“Then”—Sister Stef breathed out, and looked at the steel punishment ruler on its hook—“you’ll step forward to the front of the class.”

  Blurred, the classroom seemed to recede as Carl stood, and shakily walked to Sister Stef.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  He raised it, palm upwards, wishing he didn’t know what was about to come.

  “I’m disappointed, Carl Thargulis.” Sister Stef made no move towards the ruler. “There are so many things I don’t believe in, including the teaching power of violence. But you, you I did have faith in. Sit down.”

  Carl returned to his desk, feeling worse than if pain had cut into his soft palm. Taking his seat, he only half-noticed the sympathy on Ralen’s face.

  This was awful.

  Now it was her final day. Stef moved in a trance, teaching mechanically, scarcely responsive to questions for fear the emotional dam might give way. Sister Zarly Umbra avoided her for the same reason, being the only other nun, besides Reverend Mother, to know that Stef’s packed bags already waited atop the cot in her cell, that a room in a hostel was already booked.

  Tonight Stef would slip out through the iron gates forever.

  At the end of the last lesson—the last lesson ever—she watched her pupils file out, hoping Angela would thrive, that the city would somehow change back to the way it had been, tolerating near-humans. And there went Carl, such a disappointment. Even Ralen, the bully, had suffered such trauma, and she hoped his life would turn around, and regretted that she was unlikely to learn how things worked out for any of them, her boys and girls.

  But this was not her home, not any longer.

  The classroom was empty. She felt insubstantial, like a wraith who could slip through floor or wall to disappear. Soon enough, in an ordinary human way, that was what she had to do.

  “Damn it,” she said. “Damn it all to Hades.”

  How would the children feel tomorrow, when a new teacher greeted them?

  “They’ll forget me. So what?”

  Her gaze descended to Carl’s desk. Yes, he had disappointed her, particularly since she had been so sure he was excited by the essay theme.

  She walked to Carl’s desk and raised the lid. Perhaps an intuitive part of her already knew what she would find inside. The lace-bound pages lay on top of his textbooks.

  There was a title page, and it read:

  TRI-MILLENNIUM

  THE DATE’S TRUE MEANING

  by Carl Thargulis, aged 12

  She lifted the essay out of the desk.

  An hour later, she was hammering on Bone Listener Jamie Thargulis’ door, with Carl’s essay in hand. Jamie opened the door.

  “I’d like a word,” she said.

  “Er . . . All right.” Jamie Thargulis stepped back. “Have you been crying?”

  Stef ran a hand through her hair, then adjusted her unfamiliar coat. Jamie Thargulis was staring.

  “Where’s Carl, Mr. Thargulis?”

  “Upstairs in his room. I’ll just—”

  “No. There’s something I need to talk about. To a . . . friend.”

  “You’d better come in. And call me Jamie, if you’d like.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  She followed him—Jamie—to a small sitting-room. There he gestured to an old, overstuffed armchair, and she sat down. The room was cluttered and cosy, comforting.

  “I’ve left the order.”

  But that wasn’t what was overwhelming her. It was Carl’s doing, truly, but it wasn’t his fault, that was the thing. He’d written something wonderful, but now she was hurting.

  “You’ve . . . what?”

  “So I can’t talk to Reverend Mother, not now, and I need to. Talk. To someone.”

  “All right.” Jamie closed the door, and crossed to the other armchair. “Tell me.”

  “My mother—please don’t laugh.”

  “Why should I?” Jamie’s voice sounded so gentle. “Just talk.”

  “She was a big woman, and an alcoholic. She used to wait for my father, for Pop to come home, and then she’d . . . beat him. With empty bottles, or a roller from the wringer.”

  “Oh, Thanatos.”

  “Yes. Pop was small, and never fought back. He got drunk to numb the pain. He—”

  “It’s OK. You don’t need to tell me.”

  “I do. It’s just—Sometimes, as a girl, I’d go down to the docks. You know I lived in TalonClaw Port?”

  “Carry on.”

  “I used to see . . . people. Shuffling to the docks. I didn’t realize—”

  “What was that?”

  “I thought they were passengers, you see. I didn’t realize. Because I was young, and we all of us ignore the realities.”

  Jamie’s fingertips touched the back of her hand.

  “Tell me.”

  “My father,” she said aloud, after all these years, “sold himself. He became one of them. The shuffling horde. The doomed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She passed over the pages she’d been holding.

  “Your son would. He’s not afraid to look.”

  “Carl?”

  Jamie stared at the essay, then returned his gaze to her, focusing those incredible dark eyes on her.

  “It’s not like the necroflux piles,” she said, “but it’s close enough. Except in the suboceanic liners, they don’t extract bones from corpses. They use entire human beings. Alive. I can’t begin to imagine the agony.”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “The money,” Stef continued, “was enough to buy me passage, away from TalonClaw Port, and to enrol in college. It was hidden in my bed, the whole roll of cash. But I blew the lot on airfare, because I couldn’t bear to travel by ship. Not after—”

  “Tell me,” said Jamie once more.

  “Pop wasn’t a passenger,” she said. “He was fuel, along with all the others. He sold himself to set me free.”

  It was another Sepday, three months later, when they stood together, the three of them amid a crowd of over a million people, thronging the heart of Tristopolis. They stood on the sidewalk at the northern end of Avenue of the Basilisks, watching the great parade pass by.

  “Hey,” said Dad. “There’s the Leviathan that Carl and I saw.”

  “The balloons at Möbius Park?” asked Stef. “That’s terrific.”

  She leaned close and kissed him, hard. Keeping her arm around Dad, she ruffled Carl’s hair, and he grinned up at her.

  “It was neat,” he said.

  “ ‘Neat,’ huh? You have a better command of the language than that, young man.”

  “I know.”

  Dad smiled.

  “You two,” he said.

  A clown floated past, borne by freewraiths whose half-materialized forms glowed festive orange and yellow.

  “It’s not just a Tri-Millennial we’re celebrating, is it?” said Stef.

  During the past three months, there had been two changes of mayor, and a turnaround in public mood. The Trueblood Bill had passed, then been revoked. Now the city was returning to its previous cosmopolitan acceptance of everyone.

  “No.” Dad kissed her. “It’s our celebration too, thanks to this young miscreant.”

  He winked, and Carl grinned.

  “The interview,” said Stef, “at Tech tomorrow?”

  She meant the secular college she’d applied to for a teaching post.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Reverend Mother rang while you were at work. She said if Bill—that’s the principal—didn’t offer me the position on the spot, I was to say that some people remember what he got up to behind the bike sheds thirty years ago.”

  “Some other kind of anniversary?”

  “Shh.” Stef’s hand was gentle as she touched Carl’s head. “Not in front of our boy.”

  On that night she’d shown up at the door, the night she left the Order of Thanatos for good, she’d had sat in the old armchair for a long time. Finally, after the tears were done, she had asked Jamie to hand back Carl’s essay. Then she’d read the beginning aloud.

  “And the date, Sepday 37th of Unodecember 6608,” she’d recited, “confuses two anniversaries. While it is 3333 years since the inauguration of City Hall, the date of Unodecember 37th is remarkable for something else, dating back only six centuries.

  “It is hard to imagine what a city would be like without heat and lighting. But it is impossible to know where the power comes from, if you can’t imagine how the bones hurt and scream. When a person dies, what happens is—”

  She stopped, then continued to the end, forcing her way through the step-by-step description that Carl had provided, and the revelation that six hundred years ago, on Unodecember 37th, the first necroflux reactor pile had gone online, delivering its power to the city.

  “You’re a Bone Listener,” she said then. “Do you realize how hard that is for a person to read?”

  “Yes,” Jamie said, before doing something strange: taking hold of the blue-and-white photo of Mareela, and placing it face down on a table. “Carry on, please.”

  “That’s it. Fine writing.”

  “Disturbing,” said Jamie, for reasons that became clear only later, when he and Stef quizzed Carl about his Archive-derived knowledge, and his observation of the inner workings of the Energy Authority.

  “Yes. I remember my first day at the school”—Stef put down the essay—“when I stood in the yard, watching the children play a game called Ring-Around-A-Rhyme. You know it? They didn’t have it where I came from.”

  She pointed to the essay, where Carl had written the second verse of the rhyme.

  Worms in their eyeballs,

  No one can see

  Beetles devour

  My true love and me.

  Jamie nodded.

  “It’s about burial,” he said. “Back when we used to bury the dead, instead of turn them into fuel.”

  “I realized that immediately, and I knew that the kids had no idea. But it’s propaganda, isn’t it? Old propaganda, from six centuries back, and still required. To make the idea of burial repulsive.”

  “And get people to forget what’s waiting.”

  They looked at each other.

  “What is waiting, Jamie?”

  “I don’t know, Sister . . . ”

  “Call me Stef.”

  The three of them watched until the final float of the parade had passed by.

  “How about Shadbolt’s Halt?” said Dad. “We could have an ice-cream.”

  “I’d rather go home,” said Carl.

  “Me too,” murmured Stef.

  Dad took her hand.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said.

  THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY; OR, THIS SPACE FOR SALE

  PAUL PARK

  Stuck, facing a deadline, I decided to sell some of my things on eBay, not objects so much as ideas. Or rather, lack of ideas: I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. I auctioned off the pieces of a story I am trying to write, the location, the characters, the theme, the devices, even the title. I had seven auctions running simultaneously. I bid on a few things myself, to drive up the price. And I was rewarded by a spasm of activity the last few hours which brought in pledges totaling several hundred dollars, enough to double the money I would likely make from some anthology.

  Not every auction made the minimum reserve. And there was a downside: the story had to take place in Philadelphia. A love story: fine, whatever. I’m not so jaded that I can’t remember what that’s like. But the treatment had to involve some use of meta-fiction, some recursive pattern. For example, the story could be about writing a story. Or else more particularly, it could be about itself. Regardless, these are techniques I’ve increasingly hated, because they tend to involve a lot of stupid fooling around. They are always reminding you that what you’re reading is a construct, just some marks on paper. But the whole point of writing is creating an illusion that something really happened. That’s why people read. That’s what they want.

  Here are the directions I received:

  Dear Paul Park,

  I really liked your last story in F&SF. I appreciate the thought that ordinary problems have miraculous solutions. If you’re right, then maybe you could do something for me and the girl I love. We’re coming up on our fourth anniversary, and I was hoping to find some kind of special way to tell her how I still feel, even after some time. Her name is Sarah Kettle, and she is 26 years old. She works as a counselor for soldiers with traumatic injuries. She plays the guitar and enjoys poetry. And I think she might trust you or value what you have to say, because she liked your story too, with reservations, after I’d explained it—she never would have read it on her own. I’m sending you some jpegs, so you can see how beautiful she is. Try to do something with her smile. You can see how it lights up the whole room. Thanks.

  It was true—Sarah Kettle had a lot of teeth. There she was, cross-legged on the floor of a cozy grad-student apartment, posing dutifully with her guitar. She was dressed in jeans and a white shirt, unbuttoned a few buttons, but you couldn’t see much. In the next photograph she had a more serious expression on her face. Her straight black hair, cut to the line of her jaw, obscured one eye, most of her big nose.

  You must know, true love never does run smooth. Our hero had submitted bids in three separate categories and won two of them. In his eagerness to work his girlfriend into the story, he had exceeded my reserve by more than ninety dollars. But in the final auction he had undervalued himself by one dollar and twenty-seven cents or thereabouts, and only found out when it was too late. This often happens. It has happened to me.

  It meant our hero had allowed himself to be out-bid at the last second by someone else, a fellow named Benjamin Burgis. He also forwarded an image—only one, out of focus, taken in a group with some of his co-workers in their white coats. He said he didn’t care how he appeared to me, not that it mattered, because he didn’t require a very complicated treatment. I got the impression he wanted to be represented as some kind of monstrous version of himself, a sniveling zombie, perhaps a psychopath.

  I didn’t say anything about that to our hero. He was traumatized enough already, and it was only by promising him a cameo that I was able to convince him not to withdraw his bid. I wanted to buck up his courage, and so I told him what I’d do. He would come in at the last second and snipe his rival in return. Nor would I abandon Sarah Kettle to a fate worse than death. I would do everything in my power not to let the zombie touch her with his long, hairy, filthy, suppurating hands.

  Ben Burgis hadn’t pledged very much, certainly not enough to allow him to take any sexual liberties. I felt I didn’t owe him anything at all. And of course our hero, because of his stupidity, had all but written himself out of his own story. What an idiot, perhaps, but the least I could do was offer him a sensitive portrayal of the woman he loved. Perhaps, as a result of my efforts, she would put her guitar aside, brush the hair out of her face, stand up and put her arms around his waist and then his neck. Maybe she would reconsider.

  Frankly, I was of two minds about the whole thing. And I felt I needed more information to achieve whatever it was he wanted, to guarantee his satisfaction. A couple of pictures weren’t enough to do her justice. Was that a gold chain around her neck under her shirt? What did her voice sound like? Where was she from? Where had she gone to school? What did her parents do? I had to think about all that. And I couldn’t just choose things at random, or to please myself. Sarah Kettle was a real person, not just my creation. She had her own needs, her own stubbornness. I couldn’t just manipulate her however I wanted. I googled her and didn’t find much, a few stray pieces of co-authorship, mostly papers on veterans’ affairs.

  So I made the following request:

  . . . I feel I want to make this work for you. She looks like a really nice young woman, and as you say she has a killer smile. If you have a cv, you can forward it, but what I really want to know are things that are more personal, things that will enable me to bring her to an independent life. Maybe stories of you two together, or else things that have happened to her. Fears. Dreams. Opinions. I want you to feel you can speak to her through me. Do you have a sample of her handwriting? Give me any photographs you have. Also anything to show me the inside of her apartment—pictures on the wall. Furniture. Layout. Any favorite things. You can tell a lot about people from the objects they choose to live with. Under the circumstances, this story isn’t going to involve other characters. Just at the end, as I said. Most of it is going to be a kind of portrait. So the more you can give me, the better it will be.

  And in a couple of days I had a little package in my hands. I confess I was nervous when I opened it. As I hoped, there were some letters, and also a small brick of snapshots, meticulously tied in a black ribbon. There was a cd.

  In my New York apartment, I slipped the disk into the machine, then sat down on the couch with a glass of scotch. I heard a woman’s voice: “This is just something I’m working on.” And then a mixture of songs, some traditional, some original, I guessed—Sarah Kettle accompanying herself on the guitar. In between, a few serious, breathy, self-conscious comments: a shy person speaking for posterity. “This isn’t really ready yet.” “This is a song about my mother.” “Because we weren’t religious, Thanksgiving was always a big deal around our house . . . ”

  The voice itself was unexceptional. But I found myself affected nonetheless, as I untied the ribbon, held it up to my nose. Then I leafed through the photographs. They weren’t all of her. As I’d hoped, there were some pictures of the bedroom, the double bed with its white frame, its patchwork quilt, its orange gooseneck lamp on the bedside cabinet. A poster of Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” on the wall above the computer. Framed photos of her family in Lafayette Hill.

  “ . . . I remember those times when my brother came home from college and we were all together again. We’d sing songs and then go out into the neighborhood, visiting people I’d known all my life. Sometimes I’d feel annoyed by the routine. But it took me a long time to realize how lucky I was.” Then the song began. It was about a Thanksgiving party at the VA hospital. Nothing earth-shattering.