

EDITORIAL

  * Take Two

INTERVIEWS

  * A Chat with Minister Faust

  * The Writers Room – Marly Youmans

  * Featured Film Maker - John Williams

FICTION

  * The Air That I Breathe by Eric Del Carlo

  * The Seer by Sean Eads

  * Stop Me if You've Heard This One by KC Ball

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

Published by Waylines Media Smashwords Edition Copyright 2014 Waylines Media

Editors: Darryl Knickrehm & David Rees-Thomas Illustrations: Darryl Knickrehm

Contribution Writer: Alisa Alering First Readers: Alisa Alering, Dawn Bonanno, Beth Cato, Micaiah Evans, Ewan Forbes, Marina J. Lostetter, Emi Morimoto, Sandra Odell

http://waylinesmagaizne.com

Issue 2, just like Issue 1, was a pleasure to put together. We had a lot of fun finding our latest batch of stories and films, working with all the writers and film makers, and getting all these wonderful interviews (a whopping nine!). So have as much fun as we had, welcome to Waylines – Issue 2!

Issue 2 would also not have been possible without the help of our newly acquired team of First Readers. These dedicated souls have handled the submissions that keep pouring in to us (1100 so far) with the utmost devotion and care. If you are interested in meeting them, their bios can be found on the About page.

And now that we are up on our feet thanks to all those Kickstarters, all those First Readers, all those writers & film makers, and all you readers, Issue 2 seems like a good place for us to announce some of the goals we have for Waylines Magazine for the near and not so near future.

1) We want to become a Science Fiction Writer's of America (SFWA) eligible market. This would mean that our authors would be a step closer to membership of SFWA if they were published in Waylines.

2) We would like to fund the magazine through subscriptions and advertising. Kickstarter campaigns are great, and we got our initial start this way, but for sustainability, we need to look at other options. So we will eventually be making the Digital Download edition available as a subscription purchase, but for now is set up as a Pay What You Want format (which includes FREE at the moment).

3) We would like to move to publishing four stories per issue (possibly one exclusive to our Digital Download Edition), and also explore the possibility of publishing flash fiction, and longer works.

And we have lots of other ideas brewing in our alchemy lab, but are waiting to see if we can get all the right 'ingredients' in order first. For now, we hope the goals that we've mentioned will give you a little glimpse at Waylines' future direction (and also give an idea of how we could be helped).

But let's get back to the issue at hand – Issue 2. As always, we have three short stories and three short films, all of which we are very excited about. We also have a feature with the critically acclaimed, Kindred award winning novelist, Minister Faust, and our regular Writer's Room feature, where Alisa caught up with the always charming, Marly Youmans. Now on to the stories!

K. C. Ball takes us inside a joke, and makes us re-examine the boundaries of the reality we think we inhabit in, Stop Me if you've Heard This One.

Sean Eads takes us into a dark wasteland where a boy discovers the secrets of his society and world in, The Seer.

And...

Eric Del Carlo brings us to the edge of a world destroyed by pollution and prejudice in, The Air That I Breath.

For our films this issue, we have:

Pixels, the amazingly fun video game invasion by Patrick Jean .

The Gate, a creepy, powerful (and soon to be a feature) film about an outbreak of mutants in the city by Matt Westrup

And finally...

The touching tale of a boy and his robot in John William's Paraphernalia.

We hope you enjoy the stories, the films and the interviews with all of their creators.

If you want to send us a message, you can do so on our site, and we can also be found at  Facebook and Twitter.

Also, Waylines is gearing up for Year Two and will be running our fund raising campaign from January 10-February 10, 2014. If you like the magazine, think about heading over to our Kickstarter campaign then. There are pledge rewards like posters, bookmarks, and our Zero Issue - an issue made just for our supporters. Help make Year Two a reality.

For now, enjoy Issue 2! Safe Journeys!

Sincerely,

D & D

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

Our featured author for issue 2 is Minister Faust, a Kindred award winning author, who is about to release Volume 2 of his War and Mir series this year. He is also busy at work on putting out new editions of his earlier work, and getting involved in graphic novels and even the movies.

He has been described as "Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison and Ishmael Reed all rolled into one," and he's also been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

We caught up with him and asked him about his thoughts on everything from indie publishing to family life to other writers.

We hear that you're updating many of your works. Can you tell us a little about what this means for you? Also, what new fiction can we expect to see from Minister Faust this year?

Updating my work is not quite on the level of George Lucas adding new effects to the original trilogy, but is more like using updated technology to remove blue screen phantoms from the finished prints. In my case, I'm dedicated to the idea of making my fiction prose invisible as possible in most circumstances. Yes, sometimes I aim for "beautiful prose," but much less these days. That doesn't mean I don't want the prose to be beautiful, but rather that I want people to feel whatever the text is saying, rather than feeling the text. It's irritating to me that the very people who criticise SF movies (for instance) for being about nothing but special effects are often the same people who heap praise upon novels for allegedly beautiful prose... novels that quite often fail to create rich dialogue, three-dimensional characters, or engaging plot. For those books, "beautiful prose" is merely a special effect.

Because my first two novels are told exclusively from first-person POV (and The Coyote Kings has something like thirteen narrators), I'm very sensitive to making sure that spoken voices sound like spoken—and not written—voices. What I found while revising the text for The Coyote Kings was that there were still parts of the manuscript that read like writing. And I would tell all writers who are dealing in dialogue or first-person narration, if it sounds like writing, take it out. Now, sounding like writing might still need to go when it's third-person narration, but one can at least make a case for it there.

When I requested and got back the rights to The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, I didn't have time to review the entire text before I indie-published it as The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Now I've finished my work on the prose to make it aesthetically consistent, and I've also been able to plant a tiny number of seeds to lead towards the sequel, The Coyote Kings, Book Two: Uranium City, and to the subsequent books in the proposed series.

I'm also adding, to the electronic text, hyperlinks to the music cited in the novel (I also added a few new musical references) so that people can enjoy the novel's "soundtrack"—and buy-links on my website will make it easy for people to support the artists if they like the music.

Updating my Kindred Award-winning novel From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain means more than merely re-titling it as Shrinking the Heroes (which I already did in 2011 when I got the rights back). It also means adding some additional "behind the scenes" content to the end of the book—some of the background material I created while world-building, including a time-line, a list of superheroes and supervillains, and related content.

Both of those novels will be available in brand-new paperback form by the end of April. They've been out of paper-print since early 2011, so I'm happy they'll be back on shelves, especially since I know that each book was getting increased academic attention—and professors can't assign books that students can't actually buy.

As far as new works, I'll be releasing War & Mir, Volume II: The Darkold. I'd originally hoped to get Volume II out last year, but the entirely unexpected death of my sister pretty much destroyed my ability to care about anything other than taking care of my family. When the Volume III comes out, I'll collect all three volumes into what I'm calling War & Mir: The Unified Edition, and I'll be dedicating it to her.

My other task for new work is screenplays. Director Ernest Dickerson, best known for his work on The Walking Dead, The Wire, and Juice, is a good friend of mine who wants to bring The Coyote Kings to the big screen. He's kindly offered to help me get some scripts seen. So for 2013-2014, my main literary goal is to write as many screenplays as possible, and hopefully to turn some of them into graphic novels, too.

That's one of the things I emphasize in my Building An Online Presence for Writers class – how to do things efficiently and get the most use out of the time one spends poking around on the web getting distracted by cat pictures.

So, tell us a bit more about the graphic novels and other projects. Do you think it's important nowadays for writers to diversify?

I think that writers should do what they want to do. I'll go even further: writers should avoid doing material they don't want to do. If you love video games, comics, haiku, plays, sketch comedy, then do them. But if you think you're too good for something, or you simply don't like it, don't try making it. Your contempt will show in your work.

I do, however, come from a writing tradition that says that writers shouldn't be poets OR playwrights OR journalists OR novelists, etc.... they should be WRITERS. Learning the craft means being at least functional, if not actually good, in all those realms. I think that you get better in whatever individual realm by getting better in all of them. If you have to write dialogue for actors, and you're in workshops or sketch comedy performances and you hear your dialogue sounding like total shit, you learn quickly (unless the actors suck or you're so full of yourself you can't concede you've made a mistake) that you need to listen to how humans actually talk. And, by the way, listening to real humans, as much as possible (including to your spouse, kids, parents, co-workers, customers, etc.) with the intention of actually listening and not just pausing so you can insert your own comment, will probably make you a better human. Just sayin'.

Indie publishing. Why the switch from traditional publishing? Was it a gradual shift? How do you see this playing out in the next few years?

You know, here's the fate of most writers: obscurity and being abandoned by publishers. The corporate publishing world is corporate, and unless you're earning the publisher a LOT of money, you can expect to get ignored or even dropped. I'm not talking about Betsy Mitchell, the editor who published my first two novels--she was terrific and very supportive. I owe her, and I'll always be grateful to her. I'm talking about that entire system. As an artist, as a human being, I want control over my work and my life. Indie publishing restores that. Take my novel The Alchemists of Kush. That book has more blurbs than most books out there, enthusiastic praise by a range of outstanding writers in various fields. Could I get a single agent to represent that book? No. So those gatekeepers were gateclosers. Why should I let corporations tell me my books shouldn't exist? Because a MS on my computer isn't a book. It's only a book when other people are reading it on paper or on their own screens. So just like all painters, almost all photographers, all poets, most playwrights, all sculptors, and many filmmakers, and even many game designers, I don't wait for corporations to decide if and when my work should be seen. Fuck that. And more and more writers feel the same way and are acting on that. Call it libertarian, anarchist, or whatever you want. To me it's simply being an artist. Most writers could not realistically expect to earn a living from their novels, and I don't expect it (nor do I). I do the work because I love to, and because (I'm grateful to say) many people tell me they love what I do. I'd love to make millions, sure. But the sure sign you're doing what you love is that you do it at great expense (in time and effort) for its own sake. I've written professionally in various fields when I did NOT love what I was being told to write. Massive difference. I'm happy where I am.

What other writers have you been reading recently? Who is giving you the same sense of excitement you had when you were younger?

Plenty of the writers whose work I love and whose work excites me are also friends of mine: Robert J. Sawyer (Calculating God), Wayne Arthurson (Fall from Grace), Craig DiLouie (The Infection), Gayleen Froese (Grayling Cross), for instance. I don't know Cecelia Frey, but I loved her book A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing. But I also love graphic novels (and being the father of young children, I appreciate being able to read an entire story in a brief period), and Ed Brubaker (Incognito), who I don't know, is doing amazing work. I have recently adored the work of Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet), Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese), Daniel Clowes, Mariko Tamaki (Skim), Joe Sacco (Footnotes in Gaza), and many others. They're superb storytellers. Story is story. It's foolish to get distracted by whether it's on television or stage or screen or computer or paper.

What other interests or events in your life are often a focus or an inspiration in your writing?

I love food, tea, music, and martial arts. They're always showing up in my work. And now that I'm a father, I feel that I can do a better job writing about children, so that's increasingly part of my work.

You are also a teacher. How do you find that impacts on your own writing?

I don't know! I think having taught for so long has an impact on my work as an editor, but not necessarily as a self-editor. Great question... but I really don't know if I have an answer.

Minister Faust is a long-time community activist, writer, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker and martial artist in several disciplines.

A maverick novelist increasingly described as one of the finest voices of his generation, Minister Faust is the author of the critically acclaimed The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and the Kindred Award-winning Shrinking the Heroes. His latest is The Alchemists of Kush, which writers and readers alike have already hailed as superb.

Minister Faust refers to his sub-genre of writing as Imhotep-Hop-an Africentric literature that draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars.

He lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughters, where he also runs Canada's top bean pie bakery, Desserts of Kush.

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

Marly Youmans is the author of eleven books and a good deal of uncollected short fiction and poetry. In 2012, she published three books: a novel about a Depression-era orphan who flees tragedy on a sharecropper's Georgia farm and rides the rails, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage; a collection of formal poetry, The Foliate Head; and a dramatic adventure story in blank verse, Thaliad. Forthcoming are: Glimmerglass, the story of an artist who begins to glimpse what she thinks is the muse ; Maze of Blood, a novel inspired by the curious life of a well-known pulp writer; and Catherwood, a reprint of the 1996 novel, She now lives with her family in Cooperstown, New York. Her blog and book pages can be found at http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com. To see excerpts from her three 2012 books, go here.

I HEAR YOU LIE IN BED AND EAT TRUFFLES WHILE WRITING. IS THAT JUST FOR POETRY OR DO YOU DO THAT WHEN WRITING NOVELS, TOO?

That is an unfounded but delightful rumor, possibly instigated by me. I do have an ideal of writing most anything with my feet up, tossing down the bonbons, but I seldom reach that goal. I confess a weakness for chocolate, but I am a woman, and it was scientifically proven in the late twentieth century that chocolate and women go together.

You ask about differences between the writing of different kinds of works. (Note that I will eat chocolate with any kind of writing.) Sometimes I think that there's no difference between one mode of writing and another, that it all depends on with what shape vessel one catches the words. Sometimes I know that genre or vessel shape is a completely wrong way to think about making poems and stories: some writings come because of an itch to write, some because a work just fountains up and is irresistible, and some pour like a sluice from some distant star. Those latter sorts feel as though they are one's own and yet not one's own.

I agree with the late Tom Disch that there's nothing quite so seductive and potent as what he calls "the lyric gush," but sometimes I feel that sensation when writing not a lyric but a novel, at least in passages.

DO YOU WRITE EVERY DAY OR ONLY WHEN THE MOOD FOR CHOCOLATE STRIKES YOU?

I am wildly erratic.

Here it's all alas and alack and well-a-day: I do little the way "they" tell you to do, I fear.

Part of that is because I have three children. All three are at home at the moment, though only one is still in high school. Running a household of five gets in the way of things. It just does. Women still haven't figured out the juggling act, but we're working on it. My life works reasonably well because my husband is a superb cook and has done all the dinner labor for years now, so I don't have to shop for groceries much or cook much. That's marvelous help. Over the years, we have worked together in the mornings to make lunches and get children off to school, and that also was huge. Because of him, I was able to quit teaching right after tenure and stay home with words and children. (He also brings me truffles from exotic places.)

I have had a lot of demands in the past year that got in the way of writing, far more so that usual. Serving on the panel for the National Book Award in "young people's literature" devoured months, and I also had three books come out in three countries between March and the end of the year: a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction); next, a collection of poetry, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press); and then the most unusual, an adventure tale in verse that combines epic conventions with novelistic modes, Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing.) So for a good long time now I have been doing smaller things—poems and revision of poetry and fiction.

With novels, I tend to have a seed daydream or a dream in sleep that sets me off, and then I am always thinking about the story until I am done with a draft, whether I am sitting at my writing table or doing something utterly boring like folding laundry. I will stay up or rise in the night to write (and I have one novel from when my children were small that was composed entirely in the night) and grab any little bits of time in order to write during the day. I am obsessive and fast during that period. Revision and tweakage are easier to fit into my days, so they are seldom a problem.

With poetry, I feel a transformative change coming on, unless it's a poem that one writes simply because of an itch to write a poem; that is, I move into a receptive mode because a poem is approaching. Does that sound mad? No doubt it is. But it's a delicious madness. Now and then I have a spate of poetry and write new poems every day for a month or more, and those are intense, happy seasons in my life.

THERE ARE BIRDS IN YOUR ROOM. TELL US ABOUT THEM.

I am wandering (okay, easing around—it's a bit crowded in here, with stacks of books in the walkway) in my writing room, looking for winged things. Bat in a basket of finger puppets, Red Rose goose from the old fairy tale series of Wade tea figurines, Fra Angelico annunciation-angel print from the marvelous show in New York a few years ago, framed Cieslawski solo show catalogue with a stork-like bird accompanying a woman who is watching some fish flow up into the air in the shape of a tree, a goofy paint-by-numbers acrylic of turkeys found in an old dresser and stuck up over the door, a preschooler's watercolor bird in a circle of glitter and shiny paper over the other door: I never realized how many wings are in this room. It must be the vine-and-flower wallpaper that attracts them. (I inherited the wallpaper from the prior resident. She must have outgrown it, as I found hundreds of nails hammered into its tiny arabesques.)

But you must be thinking about the carved birds. Two turtledoves on a branch hang from the edge of a bookcase. Those birds were given to me after Ingledove (FSG, 2005) flew into the world. It's a properly mushy gift for a husband to give. A sleek (ravenous!) creature on one leg, which Michael gave me after the publication of The Curse of the Raven Mocker (FSG, 2003), stands above some sea-washed stones from Aberystwyth (where I went to honor my artist friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the occasion of his 60th birthday retrospective at the splendid Gregynog Gallery of The National Library of Wales) and a netsuke mermaid. That carved corvid may have nested in my mind afterward because the long series of poems that I've been polishing, The Book of the Red King, contains a lot of ravens... The storyline focuses on the figures of the Red King and the Fool, and the Fool has a terrible past, including a time that he spent in a dank, decayed forest with the ravens.

WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU WERE READING BUT AREN'T (BECAUSE IT DOESN'T EXIST)?

The first book that I will write after my death.

WHAT CAN'T YOU LIVE WITHOUT?

That "lyric gush." The joy of playing with words and arranging them in patterns that follow the weird, arcing and falling paths of the human heart. Love. Grace. Joy. (And you, Alisa, thought it was truffles!)

WHAT SHOULD A READER DO AFTER READING THIS?

I wouldn't mind a bit if a reader took a peep at the books I published last year, as it is a mighty job to play midwife to three books at once. Quotes and clips for the novel are here, for the collection here, and for the long poem here.

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

Christopher Kezelos has been making films for more than a decade. With a BVA from Sydney University in film production, he's worked as a writer/producer/director on ads, online videos and award winning shorts. He even has his own production company - Zealous Creative. Christopher wrote and directed his first animated short in 2010, titled Zero. His latest short, The Maker, has screened at over 60 festivals and won 21 awards. Waylines features The Maker in our Janaury 2013 issue, so head on over to view the full film.

We caught up with Kezelos during the busy winter season where he gave us some insightful answers about The Maker, filmmaking and the future. Enjoy!

John Williams has been making films for more than 12 years. In that time he has made a number of short films, worked on commercials and directed music videos for Coldplay, Radiohead and The Offspring. On top of all that, his work has won MTV Awards, 2 Young Advertising Awards in Cannes, and numerous other awards. Waylines features one of this latest films, Paraphernalia in our March 2013 issue. Head on over to check out the full film.

In February, we chatted with Williams about Paraphernalia, his filmmaking and the future. Here is his insight. Bon appetit!

What was the inspiration for Paraphernalia & what was your goal with the piece?

Firstly, the story was inspired by a friend of mine (but not a child) who needed dialysis treatment four hours a day, 3-4 times a week. She described the situation with the machine in her life as a sort of 'love hate relationship', she hated being so restricted by needing the machine but also appreciated that without such technology, she would not have been alive. This became the story I wanted to tell, but my approach was to not be so literal, so using a child and playing with the idea of personifying the dialysis machine into a robot became an exciting idea to convey the same heart of the story.

Are there any secrets you can tell us about achieving such great animation? How long did all this take?

Creating the robot was great fun. I had a clear idea I wanted the thing to look 1970's in design so I found a slightly retro dialysis machine (which we used in the end bedroom scene) and began the designs based on that. Also I found these great toy robot arms that could be operated remotely so I worked with an animator (Andy Peel) to modify these arms and paint them up to match the dialysis machine. Finally, I made the body of the robot so we'd be able to have the real thing in as many shots as possible to cut down on the post production.

In the finished film, probably less that 20% has the physical robot in it, as it was quite cumbersome to move and operate. But the textures were really helpful in making the CGI one look authentic. I do a bit of VFX supervising and I always push to get as much real stuff in as possible, I find it helps grounding things in reality and helps deceive the audience like a good magic trick.

Time wise the animation took about 6 weeks and and then the lighting and rendering took another 6-7 weeks and had to be done remotely in Portugal as Passion Pictures, where the film was produced from, got too busy to do it. This actually worked out well in the end as the guys in Portugal did an amazing job.

We think Elijah Muhammad did a wonderful job as Atari. How was it directing a child lead? Were there any secrets to drawing out his great performance?

In an early test before I got funding for the film, I found young Elijah. He'd never acted before but on camera he had a real screen presence, so we did a load of workshops and developed the script around him. He was fantastic, he has loads of energy but as soon as we called 'action' he became the most professional person on set. The only secret was finding him, he did the rest.However, it did help that we spent quite a lot of time together before filming, even just playing football and stuff so we had a good friendship.

How big of a crew did it take to achieve Paraphernalia?

You can see the film crew in the photo above, post production wise there was myself, the editor, two producers, 1 animator, 2 guys in Portugal doing the lighting and rendering. 2 guys helping do the robot graphics and rotoscoping and the musician I usually work with. Nearly everyone worked for free or at least very low fees so much was squeezed in between other jobs.

We see that you have directed a number of music videos. Was making Paraphernalia any different than that process?

Paraphernalia was a good shoot to be on. We had enough time (which is never the case when shooting music video's) and we shot the interior stuff actually at Elijah's home and his mum who is an awesome cook, did the food for us. Also with the shooting style I didn't want to go too stylized like with music video's, I needed it to feel more real and natural so the lighting set-ups were a lot simpler.

Why do you want to tell visual stories?

I guess one of the reasons I was so drawn to visual storytelling is that I wasn't that sharp at school and soon found I got a better response from stuff I made than class work.

I started out in my parents garage making stop-motion super 8mm films when I was eleven and I was hooked from there. All through school and college I was making little films and animations so when I got to university I was able to do what I love doing full time. I made a load of films at Uni and got as many as I could into film festivals. At one of those festivals (Edinburgh International Film Festival 1999) I met director Tim Hope. We got on well and a year later after I graduated he invited me to come help make a music video for a new British band I had never heard of called Coldplay. We made the 'Don't Panic' video which went down well and the band asked us to make another video. Tim was making a Play Station commercial at the time so I was asked to write some ideas and a treatment for the 'Trouble' music video. The promo went down really well and we got a lot of other work (more music videos and commercials) off the back of it. I also started developing some of my own stories as well as co-directing with another friend (David Lea) and we made a few music videos and short films together.

What has influenced you most, as a filmmaker?

Music is probably the biggest influence for my work. When I find a piece of music that moves or motivates me then I start trying to find the story that supports it. Also the first movie I ever saw was E.T. I think that says a lot about my influences.

What are your plans for the future?

I now have several bigger projects in various development stages. The stories I love to tell are often drama in disguise. I have some big film dreams but I also know I need to take care of my family so my plan is to get the healthiest balance.

What are you currently working on?

Despite having a number or projects in development things have been a bit quiet this year so I'm currently looking for new opportunities. Finally, my site is where you can see just a few of my completed projects as well as two that are yet to be created: www.cargocollective.com/abstractjohn

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

No surprise when the trespass alert flashed in my little hermetic frost-box in the Embarcadero station. I only ever go out on one kind of call. I handle every non-violent detail involving a pre-ev in San Francisco. There are only 653 of us, untouched by that special evolution, who are left in San Fran, and in a sense I am caretaker to every one.

The details overtook my screen, but I was already getting my gear, moving as fast as my age and weight would allow. My office is tiny, but it's only ever me in here, bored, waiting. The other officers in the department don't need or want--or even have the ability--to breathe the cooled, oxygenated, carefully doctored air.

I exited through my office airlock, a familiar and welcome urgency having taken hold. My mask was on but not quite fitted, and I was still slathering fresh cloaking-salve on my hands, cheeks and forehead. So I was hurrying and fumbling, and I'm hardly spry anymore; I collided with a Newt in the corridor outside my office.

My hands touched the Newt's flesh—slick, cool, textured. Like brushing a snake just emerged from an autumn lake. At least these beings are humanoid in shape. Normally I don't make physical contact with them, and if I do, I control my reaction. But I was already thinking past this moment, to the trespass call, and I recoiled. I probably grimaced too, but the mask thankfully hid it.

"Sorry."

I wasn't even outside the station and the air was already laboring my lungs, forcing a rapid pulse in my veins.

"It's okay, Lubrano. You on a call? You want somebody to drive you?"

The Newt, a fellow officer named Sussman, stood there offering his help in a way that didn't allow me to just dismiss him. He was quite unlike me, and not just in age and weight. He was...other. is skin was differently pigmented, a kind of feverish greenish purple. There were also changes to the limbs, which jointed peculiarly. The torso was oddly proportioned, accommodating as it did the wholly remade bellows of the lungs, not to mention the slew of rejiggered organs which handled the new blood.

And the head--the shape of the skull, the face...

Yet his eyes looked unnervingly human. My "human. Pre-ev human.

I said, "Sure. Let's go."

Outside, surrounded by the workaday buzz of the city, the odor and pressure of the air immediately increased. Even through the elaborate filters clinging to my doughy face like a colony of black plastic lampreys, I tasted detergent and copper shavings. The temperature was crushing, a soupy heaviness that made me think about every stride I was taking across the parking lot.

Sussmann was younger, and not a pre-ev. Newts like him had been designed for such an atmosphere. This was of course his natural environment. I dumped myself into the passenger seat while he activated the car, his every movement focused and energetic. There was something regulation about everything he did. Hell, he even put his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. His appearance had that same disciplined quality as his actions—uniform scrupulously tidy, brass badge gleaming. It felt like a mockery of my own rather slovenly appearance.

"Ready?" he asked, tone courteous, even defferential.

It was hard not to take his politeness as distant contempt. "Just go—" I bit back the last word, the direct address part, realizing I'd almost called him "Newt" to his face. Strange, though, that the expression "pre-ev" with its vaguely derogatory overtones is fair game. Annoyed, I repeated firmly, "Just go, Sussman."

The first forced-evolution generation were dubbed New Terrans by the gene wizards who created them. That was where Newt comes from; and turning that to Lizard was inevitable and maybe just a bit childish on our part. Especially since, structurally, they look more like humans than reptiles. But like human isn't human.

Sussmann drove us out of the lot, toward the foot of Market Street, and turned left at the seawall. Like a circulatory system, the city was in motion around us, its inhabitants on foot and in vehicles moving freely through an environment that perfectly suited them.

Sussman glanced over with a respectful nod.

I was old, and he was new. He was what I and the other 653 pre-evs in San Francisco had chosen not to become. That used to fill me with pride; right now I just felt left behind.

He smiled at me. I looked away. The mountain-like range of the old Financial District's buildings loomed on our left against the iridescently bilious sky.

"I've always wanted to go on one of these." Sussman sat forward, craning his neck for a better view, as if he could make their destination appear sooner. Somehow his excitement felt belittling. This call meant trouble for a pre-ev, for one of my 653.

I blinked behind the tight lenses that sealed in my eyes. My eyelashes brushed the plastic. "How's that?"

He cut around the street closures without consulting the vehicle's grid. "A call like this," he said. "One of yours."

He spoke with absolute normalcy, colloquial speech, no strange modulations--a perfectly ordinary pre-ev voice coming out of that strange living shape.

I was only getting the usual shallow sips of air that the filters could provide, which added a little constrictive panic to every intake. The heat was baking me in my clothes. "Listen, Sussmann--"

He looked over long enough to flash me a grin. Like the eyes, the lips were normal, and the grin seemed dismayingly human. "Lubrano. Hey, don't worry. I don't think I'm suddenly your partner. You've got a helluva lot of seniority on me, for one thing." He snapped out a bright little laugh. "It's just that, well... your work fascinates me, if you want to know the truth."

My jaw tightened. Suddenly all my smoldering anger felt justified. "Because I deal with pre-evs?" I couldn't say "Newt," but I did my best to turn the other term into a slur—since that was what the word felt like to me sometimes.

Sussman's eager-beaver grin vanished. Even more gratifying, he stared intently at the road ahead. I wondered if he was blushing or doing whatever his kind did.

I sank back in the unit's passenger seat and watched the half-decayed, half-rebuilt street scape unfold ahead of us.

We arrived, and I saw it. Stretching across the Bay where it connected to the gelatinous Pacific, a great creaking monster, a remnant, eaten away by the excoriating wind: the bridge.

I left Sussmann in the cruiser behind the row of empty weather-stripped toll booths on the bridge, stepped through one of the gaps in the chain-link fence, and walked out onto the span.

The wind churned, pulling swaths of toxic cotton candy across the sky. Steel groaned. Cables had snapped over the years, and those left twanged in the gusts. Patches of kaleidoscopic fungal-glowing weeds had taken root, and the deserted roadbed shifted under my feet. The concrete was turning to powder. Ahead, the two towers of the Golden Gate soared, both rusted monoliths.

I couldn't move with speed, and every step brought new pain... I labored along, uncomfortably aware that my age and deteriorating physique would have had me huffing and sweating even if the environment still suited a pre-ev. I stared at my hands, worried that the brutal sunlight was causing the cloaking-salve to bubble on my knuckles. My eyes stung. I swallowed and grimaced, an ugly aftertaste in my mouth.

The woman leaned on a guardrail in the middle of the bridge. I paused, stared at her, then looked back down, focusing on my footing. There were holes big enough for me to fall through.

She was masked, of course, and wore a long gray coat. She stood near the westward rail, up on what was the pedestrian walkway when the bridge still operated. No one ever looks out at the sea on occasions like this; they all face toward the Bay and the city. It's always been that way.

She was watching me like she'd been expecting me--waiting on me, even. There were two categories jumpers fell into. But everyone who does something like this thinks they've got a unique reason. They don't.

I halted, holding out my badge. Unlike Sussman, I don't wear a uniform.

Her eyes narrowed behind her mask's lenses. Creases stretched toward her temples.

"Look at you." She gestured toward me, voice even, tight, carrying over the wind and the groaning metal of the structure.

"Look at me." I smiled, but she would only see it in my eyes. I didn't talk in that androidic cop-speak, like the Newt. I just spoke to people these days.

"You're not a fucking Lizard."

"No, I'm not." Now I knew which of those groups she belonged to. The other one was the ruers, those who lamented the past sins against the biosphere, reliving each poisoned detail of humankind's destruction of its habitat. Those ones are a real drag. This woman was angry. That gave her a little juice.

She lifted a knobby chin, half-hidden by the dangling filters. Her posture was regal. Then her gaze went past me, intent, and I glanced, wondering if she was playing a game. She wasn't. Suddenly Sussman wasn't in the back of my mind anymore. He was literally behind me, hanging back several dozen yards but close enough that the woman could see who—and what—he was.

"I told him to stay in the car," I said, letting irritation into my voice, holding back a deeper anger. I didn't need his interference. But maybe more than that, I felt that I and this woman deserved a kind of species-exclusive privacy. No Newts invited.

I turned back to her, afraid that his presence would tip whatever balance this perilous situation held.

She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. "I didn't know there were any human cops left."

I put away the badge "Just me."

"Just you." She offered a nod that suggested a bow, which added to her regal bearing. The railing had fallen away where she was standing. She was two strides from the drop.

"That must be fun. Cheek to jowl--or whatever--with the Lizards all day." A tiny shudder moved her shoulders.

"I can take it or leave it."

"You were sent because I'm a human." Her tone suggested scorn, contempt.

"I handle these types of calls."

"These types...?" she said, like I'd affronted her.

"Any nonviolent incidents that involve pre-evs." I didn't make it any kind of apology.

Having her angry was better than despondent. I maintained my outward calm, almost a casualness, but of course I was heavily invested in this. A wiry desperateness quivered in me, making me want to flex my hands repeatedly. I held back, aware of Sussman's scrutiny.

The gusts caught the tails of her coat every few seconds. Beyond the drop-off the Bay swirled sluggishly with recombined algal forms, virtually a brand new primordial ooze out of which Christ knew what was going to eventually emerge. But it was still effectively water, and hitting it from this height would have the time-honored effect.

"How about telling me your name?" I shrugged, to make the question casual.

"Shouldn't you be telling me yours?"

"You want to know?" Every extra sentence I could get out of her was good.

"I'm Johanna. Johanna Hibbs. You'll need that for your report or whatever."

"There doesn't have to be a report. Nothing drastic at least. Trespassing. Big deal. Not even a fine." I didn't point out that this was a lot of hassle on my part for "no big deal." She knew that. I leaned a little forward, like I might take an accidental step her way, but her eyes lit up behind the lenses and I stayed put.

"None of this should be fenced off anyway." She gestured, her arm long and sweeping, taking in the whole span. Her gesture and eyes stopped over my shoulder.

For a few seconds my awareness had slipped. Now I turned, not just to glance. I glared at Lizard boy, still back there. I'd have to shout an order, and didn't want to raise my voice. It was okay if she was angry, but I needed to project calm. Still, I made a sharp wave. Sussman didn't move. Maybe he thought he was doing something essential, backing me up.

"You can't make him go away," she said. I heard the deeper meaning in her statement.

I needed to get her off the topic.

"The bridge isn't safe."

"Safe? What actually is?" She didn't gesture this time, just looked out over the city. Nothing was safe in this world, not for a pre-ev.

She turned back. "This Bridge. My great-grandfather worked on it. The fucking Lizards should be restoring it, like they're rebuilding everything else." This last sentence she aimed past me, addressing Sussman, who was probably too far off to hear it.

The Newts wouldn't repair the bridge, I knew. They would take it down and put up something new, made of the resistant alloys and other materials compatible with the current environment. I glanced north, at the bleached burnt hills of Marin. They would reconnect the Bay Area. And, eventually-the whole world.

That thought, the idea of a general rebuilding, softened something in me. It didn't cancel my anger—justified or not-toward all the Newts, but at least I wasn't so annoyed anymore at Sussman's presence at the scene.

"You still haven't told me your name," she said.

"It's Ziggy Lubrano."

"Are you widowed?" She lowered her head, but it wasn't a regal bow this time. Now she just looked too tired to hold her head up.

"Everybody's widowed. Everybody's lost somebody, lots of somebodies." I didn't waste time wondering who hers were and wasn't about to start talking about my own. With 653 pre-evs left in the city there were no biographies free of tragedy.

"I wish you could take that mask off. I bet you're handsome." She had moved nearer to the rail-less edge, somehow without seeming to have taken a step in that direction.

I laughed. "I'm not. I'm a fat old man. But I can take you to my office and show you what I look like. I've got great air there. I also have a bottle of whiskey. None of that chlorophyll-mash stuff either. Honest to Jesus whiskey." I had no such bottle, but we could cross that bridge when we got to it. So to speak.

She drew herself up to her full imperial height. Her long hair trailed out behind her like the train on a gown of state. I would have liked to have seen her face too, right at that moment.

"The Lizards can have it all! Goddamn them..." She said the first part of that to Sussman, and made it loud and furious. The last bit was for me, because I would understand it. She spoke those words softly.

Our conversation had ended.

She turned, and she moved. She glared at me, at Sussman, and then at neither of us.

I lurched forward, reached the edge in time to see the green thick foamy splash.

I stood. I had the image of her. It was almost palpable. I felt I could reach out, caress her face, and that face wore no mask. It was a pre-ev face, a human—as I still understood the word—face. My anger came back. But it was mostly directed at myself. I thought about the bridge, like I was grabbing desperate hold of it as an idea. The bridge was a monument to the effort of the pre-evs of long ago, of humanity, when the sky and sea were blue, and sunshine wasn't the enemy of human flesh. Or, perhaps it was just an expanse of steel and concrete, a stretch of junked metal, an artifact of no lasting value.

I was too old to still be doing this, but retirement would have taken away my only, my final function. Who else would make the effort? Johanna Hibbs had been expecting a Lizard in a police uniform, and she would have only said a variation on her last words, then jumped anyway. I had given her the chance for a closing dialogue, a final instance of human to human contact.

My eyes hurt. My lungs were throbbing. I had a long walk back to the car, and I started in on it, ignoring Sussman as I passed him. He followed a moment later. I'll give him credit; he didn't try to talk to me.

I took the passenger seat, logged on to the unit's dashboard. Johanna Hibbs lived at the North Beach Habitat.

When Sussman got in, I said in a cold commanding voice, "We're stopping at North Beach on the way back to the Embarcadero. I know the director there."

Johanna wouldn't have family, but there would be people who deserved to hear the news in person.

Her picture on the screen was as uncomplimentary as ID photos always have been.

Carcinogens, mutagens, industrial contaminants, hydrogen cyanide, clapped-out ozone, CO2 overkill, methane. I hadn't lied to Johanna. Everyone was widowed. The masks and filters and scrubbers and air-locked habitats do so much-just so much.

"I'm sorry you couldn't talk her out of it." Sussman had been sitting silently. Now he looked at me with a strange light in those human eyes.

I let out a breath that rattled around inside my mask. "Yeah, well. It's hard to give them a reason not to." I glanced out at the derelict toll plaza, at the photonegative sky, at the air so dense I could actually see it moving past the vehicle.

"Did you help her, Lubrano?"

Johanna Hibbs' image was still on the screen. With fingers shiny with cloaking-salve I shut off the dashboard with a sharp snap.

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" He had seen what had happened.

"I mean," he said with a gentle, placating movement of his hand, "did you...help her?"

He cared. I saw it on his face, even as alien as its configurations were to me. It was, I realized, an empathetic light in his eyes. I was speechless.

But the Newt had asked his question.

Quietly I said, "It was a better death than it would've been otherwise. Yeah, I guess I helped."

"I'm glad."

He reached out and turned the dash back on. "She jumped from about here, wouldn't you say?" he asked, just as sensitively, indicating the map he'd called up.

"Yes."

"Perhaps we can recover her body."

I looked at the map, nonplussed. "How? The department doesn't have any boats."

"I'll contact the trawlers. They know the currents. They might know where to look. Before she washes up."

I looked over at him, levelly now. Johanna hated them. Of course she did. It was easy to, for us. They were a constant shock to our cultural system. The world had changed drastically, terribly. That was one thing. But to see ourselves, our species being altered...

Sussmann made a fast series of direct radio calls. Afterward, he went to start the car, but I held up a hand. This silence belonged to me, and it was a while before I said, "Running into you outside my office today — that was no coincidence, was it?"

He looked away. Again I wondered if he was blushing. "No."

"You really are curious about my kind." I could have given that statement an ugly accusatory edge, but I didn't.

"Yes. But it's more than that. I...respect your seniority."

This wasn't just a young officer, I realized. Sussman was a rookie, eager but unsure, looking for any way to become a better cop. That was admirable.

He finally activated the unit's electric motor. "So, North Beach Habitat."

"Right." I reached for my seat belt.

"After," Sussmann said, "after work, I mean--you want to go get a drink? Someplace you'd like to go, I mean. I can be the one to wear the mask, is what I'm saying."

He wasn't looking at me; instead, staring fixedly ahead as the cruiser idled. One thumb tapped the steering wheel nervously.

"Let's go finish up this job first."

© 2013 Eric Del Carlo

Eric Del Carlo's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Redstone Science Fiction, Shimmer and many other venues. He has authored a number of novels, including the Wartorn fantasy series with Robert Asprin. Most recently, White Cat Publishing has accepted a heartfelt urban fantasy novel which he co-wrote with his father, Vic Del Carlo. It is entitled The Golden Gate Is Empty. For more information or contact check out ericdelcarlo.com or find the author's Facebook page.

How did you come up with "The Air That I Breath." What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?

First I have to admit to the genesis of the title, which I lifted from the classic song by The Hollies. I was this close to calling it "All I Need Is the Air That I Breathe" but thankfully caught myself. Environmental degradation, which figures heavily into this story, is a go-to theme for me. Like many others, I believe we, as inhabitants of this planet, are at or past the tipping point when our biosphere is going to strike back at us. I got chased out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which when placed in historical context will probably be viewed as the beginning of Earth's violent climate change. For this story I simply took a basic premise and gave it a twist: what if we didn't try to alter or save our environment, but were instead forced to change ourselves as a species simply to survive. Everything followed from there. I saw that the best way to give that premise its richest poignancy was to tell the tale from the viewpoint of the last generation of unaltered humans. So I conjured up the only human cop in a ravaged San Francisco and sent him off into the story. By then the story was moving under its own power.

The themes in the story are quite bold. How did you handle the perceived sense of the other, and do you feel that Sussman and Lubrano can find some way to empathize more strongly in the future?

Again this was a matter of turning the familiar on its head, something that is maybe more common in fantasy literature than SF. Humans in this world would be the grotesque ones. They would seem clumsy and vulnerable, and worst of all, they would bear the blame of what had been done to the planet. The new altered generation of humans, referred to in the story as "Newts" (that's a simplification of "New Terrans," which I honestly didn't come up with until after I'd coined the term Newt; also the beings look reptilian), seem to regard the original humans not so much as monsters, but as anomalies, ones that will soon die out. They're more pitied and ignored than hated. The "pre-ev" human cop Lubrano certainly seems more horrified by the Newt rookie officer Sussman than vice versa. I think age also figures into that: the young being more open and receptive, the older closed off and embittered. That added to the tension between the two characters. Yet Lubrano grudgingly comes around to some sort of accord with Sussman by the story's end. Will that seriously change anything? Probably not. The pre-evs are, after all, doomed. But it provides a warm, genuinely human moment between the two characters. I always write for an emotional effect. I like to tell the big story from a small intimate viewpoint. Lubrano and Sussman's interspecies interactions gave me that opportunity.

As well as your own novels, you also co-wrote a few book with Robert Asprin, could you tell us a little about that experience?

Bob was my neighbor in the French Quarter of New Orleans where I lived for a number of years. There is, simply, no other place like it in this world. It's intimate, chaotic, alcoholic, reckless, dangerous, joyous. Asprin was a very easy-going guy, never one to use his status as a pretty darn famous author for any untoward social advantage. I hadn't read his celebrated Myth or Phule books, but after my wife had introduced us, he loaned me copies of his work. He also started slipping me mystery novels. He knew I was an aspiring writer myself, with lots of small press short fiction sales under my belt but no breakout work. I realized he was grooming me with those loaner books to be his co-author on a French Quarter-set mystery novel he'd wanted to write for years. Before we got to that, though, he brought me in on a sword-and-sorcery series for Ace Books. At this stage in his life he was having tax issues and other troubles, and most of the fun seemed to have gone out of writing for him. I, however, was--and still am--brimming with boundless excitement for the written word. Eventually we put together the novel NO Quarter (that "NO" stands for New Orleans) which was published by DarkStar Books. When Bob died, I was living out here in California and he was getting ready to attend a convention, apparently back in the swing of being a writer again, and, hopefully, enjoying himself. He is much missed.

Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?

I asked myself that recently and was a little horrified to realize I don't know why I write. I recognize what started my interest, which was that my father wanted to be a professional writer and produced some very good work but was saddled with the responsibilities of family and job. He communicated that enthusiasm to me. But I don't know why I find the acclaim of strangers so satisfying, or why putting words together is so damn fulfilling. Mostly, I don't care why. I'm just glad that I have this drive and this purpose.

What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more Eric Del Carlo?

Right now I am doing some short story work, which was my first love in this business. It's hard to justify the effort/payoff of short fiction, but I again don't much care. I love creating something small from scratch, running it to its end, then discarding it. It's why I found The Twilight Zone more inspiring than Star Trek as a kid. The Zone began again each week, nothing to build on, you're right back at creative Pass Go. I also just got the contract for a novel my father and I wrote together, which will remain one of the treasured experiences of my life. The book, a heartfelt urban fantasy, is titled The Golden Gate Is Empty, and White Cat Publishing will be putting it out. Anybody can contact me through my website at ericdelcarlo.com or find my author's page on Facebook. I love to hear from readers. My site also has links to much of my published work.

"The traitors look like us, but they are not us."

Huntmaster Richter need not remind his men of this fact, but he does, stoking their lust to kill. Before they shoot, though, they look at me. Since my sixteenth birthday three months ago, I've been a Seer and therefore a Seer of the Hunt. Why should these older, harder men seek my guidance on anything, especially Richter? He's forty years older and, I believe, has no faith in the wisdom of the Seers. The only vision he trusts is what he finds in his gun scope.

Yet even he awaits my nod.

I look down into the desert valley, into another once-fertile place blasted into a wasteland by the weapons of the Drossan. That fierce alien race is a stubborn shadow in my mind. I cannot say, however, I ever saw one. It is impossible to think that I never did. We all did. The invasion happened in my lifetime. I think my memory problem must be part of being a Seer. I'm supposed to see the future, not dwell on images of the past.

But how can I stare at the five unsuspecting traitors we're about to kill and not see the past? We overthrew the Drossan at a terrible cost. The traitors are people who sided with the aliens when they seemed unbeatable. In our victory, we exiled these false brothers and sisters by the thousands, forcing them to live in this hell without technology, without hope. They were supposed to die of starvation or disease. But the traitors survive, somehow. So our hunting parties go forth each day to accomplish what the environment has not.

"Seer of the Hunt, do you foresee good shooting?" asks Richter.

I make sure they all see me close my eyes. It helps them believe I'm looking into the future.

"Fire," I say.

The traitors die seconds later. A dozen bloody screams echo through the valley, chasing after the noise of the gunfire.

One of the hunters smiles at me with supreme confidence. "Once again, the Seer of the Hunt's vision has come true!"

"Only through your efforts," I say.

My compliment verges on careless blasphemy. A Seer's prophecy is held to be absolute and pre-destined. The notion that my supposed vision required their skill, even when it obviously did—well, my father has a word for it. Treacherous.

We return to Almindor, my city, first among the Twelve Great Cities, and halt in front of the temple. The hunting parties always begin and end outside of the temple, and I'm certain our party is the last one back. After receiving the men's thanks again, I take my leave and head up the temple steps, knowing the rest of my order will already have gathered inside. I pause at the temple door. I sense Richter staring at my back and turn. It's true. My pivot startles him into hurrying away. I don't know what his stare meant. I'm just thrilled my premonition was true.

Perhaps I am not a fraud after all.

But after an hour in the temple, gathered in a circle of Seers led by my father, doubt returns. Of the thirty Seers of Almindor, I am the youngest by a great many years. My father is the oldest. After reporting on the success of our morning hunts, we join hands and stare into a fire while making a chanting sound. I'm sure I don't chant right. There's an art to it that seems to elude me. I'm positive, however, that I don't chant like my father. Everything he does is perfect and natural.

"Seer Edmonds," my father says, "what do you foresee?"

Seer Edmonds is about forty, with long, braided blond hair. Just the tips of each braid are gray, as if touched by frost.

"Flowers will bloom in the desert."

"I see that too," says Seer Rossard. "More, I see a clear blue sky and clear rain. I have been seeing clear, clean rain for many weeks now. It falls on the ground without making mud and brings forth green sprouts."

We bless this vision of renewal, which is exactly what every other Seer reports. Flowers in the desert. Blooms in the wastelands. The death of all traitors. The Twelve Cities becoming Thirteen, and Fourteen, and Fifteen.

There were thousands of cities before the Drossan.

"I see peace for our world," says Seer Moriant.

"I see one thousand years of prosperity."

My father says this. Were he not the head of Almindor's Seers, I would not believe his prediction. He sounds like the others, so very earnest, so very right. The weight of my inability grows..

Now it is my turn. I've needed time to piece together a phony prophecy by stealing elements from the last twenty-nine.

Father looks at me. His expression is inscrutable, but I believe he feels as nervous as I. It was he who brought me into the temple, certain of my gifts. I cannot fail him. "Seer Thomas, what do you see?"

"Birds in the trees, and rain," I say. "Very clear and cleansing rain. And the sky—it is blue. And—"

No, please don't happen now.

Until two months ago, I have never had even a single vision. Then I got my first. It happened at night, when I was almost asleep. I woke in the dark terrified and drained by the experience. Since then the images have come more frequently, each one reaching greater heights of terror. But until now, they've still only happened at night.

I break the circle and clutch my head. I can't even speak. I see death and destruction. I see a man setting another man on fire. A woman slits a man's throat. Another woman then shoots her point blank in the head. It is a war, a very personal and intimate war, with no shadow of the great ships of the Drossan. I see the strong beat the weak. I see the weak take up weapons. The sky darkens and the world grows cold. Bombs fall. Brown and coarse sand replaces rich, silt soil.

"Seer Thomas?" my father says.

"I—I am sorry," I say, attempting to recover and reaching my hands out to rejoin the circle. "I see . . . overwhelming beauty. I praise the certain future!"

After a lingering moment of silence, my father smiles at this, our mantra, and repeats it. At once all of the Seers do, too.

I smile as best I can because I must. It is awful to have lips that can lie without speaking.

When our session adjourns, Father and I go home together in silence. The aroma of supper invites us in and we sit at the table. Father and I avoid eye contact as mother compliments us and serves us.

"You should have heard Thomas talk of his vision, Meriel. It was beautiful."

Mother smiles at me as she sits. "I knew you had the gift, just like your father."

The two of them start talking and eating, absorbed by each other's company. I do the most desperate thing: I hunch forward in my chair and put my head in my hands. I hold this pose, expecting them to notice me. I'm right next to them. Surely father will become concerned and question me. How else will I ever find the courage to tell him I am a fraud? Or am I worse than a fraud? Am I a defective Seer?

There's a moment's lull in their interaction that frightens me into straightening up and eating. What would happen if my father did find me out? It would surely disappoint him to learn I didn't have the gifts everyone assumed he'd passed on to me. But his duties as Chief Seer of Almindor came before his responsibilities as a father. Were my deception discovered, he'd have to declare me a heretic and impose the necessary sentence.

So I must keep lying.

Father and I go off together to the temple and part ways to join our hunting parties. Once more Huntmaster Richter waits for me, this time with a new troop of men. He and I are the only constants, as every citizen of Almidor must eventually partake in the hunt as part of their civic duty. There is no apprehension on their faces. They look overeager and straining, birds of prey chained to a branch while the wind gusts at their backs.

"Remember, men," Richter says. "The traitors look like us—"

"But they are not us!" The men shout back.

Richter trains his gun at the sky and peers at a cloud through the scope. He is ready to make it bleed rain. "Show us the path, Seer of the Hunt."

The rest of the party stares at me and I would do almost anything to live up to their expressions of awe and faith. If only Seers could be mascots, simple good luck charms along for the ride. I'm never more fearful than when I'm consulted for guidance.

I close my eyes. All at once, a scene of destruction appears out of the darkness: a woman is driven up against a wall and choked. I gasp, opening my eyes. The vision vanishes.

"Seer?"

I just point and the men cheer. Richter sets his jaw as the party runs toward their vehicles. The chains are loosened from about their talons at last.

I take the passenger seat next to Richter in his personal transport and we race away. Beyond Almindor's gates, the terrain transforms with alarming speed into hateful desert. I still do not see how the traitors have survived, have thrived out here without shelter, without food or water. I rub my forehead.

"Are you sure of this direction, Seer?"

Almost indignant, I set my jaw and stare at him. His undisguised sarcasm is an offense that could earn even him a penalty.

"Very," I say, trying to be calm. But one-word responses are terse by nature. I can't help but sound furious.

Why be mad at him? He's an imposing and competent man shackled to the whims of a sixteen-year old fraud. I have no doubt about Richter's vision. He sees through me.

"How long will this go on, Richter?"

"Will what go on?"

"The killings. The hunting parties."

"As a Seer, you are surely more qualified than I to know."

"But how many traitors are there?"

"Tens of thousands."

"That many people sided with the Drossan?"

He shifts in his seat and moves his neck side to side until it cracks. "They must have."

"But don't you know?"

"I know only my duty." For once, Richter sounds distant. Doubtful.

"Didn't they trust the Seers and their vision of victory?"

"They were always faithless worms, even before the invasion," Richter says, confidence returning to his tone. "They look like us, but they are not us."

Soon afterwards he stops our convoy without consulting me. We get out and he gathers the men and has them fan out along a ridge to scan the desert floor for tracks. This can take hours, but we luck out with a quick find—a group of five traitors huddled under the shade of a great red rock. The men get on their bellies and cozy up with their guns. Richter turns to me.

"Seer of the Hunt, do you foresee good shooting?"

What would happen if I said no? What would he do? I picture him looking confused. I imagine him feeling impotent and worthless. Yes.

"No," I say.

The order to fire is already forming on Richter's lips before his brain processes what I've said. His expression satisfies me more than I imagined. The men are looking at me in wonder and fear.

"What did you say, Seer of the Hunt?"

"No."

The men start to rise. Richter slashes the air with his right hand and orders them to retarget the traitors. Then he stares down into the valley. "Surely the Seer of the Hunt is mis . . . guided in this prophecy. Do try again."

What am I doing? I feel like I've started a game with no rules. I close my eyes, preparing to take the exit Richter is giving me.

Just before I say, "Yes," more hallucinations hit me. I become what I see. A man throws a woman to the ground. I land on my right arm and stare up at him. For a moment, I see Richter. Then I see—it is my father! He looks different—not older, as he should in a vision of the future, but younger. How can this be? In the next instant I'm jarred again and see my father and the woman from the side. I strain to see her. Who is she?

The vision will not bend itself to let me see her face.

Gunshots.

It takes a moment to realize they're not happening in my vision. "Richter!" I say, believing he has ordered his men to fire. Then a heavy weight blankets me. Hands shove my face into the grit.

The hunting party seems to cry out in a single voice. "Seer! Seer! Help us!"

My desperate thrashing earns a low, mocking laugh from whoever holds me. Many voices call out, their words punctuated by more shots. Bullets make effective periods. Terrifying silence ensues. I focus on the hands that clutch me, the sear of the sand against my cheek, and the chaos in my heart—the only heart, it seems, in the entire universe. Somehow its pounding will travel along the ground and back to Almindor to warn my father. Then I remember the look on his younger face: Hateful, angry, and murderous as he stood over that woman.

Did he kill her?

Sobbing, I'm pulled to my feet. We've been ambushed. Had I been a true Seer, I would have known about it. I have driven my hunting party to its doom. Traitors encircle me, hundreds of them. After blinking out the tears, I see there really are no more than thirty. For a mad instant I can almost believe I'm back in the temple. But their number includes women. This shocks me. It would be like having my mother in a hunting party. Barbarians!

The sight of sprawled bodies and the clumping red sand all around muzzle me from yelling my contempt.

A man about the age of my father steps forward. Like the other traitors, his face is rough, punished by weather, his sparse hair gray, his scalp burned like the skin of his arms. The group backs away in deference.

"You're a Seer?"

I nod.

He smiles. "Well, young prophet, are you surprised to not have seen all of this coming?"

My face must redden to the color of his sunburn. The traitors, however, do not seize the moment to laugh at my humiliation. The man himself gives little more than a faint, almost apologetic smile.

"But I did see it!"

His smile becomes more noticeable. "Poor deluded fool. But remember," he says, turning to address his companions, "it is not his fault."

"It is not his fault," the traitors say in unison.

He commands them with a hand wave. In an instant I'm blinded with a hood. Someone slaps my face when I cry out, shocking me back to silence. Then I'm forced to march with them, my arms gripped by men far stronger than me. I hear engines gunning. Has help arrived? No, it is just the traitors taking what they've captured, the vehicles, the guns and myself—all of equal worth.

What do they want? Ransom? There's a darker possibility. Knowing I'm a Seer, the traitors must be rubbing their hands at the thought of using me to see the future. Maybe they'll torture a vision out of me. What will happen when what I tell them turns out to be a worthless lie?

Maybe they'll just kill me.

My legs lock up and I pitch forward. My captors drag me. It becomes harder to breathe through the hood. The imposed darkness explodes into fragments of images, halting scenes of violence and violations. I am looking at a grainy sequence where my father sits at a table, screaming at a man sitting beside him. My father pounds his fist. The world is falling apart. Five columns of fire rise on the horizon. Cities I've never seen before, cities far greater than Almindor, disintegrate. It must be the Drossan! Their attack is starting. People like my father, people who fought the aliens from the start, must have already seen the traitors among them. The woman he threw to the ground must have been a traitor. The man my father argues with at the table must be begging us to accept surrender.

I see armies of men marching through the streets. I see riots. Where are the aliens? When will they come?

My shaking becomes too much and I slip from my captors' hands. I fall forward, screaming. I curse the traitors for what they did. I weep out the details of what I've seen, my terror spewing into words. Then the hood is stripped off my face and the older man bends down, our noses almost touching, and cups my face.

"Tell me everything."

The carnage in my head has too keen an edge for the dull words I give them. It is as if I want a bland description to somehow strip the images of their potency—of their reality. I hear my voice as if spoken by another. It's a matter-of-fact voice, a voice that hoards syllables. "War. Father. Hate. Kill." I see a war I cannot comprehend and I see my father with a look of sheer hate on his face. People are killing each other in the streets.

"Astonishing," the older man says, backing away. He has me raised to my feet.

We are in a bunker of some sort. The ground is concrete rather than sand, though I never noticed the change. It is a squalid place but it is shelter. Despite myself, I feel relief for my captors. It is impossible to look at their sunburns and not be glad for shade.

He waves the traitors away, and we are alone.

"Your visions, boy—how often do they happen?"

I square my shoulders. "I'm a Seer. I always have—"

His plain, uncompromising stare thwarts my bravado.

"Usually at night," I say.

"They're increasing?"

"Yes."

"When did you first see them?"

"Two months ago."

"And do you also see what the other Seers see—visions of prosperity and peace?"

"How do you know anything about the Seers?"

He smiles. "You might say I used to be one. Anyone with a little foresight and a little honesty can be a seer. Sometimes such attributes get a man exiled to the desert."

I scoff at him. "When were you ever a Seer?"

"Oh, young man, this world once had many Seers. They called themselves pundits, columnists, journalists, sociologists, politicians. Long names, little substance, liars all—"

"My father is no liar! He is the head Seer of Almindor and a great—"

The look of shock on the man's face satisfies me. He fears my father.

"Your father is Michael Odeilik?"

Now the shock is mine. "How do you know my family name?"

"Michael," he says, shaking his head in wonder. He grins and closes his eyes like a Seer. "Then you must be . . .Thomas."

I flinch, reaching back for a wall that isn't there. He steps into the space I occupied.

"The son of Michael Odeilik. This is the greatest stroke of luck."

"What are you going to do to me?"

"Don't be afraid. Your father and I were once very close. Business associates, political leaders—friends. Did you ever hear the name Carl Drossan?"

Just hearing his name gives me a jolt. I hear Drossan and think of the aliens. I hear Carl Drossan and think of something else. Like a key unlocking a door, I sway with the power of a new image. Once more it is my father and another man looking down at me. Both men are younger and so very tall, as if I look up at them from a child's eyes.

"So you recognize my name," he says. "It was your father's last savage kick, making me the villain of his ridiculous mythology."

"Mythology?" My voice is ragged.

He grips my face in both hands again and stares into my eyes. "You and all the people who remain in the cities are programmed creatures. Your minds were conditioned to believe certain things. There are no aliens. There never were. The people of this planet need no outside force to devastate it."

The simple, sad tone of his voice creates a damnable trust, even though I know he's deceiving me.

The close proximity of the man's face, the things he says, my confusions and doubts all combine to spark another vision. It's as if a whole other world reveals itself and I slump to the ground in the man's arms. He eases me down. I moan, ashamed when the tears come, the water for a raft of emotions that are childlike in their terror. It is an orphan's fear, a pitiless and cold distress.

The spires of Almindor look like stripped trees that have rained their leaves and their fruit down like bombs upon the people. The cities are at war with each other. The rioting is intensely personal, collective yet individual in its barbarity. My father shoves a woman onto the ground and begins to beat the man who was hiding behind her. Similar scenes happen everywhere, beyond my capacity to count. The men and women on the streets have purple faces. The clouds in the sky are purple with rain and lightening.

How can all of this come to pass? What will happen to cause such hatred? How far in the future is this?

I tell him what I see.

"Don't be afraid of it, Thomas. This is wonderful."

Appalled by his reaction, I try to push away. I lash out but my fists make glancing contact. "Only a traitor could love what I've seen!"

"Love? That is not the right word at all. Remember is a better choice."

Staring at me with a blunt, unsparing expression, he begins to describe my visions in such detail that I shudder. He might as well be in my head. I look for a place to run again, but this time he's ready and blocks the only exit.

"The people of this world have built and ripped their culture apart in an endless cycle of anger, Thomas. Though our race must be thousands of years old, we have a mere seven hundred years worth of historical records that managed to survive our own barbarism. Our past is replete with civil wars, and the only thing we ever seemed to learn from them was how to wage a better one the next time around."

"I know nothing of this."

His brow furrows. "What do you know of the past?"

I think, but very soon my thoughts blur. There's just a haze when I try to recall anything that happened before the Drossan. I can't even remember reading a schoolbook about it. In fact, I cannot remember ever being interested in who and what we were before the alien invasion.

I look at him in puzzlement and shake my head.

"It's not your fault. You underwent the procedure, just like everyone else who remains in the cities and believe in the Seers."

I flinch at this. "What procedure?"

"A mind wipe, if you will. It was rediscovered technology, you see. We are a far more advanced society today than at other points in our history; but at one point, eras ago, we could do things that were almost godlike. That period was lost to yet another wave of self-destruction. That fact depresses me the most. Even at our greatest, we were subsumed by our lowest instincts. The devices were discovered by an archaeologist. They were originally thought to treat mental disorders. Your father turned it into something quite different."

"My father?"

Carl Drossan sighs. "We were on the verge of another collapse. Even in our known history, factions and partisanship had never been so extreme. With the technology we had developed on our own, this war might have wiped civilization. Your father and a small group of men in positions of power decided to use the rediscovered technology to save us. The plan was implemented in secret, over months, in medical facilities."

He tells me everything. How there was a legendary past when our people lived in extended peace, guided by Seers who foresaw the future and made the decisions necessary to sustain peace. Their word was law, for who could argue with people who knew the future? My father and many others obsessed over the idea of using the technology to make that legend real. People would have the belief put into their heads.

Whether they wanted it or not.

"And the traitors?"

Carl Drossan chuckles. "To your father, a traitor is just anyone who disagrees with him. Yet he is a brilliant man in his own naïve, hypocritical way."

I grit my teeth. "My father isn't a hypocrite."

"You don't think he actually submitted to the procedure himself, do you? Oh, no. He and the Chief Seers of the other cities remember everything as it was. They keep themselves safely in the center of their scheme, trying to convince a civilization of wolves that they are actually sheep. Far from being a traitor, I was nearly his accomplice. Yes, I almost joined them, seduced by the idea of being one of the elect shepherds. But there was a price to pay, a price Michael Odeilik and the others did not find nearly as steep as I did. Families could not be spared. I didn't have children, but I was married. I couldn't sleep, thinking of my wife emptied out and filled with a false religion. That's why I exposed the plan. By that time, though, its implementation was well under way. Only a few thousand from the various cities managed to join us in the wastelands. In revenge, your father made me the godfather of a mythical alien invasion, a little invention of his to justify the world's sad state and explain our presence. And of course the hunting parties weed us out while channeling the native aggressions of the people."

"You expect me to accept this without evidence?"

"Aren't your resurfacing memories proof enough?"

"No."

"You have Michael's stubbornness. Come with me."

He leads me to another room full of strange equipment. All of it looks old and weathered yet also otherworldly.

"What is this? Did the aliens leave these things behind when we beat them?"

For the first time, Carl Drossan looks angry with me. His face flushes red and he catches himself swearing.

"Open your eyes, Thomas, and see. These are artifacts from a past civilization—our own."

I look around again. As I do, Carl Drossan picks up a black helmet and holds it out to me. I freeze, breathless. A new wave of images crowd my mind.

"This is familiar to you?"

I nod, almost sobbing. "Someone is placing it on my head."

"It is probably your father."

"A voice . . . a voice says it will only take a few minutes."

"Perhaps in your case it should have been left on a bit longer. Imagine how happy you would be if the procedure had worked properly. You would be home right now, standing in the temple with all of the other lesser Seers who, like you, were programmed to see and relay visions of goodness and light."

"But I'd be ignorant of the truth!"

Carl Drossan steps closer, still holding the helmet in his hands. "So you do believe what I have told you?"

I look down at my feet. "I thought I was . . . defective."

He laughs. "Unfortunately the only thing defective here is this device. A spy gave his life to get it to me, but it's unfortunately broken." Scowling, he takes the helmet and jams it onto his head. "If only it could operate!"

"Why?"

"I want to know exactly how the procedure works. If only I'd paid better attention when your father was explaining it. If only I'd listened."

"Then you'd know how to defeat it?"

There's a pause as he considers his answer. He sets the helmet down with a rueful smile. "Yes," he says.

There's talk about what to do with me. Some of Carl Drossan's men want to keep me as a hostage. Others say holding a Seer is far too dangerous. I am not allowed to speak. In the end it is Drossan himself who decides my fate. I am to be returned to the place of the ambush. Drossan says he will take me there himself, alone. The many protests against this plan fail to sway him.

We return to where his party attacked us. In the east the distant spires of Almindor shimmer like an illusion. The bodies of the hunting party remain scattered in the sand. Carrion feast on the remains with a lazy, selective hunger. Richter looks no less intimidating without his eyes. Carl Drossan grimaces at the sight of the corpses.

"You're not used to seeing death?" I say.

"Oh, how patronizing you sound. How jaded and mature. I am quite used to death—and quite tired of it. Death has wearied me past your comprehension."

The tone of his voice becomes hollow and the muscles in his face slacken. Something inside of me, some flickering fire of loneliness responds to it like fuel.

"Someone you love died."

His expression of surprise lasts only a moment. Then he smiles. "Perhaps you have more insight than you know, Thomas. The genuine ability to see into another's heart is worth a thousand glimpses into the future. Yes, someone I loved died. My wife—four months ago."

"Was she . . . killed?"

"It was a disease. There wasn't the proper medicine to save her."

He began to shake before he finished speaking, and the last few words are almost lost in the depths of his sorrow. I reach out to him automatically, not knowing what else to do. We are alone with the dead and the memory of the dead, and I wish he hadn't insisted on bringing me here unescorted. He seemed suddenly frail to me, as if he could not possibly survive in the wastelands by himself.

"You should go back," I say. "Every man and woman in Almindor would turn out if they thought a Seer was captured. They'd torture you in their outrage."

He laughs and shakes his head. "I suppose your insight only goes so far. Don't you see that's exactly what I want?"

"Why?"

"With my wife dead, I'm left with little to feel and even less to fight for."

"The truth isn't enough?"

"Not anymore."

"What about all the people back there in the desert who trust you to lead them? You'll be betraying them if you surrender."

"Not surrender. Be captured."

"And you can live with that?"

"But that's just it, Thomas. I won't live with any of this. The memory of the desert and my wife will be gone. The pain will be done."

I back away, stumbling over the body of a hunter. But I don't fall. "You mean you want to go through the procedure now? You want the lie?"

"I'm in such despair without my wife. She kept me going."

I shake my head in disbelief. "You called my father a hypocrite, but you're the hypocrite!"

"We all are in some way."

"And the broken device you have, that cost a man his life. All because you thought you could just put the helmet on your head as soon as you had it."

"But this way is better," he says. "By capturing me, you get to return to Almindor a hero, a Seer beyond anyone's question or doubt."

"Don't act like you're sacrificing yourself for me! What about the people back there in the wasteland? What will happen to them when they discover their leader secretly wanted the delusion all along?"

"They won't. I'll be a martyr. I'm better off to them as a symbol."

"You're a self-serving, deluded old man."

He laughs once again. "No, Thomas. I'm an old man who's lived too long without delusions. I'm ready for their comfort now."

Carl Drossan is right about the effect his capture has on my own reputation. I receive a hero's welcome in every corner of Almindor. My father's pride in me is eclipsed only by his evident thrill at having his former friend and adversary in his power. There is a private trial in the temple in which Carl Drossan is charged with being the primary conspirator with the aliens against our cities. Throughout it all I cannot help but study the faces of the other Seers, wondering how they do not in the slightest question the fact that this traitor and the aliens have the same name. It as if they are not hearing the same words I am. The one word we all agree on, in the end, is the fate we sentence to the man. Death. When it's my turn to speak, I talk directly into the fire and don't look at Drossan's horror-struck face. It never occurred to him that my father would demand his execution. It never occurred to me either until the moment we all had to pronounce his sentence and I was trapped into being an accomplice in his murder.

In the ensuing weeks, I function as best I can, no longer troubled by memories of the dark past. The present is black enough. In the mornings I am still a Seer of the Hunt. In the temple, I continue to lie with even greater skill and imagination. I see a long and glorious sunrise that scorches the land. I see terrific floods of cleansing rain.

In the mirror, I see a coward. Sometimes I stare into my own eyes and relive my part in the trial of Carl Drossan. I keep thinking I'll have the courage to say something different. But I say, "Death" every time.

Then one morning, five months after the trial, a hooded man comes up to me and kneels as I pass near the temple. He grabs my hand and says, "Thank you, Seer, for your visions of prosperity. They give me and my wife so much hope!"

The hood falls back. For a moment his face looks like Carl Drossan's. But it is just some other old man possessed by the illusions Drossan wanted.

The illusions I help spread.

Staring at him, possessed by a meanness I should direct at myself, I say, "Your wife will die of disease."

The shadow of doom blights his face and he clutches my robes. "Please, Seer, please tell me you do not foresee such a tragedy for my beloved!"

Crying, I jerk free of him. "What do you want to be told? That death does not exist? That sadness is a myth?"

"But I have heard the Seers' visions read aloud. The long sunshine—"

I strike him. This single blow uncorks a torrent of violence and disgust within me. I kick and stomp him, wishing it could be Carl Drossan. Wishing, in a greater sense, it could be myself. I deserve no less for my duplicity.

A strong hand grips my arm and spins me. It is my father. He drags me away, off the street and into the otherwise empty temple. He shakes me once, peering in to my eyes. When I grin at him, he slaps my face.

"You sentenced Carl Drossan to die."

"Of course. It is my duty as Chief Seer."

"You made me sentence him to die."

Father nods. "You also did your duty as a Seer."

"But he was once your friend."

We stare at each other. Realization lights my father's eyes.

"Thomas, you can't believe anything Drossan told you. He was a liar."

"He was worse than that. He was a coward. And when I saw that man groveling in the streets to me, I knew I was a coward too. I'm just like Carl."

"You're not a traitor like he was. Drossan sided with the aliens—"

"There were no aliens!"

He pulls back, head turned to the right, almost looking at me askance. "What did you say? I reiterate, anything Drossan told you—"

"He didn't tell me anything I haven't seen for myself. In here." I touch my head.

"You know?" he says, the words barely audible.

"Know. Remember. Call it what you will."

He seems almost breathless as he shakes me by the shoulders. "You have your memories?"

I grin at him, flushed with fear and a savage triumph. "I recall everything. It seems the procedure failed with me, Father."

"How could it have failed? How long have you known?"

"Long enough to realize I want no part in this lie."

"It's not a lie, not if you believe. Thomas, I can correct your problem. I can—"

"What? Inject visions into my head?"

"The same kind of vision that will, through you and the office of the Seers, keep people in a state of hope."

"They don't need a lie!"

"They do," he says, his grip softening. "I used to think like you did. I thought what was needed wasn't some hopeful expectation of the future, but an uncompromising stare at the past. Now I know that all our history shows one thing: that those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

He holds his hand out to me. I just stare at it.

"I know I can't escape you," I say. "But I think if you try to do the procedure on me again, it will still fail. What happens to me if it does? Will you kill me?"

"I'm a hard man," he says, but his voice is soft.

"I'm going to go, Father. Out into the desert with the others. It's where I belong."

"What will you do? Try to overthrow the peace?"

"No. Just live, day to day. Maybe that's the only way to forget the past. Focus on the now."

"What about your mother?"

The question freezes me. At last I say, "Could you . . . make her forget me."

My father smirks. "Hyopcrite."

"I'm my father's son."

I step toward the temple door. My father does not move.

"The hunting parties will continue, Thomas. If I lead one that encounters you . . . do you think I won't fire?"

"I know that you will."

"Then goodbye, Thomas."

I leave him and the temple behind. My pace quickens as I head away from Almindor and into the wastelands. The day is so bright my eyes hurt from seeing.

© 2013 Sean Eads

_Originally from Kentucky, Sean Eads is a writer and librarian living in Denver, CO. His first novel,_ The Survivors _, was published in 2012 by Lethe Press. His writing has either appeared or is slated to appear in a variety of places, including the Journal of Popular Culture, Shock Totem, Stupefying Stories, Pseudopod and the forthcoming anthologies Once Upon an Apocalypse and Shambling Through History. Sean workshops his fiction regularly in a small writer's group led by Nebula Award winner Ed Bryant. When not writing or working, he tries to develop his golf game. You can find him online through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/sean.eads.14._

How did you come up with "The Seer?" What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?

Basically, the central premise just popped into my head one day. "What if there was a guy who was part of a society where everyone had visions of a glorious future, and he had to hide the fact he saw only visions of death and destruction." The hardest part of the process was deciding on the character's age. It felt like he should be a teen dealing with all kinds of insecurities and not wanting to disappoint his father. I'd been reading some classic science fiction stories like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" around the time I wrote "The Seer," and I think some of that story's ideas about 'scape-goat'-ism and a society built on false pretenses influenced my own tale when it came to creating the idea of the "traitors" out in the desert.

The themes of betrayal and control run deep in The Seer. Do you tend to consciously choose the themes of the stories you write, or do they become more apparent in revisions?

It's a bit of both. I think I'm a very formal writer in a lot of ways, one who thinks a lot about theme, symbolism and allusion even while working on a first draft. I have a Master's degree in literature and very early on in my academic career I gravitated toward the technique of "close reading" championed by the New Critics in the early- to mid-20th century, in which one seeks to discover how a work of literature has its own internal cohesiveness and unity. One of the pleasures of rewriting, for me, is to close read my own draft after I've separated myself from it for awhile, and look for the unintentional things that nevertheless seem to be giving meaning to the story--perhaps the accidental and unconscious repetition of an image, for instance. As I discover them, they help me direct or redirect the flow of the story in multiple rewrites. In the case of "The Seer," I had the theme of betrayal from the beginning, and once I decided the narrator was going to be an adolescent I knew I'd filter the theme through a few difficult "father figure" relationships--his real father, the Huntmaster, and the leader of the "traitors."

Your novel, "The Survivors" tells the story of a strange alien 'invasion' whereby the aliens seem to do nothing but ignore folk at first. Would it be fair to describe it as a dark comedy, or the other way around?

I still maintain it is a dark comedy, but the comedic elements dwindle a lot in the novel's second half. Generally, I love absurdism and the original intent was to have a constant mix of absurdist humor and violence to create this "I dare you to laugh" atmosphere. The main character's voice is based a bit on the type of humorous narration David Sedaris uses in his essays. When I got the idea for The Survivors, way back in 2005, I had been re-reading Me Talk Pretty One Day at the same time I learned Spielburg was remaking The War of the Worlds. I instantly wondered how David Sedaris might do as a war correspondent in an alien invasion, and the initial conceit of the novel was born then and there.

Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?

It was either write or try to become a professional golfer. And since my typical golf score is around 110, I figured I had a better chance with a pen. In reality, the urge to write has just always been in my blood as the one thing I've wanted to do in life. It's been my primary focus since I was about 14. Nothing compares to storytelling in terms of personal interest and satisfaction. Though I now think Dead Poet's Society is a pretty bland movie, it played well to me when I was 15. There's a sequence where Robin Wiliams' character quotes the great line from Whitman's "O Me! O Life!" -- "That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." Actually, I believe Whitman went back and forth in his various revisions of that line, sometimes writing "you may contribute" and other times writing the rather more certain "you will contribute." I don't know if I'm "contributing a verse" or not at the moment, but I'm working on it.

What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more Sean Eads?

People looking at my other recent or forthcoming fiction credits are going to think I've got some kind of zombie fetish. I just published a story in Shock Totem called "To 'Bie or Not to 'Bie," which I think attempts something different with the zombie concept. And I'm triple-dipping with an upcoming story called "The Revenge of Oscar Wilde." This is an alternative history tale in which Oscar Wilde finds a new reason to live when he has to battle a zombie outbreak during the 1900 Paris Olympics. "The Revenge of Oscar Wilde" is slated to come out in a TBA issue of Stupefying Stories. In the meanwhile, it was also picked up for an exciting anthology from Prime Books called Shambling Through History, which releases this summer. The story will also appear in Wilde Stories 2014, from Lethe Press--the same good people who published The Survivors. I've got a couple of novel manuscripts floating about to agents and small publishers, and I'm currently rewriting a manuscript that is basically a supernatural sequel to Huckleberry Finn. It occurred to me how much credence the characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn put in the supernatural--witchcraft, divination, bodily possession--and I thought it would be great to revisit their world under the assumption that all of those beliefs were completely accurate. So the novel takes place 10 years after Huck "lit out for the Territories," only to discover the Territories are full of various sinister creatures. Now trained as a warrior, Huck has to protect a little runaway slave boy whose innate magical ability holds the key to ending slavery forever. The novel is completely ridiculous and a blast to write.

Lori Meeker pushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned back against the sink. She squeezed the cold porcelain edge to still her trembling hands and focused on the pair of plainclothes cops shoehorned into the women's can with her.

The space was hardly bigger than a closet but the restrooms were the only private spaces in the bar, and the detectives had insisted on questioning her alone.

"The restrooms always this clean?" Detective Gayle asked.

"Yeah. Augie's bat-shit crazy about dirt and germs."

Gayle raised an eyebrow. "Bat-shit crazy, huh? Is that your professional opinion?"

"Pardon my French," Lori snapped.

Lori had met women just like Gayle. Always judging, always pretending they could do anything a man could do. Always looking down their perfect nose at girls who had to work in joints like Augie's Bar & Grill.

And Augie was bat-shit crazy about germs. A damned phobia, that's what she should have said. It was a bar, for god's sake, not some fancy restaurant. The place was cleaner than it had any need to be.

"Tell us what you saw and heard," Detective Osbourne said.

Osbourne looked like a nice man, the kind of guy who would listen without judging. Lori decided to talk to him. She weighed how much to tell him, though. She was afraid he might call her crazy, might laugh and stop listening to her, if she said she didn't think the dead body out on the bar floor was human.

Lori fished her cigarettes from her sweater pocket, shook a fresh one from the pack and sparked it with her butane lighter. Gayle turned her head away and coughed. Lori smiled.

"You going to talk to us?" Gayle asked.

Lori blew more smoke toward Gayle and focused on Osbourne's big, brown hound-dog eyes.

"I unlocked the door at eleven," she said. "Right off, this little guy strolled in, just like he owned the place. Augie gave him the once over, went back to stocking the cooler with a case of Red Hook."

"What did you make of him?" Osbourne asked.

"I saw right off that he was slumming. I can tell the type. But Augie always says it doesn't matter where a customer is from or what they look like, long as they have money."

Gayle jumped in. "And this guy had money?"

Lori nodded. "A wad of bills would choke a horse."

"Did he sit at the bar?" Osbourne asked.

"Uh huh," she said. "He crawled up on one of the stools. Could barely see over the edge. If we had booster seats I think I would'a offered him one."

Her cigarette had burned down to the filter. Lori flipped it into the toilet, listened to it hiss, and popped her butane lighter to spark another one. A skinny job with lots of filter and not much tobacco. Her mother called them coffin tacks.

"What did the fellow look like?" Osbourne asked.

"Bald, a big head. Glasses on a little nose, not much chin. He ordered one drink. Straight-up scotch. Never touched it. Most times, that sets Augie off. This time he never say a word."

"Any idea why?" Osbourne asked.

"They told each other jokes."

"Jokes?"

Lori nodded. "Augie loves jokes, can tell them all night and not repeat himself. This little guy could tell them, too."

"What sort of jokes?" Detective Gayle asked.

"All kinds. The one about the farmer's daughter and the salesman. The golfer and the dead priest. The special pig. That one makes me laugh, but I can't remember it to save my life."

Gayle leaned in close now, ignoring the cigarette smoke. "Tell us what happened at the end."

"I'd almost finished setting up the tables, when I heard the guy say, 'Augie, you ever heard the one about the little green man that walked into the bar?'"

She could feel tears welling. She tried to push them back.

"Go on, Lori." Osbourne said, kindness in his voice.

Lori closed her eyes, held on to his words. "Augie yelled, then I heard the shotgun. Almost peed myself. When I looked, the little guy was on the floor, his face shot all to pieces."

Nothing fancy to the joint, but Augie March had always been proud to say he owned it.

Low-ceilinged; long and wide. Tables on the side walls, a bar across the back. Framed posters of country-western singers on the wall around the jukebox. Expensive neon signs above the bar to light the way back to the restrooms.

Pointers to the left. Setters to the right.

With the lights dimmed, after a few beers, the place had a certain charm. But this was middle of the day, the house lights full on, and Augie was stone-cold sober.

The joint was clean, of course. Augie wouldn't have it any other way. But he had never paid much attention to the way his place smelled, and just now, perched on a stool at the bar, he felt like he might drown in the reek of tobacco and hot grease.

"Wanna beer?" he asked the street cop standing watch at the end of the bar.

The street cop shook his head. "Can't drink on duty."

Augie nodded. "Just thought I'd offer."

The cop frowned. "Just sit there and keep your mouth shut."

"I can do that," Augie said.

The door to the woman's john opened and Lori walked out, followed by the two detectives. Osbourne and Gayle. Augie had dealt with both of them before.

"Everything okay out here?" Gayle asked.

"Sure," the street cop said.

He handed an evidence baggie to Osbourne and pointed down the bar to where Augie's sawed-off shotgun rested; breach cracked and shells gone. "I figure the shotgun for the murder weapon. It's unloaded now."

"Any word on follow-up?" Osbourne slid the baggie, with the two spent green shells inside, into his pocket.

The street cop nodded. "Squad's outside. Crime scene crew's stuck on the West Seattle Bridge."

"Thanks. Take the girl outside, will you?"

"Can she leave?"

"Uh huh."

At the door, Lori turned and looked at Augie, then she was out and gone.

"When you gonna tell me I can have a lawyer?" Augie asked.

Osbourne shrugged. "We don't have to read you rights, not unless we arrest you. You want us to do that?"

"No. I'll tell you everything that happened."

"What did happen?" Gayle asked.

Augie didn't much care for the sound of her voice. Loud and too aggressive, even for a cop. Too back east for her own good. He glanced at Osbourne. The detective dipped his chin in approval.

"I know I didn't murder anybody," Augie said. "I saved the planet, that's what I did. That little creep ain't human."

He tipped his head toward the body sprawled on the floor in the center of the room, feet stretched toward the bar, toes up. Most of the stiff's head had been blown away by the point-blank blast of the twelve-gauge. Blood everywhere.

"Gonna take one of those professional services to get the place clean again," Augie muttered. "I swear, it's enough to drive a fella crazy."

"What was that?" Osbourne asked.

"Nothing." Augie shook his head. "Just talking to myself."

Gayle took a step closer. "What do you mean when you say not human?"

"What do you think I mean? He's some sort of alien, like you see in those supermarket papers. Ready to invade us."

"Why would aliens invade White Center?"

"Not here; not Seattle. I mean the world. Earth."

Gayle leaned even closer. Augie eased away.

"You expect us to believe that crap?" she asked.

Augie folded his arms across his chest. "It ain't crap."

She was in his face now, one corner of her lip curled up. Augie wished the bitch would go away, let him talk to Osbourne.

"Some Martian comes to Earth and walks into your bar, for no other reason than to swap jokes?" she sneered. "Come on, Augie. Why wasn't he three thousand miles east of here, parked on the White House lawn?"

"I never said he was Martian."

"You even sure he was an alien?" Gayle said.

"Check the stiff, you'll see."

Gayle glanced at Osbourne. He watched as she went to the body and knelt beside it. With one blue-gloved finger, she pushed at the expensive-looking mask the stiff clutched in one hand.

"Never seen one this realistic," she said.

"Maybe from that effects shop in L.A.," Osbourne said. "The place that made the mask used in the Ohio bank job."

"Maybe."

Gayle continued to inspect the corpse. Osbourne turned back to the bar. "What happened after he came in?"

Augie shivered. He'd never felt so cold. Coming down with something, had to be. The little creep must have infected him with some alien disease, not to mention how bad he messed up the bar.

"Augie?" Osbourne said.

Augie twisted his shoulders. The muscles popped in protest. He continued. "I try not to pay attention to what customers look like. I get all kinds in here. This one was funny, though, I'll give him that. He knew jokes I ain't never heard and that takes some doing, let me tell you."

"Stick to the story, Augie."

"Sorry." Augie mopped at his forehead with a fresh bar rag. Too hot now. No doubt about it. He'd been infected, probably those nano-things. He'd seen too many movies not to recognize it. If he didn't die in some nasty way, he'd probably turn into a zombie. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. He wouldn't let that happen, no matter what he had to do.

"Talk to me, Augie." Osbourne sounded impatient now.

Augie spit a wad of green-black phlegm into the bar rag.

"The little creep leaned at me and said, 'You hear the one about the alien that walks into the bar?' I leaned on the bar, our noses almost touching. He grinned, then –"

Augie couldn't swallow, couldn't catch his breath.

"You okay?" Osbourne asked.

"I'm burning up."

His toes and fingers tingled. His head throbbed. He focused on Osbourne's hound-dog face and choked out the words. "The creep grabbed both his ears and pulled his face off. Tried to hand it to me, kid you not."

"Hey, Oz," Gayle said. "come look at this."

"A second," Osbourne said. "What did he look like, Augie?"

"Without his face? Some kinda green-skinned robot. No nose, no ears. Two beady eyes."

"And then?"

Augie's stomach was in knots. "He leaned close again and said, 'I'm going to take over your damned dirty planet and I think I'll start with you.'"

"And then?"

Augie shuddered. "Dear God, he breathed into my mouth."

"Oz, you got to see this."

"I heard you, Gayle. What did you do, Augie?"

Augie glanced down the bar.

"Answer me, Augie," Oz said.

"What do you think?" Augie tipped his head toward the gun. "I keep that sawed-off twelve-gauge under the register 'cause I been robbed twice. I grabbed it and blew the little creep away."

"Oz, I need you now," Gayle said. "This body's so hot it's almost glowing. We could grill a steak here."

Osbourne poked his finger into Augie's bicep. "Stay where you are. You hear me? Not a step, not a single step. If I got to come after you, you'll be sorry."

Osbourne hurried across the room. Before the detective reached the body, it sat up, turned at the waist and looked at Augie. It stuck its thumbs where its ears should be and wiggled all its fingers.

"What the hell!" Gayle jerked away and scuttled backwards on her butt, putting distance between her and the moving stiff.

Across the room, the jukebox kicked to life. Johnny Cash belted out Ghost Riders in the Sky. With a nasty-sounding puff, the corpse burst into flames. Osbourne dived through the fire, grabbed Gayle and rolled with her all the way to the far wall.

Augie felt his bladder go, felt warm piss trickle down his legs. The least of his concerns.

"Ain't gonna be infected by no aliens," he muttered. "Ain't gonna let that happen."

He quick-stepped around the bar, scooped up the shotgun and pulled two fresh shells from his secret stash clipped to the belly of the beer dispenser. He braced himself and snapped the breach shut.

"Don't do it, Augie," Osbourne shouted.

"Hell with that." Augie pressed the shotgun barrel into the juncture of his neck and jaw, and pulled both triggers.

Pilch extruded a dorsal tendril and keyed a communications link to the control shell of the little silver ship. "Did you get it all?"

"Every nuance," Runk replied. "So intense it almost made me vacate my ventral sleeve."

The ship rode a geostationary orbit, twenty-two thousand miles above the surface of the Earth, tucked in among a string of communications satellites.

Alone in the contact shell, Pilch shed the delicate remote- sensor harness and wiggled away from the control array. Grit and abrasion! It would be difficult to shed the input data from that damned avatar; might take a full cycle in stasis to filter out the images and sounds. There could even be psychic scarring.

"The rhythmic noise at the end was a nice riff," Runk said.

"The locals call it music," Pilch said.

"Whatever. I think this is your best work this trip."

Pilch's own ventral sleeve sphincter tightened. "Kind of you to say. The peace enforcers were a little hard to figure."

"You played them perfectly. The reanimated, exploding corpse is a classic comedy routine."

"Thank you. I think so, too."

"I should thank you. A pleasure to record it all. I almost split a membrane when you pulled the avatar's face away and the barkeep shot you."

"That always gets a good response."

"It never does get old. What do you say? You ready to go home or do you want to record another gig?"

Pilch's eye stalks quivered and contracted. An involuntary gland secretion wasn't far away. "Head for home. I'm exhausted."

"You should be, after a performance like that. When these immersives play to the crowds at home, the emotive fluctuations from experiential transfer will flush the mucus out of them."

"You really think so?"

"They'll beg to sit through it again and again. We'll make a fortune."

"Good," Pilch said. "I need a break."

"Loyon, Grimik and I took a float through the outer islands last trip home. The feeding ― "

Runk's reminiscence became a withdrawing tide of sound. The nodal lights in Pilch's contact shell shifted to ultraviolet and body-temperature liquids began to ooze into the space.

Pressure in the shell increased. Runk must have initiated the acceleration field. They'd be home in a quarter-cycle, and not an instant too soon.

Pilch had gotten too close to the audience this time, had even snickered at some of Augie's jokes. And when the barkeep committed suicide – an unanticipated first in Pilch's one-hundred-seventeen cycles of improvisational performances – Pilch had lost ventral sleeve control.

The last of the cushioning amniotic fluid filled the shell. Pilch drifted into stasis, whispering the mantra a crèche parent had offered as absolution so very long ago.

"Sluice the untagged slime-worms, kid, if they can't take a joke."

©   
2013 KC Ball

K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, with her wife, Rachael, and two fussy cats. Her fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, as well as a short-story collection, Snapshots From A Black Hole & Other Oddities, from Hydra House Books, and a novel, Lifting Up Veronica, from Every Day Publishers. She is a 2010 graduate of Clarion West writers workshop and received the Writers of the Future award in 2009 and the Speculative Literature Foundation's Older Writer award in 2012.

How did you come up with "Stop Me If You've Heard This One"? What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?

This story was one of six I wrote during Clarion West. The final draft that appears here in Waylines is much changed since that first version, written almost three years ago. I've never understood some writers who say they never rewrite. I jigger with my stories until everything fits into place, like one of those steel-balls-in-the-depressions games I used to play as a kid. And it was an experiment. I wanted to try a short story told in three discernible points-of-view and - because I believe a sense of humor is one of the marks of a thinking being - I wanted to address the notion of what an alien might find funny. I'm pleased with the result.

How did you maintain the balance of humor and the more serious themes of the story? Do you find that humor is as difficult to write as is often suggested?

I've always been drawn to jokes. They're one of humanity's most enduring forms of story-telling. And I'm fascinated by the way in which jokes travel and change according to the culture in which they're told. As far as maintaining balance, The problem I've always had is repressing my humorous natures so that it doesn't take over a story. Still, writing funny can be a challenge. The trick, I think, is pushing a straight situation until it becomes absurd.

Your collaboration with Mike Alexander, "The Moon Belongs to Everyone" (Analog Dec 2012) received a recommended from Locus, and also appeared on a few years best. How did it feel to see the story being praised so highly?

I'm so pleased with that story, and with the praise it has received. I know that Mike was, too. I'm also happy that it appeared when it did, so that Mike could see it and the two of us could celebrate. It appeared just a month before he died (early in December 2012 after a long and heroic battle with cancer). I miss Mike more than I can tell you. We met for the first time at Clarion West in 2010 and became fast friends. We used to kid about Mike being my younger brother from another mother. Mike was getting noticed as a writer - six or eight of his short stories were published in major SF magazines in the two years before his death - and I believe his success would have continued, if he had had more time. We both wrote, late in life, to fulfill a long-delayed dream and wrote the same kinds of stories. Old-school speculative fiction. The collaboration for "The Moon Belongs to Everyone" was so much fun for both of us. We were four thousand words into a sequel, "Pie in the Sky", at the time of his death, and had a rough outline for a third story using the same characters, "Mars is More Than a Candy Bar". I hope to finish both stories, if I can.

Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?

As I said, I write because it always was a dream of mine and now that I'm retired I have the time. Easier things that I could do? I suppose I could sit and watch television all day. No, I've always been a story-teller and writing is a joy.

What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more K.C. Ball?

I have four other stories that will be out soon or may have just appeared when this issue of Waylines is published. "Drawn to the Glow" appeared February 28, 2012, as the two-thousandth story at Every Day Fiction. "This Little Piggy", a SF riff on one of my favorite jokes, will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Big Pulp, the online magazine; "A Quiet Little Town in Northern Minnesota" is set for the July/August 2013 issue of Analog, and "Kindred Souls", a horror story with an older protagonist (one of the things I'd like to see more of in SF) is included in A Quiet Shelter There, an anthology that will be out later this year from Hadley Rille Books. And my story collection, Snapshots From A Black Hole & Other Oddities, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as my publisher, Hydra House Books.

What I'm working on? I'm excited about "Sweetwater Notion and the Hallelujah Kid", a steampunkish novella I just sent out for the first time. I also have three stories almost finished, "Thumbing It", a horror story set in the sixties, "Froggie Went A'Courtin'", environmental SF in the Pacific Northwest, and "Amid a Crowd of Stars", a hard SF piece based on the notion of human inter-connectedness. And I have about 35,000 words written toward an alternate history novel, Shadow Man

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