I wasn’t even pretending to send a message through the Motes. I was only thinking to myself. But I thought he said, “Whenever you want,” before he just wasn’t there anymore.
I nodded to Omz and walked past all the staring Spinies, out into the lights and scents and confusion of this mysterious city poised between night and dawn where I would never find him, even though every last skull held a piece of him, including my own. And that hurt like hell.
At last.
Copyright © 2012 Chris Willrich
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Chris Willrich lives with his family in the otherworldly environs of Silicon Valley, where he works as a children’s librarian. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Black Gate, Fantasy & Science Fiction, among others, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including the ebook anthology The Best of BCS, Year One. You can find him irregularly on his blog at Goblins in the Library and on Twitter @WillrichChris..
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AUTHOR INTERVIEW: CHRIS WILLRICH
by Kate Marshall
In a special author interview for BCS Science-Fantasy Month, BCS Assistant Editor Kate Marshall talks with Chris Willrich about “The Mote-Dancer and the Firelife,” Quixotes and Sanchos, sword & sorcery and sword & planet, and how artificial augmentation in humans might impact how we would interact with alien species.
BCS: Your “Gaunt and Bone” stories are a fresh take on a classic sword and sorcery duo, but you’ve also written science fiction. How do you approach genre in your work?
Willrich: Thanks! I love both science fiction and fantasy for the big canvases they offer. I guess I differ slightly in how I handle them. I got into fantasy by way of the written word, but I originally got hooked on science fiction through movies and television. With fantasy, I’m very conscious of language, more so than when I’m writing science fiction. And with science fiction, I feel a stronger need to nail down the plot before writing, maybe because science fictional worlds seem to demand a better up-front understanding of the setting.
BCS: Where would you place “The Mote-Dancer and the Firelife” in the genre? Do you consider it science-fantasy?
Willrich: I think it’s is in the same general neighborhood as Anne McCaffrey’s Pern or Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover—something with fantasy flavor but with a science-fictional alien planet setting. Whether or not it has to be science-fantasy rather than science fiction may depend on how much the Motes and the Firelife stretch your willing suspension of disbelief. I’m happy with either label, but the term I’d personally tend to apply to “Mote-Dancer” is “sword and planet,” because it follows that old tradition of a plucky Earthling thrown into an exotic extraterrestrial setting with just three shots left in her laser pistol.
BCS: In “The Mote-Dancer and the Firelife,” the apparent magic seems to be a result of extremely advanced technology. Aside from the oft-quoted Arthur C. Clarke line, what’s the difference between technology too advanced to understand and magic?
Willrich: If we’re in a science fiction story, even the hyper-advanced technology that looks like magic has to obey natural laws. Maybe the alien builders had a better, more complete edition of the cosmic rule-book than we do, but they still couldn’t cheat. If we’re in a fantasy story, all bets are off. I think in “Mote-Dancer” I-Chen actually trips over that distinction when she realizes the Firelife isn’t quite as she expected.
BCS: Spinies fight in pairs—Quixotes and Sanchos. What’s the significance of these particular labels? If the Spinies knew the literary significance, do you think they’d object?
Willrich: I’ve assumed the labels were an ad hoc assignment by an earlier human explorer who observed this custom and latched on to the image of Don Quixote traveling around with Sancho Panza. I think it was the sort of thing that was just a placeholder at first, but ended up catching on. I imagine while some Spine Flutists would be offended by these human terms, many would find the allusion interesting. They might even read up on Cervantes, and be intrigued by Don Quixote’s picture of a warrior ideal at odds with the conditions of life. Kind of like the Star Trek joke of how you can’t fully appreciate Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Klingon! (I should confess that to my discredit the closest I’ve come to getting acquainted with Don Quixote is watching Man of La Mancha.)
BCS: Spinies are truly inhuman, but I-Chen herself is significantly altered, at least by our standards. How do you think introducing an artificial variation in humanity would impact the way we would interact with alien species?
Willrich: That’s an interesting question. I think potentially it could give us more perspectives to bring to bear in dealing with aliens, and that could be very helpful. It might be especially useful if we had aquatic humans to meet aquatic aliens, flying humans to meet flying aliens, and so on. And if human variety were even greater than it is now, maybe we would become better diplomats. But that might be an overly optimistic assessment of human nature!
The other side of the coin is the nature of the aliens. If they were pretty homogenous, and we met them as a collection of many different genetically-altered subgroups, they might find us hard to fathom. I think Walter Jon Williams explored a scenario like that in his story “Dinosaurs.”
On the other hand, science fiction has many alien cultures with huge differentiation. A famous example are Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Moties. Aliens like those might just shrug at someone like I-Chen. And of course the aliens, too, might have modified themselves considerably. It’s fun to speculate, but the number of “ifs” just multiply the longer you think about it.
BCS: The Spinies’ spiritual beliefs have quite tangible proof to back them up. What does the Firelife mean to the Spinies? Do they view the appearance of their dead as a kind of magic?
Willrich: As I see it, for the Spine Flutists the Firelife is in one sense like an afterlife, but in another way it’s like going away to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. It has aspects of both spirituality and a hard-nosed hunt for celebrity. Do they view it as magic? I think it’s an in-between sort of thing. The Motes are a tangible technological legacy from a super-advanced culture. In that sense there’s nothing magical about them. But the Motes can’t be taken apart, reprogrammed, or duplicated. So technical expertise is of no real use in employing them. The Motes connect to the Spinies’ minds on both a conscious and unconscious level, and so a degree of magical thinking is actually helpful for the Spinies in manipulating the Motes and the Firelife.
This isn’t a completely foreign idea. We humans don’t have the Firelife, but it’s commonplace for humans to have magical ideas about our own, self-created technology. We swear at our computers, we attribute personalities to our cars, we imagine dwellings to have a kind of spirit. It goes all the way back to thinking of fire as a living thing.
BCS: What other work do you find inspiring, either fictional or otherwise?
Willrich: It’s hard to pare it down to a reasonable list. Here’s a grab bag of ten things I’ve found inspiring....
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, by Lord Dunsany
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny
The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman
Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
BCS: What’s next for you? What are you working on at the moment?
Willrich: Just this moment I’m working on something I don’t think I can talk about yet! After that, I think it will be a short story or two, at least one of them a Gaunt and Bone story. Before the year gets very old, I want to get going on a new novel. I’m very tempted to write about Gaunt and Bone traveling their world’s version of t
he Silk Road. Silk Road.
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SCRY
by Anne Ivy
By dawn, the house of Eyr Eth Lun had fallen. Dead soldiers and laser-cauterized pieces of soldiers littered the stairs and bridges into the palace. The sun rose slowly over the spires, flushing the sky pink and pale blue, gleaming off broken glass, bringing color to the gore. Anubises, wading into the midst of the detritus, carried the bodies away. The dead, victorious and defeated alike, all went to the crematorium together.
The metal gates into the house hung warped and melted on their hinges. The inside echoed, empty, threatening. The first to set foot on the foyer’s metal floor had been electrocuted.
Eyr Eth Lun and his liege, the fugitive prince Ben Tur Ibren, were long gone. Some of Karnon Nameless Dae’s followers hoped their quarry—Lun and Ibren—was hiding somewhere in the house, sure to be flushed out. Most knew better. Lun’s soldiers had fought with the desperate furor of those who knew themselves dead. They’d been fighting to buy their masters time to escape, not to save their own lives. They’d succeeded, and their ranks—brave, loyal, and dead—lay in unflinching testament to the cost of Lun’s contingency plan.
* * *
Eyre Isri Esthe sat on a metal chair in a metal closet barely big enough to fit her and the chair. She held the keycards to her house in her hands, running them through her fingers idly. Their transparent and gently glowing edges provided the only light.
Beneath her chair she’d stashed the last gift her husband, Eyr Eth Lun, had ever given her—a vial of poison.
She knew that no one would find this closet. She had scryed it. She could stay here until she died. The scent of her rotting corpse would be the finger that beckoned the partisans of Karnon Dae, who had overrun her house, to her hiding place.
She had seen that this place was safe. She had not seen that she would be abandoned here in the end. Perhaps she should have looked deeper.
She had feared scrying her husband’s defeat, capture, or death. Scrying was a dangerous art. Seeing a future would make it happen. In many cases, it was better not to look.
Long ago, she had seen the acid that would burn her face and change her life. The acid sent Lun from her bed, caused him to father his heirs on concubines.
Eyre Isri Esthe was an aristo from an ancient and honorable family. She did not flinch from fate. She could have run and had the acid find her out in fear. The burn would have happened anyway, as the result of her attempt to evade it. Instead, she made the best of things. Acid and fire were the best tools for scrying, better than water and silver, better than blood and wood. She became the greatest scryer of her generation. She could give Lun that, even if he would be robbed of her beauty. She could give herself that, a sure antidote to the pity of others.
When the acid found her, it found her brave. But she always wondered in her secret heart whether it would have spilled at all if she had not spent so many years braced for its burn.
After that, she had focused her scrying on others. She used it for Lun. She brought him great power. He never divorced her, never considered it. He valued her as a wife—her brilliance, her power, her insight, her peerless family—long after he ceased to value her as a woman, repelled by the scars.
She had hidden Lun’s prince from Karnon Dae’s strange black scrying for three years . When at last he was discovered, she had misdirected Dae’s nameless powers for long enough to secure an escape.
Then came the false identity cards, with all their faces. Lun’s face. The prince’s face, the concubines’ faces. Lun’s sons’ faces, the bodyguards’. Even his valet’s.
Lun—her Eth whom she had loved so fiercely once—told her that he’d left her card with her scrying things, packed away in this hidden room. She had gone to find it and found the vial instead.
She had never imagined that Lun lacked the courage—lacked the respect—to tell her the truth. She had never imagined that she—the greatest scryer of her generation—could be lied to and tricked by her own husband. It was so... common. So despicable.
Worse, he could not have lied to her if she had not lied to herself.
It should have been obvious—no false name on an identity card could hide her scars, the infamous scars of Eyr Eth Lun’s reclusive and witchlike wife. Security would have arrested her on sight, no matter what her identity card said.
Consciously or not, he had not wanted to save her. He had not wanted to see her scarred face, carefully schooled to hide any traces of jealousy, beside his beautiful concubine Jane Lin Elle’s. Lun had even less tolerance for guilt than he did for ugliness.
He didn’t want her spilling his secrets at the last, either. Lun knew she was highborn, aristo by blood and breeding, to her bones. To be tortured to death by Karnon Dae, to scream and spurt and squeal her secrets at the end, was beneath her. Suicide was dignified by comparison. Lun trusted her to clean up this last mess for him, like so much detritus burdening his flight, even though the mess was herself.
She was not detritus. She would not passively hand herself over to the anubises. Even if she could not save herself, she could avenge herself.
The greatest danger a scryer faced was to scry her own death. It was the one utterly forbidden vision. Esthe had killed Dae’s lone scryer by tricking her into seeing herself topple dead from her scrying chair. Now that Esthe knew she herself was certain to die, by her own hand or by Dae’s, she could skim closer to that risk.
She had no acid and no knife, but she had a little light from the keycards. She bit her tongue hard and spat blood into her hand. Within it she saw, not for the first time, that Karnon Nameless Dae was not a human man. He was neininki; alien. Like all neininki, a lie would cost him his life. Having promised to kill all who sheltered the prince, he would never spare her life. She saw that it was too late to escape him.
She also saw that she would not die in this closet.
* * *
By midmorning, the technicians had disarmed the worst of the traps in the central part of the palace, the foyer and the main hall. Their troops had filled it, and the head technician was briefing Karnon Dae on the traps that awaited them in the rest of the house.
In the midst of all the chaos, Karnon Dae stilled and turned his head. He held up a hand to quiet the technician.
Silence spread outward through the people in the hall.
Esthe emerged from a door hidden in the wall. Both her hands showed, but one of them was full of keycards. She walked slowly and purposefully toward Karnon Dae.
A gesture from Dae made the security hang back.
When she reached Dae, she knelt, spreading the key cards on the ground before her. Then she looked up and let her hood fall back. In the surrounding company, a gasp sounded and was stifled.
Esthe’s shaven head marked her as an aristo, and the scars disfiguring the right side of her face left no doubt as to her identity. These people who gawped at her had never dreamed of seeing her at all, let alone seeing her kneel on the floor.
All was silent, and then she spoke.
“Karnon Dae, I know that you never lie,” she said, her voice clear and strong. “And you have said that you will kill all who shelter and aid Ben Tur Ibren. At the request of my husband, I have sheltered and aided Prince Ibren. I know that by your word my life is forfeit.
“My husband has broken his word to me. He has fled with Ibren. He left me here, knowing that you would break in and kill me.
“I do not ask that you spare my life. My death sentence has already been issued. Because you keep your word, it is final. You have not said when it should be carried out, however. I ask only that you delay my death. As long as I remain alive, I will serve and aid you however you desire, save that I will not harm my family—by which I do not mean my husband, but the family of my birth: my parents and my siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces. In all other respects, I will do whatever you will. Further, here ar
e the keys to my house. They will open all the doors without harm to you or your servants.”
Karnon was silent, considering.
Everyone else simply stared. People had whispered about her for years. Much had been made of her scars—how horrible and monstrous they were, beyond the ken of medics to fix. They distracted the eye, shiny runnels spreading down the front and right side of her face.
Aside from the scars, she was not bad-looking. In her thirties, tall, slender. Eyr Eth Lun was a connoisseur of women, and he’d married her for more than her family connections.
She knew that Karnon Dae would know her offer was genuine. Neininki always knew lies when they heard them. They were jealous of humans’ ability to lie, and Karnon Nameless Dae would have her screaming on the floor if she were telling one. Knowing she was truthful did not mean Dae would accept her offer, though. The safer move would be to kill her straight off.
“Your family members are numerous and powerful,” Karnon Dae said. “Can you bring them to my side?”
There was a pause.
“No,” she said at last. “Not if you intend to replace the aristos as rulers of the world. I can help you accomplish that goal—my family’s political standing means nothing to me—but I cannot persuade them to change sides.”
Dae paused, contemplative. Esthe’s value as an ally was compromised by her inability to recruit—and unwillingness to harm—her family.
“Your offer stands no matter how short a time I let you live?” he asked at last.
“While I live, I am your servant,” she said.
“Then change into drudge’s gray and scrub the blood off the stairs in front of your home.”
There was a beat of complete silence.
“I appreciate the gift of your keys,” Dae said, and his face was almost gentle. “If you wish to rescind your offer now, I will kill you swiftly and painlessly.”
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