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Since his first pro sale to Asimov’s in 2005, Ted Kosmatka has sold stories to F&SF, Cemetery Dance,

City Slab, Ideomancer, and elsewhere. His tales have been translated into Hebrew and Russian, and have been reprinted in both Gardner Dozois’s Best SF of

the Year and Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction

and Fantasy of the Year. In his latest tale, Ted explores some of the possible ramifications of illumi-nating quantum mechanics with . . .

DIVINING

LIGHT

Ted Kosmatka

It is impossible that God should ever deceive me, since in all fraud and deceit is to be found a certain imperfection.

—Descartes

I crouched in the rain with a gun.

A wave climbed the pebbly beach toward me, washing over my foot, fill-ing my pants with grit and sand. Around me, the rocks loomed black and big as houses.

I shivered as I came back to myself and for the first time realized my suit jacket was missing. Also my left shoe, brown leather, size twelve. I looked for the shoe, scanning the rocky shoreline, but saw only stone and frothy, sliding water.

I took another swig from the bottle and tried to loosen my tie. Since I had a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other—and since I was unwill-ing to surrender either—loosening my tie was difficult. I used the gun hand, working the knot with a finger looped through the trigger guard, cold steel brushing my throat. I felt the muzzle under my chin—fingers numb and awkward, curling past the trigger.

It would be so easy.

I wondered if people have died this way—drunk, armed, loosening their ties. I imagined it was common among certain occupations.

Asimov’s

Then the tie opened, and I hadn’t shot myself. I took a swig from the bottle as reward.

I watched the waves rumble in. This place was nothing like the dunes of Indiana, where Lake Michigan makes love to the shoreline. Here in Gloucester, the water hates the land.

As a child, I’d come to this beach and wondered where all the boulders came from. Did the tides carry them in? Now I knew better. The boulders, of course, were here all along, buried in soft soils.

Behind me, near the road, there is a monument—a list of names. Fish-ermen. Gloucestermen. The ones who did not come back.

This is Gloucester, a place with a history of losing itself to the ocean.

I told myself I’d brought the gun for protection, but sitting here in the dark sand, I no longer believed it. I was beyond fooling myself. It was my father’s gun, a . 357. It had not been fired for sixteen years, seven months, four days. The math came quickly. Even drunk, the math came quickly.

My sister Mary had called it a good thing, this new place that was also an old place. A new start, she’d said. You can do your work again. You can continue your research.

Yeah, I’d said. A lie she believed.

You won’t call me, will you?

Of course I’ll call. A lie she didn’t.

I turned my face away from the wind and took another burning swig. I drank until I couldn’t remember which hand held the gun and which the bottle. I drank until they were the same.