“Names in the city do not mean the same thing,” Kit said absently, aware that he had said this before and not caring. “Did I change the world?” He knew the answer already.
She looked at him for a moment, as if trying to gauge his feelings. “Yes,” she said slowly after a moment. She turned her face up toward the loose strand of bobbing lights: “There’s your proof, as permanent as stone and sky.”
“ ‘Permanent as stone and sky,’ ” Kit repeated. “This afternoon—it flexes a lot, the bridge. There has to be a way to control it, but it’s not engineered for that yet. Or lightning could strike it. There are a thousand things that could destroy it. It’s going to come down, Rasali. This year, next year, a hundred years from now, five hundred.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “All these people, they think it’s forever.”
“No, we don’t,” Rasali said. “Maybe Atyar does, but we know better here. Do you need to tell a Ferry that nothing will last? These stones will fall eventually, these cables—but the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here. My mother died, my grandfather. Valo.” She stopped, swallowed. “Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.” She leaned forward, across the space between them, and they kissed.
“Are you off soon?”
Rasali and Kit had made love on the levee against the cold grass. They had crossed the bridge together under the sinking moons, walked back to The Deer’s Heart and bought more beer, the crowds thinner now, people gone home with their families or friends or lovers: the strangers from out of town bedding down in spare rooms, tents, anywhere they could. But Kit was too restless to sleep, and he and Rasali ended up back by the mist, down on the dock. Morning was only a few hours away, and the smaller moon had set. It was darker now and the mist had dimmed.
“In a few days,” Kit said, thinking of the trunks and bags packed tight and gathered in his room at The Fish: the portfolio, fatter now, and stained with water, mist, dirt, and sweat. Maybe it was time for a new one. “Back to the capital.”
There were lights on the opposite bank, fisherfolk preparing for the night’s work despite the fair, the bridge. Some things don’t change.
“Ah,” she said. They both had known this; it was no surprise. “What will you do there?”
Kit rubbed his face, feeling stubble under his fingers, happy to skip that small ritual for a few days. “Sleep for a hundred years. Then there’s another bridge they want, down at the mouth of the river, a place called Ulei. The mist’s nearly a mile wide there. I’ll start midwinter maybe.”
“A mile,” Rasali said. “Can you do it?”
“I think so. I bridged this, didn’t I?” His gesture took in the beams, the slim stone tower overhead, the woman beside him. She smelled sweet and salty. “There are islands by Ulei, I’m told. Low ones. That’s the only reason it would be possible. So maybe a series of flat stone arches, one to the next. You? You’ll keep building boats?”
“No.” She leaned her head back and he felt her face against his ear. “I don’t need to. I have a lot of money. The rest of the family can build boats, but for me that was just what I did while I waited to cross the mist again.”
“You’ll miss it,” Kit said. It was not a question.
Her strong hand laid over his. “Mmm,” she said, a sound without implication.
“But it was the crossing that mattered to you, wasn’t it?” Kit said, realizing it. “Just as with me, but in a different way.”
“Yes,” she said, and after a pause: “So now I’m wondering: how big do the Big Ones get in the Mist Ocean? And what else lives there?”
“Nothing’s on the other side,” Kit said. “There’s no crossing something without an end.”
“Everything can be crossed. Me, I think there is an end. There’s a river of water deep under the Mist River, yes? And that water runs somewhere. And all the other rivers, all the lakes—they all drain somewhere. There’s a water ocean under the Mist Ocean, and I wonder whether the mist ends somewhere out there, if it spreads out and vanishes and you find you are floating on water.”
“It’s a different element,” Kit said, turning the problem over. “So you would need a boat that works through mist, light enough with that broad belly and fish-skin sheathing; but it would have to be deep-keeled enough for water.”
She nodded. “I want to take a coast-skimmer and refit it, find out what’s out there. Islands, Kit. Big Ones. Huge Ones. Another whole world maybe. I think I would like to be Rasali Ocean.”
“You will come to Ulei with me?” he said, but he knew already. She would come, for a month or a season or a year. They would sleep tumbled together in an inn very like The Fish or The Bitch, and when her boat was finished, she would sail across the ocean, and he would move on to the next bridge or road, or he might return to the capital and a position at University. Or he might rest at last.
“I will come,” she said. “For a bit.”
Suddenly he felt a deep and powerful emotion in his chest, overwhelmed by everything that had happened or would happen in their lives: the changes to Nearside and Farside, the ferry’s ending, Valo’s death, the fact that she would leave him eventually, or that he would leave her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said, and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it.”
All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.
“When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you.”
A fo ben, bid bont. To be a leader, be a bridge.
—Welsh proverb
Biographies
Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Lightspeed. She lives in Louisiana with her family, and her attempts at origami have never been known to commit atrocities except against aesthetics.
Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is the co-author of Geek Wisdom. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, has won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.
Bradley Denton studied speculative fiction and writing under Professor James Gunn at the University of Kansas, and his first professional story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984. Since then, his work has won the World Fantasy Award (for the two-volume story collection A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians), the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for the novel Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella “Sergeant Chip”). His other novels include Blackburn, Lunatics, and Laughin’ Boy, and more of his short fiction can be found in the collection One Day Closer to Death. He now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Barbara, their four dogs, and probably too many guitars.
Vylar Kaftan has published about three dozen stories in places such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Realms of Fantasy. Her 2010 Lightspeed story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” was nominated for a Nebula. She founded FOGcon, a new literary sf/f convention in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Awar
d in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.
Alan DeNiro is the author of a story collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (Small Beer Press), and a novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less (Ballantine/Spectra). His website is www.alandeniro.com and he tweets with the username of @adeniro. He lives outside of St. Paul with his wife and twin son and daughter.
Suzy McKee Charnas is the author of over a dozen works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her novels include The Vampire Tapestry, the Holdfast series, and the Sorcery Hall series of books for young adults. A selection of her short fiction was collected in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms. She has been awarded a Hugo, a Nebula, and has won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award twice. Charnas took a joint major at Barnard College—Economic History—because she “wanted tools to build convincing societies to set fantastic stories in.” She lives with her lawyer-husband in New Mexico. Her website is www.suzymckeecharnas.com.
Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty books, including science-fiction, thriller, and crime novels, three collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and an anthology of stories about popular music, which he co-edited with Kim Newman. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell award, the Sidewise Award, and the British Fantasy Award for best short story. Having worked for twenty years as a research biologist and university lecturer, he is now a full-time writer. He lives in North London.
Jonathan Carroll is the author of sixteen novels and one story collection. His latest is The Ghost in Love, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. He lives in Vienna, Austria.
John Barnes is the author of more than thirty science fiction novels, including Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors, Finity, and Directive 51. With astronaut Buzz Aldrin, he wrote the novels Encounter with Tiber and The Return. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and, most recently, The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.
Alexandra Duncan is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her first novel, Salvage, is scheduled to be published by HarperCollins’s Greenwillow Books in 2013. She lives with her husband and two monstrous, furry cats in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she works as a librarian. You can visit her online at alexandraduncanlit.blogspot.com and twitter.com/DuncanAlexandra.
Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and (with Terry Pratchett) Good Omens; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and M Is for Magic. He has won numerous literary accolades including the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Stoker Awards, as well as the Newbery Medal.
Gavin J. Grant is the publisher of Small Beer Press. He co-edits the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet with his wife, Kelly Link. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, SciFiction, Salon Fantastique, Best New Fantasy, among others. He lives with his family in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club, a New York Times bestseller, and three short story collections, including What I Didn’t See, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. Other honors include the Nebula and the Shirley Jackson awards. She lives in Santa Cruz, California with her husband and her daughter’s dog.
Chris Lawson is an Australian speculative fiction writer with an eclectic approach to subject matter that has skittered across the hard sciences of genetic engineering and epidemiology, unapologetic fantasy about the voyages of the Argo at the end of the Age of Myths, and ambiguous-ghost stories set in the Great War. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Dreaming Down-Under, and several Year’s Best anthologies; his collection Written in Blood is available through MirrorDanse Books (www.tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse). In non-fictional life, Chris is a family medicine practitioner and university teacher with a special interest in public health, evidence-based medicine, and statistics. He lives on the Sunshine Coast with his spouse, two children, and a hyperdog. Chris blogs, irregularly, at Talking Squid (www.talkingsquid.net).
Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Margo Lanagan is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner, for novel, novella, collection and short story. Her stories have twice been short-listed in the James Tiptree Jr and Shirley Jackson awards, as well as for Hugo, Nebula, Stoker, Sturgeon and International Horror Guild awards. She is the author of four collections of short stories, White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes and Yellowcake, and two novels, Tender Morsels and The Brides of Rollrock Island. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia.
Nina Allan’s stories have appeared regularly in the magazines Black Static and Interzone, and have featured in the anthologies Catastrophia, House of Fear, Strange Tales from Tartarus, Best Horror of the Year #2 and Year’s Best SF #28. A first collection of her fiction, A Thread of Truth, was published by Eibonvale Press in 2007, followed by her story cycle The Silver Wind in 2011. Twice shortlisted for the BFS and BSFA Award, Nina’s next book, Stardust, will be available from PS Publishing in Autumn 2012. An exile from London, she lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex.
Kat Howard’s short fiction has appeared in Subterranean, Lightspeed, and Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, among other places. She’s a graduate of Clarion 2008 (UCSD), and teaches speculative fiction when she’s not writing it.
Born in Vermont and raised all over the place, K.J. Parker has worked as, among other things, a tax lawyer, an auction house porter, a forester and a numismatist. Married to a lawyer and settled in southern England, Parker is currently a writer, farm labourer and metalworker, in more or less that order. K.J. Parker is not K.J. Parker’s real name, but if somebody told you K.J. Parker’s real name, you wouldn’t recognise it.
Robert Reed is the author of several novels and a small empire of short fiction. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo. Reed lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and daughter, and his new best friend, a NOOK Tablet.
George Saunders, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of six books (including the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation) and, most recently, the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone. He teaches at Syracuse University.
C.S.E. Cooney collects knives and books. Her fiction and poetry can be found in SteamPowered II and the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthologies, at Apex, Subterranean, Strange Horizons, Podcastle, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium. Her book Jack o’ the Hills came out with Papaveria Press in 2011, which will also put out her poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes in 2012. She was the recipient of the 2011 Rhysling Award in the Long Poem category. All the women in her family have dark eyes.
Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer of over eighty short works of science fiction and fantasy. She lives in
the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Tor.com, Clarkesworld and Subterranean Magazine. She’s been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and in 2011 she won the Nebula Award for best novella. She hasn’t ever written a bucket list, but if she had, she probably wouldn’t have accomplished most of the stuff on it. (For instance, she has never starred on Broadway. What’s that about?)
Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and has since lived in South Africa, the UK, Vanuatu and Laos. He is the author of the ground-breaking alternative history novel Osama (a BSFA Award nominee), and of the Bookman Histories trilogy of steampunk novels comprising The Bookman, Camera Obscura and The Great Game. Lavie’s other works include linked story collection HebrewPunk, novellas Cloud Permutations, Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, An Occupation of Angels and Jesus & The Eightfold Path. He edited The Apex Book of World SF and was a World Fantasy Award nominee for his work on the World SF Blog.
E. Lily Yu is a senior in English at Princeton University working toward a certificate in biophysics. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Clarkesworld, Jabberwocky 5 Electric Velocipede, and Goblin Fruit, and her short play on beta decay had a staged reading at Princeton in October. At school, she competes on the ballroom team, plays flute, and juggles. She was born in Oregon and raised in New Jersey.
Since her first sale in 1987, Kij Johnson has sold dozens of short stories to markets including Amazing Stories, Analog, Asimov’s, Duelist Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short story and the 2001 Crawford Award for best new fantasy novelist. Her short story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was a nominee for the 2008 Nebula and Hugo awards. Her novels include two volumes of the Heian trilogy Love/War/Death: The Fox Woman and Fudoki. She’s also co-written with Greg Cox a Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Dragon’s Honor. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan; and Kylen, two novels set in Georgian Britain.
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