Glimmering

Elizabeth Hand GLIMMERING

To my son, Tristan,

heir to a broken world, but with the tools to fix it.

With all my love.

Four voices just audible in the hush of any Christmas:

Accept my friendship or die.
I shall keep order and not very much will happen.
Bring me luck and of course I’ll support you.
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

—W. H. Auden, “Blessed Event”

“Fin de siecle,” murmured Lord Henry.

“Fin du globe,” answered his hostess.

“I wish it were fin du globe,” said Dorian with a sigh.

“Life is such a great disappointment.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Copyright

Copyright © 1997, 2012 by Elizabeth Hand

Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts “The Wasteland,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Brace & Co., copyright © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot.

“A House Is Not a Motel,” by Arthur Lee, published by Grass Roots Music BMI.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission should be emailed to underland@underlandpress.com

UNDERLAND PRESS

www.underlandpress.com

Portland, Oregon

eISBN : 978-0-982-66393-6

First Underland Press Edition: June 2012

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

AUTHOR’S NOTES TO THIS REVISED EDITION

Introduction

PROLOGUE

RUBRIC

PART ONE - Come As You Are

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

PART TWO - Everyone’s Invited

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

PART THREE - Regrets Only

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOVELS BY ELIZABETH HAND

AUTHOR’S NOTES TO THIS REVISED EDITION

I began writing Glimmering in 1994 as a near-future science fiction novel about a climate change–induced apocalypse. Today, 15 years after its 1997 publication, it reads more like a documentary. Terrorist air strikes against a New York City landmark, devastating storms and rising sea levels, fundamentalist terrorism of various stripes—eco, Christian, Muslim—viral pandemics, mass extinctions, melting ice shelves, rolling brownouts, economic meltdown, 3-D entertainment on a mass scale, music downloads, handheld computers—I loaded the book with these not because I anticipated they’d be part of my own near-future, but because I wanted to create an over-the-top, perfect storm scenario that would support a cautionary SF novel of the type I’d loved reading when I was a teenager in the 1970s, books like Dhalgren, The Sheep Look Up, Heroes and Villains. (The strange celestial effects which gave the book its title have yet to occur, and I completely missed the impact of cell phones, global email—then in its infancy—and social networks.)

In my wildest nightmares—and I’m a lifelong pessimist who’d written extensively about apocalyptic scenarios—I never imagined that the world of Glimmering would arrive so quickly, and with such devastating impact.