Brave New Worlds

and touched his neck against the maintenance man's. He could feel the maintenance man's arms rise around him. the maintenance man patted his hands against Jordan's back.
    Jordan said, "Did he who made you make me?" there was a flash of light and a brief pain in his head. Then there was nothing.

Of A Sweet Slow Dance In The Wake Of Temporary Dogs
    by Adam-Troy Castro

    Adam-Troy Castro's work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God . He has also collaborated on two alphabet books with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie and V Is for Vampire , which are due to come out next year. Castro's short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Science Fiction Age , Analog , Cemetery Dance , and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead , The Living Dead 2 , The Way of the Wizard , and in Lightspeed Magazine . His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings .

    We've heard it so many times that it has become a cliché: "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die. " (Isaiah 22:13). Most of us only dream of living that way, but in our next story, we present a society that makes merry for nine remarkable days—and on the tenth, gives its citizens a taste of a fate worse than death.

    Castro says that this story came as a response to New York post-9/11, after he learned that some people didn't think they could ever visit the city again. His response: "New York is so exciting, so rich, so vibrant, so much a feast for the heart and for the senses, that if anything 9/11 made me want to be there even more. "

    But the world of this story is far more intense than that of New York. It raises an interesting question: is it possible to keep living merrily in the face of repeated torment? After all—how can you live through hell without losing a piece of your soul?

    Before
    1.

    O n the last night before the end of everything, the stars shine like a fortune in jewels, enriching all who walk the quaint cobblestoned streets of Enysbourg. It is a celebration night, like most nights in the capital city. The courtyard below my balcony is alive with light and music. Young people drink and laugh and dance. Gypsies in silk finery play bouncy tunes on harmonicas and mandolins. Many wave at me, shouting invitations to join them. One muscular young man with impossibly long legs and a face equipped with a permanent grin takes it upon himself to sprint the length of the courtyard only to somersault over the glittering fountain at its center. For a heartbeat out of time he seems to float, enchanted, over the water. Then I join his friends in applause as he belly-flops, drenching himself and the long-haired girls wading at the fountain's other rim. The girls are not upset but delighted. Their giggles tinkle like wind chimes as they splash across the fountain themselves, flinging curtains of silver water as their shiny black hair bobs back and forth in the night.

    2.

    Intoxicated from a mixture of the excellent local wine and the even better local weed, I consider joining them, perhaps the boring way via the stairs and perhaps via a great daredevil leap from the balcony. I am, after all, stripped to the waist. The ridiculous boxers I brought on the ship here could double as a bathing suit, and the way I feel right now I could not only make the fountain but also sail to the moon. But after a moment's consideration I decide not. That's the kind of grand theatrical gesture visitors to Enysbourg make on their first night, when they're still overwhelmed by its magic. I have been here nine nights. I have known the festivals that make every night in the capital city a fresh adventure. I have explored the hanging gardens, with all their deceptive challenges. I have climbed the towers of pearl, just down the coast. I have ridden stallions across Enysbourg's downs, and plunged at midnight into the warm waters of the eastern sea. I have tasted a hundred pleasures, and wallowed in a hundred more, and though far from sick of them, feel ready to take them at a more relaxed pace, partaking not as a starving man but as a connoisseur. I want to be less a stranger driven by lust, but a lover driven by passion.
    So I just take a deep breath and bask in the air that wafts over the slanting tiled roofs: a perfume composed of equal parts sex and