As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity.  I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

excerpted from “The Playmaker,” a work in progress

Grand Delta, Away: YC 184 Teldy 17

“Happy equinox!” Oisín yelled when he heard his little brother clattering up the stairs. “You’re not supposed to wear your boots in the house. How was practice?”

“Sorry!” Anwar yelled back. “Gotta talk to Dads!”

“Not here this evening. You know that.” Leaning back from the worktable, Oisín twisted and stretched shoulders and back. “Hevel’s at rehearsal, Vítor has a business dinner.”

“Oh. I forgot.”

When Oisín turned, he found Anwar in full match kit hanging from the frame of his bedroom door, stretching out. Filthy, he was stippled with mud from caked boots up, only his face almost clean where he must have swiped it with a towel after practice. Generally he cleaned up and changed at the fieldhouse before coming home. “I forgot,” he said again. “What’re you doing?”

“Take your boots off. Take a shower.” Standing, looming like a proper big brother—he was a good deal taller than Anwar, more than four years accounted for—Oisín took a step forward. “I’ll make something to eat.”

With a last twist of the spine, Anwar released the door frame and straightened up. “All right.” He started to turn. “But I gotta talk to somebody, Sheeny, and you’re all I got till Dads get home.”

“Call one of your little friends.”

“It’s too … big, too important for that. Please, Sheeny.”

“Fine.” Oisín resisted the urge to reach out and ruffle Anwar’s hair. “Anything to keep my baby brother happy. Take your shower. I’ll stand by and you can talk.”

Anwar shrugged and pulled the muddy jersey over his head, turning away from the door. The cleats of his boots chattered on wood. Oisín followed his little brother into his own room, where Anwar tossed the jersey into a corner before sitting on the bed to remove shin guards, boots, stockings. On the wall above Anwar’s worktable hung his greatest treasure, a priceless thing: the match-worn, autographed shirt of Notós Windlords’ great playmaker İlhami, framed and vacuum sealed under glass. Posed portrait and action images surrounded it, İlhami of course, and others, present and past stars of football sides worldwide—Grand Delta’s two professional clubs prominent although neither City nor River had ventured near the championship in longer than Anwar or Oisín had been alive. When shorts and groin guard followed jersey and socks into the corner, Oisín shook his head and said, “Please don’t leave those to fester, little brother.”

Naked, Anwar glared at him, half serious. “Please don’t turn into Hevel on me, big brother. I’ll wash them after I wash myself. I don’t imagine they stink any worse than I do.” Stepping into the lavatory, he leaned into the corner to turn the faucet. “When did I start to stink so bad, anyway? Is it a growing-up thing? You smell bad too when you bother to sweat.”

“Growing up? Yeah.” Oisín regarded his adolescent brother. He still thought of Anwar as a child but despite his stature it was clearly not true. “You have two types of sweat glands but the second kind doesn’t do much till puberty and some of those secretions feed skin bacteria that make the stink. Your balls get bigger, you start getting hairy, your dick realizes it’s not just for pissing, you begin to stink—it’s how it works. You can try my perfumes if you want.”

“Really? Thanks! There’s one—I like how you smell when you wear it.”

“Smells different on different skin. You’ll have to experiment. And nothing’s going to overpower scrimmage sweat unless you use far too much.”

Oisín leaned against the wall, watching. Anwar stuck his head under the spray and sputtered. Water streamed over limbs and torso. He was muscular—when had that happened?—legs more than arms or chest, and the structure of his face seemed to have changed, finer, more angular, less round. Not much hair yet, though: Oisín felt he’d already been hairier at that age. But both his dads were hirsute. Oisín didn’t remember his uncle well or Anwar’s other genetic parent, his mother, at all. Women had been less hairy than men, he knew, not that it was a trait passed on to their sons, but maybe the men of her family.… He scratched at his chest, a rough fingernail catching on hairs, tugging them. Thinking about Anwar’s birth parents (the word birth) made him uneasy. “What was it you needed to talk about, Anwar?” he asked.

“What?” Soaping under his arm, Anwar looked up. “Oh! The scout from City came to practice again today.”

“Third time, right?”

“He brought the manager of youth development this time. I set up a pretty opportunity for my forward—Tudor botched it but I got the ball back and made the goal. Next time I looked past the touchline they were huddled with Cayetano.”

Cayetano was the coach of Anwar’s amateur youth team. Oisín straightened up away from the wall. “You’re not joking around.”

Anwar grinned, shook his head.

“Contract?”

“They have to talk to Dads first—wanted to start negotiations right away but I said I wanted to break the news.”

“Anwar!” Without thinking, Oisín strode into the spray to embrace his brother, lifted the little man off the floor. “That’s spectacular!” He didn’t have so much use for the beautiful game himself, had only ever followed it because Vítor did and then because it became the most important thing in the world to Anwar. “Congratulations, babe.” Setting Anwar on his feet, he kissed his brother’s forehead. “I’ll make you something special for dinner.”

“It’s just City.”

“Just City—could have been River.” FC River’s past was less illustrious than City’s, its present no more promising. “How’s Windlords going to find out about you before you’re on a bigger pitch than Cayo’s little babies’ club?”

Anwar pushed against Oisín’s chest with both hands until he stepped back a bit. “Stupid. I’m trying not to let it feel bigger than it is.”

“You’re thirteen, Anwar. It’s big. It’s really big. City’s not recruiting any of Cayo’s other boys, are they?”

“You’re all wet, Sheeny.”

The water that got past Anwar’s head and shoulders peppered Oisín’s chest. Sodden, his sarong clung to his thighs, crisp folds melted, the weight of wet fabric threatening to pull apart the tucks that held the garment together on his hips. “Appears I am. Soapy too.” Hands firm on Anwar’s shoulders, he moved his brother aside. “Let me rinse off.” The full rush of warm water felt good. He hugged Anwar again. “I’m so proud of you. Pleased for you. Wait till Vítor hears! You’re happy, aren’t you?”

Anwar pushed him off again, turned away, turned his back. “Let me get clean,” he muttered.

“Oh.” Understanding—it would have horrified him if it weren’t funny—Oisín stepped farther away. “You know, it’s a natural reaction, babe. After all, I’m a very handsome man.”

“Shut up!”

Loosening the folds and tucks of his sarong, Oisín let it fall to his ankles, stepped out of it and the spray of water. “Here, you can wash this with your kit,” he said, good humored. His little brother’s lean, small body held no attraction at all. “I’ll put something else on and make your dinner.” Grabbing a towel, he headed for the door. “I am proud of you, Anwar.”

“Shut up, Oisín.”

Back in his own room, mostly dry, Oisín chose a clean sarong and draped it longer than he usually wore around the house, to the calf. Reflecting, he pulled on a shirt as well. Regarding the seven little flasks of perfume atop his bureau, he selected the one he thought least fleshy, a complex bigarade too bitter in its top notes to smell edible, its confounding drydown at once oily and arid, spritzed it on the hollow of his throat and insides of his wrists, inhaled with relish. His baby brother had grown into a little man, horny and easily aroused by touch or thought or vision—probably beat off four times a day, fast as he could, just to relieve the pressure. Probably wanking right now under the shower.

“Hey!” he yelled, passing Anwar’s door, not looking in (the water was still running), “you know where my perfumes are. Feel free. Find one you like, I’ll buy it for you.”

Anwar did not reply. Oisín went on to the kitchen, investigated the pantry, stalking inspiration. He wasn’t sure yet (Hevel often said, “You’re seventeen—wait till you’ve done global service to plan your future”) but he thought he wanted to pursue cooking. For years now neither Hevel nor Vítor had had to prepare a meal unless they chose to. Feeding people made Oisín feel good. Startling and delighting their mouths made him feel better, but Anwar was a problem Oisín had yet to solve to either’s full satisfaction: he had a child’s palate, wanted clear, bright, uncomplicated flavors, rebelled against any dish that required more than an instant to understand.

Having chosen primary ingredients from what he could find, Oisín was contemplating his method when Anwar, belligerent, said, “You did that deliberately, didn’t you?”

“What, babe?” Dim, amiable, Oisín looked up from half-formed plans for the cutlets of tank-grown lamb on the board.

As if in rebuttal, Anwar had chosen not to don a shirt. He sat across the table, flushed, glaring. “To embarrass me again. Sent me into your room to see that.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“On your worktable.”

“I didn’t—” Realizing what he’d left for his brother to discover about him, Oisín swallowed. He felt heat flare up in the skin of chest and cheeks and looked down past the white-marbled rose of the lamb, away from Anwar’s searing gaze. The bundle of fresh rapini gleamed green as flakes of malachite, studded with tiny yellow blossoms. He wasn’t certain he could persuade Anwar to eat rapini. “I thought I wiped that when I heard you come in. I wasn’t … what you think.”

“What’s the point, Sheeny?”

Laying down his knife, Oisín lifted his head, tried to smile. “Frustration, I suppose.” He had left his collection of women cycling on the worktable, still images he’d been pigeonholing off the aether for years: faces and bodies, actions and reactions and repose. Most of them were clothed but a significant percentage not—perhaps a hundred images were overtly sexual, whether the woman was pleasing herself or pleasing or being pleased by a man or another woman. “Anwar, I don’t even really know if that’s what I want, if it were possible. I’m fine with other guys—I mean, they’re not repulsive. I get it up, get off, get them off. But I can’t help wondering if that’s all.… They’re beautiful, women. I haven’t met a man I thought was beautiful.”

“Were.” Anwar shook his head. “Were beautiful, Oisín. The youngest women still alive are fifty years older than you.”

“And some of them, many of them, are lovely. Not that they’d have me. I’m just a kid. But, you know, I’ve never really known a woman. I can’t know if I’d like the way they think, if I could get along with one. I can … imagine growing fond enough of a guy I’d want to spend my life with him, if he were the right guy.”

Anwar’s voice sounded small, thin, when he replied, “I can too.” Lowered eyes regarded his hand, clenched so tight on the counter the knuckles were white.

“Oh—Anwar, is that why you were angry? You found them attractive too?”

“I don’t know!” Abrupt, Anwar pushed away from the counter, fumbling his way off the stool and turning his back. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Unless somebody somewhere figures out how to break the light-speed barrier and spacewomen from the homeworld or one of the other colonies out there suddenly drop from the sky, we’ll never find out, will we? Even then, we’d have to be quarantined. Spacewomen couldn’t risk getting themselves infected, carrying that stupid gene home and dooming their world too.”

“X-chromosome’s still in the gene pool. All they have to do is eradicate or inactivate—”

“They’ve been trying for sixty-five years.”

“Sixty-four.”

“You know how much of the government’s science budget goes to the effort? All of it. For sixty-four years. Whoever wherever designed the thing was good.”

Oisín picked up the knife again. “I want to cook for you, Anwar. I don’t want to think about things I can’t affect. Your news made me happy. Can we go back to that?”

Anwar looked back over his shoulder, a jarringly provocative gesture that reminded Oisín, in a way he didn’t like, of the second boy who’d seduced him, the boy who wanted to break his heart, first made him wonder if his heart was breakable. He wondered—he didn’t know, he wondered if he ought to know—whether his younger brother had fooled around with friends or teammates. Whether the gesture was innocent.

“I don’t know if I chose the right perfume,” Anwar said. “I liked it a lot when I first put it on but it’s changed.”

“They do that—they’re designed to. There’s the top note, what you smell right out of the bottle. It’s very volatile. You’re smelling the heart notes now.”

Lifting his wrist, Anwar sniffed at it. “Well, I don’t know that I like this one’s heart. It’s beating too hard.”

Between the dry heart of his own scent, the fragrance of the raw meat, and the rapini’s bitter odor, Oisín couldn’t smell anything off Anwar but he had a good idea which perfume his brother had chosen: in the bottle it smelled like melted chocolate and caramel and roasting coffee, but its heart was thick, sweaty, fading from edible to carnal. Oisín himself had to be feeling especially grown up to wear it. “Tell you what, babe. Tomorrow—you don’t have practice, do you?—I’ll take you to the perfume shop, find you something just for yourself. Now go away and let me cook.”

§

Ra’d, the Australs: YC 190 Zizdy 01

Hraban woke early, feeling ill, not a surprise. Without pronouncing the words aloud or in his head, he resolved not to drink again before the equinox. He knew it was a promise he wouldn’t keep. Rolling across the bed, eyes clamped shut against the intolerable light that had wakened him, he encountered no Annie. Also not a surprise. She had never spent an entire night in his bed: he had never seen her in daylight. Not knowingly, at any rate.

He stumbled to the lavatory. A clean mouth and cool shower helped. After he asked the AI to dim the windows, two liters of water revived him enough that he could consider searching out the hangover remedy and making coffee. Cradling the hot mug in both hands, he sat on the edge of the bed. His temples throbbed. The thought that he might have encountered Annie out in the world, out of travesty, troubled him.

Of course he knew that in the daylit world she would be a man. Even in the sanctuary of his flat, it had never been a surprise when her breasts came off with her clothing, when removing the unpleasant undergarment that left welts on her flesh exposed a man’s ready dick and balls. No help for it. Hraban had heard of, read about, seen images of professional travesty artists who had suffered surgical and hormonal intervention to become closer approximations of women, but not on Ra’d. What was there on this grimy, mediocre island to attract such a glorious being? What chance was there of his ever living in a place that would attract them? He would never pay off enough of his debts to leave his job, leave Ra’d.

Annie was a stupendous, unbelievable fluke, whoever she might be out of travesty. On first sight, Hraban had been enchanted. She swept into the club under the arm of a giant of a man, a stranger—they both were strangers—who clearly believed he owned her. Any fool could see it was the other way around. Hraban had choked on the rough rum in his glass, seeing her.

The striking travestida (Hraban didn’t know what she called herself yet) and her patron held court for the club’s habitués, skirtchasers and travestidas alike, but even two more rums had not given Hraban sufficient courage to approach. He left before they did, sick with the knowledge that the giant had her (that night, at least), that she would never deign to visit the club again—that she would not come alone if she did … that, in the inconceivable event of her returning unaccompanied, he could never afford her. He couldn’t properly afford the plainest of Ra’d’s sad travestidas. Back at his flat, he finished off the last half bottle of cheap Bougainville rum and cried himself to sleep.

And yet she had returned, two fivers later. Alone. Serene, unconquerable, she stood in the bright-lit entry for a long moment, gazing about the club as if it were her own domain, lovely as any woman or expensive travestida Hraban had ever seen but alive, no hologram or flat image fixed on a journal’s or worktable’s display. He set his glass down without drinking, afraid the liquor would choke him again. Drinking in the sight of her had already intoxicated him.

Then, terrifying him, when she stepped down into the club, she turned toward him with a slight smile on her painted lips, approached. He was aware of the other skirtchasers staring at him, wishing him dead. The hand on his glass trembled. “You look a pleasant young man,” she said in a husky voice he had to strain to hear. “May I join you?”

Hraban shook his head hard, afraid she would take him at the word he couldn’t speak.

Hiking herself gracefully onto the stool beside him, she said, “You may call me Annie.”

Mute, Hraban shook his head again.

Cautious, the bartender sidled up. No travestida of Annie’s quality had been seen in the club before. Most of them could hardly be bothered to shave again before they trussed themselves up, trusting to thick maquillage and low light to disguise stubble. “Whiskey,” she told him. “The best you have. One for my friend here as well.”

Her hands, quiet on the bar, were beautiful, pale and small and soft, the oval nails lacquered the same vivid scarlet as her lip paint. There was no hair at all on her forearms.

“I can’t afford whiskey,” Hraban mumbled, his voice thick and phlegmy, deeper than usual.

“I can.”

“I can’t afford you.”

“My dear man, I’ve no doubt I could buy you and sell you and never notice.” She turned her head, smiling again, and Hraban saw with another shock that she was young, years younger than he. “That aside, I’m not a pro. Money need not enter into any transaction we might entertain.” He was fascinated by the glints of light on her teeth, on her glossy lips, on the blue-grey irises of her eyes. “Unless I choose to make you a gift, which I will, of course, expect you to accept without quarrel. Now—” one of her lovely hands rose from the bar, a slender finger brushed the bristly beard along his jawline, leaving a painful thrill like electricity behind—“handsome stranger, tell me your name.”

“What about that man? The giant who brought you here before?”

She blinked slowly, subtly painted lids and thick lashes falling to obscure the fascinating eyes, then rising. “Were you frightened of him? Is that why you didn’t come talk to me?” When her head turned again, graciously acknowledging the delivery of their whiskeys, Hraban saw the tiniest flaw in her masquerade: the small protrusion of cartilage between the tendons of her long powdered throat. “Turgay need not trouble you. He was here only briefly. He has gone away, far away. I do not expect him to return.”

The same hand lifted one of the glasses of amber liquor to his lips. The sharp, complex fragrance burned his nostrils, made him blink against salt in the corners of his eyes. “Drink,” she said, “and tell me your name.”

Before he comprehended what it was about, his own hand had come up to cup the soft complexity of her fingers, lifted the glass just enough to tilt a little whiskey onto his tongue. It was so smooth and not sweet he knew it for spirits only by the burn on tongue and palate, the vapors effervescing in his sinuses. He was not actually holding her hand but his accompanied hers when it returned to the bar and set the glass down, and then her fingers closed on his and he said, “My name is Hraban.”

“Not so difficult?”

“You could have any skirt-—any man here.”

“But you’re the handsome, melancholy one, Hraban.”

Nobody had ever called him handsome. Was he? He was too tall—not big like Annie’s giant, Turgay, but too tall, skinny, clumsy; too hairy (except on his scalp: he couldn’t afford to remediate the balding); too sad and needful. His features were over large, over emphatic. He liked the color of his eyes but molasses brown could never be as striking as Annie’s blue. The only compliments he had ever received—they were half complaints—were on the size of his prick. Annie hadn’t seen that yet, though if she continued to stroke his fingers and caress him fondly with her eyes it would rise up stiffer in his lap and make its presence known.

They did not stay much longer at the club. Annie did not drink her whiskey as Hraban had imagined a woman would but in two swift swallows. His flat was not far—he had taken it partly on account of its proximity to the travesty club. In any case, she said nothing of any other place they might go. Along the way, she halted him before the blank glass display window of an empty shop and insisted he kiss her.

He didn’t know what to expect, he had kissed so few. She was so small he had to bend farther than was comfortable and lift her higher onto her toes with a palm in her lower back. The fragrance of her stupefied him. It was a perfume so lewd he wondered she dared wear it except you had to be this close to perceive it under the fresh scent of her sweat. Then her lips touched his, greasy and cool, the grease smelling of lime and bitter orange that didn’t so much obscure the perfume as slice its layers apart so he could distinguish the faint fecal note under the athlete’s armpit under the heady old wine about to turn under the fermenting apples under the spices and incenses and aromatic woods. Gasping, he opened his lips for her tongue.

Nearly half a year later, Hraban knew not much more about Annie than he had the first time they kissed. Occasionally he found vivid bruises on her legs and flanks but she would not discuss them. The only new thing he knew about himself was that he would, if he was drunk enough (even if he wasn’t), allow her to fuck him. Sometimes he asked for it.

He assumed she was not native to Ra’d, assumed—she was very young—she had come to the Australs on global-service assignment. Doubtless in daylight, disguised as a man, Annie worked in one of the factories that powered Ra’d’s economy, just as he did. Although her labor would be temporary, arbitrary, on the whim of the Ministry of Works: he could not imagine Annie settling for Ra’d. She was too fine for factory work, too rare for the island.

Global service would explain her sudden, immaculate appearance on Ra’d’s tiny travesty scene. It would mean she was likely to leave soon for her next assignment, a possibility he feared to bring up, tried not to contemplate. If she left, when she left, he didn’t know what would become of him.

Overpowered by misery, he dropped his mug. It made a dull sound on the mat underfoot. Cool, grainy dregs splattered his feet, stained the rug. His head still ached and throbbed. He stared at the stain but made no move to clean it up. As diffident as if it were aware of his condition and mood (he supposed it was), his phone reminded him of his 11:50 appointment.

“What—” but he remembered. “Time now?”

The phone knew him so well it had given two intervals’ warning. Angry with the phone, with himself for accepting Jarek’s invitation and with Jarek for extending it, Hraban sketchily swabbed up the spill, swallowed another dose for his hangover, made another cup of coffee. More than a casual acquaintance, perhaps, Jarek was yet no more than a man Hraban saw on the factory floor every work day. They talked, it would be peculiar if they didn’t, but Jarek knew precisely nothing about Hraban. He had no reason to believe Hraban might be entertained, the day after New Year’s, by an off-season demonstration match between two lower-division football clubs. It would fill time on the final afternoon of the holiday, Hraban supposed he had been thinking when he told Jarek he would attend, and please a co-worker he had no cause to distress. It was going to be, Jarek said, the last public appearance of the side’s young star, a global-service draftee due to move on to a new assignment before the season opened.

Hraban drank coffee. He ate. He dressed, knotting one of the costly sarongs Annie had given him around his hips because he half-remembered Ra’d Bolt’s jerseys being a similar red-orange. He anointed exposed skin with UV-block and looked out a hat and dark glasses. He ate again. He called for a street-rail jitney to carry him to Bolt’s ground, a site he had never visited. Perhaps liquor would be sold. His headache was nearly appeased. On the point of walking out the door he hesitated, opened the small cabinet where he stored his perfumes. There were two bottles he had purchased long before meeting Annie but he had not worn either since she pronounced them unsubtle; three from a Haven-city perfumer, the value of which he dared not consider. Two were for nighttime, Annie said: he wore one or the other to the club, in hope she would come. He had no occasions to put on the daylight scent.

It smelled like daylight, he thought when the vapors condensed on the skin and hair of his chest, not understanding the thought: like fresh air thick with ocean salt, like hot washed stone. It smelled like nothing human.

Bolt’s little stadium had been raised by a consortium of factory owners on the headland at Thunder Point, looking south across the channel toward Yıldırım-island. It almost seemed to Hraban that the entire population of Ra’d had chosen to attend, although he knew it couldn’t be true. Indeed, across the pitch opposite the seat his ticket entitled him to, a blue and white banner and several hundred fans in blue and white shirts celebrated Yıldırım Lightning, Bolt’s opponents. Hraban’s acquaintance Jarek would not appear to sit beside him and engage him in conversation, for Jarek was Bolt’s central defender and would be on the field.

There was uproar in the stands when the two elevens trotted onto the pitch. “Anwar! Anwar!” cried a boy near Hraban, “you mustn’t leave us!”

“Of course he must,” the boy’s father told him. “Just as you will in a few years.”

Hraban had been very ready to leave Aglaopheme, the island of his upbringing, long before his eighteenth birthday, but his parents had not been the kind of men who indulged their sons’ enthusiasms nor had Hraban’s enthusiasms been the kind that were easily shared. He was not athletic or artistic or terribly clever. His brothers scorned the fictions and immersives he preferred—historical artefacts from the days before women stopped being born. His global-service sojourns in the great cities of Westwind and Haven had revealed to him the beauties still left in the world—he wished never to return to Aglaopheme—but he had no particular aptitude for the work he was assigned. He had aptitude if no love for the work they gave him when he came to Ra’d and the place seemed tolerable if unlovely. At first. What aptitudes, he wondered, did Annie possess—where had she come from, where would she go?

The match had commenced. Players chased the ball or other men across the green pitch, making patterns some men might find pleasing. Hraban was not properly watching when one person in red-orange shirt, very fast, approached the blue goal, neatly trapped the ball passed by a teammate, made his shot. Tripping, Yıldırım’s keeper reached for the ball, put a finger on it, deflected it into the net. It would have gone in regardless.

In a fury of approbation, Bolt’s supporters roared: “Anwar!”

Half curious, Hraban asked his journal to tell him more as, on the green, Bolt celebrated and Lightning, despondent, consulted with their manager. The youth was twenty-three days short of turning nineteen, he stood 1.7 meters, massed sixty-eight kilos, came from Grand Delta on Away where City, one of the town’s two professional sides, had had him under contract until he was drafted into global service. His hair, in the still image captured at the moment of understanding his shot had struck home, was already damp and stringy with sweat, unfashionably long. His face Hraban knew, horrible in its ungendered beauty.

Hraban found himself stumbling up the stairs to the concourse. Out of the happy crowd, he threw his arms around one of the piers that supported the stadium’s sun and rain shield, breathing so hard it hurt his chest. A translucent membrane prevented his reaching for the thirty-meter sheer drop to the ground below. Behind and below him, the crowd bellowed again: had Anwar made another goal so quickly? Hraban knew the cause of Annie’s bruises now. Covering his face with his hands, he smelled the chill, inhumane perfume on his wrists.

§

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