Authors

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s alternate history stories have won or been nominated for every award in the sf field. “The Arrival of Truth” shows why. In pre-Civil War Virginia, some slaves tell a story about Sojourner and the Truth. One young girl, forced to give up her own children and nurse a white baby, wonders what the Truth will mean. Will it set her free? Or will it force her to make terrible choices of her own?

In “The Arrival of Truth,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch casts light on the powerful struggle between right and wrong, slavery and freedom.

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Arrival of Truth by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I first heard the story the morning they took my third child. My body, half-hidden in the feather bed, ached from the effort of birthing a baby I would never raise. My breasts dribbled milk that would soon feed a white child. The Missus and Old Sal, the midwife, took my new baby out of the room so I couldn’t hear it cry. I reached for it—all small, bloody, and wrinkled—but wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed. As the door closed, I turned by face against the Missus’ feather pillow and wished I had died.

A breeze rustled the gingham curtains on the open window. Voices echoed in the yard, and from Big Jim’s yelp, I knew I had had a son. The voices hushed for a moment, then Big Jim cried, “No! No! That’s my boy! You can’t take him away! That’s my boy!” and I tried to sink deeper in the soft bed, softer than I was used to, the bed the Missus used when a girl gave birth to a baby she could sell and make more money for the House. Big Jim’s shout got cut off mid-word as a whip snapped and cracked through the air. Big Jim would get another scar because of my baby, and the child wasn’t even his.

The door creaked open, and Nesta stood there, eyes sad as eyes could be. She snuck inside and let the door close quietly. She was big and soft, and I wanted to bury my face against her chest and cry until no more tears would come, but when her hand caressed my forehead, I couldn’t look at her.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “All that learning didn’t save you. It don’t save none of us, long as we look different from them.”

She took a cornhusk doll, painted black, with frizzed yarn hair and a sackcloth dress, and tucked it in my arms. “Sojourner’s coming,” Nesta said. “And when she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.”

Then she slipped out the door, quietly as she came. I buried my face in the doll’s rough skin and I wished, Lord how I wished, it could move and cry and pat its little fist against my cheek.

***

Some days I can still remember the feeling of being a child, the closest to white I’ll ever get.

The old Missus, she had ideas that her son, Master Tom, said was dangerous and harmful to his way of life. But when he was a boy and had no say in the house, the old Missus would teach some of us. She taught us how to read and spell and how to talk proper. She read to us from the Bible and said we needed to know God’s Word so we could get into heaven. She made us promise we would never tell nobody what she done because she would have to stop and some of us could get killed because of her mistakes. So we practiced reading in private, hiding the books when the old Master or Jake the overseer or any guests came to the House. The old Missus talked to use like we were the same as the white folks she spent the rest of her time with. And she loved us, each and every one. No babies got sold when she ran the House, and she promised that when she died, we would all go free.

But she died one sunny afternoon when her horse stumbled and threw her. The old Master said her will was written by a crazy woman who didn’t understand money, and he wouldn’t abide by her wishes. So none of us got our papers, and none of us were set free. The old Master brought us—the ones she educated—into the House and made us “the best House niggers” in the state of Carolina. We were never allowed to leave, never able to talk with the field hands or any of the others, as if he was afraid our knowledge would spread like pox through a room full of children.

***

Three days later, when I could stand alone, the Missus let me return to my cabin behind the House. I took the doll with me, clutching it like the child it had replaced. The Missus had promised me to the Wildersons down the road, and I was to pack my things and get before nightfall.

Big Jim wasn’t inside, but we had already said our goodbyes before he took the livery out that morning. He said he’d keep my side of the bed warm, but we both knew I wouldn’t be back until the Wilderson baby was weaned. A lot could change in that kind of time. People could get sold, people could get killed, people could disappear in the middle of the night. I only promised that I would love him as long as I lived.

The cabin was neat except for a pile of bloody rags that sat by the door. Jim had probably used them to stop the bleeding on his arm where the whip had wrapped around his skin while he was trying to save my baby boy. The cabin wasn’t much—a straw bed, a few chairs, and a table—but it was the place where we could speak our minds. After the old Master died, and Master Tom married, places like that had become harder and harder to find.

I put my other dress and my doll in a scarf and packed it in a wicker basket. Then I went out front to catch the delivery wagon as it made its way into town.

I sat on the back, and got off on the road outside the Wilderson place. The Wildersons had a bigger plantation than we did, and more babies this year than we did. But Missus Wilderson wouldn’t tolerate a field hand nursing her babies, and she wanted someone “almost human”—like me. After I’d been there a while she told me I didn’t talk like a nigger and if she closed her eyes she could pretend I was a person, someone worth talking to. She expected me to be flattered, and even though I thanked her in a quiet voice, I could see she was surprised by my tone.

Big arching trees hung over the Wildersons’ lane. After the wagon dropped me off, I walked, exhaustion making my limbs shake. I had to stop once, and lean against a wide tree trunk to catch my breath. My mother used to go back to the fields the same day she had a baby, and my pa used to say that was what faded her away. Dizziness swept through me, just as it must have through her the day she collapsed on the field—the day after my baby brother was born—and the overseer beat her to death with his whip. The old Missus had fired him, and the old Master had jailed him for destroying property. But that never did bring my mama back.

“Hey, girl, they’s expecting you up to the house.”

The voice came from a big man standing just inside the trees. His skin was dark as tree bark and his muscles bulged out of his ripped and torn shirt. His eyes shone with intelligence and when he spoke, he smiled.

“How much farther is it?” My voice sounded breathless.

“Half mile maybe,” he said.

I nodded, the thought of the extra distance defeating me. Maybe I could go a few more yards, but not a half mile. My body hadn’t recovered enough.

He peered at me through the trees, then crossed the road and stopped beside me. He was a big man, bigger than Big Jim. “You don’t look so good.”

I nodded again, afraid to say anything.

“How long since you had that baby?”

“Three days.” The words were no more than a whisper.

“And they sent you to walk? Here, honey, lean on me. I got strength enough for both of us.”

He touched me and I jerked back.

“It’s like that, is it?” He spoke softly, almost to himself. “Okay. I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey. Just let me put my arm around you, and then you can lean against me. Okay?”

I swallowed, not wanting him to touch me, but knowing I wouldn’t make it to the great house any other way. He slid his arm around my back, his skin hot against mine. He smelled of soap and honest sweat, and his touch was gentle.

“Come on,” he said, and together we walked down the center of the road leading to the great house. The trees towered over us, and an occasional bird chirped. The Wilderson plantation was quiet. No one shouted over the breeze. No overseer’s whip echoed in the distance. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought no one lived at the end of the road.

A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead, and the man tightened his grip. By the time we had reached the house, he was almost carrying me while keeping me upright.

“Lord a mercy, girl, where you been? The mistress is swearing and that baby’s crying like it won’t never shut up.” A woman stood on the porch, hair tied back in a scarf, sun reflecting off her dark face. She had her arms crossed on her hips and her skirts swished as she walked. She was in charge of the house. No one had to tell me that.

“She’s three days from the baby,” the man said, “and they left her down the road. She can barely walk and I think she’s bleeding.”

“Don’t know how to take care of their people over there,” the woman muttered as she walked down the stairs. She leaned over me and took me from the man. She was almost as strong as he was. Her hand brushed my breast as she reached around. “Lord, you’re full up too. We’ll get you to a bed, put that baby against you. He’ll ease that pain in your chest some.”

I looked at her sharply. Maybe she was referring to my swollen breasts. But I didn’t think so. I wondered how many babies had been taken away from her.

The man hadn’t let go of me. The woman looked at him. “I got her, Sam,” she said. She pulled me close, but he still didn’t let go. “Let her go, Sam. You ain’t allowed in the house.”

Sam released me. I stumbled against the woman, then she supported me.

“It’s a crime,” he said, “the way they treat people. When Sojourner comes—”

“Shush,” the woman said. “We don’t have talk like that at my house.”

“This ain’t your house.” But he said no more. He tipped a make-believe hat at me. “When you’re feeling better, you come sit with Sam. We’ll have ourselves a talk.”

I nodded, and the movement made me dizzy. When we reached the porch, the front door opened, and Missus Wilderson stood there, face blotchy and red. “They said you’d be here this morning. A sugar teat isn’t doing my Charles any good.”

Behind her, I could hear a baby wail. The sound made the pain in my chest grow stronger.

“She’s sick,” the woman holding me said.

“Something she’ll pass to the baby?”

“Her babe was born a few days ago. She ain’t recovered yet.”

Missus Wilderson humphed and moved away from the door. “As long as she can feed my boy, I don’t care what you do with her, Darcy.”

Darcy didn’t reply. She helped me in the front door. The house was cooler than the outdoors, and the hallway was lighter and airier than the one I was used to. She led me past the kitchen to a small room furnished with a cross and some figures made out of straw. I set my basket down, and she eased me onto a chair. The dizziness swept across me as she opened my bodice and handed me a wet rag. I ran it across my chest and my face. The cool cloth sent a shiver through me.

Then Darcy was beside me again, the squalling baby in her hands. I reached for him before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to feed another woman’s child. I wanted to feed my own. But if I closed my eyes, I didn’t see this little boy’s pale skin. All I felt was his soft baby fat. He smelled of newborn, and he clamped onto my breast with a greediness that hurt.

I rocked him, not opening my eyes, not wanting to see him, and I crooned a lullaby that Big Jim used to sing to our boys before they got taken away. But I couldn’t pretend. I knew that someday this boy in my arms would grab a woman with skin darker than his, beat her senseless, knock her to the ground, and stick himself inside her. I knew he would hire an overseer who used a whip instead of kindness. I knew that no matter whose breast he nursed on, he would never see people with dark skin as human beings.

***

After a week of Darcy’s food and care, I could walk on my own. The dizziness left me and the ache in my bones left with it. I missed the ache—it was my last attachment to my child. The bleeding stopped after about a day, and we didn’t discuss it or what it might mean about my chances for having future children. Little Charles was growing fat, and he reached for me instead of his mother, much to her dismay.

I had no place in the household, except as a milk store for Charles. I had to stay near the house, so that I could feed him when he was hungry, but other than that, I could do anything I wanted.

It took me another week to find Sam. His words had bothered me because they echoed Nesta’s. When Sojourner comes . . . When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

Twilight had fallen across the fields, making shadows long and dark. Charles was already asleep. I walked toward the field-hand cabins—no restrictions on me here. Apparently Master Tom hadn’t told the Wildersons that I could infect their darkies with all kinds of evil knowledge.

Children scrabbled in the hard dirt, and adults sat on porches and talked. Sam sat outside his cabin, whittling, and listening to the conversation around him.

“Okay if I join you?” I asked.

He indicated a space on the wood stairs leading up to the door. I gathered my skirts under me and sat.

“I didn’t spect to see you again,” he said. “You one of them precious house girls your master always bragging up.”

A shiver ran down my back and it was still light enough for Sam to catch it. “He don’t treat his people right, do he?”

I bit my lip and looked across at the children. They were yelling and carrying on, playing a game I didn’t understand.

“And he didn’t want no baby around to remind him of that, did he?”

I started to stand up. Sam reached over and grabbed my arm. I pulled away from him.

“He hurt you right bad.”

His words brought back that night: the smell of liquor on Master Tom’s breath, the weight of his body on mine, the bruises I couldn’t hide from Big Jim. He had wanted to kill Master Tom that night. I had stopped him.

Sam was watching me with the same intensity he had that day in the lane. “And you ain’t never gonna let a man touch you again, are you?”

“Lordy, girl, you a bunch of sticks and bones, and that baby broke some things when it busted out of ya. I had me a woman once. Don’t need another.” He waved a hand. “Sit. Tell me why you come searching me out.”

I sat back down and laced my hands in my lap. My fingers were cold, despite the heat of the night. “When I came here, you spoke of something. You said, ‘When Sojourner comes.’ What did you mean by that?”

He let out air slowly, then glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Twilight had given way to darkness. The children were inside. Candles flickered through the open windows, and five cabins down an old man smoked a pipe on his porch.

“You ain’t never heard of Sojourner?”

“Once I did. Nesta, the cook up to the Great House told me when they took my baby away. She said when Sojourner gets here, white folks are going to learn the truth.”

“The Truth, girl.” He put an emphasis on truth so strong that I could hear the capital letter. “You was born into this life. I can tell from that fancy speech of yourn. Was your mama born into this life?”

I nodded. My family had come to the colony with the Master’s family. The old Missus said we had a good and strong heritage.

“And you been a house woman your whole life?”

Again, I nodded.

“They raised you like family till the young master decided that the people can’t be family.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “I want to know about Sojourner.”

“Girl, what I’m saying is you’d know if you was raised in the fields.” He leaned back in his chair. The chair creaked. The muscles rippled through his dark skin. “When I was a boy, they’d sing a song when the overseer was gone. They’d sing about the promised land and how the savior would come to the land and take us all to a better place. You ain’t never heard them stories?”

I shook my head. My mama was happy that the old Missus took me into the schoolroom. When Mama put me down at night, she would say, “You almost white, honey. Someday, you go free and you will live without no whip and no dogs.”

“You do remember when that boy up to Virginia led a bunch of the people and killed the white folks?”

I didn’t remember it because it happened the year of my birth. I had heard of it, though. Master Tom would talk to the overseer about it. The way they had to keep us separate so that we would never think of a rebellion. “I know of it,” I said.

Sam stared straight ahead. Nothing moved in the darkness. “I was ten. The overseers came down and locked us all in our cabins. They took the men away and the women were left alone with the children for days. They was afraid the rebellion would spread down here and all the white folks would die. Anyone caught singing about the promised land got whipped. And anyone who talked about a savior got beat within an inch of his life.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said, and felt inadequate because of it. I was glad the darkness hid my face. My mama talked about the bad times, but I never associated it with the rebellion. It hadn’t mattered to me. It had happened before I was born.

“That didn’t stop the stories. They just got whispered in bits and pieces, back and forth. We spected things to get worse. And we spected our savior to come. But no one ever did.” Lights came on in the kitchen in the back of the house. I strained to hear the baby’s cry, but the yard was quiet.

“Then a few years ago, a runaway come through the barn. He was torn and bloodied and tired, but he told a story, Lord, we wanted to hear. He said Sojourner came to his plantation and taught white folks Truth. And all the people went free.”

I sat up straighter. “What happened?”

“He was too addled to tell us. We passed him along, and another came, just as bloodied, saying the same thing. Only he said Sojourner led them into battle, like the white folks’ Bible talked about, and all the people went free.”

“How come we haven’t heard about it?”

Sam shook his head. “These battles are quiet ones. Ain’t nobody getting caught, and ain’t nobody gonna tell.”

“Sounds like tales to me,” I said. I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “White folks won’t let niggers free, not without a fight. And if niggers put up a fight, then white folks kill them, and kill other niggers until the fight has gone out of us.”

Sam was silent for a long moment. I thought, with my simple argument, I had knocked a hole in his belief, and I felt oddly disappointed. The story of Sojourner had an appeal to it that I wanted to feel. I didn’t want to destroy his belief so easily.

“You call the people ‘niggers,’” he said. “Just like the white folk. We all know we different. But we ain’t niggers or pickaninnies or any of them pet terms they use. We’s people just like they is. And we shouldn’t make ourselves sound any other way.”

He got up and walked around me. The steps sagged under his weight. He went into his cabin without saying good night.

My cheeks were hot. I hadn’t meant to offend him, by insulting his beliefs or by using a word that I had heard since I was a child. I stood on his porch for a long time, thinking about the difference a word made. I had never thought of myself as a person. To me, people were always white.

The light in the kitchen grew, and a bad feeling ran through me. I lifted my skirt and crossed the now-empty yard. I was too awake to sleep, but something called me indoors.

I mounted the back porch steps and let myself in the back door. A hand slapped me across the mouth, and I stumbled backwards, holding up my arm to protect myself. Missus Wilderson stood there, her long hair flowing down her back, her nightgown askew. “You were brought here to feed my baby, not to go whoring.”

I wiped my palm against my mouth, felt if come away bloody. “I wasn’t—”

“Sam is a big man and probably just what you girls want, but I won’t have my baby’s milk tainted, you hear me? You stay in the house at night. You stay here where the baby can have you if he needs you.”

I nodded, knowing that she would never listen to my denials. She turned, grabbed her lamp, and walked back through the darkened hallway, looking like Lady Macbeth from the Shakespeare stories the old Missus used to scare us with.

Darcy stepped out of the corner where she had been standing. She dipped a rag in the water basin and wiped my mouth. “She knows you wasn’t doing nothing with Sam ‘cept talking. She watched almost from the start. She just don’t like him none. She’d have sold him long ago, but the Master says he’s a good one in the fields, and won’t let him go.”

My lower lip hurt. I could feel it swelling. “Why did she hit me?”

“She’s got a sense about her. When you showed up at the door, she said the final time was here, and there wasn’t nothing she could do.”

“Final time?”

“Lord, honey, white folks is as superstitious as we are. They got their strange beliefs too. I think all the white folks know they’re sitting on a powder keg, and they just waiting for it to explode underneath them.”

I took the cloth from Darcy’s hand and wiped my own mouth. I had never thought of rebellion before. No one talked about it at home, at least no one had talked about it with me. If Sojourner had come there, would they have killed me with the white folks? Because I had lessons and could read and talk like a white person, did that mean my skin had lightened? It didn’t stop Master Tom from beating me senseless and planting a baby in me. Or did he only do that to some women? Those who could pass for his own kind?

“They’ll kill us,” I said.

“Ah, honey.” Darcy brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. “At least we’ll die free.”

***

I didn’t leave the house for weeks. Little Charles grew heavier and more demanding. Missus Wilderson ignored me. Darcy made sure I was fed and had someone to talk with, and Sam waved whenever he saw me on the porch. I didn’t wave back.

The humid spring turned into a hot summer. The aches left my body and Charles crawled into my heart. Sometimes, as I put him down to sleep, I called him mine. And in so many ways he was. He reached for me and cooed when he saw me. When he had angry fits, only I could stop them. He tolerated his mother, cried at his father, but loved me.

I found no solace in that.

Mid-July I was sitting in the porch swing, rocking Charles and humming him a lullaby. He didn’t want to sleep. He reached for the butterfly circling around us, played with the buttons on my dress. His eyes would droop and then open again, as if he didn’t want to miss anything. I told him now was the time for sleeping. When he grew up, sleeping would be something he would have no time for at all.

A noise stirred Charles out of his playfulness. He turned his head toward the road, and so did I. A horse’s hooves pounded against the dirt. An angry or panicked horse, one that had ridden at top speed all day. Darcy came onto the porch followed by the Master and Missus. Sam appeared from around back, and even though the Missus tried to send him away, he stayed.

The rider came around from under the canopy of trees. He leaned over his horse, mud-splattered and exhausted. His hair, plastered to the side of his head, was straight, and his skin under the dirt was white. His clothes had once been nice, but they were torn and showed signs of wear.

“Get them out of here,” he said, waving a hand at Sam, Darcy, and me.

“How can we help you?” the Missus’ tone was cold. She didn’t take orders from anyone, especially from someone she didn’t know.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “But I won’t do it with them here.”

The Master nodded at Sam, Darcy, and me, but we didn’t move. “Come inside,” he said. “We’ll find you something to drink and maybe a bite to eat. Give Sam your horse, and he’ll take care of it.”

The man clutched the reins tighter. “Just show me where,” he said, “and I’ll rub down the horse myself.”

“Sam,” the Master said, then caught the look on the man’s face. Pure fear. I recognized it because I had seen it on so many dark faces all my life. “Never mind. I’ll take him to the stables. I don’t want you people here when I get back.”

Charles was wide awake now, and leaning forward. The excitement entranced him. The Missus took him from me. “He’s not going to sleep now,” she said. But for the first time, her words held no blame. The situation had her as spooked as it had the rest of us.

Darcy took my arm and led me down the stairs. We followed Sam into the back. The Master and the stranger were on their way to the stable, the horse limping behind them.

“Something had happened,” Darcy said.

“He’s scared of us,” I said.

“They all scared of us.” Sam reached in his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and rubbed the sweat off his face. “That’s why they treat us the way they do.”

“He’s scared worse,” Darcy said. “You seen him.”

“Yeah.” Sam tucked the handkerchief in his pocket. “That’s why I want to hear what he says. He ain’t going to tell it all to the Missus. He saying something right now.”

The groom came out of the stable, along with two stableboys, looking as confused as we felt. Sam signaled us to stay where we were, and he hurried along the path, then went around behind the stable. Darcy shook her head.

“Boy gonna get himself a whipping if he not careful,” she said.

I stood as quietly as I could. I didn’t like the feeling that surrounded me. The stranger’s presence had added a tension to the place, a tension that made all the other tensions visible.

The groom went to his cabin, and the stableboys sat outside, staring at the stable as if they could learn the secrets. Darcy said no more to me. After a few minutes, she touched my elbow. The Missus had come onto the back porch and was staring at the stable. She no longer held Charles. A slight frown creased her face. She too knew she wasn’t going to get the whole story.

And if she stood there long enough, she would see Sam.

I wiped my damp palms on my skirt and headed up the stairs. “Did you get Charles to sleep, ma’am?”

She looked at me as if I were intruding. “He’s down. I don’t think he’s sleeping though.”

“Long as he’s quiet,” I said. “I think it’ll be a minute before the men come back. Let me help you get out some lemonade, in case they want something cold.”

Her glance was measuring. I brought my head down. My heart pounded. It seemed important to me that she didn’t see Sam.

“I’ll be gone before they get back. I promise.”

She sighed then, and lifted her skirts. I followed her into the big cool kitchen. Her cousin had sent a shipment of lemons from Florida the week before, and although much of the fruit was bruised, some of it was good enough to use. We had had all of the lemonade that morning, and so I stood side by side with Missus Wilderson, squeezing lemons and listening for any sign of the men.

We had filled two pitchers by the time we heard footsteps on the stairs. I grabbed a towel and wiped off my hands, then disappeared out the front way, as the men came in the back.

“—didn’t see me leave,” the stranger was saying. “That’s how they’re getting away with this. No one is left.”

I couldn’t hear the Master’s response. I went out the front door and circled around the house to find Sam and Darcy standing in the yard.

“There you are,” Sam said. “Come to my cabin. We’re far enough away there.”

I glanced up to see if the Missus was watching, but she was nowhere in sight. Darcy and I followed Sam down the path to the one-room shack he called home.

The inside was neat and well kept. The straw mattress had a wooden frame beneath it, and the wooden furniture lining the walls was strong and well made. Not hand-me-downs issued by the family. Sam had made his own home.

I took a cane-backed chair in the corner, and Darcy sat beside me. Sam sat on the edge of the bed, where he could see through the windows and keep an eye on the door.

“It’s happening,” he said to Darcy. “Right now.”

“That’s just talk,” she said.

“Not no more. He’s been riding up from the south, warning every Great House he sees. He ain’t gonna stop until he hits every plantation between here and the capital.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He said the people were talking among themselves for days, then this stranger shows up, and suddenly the people don’t take orders no more. Then, in the middle of the night, they come into the house just like they did in Virginia all them years ago, with pitchforks and knives and butcher the family. He’d been staying with one of the daughters—snuck in so’s nobody would see, and he got out before the mess got too bad. He grabbed a horse and started to ride, to warn white folks it was coming.”

“Now they’ve probably lynched all the people who done the killing,” Darcy said, “and the rest of us will get punished.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Or maybe he’s just the first wave in a battle we ain’t begun to fight.”

“Or maybe he’s crazy,” I said, “and none of this is true.”

“Don’t think so,” Sam said. “He looks like a man who knows.”

We were quiet after that. The small cabin grew oppressive. I went out onto the stairs and heard Charles wailing. He was hungry. The Missus came on the back porch, looking for me. When she saw where I was standing, her mouth set in a thin line.

“I guess you can come back in now,” she said. “Charles needs you.”

I nodded and crossed the yard. Missus Wilderson went back inside. As I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch, I heard voices coming from the kitchen.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” the Master said. “We give them a good home.”

“A good home isn’t all they want.”

I pushed open the door. Missus Wilderson stood near it, biting her nails. Charles was in a basket on the table, face red and streaked with tears. I went to him and picked him up, not happy that she had let him cry without comforting him.

“I’ll take him outside,” I said.

She shook her head. “They’re almost done. I don’t want Charles outside.”

I sighed and sat in a kitchen chair. I unbuttoned my blouse and put Charles to my chest. He clasped with his mouth and both hands. He hadn’t been hungry, he had been starving.

Missus Wilderson watched for a minute, then went into the other room. Her look had left me cold. I had seen her use it with me before. Almost a jealousy, and half an envy, as if she wanted Charles at her breast instead of mine. But it was a sign of good breeding and wealth when a woman didn’t have to feed her own children. Besides it would destroy her figure and give her marks.

I didn’t mind the marks. I just wished they had come from my own child instead.

“I take good care of the people who work for me,” the Master said. They must have been in the dining room. Only in the kitchen could we hear the dining room so well.

“They don’t work for you,” the stranger said. “You own them. I think that’s what they object to.”

“And I feed them, and house them, and clothe them. They’re little more than savages. Only a few can be trained to do anything beyond the most menial task. I take care of them and they’re grateful to me.”

I brushed the thin hair on little Charles’ scalp. Feeding his baby was a menial task? I could read and write and it was against the law for me to have those skills. I could speak better than Missus Wilderson and I was still owned by someone. I was as smart as they were, and still all of my children had been taken away from me. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe I had let their thinking invade my own.

“Grateful,” I whispered to Charles. “We’re not grateful. We’re scared.”

He closed his eyes and continued sucking. I cradled him to me. I didn’t want a revolution in which all the white folks would die. I loved some of them. I loved the little ones, like Charles, before they had time to turn into someone like Master Tom back at the plantation I was born at.

“I thank you for the warning,” Master Wilderson said. “I will heed it as best I can.”

“Protect your family,” the stranger said. “Get rid of as many of those slaves as you can.”

The voices receded from the dining room. Soon I couldn’t hear them at all. I was tense, waiting for Missus Wilderson to come back. She didn’t. Charles fell asleep, letting my nipple slip out of his mouth. I held him and rocked him just a little, clutching him to me.

After a few minutes, I heard a horse on the lane. The stranger was gone.

I took Charles to his daybed in the front parlor. The Master and Missus were standing on the porch looking at the dust cloud in the lane.

“. . . give this kind of thing credence,” he was saying. “It might give them ideas.”

“But don’t we have to protect ourselves?” she asked.

“This family has been on this piece of land for over a hundred years. If slaves were going to rebel, they would have done it long ago, when things were much more isolated. I think he got caught in an unusual incident, and it has spooked him so badly that he is afraid of any nigger he sees.”

Missus Wilderson shrugged and moved away from her husband. She didn’t believe him, but she had no choice except to abide by what he wanted. We weren’t so different, she and I. She had a nice house and a legitimate place in society, but her husband still owned her. She couldn’t do what she wanted to do.

She couldn’t even nurse her child herself.

I made myself stop watching the interchange and took Charles to his bed. He didn’t wake up as I put him down. I covered him with a light sheet and kissed his forehead. He stirred, but his eyes remained closed.

“He’s a beautiful baby.” Missus Wilderson stood behind me. I made myself turn slowly, even though my heart was pounding a drumbeat against my chest. “Even though sometimes I think he’s more yours than mine. Do you love my child?”

We had never had a moment like this before. She wasn’t speaking to me out of anger or even fear. She was actually curious about how I felt. I was the one who felt the fear. I didn’t know what she wanted of me.

I decided to tell her the truth.

“They took my baby away from me the day he was born,” I said. “Once he left my body, I never got to see him or touch him again. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I pretend Charles is that baby. But he isn’t. He’s yours. He looks like you and he loves you and I could never ever do to another woman what’s been done to me.”

The words rushed out of me before I could stop them. She put a hand to her chest as if she were trying to guard her heart. “I never sold anyone’s babies,” she said. “I’m not like your owners.”

“I’m not blaming you. I just wanted to reassure you that I would never hurt or steal your child.”

She nodded, brushed her hair out of her face, and walked out of the room. I leaned against the daybed. My hands were shaking. I had never spoken that frankly with a white person before, not even with the old Missus.

I wondered if anything would change because of it.

***

The tensions remained after the stranger appeared. My Master and the Wildersons had a long conversation and other gentlemen from the area appeared to discuss the situation. From the bits and snatches I gathered, they decided to tighten security around their homes, to punish “uppity niggers,” and to make sure if more than three of us gathered it got broken up.

Missus Wilderson didn’t speak to me again, and I cared for Charles in almost complete silence. Sometimes I exchanged words with Darcy and sometimes I spoke to Sam, but mostly I kept to myself.

Early August brought with it hot nights and sweltering days. Just into the month, I carried a sheet to the back porch swing, hoping to catch a little midnight breeze. I lay across the wooden slats. Even though they were uncomfortable, they were better than the sweaty stickiness of my straw bed. Down by the cabins, I could hear restlessness and children crying as people moved about.

The moon was full, and cast a thin daylight across the path. The dogs started barking out near the road, then just as quickly stopped. The voices from the cabins stopped too. I sat up. It felt as if the entire yard was waiting.

People came out of their cabins and stood on the stairs as if they felt the same thing I did. In the Great House, no one got up except Darcy, who let herself out of the kitchen and stood by the door. She didn’t seem to see me.

We were all looking in the direction of the dogs. Then I heard a gasp. I looked toward the sound. Sam was standing in his door, facing the opposite direction from everyone else. I followed his gaze and gasped myself.

A woman stood at the edge of the path. She was tall and angular, her hair cropped short. “Let’s gather at the edge of the field,” she said.

Sam went and got the others. Darcy and I walked toward the nearest field following the woman. As we got closer, we realized that she was old. Her skin was leathery and tough and her hair had turned white. Neither of us had even seen her before.

She stood on a wooden box that Darcy brought over and watched as the people gathered around her. Mothers held their children close, and the men stood forward, eager for a fight.

“My name’s Sojourner,” she said, her voice just loud enough for all of us to hear. “And I come to give you a message. The white folks ain’t gonna give us freedom. It costs them too much. We got to take freedom. There’s more of us than there is of them. It’s time to make life ours not theirs.”

She looked at her hands for a moment, then faced us again. In the moonlight, her face looked as if it had absorbed the night. “I’m going from place to place telling people it’s time to be free. I want to see all my people stand on their own in my lifetime, and my lifetime is going away quick.”

“You telling us to fight?” Sam asked.

“I’m telling you to take control of your lives however you want to do it. And I want women to take control two places, with the white folks and with your men. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

Simple words. As I repeat them back, they have lost the magic they held that night. She spoke with the power of a vision, and we listened as though the words of God himself came from her lips. She stepped down off the platform, and people tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t talk. “I got too many places to stop,” she said.

And she walked away.

The others stayed behind and talked, but I followed her to the road. She walked with her back straight, her head up, even though her movements were slow and tired. So the stranger had been right. Someone was leading my people home. A woman, with a single message, seeking to overthrow an unjust system that had existed for generations.

Shouts and cries echoed behind me. I turned back to see people hacking at their own cabins and setting fire to the Great House. Through the smoke, I thought I saw the Missus’ face. Do you love my child? she asked.

He was the only baby I got, and now they were setting his house on fire because he was born in the wrong place to the wrong family. Wasn’t that as bad as what they had done to us all these years? Or did we follow their Bible: an eye for an eye, a whip scar for a whip scar, a murder for a murder, and a baby for a baby?

A giddiness took me. I ran toward the house. I wanted to be free like the rest of them. I wanted to have my own babies and my own life. I wanted a house with more than one room and Big Jim beside me for all the rest of my days. I wanted to live like free people lived, making my own choices.

But I didn’t want to do it at the expense of Charles and his mama.

Smoke was already inches thick as I burst through the front door. In the back, I heard glass smashing and people laughing. My eyes started to water. I charged up the stairs. Charles was crying, gasping wails that made my heart ache. I ran into his room and gathered him in my arms as the Missus came in.

“You’re stealing my baby.”

“I’m saving him.” I wrapped him in his blankets and hid his face against my arms. “You got to get out now. They’re going to kill you.”

“I can’t let you take my baby,” she said.

“Then come with me. Get out now.”

“Laurel?” The Master’s voice echoed from the other room. For a moment, he sounded like Master Tom, and I wanted to go in and use a knife, hacking him to death. Beneath my surface lurked a sea of hatred.

“It’s like the man said,” she shouted. “They’ve gone crazy.”

He came into the nursery, with a shotgun leveled at me. “Put the baby down,” he said.

“You’re not going to shoot me while I’m holding Charles,” I said. “And you need me. I’m the only one who can get him away from here. You have to convince the people downstairs that you never meant them any harm. And I don’t think you can do it.”

He didn’t move the gun, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. I turned and ran from the house, Charles pressed against me. The smoke had grown so thick that my breath caught in my lungs. Charles was gasping against me. The fire was eating the entire first floor. We ran past its heat and into the cooler night. I drank the fresh air like cold water. Charles coughed and spit up on me.

Sam was off to one side, leading them all on, and Darcy leaned against a tree, tears glinting off her cheeks. I ran down the road with half a dozen people I had never seen, not caring where I was going, careful to keep Charles’ face hidden.

We ran for what seemed like miles until we found an abandoned barn. I crawled inside, followed by a few others. Charles was crying softly, in fear, and I bared my breast for him. He took the milk, but his eyes remained open. He knew something was wrong.

Outside, we could hear the sounds of destruction. A woman I had never seen before made a place beside me in the straw. “She never said kill ’em,” the woman said. “She just said to take what’s ours. We could have slipped away in the night and nobody would have known.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched Charles eat, and then I soothed him until he slept. The woman beside me slept and I watched the light change through the crack under the door.

I hadn’t been thinking when I took Charles. I needed to go home, to Big Jim. When we took our freedom, we would search for our own children, our own past. But I knew, from the sounds all around me, that people had already scattered all over the countryside, and Big Jim was probably running, just like me.

We had said our goodbyes, just like we had done with our children. And even though I wasn’t ever going to stop looking for them, I doubted I would ever find them.

My arms were growing tired from holding Charles. I wrapped him in his blanket and put him in a nest of straw. Then I went to the door and peeked out. Smoke rose over the trees like a threatening cloud.

When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

What truth? I wondered. That we hated them for holding us in place? That we hated the way they ripped up our lives and treated us like cattle? That we were human too? That was truth? That was something white folks had never been able to see? It seemed so simple. They had to have been blind to miss it.

Cries and yells echoed around me, and my body ached to join them. Smash a wall with an axe, destroy a man for taking a child. An eye for an eye.

A baby for a baby.

I looked back at Charles, sleeping peacefully. Within my reach, I had the best revenge of all.

***

I didn’t take it. At least, not in the obvious way.

After the fires, we followed the old Underground Railroad line and eventually ended up west, where the land goes on for miles and people are as scarce as coyotes. The trip wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as rough as it could’ve been either. Charles and I survived.

Which was more than Big Jim did. I went back to my old home the morning after Sojourner appeared, and found his grave outside the house where I had been born. They’d buried him two weeks after I’d left. Master Tom had killed him for some infraction no one remembered. The Great House was torched, and the Master’s family dead, just like the Wildersons, who had been too stupid to listen to me. I left with Sam and Darcy and the rest from the Wilderson house, and they were the ones who got me and Charles safe.

Now we live in a house with five rooms in a community made up of our people. I wasn’t the only one who grabbed a white child, and by an unspoken pact, we never told them a word about their origins. Charles believes I’m his real mama and Sam his real papa. And he thinks that skin color changes like eye color. Some babies are born dark and others born light. I’m not going to tell him otherwise. I don’t ever want him to see me as anything less than I am, nor do I want our roles to get reversed, and for him to become the slave to my master.

We never learned what happened to Sojourner. We just know that most of the eastern and southern sides of the country disappeared in flames. All people may be equal in God’s eyes, but every once in a while only wrath will make us equal on earth.

And I still dream about that moment in the barn, when I looked at Charles and saw only his white skin. Not his baby fat, not his beloved blue eyes, not the little hands that trusted me. Only a white boy who would grow into a white man, and white men had hurt me and left me to die. When I took him in my arms, the anger filled me—

And then I remembered why I ran into that house for him. Why I had risked a freedom I had always desired for one baby boy.

I had lied to Missus Wilderson.

He was a substitute, yes, for the children I would never ever see.

But that never stopped me from loving him.

 

____________________________________________

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Arrival of Truth

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Alternate Warriors, edited by Mike Resnick, TOR Books, September 1993
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Zacarias Pereira Da Mata/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

We are freezing here in Texas. I’ve thrown caution to the wind and made myself a second cup of tea. We started with Hot Apple Spice from Harney’s and now I have Christmas tea from Fortnum brewing.

Questions from readers have been piling up, so here is an interesting one.

What is a workshop burn?

A workshop burn occurs when writers overedit. One time I watched a documentary on beauty pageants and a hair stylist shared that hair looks best when it’s a little dirty, which is why we put product in it. Good writing is like that, a little dirty in a sense that it’s slightly rough and imperfect. There is texture to it.

In a workshop environment, you have a single manuscript being edited by a lot of people, and everyone is actively looking for imperfections. Even worse, everyone is also simultaneously attempting to perfect their own writing, and most writers concentrate on a single issue at a time. Meaning that if Bob became convinced that he is using the word “said” too much, he is going to scrutinize every occurrence of said in your manuscript.

The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk.

~ J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

A gorgeous paragraph.

The writer sees the girl and forgets to breathe. It is a moment of profound loneliness and longing. You know that even if they never meet again, the writer will remember the girl for the rest of his life.

In a workshop environment, inevitably someone would want to fix “She wasn’t doing a thing” to “she wasn’t doing anything.” Then someone else will point out that it is too passive and it needs to be rewritten in an active voice, so it will become “doing nothing”: or “She did nothing,” and then someone else will point out that the girl has no description. Pretty soon you have “The girl leaned on the balcony rail, doing nothing, the curtain of her dark hair spilling over her shoulders” and the magic is gone.

Here is what Chat GPT did with it:

The apartment below mine was the only one with a balcony. I watched a girl standing on it, enveloped by the rich haze of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing anything that I could discern, just leaning against the railing, as if she were holding the universe in place. The way the soft contours of her face and body merged with the hazy light left me feeling a bit unsteady, as though the world itself had shifted.

Ehhhh, no.

Does this mean you should ignore the workshop feedback?

It’s a complicated question. The stock answer is to use the suggestions that you feel make your writing better, but when you are starting out, it’s often hard to figure out what is “better.”

If you are in doubt, it helps to ask when the edits were made. Did the reader read the whole piece of writing first and then offered corrections because they are supposed to or was the need to correct strong enough to stop the reader? Only the second type of correction really matters. Did they stumble over something? Was the issue severe enough to interrupt the act of reading? If it was, it might be something to consider. But then again, we have Bob, who will highlight every “said” in the manuscript as he is going through it out of principle.

::raises her cup of tea:: Here is to Bob! Good luck with your writing this week.

The post Workshop Burn first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Dis mah tunnel, do note trezpaz.

Jus chillin.

I see nothings, I hear nothings.

Y’all are weird. You know that right?

Idle Thoughts On Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, And The Future

The iron rule of politics is that if there are real problems in society and responsible parties don’t deal with them, the irresponsible parties will jump on them.

-Daniel Schwammenthal

It is a sad irony of history that the greatest President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, was succeeded by a President who was arguably the worst. Neither Jefferson Davis nor Robert E Lee managed to do quite so much damage to the United States as Andrew Johnston, a man who came close to undoing the verdict of the American Civil War and managed to do enough to ensure that the racial question continues to plague America to this day. It was a serious mistake. Lincoln knew there was a very real risk of assassination, and if that happened his vice president would assume the presidency and make his own mark on history. If Lincoln had survived, Johnson would have remained a non-entity. But history did not work out that way.

President Roosevelt came very close to repeating that mistake, with far less cause. FDR was nearing the end of his life as he campaigned for his fourth term in office, and he should have known it. He was already showing signs of losing his touch, from working with Stalin and giving him far too much for nothing to alienating his allies, and the odds of him surviving long enough to leave office were extremely low. Fortunately for the United States, FDR was smart enough to choose Harry Truman as VP, and Truman rapidly proved himself a decent president. Imagine if Henry Wallace had remained VP! He was even more trusting and gullible, where Stalin was concerned, and if he had assumed office it is quite likely America would have betrayed their European allies to the Soviet Union.

In ideal times, the VP is little more than a placeholder, a president-in-waiting who will assume office in the event of something happening to the president. His formal roles are very limited and historically vice presidents struggle to carve out a name for themselves. They tend to be chosen for political reasons rather than actual competence. Biden, Pence, and Cheney were picked, I suspect, because they brought something to the ticket, rather than being envisaged as future presidents themselves. The vice presidency is not a guaranteed ticket to the Oval Office unless the president resigns or dies in office.

With that in mind, why did Joe Biden choose Kamala Harris as his vice president?

It is a question that has puzzled me ever since Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020. Was she qualified? Possibly, but there were others more so. Did she have a power base that could be convinced to support Joe Biden? No, her supporters would likely have voted blue no matter who. Was she someone who could be relied upon to work closely with Joe Biden and support his presidency? Probably not, she had attacked Biden heavily during the early debates and could not be trusted to support him. Was she someone who could serve an apprenticeship under Biden, and then assume the presidency in her own right? No, she lacked popularity and an independent support base. Was she a DEI hire? Perhaps, but once again there were others who were more qualified.

Why Kamala Harris? Why not someone who enjoyed more support within the Democratic Party and/or could appeal to swing voters? Why her?

I have a theory, and it is not flattering to Joe Biden.

It was generally asserted, in 2020, that Joe Biden would be a one term president. He would boot the despicable Donald Trump from office, then refuse to seek the nomination for a second term, opening the field to newer and better candidates. His prospective successors would have plenty of time to get their names in front of the public, line up support from donors, and eventually one would emerge with the legitimacy needed to carry the party into the 2024 general election. But was this actually true?

I don’t believe that Joe Biden had any intention of becoming a one term president. Biden has spent much of his career in pursuit of the presidency. He certainly had reason to feel that he had been pushed aside in 2008 and again in 2016, the latter tainted by the fact Hillary Clinton lost to the detested Donald Trump. Whatever agreement was made in smoke-filled back rooms, if indeed there was an agreement, Biden had no intention of honouring it. If winning the presidency is the height of a politician’s career, being re-elected to office is confirmation that you enjoy popularity far beyond your party loyalists. Why would Biden want to give it up?

In that light, choosing Kamala Harris as VP makes perfect sense. She was incredibly unpopular outside California, and never earned a single vote outside her own state (until 2024): indeed, she actually quit the nomination process before the first votes were counted, although is quite likely she would have come in dead last. Having Kamala as VP would force the Democratic party to make a painful choice, if they needed to force Biden to step down. Kamala Harris would be his logical successor, yet she was so unpopular that the odds of her winning against a decent Republican candidate would be extremely low. If the Democrats accepted her as their nominee, she might destroy their hopes of keeping the White House; if they forced a primary, the ensuring civil war would tear the party apart, because they had refused to give a woman of colour the role she was technically entitled to have. Either way, the Democrats would be staring at disaster.

From a political point of view, this is an old and trusted trick. If your prospective successor is far worse, people will think twice before kicking you out of office. A politician as experienced as Joe Biden would know it, and use it. But from a practical point of view, this was utterly disastrous. The Democratic Party could not stop Biden saying he would run for election, nor could they prevent complete disaster when it became clear the entire country that all the fears for Biden’s health were, if anything, understated. A party that spent years insisting that Biden was mentally sound and that anyone who suggested otherwise was spreading fake news could not survive the truth coming out. It was very much the worst case scenario for the party. They put Kamala Harris into the hot seat because it was the best of a set of bad choices, and it cost them. And I think that Biden is currently enjoying their disarray. Who knows? If Biden had stayed in the race, he might have won. No one will ever be able to prove otherwise.

In the end, the problem with Joe Biden was that he put his political career ahead of the long-term good of the country. He won the presidency under circumstances that will (hopefully) never be repeated, circumstances that allowed him to hide his weaknesses and make it easier for him to manipulate the movers and shakers within the party. He did not choose someone who could be a rival for power, nor did he give her any roles that would have prepared her for the presidency. If he chose Kamala Harris because he wanted to safeguard himself, it was a serious mistake. In the end, it helped ensure that Donald Trump would return to the White House.

Does this make sense? What do you think?

***

A while back, I was talking about the public perception of Donald Trump and his enemies, particularly the oddity that the more Trump is attacked legally (with varying degrees of legality) the more popular he becomes. And I came up with this metaphor to explain the situation.

Donald Trump is a selfish cruise ship passenger, who blithely ignores the NO SMOKING signs and lights up his cigars in his cabin. His enemies are the ship’s crew, who try to get water to put out the fire by chopping a hole in the bottom of the ship!

I think this explain something about Trump’s appeal. A man who smokes in a no smoking zone is a jerk, but a crew who actually sink their own ship in a desperate bid to put out the fire is dangerously insane. One might compare it to a farmer who eats up his seed corn, or an astronaut who uses his emergency oxygen supply to perform tricks in zero gravity. The risk is not just born by the farmer or the astronaut, but the people who depend on them. It takes a great deal of effort to make Donald Trump seem like the better candidate, but the Democratic Party succeeded. From the moment Donald Trump became the Republican candidate, his enemies have attacked him in a manner calculated to undermine the United States: they have accused Trump of being a fascist, a Russian agent, a criminal, and twisted the law into a pretzel in a bid to finally defeat the accursed Donald Trump. In doing so, they have severely insulted his voters and make themselves look like the worse choice.

I have said this before and I will say it again. The central paradox of Trumpism is that it has very little to do with Donald Trump. Trump would not have become the Republican candidate, let alone President, if there hadn’t been a mass of desperate, alienated, and largely unheard Americans who were just waiting and praying for a leader. Getting rid of Donald Trump would not get rid of his supporters, who would start looking for a new leader. Trump did not create the tensions dividing the United States. He merely took advantage of them.

The key to defeating Trump would be to acknowledge that his supporters have a point and take steps to reach out to them. This would require, however, both the Democratic and Republican parties to give up the one thing they won’t – power. Both parties have lost the ability to connect with their base, understand their aspirations, and indulge in practical politics and reasonable compromises to create a world that everyone can tolerate, even if they don’t get everything they want. Instead, they have resorted to delegitimizing Donald Trump and his supporters, which has served as proof that the parties are unable or unwilling to address the issues that matter most to their voters.

The core of the problem, however, is that managers have taken over both parties.

This probably requires some explanation. Most institutions consists of producers and managers. Producers are innovators, practical men of hard science who have a realistic view of the world combined with the imagination to think outside the box. Managers are organisers, people who try to keep the institution going and refuse to think outside the box, for fear it might be enough to destroy them. At an extreme – I’m talking about stereotypes and generalisations here – Tony Stark is a producer, Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss is a manager.

The Pointy-Haired Boss looks incompetent to Dilbert, and by extension the readers, but he is actually very competent in his own field. He has an understanding of how the company bureaucracy actually functions, and how to manipulate the corporation to secure his own position. He may not understand that 2+2 = 4, but he does understand the importance of making himself look good even if his actions are actually detrimental to the corporation and/or his staff. At base, he puts appearance over reality: he will hire an employee who can make him look good, rather than someone who can do good work. This is partly why managers get caught up in insane fads and internal reporting that is worse than useless: it doesn’t matter to a producer if the staff is properly diverse or not, or if the TPS reports are in on time, but to a manager the appearance of failure is worse than actual failure (particularly if he can escape blame for the disaster.)

Producers and managers rarely get along, particularly if there is a personality conflict right from the start. Producers are focused on actually doing something, managers are focused on procedure and policies rather than practicality. Producers are forthright and plainspoken, good men if not always very nice men, while managers have a nasty tendency to dance around the subject and refuse to make their feelings explicit, for fear someone will hold them to account for it. At base, most managers are subconsciously afraid of producers. A man who can do something real is a man who has options most managers lack, which means he has to be kept under control. When they feel they have actual power, managers enjoy making producers jump through hoops. It isn’t a coincidence that vast numbers of managers gravitate to HR departments.

A small number of managers is often good for an institution. The greater the number of managers, however, the more problems they will cause in a desperate bid to justify their existence. A middle manager like Bill Lumbergh wastes time and resources on pointless diversions, while the company itself goes to the dogs. The more managers take power, the more they promote their fellow managers (choosing recruits for going to the right schools instead of having the right experience, for example, or picking people they know will support them) and the more they use their understanding of internal procedures to drive out producers from their company. At some point, an institution reaches a tipping point where there is a critical mass of managers who have completely lost touch with the reality of what they are trying to do and the company itself is no longer fit for purpose. If there is competition, the company collapses and its assets sold to more productive companies: if it has secured a dominant place in the market, it shambles on, producing worse and worse produce, until it finally collapses. I suspect that both Facebook and Microsoft are currently in this state.

This problem bedevils both the Republican and the Democratic party, and to a very large extent much of America. The most significant figures in both parties are old (Nancy Pelosi, for example, is 85; Mitch McConnell is 83; Donald Trump is 79; even Kamala Harris is 61) and perhaps the only major exception amongst the senior politicians is JD Vance (41). This has provided fertile breeding room for both managers and the bureaucracy they bring in their wake, but also a lack of understanding of what is truly important. The elites have lost touch with the people they represent, and put appearance over reality. They are no longer capable of imagining what life is like for people without their privilege, and in many cases put forward policies that are at best useless and at worst completely out of touch. This drives middle managers to do stupid things to prove their value, many of which are actively harmful and/or mind-boggling stupid.

Worse, they are incapable of recognising their supporters no longer have any trust or faith in them. The election proved, beyond a doubt, that supposedly solid Democratic voters were willing to give Donald Trump a chance – and while this seems absurd, it does make a certain degree of sense. The voters want sensible policies, not foolish and short-sighted policies designed to please college students rather than the people they affect. Berating these voters, mocking and censoring and treating them as de facto children, lacking agency of their own, is the act of a manager, not a producer. Denying them any say in who should be the Democratic candidate, after Joe Biden stepped down, was the icing on the cake, but insulting them was even worse.

A producer would actually listen to the voters, then actually adapt his tactics to give them what they wanted. This is inconceivable to managers. The idea that their power could be questioned is unthinkable, because if it were to be challenged it would force them to justify themselves. Why, they might be fired! This provokes a panicky response, which in turn fuels hatred and contempt amongst their employees. It also makes it harder for them to understand what is really going on. If no one is telling them the truth, how can they adapt? Indeed, one of the more persuasive explanations for Hillary Clinton’s failure to adjust her tactics in 2016 was that she thought she was winning, because no one was ready and willing to tell her the truth!

The sad truth is that vast numbers of Americans did not vote for Donald Trump, but against government managerialism. Against bureaucratic overreach, against distant government agencies that blight the lives of people they know nothing about, against corporate exploitation and mass migration and political correctness and many other problems that have blended together into a tidal wave of discontent and anger that is currently lapping against managerial castles of sand. They voted against people who put appearance ahead of reality, people who believed that declaring something to be true was enough to make it so, people who mindlessly attacked anyone who didn’t get with the program the moment it was announced. Donald Trump did not create this wave. The dispute over H-1B visas is a sign that the wave may wash against him too, if he fails to get ahead of it.

Put unkindly, managers have become a little like Colonel Jessup, loudly proclaiming “you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honour, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.” And just like Colonel Jessup, they don’t realise that their actions have proven they cannot be trusted to be on that wall. They are incapable of taking decisive action, which means that problems tend to fester (like the grooming gangs in the UK) and when pushed into a position where they have to do something, they have a nasty habit of blaming the messenger instead.

The lesson of the election is that the Democratic Party needs some time to rebalance itself, to purge the ageing gentocrats and the crazies and work to get back in touch with the American people. It must put forward candidates who are not professional politicians, but people who have grown up in the real world and understand the importance of keeping politics practical, and compromising where necessary, people who are capable of remembering that politicians work for the people. It must stop gathering issues into a huge bundle where one bad apple can be used to taint the rest; it must isolate issues, and address them one by one, and it must always take into account the needs and feelings of those who are affected by changes in the law, or culture, or society. Most importantly of all, it must commit itself to rebuilding the social contract, to rebuild the legitimacy that so many Americans think the federal government has lost.

It must be capable of making hard decisions, including the hard decision to give up power and give up the pretence that they are the parents and they know better, while the rest of the population are the children who must obey. It is never easy for any parent to let the child fly free, to make their own mistakes, but failing to do so means a child that will never grow up (despite having an adult body) or a child driven to perpetual rebellion, to endless pointless defiance even if defiance is not in their best interests. Voting for Donald Trump should not have been an act of rebellion, but that was what it was. The Democratic Party must take heed.

And after two defeats to Donald Trump, perhaps the time is right for a change.

I wasn’t impressed by most pro/anti-Harris or pro/anti-Trump memes this time around (most were cringe or just plain silly) but this one points out the problem nicely:

Variety reports that Teacup has been canceled after just one season. Click the image to read the article.

The Dushegub Faction of the BDH informed us that today is a Hughday. Contrary to their initial statement, they were not willing to discuss.

First half here.

Three months ago, he had come to Baile with 332 soldiers, all that remained of the Iron Dogs, the elite army he once built and led for Roland, the sun around which his universe had revolved.

He’d thought of Roland as his god and father, the man who rescued him when he was a child, taught him the magic and secrets of a forgotten age, and granted him the gift of the bloodline bond, mingling their blood and sharing his power.  

For his part, Roland had thought of him as a convenient tool. When tools stopped working, they were discarded.

One failure. Just one. That’s all it took.

A gust of wind fanned him. He waited it out and resumed his trek along the ledge.

Roland had purged him, stripping him of everything: his power, his place, his purpose, and the immortality Roland’s affection promised. The bond that used to be a source of strength and reassurance turned into a burning void that gaped in his soul, gnawing at him with scorching, razor-sharp teeth. It nearly drove him out of his mind, and he’d crawled into a bottle to find oblivion. He would’ve died there, except his once-father hadn’t been contented with throwing him away. Roland also decided to dismantle everything he’d built, so he used the Golden Legion, his necromancers armed with hordes of mindless vampires, to exterminate the Iron Dogs.

For their sake, he pulled himself together enough to reshape the tatters of the best private army on the continent into a small, but powerful, fighting force. A force that needed to be housed and fed and had no means to pay for either. He needed food and housing, and Elara and her people required protection from Roland’s necromancers who desired their castle.

An alliance was formed. His reputation was shit, hers was worse, they married to make it believable and to buy time. He and Elara clashed the moment they met. They argued over everything: money, strategy, people… He rushed to fortify the castle against the attack he knew would come and she clung to her traditions and tried to cobble together enough money to keep up with his requests. He’d thrown himself into this tug of war, at first enraged and then looking forward to it.

He was almost to the window now.

And then they were invaded by an enemy like no other.

Somehow in the middle of it all, Elara became the center of his world. They slept together once, and those short few hours were the first time since the purge he felt a hint of happiness. A cruel glimpse of what life could be like.

They saved the neighboring town, but the enemy returned just as Landon Nez, the Legatus of the Golden Legion and Roland’s premier necromancer, came calling with his undead horde.

It was the kind of battle that spawned legends. In the end, he managed to turn the tide, but Nez had captured him, and he got to see his father one more time.

Roland’s image surfaced from his memory, wrapped in magic, with the face of a sage, radiating kindness and wisdom.

Take my hand, Hugh.  Take my hand and everything will be forgiven.  Everything will be as it was.

He’s laughed in his former god’s face. He thought he would die. Instead, his wife came for him. She appeared before Roland in her true shape, and it was so terrifying that the immortal wizard fled.

The memory of what she was lived deep inside Hugh as well, but he did not reach for it. There were no words to describe the chaos of teeth, mouths, and eyes wrapped in a cosmic cold. He’d tried to recall it before and remembering it stretched his sanity to its limit.

He had woken up in his bed three weeks ago. She came to visit him and brought him crepes she made.

You’re my husband, Hugh. As long as you want to stay here, you’ll have a home. I’ll never abandon you.

They hadn’t had a real conversation since. They nodded at each other, they resumed their petty bickering in a half-hearted way, but they did not discuss his past or what she was. She hadn’t come to his bed again.

And now she was not at her desk for the fourth day in a row.

He reached the window. The ledge had ended and there was no windowsill.

The woman was a fucking disease that took root in his brain and refused to leave.

He gripped the edge of the window and slowly leaned as far as he could, craning his neck to glance through the glass. She sat in an overstuffed chair with a knitted blanket on her lap. Her long white hair was down, and it dripped over her shoulders like a silver curtain.

The wind hit him again, and he pressed his back against the stone. This was one of the few times in life when being smaller would’ve been an asset.

The gust died and he leaned to the side one more time.

She was watching a computer monitor mounted on the wall and taking notes in a small notebook.

He focused on the muffled sound coming through the window. A soft male voice with a trace of London.

“… pastry week.”

What the hell.

“…the rough puff pastry… bakers… rolling out the dough and laminating it with cold butter. If the butter is too warm…”

Hugh took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall.

He walked across a narrow ledge a hundred feet above the ground in the middle of the night for a baking show. He had no one to blame but himself. He let the harpy get under his skin and this was the result.

A hint of movement at the edge of the forest caught his attention. He focused on it.

Three people emerged from the tree line, two in Iron Dog black and one a nightmarish meld of wolf and human, a shaggy monster seven feet tall. Karen. One of his best scouts.

The other two were Stoyan, one of his centurions, and Sharif, also a werewolf and the new scout master. The three Iron Dogs double-timed it to the castle.

Stoyan wasn’t fond of night adventures in the forest, especially their forest. Magic waves nourished the trees, speeding up the growth, but the woods around Baile defied all expectations. They felt ancient, as if they had been growing here for a thousand years, with old, rugged trees and undergrowth that spawned hungry things with savage claws and bear trap teeth. The Iron Dogs treated the forest with healthy respect and never went in alone.

Something happened. Something bad enough for Sharif to notify the centurion on watch and urgent enough that Stoyan didn’t wait until daylight to check it out.

The small door within the gate swung open, and the three Iron Dogs passed through into the bailey. Sharif inhaled and stopped. The three of them looked up, directly at him.

Stoyan squinted, as if he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

Hugh put his finger to his lips and pointed at the window of his study. Stoyan gaped at him for two seconds, nodded, and the three soldiers jogged to the keep’s door.

So much for the quite evening. The Universe must’ve decided that he rested long enough.

The wind pulled at him.

Hugh gritted his teeth and started back along the ledge to his turret.

The post Hughday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I love the cat!

Thanks for the update on the German Edition, very pleased that Inheritance is now multi-language as it will further ensure that we get the whole series published (when written). I also very much like the covers, and am glad that Hobbes is getting the publicity that he so richly deserves!
BTW: how are your ‘kittens’ doing? Any chance of photos?

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Generational Change

Those of you who read my monthly Recommended Reading List know I love The Year’s Best Sports Writing volumes. I always feel sad when I finish reading it, but this year, I felt especially bereft. Normally, I would have started The Best American Essays or some other nonfiction book to fill that slot, but I didn’t have anything on my TBR shelf that would have fit into that mix of uplifting and difficult and well written.

So, thanks to some automated bot suggestion on Amazon, I ordered The Best American Sports Writing of The Century, edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout. The book is almost 25 years old (and does not have an ebook edition for obvious reasons), but I didn’t care. I figured there would be a lot of good reading in it.

What I hadn’t expected was the healthy dose of perspective that came from David Halberstam’s brilliant introduction.

Halberstam was one of the most influential writers of his generation. He died in a car accident, not ten years after writing that introduction. I suspect he had a lot more books in him that we’ve sadly been robbed of.

He wrote one of the most devastating nonfiction books on the Vietnam War, which came out while the war was still going on. In the late 1970s, he wrote a book called The Powers That Be, which examined the impact the media had on history (put a pin in that right now), and he also wrote some of the classics of sports journalism, including a book I have on my shelf called The Summer of ’49.

All of that experience came together in this long introduction, which you can probably read as part of the “look inside this book” feature on any online bookstore.

What this introduction did was look at the history of sports journalism and sports writing as it developed in the 20th century. In the 19th, sport itself was local and often based in neighborhoods. It took nearly 100 years to become the big entertainment business it was in the 1960s, and another sixty years to become the juggernaut it is today—not that Halberstam lived to see that.

Right now, sport is getting me through some of the world’s dark times, and I noticed as it’s been happening that I had the same experience in 2020.

In the introduction, Halberstam explores several things and does so in the context of 800 pages of historical sports writing. Some of what he does here is what I call “editorial justification.” It’s something that all of us who edit do: Here are the reasons I chose the works in this book—not just because I like them (which I do) but because they make this point or illustrate that concept or explore these tiny corners of this particular topic.

Inside Halberstam’s justification, though, is a brilliant century-eye view of the way writing and journalism and entertainment changed as the world changed.

Reading about those changes got me thinking about our changing world. I’m going to get to modern times later in this post—and yes, I’ll be dealing mostly with fiction—but I’m going to set it up first.

Halberstam started the essay (and the book) with Gay Talese’s 1966 piece on baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (whom most of you probably know of because he married Marilyn Monroe). The Talese article, titled “The Silent Season of a Hero,” is considered by some to be the beginning of a sea-change in reporting called New Journalism.

In his editorial justification, Halberstam wrote:

It strikes me that the Talese piece represents a number of things that were taking place in American journalism at the time—some twenty years after the end of World War II. The first thing is that the level of education was going up significantly, both among writers and among readers. That mandated better, more concise writing.

Right there, I perked up when I was reading. It was kind of a well-duh moment for me: Of course what was happening in the journalism profession and in the craft itself was a reflection of what was going on in society at the time. Of course.

He went on:

It also meant that because of a burgeoning and growing paperback market, the economics of the profession were getting better: self-employed writers were doing better financially and could take more time to stake out a piece. In the previous era, a freelance writer had to scrounge harder to make a living, fighting constantly against the limits of time, more often than not writing pieces he or she did not particularly want to write in order to subsidize the pieces the writer did want to do.

Those changes—writers doing better financially—pretty much describes what happened to the fiction-writing profession as well, from about 1960 with the rise of paperbacks to the massive distribution collapse in the mid-1990s.

After that collapse, everything got very hard for fiction writers for about 15 years. A lot of writers vanished during that time, heading off to professorships or corporate jobs, convinced that writers couldn’t make a living at their chosen profession.

They had a point.

Anyway, a few pages later, Halberstam writes that he did not intend this collection to become a work of history, although it had “a certain historical legitimacy.” He explains:

In the background as we track the century from beginning to end, the reader should be able to see the changes being wrought by society by a number of forces: racial change, the coming of stunning new material affluence, the growing importance of sports in what is increasingly an entertainment age, and finally the effect of other communications on print.

He elaborates on all of those things, but I’m going to focus on the final one. For that, he wrote:

The role of print was changing—it was no longer the fastest or the most important means of communication. Instead by the late fifties reporters had to assume that in most cases their readers knew the [sports] score and the essentials of what had taken place; increasingly their job was to explain what happened and why it had happened, and what these athletes whom they had seen play were really like.

My copy of the book is a sea of underlines here. I really paid attention on two levels—on what Halberstam was actually saying and how all of this analysis could apply to 2025. (Not literally—again, I’ll get to it. Bear with me.)

He discussed politics and regular news reporting as seen through the lens of television cameras, and then wrote that TV had become more powerful in the 1960s than it had ever been before. He wrote:

That meant talented print journalists, to remain viable and be of value, had to go where television cameras could not go (or where television executives were too lazy to send them) and answer questions that were posed by what readers had already seen on television.

Therefore, for print to survive, the reporting had to be better and more thoughtful, the writing had to be better, and above all—the storytelling itself had to be better. Print people were being forced to become not merely journalists, but in the best sense it seems to me, dramatists as well.

I pulled back here and thought long and hard about what he was saying, and the implications.

Of course, I went to modern media first because I have three levels of training. Level one: my B.A. is in history (and I constantly wonder if I should get some graduate degrees in it—until I remember that I would have to focus on a time period and immerse myself in it. My butterfly brain resists that on so many levels that I can’t begin to express how I would feel about it).

Level two: my secondary training is in journalism. I started in print (and initially got published, ironically enough, as a sports writer at 16, covering my high school), and then fell into broadcast journalism. And no, I don’t have a degree in it. I worked as a reporter all through college, and then became a news director. Let’s put a pin in that one too.

Level three: fiction and editing. Once again, I learned by doing, which was pretty much all we had. Sure, there were classes at the universities (one story per semester, taught by someone who had no idea how to make a living at it), but mostly there were workshops (like Clarion) taught by working writers, and talks at fiction conventions and little else.

So…all of those levels combined into the way my brain worked after going deep into the Halberstam piece.

First, modern media.

I’ve been saying for some years now that it needed to change. If it’s broadcast, it’s being run by people who have no journalism experience as well as no courage. Let me add this: It has always been so. TV and radio were generally owned by entertainment companies that were required, by law, to include news.

(Most of these laws, by the way, were gutted first by the Reagan administration and then by each Republican administration since.)

The influential print media left the hands of large family groups (the Grahams at The Washington Post and the Chandlers at the Los Angeles Times come to mind), and were purchased by billionaires. At first, those purchases were praised, but they’re not going well now.

Again, this is not a huge change. William Randolph Hearst owned the biggest media empire in the world in his lifetime, and controlled content with an iron fist.

So the idea that journalism always had free reign was and is wrong.

However, when I say that the media has to change, I’m referring to generational change, just like Halberstam discussed above.

Sadly, education isn’t as good now as it was in the 1960s. The U.S. government turned its back on good education for all in the 1980s—once again under Reagan—but most successive administrations did little to shore it up. A lot of people fell through the cracks.

And now, most folks do not have the time for long-form journalism or explanations of “what happened and why it had happened.” There are/were entire cable news channels dedicated to just that kind of musing, but those aren’t reaching the younger generations either. Cord-cutting and fragmentation is actually bringing journalism into a completely different place than it was when Gay Talese wrote his article in 1966.

In some ways, we’re returning to the 19th century when the news (and entertainment) was fragmented. In other ways, we’re in a whole new place where a journalist or a fiction writer can hang out her shingle and people can come support her and her long-form journalism or fiction or whatever.

That’s good, if you’re good at the social media side, and difficult if you’re not.

But…what I mean when I say that the media needs to change with the world is that with online access and cable and broadcast news and podcasts, there are literally thousands of ways to get information.

Now, journalists need to figure out how to do it on their own. And they need to throw out some of the rules developed at the journalism schools they all went to.

Here we’re going to have a sidebar for one of my pet rants:

When I moved to Oregon, I wanted to freelance for the local Eugene paper. The city desk editor, whom they shuttled me off to, wouldn’t give me the time of day. I had written for major publications around the world. I’d had pieces on NPR and was still working for several information-based foundations. I had been a news director for years.

What I didn’t have, and what he sniffed over, was a journalism degree. My experience counted for nothing; all that mattered to him—and his cronies as the years went on—was the vaunted degree.

Over the years, I’ve worked with people who have J-school degrees but little experience. They’re terrible reporters and even worse writers. Plus they have a two-sides attitude, particularly when it comes to politics.

They don’t want to talk to everyone. They figure there’s only two sides—for and against. Most things in life are more complex than that.

So as the media landscape is fragmenting and becoming more complex, the big media companies are becoming less so.

They’re paying a price for that. But not the price everyone discussed in November. For all the hand-wringing after the election, the loss of viewership among most of the cable news channels isn’t a big deal. It happens after every election.

What is a big deal is that both readership and viewership of all traditional mainstream news has been declining for decades now. And the change is profound. People 50 and older still tend to get their news from traditional sources like television or print, but people younger than 50 get their news from social media or a digital aggregator. Mostly, though, they get their news from a variety of sources, some of them untested and inaccurate.

Rather than lament that this change allows for the spread of disinformation as most are doing, the media companies (and those of us who work in media) should be embracing the change, and finding other ways to fight disinformation.

Let me add this: when big media companies are in the hands of a single entity, be the Murdochs at Fox or Gannett News Media, the news is biased anyway. The owners of large corporations have an agenda. Sometimes it is to make profits. Sometimes it is to spread a certain perspective in the world.

Once again, it has always been thus. I didn’t work for commercial stations back in the day, because commercial reporters were muzzled. They were not allowed to report on any company that advertised with the parent company. So imagine this: no investigative reporting on pollution from a local company. Coverage was only allowed when the story became too big to ignore.

Journalism is changing again, and we need to embrace that change. We need to see the plus sides of it.

Places like Patreon and Substack help, but they have issues as well. They’re private companies that can get sold like Twitter did and then there will be huge (and often unpleasant) changes.

So…my mind went through all of that as I read the Halberstam piece. New Journalism (which is now old journalism) still exists. There are places that publish great long-form articles. Now there’s some great long-form reporting on podcasts and in new forms of media that did not exist when Halberstam wrote his introduction.

The key will be how the creatives—from writers to photographers and others—respond to these new forms of media. Some of us will adopt what we can, and others will cling to the old ways.

Maybe the old ways will return. Who knows?

Once I got through the traditional thinking on all of that, though, my mind turned toward fiction.

No one, to my knowledge, has done the kind of analysis of fiction in the 20th century that Halberstam did (first in the late 1970s, and then again in this article). Sure, there’s been a lot of writing about the history of fiction, in America in particular.

But that writing is myopic. The literary historians in the university system (including my late brother) focused on literary works or “mainstream” bestsellers, books that took over the national consciousness and led to changes and/or discussions.

There have been too many papers written on the impact of Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird and not enough on the overall fiction landscape.

The genres aren’t immune from the myopia. I have read as many books on the history of science fiction and fantasy as I can get my hands on, and probably just as many on the history of mystery fiction (both here and in the U.K.).

There are fewer analyses of romance fiction for two reasons: The first is that the genre is the newest of all of the big genres and second is deadlier. Romance was (and is) perceived as fiction for and by women, so it isn’t considered important (especially by the white men who ran university literary programs for most of the past century).

What books there are on romance were written by romance writers and aficionados for romance writers and aficionados.

So, let me put this out there for graduate students in search of a topic: Examine all of fiction publishing since the 1890s or so—genres, pulps, digests, and paperbacks as well as hardcovers and “important” books. See where such an examination takes you. If nothing else, I can guarantee that your dissertation will be different than all the others.

What Halberstam did so deftly in his introduction, though, is something I need to spend quite a bit of time thinking about.

He combined the changes inside America with the changes in the journalism business. Then he looked at the impact of those changes on the way that sports journalism was produced—

And he examined the impact those changes had on craft.

For example, he included little craft gems like this:

The [New York Times] in those days was still a place where copy editors were all-powerful, on red alert for any departure from the strictest adherence to traditional journalistic form, and [Talese’s] tenure there had not been a particularly happy one. But if he had wrestled constantly with the paper’s copy editors, his work was greatly admired elsewhere, particularly by reporters of his own generation in city rooms around the country who were, like him, struggling to break out of the narrow confines of traditional journalism and bring to their work both a greater sense of realism as well as a greater literary touch.

Passages like this make me think of modern traditional publishing, which got more and more hidebound after the distribution collapse in the 1990s. Then the purchase of those publishing companies by non-book people, who were buying inventory and intellectual property, and who needed these companies to make a profit on the balance sheet.

To do that, they hired editors without experience, many of them Ivy League graduates whose biggest credential was taking classes from some famous fiction writer (who could no longer make a living at writing). (Sound familiar? See J-School above.)

It became more and more difficult for established writers to work with these inexperienced (and low-wage) editors, prompting some writers to change companies. Other writers simply left to do other things, and once self-publishing became a major big deal, started publishing their own works.

There have been a lot of changes in fiction publishing, both indie and traditional, in this century. From the gold rush of new material when the Kindle was introduced in 2007 to the plethora of distribution sites for fiction, the changes have been immense.

For a while, it was possible for all of us to have the same information and act on it in the same way. If you have a newsletter, you get x-many more sales. If you monkey with Amazon’s algorithms, you will get your book in front of these eyeballs. If you use this program, you will have adequate paper books.

And then…suddenly…everything changed. Just like in the California Gold Rush, there’s money to be made in side businesses. You can make money as a cover designer, as a virtual assistant managing social media, as an expert in In-Design.

Not every writer needs those services, but a lot of them do.

What I find most amusing now is that, properly designed, indie books look better than traditionally published books. Traditional publishing companies are still trying to cost-cut their way to profit.

Indies are still experimenting with the latest bestest coolest tech, to see if it will not only enhance book sales, but also the reading experience.

What I hadn’t really considered—and I should have—was the thing that Halberstam was mentioning the most in his rather long introduction. He talked about technological, economic, and cultural change leading to changes in craft.

I know that has happened for fiction writers. I know that a lot of writers feel free to write what they want. I know many writers who are writing long series that would have either never sold at all in traditional publishing or been abandoned midway through the series.

Halberstam talks mostly about changes in storytelling methods, and I think we’re seeing that. I’m not well read enough, though, in the indie world to know what the craft changes are.

And it’s also not just a matter of being well-read. It’s also a matter of influence. When the publishing world was small, as it was in 1966, everyone saw a piece like Gay Talese’s. Everyone had an opinion about it—some good and some bad.

Talese’s influence on his peers came in the form of freedom to write differently as well as the freedom to try something new with the writing career.

We, as indie writers and publishers, can see what the something new is on the business level. I’m watching all the beautiful books being produced by writers like Anthea Sharp and Lisa Silverthorne. I want my books to be lovely as well, and I have a vision for it. Back in the day, it cost thousands of dollars to print beautiful books, and now it can be done as print-on demand.

There are other innovations that don’t interest me at all. Some of them make me ask a business question, “Should I do this? Will I be able to monetize it?” And some of them make me shrug. Some of them make me realize that there’s only so much time in every day, and I need it to do many things, including writing and running my business.

But as I climb out of these hectic and difficult past two years, I can finally see ahead. I didn’t realize, until I read the old Halberstam essay, that part of looking ahead is looking backwards on a macro scale and figuring out what the heck happened in the industry.

The cool thing about the macro scale is this: It makes everything that happened to an individual writer during the change impersonal.

For example, I got caught in the distribution downturn and wasn’t allowed by my traditional publisher to finish a series. I spent the early part of this century scrambling for work.

Then indie came along, and opened a lot of doors. But nothing remains the same. What looked good in 2015 doesn’t look good now. What worked ten years ago doesn’t work at all now.

Change happens. Sometimes it’s good, but often it’s confusing and difficult and frightening.

I was one of the first generations to go to college after New Journalism took over the big publications in New York. I had professors who railed against that. I mostly ignored it because I wasn’t a journalism major. I worked in the industry and learned a lot. But today I find myself thinking of my colleagues, many of whom were journalism majors, and wonder what they’re doing now.

I know of two people who followed the same path I did. One, a beautiful and brilliant reporter, ended up as an investigative reporter on a major Wisconsin TV station. Now, she’s working as senior anchor (and still reporting), benefitting from all the lawsuits that women had filed over the years about ageism. (She fully admits this.)

The other kept getting jobs at places that died. From UPI to major newspapers that closed up shop, he moved from place to place until he finally gave up and went fully into broadcast. I hear his familiar voice on occasion on one of the streaming channels, where he has his own show.

Those two stuck with it, weren’t afraid to take risks, and ended up with forty-year long careers.

The others…? I have no idea where they are now. I do know that, even in those halcyon days, they had trouble finding work because their writing showed their lack of experience in actual reporting.

They’re victims of a change that is no longer really relevant to modern journalism. And another change is coming.

I can see the changes in the media—as I mentioned above.

I’m going to have to think about what’s going on in fiction.

And I’m really looking forward to that.

 

“Generational Change,” copyright © 2024/2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

 

…to all of the backers on the Series Collide Kickstarter. You went beyond our expectations. We—I—appreciate the support.

Thank you!

I’m still catching up on the Recommended Reading Lists for 2024. After August, I have to finish September’s (and December, of course), and then I’ll be caught up! Yay!

I remember August better than I remember July. (Whew.) We held a successful anthology workshop. We learned a lot. We made a lot of progress on truly good things. And…we had to hire a lot more lawyers than the two we usually deal with. Such fun that was/is. [sarcasm alert]

I did get a lot more reading done in August than I did in July, but still not as much as I would have liked. Although some of that reading was for the anthology workshop, which I can’t count here, but you will see many of those stories in the coming year, as we revive and rebrand Fiction River. (Oh, I’m looking forward to that.)

So you’ll find some interesting books here, and just two articles to match my necessarily short attention span from that month.

August 2024

 

Baxter, John, Montemarte: Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, Harper Collins, 2017. I plucked this out of my TBR pile because I needed something that was not going to challenge me in the front part of the month. I just needed vignettes, which this has in abundance. What I did not expect was how many story ideas I got from this. Quite a few! I hope I’ll have a chance to get to them before getting distracted by something else. There are a lot of fun things here, as always with a John Baxter travel “guide.”  (It’s an excuse for great literary and historical essays.

Cabot, Meg, No Judgements, William Morrow, 2019. A fun and dramatic book from Meg Cabot. This one is set on a Florida island as a hurricane bears down. Our heroine is a clueless New Yorker who had never lived through severe storms before and can’t quite believe the locals when they tell her that she has to do certain things. Of course, there’s this one particular local who helps her…

One of the most fun things about this book for me is that I lived on the Oregon Coast for 23 years. We had hurricanes, although they’re not called hurricanes in that part of the world. We had Big Storms. And no one from the outside could believe that things would be bad. In fact, when there were tsunami warnings, people drove to the Oregon Coast to watch the big wave hit. Friends of ours had to yank tourists off the beaches so they wouldn’t be killed. (I kid you not.)

So there’s an extra layer in this book for me, but I think you’ll enjoy it even without that. This is Meg Cabot at her most fun.

Nevala-Lee, Alec, Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Dey Street, 2018. Alec’s book is a Hugo and Locus Award Finalist. I bought the paperback when it came out. (Note: I’ve linked to a ridiculously priced ebook.) When the book came out, I picked it up a few times, cherry-picked a few references using the index, and got grumpy. I fell into the mistake so many writers make, which is that the book I held was not the book I would have written. Let me say to me (and to all of you who do that): Well, duh. If I was going to write the book, I would…ahem…write the book.

I don’t know what made me pick up the book in August, but I’m so glad I did. It kept me entertained while a lot of the above stuff happened in my life. I had met Isaac a few times, and the bastard groped me every single time. I nearly killed him once in an elevator, because my reaction to being grabbed like that is to hit someone as hard as I could with my elbow, and I refrained only because it was my first Nebula award ceremony as the editor of F&SF. I had a thought that maybe whoever groped me was someone famous—and it was a frail Asimov. His delicate ribcage was only a few inches from my deadly elbow. That would have been bad.

Needless to say that while the rest of the world admires the heck out of that man, I do not. I didn’t know much about Campbell other than the stories the old timers told about him, and I had avoided reading/listening to stories about Hubbard. OMG, that man should have been in jail. Heinlein, whom I had met and who was bombastic as hell, came out the best.

Kudos for Alec for writing about all of these men, warts and all. I love the analysis of what sf became because of them and what still needs to be changed. As worthy a book as I have read in years.

Rose, Lucy, “The Worst Thing that Can Happen is You Suck,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2024. This is a roundtable interview with actors John Hamm, Matt Bomer, Nicholas Galitzine, Clive Owen, David Oyelowo, and Collum Turner. I love the roundtables that The Hollywood Reporter does because they get a group of professionals together to discuss their art. There’s always something in the roundtables that mean something to me. Here, there are quotes I circled from Clive Owen…

I have never listened to anybody else. Ultimately, you are the one who has to go to work every day. I do what I want to do because that’s what’s going to sustain me through it.

…and John Hamm…

But yeah, to Clive’s point, agents and managers can all bat a thousand in the rearview mirror, they can always tell you what they thought after the thing came out and it was good or bad. It’s in the moment that you have to make the decision. And the worst thing that can happen is you suck.

I love that last part, which is also the title of this piece in the printed form. “The worst thing that can happen is you suck.” Exactly. And that’s not so very bad, now is it?

Silva, Daniel, A Death in Cornwall, HarperCollins, 2024. I’m fascinated by the way that Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series has changed since the Trump era began. Silva’s books were always on the edge of modern politics, as close to real politics as possible. But it became clear that Silva was struggling with the constant changes instigated by Trump in his first term, and then the worldwide unrest in Biden’s term—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the utter mess in the Middle East.

Silva solved it by returning Allon to his roots; he was a painter and an art restorer who also became a spy. (And then a super spy.) Now, he has retired and gone back to restoring amazing paintings…and solving worldwide art-related crimes. This crime starts in Allon’s former residence on the Cornish coast of England, with the death of a reknown art history professor and scurries along from there. Highly recommended.

Stoynoff, Natasha,“Brooke Shields Wants You To Know She Is Just Fine,” AARP Magazine, April/May 2024.  Because of the year I had in 2024, I sometimes find it hard to remember articles I had marked as long ago (and far away) as August. I have dumped a few magazines without recommending anything from them because, for the life of me, I have no idea why I marked a certain page.

Not so with the April/May AARP Magazine. I picked it up to see what I had recommended, didn’t see my usual mark, and frowned at it. I distinctly remember reading the Brooke Shields interview and finding it both wise and inspiring.

Brooke Shields and I are of an age. She’s younger, but not by much. And by the time she was being exploited all over the world, I was old enough to feel icky about it, but young enough not to know why. This article addresses her past, yes, but it also looks at her now. At least from this interview, it seems that she has accepted both her age and the changes that aging brings. I recommend this article to everyone.

This morning, while I waited for Gordon’s MRI, my phone made this video for me complete with the overly sentimental music. Apparently I take a lot of pictures of the orange menace. He got in trouble yesterday because he was very pushy about shoving the dogs aside to sit in a specific spot on my lap.

Behold, Tuna the Cat.

He can never see this, or his ego will be even bigger.

The post Tuna’s Video first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

So I’ve been living under a holiday rock. The tree is still up. Yes, I know, but it’s pretty. I will take it down, leave me alone.

Anyway, I just now saw this.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Elisabeth Wheatley (@elisabethwheatley)

I think Elizabeth Wheatley is in Austin and I so owe her a lunch and a coffee. Thank you for making my day! You can find Elizabeth’s books at her online home, at https://elisabethwheatley.com/.

The post The Book Goblin first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

The Series Collide Kickstarter is winding down. As of this writing, we have hit two stretch goals, which brings the total of short stories you’ll get when you back the Kickstarter to 104. Given the unpredictability at the end of a Kickstarter, we might add anywhere from two to four more stories to that total as we hit even more goals.

That’s a lot of reading.

I don’t know about you folks, but I’m finding myself in great need of escapism right now. Fiction is the best way to block out the problems of 2025. What could be better than concentrating on some made-up adventures right now?

The Series Collide Kickstarter features 100 short stories in 36 series. Fifty stories are by me and fifty are by Dean. Think of the five books in the Kickstarter as a massive sampler. You can sample each series and if you like what you’ve read, you’ll have a lot more series reading ahead of you.

As an illustration, read this week’s Free Fiction story. It’s from my Retrieval Artist series. If you like it, there are 15 novels to grab your attention.

So head on over to the Kickstarter. In addition to the five Series Collide books, you can find other short story collections as well as some writing workshops and the opportunity to submit stories to Pulphouse Magazine (which is usually closed to submissions.)

 

Polish published Vesper has revealed the cover for Żądlak, their upcoming translation of Stinger, to be published in February 2025! The art is by Maciej Kamuda, and the translation is by Sławomir Kędzierski.

Żądlak on the Vesper website

From the award-winning, bestselling Retrieval Artist Universe comes a story about a pulse-pounding race for survival and a foreshadowing of dangerous events yet to unfold.

Takara Hamasaki made plans to leave the far-flung starbase for weeks, but something always stopped her. Until today. Now, she finds herself running for her life as bodies fall all around her, cut down by dozens of identical-looking men. If only she can reach her ship, maybe she can escape. Because one thing seems perfectly clear: The men attacking the starbase plan to leave no survivors.  

“Sole Survivor” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love my series stories, like the Retrieval Artist? Support the latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from my different series – Go here now to check it out! 

 

Sole Survivor A Retrieval Artist Universe Story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Takara Hamasaki crouched behind the half-open door, her heart pounding. She stared into the corridor, saw more boots go by. Good god, they made such a horrible thudding noise.

Her mouth tasted of metal, and her eyes stung. The environmental system had to be compromised. Which didn’t surprise her, given the explosion that happened not three minutes ago.

The entire starbase rocked from it. The explosion had to have been huge. The base’s exterior was compensating—that had come through her desk just before she left—but she didn’t know how long it would compensate.

That wasn’t true; she knew it could compensate forever if nothing else went wrong. But she had a hunch a lot of other things would go wrong. Terribly wrong.

She’d had that feeling for months now. It had grown daily, until she woke up every morning, wondering why the hell she hadn’t left yet.

Three weeks ago, she had started stocking her tiny ship, the crap-ass thing that had brought her here half her life ago. She would have left then, except for one thing:

She had no money.

Yeah, she had a job, and yeah, she got paid, but it cost a small fortune to live this far out. The base was in the middle of nowhere, barely in what the Earth Alliance called the Frontier, and a week’s food alone cost as much as her rent in the last Alliance place she had stayed. She got paid well, but every single bit of that money went back into living.

Dammit. She should have started sleeping in her ship. She’d been thinking of it, letting the one-room apartment go, but she kinda liked the privacy, and she really liked the amenities—entertainment on demand, a bed that wrapped itself around her and helped her sleep, and a view of the entire public district from above.

She liked to think it was that view that kept her in the apartment, but if she were honest with herself, it was that view and the bed and the entertainment, maybe not in that order.

And she was cursing herself now.

Then the men—they were all men—wearing boots and weird uniforms marched toward the center of the base. Thousands of people lived or stayed here, but there wasn’t much security. Not enough to deal with those men. She would hear that drumbeat of their stupid boots in her sleep for the rest of her life.

If the rest of her life wasn’t measured in hours. If she ever got a chance to sleep again.

Her traitorous heart was beating in time to those boots. She was breathing through her mouth, hating the taste of the air.

If nothing else, she had to get out of here just to get some good clean oxygen. She had no idea what was causing that burned-rubber stench, but something was, and it was getting worse.

More boots stomped by, and she realized she couldn’t tell the difference between the sound of those that had already passed her and those that were coming up the corridor.

She only had fifty meters to go to get to the docking ring, but that fifty meters seemed like a lightyear.

And she wouldn’t even be here, if it weren’t for her damn survival instinct. She had looked up—before the explosion—saw twenty blond-haired men, all of whom looked like twins. Ten twins—two sets of decaplets?—she had no idea what twenty identical people, the same age, and clearly monozygotic, were called. She supposed there was some name for them, but she wasn’t sure. And, as usual, her brain was busy solving that, instead of trying to save her own single individual untwinned life.

She had scurried through the starbase, utterly terrified. The moment she saw those men enter the base, she left her office through the service corridors. When that seemed too dangerous, she crawled through the bot holes. Thank the universe she was tiny. She usually hated the fact that she was the size of an eleven-year-old girl, and didn’t quite weigh 100 pounds.

At this moment, she figured her tiny size might just save her life.

That, and her prodigious brain. If she could keep it focused instead of letting it skitter away.

Twenty identical men—and that wasn’t the worst of it. They looked like younger versions of the creepy pale guys who had come into the office six months ago, looking for ships. They wanted to know the best place to buy ships in the starbase.

There was no place to buy new ships on the starbase. There were only old and abandoned ships. Fortunately, she had managed to prevent the sale of hers, a year ago. She’d illegally gone into the records and changed her ship’s status from delinquent to paid in full, and then she had made that paid-in-full thing repeat every year. (She’d check it, of course, but it hadn’t failed her, and now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting off this damn base.)

Still those old creepy guys had gotten the names of some good dealers on some nearby satellites and moons, and had left—she thought forever—but they had come back with a scary fast ship and lots of determination.

And, it seemed, lots of younger versions of themselves.

(Clones. What if they were clones? What did that mean?)

The drumbeat of their stupid boots had faded. She scurried into the corridor, then heard a high-pitched male scream, and a thud.

Her heart picked up its own rhythm—faster, so fast, in fact that it felt like her heart was trying to get to the ship before she did.

She slammed herself against the corridor wall, felt it give (cheap-ass base) and caught herself before she fell inward on some unattached panel coupling.

She looked both ways, saw nothing, looked up, didn’t see any movement in the cameras—which the base insisted on keeping obvious so that all kinds of criminals would show up here. If the criminals knew where the monitors were, they felt safe, weirdly enough.

And this base needed criminals. This far outside of the Alliance, the only humans with money were the ones who had stolen it—either illegally or legally through some kind of enterprise that was allowed out here, but not inside the Alliance.

And this place catered to humans. It accepted non-human visitors, but no one here wanted them to stay. In the non-Earth atmosphere sections, the cameras weren’t obvious.

She thanked whatever deity was this far outside of the Alliance that she hadn’t been near the alien wing when the twenty creepy guys arrived and started marching in.

And then her brain offered up some stupid math it had been working on while she was trying to save her own worthless life.

She’d seen more than forty boots stomp past her.

That group of twenty lookalikes had only been the first wave.

Another scream and a thud. Then a woman’s voice:

No! No! I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll—

And the voice just stopped. No thud, no nothing. Just silence.

Takara swallowed hard. That metallic taste made her want to retch, but she didn’t. She didn’t have time for it. She could puke all she wanted when she got on that ship, and got the hell away from here.

She levered herself off the wall, wondering in that moment how long the gravity would remain on if the environmental system melted. Her nose itched—that damn smell—and she wiped the sleeve of her too-thin blouse over it.

She should have dressed better that morning. Not for work, but for escape. Stupid desk job. It made her feel so important. An administrator at 25. She should have questioned it.

She should have questioned so many things.

Like the creepy older guys who looked like the baked and fried versions of the men in boots, stomping down the corridors, killing people.

She blinked, wondered if her eyes were tearing because of the smell or because of her panic, then voted for the smell. The air in the corridor had a bit of white to it, like smoke or something worse, a leaking environment from the alien section.

She was torn between running and tip-toeing her way through the remaining forty-seven meters. She opted for a kind of jog-walk, that way her heels didn’t slap the floor like those boots stomped it.

Another scream, farther away, and the clear sound of begging, although she didn’t recognize the language. Human anyway, or something that spoke like a human and screamed like a human.

Why were these matching people stalking the halls killing everyone they saw? Were they trying to take over the base? If so, why not come to her office? Hers was the first one in the administrative wing, showing her lower-level status—in charge, but not in charge.

In charge enough to see that the base’s exterior was compensating for having a hole blown in it. In charge enough to know how powerful an explosion had to be to break through the shield that protected the base against asteroids and out-of-control ships and anything else that bounced off the thick layers of protection.

A bend in the corridor. Her eyes dripped, her nose dripped, and her throat felt like it was burning up.

She couldn’t see as clearly as she wanted to—no pure white smoke any more, some nasty brown stuff mixed in, and a bit of black.

She pulled off her blouse and put it over her face like a mask, wished she had her environmental suit, wished she knew where she could steal one right now, and then sprinted toward the docking ring.

If she kept walk-jogging, she’d never get there before the oxygen left the area.

Then something else shook the entire base. Like it had earlier. Another damn explosion.

She whimpered, rounded the last corner, saw the docking ring doors—closed.

She cursed (although she wasn’t sure if she did it out loud or just in her head) and hoped to that ever-present unknown deity that her access code still worked.

The minute those doors slid open, the matching marching murderers would know she was here. Or rather, that someone was here.

They’d come for her. They’d make her scream.

But she’d be damned if she begged.

She hadn’t begged ever, not when her dad beat her within an inch of her life, not when she got accused of stealing from that high-class school her mother had warehoused her in, not when her credit got cut off as she fled to the outer reaches of the Alliance.

She hadn’t begged no matter what situation she was in, and she wouldn’t now. It was a point of pride. It might be the last point of pride, hell, it might mark her last victory just before she died, but it would be a victory nonetheless, and it would be hers.

Takara slammed her hand against the identiscanner, then punched in a code, because otherwise she’d have to use her links, and she wasn’t turning them back on, maybe ever, because she didn’t want those crazy matching idiots to not only find her, but find her entire life, stored in the personal memory attached to her private access numbers.

The docking ring doors irised open, and actual air hit her. Real oxygen without the stupid smoky stuff, good enough to make her leap through the doors. Then she turned around and closed them.

She scanned the area, saw feet—not in boots—attached to motionless legs, attached to bleeding bodies, attached to people she knew, and she just shut it all off, because if she saw them as friends or co-workers or hell, other human beings, she wouldn’t be able to run past them, wouldn’t be able to get to her ship, wouldn’t get the hell out of here.

She kept her shirt against her face, just in case, but her eyes were clearing. The air here looked like air, but it smelled like a latrine. Death—fast death, recent death. She’d used it for entertainment, watched it, read about it, stepped inside it virtually, but she’d never experienced it. Not really, not like this.

Her ship, the far end of this ring, the cheap area, where the base bent downward and would have brushed the top of some bigger ship, something that actually had speed and firepower and worth.

Then she mentally corrected herself: her ship had worth. It would get her out of this death trap. She would escape before one of those tall blond booted men found her. She would—

—she flew forward, landed on her belly, her elbow scraping against the metal walkway, air leaving her body. Her shirt went somewhere, her chin banged on the floor, and then the sound—a whoop-whamp, followed by a sustained series of crashes.

Something was collapsing, or maybe one of the explosions was near her, or she had no damn idea, she just knew she had to get out, get out, get out—

She pushed herself to her feet, her knees sore too, her pants torn, her stomach burning, but she didn’t look down because the feel of that burn matched the feel of her elbow, so she was probably scraped.

She didn’t even grab her shirt; she just ran the last meter to her ship, which had moved even with its mooring clamps—good god, something was shaking this place, something bad, something big.

Her ship was so small, it didn’t even have a boarding ramp. The door was pressed against the clamps, or it should have been, but there was a gap between the clamps and the ship and the walkway, and it was probably tearing something in the ship, but she didn’t want to think about that so she didn’t.

Instead, she slammed her palm against the door four times, the emergency enter code, which wasn’t a code at all, but was something she thought (back when she was young and stupid and new to access codes) no one would figure out.

What she hadn’t figured out was that no one wanted this cheap-ass ship, so no one tried to break into it. No one wanted to try, no one cared, except her, right now, as the door didn’t open and didn’t open and didn’t open—

—and then it did.

Her brain was slowing down time. She’d heard about this phenomenon, something happened chemically in the human brain, slowed perception, made it easier (quicker?) to make decisions—and there her stupid brain was again, thinking about the wrong things as she tried to survive.

Hell, that had helped her survive as a kid, this checking-out thing in the middle of an emergency, but it wasn’t going to help her now.

She scrambled inside her ship, felt it tilt, heard the hull groan. If she didn’t do something about those clamps, she wouldn’t have a ship.

She somehow remembered to slap the door’s closing mechanism before she sprinted to the cockpit. Her bruised knees made her legs wobbly or maybe the ship was tilting even more. The groaning in the hull was certainly increasing.

The cockpit door was open, the place was a mess, as always. She used to sleep in here on long runs, and she always meant to clean up the blankets and pillows and clothes, but never did.

Now she stood in the middle of it, and turned on the navigation board. She instructed the ship to decouple, then turned her links on—not all of them, just the private link that hooked her to the ship—and heard more groaning.

“Goddammit!” she screamed at the ship, slamming her hands on the board. “Decouple, decouple—get rid of the goddamn clamps!”

Inform space traffic control to open the exit through the rings, the ship said in its prissiest voice as if there was no emergency.

Tears pricked her eyes. Crap. She’d be stuck here because of some goddamn rule that ship couldn’t take off if there was no exit. She’d die if there was another explosion.

“There’s no space traffic control here,” she said. “Space traffic control is dead. We have to get out. Everyone’s dead.”

Her voice wobbled just like the ship had as she realized what she had said. Everyone. Everyone she had worked with, her friends, her co-workers, the people she drank with, laughed with, everyone—

We cannot leave if the exit isn’t open, the ship said slowly and even more prissily, if that were possible.

“Then ram it,” she said.

That will destroy us, the ship said, so damn calmly. Like it had no idea they were about to be destroyed anyway.

Takara ran her fingers over the board, looking for—she couldn’t remember. This thing was supposed to have weapons, but she’d never used them, didn’t know exactly what they were. She’d bought this stupid ship for a song six years ago, and the weapons were only mentioned in passing.

She couldn’t find anything, so she gambled.

“Blow a damn hole through the closed exit,” she said, not knowing if she could do that, if the ship even allowed that. Weren’t there supposed to be failsafes so that no one could blow a hole through something on this base?

That will leave us with only one remaining laser shot, the ship said.

“I don’t give a good goddamn!” she screamed. “Fire!”

And it did. Or something happened. Because the ship heated, and rocked and she heard a bang like nothing she’d ever heard before, and the sound of things falling on the ship.

“Get us out of here!” she shouted.

And the ship went upwards, fast, faster than ever.

She tumbled backwards. The attitude controls were screwed or the gravity or something but she didn’t care.

“Visuals,” she said, and floating on the screens that appeared in front of her was the hole that the ship had blown through the exit, and debris heading out with them, and bits of ship—and then she realized that there were bits of more than ship. Bits of the starbase and other ships and son of a bitch, more bodies and—

“Make sure you don’t hit anything,” she said, not knowing how to give the correct command.

I will evade large debris, the ship said as if this were an everyday occurrence. However, I do need a destination.

“Far the fuck away from here,” Takara said.

How far?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Out of danger.”

She was pressed against what she usually thought of as the side wall, with blankets and smelly sheets and musty pillows against her.

“And fix the attitude controls and the gravity, would you?” she snapped.

The interior of the ship seemed to right itself. She flopped on her stomach again, only this time, it didn’t hurt.

She stood, her mouth wet and tasting of blood. She put a hand to her face, realized her nose was bleeding, and grabbed a sheet, stuffing it against her skin.

She dragged it with her to the controls. The images had disappeared (had she ordered that? She didn’t remember ordering that) and so she called them up again, saw more body parts, and globules of stuff (blood? Intestines?) and shut it all off—consciously this time.

God, she was lucky. She had administration codes. She had a sense that things were going bad. She had her ship ready. And, most important of all, she had been close enough to the docking ring to get out of there before anyone knew she even existed.

She sank into the chair and closed her eyes, wondering what in the bloody hell was going on.

She’d met those men, the creepy older ones, and asked her boss what they wanted with ships, and he’d said, Better not to ask, hon.

He always called her hon, and she finally realized it was because he couldn’t remember her name. And now he was dead or would be dead or was dying or something awful like that. He’d been inside the administration area when the twenty clones had come in—or the forty clones—or the sixty clones, god, she had no idea how many.

It was her boss’s boss who answered her, later, when she mentioned that the men looked alike.

Don’t ask about it, Takara, he’d said quietly. They’re creatures of someone else. Designer Criminal Clones. They need a ship for nefarious doings.

They’re not in charge? She’d asked.

He’d shaken his head. Someone made them for a job.

Her eyes opened, saw the mess that her cockpit had become. A job. They’d had to find fast ships for a job.

But if the creepy older ones were made for a job, so were the younger versions.

She called up the screens, asked for images of the starbase. It was a small base, far away from anything, important only to malcontents and criminals, and those, like her, whose ships wouldn’t cross the great distance between human-centered planets without a rest and refueling stop.

The starbase was glowing—fires inside, except where the exterior had been breached. Those sections were dark and ruined. It looked like a volcano that had already exploded—twice. More than twice. Several times.

Ship, her ship said, and for a minute, she thought it was being recursive.

“What?” she asked.

Approaching quickly. Starboard side.

She swiveled the view, saw a ship twice the size of hers, familiar too. The creepy older men had come back to the starbase in a ship just like that.

“Can you show me who is inside?” she asked.

I can show you who the ship is registered to and who disembarked from it earlier today, her ship sent. I cannot show who is inside it now.

Then, on an inset screen floating near the other screens, images of the two creepy older men and five younger leaving the ship. They went inside the base.

“Did anyone else who looked like them—”

The other clones disembarked from a ship that landed an hour later, her ship answered, anticipating her question for once. Did ships think?

Then she shook her head. She knew better than that. Ships like this one had computers that could deduce based on past performance, nothing more.

That ship has been destroyed, the ship sent, along with the docking ring.

“What?” Takara asked. She moved the imagery again, saw another explosion. The docking ring about five minutes after she left.

She was trembling. Everyone gone. Except her. And the creepy men, and maybe the five young guys they had brought with them.

Bastards. Filthy stinking horrible asshole bastards.

“You said we have one shot left,” she said.

Yes, but—

“Target that ship,” she said. “Blow the hell out of it.”

Our laser shot cannot penetrate their shields.

Her gaze scanned the area. Other ships whirling, twirling, looping through space, heading her way.

Their way.

She ran through the records stored in her links. She’d always made copies of things. She was anal that way, and scared enough to figure she might need blackmail material.

One thing she did handle as a so-called administrator: requests to dock for ships with unusual fuel sources. She kept them on the far side of the ring.

She scanned for them, and their unusual size, saw one, realized it had a huge fuel cell, still intact.

“Can you shoot that ship?” she asked, sending the image across the links, “and push it into the manned ship?”

What she wanted to say was “the ship with the creepy guys,” but she knew her ship wouldn’t know what she meant.

Yes, her ship sent. But it will do nothing to the ship except make them collide.

“Oh, yes it will,” Takara said. “Make sure the fuel cell hits the manned ship directly.”

That will cause a chain reaction that will be so large it might impact us, her ship sent.

“Yeah, then get us out of here,” Takara said.

We have a forty-nine percent chance of survival if we try that, her ship sent.

“Which is better than what we’ll have if that fucking ship catches up with us,” Takara said.

Are you ordering me to take the shot? Her ship asked.

“Yes!”

Her ship shook slightly as the last laser shot emerged from the front. The manned ship didn’t even seem to notice or care that she had firepower. Of course, from their perspective, she had missed them.

The shot went wide, hit the other ship, and destroyed part of its hull, pushing it into the manned ship.

And nothing happened. They collided, and then bounced away, the manned ship’s trajectory changed and little else.

Then the other ship’s fuel cell glowed green, and Takara’s ship sped up, again losing attitude control and sending her flying into the back wall.

An explosion—green and gold and white—flashed around her.

She looked up from the pile of blankets at the floating screens, saw only debris, and asked, “Did we do it?”

Our shot hit the ship. It exploded. Our laser shot ignited the fuel cell—

“I know,” she snapped. “What about the manned ship?”

It is destroyed.

She let out a sigh of relief, then leaned back against the wall, gathering the pillows and blanket against her. The blood had dried on her face, and she hadn’t even noticed until now. Her elbow ached, her knees stung, and her stomach hurt, and she felt—

Alive.

She felt alive and giddy and sad and terrified and…

Curious.

She scanned through the information on the creepy men. They didn’t have names, at least that they had given to the administration. Just numbers. Numbers that didn’t make sense.

She saw some imagery: the men talking to her boss, saying something about training missions for their weapons, experimental weapons, and something about soldiers—a promise of a big payout if the experiment worked.

And if it doesn’t? her boss asked.

The creepy men smiled. You’ll know if it doesn’t.

Practice sessions. Soldiers. A failed experiment. Had her boss realized that’s what this was in his last moment of life? Had he indeed known?

And the men, heading off to report the failure to someone.

But they hadn’t gotten there. She had stopped them.

But not the someone in charge.

She ran a hand over her face. She would send all of this to Alliance. There wasn’t much more she could do. She wasn’t even sure what the Alliance could do.

This was the Frontier. It was lawless by any Alliance definition. Each place governed itself.

She had liked that when she arrived. She was untraceable, unknown, completely alone.

Then she’d made friends, realized that every place had a rhythm, every place had good and bad parts, and she had decided to stay. Become someone.

Until she got that feeling from the creepy men, and had planned to leave.

“Fix the attitude and gravity controls, would you?” she asked, only this time, she didn’t sound panicked or upset.

The ship righted itself. Apparently when it sped up, it didn’t have enough power for all of its functions. She was going to need to get repairs.

Maybe in the Alliance. She had enough fuel to get there.

She’d been stockpiling. Food, fuel, everything but money.

She could get back to a place where there were laws she understood, where someone didn’t blow up a starbase as an experiment with creepy matching soldiers.

She’d let the authorities know that someone—a very scary someone—was planning something. But what she didn’t know. She didn’t even know if it was directed against the Alliance.

She would guess it wasn’t.

It would take more than twenty, forty, sixty, one hundred matching (fuckups) soldiers to defeat the Alliance. No one had gone to war against it in centuries. It was too big.

Something like this had to be Frontier politics. A war against something else, or an invasion or something.

And it had failed.

All of the soldiers had died.

Along with everyone else.

Except her, of course.

She hadn’t died.

She had lived to tell about it.

And she would tell whoever would listen.

Once she was safe inside the Alliance.

A place too big to be attacked. Too big to be defeated.

Too big to ever allow her to go through anything like this again.

 

____________________________________________

“Sole Survivor” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love my series stories, like the Retrieval Artist Series? Support the latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from my different series – Go here now to check it out! 

Sole Survivor

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fiction River: Pulse Pounders, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, WMG Publishing, January 2015
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

I missed December, and apologize: I was writing. I’m still writing; Cast in Blood isn’t finished, and it may undergo a title change by the end. Also, I’m now in the “panic about how long this book is going to be” phase of the novel, but it is otherwise going well. In advance: this will not be the last Barrani book. I am hoping to finish, with a reasonable arc, a book that is going to be followed by another Cast Barrani book. Just saying. My entire household succumbed to the stomach flu a week ago, and we have all mostly recovered, although I’m now in that state were, having eaten almost nothing for a week, my body assumes it is … Continue reading →

As some of you remember, Clean Sweep was adapted into comic book format by Tapas. It has been licensed by Andrews McMeel and released as a beautiful graphic novel. Because of the length, Clean Sweep was broken into 2 volumes.

Volume I

The second volume of Clean Sweep will be released on January 28th. Tada!

Volume II

To be clear: this is not Sweep in Peace. It’s the second half of Clean Sweep. The comic book expanded the story and added new characters.

When the first volume was released, Andrews McMeel offered these stickers below as a giveaway. As an aside, they have been an awesome publisher to work with. Highly recommend.

There was some butthurt regarding people not being able to buy the stickers.

The stickers for Volume I featured cute versions of the characters. These cutified characters are called chibis. In the example below, top panel is regular art and the bottom part is chibi art. Usage of chibis in comic books usually indicates light-hearted or funny moments when a character is comically upset, for example.

Andrews McMeel just asked us about the stickers for Volume II. BDH, we need your help!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

And

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Let your opinions flow!

The post The Clean Sweep: Vol II and the Dilemma of Stickers first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

There are lots of things I would like to write about today. Our lives are busy right now, in a variety of ways, all of them pretty positive. I have professional stuff going on, personal stuff going on. I could write about all of it.

But Los Angeles is on fire. I’m writing this as the weekend approaches. Maybe — MAYBE — by the time you read this, the fires will be under control. But I doubt it. The photographs of damage on the ground are horrendous. The satellite imagery — before and after shots of neighborhoods and towns — is terrifying. The pictures posted overnight of the fires as seen from airplanes on approach to LAX look like something out of a disaster movie.

I don’t live in California (not anymore, but I once did; I love the state), but I have family and friends who do, people I love who have been impacted directly by this mind-boggling tragedy. Chances are, you do, too. Or if not you, then someone close to you does.

That’s the thing about climate change. It touches all of us. We don’t have to be in the path of the latest Category 5 hurricane, or impacted by yet another drought, or threatened by apocalyptic fires, for its impacts to reach us. It’s not all cataclysm and news headlines. It’s higher grocery prices resulting from crop damage (storms, heat, frost, drought, flood — take your pick). It’s stronger winds resulting from greater temperature gradients, which lead in turn to harder headwinds when we fly, or more turbulence, and yes, greater, more frequent delays at the airport.

It’s hotter summers and milder winters. It’s also more storms year-round, except, of course, during droughts. It’s more mosquitoes and ticks. It’s less snow for ski resorts. It’s vanishing glaciers in our beautiful national parks. It’s more mass extinctions, falling bird populations (30% of North American birds have been lost in the last fifty years, not all because of climate change, but it’s a significant factor), and frightening losses in the populations of our natural pollinators.

It’s greater strains on our electrical grid, more blackouts, a greater need for frequent rolling power outages, all of which contribute to higher utility costs. It’s increased insurance premiums, as insurance companies race to recoup the losses caused by the aforementioned floods and fires and storms.

Climate change is a thousand different things. Some cause inconveniences and cost us a few bucks. Some cause deaths, disease, injuries, and cost our society billions.

“We don’t get as much snow as we used to.”

“There are more storms than there used to be.”

“Glacier National Park won’t have glaciers for much longer.”

“Los Angeles is on fire.”

It’s not a hoax. It’s not a left-wing plot to grow government and control our lives. It’s not a figment of some scientists’ imaginations. It’s real. It’s borne out in evidence gathered by meteorologists, physicists, biologists, ecologists, and historians. It is a threat to our economy, our way of life, and the health and welfare of every person on the planet, as well as our children and grandchildren.

If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem. The proof is in all that our planet has experienced over the past half century and more. Refusing to acknowledge the truth of climate change does nothing to slow it down or mitigate its myriad costs. All it does is ensure that future generations will pay an ever greater price for our failures.

But if you still don’t believe me, take five minutes — five full minutes — to look at the images coming out of Southern California. I guarantee, you’ve never seen anything like it. None of us has. We will see it again, though. Sooner rather than later, with ever-increasing frequency.

As to the suggestion made by some Republicans, including the Felon-elect, that California should be denied disaster aid because Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has mismanaged the state’s water resources, I will simply refer you to this article from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czj3yk90kpyo

Not only are GOP claims baseless, they are deeply cruel. Denying aid to the state won’t hurt Newsom. It will hurt innocent people who have lost their homes and businesses. And if blame for this travesty falls on anyone, it ought to be those who have spent the last three decades denying that climate change is real, the political Neros who pander to the fossil fuel industry while the planet burns.

Climate change is here. It’s merciless and indiscriminate. You can see its impact on your televisions and computer screens and smart phones right now. And it’s only getting worse.