Then came the gown, which she’d managed to pack well enough to prevent the worst of the wrinkles. The fasteners in back, however, presented some difficulty. She could feel the hook and eye at the back of her neck, but no matter how she contorted herself, couldn’t get them to catch.
She turned to the pilot’s chair. “Marlowe—”
He sprang to his feet, as if he’d been watching. Waiting for her to ask.
At her back, he fumbled with the tiny hooks, the tips of his fingers brushing along the bare skin of her neck. Closing her eyes, she reveled in the warm flush his touch inspired. The breath of his sigh tickled her skin. If she took a step back, she would be leaning against him, and she was very tempted.
If only they could only stand like this for the rest of the hour. The rest of the war …
He moved away, but only after smoothing away a lock of her hair. Back at his seat, he clasped his hands together and gazed at her with a look of blank innocence.
They both practiced that look.
“Thank you,” she said. He nodded.
She continued with buttons, hooks, earrings, necklace, arranging them all properly. Next she used the little tray of cosmetics with the tiny fold-out mirror. After some powder, some color on her lips and cheeks, and a few pins in her hair, she’d be able to pass in the most respectable society without comment. She saw the gown, with its corset, ribbing, and petticoats, as armor.
“All right, I’m finished. How do I look?” She gave her skirt a last brush.
He said simply. “Your Highness. Princess Maud returns.”
She ducked her gaze. She wasn’t ready for Princess Maud to return.
“It’s amazing how you do that,” he continued, when she didn’t speak. “You’re a chameleon.”
“I think you are the only one who sees my true form.”
His smile flashed, and fled. “Sometimes I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.”
Marlowe steered them to an upper landing platform at the air port. He followed the signals of the tower controller, sending back his reply with the lantern at the window.
“I’ll get the line,” she said, intending to throw out the mooring lines to the deckhands.
“You’d better not,” he said, nodding at her current dress. “Why don’t you gather your things?”
She unlocked the safe and retrieved the prize, which she put in the valise that had hidden her gown, burying it in her dirty clothes. She tucked her pistol in a pocket in the side, and remembered to keep that side of the bag closest to her. Not that she expected to encounter any trouble here; rather, it was habit.
Marlowe and the deckhands got the ship anchored perfectly well without her, of course. But she felt useless, standing there, stiff as a statue in this clothing.
Out the window, she could see the street leading toward the village and castle, and the carriage drawn by a pair of large bay horses parked there. The carriage door would have her brother’s crest painted on it. The royal crest belonging to the Crown Prince. He’d gotten her message, then, and made it as easy as possible to bring the box straight to him.
Anchored and still against the tugging of the bladder above it, the ship felt like a rock instead of a bird. As soon as the door to the cabin opened, she’d have to leave. She and Marlowe stood together, regarding one another. She never knew what to say in these moments, when their missions ended. Whatever she said felt awkward and artificial, and as soon as he was gone she’d think of everything she should have said.
“You’ll come to the Royal Academy? To be on hand when they examine the artifact?” she asked.
“I hope to. But I suspect the general will send me and the Kestrel to Plymouth, to assist in the defense.”
That hadn’t been part of the original plan. The war had crept far too close to home shores; she preferred to forget.
“But I will see you again, soon?”
“As soon as possible, I should think,” he said.
They shook hands, as if they were familiar colleagues and not … she couldn’t decide exactly what they were. There was no civilized name for it. As she made her way down the steps from the platform to the street and Prince George’s carriage, she could feel Marlowe watching her, and was glad of it.
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. Kitty’s Big Trouble, the ninth book, was released summer 2011, and the tenth will be released summer 2012. She has also written for young adults (Voices of Dragons, Steel) and two stand-alone fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and was nominated for a Hugo award in 2011. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.
Author Spotlight: Lucius Shepard
Gina Guadagnino
“Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” has such a unique voice, particularly for a science fiction novella; what inspired your choice to make Maceo a self-proclaimed redneck?
These were people I grew up with in Florida. Most people don’t think of Florida as a redneck state, but once you get away from the coasts there is a heavy concentration of rednecks and Florida crackers and such, and they generally drift toward the coasts and toward Orlando, because that’s where the money is. Maceo is a Florida cracker as opposed to a redneck, the difference being defined this way: If you tell a redneck he’s stupid, he’s liable to get angry, but if you tell a Florida cracker he’s stupid, chances are he’ll have a swig of beer and say, “Yeah? So what?”
The backdrop of this novella is Central Florida and the Space Coast. As a writer, what were you able to accomplish by setting a story with flying saucers there as opposed to, say, Roswell?
The reason’s pretty basic. I’m familiar with the area and felt I could write about it with an authenticity of detail. And, too, Florida used to have the highest incidence of UFO sightings in the US, and there still are quite a few sightings today, though they occur mostly along the Gulf, rather than along the stretch of coast between Daytona and Vero Beach. State Highway 44, which traversed the state between Cocoa and Tampa, was a hotbed of sightings and guys in high school used to take dates down there to watch the sky. It was a rare night when you didn’t see something odd.
Ava tells Maceo three different versions of her background, and only one of them is remotely “plausible” in a real-world sense. As readers of science fiction, however, we look for the truth in her stranger and more outlandish stories. How do you guide the reader toward the “truth” in a novella where the main character never finds it?
Ambiguity is an important part of this story, and I wasn’t concerned with a reader coming to any particular conclusion about it. The story works, I think, whether one considers it a weird mainstream story or a science fiction story. I wanted to tell Maceo’s story against a backdrop that might be considered science fiction, rather like the movie Monsters, a film in which the love story was set in the foreground of the narrative and the science fiction was used as background … at least mostly.
Personally I consider “Hands Up!” science fiction and in order to push the reader in that direction without making it the focus of the story, which would be the narrative strategy of a typical science fiction story; you have to be very deft in the way you layer information, trying to influence the reader yet maintaining the ambiguity. Your exposition has to be subtle, without big lumps, and it generally requires a good bit of rewriting in order to get the balances right.
Variations on the theme of sexuality (vitality, desire, control, orientation, promiscuity, fidelity, jealousy) are woven throughout the novella. Sex drives the plot in many ways as well, working both as the thread that ties the characters together and the motive that drives them apart. How does Ava’s sexuality tie into her otherworldliness?
I envision Ava as a sex tourist, like some guy who takes his holiday in Phu Ket, but possibly on an interstellar scale. What Maceo has stumbled into is the last leg of her sex tour through this little ol’ galactic backwater of ours.
Of course, her bi-sexuality falls within human norms, but in context with all the other strangeness in the story, it was my hope that readers would come to that conclusion, or reach a conclusion that was proximate to that one.
Maceo muses frequently throughout his narration of the novella about the class he was born into, and about his place in society. How do you feel that science fiction and fantasy allow you to explore these themes of class inequality as a writer?
I don’t have that kind of view of a story. I usually have a character in mind, I work out the voice, and as I’m doing that, the story comes together. It’s sort of an intuitive way to work, as opposed to having a plan, and I make a lot of false starts—but I’m never thinking about themes and how the genre will enable me to do this or that. I have a character in my head and if I’m lucky he or she begins to take on a life of their own and make moves and say things that I wouldn’t have predicted. That said, I imagine that coercing the reader into viewing these characters in a science fictional light has the effect of an amplifier—it compels one to perceive these relatively normal characters to be passing strange and exotic. Which, in fact, they are. People are basically incomprehensible. It’s only when we don’t really look at people, when we take them for granted, that they appear normal.
Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated with this kind of guy, a canny redneck, a guy trapped by the limitations of his culture who is really intelligent, but can’t act upon his intelligence. So I hoped by putting him in a science fiction story, making him a tad more articulate than the average, I could show people there was perhaps more to him than met the eye.
Where is your writing taking you these days? What are you working on next?
I’m working on a short novel set in Tibet, a science fantasy, and a post-apocalyptic novel of sorts. After that, I’d like to do a big adventure novel with fantasy elements.
Gina Guadagnino compensates for being extremely short by cultivating her expansive vocabulary. She is overly-impressed by her education and the number of books in her personal library. A fiction writer and a blogger, she earns her living in social media, and still can’t believe that someone actually pays her to muck about on Facebook all day. Gina lives in exile in Florida with her husband, his rapier wit, and their precocious child.
Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolander
Theodore Quester
Your story for Lightspeed, “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring,” has quite a lyrical title—what came first, the title or the story? What was the inspiration?
My deep, dark secret: I began and finished this piece without a title, gave it an absolutely horrible placeholder during Clarion (don’t ask; bad enough eighteen other people in the world know), and pulled the final product out of my keister about three days before submitting to Fantasy. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but I do know I listened to a lot of Australian band The Dirty Three while pounding this out—their songs have titles like “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” and “I Knew It Would Come To This,” really evocative stuff that tells a story by itself—so I’m reasonably sure that post-rock sensibility and rhythm seeped into my brain a bit. The idea for the short itself was a lot more cut-and-dry. It came from an illuminated manuscript my friend and fellow writer Alex D. MacFarlane found, which featured, among other things, a medieval lady with a fox scrambling out of her mouth. We came to the conclusion that she was either playing the poor thing like a bagpipe or horking it up, and either way there were stories screaming to be told there.
This is how my writing process usually goes. Some writers sit down with flow charts and whiteboards and map their stories out to the final detail before they begin; others strap themselves to a snippet of idea, light the fuse, and hope they land somewhere arable. I definitely fall into the latter category more often than I’d care to admit.
Your story first impressed me with its distinctive voice—very lyrical, at times tall tales / folkloric and bigger than life … Any major influences? Does this style come naturally to you, or is it something you aim for as you revise?
My influences are the usual suspects: Neil Gaiman for his storytelling chops, Peter S. Beagle for his musical prose and amazing character voices—The Innkeeper’s Song has something like seven different first-person narrators and all of them are distinct entities, it’s incredible—and Cat Valente, who showed me that lush, descriptive lyricism is not something to be ashamed of. This is naturally how I’ve always written, but early on I was a little afraid to just be myself, lest I wander into the Valley of the Shadow of Purple Prose (cross yourself and spit over your shoulder when you speak of it). Several people mentioned that Valente had a similar style, I picked up The Orphan’s Tales, and lo and behold, another writer was doing it and doing it well, with grace and skill intact. So yeah, I owe her an eternal debt for teaching me to let my lyricism flag fly. The Devil is in the details, and everybody knows the Devil is the most interesting guy at the party.
That said, I also have a huge love for minimalist storytelling. You can convey so much with a few well-chosen details. Look at the opening twenty minutes of WALL-E, the island scenes in Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, or the sparse, windswept landscape of Team ICO’s video games. There’s a lot to be said for letting the reader fill in the gaps themselves. A good storyteller knows what to say, and just as importantly, what not to say.
You create a strong sense of place—the southwest and its border, with a dash of frontier wild wild west. How did you get such a good feel for the region? Are you a native of the southwest?
I spent my childhood in rural East Texas, around the border of Louisiana. When folks think of Texas, they think of a setting a lot like the one I’ve written about in this story, but East Texas is more aligned with the Deep South in both climate and culture, all magnolias and deep forests and stifling humidity. I took my inspiration here from several trips through New Mexico, which is, in some stretches at least, one of the most isolated, desolate places in the US. Highway 104 between Tucumcari and Las Vegas (not the one in Nevada) makes the surface of Mars look like your gran’s kitchen at Christmastime.
Without revealing any spoilers, your story also features quite a lot of action, lots of plot twists and turns. Did you have the story planned out beforehand? Know your ending?
I sort of knew where I was headed, in that it was a Bluebeard revenge story, and I also knew that Rosa had to be the one to pull the proverbial trigger. Otherwise I was flying by the seat of my trousers. The ending gave me fits for ages and I still don’t know if I’m entirely pleased with it, but I think it ends honestly and seems to work for most people. I’m at peace with it, anyway.
You are a recent graduate of Clarion UCSD. How does the workshop inform your writing? Is it difficult to produce after going through such an intense program?
I think the biggest lesson I learned at Clarion was that I’m the absolute worst judge of my own work. I’ve got the self-esteem of a mopey fifteen-year old; nothing I do is ever good enough. Having twenty-three talented writers slap me in the head with bricks every time I groused and moaned about what a talentless fraud I was was something of a wakeup call. In each of my personal conferences with the instructors I would ask what I was doing wrong, and each time the instructor in question would cock his or her head and say, “Uh … are you actually submitting anything?” Oops.
It sounds like such a simple thing, but when you are utterly convinced that your output is devoid of merit, having people whose opinions you respect reassure you that yes, you’re doing okay and yes, you are Real Writer is sort of a big deal. Living and working in a bubble with a group who completely believe in each other’s talents for six weeks is an amazing experience, and you carry it with you when the bubble finally bursts and you’re forcibly ejected back into the real world. And if you don’t remember, and don’t keep producing? They will come after you with sharp, pointy objects and make you remember. You don’t want Kij Johnson hunting you down with a morning star, believe me.
Clarion is completely deserving of all the legend that surrounds it. I highly recommend applying if you’ve been on the fence and are ready to get serious about things. It’s a crucible, and it’s not for everyone, but when it works it’s like roping the whirlwind.
I understand you attended this year’s World Fantasy Con and read an excerpt of your story. Can you comment on the experience?
Terrifying. I never read my stories aloud while I’m writing them. I hate the sound of my own voice and find it acutely embarrassing, like my thoughts are being pulled out through my nose and hung up naked for all the world to see. A mental gibbet, if you will. It’s an intensely personal thing that leaves me feeling pretty vulnerable, but readings are part and parcel of being an author so I figured I’d better learn sooner than later. And it worked out pretty okay! I wasn’t at all pleased with how I did, but then, like I said, I rarely am. I’ll keep striving to get better at it. If you come to one of my readings in the meantime, though, please be patient with me. I’m a work in progress in many ways.
My personal reading heroine is Wendy Wagner, one of the most amazing storytellers I’ve ever sat in on. When you go to one of her readings, you get a goddamned performance.
What are you working on right now? Anything else you’d like us to know about?
I’ve got several pieces circulating on the market right now that I intensely hope you will all get a look at very soon, a website (www.brookebolander.com) that I update on a fairly regular basis, and a novel idea I’ve been nursing for a few years now about a griffin that eats stories to survive. Don’t we all, though?
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 Page 25
