“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” © 2025 by Catarina João

When I met the young Mr. Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shifting hierarchy of the Courts by virtue of intrigue, scandal, and the naked blade; but in those times, it was the custom to advance one’s position through the collection of human bagatelles. Poets, polymaths, politicians—all manner of mortal myrmidons who flourished, in turn, during their time under the butterfly-bright attention of this Court or that one.

A changeling, of course, affords the best expectation of loyalty, but I have never had the patience for cultivating a companion from scratch; nor have I ever seen reason to abandon the comforts of the Courts to scrounge through cradles low and high. Instead, I opened doors. Anyone worth having would come to me. To ride searching and screaming over the worlds—that is the purview of the Wild Hunt, and my taste for flesh has never been of a kind with theirs.

On what was for me a quiet morning, he jogged into my Fellforest parlor through a door I’d tossed—in a fit of pique or boredom—at a musty potato cave in Dorsetshire. A few mortals had wandered through it before, as well they might; but never yet one wearing sodden-wet running shorts and trainers. (Indeed, the most recent visitor to use that door had done so some hundred years before running shorts had come into fashion.) He turned from me at once to survey the door through which he’d come. On the other side, rain pattered down through bud-tipped branches. Yes, he said, I thought as much; and he nodded with satisfaction in a hypothesis duly supported.

Visitors have most commonly responded with awe, or fear, or simple confusion, when they first arrive, through my intervention, in Elfhame; there are those, too, who step across my threshold a-shiver, with simple hope or elaborate greed, that they will find among the Lords of Faerie such things as they have been denied in their own world. To be met instead with this supple curiosity presented me the rare gift of novelty, and I could only laugh, for I knew that such a creature would be the envy of all the Courts.

At the sound, his shadow moved first—realizing for the first time, perhaps, that it was not bound to him in the same ways, not in the sunless light of Elfhame—and it strained toward mine where it lay on the carpet of dry leaves at my feet. Alan himself turned to me and offered a rueful smile and his apologies for entering uninvited, and without any sort of decent greeting besides. Still a youth, then, tripping around the rim of manhood and waiting to tumble into his majority. When he spoke, steam billowed from his mouth, to match what rose from his rain-dampened shoulders: good afternoon, sir, or—He paused there, taking account of the wan light that streamed down through the woven branches of the parlor roof, before he continued: or perhaps I ought to say good morning.

I passed the correspondence with which I had been occupied to a waiting raven and stood, so that my shadow slid across my visitor’s. He seemed entirely unconcerned by his sudden arrival, and I said as much; to which he replied that there was little enough utility in being disturbed by the unconventional method of transport. I’m here now, in any case, he said, and he smiled again, and asked me how my door worked.

While our shadows cavorted, playing a coy hide-and-seek in the patches of darkness beneath the branches, I showed him the runes I had drawn upon the trees that formed the doorframe: those markings which guided the path he’d traveled and other like-minded routes from his realm to mine; those which bound world to world and held them fast against one another. He scratched his head, and said that he’d hoped for a stronger basis in the natural laws with which he was familiar, though he confessed that he wasn’t much of a physicist. And he craned his neck for a better look into the Fellforest and asked me if I might show him around.

That carried us into the disappointment of familiar terrain: lacking true power of their own, mortals grasped instinctively at any they saw. Even now, as Autumn King, I watch my human petitioners stare up into my face, seeking nothing deeper than some glimmer of their own reflection. I had already indulged him in one curiosity, and I reminded him, velvet politesse draped over the blade of meaning, that nothing in Elfhame was freely given—even if you did not know the cost, it would come to be reckoned in its course.

He protested then, with a hint of abashment, that he had not brought his billfold nor anything worth trading on his long jogging route, and at that I laughed again, and suggested that we might exchange something beyond mere material goods.

Time can be a gift, he said, one not always fully appreciated when it is given. And his eyes went to the wooden chessboard that rested in its place of honor atop a polished stump, its rows of rooks and redcaps, queens and courtiers.

Time, yes, a passable euphemism. But to ensure my intent did not slip past him, I allowed my shadow enough rein to rise from the rough earth—my visitor had not learned the game of control over his own, not in his realm where a man’s shadow bends unthinkingly to his every whim, and his followed mine into the air. As speech is not in the nature of a shadow, these silhouettes told each other of their desires without words, and in doing so, they also told Mr. Turing of mine. We slipped out of our clothing and our shadows alike, so that we and they might couple privately and like unto like.

I found him eager but not desperate, attentive but not self-effacing, and not long after we had finished, with the lacework of sweat and semen drying on our skin, he stood up again and dusted away the bits of leaf and soil that clung to him, and he said he’d had a fine time but that he ought to finish his jog before it got much later.

Though this son of man towered over me, I did not trouble myself to rise. He still had no shadow to drape over me, with his and mine alike still elsewhere at their play. Cool air or English shame drove him quickly to dress himself, but, unbothered by either of those, I propped myself up on one elbow to watch him. Did he not, I wondered aloud, wish a proper introduction to my Court? Here, he would find pursuits that would put his time to better and more interesting use than trotting to and fro. Here, he would be understood and appreciated in a way he never would be there. Here, things were sweet and simple.

He brushed the leaf-litter out of his hair and told me that as he himself was neither sweet nor simple, he thought he would rather not stay. But he hesitated, and I knew then that I had adequately baited the hook after all. He would return in time—and what matters time, to the timeless?

If you like, I said carelessly. I warned him that he would not be able to use the same door twice, but told him, too, that there were others that would make themselves known to a watchful eye.

He nodded gravely, and said he hoped we would meet again, and as he turned to go, he said to me one more thing: My name is Alan, by the by. Alan Turing.

A true name freely given, without a thought as to how I might use or abuse it. I offered him something in turn, a figment of a name to call me by—the north wind’s passing fart, a grasshopper’s cough, and he smiled, and thanked me for it, and when he trotted off back into Dorset, rain quickly darkened the dry patches on his shirt.

He did return, as good as his word and better, without me ever having to yank on the chain of that true-given name. By his reckoning, some three years had passed, while I had seen the rise and fall of three would-be fey dynasties all in the course of a single evening’s ball. When we allowed ourselves the opportunity for closer examination, his body had changed in innumerable little ways, which was a profound curiosity to me; and mine had changed not in the least, which he found an impossible riddle.

He did not much appreciate my explanation that I was as old as my world itself, and also born anew with each falling leaf and encroaching early frost. A human mind is an incomplete thing, and I knew there was no way to express my nature to him in a sense that he could have understood, and yet he continued to desire all along that I try, and I cannot say that my explications were enhanced for his wishing me to speak with his fingers in my mouth. Among his faculties he did not count a capacity to let things rest in their native duality—he demanded a single phenomenon with unifying explanatory power.

Later, while our shadows played a well-matched game of chess, Alan sketched out a shape in the dirt between the roots of a yellow-leafed beech tree—a fortuitous choice, for the beech grove was young enough not to take offense at this forwardness, and this specimen in particular was too shy to interrupt Alan with questions about his thought experiment. There must be some means, he said to me, by which matter is processed—transformed—as it is moved from a realm with one set of physical laws to a domain with another set entirely. Imagine, then, a circle that exists on a flat plane, a plane of only two dimensions (and he indicated the shape in question where he had scratched it on the ground).

Easily enough done, I said, and having done so, I suggested that we move on to pursuits of a more challenging nature, be it intellectual or physical.

But he urged me to possess myself of a moment’s patience, and he placed a round acorn-cap atop the circle. Imagine again, he said, that the circle passes through a portal, or indeed a doorway, of some sort, into a world of three dimensions. And there, our circle finds that the shape it possesses in two dimensions represents a mere cross-section of the whole, and that only now, senses transformed, can it perceive itself in its entirety.

I laughed, and moved the acorn cap out of its circle. A circle altered by its passage into a greater world, I suggested, might well perceive new qualia outside its ken. But perception and ascension were two different things.

He looked at me then, out of the corner of one dark eye, and he got up to retrieve his things—not to depart, he said, but to offer a small gift: a handsome watch on a chain. Truly the gift he gave was the gift of labor, for he taught me how to wind it and asked me to do so regularly, and showed me a twinned timepiece that he kept in the pocket of his own waistcoat. When next he came, he said, he would compare the time that had passed between the two devices, and so develop his understanding of how our worlds aligned. He said, even a simple circle can grow into a third dimension, once he knows it is there.

I laughed and told him that talking in quite literal circles had grown tiresome, and offered him apple wine and roasted hazelnuts, and he ate of what I brought forth, and spoke with both his mouth and mind full and overflowing: of hypotheses and raw-cut first principles. Of experiments. Of proof—proof of natural law, he said, but what he truly meant to prove lay deeper than data.

And by then he had freely given his name, and freely eaten my food. Even when a flat shape perceives an added dimension, it may not always understand what it has been shown. When I next return, he had said, and I knew it for a certainty.

He spent three days in the mortal realm, searching all the while over a long holiday weekend for another door, before he strolled back into my parlor. Nearly all that while had I been drowning in the rot-and-honey oubliette of the Dawnsun Court (for my faintest of associations with the youngest principality, before his failed coup). Before I knew I would be captured, I had entrusted the watch to the care of the wisest pine marten in my parlor. Before she died, she had taught her daughter how to wind the wretched thing, and her daughter taught her own son in turn; and because they were good and loyal subjects all, the watch had known a fastidious custody across their generations.

And yet Alan was not best pleased when he re-examined it, for in his absence each of the numerals had become a small blinking eye, twelve in total, and when he went to wind it he found that the gears had turned into a maze of interlocked, white-enameled teeth (which still turned, and the hands on my watch’s newly vigilant face kept pace with the hands on his).

In sympathy—for he had exclaimed with great dismay over the predicament I had suffered—I offered to alter the watch in accordance with his wishes. What would he prefer it to say? How might I bring it more neatly in line with his expectations?

But he gave the watch back to me, keeping back, this time, the insistence on its care and feeding. I still believe the premise is sound, he said, and he put his mouth to mine as if searching for what honey might linger.

On that occasion he did stay long enough to accompany me to the Seaward Court, where he made exactly the impression that I had desired upon my fellows. The attention of a Tide is an enduring thing, waxing and waning but always present. All manner of watery fey came and went while Alan explicated his mortal mathematics. A fundamentally flawed system, as he described it, what he called the Entscheidungsproblem: incomplete, inconsistent, fumbling attempts to grope for a truth that was at its roots unknowable.

A cold-water Current with limpid blue eyes draped herself over Alan’s shoulders. A pitiful thing, she said solicitously, that there existed no power nor principality in the mortal realm who might address such inadequacies.

But, Alan protested, what was not complete did not inherently equate to what was not interesting. The greater significance of his findings lay, he went on, as the Current receded and was directly replaced by a Tropical Breeze, in the notion of a Universal Computing Machine. Another of his thought experiments, which he explained at length; a thought experiment that argued against its own very existence. And yet, Alan averred, a computing machine of less than universal capacity could, and would, still be achieved. Whatever computational capers a mortal might be capable of, this machine could reproduce, and yield an identical output. Such a computation machine would be governed by written rules to impose upon it the structure of mathematical law, to recapitulate the human capacity to memorize formulae and figures—differing chiefly, Alan noted, in its inability to deviate voluntarily from the structure imposed by those internal instructions. A computational golem, with a set of algorithms carved into its soul.

I wondered aloud whether that was any difference at all, for it seemed to me that a mortal mind found itself ruled in all things by the labyrinthine law engraved upon it by habit, by social custom, by biological demand. Any difference lay only in scale.

But what of free will? asked Alan, and he frowned at the eddy of laughter that spun around him.

Come now, I said gently, you are too old to believe in such a children’s tale as that. In your day-to-day life you must pretend yourself free to choose—to feel oneself an automaton should be intolerable—but in such exalted discussion as this, it is time to fold away your delusions until you need them again. You are more like your machine-computer than you are like to any of your present company.

Am I, he repeated.

Though he did not say this as if to argue the opposite, he spoke with a distance I did not appreciate, not while I still hoped to burnish my reputation with the careful application of his intellect. In my impatience, I said: It is very well to make a machine that behaves like a man. If you could contrive one that thinks like the fey, now, that would be something else entirely. And a deep-sea Current trilled a laugh, and a sea-devil asked on what sort of fuel this fey-machine would run, and as the wheels of conversation settled onto these new tracks, Alan excused himself and retrieved his shadow from beside the dessert arrangement.

It would be some time by both of our reckonings before he returned, and my circumstances and his were both much altered. The turn of his years had carried his world into war, while mine had elevated me into a position of power. When Alan first stepped into the Goldbower, he was much taken aback, and protested that he had never known I was the son of some great lord. I was no such thing, and before he could ask more than I wanted to tell, I said simply that a position had opened and that I had availed myself of it quickly.

Our shadows slunk off hand in hand—for their bond was possessed of a simplicity lacking in our own—while I showed Alan the rest of my new estate’s grounds. The Firstfrost Garden, the Hall of the Dying Sun, the acres of vineyards that tumbled down sloping hills and arbors whose leaves melted into every warm and welcoming color that light has ever touched. He said I had done well for myself, and I told him I could do well for him, too. He could be my royal mathematician, or an Architect Prince of the realm I had won. He could build for me a tower of flowers and calculus.

Perhaps he could, he allowed, but he had work already, of a sort that engaged him, and people dearly relying on its completion. And he refused to be convinced, and refused to be more than politely impressed by the Goldbower, and refused my advances when I pressed myself against him in the Crimson Gallery. Was there not somewhere more private, he protested, and gestured at the servants who hurried through, who watched us intently through a flimsy veil of indifference. He was not that kind of man.

But you could be, I said, this once, for me, and amid a flood of endearments and sweet words, he was, yes, just as I asked of him, he was. Yet he did not linger long before he made his excuses and dressed, saying moreover that with the war and his work, he was not sure whether or not he would be back again any time soon—or indeed at all. The bombings, you know, he said. Might get caught out by the Blitz any day now, or any night rather.

I freely confess that I did not like to hear that, and I offered him again titles, riches, attention, all of which he brushed aside. None of it would last; his mortal body would grow old, and—he said, with a rueful gesture at his face, not as smooth as it once had been, his belly, not as flat—youth’s blossoms had already faded.

And so what? Both my world and his would use him up in their course, but only one would love him first for who, for what, he was.

He stood with that in silence, listing as if against an unseen wind. Finally he said that an argument could be made in favor of open earnest cruelty over the shabby facade that had stood between him and every fey creature he had met in his time among my kind.

The temptation to wield his name rose within me, but I did not enjoy his company because of his tractability, and I knew—had traveled before upon—the compliant ruts that I would wear into him, should I rely too heavily on what I had been given. Instead I lay a last offer before him: If he stayed, I would grant him the power to invent a new arithmetic that would obey every command he set before it, as pliant as a pussycat. Not this nightmare of illogic that he must deal with in the mortal realm.

He smiled, and allowed that there were days where he would have enjoyed that. Do you know, he said, I sometimes imagine that a fey lord got his hands on mathematics before human beings had fully got their minds around it. And he clasped my hand, as if I were an old classmate or a coworker at Bletchley Park, playing his goodbyes in a key of formality to which he had never before tuned himself. He walked through the door and out of the Goldbower. Not for good, not forever, though it seemed so at the time. And because I held his name like a key, and because he had eaten of what I had offered, he left a part of himself behind, and did not notice what he lacked.

I nodded to his shadow where it shuddered on the carpet, unable to follow its master, and bade it make itself welcome.

In later days, mortals would whisper that it was fey magic that broke the machine’s stubborn code. They would say, too, that it was Alan’s time in Elfhame which bent his desire toward the attentions of other men: breathing our strange air, aping our strange customs. Human beings tell stories to understand what falls beyond their ken: wild-eyed mutterers squatted around a primeval campfire, reassuring one another that the raging thunder is the voice of the gods, that the sun soars and sets on the backs of winged horses. That these things are lies does not matter to them, so long as their fears are, for a moment, assuaged. But Alan remained as infuriatingly unmoved by his visits to my world as any man has ever managed to be. Nor did he ever carry his work with him. When he came, he came for an escape—albeit only ever a temporary one—and so he never offered an explanation of his code-machines to me, and I did not ask for one.

What he longed to explain was how things could be one way for me, and another for him. And what I asked was that he stay. And we were both ever disappointed.

Perhaps in the mortal world, hewing to mortal custom, our next meeting would be painted with the same formality: stiff brushstrokes of small talk, reminiscences, the steam rising over a cup of tea. Perhaps there, distasteful news could be received without taking on a life of its own. Certainly human beings have found innumerable ways to convince themselves to live with the intolerable—else they should have run themselves into madness long ago, and from madness into extinction. The wind-up toy, tracing its aimless circles, was not made to look back and understand the trajectory of its journey.

But he came, as he always had, to my realm, and his news trailed after him like a shadow should have done: a fiancée, a wedding date. If he had tried to hand me an invitation like some kind of unearned prize, I could not have held back my wrath. Bad enough that he told me, and then sat with the telling as if he thought I might be glad for him. Was he here, then, to post the banns, I wondered? Did he hope to dress his darling bride in fey-made lace, to make her the envy of mortal women?

Only then did he make note of my ire, and he dared to look put out about it. I had hoped—he began to say, but I did not let him finish, for I knew what he had hoped, and told him so: a human wife for daily wear, a lord of Elfhame for holidays and special occasions. I had killed men and fey alike for lesser insults.

He protested at that—she was his best friend, he would build a plain and mortal existence atop that trustworthy foundation, he had not come to ask anything of me. But he had come, had he not, and the act seemed to me in itself a kind of petition. He had not asked, but I would give, and I gave him his true name and all the obligation it bore. Whether he knew or not that he was compelled, he could not help but follow the tug of the lead. And in the end, if he was in any way truly distressed, it was not to such a degree that he failed to enjoy the fullness of his pleasure.

I kept him for only three days. Three days of dancing, of a whirlwind tour through all the Courts that called me friend or ally, of every kind of congress. He ate what he was offered and slept beside me in the highest tower room of the Goldbower while a dozen Winds capered and sported outside our windows. On the fourth morning, I told him he might as well go back and see to his fiancée. He knew then where he belonged, I said, and I let go the lead.

When he felt his liberty return to him, he cocked his head, a hound listening for its master’s call—or for the thunder. He took my hand, before he left, and kissed my palm, and his lips were chapped and dry.

Three days, that was all, and that really only for show.

Imagine a Changeling, I said, once upon a different day, long before that. Sweep her out of her cradle and carry her to Elfhame and put her in a little room where she can read every book that has ever been written (and several that never will be), but let her never once hear the nightingale sing or the little breezes whistle. But now you must set her a task, and you will write the instructions on your little paper tapes and feed them through the letter-slot in the door of her room, and you may not sing to her when you do so. She will take up your instructions and, following them by rote, she will be able to convert a page of music from A-flat major to the key of the West Wind—if your rules are clearly written and if you have chosen a clever enough changeling. But. But! She will never be moved to tears by the symphony she has altered, because she does not know what music is, let alone that she can hold it in her hand. I can teach a caveworm to dance if he hears the word blue, but that does not mean he has ever seen the sky.

And Alan asked, neither laughing nor serious: And I am the caveworm in this scenario? And I laughed, and said, all over teasing, that he was the sky.

I am no craftsman by trade or calling, but I take pride in the masterwork I wrought from the raw material he left me. With fine hooks of thistle-burr, I reworked the fabric of Alan’s shadow, until it took on depth; with silver needles, I sewed it to shape. What resistance lay in the material worked itself out over long hours of kneading and steaming and pressing. When it was ready, when it was possessed of enough substance and structure to sit upright in a chair and hold a knife and fork, I fed it on all the best and most precious foods: every hair that Alan had shed under my roof, every eyelash that had remained behind on my pillow. Every color reflected in his eyes, or in the shine of his hair. And every word he had spoken aloud in my company, every thought to which he had given the gift of voice. I worried that the frame to which I had fitted this new creature would too swiftly be satiated, but I worried for naught. Though a shadow was never meant to eat, Alan’s—under my guidance—proved to be a hungry thing.

After Alan’s war had ended, I went looking for him. It took me longer than I would have liked to find him, for he had crossed the sea to the patchwork-quilt states that called themselves United, and I had never yet built a door to open onto that strange land. But many things may change in the course of time and necessity, and I did find him, and the light of victory was in his face, so I did not ask him about his little human wife. (Only later did I learn they never wed. Only later.)

In his absence, I had kept busy, and on my visit I was accompanied by the fruits of my labors. With his added dimension and depth, he had come in the course of my work to resemble a facsimile of the man himself—a charcoal drawing, a photographic negative, a shifting inkblot brought to life.

Alan took the introductions in stride. Perhaps he’d already noticed what he’d lost, or perhaps he’d simply come to grips with the matter with a ruthless practicality. The shadow was mine, and not his. I had made an artificial man, and he had not. These facts had been written and would not suffer to be altered. He asked what I called my new pet, and the shadow answered for himself: My name is Alan.

That collected a glimmer of interest from Alan. He studied the shadow up and down, and thought for a moment, and he nodded, and he asked, do you love the one who made you?

Puzzled, the shadow looked at me, but he found nothing in the set of my face—no answers, no explanations. But Alan interceded with an apology: I have put you on the spot, of course you cannot say. And he smiled at me, saying, again we are faced with the Entscheidungsproblem; still, it is a very good likeness.

I spoke his true name then, invoking its power without wielding it in full, and told him he could still return. He could still stay. His smile faded, and he said no. No, he did not believe that he could. And because I did not see any sense in keeping two shadows of the same man, without possessing the real thing, I took what I had and I went back to my own realm.

I think sometimes that it was the loss of his shadow that kept him from returning to Elfhame for help, for solace. For revenge. Or then again perhaps it was simple vanity. The punishment they fitted him with softened his body, stole the vigor from his flesh. A normal course of aging had annoyed him enough, in the face of my immortality. Or else perhaps—

No, we had made our goodbyes, such as they were. He could not have hoped that I would return yet again, to see what they had made of him and to demand redress. He would—

Perhaps there can be no single unifying principle. Some equations refuse to be reconciled.

But if he had asked, I would have roused the Wild Hunt and set it upon Misters Wills and Rimmer, the grubby detectives who charged him with what they called indecency. Or upon the court of his country—have I not gone to war with fey Courts, for reasons worse and more whimsical?—or indeed upon that Queen herself whom they styled Regina when they set her authority against Alan’s good name. I would have scourged England from the Channel to the North Sea, I would have salted her rivers and burned her fields. I would have toppled every standing stone raised in honor of me and mine, I would have rained destruction down on London until she cried out for the mercy of the Blitz.

When I think of his death, alone, in a body forced upon him, the taste of summer’s apples in his mouth—sometimes I think I still will.

His shadow-self remains beside me, and that one remembers all that we have shared—the stories, the embraces, the conversations that led us nowhere except back to bed. So that it will not be lost. So that I will not be left alone in loss. For a time, he made for a popular dinner-guest among the Courts, but it was not long before many ambitious young fey collected their own. Balls and hunts and skating-parties are a hopeless jumble now, all manner of solicitous and well-mannered shadows following in the wake of each fey lord or lady.

Imagine a circle, his shadow, my shadow, sometimes says. Imagine a changeling child.

Imagine something else, I say back. Imagine a sunbeam that knows you are watching it. Imagine an adding-machine that could write its own symphony, and indeed longs to. Imagine for me a different world, for this one has outlived its pleasures.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Norah Woodsey during our annual Kickstarter. Publication of the artwork for this story was made possible by a gift from Kim Kuzuri during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Austin Dewar

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