IGMS Issue 31 Page 10

  Xena tossed her hand and stepped to Pat. "I told you he was gay." Then she laughed as if it had been a joke. Which it was. Mostly. Maybe.

  I have no business trying to lead a group of any kind. I should take back all these gates and leave right now and never come back. Everybody will be better off it I do that.

  Everybody but me.

  He'd been lonely his whole life. This was the first time he had friends. And he couldn't give them up. He didn't want to give them up, and he could do whatever he wanted, and so he was going to stay here with them. Because they thought he was cool. They liked that he was powerful. They weren't trying to kill him. And they liked him before they knew he could do this thing with gates.

  And he was going to be thinking about Xena in spite of the fact that he wasn't attracted to her. Or to any of the girls. He was sixteen now, so any offer was going to make him obsess for a while. Knowing that it was just his hormones making him feel this way didn't make the feelings go away. Might as well enjoy the feeling. As long as he didn't do anything about it.

  That night Danny went to DC and Stone agreed to let him put the tail of the emergency gate in his attic. "But no gun," said Stone.

  "What if someone's coming after them?" asked Danny.

  "Be creative," said Stone.

  What Danny came up with was a stack of pennies with gates on both sides. As long as you handled them by the edge, you didn't go anywhere. But if you touched heads or tails, you found yourself someplace interesting and public. Just inside the gate of the White House. The middle of the Capitol rotunda. Lincoln's lap. On the nose of the giant in the Awakening statue. If one of his friends was getting chased through the gates, they come to Stone's attic closet, grab a penny, and throw it at whoever comes through the gate after them.

  "Weaponized money," said Stone. "But if one of your friends comes through just for fun, I get to throw a penny at them."

  "They're nice," said Danny. "I don't want them getting treated badly just because they're drowthers."

  "You know me better than that," said Stone. "I'll treat them badly because they're teenagers."

  When Veevee and Hermia heard about the portable gates, they both demanded some of their own. Veevee had a charm bracelet which she loaded up with rings, each one a gate leading to a useful place -- her condo, the Silvermans' farm, Danny's house, Danny's school, Stone's bedroom. "I'm his wife, I don't have to use the attic," she said.

  "What if somebody steals the bracelet?" said Danny. "I suppose if Hermia locks them for you and you only open them when you --"

  "While you were playing with your little friends," said Hermia, "we were working."

  "We can't make gates," said Veevee, "but now I can lock them and Hermia can unlock them. We both have lock and key now."

  "We're working on moving gates," said Hermia. "I think I moved one. Just the tail."

  "But she can't do it again," said Veevee.

  "So then it doesn't have to be a ring," said Danny. "I can attach a gate to anything, and it only works when you want it to."

  Hermia handed him a euro. "Put a dozen or so gates on this," she said. "I'll only open the ones I need, when I need them."

  Her list of destinations was longer than Veevee's, but she had to stay a jump ahead of her Family. Danny attached two dozen gates to the coin. At first he tried to arrange them in some orderly way, but Hermia just laughed. "Danny, I can see them all, I can tell them apart, I know where they go, and I can keep them all locked except the one I want to use. Go ahead and pile them on in a jumble."

  He gave her Paris, New York, Dubai, Singapore, Katmandu, Accra, Brisbane, São Paulo, a dozen other cities -- not to mention the Greek Family's office building in Athens, the North Family compound in Virginia, and the Library of Congress. "It's practically the whole atlas," said Veevee admiringly.

  "I'll add as many gates as you want," said Danny.

  "No, I'm not jealous, and I know you'll open a gate to anywhere I want. What I'm worried about, Danny, is that there's no gate that takes me to you."

  Hermia nodded. "We have all these gate mouths with us. But we need a gate whose tail always leads to wherever you are."

  "I can't have you popping out of my pocket," said Danny.

  "I know," said Veevee. "Have us come out of an old-fashioned oil lamp. We can be your genies."

  "Amusing as that sounds," said Danny, "I don't want you popping up when I'm on the john."

  "What if you need our help?" asked Hermia.

  "I'll always know where these gates are. If I need to, I can move the tail of one of your portable gates to a place near me."

  "Unless you're unconscious," said Veevee.

  "I'll think about this," said Danny.

  "You can lock it," said Hermia. "And then unlock it if you need us. We aren't going to intrude on your privacy."

  "We unlock it ourselves only if we think something is really wrong," said Veevee.

  "We peek through ahead of time," said Hermia.

  Danny hated the whole idea. It was one thing to give them the power to go anywhere by using their amulets. But to give someone constant access to him -- that wasn't going to happen. Even if they promised not to use it.

  "I don't think he sees a difference between peeking through a gate and coming through it," said Veevee. "He doesn't want to be spied on."

  "You have to trust us," said Hermia.

  "I said I'd think about it," said Danny.

  "Meaning the answer is no," said Veevee.

  "It's really unfair," said Hermia. "You can make a gate anytime you want, no matter what we're doing. We can't hide from you, but you don't think we can be trusted not to spy on you or intrude when you're kissing some girl."

  "We won't take pictures," said Veevee. "Or at least we won't post them online."

  "I said," Danny began.

  "He's getting testy now," said Veevee.

  "I don't spy on you," said Danny, "and I know you won't spy on me. But that's how power is -- just because you have a power doesn't mean you want other people to use their power on you. Fairness only seems reasonable when the other person is more powerful than you."

  "As it seems to us," said Hermia.

  "I hate to sound like one of the Family," said Danny, "but ... you're just going to have to live with it till I get used to the idea. Maybe someday I'll wish I had made gates that follow me around like puppies, so you can always find me. But right now I don't know how to do that, and I don't think I even want to, and so ... I won't."

  "Tough guy," said Veevee.

  "He's not so tough," said Hermia. "He sounds like he's apologizing. Real assholes don't even pretend to be sorry."

  "True," said Veevee. "It isn't in his nature, so he's not good at assholery yet."

  "Thanks," said Danny. "I think."

  "Well," said Hermia, "I'd better go, or the Family will track me here."

  "You've got to get those gates out of her," said Veevee.

  She was right.

  Danny studied Hermia, and then passed a gate over her, one that left her exactly where she was.

  "What was that about?" asked Hermia.

  "I didn't know what I might have gained by going to Westil," said Danny. "For all I know, I might always have had the ability to attach gates to portable objects. And maybe going through a Great Gate doesn't affect the mage who made it. But I think there is a difference. When you went through the gate I just made, I could feel a difference in you -- the places where the gate was trying to heal you and meeting with resistance. Maybe that's what it was, anyway. I counted five places like that."

  "You should just send her through an airport scanner," said Veevee. "They'll show you exactly where the trackers are implanted.

  Danny laughed. "Of course. Veevee, will you come along and make a distraction?"

  He took them to the Roanoke airport. Veevee got to the end of the security line and then started wailing. "Where's my ticket! I had my ticket right here!"

  Her noise drew everyone's at
tention, and in the moment, Danny put Hermia right in front of the security gate, ahead of the person at the front of the line. Then he opened a peephole over the shoulder of the TSA official working the screen.

  Veevee, seeing Hermia in place, took off on an elaborate charade of searching for her lost boarding pass. The guard waved Hermia into the machine.

  Danny had been right about the trackers. Five of them, exactly where he had felt the gate trying and failing to heal her. The trip to Westil had given him more power. A sharper focus, a greater awareness.

  He moved the porthole to a spot an inch from Hermia's ear. "Gate to my house in Buena Vista," he said. Then he gave the same message to Veevee.

  In a moment they were all there. "I spotted all five trackers," said Danny. "I think I can gate them out."

  "'Think'?" said Hermia. "This is my body we're talking about."

  "I'll have a nice big gate ready for you to pass through so when I get each one out, you can heal yourself instantly. What can go wrong?"

  "Famous last words," said Veevee.

  But after another minute of dithering, Hermia said, "Oh, just do it."

  "Are you sure?" said Danny.

  "Do it, gate boy," said Veevee. "Can't you tell when a woman's saying 'yes'? You really are young."

  In about ten seconds, Danny was done. There were five chips on the table, and Danny had passed the healing gate over Hermia after removing each one. It was very quick.

  "It did hurt," said Hermia. "Surgery is surgery."

  "Sorry," said Danny.

  "I was just reporting, so you'd know," said Hermia. "I never thought it would be painless, so it wasn't a complaint." She picked up one of the chips. "So my parents thought it would be a good idea to put these things in their baby girl."

  "The question is, what do we do with them?" said Veevee. "I say gate them to an incinerator."

  "Or implant them in somebody else," said Hermia.

  "That wouldn't be nice," said Veevee.

  "I was thinking, what about the President? Or Prince Charles?" said Hermia. "Or some dictator somewhere. Make my Family go chasing them."

  "Or five different people," said Veevee. "Make them go crazy trying to figure out which one is you."

  In the end, Danny gated one tracker under the skin of each of the Hittite-Armenian assassins and sent the other trackers about a mile deep in the Atlantic. Then he gated the two assassins from the jail to the Greek Family's offices in Athens. "Let my folks deal with them," said Hermia.

  "Are you going to tell them what the bastards tried to do to you?" asked Veevee.

  "No," said Hermia. "Let them try to talk to each other. They'll know we picked these clowns to receive exactly two of the trackers for a reason. They'll know it wasn't random. But if I tell my family, they'll just kill them. Even if they're seriously angry at me, they won't approve of assassins from another Family going after me."

  "So you think the assassins won't talk?" asked Danny.

  "My family won't dangle them upside down over the ocean," said Hermia. "Or maybe they will -- but they won't do it as cleverly and magically as you did."

  "We are gatemages, aren't we?" said Veevee with some satisfaction. "It's so much fun to prank everybody at once."

  They went to Veevee's favorite gelato place -- Angelato, on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica -- and ate their gelatos on the Third Street Promenade. Then all three of them gated away to wherever they were going to spend the night. Veevee laughed in delight as she prepared to stick a finger into one of her rings. "Oh, I feel so powerful. Like the first time I got the keys to the family car." Then she was gone.

  Alone in his little house in Buena Vista, Danny could hardly believe what he had done in a single day. Went to Westil and met the Gate Thief. Created portable gates for his friends. Removed the tracking chips from Hermia. Ate dessert in California and got back before bedtime.

  Botched a Great Gate.

  He really wanted to think about Xena as he went to sleep. But all he could think about was the angry gate that Marion and Leslie were tending now. How could he do something that stupid?

  And then, inexplicably, he thought of Coach Lieder's daughter Nicki. How was she doing? Had they realized yet that she was healed of her cancer?

  That, at least, was something Danny hadn't screwed up.

  InterGalactic Interview With Ken Liu

  by Jamie Todd Rubin

  * * *

  Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and InterGalactic Medicine Show among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon, the Locus, and the World Fantasy Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  RUBIN: Ken, first I wanted to thank you for doing this interview. You already know I am a big fan of your work, which includes the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "The Paper Menagerie." I'm not sure that I have read every story you've published (which by my count is now north of 55) but I've read a great many of them. You write a pretty wide variety of stories, but they are often centered around some common themes. Before we get into the specific stories, I wanted to ask you: what drew you to story-telling, and in particular, science fiction stories?

  LIU: Thank you for doing this, Jamie, and for the kind words about my stories!

  As far I can recall, I've always liked reading stories and telling them. I remember my grandmother telling me stories before I went to bed every night (this was back in China, where I was born and spent my childhood). I would then take those stories, make alterations, mash them up, and retell them to my friends to entertain them.

  Once, when I was nine, I even wrote a little science fiction story that I illustrated myself and tried to get adults to read it. The only person who took me up on my offer was my aunt, and her reaction was: "I'm never going to ride in your rocket airplane. It's too dangerous!" (Just for the record, my invention there was powered by a giant spring and I estimated it to be 99% safe -- most accidents occurred on landing, when it would bounce a few times on the giant spring. It also was very environmentally friendly and used no fossil fuels. So if anyone's interested . . .)

  As for the choice of science fiction in particular, I've always liked technology and thinking about how our lives have been altered by the use of technology. To get ideas for stories, I get to read science papers, so that makes the research even more fun.

  RUBIN: Your grandmother must have been quite a storyteller for her stories to resonate with you so much as a child. Does her style of telling come through in your stories today?

  LIU: I'd like to think so. She used to tell me Chinese folktales inflected with modern touches. Maybe my love of playing with tradition and modernity was in part inspired by her.

  RUBIN: In addition to being a writer, you are also an attorney and an application developer. As a software developer and writer myself, I recognize some overlap, but what led you to such a diverse array of jobs?

  LIU: You're really asking for my life story :-)

  Like most people, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college. My best subject was math, and I really liked plants (I studied wildflowers the way some studied baseball cards). So I thought I might major in math or biology. And then, as a freshman, I took a couple of introductory literature courses and got exposed to literary criticism, which transformed the way I thought about reading and writing. I became an English major.

  At the same time, I didn't lose my love of math. I enjoyed the rigor of proofs and the elegance of mathematical reasoning. I got interested in Computer Science because it was a way to do some math as well as being able to construct virtual machines out of math that could perform real functions, solve real problems. (Some of my first AI programs generated poetry -- which I guess wasn't really solving a real problem. But it was
fun . . .)

  After college, my programming skills were of much more interest to employers than my skills in literary criticism, so I went to work at Microsoft. Later, I came back to Cambridge to join some friends in a startup. That's the best kind of experience you can have when you're young: all of you are poor and free to take risks, and it's fun to squeeze into a little apartment and work at all hours to make a dream come true. We did pretty well, and I loved being a software developer. This was also where I met my wife, Lisa.

  At some point, though, I missed using my skill with words. So I went back to law school, and then became a law clerk for a federal judge and then a corporate lawyer specializing in tax cases. The work was fun and rewarding, but the hours were long.

  When Lisa and I decided to start a family, I knew I didn't want to be one of those dads who never got to see his kids. So I changed jobs and became a litigation consultant for high-tech patent cases. This is a job in which I get to be technical and also to use my legal knowledge.

  I think all these jobs have something in common: whether it's programming, drafting a contract, or writing a story, I'm always manipulating symbols to create structures that perform functions according to rules. I guess I just like the creative, playful nature shared by all these tasks.

  RUBIN: There are two notable generalizations that can be made about your writing: you are a prolific writer of short fiction -- and your stories are always good. These two things are often inversely correlated, but in your case, you seem to work best at a high throughput. Given your consulting work, and the fact that you have a family that includes two small children (I know what that is like!) how do you manage to write so much and so well?

  LIU: Well, first, thank you for the praise. I hope I live up to it! I find that writing is like any other skill, the more you practice, the better you get at it. I use writing as a way to work out my thoughts, and the more I write, the more ideas I get. I also learn a lot about the craft with each story I write, and so I think I'm improving with a sustained period of deliberate practice.