stumbling about at 4 a.m. and restarting expired websites. He has split ends and an increasing number of bicycles. While growing up in the depths of rural Gloucestershire J-HR alternated between the John Peel programme, strong coffee, JG Ballard, and “Programming the 6502.” In 2006 he attended Viable Paradise, a residential SF workshop in Martha's Vineyard. It was one of those life-altering experiences that usually happen to other people, and made it obvious that he should write a lot more. “The Guerilla Infrastructure HOWTO” is J-HR's first sale. He has vague plans to retire to a smallholding where he will grow rusty farm machinery.

Colin Harvey is the author of the novels Vengeance (2001, revised 2005), Lightning Days (2006), The Silk Palace (2007), and Blind Faith (2008). His next novel is Winter Song . He has also edited Killers , an anthology of cross-genre speculative thrillers and mysteries. His short fiction and reviews have been published in Albedo One, gothic.net, The Fix, and Strange Horizons —among others; and in 2006 his short story “The Bloodhound” was a runner-up for Ralan's Grabber contest. Colin is a member of the HWA, is the Featured Writer on SF and Fantasy for Suite101.com, and for four years served on the Speculative Literature Foundation's management committee judging their Travel and Older Writer's Grants. He lives just outside Bristol.

Joanne Hall lives in Bristol with her partner. She enjoys writing fantasy, and has been lucky enough to have short stories accepted by a number of magazines, including Sorcerous Signals, The Harrow, Written Word, and Afterburn SF . In addition to her short stories, Joanne's New Kingdom Trilogy has been published by Epress Online: the final instalment, The Eagle of the Kingdom , was published in November 2007. She is now working on a stand-alone novel, The Leaving of Avenhelm , which is set in the same universe. In her spare time, Joanne enjoys listening to music and going to concerts and the cinema, when she can be coaxed out from behind her keyboard. Joanne is passionate about encouraging children to read and enjoy writing, and hopes to become more involved in this field in the future. In the meantime, she is always happy to encourage and talk to other writers, and can be reached via her website at www.hierath.co.uk

Stephanie Burgis is a graduate of the Clarion West writing workshop who was first lured to Bristol by her husband, fellow writer Patrick Samphire. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines, podcasts, and anthologies including Strange Horizons, Aeon , and Escape Pod . Her YA Regency fantasy trilogy will be published by Hyperion Books, beginning with the novel Kat by Moonlight in 2010. For more information, please visit her website: www.stephanieburgis.com

Andy Bigwood is an artist, draughtsman, bookbinder, cartographer, and illustrator from West Wiltshire in the UK where he lives alone, only venturing out for disastrous foreign holidays and the occasional convention. Trained in technical illustration, in Bath (shortly before the evolution of computer-aided art), Andy has provided artwork, cartography, and cover designs for a variety of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction novels including The Winter Hunt, Subterfuge, Future Bristol, and maps for the Wraeththu trilogy; winning the BSFA Art Award for his cover for the multiple award winning dis LOCATIONS (edited by Ian Whates). He has also provided cover art for Immanion Press's esoteric non-fiction titles such as Raising Hell, Ogam—Weaving Word Wisdom, Charlemagne—man and myth , and The Pop Culture Grimoire. Andy is currently attempting to write a novel when on the train to various places; his website can be found at topaz172.deviantart.com. Visit www.swimmingkangaroo.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.