Stephen thought that he was finally out of the thick of the fight until a rear thermal camera flashed red. A missile was speeding towards the stern of his spaceship.
“Right ascension twenty degrees, on the double,” he ordered. But the missile recalibrated and honed in. The Stalwart shuddered with the crash. Smoke, sparks, and curses deluged its bridge in Bedlam, surrounded by broken instruments like a windrow. The collision slammed the frail Dannyxa against the aluminum bulwark. She bounced off, her cranium misshapen and her right arm oddly angled.
While automatic fire extinguishers dowsed the bridge, Stephen’s swarthy lieutenant, Mer, floated to the injured woman. Both were Alaturians—natives of the planet below, which Earth “protected” for a hefty compulsory fee. Watching the couple, Stephen couldn’t help a twinge of jealousy. “Physician to the bridge,” he radioed.
The Stalwart still trembled, and the aft boosters didn’t respond. The acrid smell of scorched metal choked Stephen. The crew, most of them greenhorn Alaturians, texted for help throughout the ship. Now that the hostile Earthmen had the Stalwart’s range, their next missile could pulverize it. How dare they bombard a vessel of their own?
Groans and cries rose from the crew’s quarters, like smoke from a charnel house. As Stephen organized emergency teams, he glanced at Dannyxa, crumpled in a corner, restrained by Mer from drifting away. The physician arrived and hovered over her, unsure of what to do. Stephen knew the feeling. He had been unsure of what to do since the day he was born.
The lean Earthman doctor unbent and floated towards Stephen. “Dannyxa is….”
But Stephen, slipping into shock, was already in another time.
***
Six months earlier, on Alatur. Stephen walked through a thick forest of the iridescent blue woods that fetched a fortune from other planets. A kilometer from the path, a dozen Alaturians silently and precisely girdled a tree to bring it thundering down. No leader was evident. On the path ahead of Stephen, a gaggle of richly-dressed and heavily-armed Earthmen jeered at the Alaturians. “You cut the wood. We’ll cut the paychecks!” The Alaturians smiled ingratiatingly.
Stephen continued to the capitol’s concert hall. As he walked down a spotless corridor, he saw an Earthman approaching from the other end—hunched, hesitant, dressed in a grubby shirt and a pair of jeans sliding down his slim waist, with a mop of graying hair on his head sticking out at angles like hay straws; a disgrace to the human race. Then he realized that he was looking into a three-dimensional mirror.
In the concert hall, the audience was restive and fissiparous; few good seats remained. The Earthmen had commandeered the front rows, saving one spot for him. He ignored their gestures and headed to the back rows populated by latecomers—Alaturians, of course; they had a woozy sense of time. A fug of smoke wafted from the rancid mamsen weed favored by indolent Alaturian males. He settled into the seat next to an Alaturian female, improbably in her twenties, wearing a spencer about her trim bosom and a threadbare scarf around her glistening black hair. She was tall and rosy, like an asphodel. At a distance, the creases in her face had made her look male, which was why Stephen had chosen that seat. But close up, the creases resolved into high cheekbones and a worldly grimace. She looked him over, laughed with a near-German bark, and turned back to the orchestra. He had been on Alatur for less than a month, and he did not know what the planet’s etiquette demanded of him. But he was rescued by the music.
Alaturians regarded an orchestra as the apex of their race, the sublimation of self. An orchestra of 80 had no conductor. It rehearsed until each musician, from the weed flautist to the wood hornist, could anticipate every crescendo and pause. The composer didn’t matter either, since the ensemble would interpret him as it wished. In one famous incident, a popular songwriter had interrupted a soprano singing his ballad with her own syncopation; the audience chased him away. In every line of work, the creator was just the spark for collaboration. Plagiarism was an act of honor. Stephen glanced at his seatmate, who was entranced.
The symphony portrayed the 50-year-old invasion of Alatur by Earth. Always deferential, the Alaturians spoke of the “incursion.” The opus opened serenely—life before the incursion—then shifted to a minor key and staccato strings for the first contacts by the United Nations. Stephen’s thoughts wandered from the musical portrait to the actual.
The Alaturians were peaceful but, in Earthmen eyes, primitive, since their selflessness slowed their economy. The Alaturian would mourn the death of a friend for a week, skipping work and sleep—not to mention the beloved cups of kuskus, regarded as potions, at the neighborhood café in the high-sun hour. Political power hardly mattered. Indeed, the fairy tale told in every home and country kibbit was of the prince who renounced his throne.
Alatur, weakly led, depended on Earth for protection from alien marauders, at a price. The crux of the matter was a paradox. As a people, the Alaturians would gain from a pact guaranteeing the planet’s safety; but as a person, the Alaturian wouldn’t offer to pay much since he would enjoy the same protection as his neighbors even if he paid nothing. The sum of such paltry payments would not satisfy Earth. But Earth found a solution.
The concert ended with a dissident crescendo. Jolted awake, Stephen felt his neighbor’s elbow and saw her vulpine grin. “I’m Dannyxa,” she said, and strode away.
Stephen went to the mezzanine. But he didn’t see her in the quiet crowd below. In the high windows shaped like landscapes, the two moons of Alatur shone in tandem through the hoarfrost and the brume. The vacant UN site on the smaller orb was a faint jot. The larger moon, Ambrosia, shone with unholy brightness. This was the main missile site of the UN, which threatened to lay waste to Alatur if the planet fell behind in its payments for protection. The UN explained that only belligerence could protect the Planet of Peace.
Thus Alatur became a colony in 2125. To show who was boss, a UN fleet circled the planet in a low, geosynchronous orbit, from which the equidistant ships seemed stationary and were visible to the naked eye. To save money, they used century-old systems of propulsion. A few ships even ran on solid fuel, like the Stalwart, the rickety destroyer that Stephen commanded reluctantly. And reluctantly he returned to the ship.
***
Encounters ensued. Stephen was on Alatur twice per week to meet bureaucrats who lamented the cost of UN “insurance.” The Alaturians required the meetings. Being honest, the result of long-ago wars that had demonstrated the cost of dishonesty, they cherished face-to-face cues and disdained video gabs. And it was a rare trip when Stephen did not come across Dannyxa in the halls of government. She was an activist for the planet’s independence, which, by mutual disagreement, they never discussed.
She was slight but forceful. She leaned forward as she walked, pumping her fists, compressing her lips. He would say, “Perhaps we could just catch our breath?” But she would press on grimly to the nearest kuskus café, which served the thick, sweet stimulant that Stephen couldn’t abide. He conversed to avoid a sip.
“I’m not really a commander,” he said. He was soft-spoken but audible over the café’s harp harmonics. “I was kicked out of military school for skipping the war games. My father is a senator and bagged for me the ship command. He thinks it’s the only honorable life for me.”
“Do you agree?”
“Yes, but I don’t want honor.”
“Why didn’t you say no?”
“I did. We should talk about something else. Isn’t the kuskus delicious?”
“You haven’t touched it. Answer my question. Why should we talk about something else?”
“For the same reason that I’m answering your question. I’m weak.” He couldn’t put off the kuskus any longer, so he put it to his lips. And gagged.
***
“I was born on the wrong planet,” he said. The two of them sprawled on the small torn couch in his disheveled apartment. Glimpsed through the veranda, the midnight sky seemed studded with stars. “On Earth, the military academies produce the elite. I didn’t fit in. At Stonewall, you had to run a six-minute mile to graduate. I finished half a mile in ten minutes and passed out.”
“You could have tried again.”
“Yes, and maybe I could have flown off Dover Cliff by flapping my arms.” He did not mention that he had defied his father’s order that he submit to Stonewall a fake record of his runs. “Anyway, I dropped out. I would have been happy as a high school history teacher living on a crust of bread, but my father saw that as a mortal insult. So he pulled some strings, and only a few broke, and here I am.”
“Why don’t you fit in?”
“I don’t have to tell you. I need a goal—a what or a who. Earthmen are aggressive, competitive, gloomy, violent, drunk for power and wealth, and the most successful species in the galaxy. I’m none of the above.”
She guffawed. “I’m some of the above. Drunk for power, anyway. My father was a senator when Alatur was independent. After Earth invaded, he joined the Vichy government that we now have. I’d like to rebel, but how do you reject an enemy who can crush you? And I’m aggressive, of course.” She moved closer. But what followed was nothing to write home about.
***
Three weeks passed pleasantly. They were back in the Culture Café, with small and steamy cups in a small and steamy booth and with small and not-so-steamy talk. Dannyxa stopped in mid-sentence and stared over Stephen’s shoulder, her eyes swiveling and her mouth agape. Then she smiled so widely that she almost scowled. Stephen turned to see a tall Alaturian with a shaved head and military bearing vanish in the milling crowd outside the long bright window of the café.
“Who was that?”
She shrugged innocently. “One of my choir-mates, Mer. Why don’t you add a little cream? You might find the kuskus more palatable. Most Earthmen do.”
“Meaning we’re not as herculean as male Alaturians.” He knew better, but he drained his cup anyway.
A week later, on his next jaunt, he texted Dannyxa at the usual time. She didn’t respond.
So he asked around. Mer, he learned, was that rarest of Alaturians, a warrior; the son of a one-star general who had never seen battle but who nevertheless was adored by Alaturians, most of all by his now-late wife. Since Alatur had no military spaceships, Mer served on the Earth destroyers orbiting the planet. He preferred the ships to the land since he could always find on them someone to box. Someone or some bot: Being conscious, the Generation 2 robots comprised most of the ship crews, which were commanded by Earthmen who knew better than to spar with Mer. To keep an eye on him, Stephen had the warrior reassigned to his own ship as Choirmaster.
***
To his chagrin, Stephen discovered that Mer amounted to more than that.
Stephen commanded robots clumsily because he was not sure whether to treat them as quasi-human or quasi-machine. Nothing infuriated bots more than ambiguity. The only known mutiny of robots in the UN Military System, in 2120, had been on the ship of a commander whose favorite word was “maybe.”
That word was not in Mer’s vocabulary. His soft baritone voice belied his piercing blue-eyed stare, and he rarely had to repeat himself. Stephen turned over to him more and more of his supervisory tasks, and praised him in the weekly reports to the brass on Ambrosia, until he caught him trying to sneak Dannyxa into his spotless quarters after visiting hours.
“She just wants to see the stars,” Mer said. Unusually, his voice shook.
“Try the bridge next month. You’re grounded for four weeks.”
“So are you, Commander,” Dannyxa said. “No more kuskus and concerts.” She stomped away. He felt like the man who crosses the street, contemplating dinner, only to see too late the impending steamroller.
“I need her,” Mer said as he watched her leave. His eyes were moist. Stephen ignored him.
***
“Mer is stronger than you,” Dannyxa told Stephen four weeks later. “He could lead a revolt against the Earthships. Could you?”
“Rebellion is treason.”
“Yes, and the Earthships are just protecting us. I know.” She put down her spoon. Stephen had not joined her in consuming the stew since he rarely ate meat; he didn’t need much energy. She cocked an ear toward the café quartet playing moonjazz, a blend of New Age and Old New Orleans. She leaned towards him conspiratorially. “Only five Earthships orbit Alatur,” she said. “What would happen if one went rogue and forced the others out of orbit?”
“No ship would ever go rogue. Earthmen command them all.”
“Hypothetically, what would happen?”
He sighed. “Hypothetically, nothing. The UN has three or four spare ships at its moonport. The rogue would face seven or eight ships. It wouldn’t have a chance.”
“No, but it could send a message. And yield a few side benefits. For you.”
The jazz group stopped abruptly on a leading note and began to retune. Watching them fiddle, Stephen said, “It won’t do any good. Alatur isn’t the only planet that Earth has, er, taken under its wing. The protection racket is profitable, and the UN won’t permit one planet to demonstrate how to escape it. It will just double the ships in orbit and triple the insurance premium. But all right.”
“All right what?”
“I better get started.” He paid his own bill but not hers.
***
The Stalwart, small, unpainted, and unloved, had a traditional interior design. Most analysts—navigation, engineering, and security—sat on the huge main deck. The coffee aides, Generation 1 primitive robots, stood by for orders. To conserve space, the ceilings were only seven and a half feet high, just enough to permit Mer to walk erect. The wall décor, of curved plastic screens mounted on the carbon-carbon heat shields, changed daily to stimulate the analysts: The Grand Canyon, the Horsehead Galaxy, Picasso’s Guernica. Aft of the main deck lay crates of steel for emergency repairs. On the smaller deck above, the three department chiefs sifted through analyses and bickered over which to forward to the commander, whose cabin was on the top deck and fore to protect him against a hostile boarding,
Stephen was preoccupied by how to recruit a rebellious crew. He would have to dismantle the Stalwart’s robots. He could direct them all to stand down, but a copy of the order would go to the military spaceport on Ambrosia. Even if he could block the transmission, he still would need to quickly place 300 Alaturians at posts around the ship without raising suspicions—and train them on the spot.
Maybe Mer would have ideas. He would probably wind up leading the rebellion, anyway.
***
Two days later, the Stalwart landed at the spaceport on Alatur. Jagged blue hills surrounded the rusting launch pads and decrepit offices, like an oldster’s healthy gums surrounding rotting molars. Most of the spaceport consisted of gaudy duty-free shops, encrusted with verdigris, frequented by the old and the rich and run by expatriates of Earth who laundered dollars on the side. When Stephen taxied down the runway to the launch pad, UN guards swarmed over his ship.
“We thought we’d offer an Open House Day for Alaturians who would like to know how a starship works,” Stephen said. “The robots will give them hands-on experience.”
“Folks are lining up already.” The guard pointed to the youths muttering to one another. Stephen recognized them. Members of Mer’s folk orchestra.
As each Alaturian, flushed with excitement, entered the Stalwart, Stephen coupled him with a robot who took him to its station. Two males remained in the queue when Stephen spotted a UN cruiser racing to the ship, barely a meter above the ground. Sirens wailed.
“Hurry,” he said to the last male in line, hooded like the rest. Stephen looked over his own shoulder for the last robot, but all stations were manned. “You should go home,” he said to the male. The cruiser braked and its doors flew open, spitting out a brawny UN guard who sprinted toward the ship, his stun gun cocked.
The male in line threw off the hood with a vulpine grin. “Don’t you have a spot for me?” said Dannyxa. Stephen pushed her towards his quarters. The UN guard drew his gun and crouched like an amateur pretending to be a pro, and fired. His legs numbed, Stephen fell halfway out of the hatch. “Fire the engines,” he ordered his robot majordomo, S20, who normally mapped the optimal orbits. A taut long arm pulled Stephen in. Mer. Smiling, S20 closed the hatch.
“Who tipped off the UN?” Stephen said. Feeling painfully returned to his legs.
“You,” said Mer. “You need a permit to host Alaturians on a UN destroyer.”
Stephen sighed. “Prepare to launch.”
***
The game plan was to cripple an Earthship—or at least to damage it conspicuously enough to force political concessions. Stephen had not considered that he might get shot down. He considered it now. In two hours, he could be a floating corpse. As little as he mattered now, he would matter even less as a lump of protoplasm in space. Surely he could reverse his plans, undo the risk. Surely there was time.
“We’re in orbit now, skipper,” Mer said over the videocom. “Initiate the chase?”
“Uh, Roger.”
A shadow fell over him. Smitten by the six Gs—the Alaturians rarely underwent launches—Dannyxa stood groggily behind him. “What next?” she said.
“Five Earthships are in our orbit. We’ll wing one. But we must move fast. Spaceport Control has probably already notified the four ships of a rogue. Yet we can’t move too fast. The ship would overcome Alatur’s gravity, slip out of orbit, and veer off into space. One of life’s little surprises.”
She made a wry face. “Is that all?”
“No. The orbit crosses an asteroid belt at a Lagrangian point.”
“A what?”
“A point at a 60-degree angle from a line connecting the sun to Alatur. The point is so stable that debris piles up there. A collision could disturb the ship’s angle of inclination with Alatur’s equator and knock us into a new orbit. Fasten your seat belt.”
Stephen had planned to insert the Stalwart into orbit just behind the Vigilant, the oldest of the monitoring ships and thus the one most vulnerable to a sneak assault. He had programmed the sequence of adjustments in the angles of the exhaust nozzles. But the forced launch from the spaceport had made surprise impossible. The UN destroyers were armed and waiting.
As the Stalwart glided into orbit, the Excalibur, the Kraken of the fleet, attacked from behind with a fusillade of small missiles. To evade them, Stephen accelerated to just below escape velocity. “We can hold this course for only five minutes,” he told Mer. “Any ideas?”
“We could appeal to the robot crews.” Mer grinned woflishly. “All-points bulletins aren’t filtered by the local command, since they’re almost always for emergencies. A political appeal to the robots might slow operations long enough to foil an attack.”
Dannyxa wrote the announcement and broadcast it. “From the Committee to Free Alatur. To our crewmen brothers: We guarantee to you the same rights as humans enjoy on Earth, if you will liberate your ships from the UN slavemasters.”
Minutes passed. “Excalibur is no longer firing rockets,” Mer reported. “It’s firing up its reverse boosters.” The ship was slowing.
The Stalwart was pulling away from the Excalibur and gaining on the Pandora ahead, which was burrowing like a vole. “Should we attack?” Stephen said.
“I don’t think so,” Mer said. “Pandora is slowing, too. The all-points bulletin may have so confused the local commands as to cripple the fleet. No missiles required.”
The officer on watch broke in. “Micrometeors ahead, in seven minutes.”
“Evade them,” Stephen ordered. But the preprogrammed maneuvers wouldn’t help, since they had been calculated on the assumption that the ship would cross the asteroid belt at a different time and place. “We’ll have to play it by ear.” Ship instruments would judge the size and distance of each large chunk by its gravitational pull. But to evade it, the Stalwart would have to slow during the five minutes required to cross the belt. “Fire the reverse boosters.”
Stephen kept his eye on a screen visualizing debris heading toward the ship and recommending course corrections. Since the recommendations unerringly worked, he made them automatic and began charting the trajectory that the ship would take when it exited the asteroid belt. Three minutes remained in the belt... two… one. Then the bridge crumpled and the lights went out.
***
“Dannyxa is dead,” the doctor said.
Stephen emerged from his reverie. “What?”
“She’s done. What do you want to do with the corpse?”
“Eject it,” he said automatically. Corpses on board were hardly ideal for morale. He had the unsettling sense of crossing a red line but didn’t have time to think about it.
Ashen-faced, Mer gripped Stephen’s arm. “Put her in my cabin. She deserves burial. I’ll see to it.”
“All right.” Stephen was still numb. By reflex, he looked at the velocity instruments. The collision had slowed the Stalwart, and it was about to drop out of orbit.
The videophone crackled. “This is the UNS Vindicator. Surrender. Two more destroyers have launched from the moon port. Give up in two minutes or we will open fire again.” No visuals on the phone—just a voice.
“Is it a trick?” Stephen said. Mer gave him a vacant stare. Stephen turned to S20.
“It’s a ruse,” the robot said, with his standard deferential smile. “The logistics don’t work. The launch window for the moon port won’t open for several hours, assuming that we’re even in the launch period.”
“We are,” Stephen said glumly. “But let’s play the percentages.”
“Two ships launched from Ambrosia,” the observer reported. Two minutes crept by. The Stalwart remained intact.
“Where are the ships?” Stephen said.
“They won’t reach our orbit for a while,” S20 said. “Ambrosia is spinning in the wrong direction. That slows the ships in the launch.”
“Let’s give them two more minutes.” But the ships still did not appear.
“The Ambrosia port is at an obtuse angle to this point in our orbit,” S20 explained. “The launch pad can swivel only to an acute angle—the UN saveed money when it built the port. The ships have to change the angle of inclination in mid-flight. That takes time.”
“But it doesn’t take forever.”
“Well, Alatur is small. Our low orbit is only 20,000 kilometers in circumference. The UNS destroyers were built for an Earth orbit of at least 40,000 kilometers. Inserting a couple of Earth destroyers into a small orbit already clogged with six means that the command must redistribute the ships quickly. That’s not happening. Even if it does, the two destroyers may, if they’re frantic, enter the orbit at a speed above Alatur’s escape velocity. They’d spin off into the wild black yonder.”
“You’re grasping at straws. What should we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let’s accelerate, attack, and get the hell out of Dodge City.” Stephen dialed up his engineer. “Can we speed up by Mach 3?”
The engineer, an Alaturian, was green but eager. “Maybe for 15 minutes.”
Stephen glanced at the bulwark weakened by the asteroid. The Stalwart was already repairing itself. But it bolted in the sudden acceleration, flooring Stephen.
“Destroyer 200 kilometers behind,” said the navigator. “The Rabble-Rouser.”
“It’s a small old ship,” S20 said. “Not likely to retaliate.”
“Attack, then.”
“We’re running low on fuel,” said the engineer.
“No worries!” said the bright-eyed assistant navigator. Under her instruction, the spaceship accelerated into an outer elliptical orbit, which took longer to complete than the original circular orbit. After 90 minutes, the Stalwart neared the Rabble-rouser from behind. It slowed to re-enter the Rabble-rouser’s orbit and match the speed of the old ship.
Stephen ordered the launch of a missile too small to damage the Rabble-rouser’s structure. It would just be a warning shot to enlighten the UN. But the aft watch broke in. “Incoming missile at five o’clock. Impact in two minutes.”
S20 smiled wanly. “Those two new destroyers must have been hiding in a parking orbit.”
“Evade the missile,” Stephen ordered.
“Which way should we move?” the navigator said. “Away from the moon port or towards it?”
“Away. The launch pad fires at an acute angle. It would aim the destroyer launch too low, not too high.”
The Stalwart ascended. On the bridge monitor, Stephen watched the missile slip past. It was one of the largest stocked on the destroyers. “Why didn’t they set the missile to hone in on the Stalwart’s gravity?”
“That was their warning shot,” S20 said.
Three emergency alarms blared like a demonic chorus. “Prepare for invasion,” said S20. Braking with retrorockets within meters of the Stalwart, the Behemoth extended magnetic grappling hooks to pry open the Stalwart’s entry module. Stephen threw a switch to stop the module from depressurizing. “That will buy us just a few more minutes,” S20 said. “The assailants have pressure suits.”
“Pile crates of steel at the ingress and prime your blasters,” Stephen ordered. On the main deck, the analysts used a small tractor to move the crates, each weighing the equivalent of a ton on Alatur’s surface, to the ingress from the entry module. They drew their weapons and stood in a semicircle around the blocked entrance. The assailants painfully forced open the ingress and charged upon the analysts as Stephen and S20 watched from the highest deck. “Shoot to stun,” Stephen shouted.
Although the assailants outnumbered the analysts, only two at a time could squeeze through the constricted ingress. They were picked off by the dozen swearing analysts. The unconscious bodies piled up helter-skelter at the ingress until no more assailants could barge in.
Stephen’s phone thrummed. “This is Dixon.” Commander of the Behemoth. “Surrender, or we’ll be back.”
Stephen sighed. Memories of Dannyxa returned in waves, as if from the distant past. “We can’t fight off seven ships.”
“No need to,” said Mer, who was back among the living. He looked oddly relieved. “The UN built a backup port on Moon Diablo but never used it—the ships never had to fight before. We can hole up there. The UN will leave us alone. It doesn’t want a revolt on its hands.”
***
Over three months, Stephen and his crew of 200 Alaturians set up a colony on Diablo, in a rocky crater facing the sun, based on his crude blueprints of cookie-cutter homes. Since the small moon had no atmosphere, the dwellings would fit together in a hexagon of seven stories to minimize travel time to the services at the center and to avoid the lethal chill and solar radiation. Social ties in this honeycomb were inevitably close, which suited the Alaturians. The UN grudgingly permitted trade with Alatur for food, water, and the famous bluewood for construction. In exchange, the rebels vowed to stay on Diablo.
Mer had reached the apogee of his career when Dannyxa died. Now he devoted his short days to erecting a shrine of granite to her, with ministrations; he buried her remains beneath it. When the Alaturians on Diablo asked him to head their security force, he took umbrage and declined. He did not attend the weekly town hall meetings quietly chaired by Stephen. He earned a living by coaching soccer at the secondary school. He married the beguiling Alaturian who had been assistant navigator on the Stalwart’s combat flight. She was more inclined to follow her gruff boss than to propose her own changes in course They raised four children and led the classic Alaturian life, a quotidian one.
The UN cast off Stephen as a traitor, banned for life from Earth. His father disowned him in a speech to the General Assembly. So Diablo elected the indefatigable commander as mayor. Worried about copycat rebellions elsewhere, the UN permitted the settlement no media ties to inhabited planets, save for a redacted weekly from Earth that arrived a month late.
The isolated settlers invented for their own culture a saga of their revolt, revolving about Stephen’s literary doppelgänger and performed each year on Independence Day.
One afternoon Stephen saw an Earthman at the other end of the main hall in his palatial home—ramrod straight, confident, his shirt and jeans trim and clean, his hair well cut. It was a holo-mirror, and he did not turn away.
Leon Taylor teaches economics at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet nation in Central Asia. A Hoosier, he was a newspaper reporter before becoming an economist. He has written fiction for Schlock!, Space and Time, 96th of October, 365tomorrows, kaidankai, Sanitarium, Mono blog, Spotlong Review, The Quiet Reader, The Unpleasantville Anthology, Samjoko, Made of Rust and Glass Anthology, HalfHourToKill, Confetti Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Baltimore. Blog: centralasianeconomy.blogspot.com