Issue #298 • Feb. 27, 2020

Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 5

“The Mermaid Astronaut,” by Yoon Ha Lee

“The Spoils,” by Aliya Whiteley

“My Sister’s Wings Are Red,” by Christine Tyler

“The Glassblower of Galilei,” by Katrina Smith

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

THE MERMAID ASTRONAUT

by Yoon Ha Lee

        On a wide and wondering world in a wide and wondering galaxy, there lived a mermaid. She was not the only mermaid who dwelled in the deep and dreaming oceans of her world. An entire society of mers shared rule of the seas with the whale-sages and the anemone-councils, among many others. This particular mermaid had named herself Essarala, which means seeks the stars in the language of tide and foam.

        Essarala’s mothers and sisters and cousins understood the significance of her name, and they sometimes came to discuss it with her. On one such occasion, Essarala sat upon a rock jutting out from the sea, the waves lapping against her koi-spotted tail. It was nighttime, and she gazed longingly up at the constellations and the one bright planet that was visible to the naked eye. The stars in those constellations, she knew, were suns like the one her own planet orbited, a fact that fascinated her but which none of her relatives found of particular interest.

        “We are navigators true and fierce,” said one of her younger sisters, whose name, Kiovasa, meant the sea and the moon are partners—a standard, conventional name, resurrected every few generations by proper-thinking mers. She swam in lazy circles around Essarala’s rock, her striped tail flicking in and out of the waters. “But I fear, Essarala, that you mean something other than simple navigation.”

        “I want to visit the stars,” Essarala said. “There are other worlds out there. Why remain confined to this one, when I could see the plethora of galaxies that exist?”

        Kiovasa playfully splashed water at her. Essarala accepted the drenching with good humor. After all, she had nothing to fear from water.

        “I don’t think it’s about wealth, for you,” Kiovasa said. “If all you wanted were riches, why, we could find you plenty of plunder.”

        Essarala had to admit this was true. The sailors who plied the waters made copious offerings to the sea, either in exchange for good luck or, more tragically, when their ships sank and their cargoes spilled into the ocean. From the moment of her birth onward, Essarala’s family had not stinted with their gifts, and when she grew older and more adventurous, she, too, had participated in scavenging expeditions so she could give gifts back in her turn. Her own sea-cave was filled with asymmetrical crowns set with spinels and sapphires, gilt-edged chanfrons, scrimshaw depicting sacrifices to eldritch gods, and more.

        But these gifts, however well-intentioned and however gratefully received, did nothing to ease the itching in Essarala’s heart whenever she looked up at the star-wealth of the night sky.

        Kiovasa spoke with Essarala a little longer and found that Essarala would not be dissuaded from her desire. Having established that, Kiovasa called out a song of farewell and dived deep, swam fast, leaving Essarala behind.

        Essarala might have remained suspended in the land of dreams forever, coming to her rock on clear nights to gaze fruitlessly skyward, if not for the arrival of the traders.

* * *

        The traders came from the sky in a great ship made of metal. It did not look like the galleons or junks or outrigger canoes that the mers were familiar with. But then, mers had little expertise in shipbuilding, so this did not alarm them unduly.

        The ship landed on the coast of an island above the coral reef where Essarala’s family held their ancestral seat. From it emerged creatures the likes of which the mers had never seen before either; no two of them alike. Some of them walked on two legs and some on six, some of them had six fingers on their hands and some had tentacles instead, some of them had friendly waving eyestalks and others no eyes at all.

        The mers’ interpreters worked day and night to communicate with these newcomers and find out what they wanted. Their visitors cooperated with this process, making offerings of shimmering metalweave fabrics and curious tools for capturing fish more efficiently. The mers found the former of more interest and smilingly declined the latter. After all, they had treaties with the fish nations and no desire to overstep them.

        Essarala learned of the traders from her cousins’ gossip, and she lingered near the interpreters, watching and wishing. She longed to explore their ship and ask them to take her with them to the stars. But the more she listened, the more she learned, and one thing became obvious: their ship might carry water for its crew to drink, but it didn’t contain water for a mer to live in. Saddened by this obstacle, she withdrew, and at first no one noticed it.

        In the meantime, the mers and visitors learned to speak to each other. They planned a grand feast, featuring the fish nations’ best offerings, as well as tasty morsels of sea urchin or sea cucumber and the finest kelp salads. The visitors, for their part, ran curious tests—to make sure they didn’t accidentally poison anyone, they said—and contributed strange delectations of their own, some resembling fruit, some resembling fish, and some concoctions that the mers had no word for other than delicious.

        At last Kiovasa realized that she hadn’t seen Essarala hanging around the traders for some time. Concerned, she secured her sister an invitation to the feast. It wasn’t hard—no one would have thought of leaving her out—but Kiovasa made sure it had been handwritten upon a sheet of magical ice by one of the mers’ master calligraphers, all the better to reignite Essarala’s interest.

        Kiovasa found Essarala on her rock as usual. The weather had been unusually fine, courtesy of the local dragon-spirit, yet Essarala had hardly interacted with her family at all during the past week. Still, she couldn’t refuse to welcome her sister.

        Kiovasa presented the glittering invitation to her. “Come,” she said coaxingly, “you’ll hear more stories from the far-travelers, of the places they’ve seen and the things they’ve eaten. They’ve even brought foods from the stars.”

        Essarala didn’t react with the delight that Kiovasa had expected. “Sister-sweet,” she said, turning the invitation around disconsolately in her hands, “I have heard their stories. What’s more, I have been listening to the murmurs of the waves and the wind about this ship of metal, and they have confirmed what I thought. This ship of metal is full of travelers from the stars, yes—but the ship itself has no water for a mer to live in.”

        Kiovasa, who had been swimming clockwise around the rock, reversed direction, thinking. Her sister was right. All of the traders were land-dwellers.

        “You should come anyway,” Kiovasa said. “At least you’ll get a glimpse of the faraway worlds that you’ve always loved.”

        “No,” Essarala said, turning her face away. “I’m afraid that once I hear more stories, being left behind when the visitors leave—and they will leave, won’t they?—will be all the more unbearable.”

        It was a young mer’s logic. But the only cure for that was time, and time was what they had so little of. “In that case,” Kiovasa said, “we must take more drastic measures. We must visit the witch beneath the waves, and she will have a solution.”

* * *

        The witch beneath the waves lived at the bottom of a great chasm, one so vast and dark that even the mers visited it reluctantly. Swarms of lanternfish lit the way down to the witch’s dwelling, and even so, Kiovasa and Essarala struggled to see anything in the murky gloom of the waters.

        At last they reached the witch’s dwelling. Strange phosphorescent worms and rocks indicated the entrance. “We have come to ask a boon of you,” Kiovasa called out, her voice distorted by the pressure of the waters.

        For a long time all they heard was silence. And then the witch’s voice emerged from within: “I would hear from the one who wishes the boon.”

        Essarala let go of her sister’s hand and swam toward the voice. She could not see the witch, and it made her afraid. “It’s me,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I wish to petition the travelers from the stars and ask to join their crew.”

        A soft glow lit the witch’s dwelling from within, more worms waking and wriggling. The witch herself, however, only manifested as a sketch of inky lines, like half a silhouette. She was smiling, but her smile was sad.

        “You would give up the sea you know, and your family, and the songs of gulls, to explore the worlds beyond?” the witch asked.

        “I don’t think it’s such an evil thing,” Essarala replied, “to want to see new worlds and taste their waters.”

        “Evil, no,” the witch said. “Difficult, yes.”

        “If you can’t help me—”

        “That’s not the kind of difficulty I meant,” the witch said. “I can give you two legs like the humans, that you might walk on land, or upon the deck of a starfaring ship for that matter. The rest, though—the rest is up to you. For there’s more to starfaring than having legs. You’ll have to familiarize yourself with their alerts, read oxygen gauges, watch out for toxic atmospheres and flesh-eating pathogens, and that’s just the beginning.

        “You are well-educated in the ways of your people,” the witch went on. “I have no doubt that you can identify every fish in the sea by the way it swims, and the birds of the waters by their silhouettes. You know the language of the moon when she sings to the waters and how to read the writing of every civilization that has ever built ships. You can read the wind and the waves. But where you are going, it’s darker even than the chasm I call home, and there’s no wind in space, nor waves other than the spiral density waves of the great galaxies themselves.”

        Essarala trembled, for while she didn’t understand much of the terminology that the witch had used, she recognized that she was out of her depth. If only she had spent some of that time star-gazing instead learning about the strange and chancy technologies that land-dwellers had invented, and which might keep them alive in the hostile void. But it was too late now. She had to choose, and choose soon, for the traders would not remain indefinitely.

        “Tell me your price,” Essarala said, speaking more loudly.

        The witch nodded. “Someday you will want to come back home,” she said. “When you do, visit me, and we will speak of it then.”

        “Is there nothing else you would accept of me?” Essarala asked, for the thought of returning to the chasm filled her with a nameless dread.

        “That is the price,” the witch said. “Take it or leave it.”

        “I will come with you,” Kiovasa said to Essarala, “when you return. You won’t have to do it alone.”

        Much later, Essarala would remember the witch’s expression and the grief in it. At the time, however, all she knew was her gratitude for her sister’s kindness and loyalty. She reached out and pressed Kiovasa’s hand.

        “I cannot do it here,” the witch said. “The depths would kill you before you could ask your boon of the spacefarers. But I can give you the means.”

        The dark lines of the witch’s figure shifted and stirred. For a moment she resembled nothing so much as the abstract patterns that moonlight makes over the waves, except in reverse. Then the patterns reassembled, and the witch held out a knife, hilt-first.

        It was made of shell, and in the eerie light of the worms and rocks it had an iridescent sheen. “It will hurt,” the witch said. “Certain kinds of desire always do. When you are ready, cut your tail in half, and your legs will emerge. If you change your mind”—and Essarala opened her mouth to protest that she wouldn’t, except the witch’s stern look quelled her—”then throw it into the sea, and it will find its way back to me.”

        “Thank you,” Essarala said in spite of her trepidation, for a favor given must always be acknowledged. She did not speak the rebellious thought in her heart: that she would journey among the stars as long as possible, and perhaps in that time she would find a way to cheat the witch of her price.

* * *

        The next night, Kiovasa and Essarala attended the feast. The sentinel sharks and dolphins recognized their invitations and let them in without comment. On any other occasion, the two of them would have noticed the splendid decorations that the creatures of sea and shore had labored over. Bright banners of fabric woven from hippocampus manes and the mers’ own long tresses waved in the wind; lanterns containing glowing fungus and dancing fireflies illuminated the long tables. The platters, of lacquer or beaten gold, carved jade or peerless celadon, contained every form of delicacy the peoples of the sea and the peoples of the stars knew how to prepare.

        But Kiovasa could only think of how she was going to lose her sister, and Essarala felt the weight of the witch’s shell knife, carried in a pouch of gold-washed chainmail, as though it would drown her.

        “Come join us!” the other mers called from their seats by the lapping waves. They were already drinking and singing, exchanging stories of navigators and mapmakers, and the occasional ballad of island-dwelling lovers. Kiovasa waved back, heavy of heart though she was.

        “I must do it now,” Essarala whispered to her sister, “or I will lose all courage.” For beyond her many relatives she could see the visitors from the stars, supping in their various fashions, and even past them, the long silhouette of their far-voyaging starship. And the longing burned even more fiercely in her heart.

        Mers have little notion of privacy, since everything that happens in the sea is known to one and all in short order. Even so, Kiovasa nodded and took her aside, a little way down the shore from the feast. Gulls and terns wheeled overhead, and the sandpipers cried out, whether in warning or welcome. No one watched, and why should they? They had other matters on their mind.

        Essarala drew out the knife and passed the pouch over to her sister. She steadied herself with a deep breath, tasting the salt spray in the air, the sweet ether influence of the star-currents. Then she brought the knife plunging down.

        The pain of the cut almost caused her to faint. But her sister caught her in her arms and steadied her as she swayed. The beautiful koi-spotted scales of Essarala’s tail peeled away, and she emerged with two legs, like the humans of her world.

        Kiovasa kissed her on the brow. “Go,” she said to Essarala. “The stars are waiting for you.” And she watched from the shallow lapping waters as Essarala took her first uncertain steps.

        One by one the mers noticed; one by one the traders noticed. And they all stared, murmuring in wonder among themselves, as Essarala made her way to the starship’s captain.

        The captain dined at the head of the aliens’ table. They were a tall creature covered with downy feathers, and their head sported a magnificent crest that Essarala had originally mistaken for a hat. When they saw Essarala approaching, they nodded at her in welcome. “Have you had a chance to enjoy the food?” they asked her in her own language.

        For her part, Essarala was embarrassed that she could not speak the captain’s tongue, although she knew very well that it contained sounds that no mer could make. “My name is Essarala,” she said, “and like my name, I wish to seek the stars. I beg a boon of you—that I may join your crew, and travel to distant worlds with you.”

        The captain glanced at the koi-colored scales that clung still to Essarala’s bare legs and knew the sacrifice that she had made. “Of course you may,” they said kindly. “But you will start as the least among my crew, not because we wish to insult you, but because there are a great many protocols involved in life on a starship that you will have to learn before you can be trusted with more.”

        “I do not mind,” Essarala said, her heart leaping within her.

        “You will,” the captain said, “but no matter; you will also have friends and comrades to share the journey with you.”

        And with that they invited her to squeeze in to their right, and to join with them in the feast.

* * *

        The next morning, the captain and their crew prepared to say farewell to the mers and the people of the sea. Essarala, however delighted with her good fortune, was not so overcome that she forgot her sister. She sought Kiovasa out by the ocean’s edge and ran out into the water to embrace her one last time.

        “I hope you see every world around every stars,” Kiovasa whispered into her ear. Kiovasa, who had never thought much about the sky except the fact that her sister yearned after it so much, had no idea how many worlds there were in the universe, or stars either. But Essarala accepted the blessing in the spirit in which it had been given.

        “I will sing your name to each of them,” Essarala promised.

        “I will listen for it every night,” Kiovasa said. Then she shoved Essarala lightly. “Go! I don’t want you to miss your opportunity.”

        Trepidation seized Essarala’s heart, but she had come too far to turn back now. She ran through the splashing waves to the starship, which gleamed pink and orange and silver-bright in the sunrise. Already she was acclimating to her new legs, and to the sensation of her feet in the wet sand, and then on the cold metal of the starship’s ramp.

        The captain welcomed her aboard and introduced her to the crew members who would show her the basics of life on a starship. “Listen always to Ssen,” the captain said, indicating a snakish alien whose mechanical suit provided them with tentacle-like grippers in the place of hands. “They will watch over you. I will see you at ship’s mess.” And the captain dismissed her.

        “Come with me,” Ssen said through a translation device. They showed Essarala how to strap herself into a couch for liftoff and warned her not to panic when the couch engulfed her with oxygenated gel to cushion her from the ship’s acceleration. “As a member of the crew,” they added, “you will have to study the fundamentals of physics, and the functioning of the ship, and how to help with its maintenance. We’ll speak more of that after we’re underway.”

        As a kindness to her, although Essarala would not realize it until later, Ssen had given her a couch across from the viewport that would give her the best view of her world as she left it for the first time. Her heart beating rapidly with mixed worry and excitement, Essarala braced herself for liftoff. Ssen need not have been concerned about her reaction to the protective gel, for it was not so different from the waters she had swum in all her life.

        Nevertheless, while Essarala’s innate magic as a mer protected her from the crushing depths of the sea, and the variances in pressure, it gave her no such defense from a starship’s acceleration. As the starship blasted off for a destination whose name she didn’t know, she caught only the merest glimpse of her native ocean from above, and the glittering of sunlight on the waters, before she lost consciousness.

* * *

        Ssen apologized profusely once they had safely left the world’s gravity well. “I should have expected that you would need more protection,” they said, “and prepared your couch accordingly. I will teach you how to do that yourself, so this incident is not repeated in the future.”

        It wasn’t the only thing Ssen showed her. Essarala learned that Ssen usually took on the task of training new crew, partly because they had infinite patience, but partly because they never slept and could remain vigilant for the inevitable mistakes. She had cause to be glad of both traits, for she always had someone to listen when she despaired of achieving basic competence in her assigned tasks, and Ssen ensured that she would never put the ship in danger.

        From Ssen she learned that the ship had two propulsion systems, one used for short distances and landing on and departing from planets or starbases, and a fancier one that enabled it to travel near the speed of light. “The latter is the domain of the engineer-priests,” Ssen told her, “and unless you choose to become initiated in their mysteries, it will be of no particular concern to you. But you will need to study orbital mechanics, for everyone’s safety.”

        Over the passing days, weeks, months, Essarala grew proficient in putting on the spacesuit that Ssen designed for her and produced using the ship’s matter spinner. She only once forgot to check the oxygen tank, which Ssen lectured her gently about because it was a serious matter. As she grew in proficiency with the ship’s systems and the simple maintenance tasks that Ssen assigned to her, she started taking pride in her work, however simple. She started to sing at her work, songs of the sea to remind her of the home she’d left behind.

        In her leisure hours, she sat by the viewports of the starship and gazed at the stars streaking by. She saw wonders up close, from the dust-forges where stars are born to the hot glow of the accretion disks around black holes. She saw planets of different colors spinning like enchanted beads, and their diadems of moons. And all these visions reminded her of her sister Kiovasa, who had helped her attain her heart’s desire, and the fact that they were now parted; but she was not sorry, not yet.

        Next the starship visited a starbase to restock on supplies. While Essarala wasn’t present for the negotiations, given her lack of expertise, she helped Ssen stow the supplies in the ship’s hold. Despite the labor involved, she enjoyed figuring out how to fit the containers most efficiently into the available space. In the sea, she’d never had to worry about space before, but it was, of course, an ongoing concern in the confines of the ship.

        Afterwards, the captain gave the two of them permission to explore the station while the ship was docked. “You don’t mind my following you?” Essarala asked Ssen, for she wondered if they wanted some time to themself.

        “No one should have to brave a starbase alone on their first visit,” Ssen said. “Of course I don’t mind.” And they took Essarala to the starbase’s zero-gravity gardens with their fantastic floating plants and intoxicatingly perfumed flowers, and clusters of lanterns that changed color according to the designer’s whimsy. After that, Ssen introduced her to other pleasures, from restaurants that served crisp honeyed insects to lounges where people traded poetry new and ancient, from cafes where one could pet small furry aliens who told one’s fortune to monuments where spacers carved the names of those who had been lost to pirates, or radiation, or other hazards.

        Not least of all, Ssen took her to the observation deck of the starbase, where Essarala caught her breath at the sight of the stars all around them, as though everyone lived inside a constellation of splendors. Ssen told her the names of the brightest stars and the peoples who lived on their worlds and visits they had made in times past.

        At the end of these journeys, Ssen took Essarala aside in a quiet lounge, their expression serious. Essarala shivered with dread, for she feared that she’d performed so poorly aboard the ship that they were going to abandon her here. But Ssen hissed in concern when they smelled her fear and bought her a soothing cup of broth.

        “If you ever weary of life on our ship,” Ssen said, “we will find you a new home, or return you to your old one. This starbase, for instance. It’s known for its hospitality, and you could make a life here if you chose, not just with the skills you’ve learned with us, but with your singing.”

        Essarala knew she had a fine voice, like every mer. She hadn’t realized that Ssen had listened to her singing during her chores. “Do you wish for me to leave?” she asked in a small voice after taking a sip of broth.

        “Not at all,” Ssen said, their voice softening. “But you should always live on a ship because you’re there by choice, not because you’re out of options.”

        “I love the ship,” Essarala said. It was true. She loved its metal sleekness and the way it hummed when it accelerated or decelerated. She loved the views of whorled nebulae and globular clusters. She loved the starbase, too, with its vast exterior symmetries and asymmetries; the way it housed a variety of aliens even more diverse than those upon the ship. She could not imagine giving up her shipboard life, not yet.

        And if she dreamt sometimes of her sister’s kind smile, and the sea’s embrace, and the moving constellations of glowing jellyfish or the whale-sages’ vast chorales as they deliberated upon matters judicial, or what it had been like before she’d given up her koi-spotted tail to walk upon two legs—why, that was the price she had to pay, in exchange for this bounty.

* * *

        In the years to come, Essarala grew expert in the ways of life upon a ship, until she almost forgot what it had been like to live upon a single planet and no more. The starship visited other starbases, each more wondrous than the last, and paid calls to other worlds as well. By now, Essarala herself helped Ssen orient the ship’s newcomers and occasional guests, and she took great pleasure in sharing her hard-earned knowledge.

        Now at mess she knew all the crew by name, and the captain nodded to her in greeting when they passed each other. She knew the astrogator and her fondness for fruit preserves, and the engineer-priests with their incantations and calculations. She knew the ship’s pilot, the gunner who defended them against pirates, the cook. And they in their turn knew her, and sometimes, in moments of leisure, asked her to sing the songs of her world for them.

        Essarala learned to fly in skysuits in vast and turbulent gas planets, some of which had corrosive atmospheres. She saw twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nighttime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once a millennium. And she kept her promise, too: for every world she visited, she sang her sister’s name.

        Someday I will go back and tell her of the things I have seen, Essarala thought again and again. But not yet, not yet.

        But Ssen was not done teaching her, as expert as she had become in the starfarer’s life. Now that Essarala had mastered the pragmatic skills she needed to survive, and to contribute to the crew, Ssen sat with her during their spare hours and taught her theory. They started with the simplest principles of mechanics and chemistry, then progressed to special relativity.

        And it was in learning about relativity that Essarala finally understood the price that the witch beneath the waves had exacted from her—or, more accurately, warned her about.

        She looked at the equations, at the time dilation factor that had emerged from such deceptively simple premises: the constant speed of light, the fact that no inertial frame of reference was privileged over any other. In the years that she had spent away from home, decades upon decades had passed for her sister Kiovasa. And mers lived long, but they were not—quite—immortal.

        Ssen saw Essarala clench her hands in distress and asked why.

        “I must return to my homeworld,” Essarala said. “However long it takes—but sooner is better. For I left unfinished business there, and I did not realize it until now.”

        “It is out of our way,” Ssen said, “but we can petition the captain. Even if we cannot take you there, we may be able to find another ship that can.”

        Indeed, the captain summoned Essarala to their stateroom. They listened attentively as Essarala explained her dilemma. “I will do whatever it takes to get back home,” she said. She feared it was already too late—but that, she would not say aloud, even to the captain who had so generously welcomed her to their crew.

        “It’s true that it’s a long way for us,” the captain said. “But we will make the detour, and we will wait as long as you need. I know what it’s like to be far from family.”

        Essarala bowed her head. “You won’t need to wait,” she said. “I will not be leaving my home again. Thank you. This is a kindness I cannot repay.”

        The captain’s crest stirred in the manner that Essarala had learned, by now, meant sympathy. “You are not the only one who gave up a lot in exchange for the long dream of stars,” they said. “We will miss you; but so does your family, I imagine.”

        “Thank you,” she said again, and left the captain’s stateroom a little easier of heart.

* * *

        The captain was as good as their word. They did not head straight back to Essarala’s homeworld, for they had trade contracts and obligations to keep, but they did guide the ship closer and closer to it, in a zigzag path. Essarala pored over the star-maps, dreaming of her return.

        One by one, the other members of the crew, whom Essarala had come to think of as friends over the course of her journey, stopped by to give her small gifts. These included fruit preserves from the astrogator (of course), circuit jewelry from the engineer-priests, petrified wood from a certain extinct forest on a certain museum world, and cubes that spindled out performances by radiant holographic puppets. Even the captain gave her a feather from their crest.

        Last of all came Ssen, teacher and companion. Ssen gave Essarala a bracelet of star-metal carved with the constellations of the night sky as seen from Essarala’s homeworld during that long-ago visit. “I will think of you,” Ssen said, “even if we never see you again.”

        “You have been the best of teachers,” Essarala said, quite overcome. “I will wear this always.”

        Ssen smiled their snakish smile, and that was that.

        All too soon, for her impatience, Essarala strapped herself into her couch for the landing on her homeworld. This time she didn’t require Ssen’s assistance, and this time she didn’t lose consciousness as the ship decelerated. The world came into view, a whorled marble of blue and green and violet and pearly streaks, and her breath hitched at its splendor; the old made new again.

        The ship touched down, and Essarala freed herself from the couch. “I hope it’s not too late,” she said to herself as she and Ssen made their way to the ramp.

        “There is only one way to find out,” Ssen replied. “Go, and be well.”

        Essarala’s feet met the shore, the same one where the ship had landed on its first voyage to this world. This time she wore a spacer’s suit with its magnetic boots. It had served her well in her time aboard the ship.

        She looked over the sea with its ever-crashing waves and the wheeling gulls, then took off the suit. “I won’t be needing this anymore,” she said to Ssen. “You can go ahead and recycle it.”

        Then Essarala waded out into the ocean, and as she did, koi-spotted scales grew to cover her legs and feet. With a last shuddering breath, she reclaimed the heritage that she had set aside in exchange for the stars and dived into the waters. As she did, her legs fused into a proper mer’s tail.

        Essarala hadn’t forgotten her promise to the witch, and besides, the witch might know where—if anywhere—to find her sister. So she swam deep, beyond the colorful coral reefs with their shy darting fishes, beyond the pods of dolphins, until she found the lanternfish that lit the way to the witch’s dwelling. The sea was cold and dark, but it was, after all, no colder and no darker than space.

        “I have returned,” Essarala called out, wondering what she would do if the witch had perished in the interim.

        But witches are not so easily escaped. The worms began to glow, as they had all those years ago, and the witch of the waves emerged. “You have indeed,” she said. This time Essarala could see her face more clearly, and it was not so dissimilar from her own.

        “You gave me my heart’s desire,” Essarala said. “You said you would name your price once I returned. Well, here I am.”

        “Indeed,” the witch said. “I am ready to summon my death. It will take its time coming; but it will come all the same. When it arrives, you will take my place as witch beneath the waves. For you, too, have tasted life among the stars, and you have the wisdom that your journeys have given you.”

        It was a hard price, but not an unfair one. “Understood,” Essarala said. “I have a question for you, if you are willing to answer it.”

        “Ask.”

        Essarala steeled herself for the answer she didn’t want to hear. “What became of my sister Kiovasa? Where can I find her?”

        “She is old and ailing,” the witched answered, and Essarala’s heart almost burst with relief. “You will find her by the rock where the two of you spent so many hours gazing at the stars. She has never forgotten you. But you should hurry. She doesn’t have much time left.”

        “Thank you,” Essarala said. And then she shot upward through the waters, swimming with all her might toward the rock. It would be terrible if she had come all this way only to be too late after all.

        At last she broke the ocean’s surface in an explosion of glittering water and rainbows. “Kiovasa!” she cried when she saw her sister lying upon the rock.

        Mers do not age as humans do, but they age nonetheless. Streaks of shell-white had appeared in Kiovasa’s hair, and the stripes of her tail were so faint they were almost invisible. But her face lit when she saw Essarala. “You’ve returned,” she murmured. “You look the same as you did the day you left.”

        “It is a magic of the stars,” Essarala said, “which I will explain to you if you wish.” She swam up to the rock and took a seat next to her sister. They hugged each other fiercely. Essarala added, “I will not leave you again.”

        “But your dream of traveling among the stars,” Kiovasa said. “I would not take you away from that—”

        Essarala grasped Kiovasa’s hands, then craned her neck back to look at the afternoon sky. “You haven’t,” she said.

        Kiovasa shook her head, bemused. “I don’t understand.”

        “What I did not know before I left,” Essarala said, “is that every planet is traveling through space, and every star, and every galaxy, and more beyond, in a great celestial dance. I wanted to visit other worlds, and so I have. But now that I understand the motions of celestial bodies, I don’t need to leave home in order to journey through the universe.”

        “I don’t understand,” Kiovasa said again, “but I look forward to learning, in the time that remains to me.”

* * *

for Yune Kyung Lee, best of sisters.

Copyright © 2020 Yoon Ha Lee

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, in Clarkesworld, and nine times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Starship and the Temple Cat” in BCS Science-Fantasy Month 4, which was a finalist for the Locus Award and the Sturgeon Award. He is the author of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, and his standalone fantasy Phoenix Extravagant is forthcoming from Solaris Books in June 2020. Yoon lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat and has not yet been eaten by gators. Visit him online at www.yoonhalee.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE SPOILS

by Aliya Whiteley

        Some carried their cuts from the corpse of the Olme home with bare hands, choosing to follow tradition. The smell permeated the skin of their palms and became part of them; their sweat would always bear the sweet, rotting scent of it.

        Others used gloves, or held out tins or bags to receive their piece, sliced with such expertise. For those people, there was no smell at all, even if they kept it in the house after the ceremony. It wasn’t the gift alone that created the scent. It was the connection, between human and beast. The flesh of the Olme had to be touched to make the smell.

* * *

1. First Finder: the unused eye

        The butcher made the initial cut across the unopened lid and peeled back the slippery skin to reveal the eye. Then she slid the knife underneath it, pushed down and in at a shallow angle, and the cloudy blue orb came free with a loud, sucking sound that reverberated around the cavern.

        The crowd watched as the butcher chose the saw from her low table of instruments and worked its teeth against the thick veins that joined the eye to the body; it took muscular energy to complete the task.

        “Step forward,” she said. “Michael Rittle.”

        Michael roused himself from his spot next to the far pillar. He found he didn’t want to look upon the bulk of the Olme. It was too reminiscent of the discovering of it, deeper down in the earth, during one of his frequent trips through the lower caves looking for the mosses and lichens that the medic would pay for. By the light of his own torch the Olme had heaved and groaned—how had it managed to squeeze itself so far through such a narrow passage? It had blocked the route entirely, pinned itself solid in rock, and yet it was still living when he came across it. He had not dared to approach it, and he could not bear to leave. So he witnessed its weakening in increments, in the struggles that grew fainter, sighs that faded, until his torch was worn down low and he had to head back home in the last wisps of its light or risk being left in darkness absolute.

        By the time he had returned with the killing crew the Olme was dead.

        “May you see with endless clarity,” the butcher said solemnly to the crowd, and held out the eye.

        Michael took it. He had brought along a pair of gloves, the ones he wore to protect his fingers while down in the sharp-walled mineral caves that made their own light—as blue as the eye he now held—but at the last moment decided to follow the old ways. He’d bear the stink of it all his life, but, well, that seemed right to him. His grandfather had worn the scent, too; that had been the last time an Olme had been found. Now it was his turn. His skin, his gift. A trade.

        The Olme’s eye, now Michael’s, was thought to serve no purpose. A remnant of a time when Olmes had lived above ground, perhaps? Or maybe never an eye at all but used for something else. Some other form of seeing.

        Later that evening, Michael came home to find his house in unusual silence. His talkative pet bird, which had been an expensive purchase from one of the surface traders who would sometimes come to the trapdoor, lay dead at the bottom of the cage that hung from the ceiling. He reached for it, and it was so very light in his hands. Its bright colors were still vibrant; in fact, they seemed more vivid than ever before, to him. Red and yellow. When he put the eye of the Olme into the cage to take the bird’s place, it took on those colors and reflected light around the room for him at sharp, strange angles. He smelled the scent of it, rising up from inside him.

* * *

2. Retriever: longest toenail

        Clare had used her tractor to pull the Olme to the upper caverns, and it was not a difficult job. It came free quickly from the rocks between which it had jammed its bulk, and the body was obedient in its response to the hooks she sank into it and the chains that demanded it follow.

        Moving rocks in subterranean farming was usually difficult, heavy labor; she had been expecting much more of a struggle for this task. But the inexplicability of the Olme’s smooth passage did not bother her. It suited the elements of mystery and ritual that permeated her life, and had been long associated with pragmatic repetition. The things we do, over and over, that create our place; these were the words she had grown up with, spoken so often by her grandmother, and they filled her head as she transported the Olme to a storage cave.

        The words, in truth, had never meant a lot to her. It was by example she had learned, and now she was alone, and aged, and one day soon would have to attempt to explain all this to the next generation. These were concerns that bothered her sometimes, but mainly she enjoyed being left in solitude, and that suited her.

        But a crowd had gathered for the final stage of the retrieval, and that did not suit her at all. It was—she reflected during the ceremony—the first time she had ever been watched at work by others. The butcher seemed so at ease with their perusal of her cuts and slices; Clare did not think she could ever have done such a task, under scrutiny. She admired the precision of it.

        “Step forward, Clare Askett,” said the butcher, so she did so, with reluctance. She had thought the community smaller than this. Before the ceremony she had inquired about the possibility of receiving her gift in private and had been told that was not an option. It didn’t help that it was her lot to receive such an unpleasant object. A toenail, no less. It had a laughable element to it. Would anyone snigger, or make a comment, as she approached?

        They did not. And the toenail was, once sawed through and snapped from the bed of the largest toe on the last foot, a sleek, polished object in a warm shade of reddish-brown that was scored through with curved cream lines. Separated from the Olme, it became a sculpture; a statement divorced from reality.

        It also became familiar.

        “May you cherish movement,” said the butcher, and Clare held out her gloved hands to receive the toenail. It was hard, and very light. She wished, for a moment, that she had not opted for the gloves. But did she really want to be marked in such a way? Impregnated, forever, by this one event? Her grandmother had smelled so strongly of it, and had talked of dragging the Olme forth in a tone of wonder. All the secrets of their trade forgotten, her grand-daughter’s name gone from her mind, but the Olme remembered. A toenail, they gave me, she had said, over and over. It’s my favorite decoration. She had kept it by her bed, at the end. The smell from her skin had been so strong.

        It had never occurred to Clare before, but she could not remember ever seeing that old toenail since her grandmother’s death. Where had it gone? Why was there never anything to show for service but some memories and a bad smell?

        She kept the gloves on and tried to think of this as an unremarkable event. She did not want it to become the one thing she remembered, at the end.

        The toenail came home with her. She tried her hardest to think of it as a curio, a knick-knack. She moved it from one decorative position to the next, and could not find a spot where it felt like a background object. It seemed, to Clare, that it needed to be matched. One of a pair. It was not, after all, unique.

        She took to searching through old possessions, dank corners, and found many strange objects she could not fathom: instruments from older forms of farming, perhaps. There was no matching toenail anywhere. She started to scan the caves where she farmed, searching amongst the pigmentless plants and insects that she cultivated, but the further she walked, the less she knew her place. All things were newly inexplicable.

        She kept walking, between her farming tasks. It became a habit. She did not find another toenail to make her own diminish in meaning.

* * *

3. Reader of Rites: tip of the tongue

        Adam held out his exposed hands. Putting a barrier between his own tools and any surface was unthinkable. And he already smelled, so what did it matter? The pages of the books he read were made of the skin of the Olme anyway, and the act of curing and preparing the skin released the scent.

        “May you learn the gift of sound, Adam Budding,” the butcher said, and passed him his cut.

        The tip of a tongue had sounded like a small gift, but this—this was a heavy mess of flesh, soft, like a haunch of meat for roasting.

        Adam had once read, in Farbington:

        To read in the absolute dark, one needs to learn how to touch. People think they have this skill simply because they are born with hands, but they are wrong. They pick up, they handle, they grasp. They use the tools on the ends of their arms for utilitarian purposes.

        You will learn to embrace the art that lives in the tiny folds of each finger and the curve of both palms. You will translate these sensations to speech. These books are filled with raised marks that contain such nuance. Embrace it. Speak it.

        Adam had lived amongst such books since the age of four. At first Farbington had made him sleep in the library, with the stench vivid in the darkness, thick and curling in his nostrils. Eventually he had learned to stop crying and felt around for the door, which was open. It had always been open.

        First lesson. It had taken him months to learn.

        Was it a cruelty? Well, life was cruelty; the words had taught him that, and nowhere was that second lesson more evident than when holding the tongue of that rarest of creatures and celebrating its death. It had been in pain, confused. Bewildered as it headed up to unknown tunnels—this much Adam could read in the harsh, dry buds of the tongue.

        He lived in a community that made the most of such deaths. He, personally, had been guiltily delighted to have the opportunity to take down the Book of the Ceremony and feel the tender bumps of explanation. Then he had spoken aloud of it to the butcher, outlining step after step. How he loved the butcher. She had a smile made for candlelight.

        She was smiling at him now.

        “You can step back,” she whispered. She had a soft spot for him; he was almost certain of it. If only he could touch her face, then he would have known for sure; could love leave a gentle pattern upon the skin that could be traced? This was not a lesson that Farbington, long dead, had taught him. It was his own theory, that he would pass to an apprentice of his own, when he was ready to accept his own cruelty and had found the will to inflict it.

        He would put a small child in a library, and listen to them cry.

        The gift of sound. To hear his own voice clearly, or listen to the voices of others?

        Years later, he would find himself unexpectedly welcoming the butcher to the library. She inquired after the procedures needed to finish the long-term curing of the skin of the Olme for bookmaking purposes. He found the book in question and repeated passages to her. He was, in that moment, transported back to the time that the Olme first found its way to uniting them.

        On an impulse, he reached out and touched her face. He tried to read it and could not tell if she loved him. She was, after all his dreams, unknowable.

        Then she sighed.

* * *

4. Storage: The Tubing

        A deep slice along the side facing the crowd, and then the boring tool was applied to the precise spot between the fifth and six leg, measured by an ancient angular device without a name. When the butcher pulled it free a thick, blue, rubbery tube came with it, speared upon its point, stretching from the incision.

        “Step forward, Bill and Mary Clement,” said the butcher, and the couple waddled up in their thick matching coats and boots. Bill held a long pole, and Mary had her arms filled with a sturdy net that she found slippery to hold. Mary felt hot and uncomfortable under the gaze of the crowd; she glanced at Bill for reassurance. He, with his nervous expression, looked as if he was about to embark upon a trying adventure.

        “May you bear the gift of forgiveness.”

        The butcher transferred the tubing to the pole, and Bill began to cautiously loop it as it spilled forth. Once the pole was filled with coils Mary opened the net wide and received them. They slid down the pole with ease as Bill angled it with great care into position, and then the whole business began again. The process was repeated four times, until the net was bulging and Mary could barely hold it open. She braced her legs and thrust back her chest, turning her face to the side, as far from the tubing as possible.

        Only a few loops into the fifth coil and the end of the tube popped free to reveal a pink, veined, star-shaped growth that flopped into the net and nestled there.

        “Done,” said the butcher. Bill nodded, took the net from Mary, and slung it over his shoulder. Then the two of them maneuvered their way back through the crowd, who parted wide for them.

        “Yes, but what’s it for?” Bill said that evening.

        The star sat in their largest cooking bowl, in his lap. It had come free from the tubing once they got it to their closest cave and had rolled to Mary’s feet where it glowed so fetchingly that she had scooped it up in the folds of her dress, taking care not to touch it with bare skin, and carried it home. It appealed to her deeply, even though she felt it should have belonged to a different kind of woman. A glamorous one, perhaps.

        “It must have served some purpose,” Mary said. “Bodies don’t have bits without purpose.”

        “In this day and age we should have worked out the internals of the Olme, and why all this ceremonial stuff is claptrap,” he grumbled.

        Brother and sister, side by side in their armchairs, faced the amethyst geode that formed the centerpiece of the room. Owning the largest number of caves in the upper tunnels kept them well off, but it was wealth inherited from the courage and strength of their ancestors who had dug out so much rock with their primitive tools and fought back others to stake their claims. The past was therefore romanticized and inaccessible from their own understanding, and quite useless to them. But now it had been foisted upon them, first by having to accept the bulk of the Olme in one of their caves, then by having to keep a length of tubing that had no obvious meaning. Would it be with them forever? It was an upsetting thought.

        But the star itself was beautiful, Mary thought. It looked alive in the bowl, like a fascinating creature from another world, waving its arms at her. It didn’t look dead at all.

        “Are we keeping that in here, then?” asked Bill.

        “For a while,” she said. She took the bowl from him and put it on her own lap. She watched it rather than staring into the colors of the geode, which had gradually become less interesting to her over time.

        In between the light duties of checking their caves for trespassing, Mary sat with her star and found a curious phenomenon: if she truly concentrated upon it, her breathing would fall to a slow, steady whooshing through her barely open mouth, and her vision would narrow, and a strange calm would spread through her. She had never known anything like it. She craved it. This clear state of being brought her knowledge. She began to understand that she had lived her life so far in a state of permanently suppressed irritation.

        Bill.

        Bill was annoying.

        He possessed a ferocious negativity. It was sharp, pointed, and always on hand to prick her. Doing this appeared to be his only enjoyment.

        “What a waste of bloody time,” he said, without fail, whenever she stared at her star.

        Mary started to wear different clothes to him. She wore Tuesday’s outfit on Monday and Friday’s outfit on Sunday. He frowned, and told her she looked ridiculous, at first. Then he lapsed into a wounded silence.

        Their ancestors had been so brave; where had that courage gone? She could not find it, even when her ritual revealed to her that she irritated him in equal measure as he her, and she enjoyed doing that as much as he enjoyed doing it to her.

        Then the contemplation of the star revealed to her that this relationship would not change because they had grown together into symbiotic beings of mutual irritation; it was much too late to ever work out how to pull apart, and if they did, they would remain two separated, unhappy halves of a whole until their deaths.

        In the wake of this revelation, she said to him, aware she sounded unconvincing, “I could leave you. I could go upside,” and he laughed, and said, “Not likely,” but she heard the tremble in his voice and discovered how to love him again for believing that she might actually be capable of such an act.

        So she plunged her uncovered hands into the bowl, and picked up the star. She felt no different to hold it, not at first; then she slowly became aware of the smell she now emitted. It had soaked into her skin. It could never be scrubbed away.

        Bill stared at her as she stood up and carried the bowl away. She took it to the closest storage cave and laid it atop the long length of the tubing. Then she returned to Bill’s side.

        “I’m done with it.”

        “You smell of it,” he told her.

        “I know,” she said.

        When they next changed clothes, she dressed once more in matching materials, and after completing her tasks she took her seat in the armchair beside his and looked into the depths of the amethyst geode. The scent emanating from her was barely noticeable, sometimes.

* * *

5. Watcher: sliced buttock

        “Some jobs are so unpleasant that they come with huge benefits,” said Kim’s mother. It’s the only way they can get anyone to do it. This is one such job. But here’s the thing—you do this thing, once, and then you’re free forever more. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be free of us all?”

        Ah, the edge of bitterness: it had just crept in on the final words. They had almost been having a conversation as equals. Kim fell back on her usual weapons, since the ceasefire was over. She rolled her eyes.

        “Is that a yes or a no?”

        She shrugged.

        “Right then. I’ll tell them it’s a yes, and you can tell them otherwise if you like.”

        That was how Kim ended up sitting next to the hulking carcass of the Olme before the ceremony, for the allotted length of time as laid out in the old books.

        It had not seemed like a long time in theory, yet was close to endless in practice.

        She tried to think only of her daydreams, which always involved the sun. Standing in it, lying in it, bathing. Being kissed by it. She had spent so much time learning about it when she should have been choosing a trade, and she had run out of time to find an apprenticeship because nobody valued her knowledge of that radiant ball that hung above ground. Her mother had declared her interest a phase, then an infatuation, then an inappropriate obsession caused by faulty hormones. It did not matter—Kim knew she would always love the sun. To be in its presence would complete her life.

        The lifeless body of the Olme made strange sounds beside her, in the storage cave. It shifted, squeaked and muttered in the dark. Kim could picture its organs shifting inside it, filling with gases that were then expelled as long, high whines.

        Sun, I’m coming, she said in her head. Similar seismic shifts were happening inside her. Her own organs were moving; she felt sure of it. They were traveling in tiny increments, rubbing against each other, growing, shrinking, changing who she was.

        Is this making me better or worse? she thought.

        The Olme settled further into death.

        When the butcher came to start the task of preparation for the ceremony, she looked hard at Kim and then gave her a kindly hug. “How was it?” she asked.

        Kim shrugged. She hated the idea that there had to be words for every experience.

        “You deserve a prize for your service, Kim.” The butcher whispered a word to her: a password, that would open the only door Kim had ever wanted to travel through.

        “Thank you,” she said. The butcher nodded.

        And the next time Kim saw her, the butcher was a tall, formal creature of ceremony, carving and sawing and rewarding. She called Kim forward, then looked down her nose as if they’d never met.

        “The gift of time.”

        It was a long thick strip from the hind flank of the Olme. Kim opened the rucksack she had brought along for the occasion, and the butcher slid it inside. Then she left the ceremony behind, keeping her eyes cast down as she walked so as to avoid making eye contact with her mother, and started the journey upwards. She traveled through the caves and tunnels that she knew well at first, and on to those she had only visited before when determined to flout her mother’s rules, and finally to those that were lined with wires from which steady-burning bulbs dangled, making her eyes water.

        Nailed to the wall of Cave One was a long ladder. She climbed it, hand over hand, legs working, muscles tiring with the unfamiliar movements. She did not dare to look down. It took all her courage to reach the trapdoor set in the rock at the top and knock against the wooden planks that separated her from the surface.

        There was no reply.

        She knocked again, then banged. In the fear of not being answered, she remembered why she had come this far, and she called out the password, over and over, until the trap door was lifted and a warm red light flooded her vision. It was not sunlight, surely? She had expected to be blinded by it—had been ready to be given eye protection by the surfacers. This light was gentle and dim.

        “Where has the sun gone?” she asked. A hand was held out to her, and she took it. Pulled up to stand in an open world, lidless, exposed to an expanse of emptiness, she crouched down and grabbed handfuls of soft green flooring to anchor herself. “Has there been an accident? Is the sun still there?”

        “Here,” said the man who had helped her up. He clapped a heavy hat on her head, just like one he was wearing himself, and the sensation of being closed and covered diminished Kim’s terror just enough so that she could take in a little of the world above. It was an indistinguishable mixture of sights and sounds, straight lines and swooping curves, jutting walls and tangling growths and nothing familiar. The man took her arm, and propelled her forward. “Come on.”

        “Why is there no sun?” she asked again, as he led her away from the trapdoor. Everything was changing color again, from soft red to darker violet, mixed with a creeping greyness.

        “There’s a sun!” said the man. He sounded amused. “It’s just setting. End of the day. But the councilor will want to see you, even if we’re after hours. It’s not far.”

        He took her to a tall building of chiseled, even stone walls. The roof was slanted to a sharp point. Inside, false bright lamplight blazed. Kim, fighting the pain in her eyes, managed to make out a large hall, without furnishings; very long spears had been arranged in crossed designs around the walls. A woman stood before her, at the foot of a staircase. She, too, wore a thick hat. Her bearing made her importance obvious. She was like the butcher during the act of cutting up the Olme: businesslike, and prepared to run the show.

        “You’re from Downtown,” said the woman.

        The name meant nothing to her.

        “Underground. And you know the password. Nobody has used it in a generation. Longer. Does it mean...”

        Kim waited. She gave no words away.

        “Does it mean you carry part of an Olme?”

        “You know about Olmes?” she asked, surprised out of her silence.

        “Let me see what you’ve brought.”

        Kim took off her backpack and held it open for the woman to see.

        “What’s that?”

        “A slice from its hind.”

        “It doesn’t smell.”

        “Olme doesn’t. Unless you touch it.”

        The woman reached out, then curled her fingers into a fist and dropped her hand to her side. “It can’t possibly be real,” she said. Her voice carried excitement and fear in equal measure.

        But tests at the local laboratory proved otherwise.

        Kim adjusted quickly to a life in which she was the center of attention, and everything she said was greeted with amazement. At first she told the truth about the Olme, as she understood it, to many rich and influential people who held parties for her in grand houses. She described the butcher, the gifts, and the craftspeople who received them. With every retelling she found the crowd who surrounded her filled with wonder and agitation. The Olme grew bigger and more monstrous with each reimagining. Was it in the way she used her voice? She felt a distance springing up between the way it had been and the way she talked of it. She began to hate the sound of her own voice, which had a strange, flat timbre in the high-roofed houses.

        The sun might have been enough compensation for that, but it would not speak to her in any form but anger. Whenever she tried to look at it, she was blinded. She stood in its brightness and raised her arms to it, and after only a short length of time found that her skin burned and blistered. She wanted to love it, but it did not love her.

        It was, she discovered, very hard to go on caring about a thing that did not care for her.

        At about that time, Kim realized she missed her mother.

        She thought about returning to the dark sometimes, but mainly she thought about the slice of Olme that had been taken from her and experimented upon at the laboratory. Had it been taken, or had she given it? She wasn’t sure. The feeling that she should have kept it bothered her. She felt duplicitous. False, in some way that she couldn’t pin down.

        So she didn’t try to explain it. She kept going to the parties, even after the people seemed to calm down and find her of less interest. Often she stood on her own, beside the crossed spears that decorated every room. She would drink the free drinks, eat the free food, and watch the people mingle in their strange heavy hats that they never took off. Then she would go back to the pointed house that had been provided for her and sleep all day so that she did not have to spend time with the sun.

        At one such party, a woman came to speak to her. The woman had sloping shoulders and a curved back. She looked as if she had spent a lifetime doing manual work; she immediately reminded Kim of home.

        “Do you remember me?” she said.

        Kim shook her head.

        “I greeted you. When you first arrived. I was the councilor.”

        “No,” said Kim. That had been a confident person, just like the butcher. She realized that time must have done its work on the butcher too, and everyone she had known. Nothing would be the same down there. “Really? How long ago was that?”

        The woman said a number that didn’t mean anything to her. “I gave it up a while back. I’m retired now. It was a hard job, making all those decisions for the benefit of everyone. Can I ask you something? Are you glad you came here?”

        “Yes and no.”

        “I wish I’d seen your Olme. Imagine. A living Olme.”

        “I didn’t see a living one.”

        “No. Well. Do you know what I think about the most, when I look back over my time in the job? I think about you offering me that part of the Olme. I wish I’d picked it up.”

        “You want to smell terrible for the rest of your life?”

        “I want to have proof that it happened,” said the woman. “Chances are, that was the very last one of its kind. There have been no eruptions for such a long time.”

        “Eruptions?”

        “Drolmeflies,” she said, as if that should mean something to Kim. “You know, the next stage. You don’t know this? The Olme are the larvae. Then they pupate, hatch, dig upwards. Take to the skies. The last eruption was hundreds of years ago. Over four hundred people were killed before we could bring it down, stop it from feeding. The fact that such an event hasn’t happened in so long made us think they were extinct.”

        “Then... what lays an Olme?”

        The woman considered the question. She said, “Something else. Something we haven’t seen. It must be terrible, whatever it is. Or was. But the signs are good, aren’t they? Maybe that was the very last one. We’ve lived in fear for so long, but now we can start to believe that the need to hunt the Olmes are over. All your people could return to the surface. Do you think more of you will come up?”

        Kim looked around the room. How many people knew why they wore those hats? How many could have picked up a spear and thrown it, straight and true, at a flying monster? The crowd were mingling, laughing. They had their own old jokes to tell, and even if they didn’t understand the punchlines any more, they would laugh.

        Would the butcher come up to the surface if she knew, or her mother? Would the masters and the apprentices give up what they loved, even if it did not love them? There were still some questions that couldn’t be answered. She shrugged, and rolled her eyes.

        Eventually the woman left her alone, and she abandoned the party and went for a walk in the night air. How fresh it was, and cold. She loved the icy touch of the wind; after removing her hat, she put her fingers to her hair and shook out the loose band that held it back from her face. The sensation was as close to freedom as she had ever felt.

        Her feet took her back to the trapdoor. It was sealed up tight, and the same guard sat beside it. When he saw her, he jumped to her feet. “Your hat!” he said. “Quick, put it back on.” He plucked it from her fingers and clapped it back upon her head.

        “Why?”

        “It’s not polite,” he said. “To be seen without one. It’s just one of the rules. What are you up to?”

        “I want to go home,” she said, although she hadn’t known it until the words had left her mouth.

        “Really?”

        “Why does that seem so surprising?”

        “Isn’t it all hard work down there? It’s up to you, though. Here you go. It’s a free choice—be up here, or down there. Different things suit different people, right? It’s all for the greater good.”

        Kim didn’t reply. She started down the ladder, and with each rung she descended she considered what she would say to the people who remained, who had tasks to fulfill, who had decided whether to be rewarded with gifts that bore a scent so strong that it could mark them forever.

Copyright © 2020 Aliya Whiteley

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Aliya Whiteley writes genre fiction. Her horror novella The Beauty was shortlisted for the James Tiptree and Shirley Jackson awards. The historical-SF novella The Arrival of Missives was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, and her noir novel The Loosening Skin was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. Her SF novel Greensmith will be published by Unsung Stories in May 2020, and a collection of her short fiction will be published by Titan books in November 2020.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

MY SISTER’S WINGS ARE RED

by Christine Tyler

Breakfast—5:00 a.m.

        Red. I’d thought my other sisters getting blue wings and purple wings would be the worst I’d ever have to swallow. But red wings? On 4408? The sister who shrilled like a teakettle when she saw her friends and snorted when she laughed? The sister who’d called me boring, who’d yelled “This is why no one likes you!” when I threw a dead chicken in her face? And now she was going to be queen. She was going to be my queen.

        I’d only just walked into the kitchens, a plucked chicken in either hand, ready to start another ruddy shift on another ruddy day, and Priscilla went and dropped the news on me while buttering a soufflé dish, just like that.

        “Her pupa went translucent last night.” Priscilla’s mandibles clicked pensively. She coated the dish in caster sugar and tapped it on the counter to shake off the excess. “I thought I’d go to the Chrysalis House to check on her, give her a bit of encouragement. Her pupa was already starting to clear up by the time I got there. The guards, everyone, we watched it for hours. At first we thought her wings might be orange, a dark orange, but...”

        “Red.” I slapped my chickens onto the counter and tried not to picture it.

        “Red as rosehip.”

        I took a deep breath. The aroma of the in-progress fry-up for Queen Charlotte washed over me. Eggs, sausage, rashers of bacon, fried bread, baked beans, black pudding, bubble and squeak, mushrooms, and fried tomatoes—a banquet of olfactory sensations.

        But underlying it all was Her Majesty’s mandibular pheromone. Musky and floral. Real and warm. Love eddied at the edges of my consciousness. I breathed again, deeper. Queen Charlotte’s pheromone used to be potent enough to induce bliss. These days it was just enough to make me feel calm but not good. Never good.

        “Olive...” Priscilla said as she carefully separated egg whites and yolks into two bowls. “I think you should go see her. Before she hatches.”

        I preened chicken feathers from my antennae. “No.”

        “She’s your sister.”

        “She’s not.”

        Priscilla liked to use words like that, words from before the first Imago came here. She still referred to larvae as “humans” and called her brood of larval kitchen maids her “daughters.” Apparently that made us all “sisters.” Everyone loved Priscilla, so we adopted her terms. But I’d be damned if I let her use her defunct old-world jargon against me.

        “She’s scared, Olive.”

        “What does she have to worry about? She’s going to be queen.”

        Priscilla finished separating the eggs and set to beating the whites. “Metamorphosis is always a touch daunting. Surely you remember your own hatching day.” Her whisk tsk tsk-ed on the old metal bowl.

        Heat crawled up my antennae. She hadn’t needed to bring that up. I crammed clumps of herb butter under the chicken skin, trying not to think about the worst day of my life, and failing.

        The first words I’d heard, the day I regained consciousness inside my chrysalis, were congratulations. But they weren’t for me. There was talk of a blue attendant, a purple nursemaid, a yellow guard. I was so excited to hear what color my wings were that I was shaking. And then came Priscilla’s voice—so careful, so quiet, I could hear my heart beating over it. And she told me my wings were grey. That I was a drudge. That she’d requested I return to the kitchens instead of doing menial labor with the other grey-winged toilers. I was going back to the brood. With the larvae.

        “Purpose is nectar,” she’d said as she handed me my assignment file.

        “Purpose is nectar,” I’d echoed, as if in a dream.

        Then the nursemaids gave me a slap on the rump and a good look in the mirror. Sure enough, my wings were grey. And beige. Dull as a December moth. And then they’d named me Olive, like a load of right jokers.

        Priscilla lifted a white sauce from the stove and gently folded in her meringue peaks. “It’s just as hard for your sister as it was for you.”

        “Doubt that.” I shoved a lemon into the chicken.

        “Her being queen isn’t any better than you being a kitchen maid. Besides, if you didn’t have grey wings, who else would help me cook?”

        I gestured to the larval idiots.

        Priscilla sighed. “None of them can stay, as far as we know. And I’ll need someone to take my place when I’m gone. We all have our purpose, and purpose is nectar.”

        “Purpose is nectar.” I murmured, joined by a chorus of voices from behind me. I turned to see the kitchen larvae staring, and I jumped. It was times like this, with a dozen pairs of creepy white sclerae all set on me, that I was reminded how odd looking larvae were. No wings sprouting through the backs of their jumpers; no mandibles or antennae. They didn’t even have exoskeletons but skin that tore and bruised as easily as a peach.

        The kitchen larvae had to know about 4408 already, gossips that they were. They just wanted to see what their ornery, rubbish-winged sister had to say about it.

        “Bugger off,” I said, and went back to salting my stupid chicken.

        Priscilla shooed the larvae away and slid her soufflé into the oven. “Get back to work, you silly pests.”

        The larvae feigned busyness, rattling plates and thunking pans, though a few kept stealing glances at me. Their voices buzzed, and a bloom of excited pheromones rose with the aroma of breakfast. A new queen. One of Priscilla’s daughters. Everyone was delighted, just delighted.

        “Purpose is nectar!” came a cry above the din. A larva waddled toward us with a bucket of jelly. For every meal, whatever Queen Charlotte didn’t eat went to the royal entourage: attendants, nursemaids, drones. After they’d had their fill, it was liquefied, distilled, flavored with a black currant extract, and turned into the cloying gelatinous nectar all of us workers knew and hated.

        “Purpose is nectar,” the rest of us repeated, and formed a queue. I grabbed my mug and stepped behind Priscilla.

        When the sludge hit the bottom of my cup, I half turned, expecting to hear 4408 say, “What, no roast chicken?” I’d told her one time, just one time, that I had a daydream about burying my face in a fat, greased up, oven-roasted chicken, cramming gobs of meat into my mouth. I wanted to bite it off the bone, to feel the juice dribble down my chin, to crunch and chew and mash, to suck it all up with ice-cold elderflower cordial. 4408 had loved that idea so much she teased me about it every day for the next five years. Every day. “What, no roast chicken?” and I would deadpan, and she would needle me with her pointy little vertebrate elbow and tell me I had no sense of humor. The day before she went into her chrysalis she’d said, “You’ll get it someday, Olive.”

        But I wouldn’t. She would, though. She’d get everything.

        I sloshed the nectar around in my mug and slurped it up as quickly as I could. The sickly-sweetness made my proboscis ache and my stomach churn. I dumped the chicken onto a roasting pan with some garlic and onions and opened the oven to get it cooking.

        “My soufflé!” Priscilla gasped and lunged for the door, but it was too late. The little tower of perfect fluff let out a sigh and sank into the center of the dish.

        “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot it was in there...”

        Priscilla retrieved the fallen soufflé. Her antennae drooped clear to her shoulders.

        “Can’t you send it up anyway?” I asked. “It’ll still taste good.”

        “I’ll make another.” Priscilla scraped her would-be masterpiece into the liquefier and retrieved the kitchen ledger to account for the wasted ingredients while I stood there like a fool, still holding my roasting pan.

        “Why are you making a soufflé for breakfast, anyway?”

        “It’s for elevenses,” she said. “It’s actually slated to be made by you, later on. I just wanted you to be ahead of things so you could pay your sister a visit.

        “I told you, I’m not going.”

        “Olive, you don’t have time to be stubborn about this. Once they declare her queen, you’re never going to see her again.”

        “Good.”

        “Why are you being like this? What did she ever do to you?”

        “You wouldn’t understand.”

        “Let’s have it, then.”

        I slung my disaster of a chicken into the oven and slammed the door shut. “Okay. Fine,” I said. “You know what? It’s not fair.”

        “Not fair?”

        “She had better odds than me! If Queen Charlotte’s pheromone was anything like it used to be, we wouldn’t even have another queen, but it’s been at an all-time low for months. Months! Someone was getting red wings. The timing was perfect for 4408.”

        Priscilla didn’t immediately reply. Because I was right.

        “You think that’s fair?” I said. “That we get to wake up in the dark every morning and kill and pick chickens we’ll never eat? That we get to spend every day for the rest of our lives chopping and kneading and boiling and frying, glazing and deglazing, cooking feasts, while 4408—or whatever her name will be—gets to lounge on silk cushions and eat meat and cake and sandwiches!”

        “It is fair,” Priscilla said quietly. “It’s as fair as nature.”

        “Nature’s a bitch.”

        Distress pheromones emanated from Priscilla, but she kept her composure. “It’s a big change, and she’s vulnerable. A lot could go wrong.”

        “Oh don’t. Don’t.”

        “I’m not trying to guilt you, Olive. I’m asking you, as your mother, to do something kind for your sister. If you won’t go for her, and you won’t go for yourself, then go for me.” Her wings flickered. They were a gorgeous iridescent blue, as velvety deep as any of the queen’s attendants but crumpled as a dishrag.

        Admittedly, Priscilla’s story was worse than mine. When the first Imago arrived here, they discovered an entire planet full of larvae that didn’t know they were supposed to change, that didn’t even know they could. For whatever reason, “humans” lacked the hormone to trigger their metamorphoses. The Imago showed them their full potential, and humans became Imago; or they realized they’d always been Imago, just trapped in stasis, never reaching their individual or collective destinies.

        There’d been a few outliers, misled radicals who fought against the change. One night they broke into the Chrysalis House and ripped open a whole row of pupae before anyone could stop them. Priscilla had been in one of those chrysalises. She’d survived it because she’d been so far along, but the moment the air hit her premature wings they’d shriveled like a half-baked soufflé. She’d gone from one of the queen’s royal attendants, destined for easy work and opulence in a glimmering palace, to nobody. Queen of the Rubbish Dump, people called her. Because broken wings, no matter the color, were just as bad as grey wings.

        Somehow she pulled enough strings to get this stint in the kitchens, to recruit larvae—who weren’t even supposed to have jobs—to make pre-colony human food for Her Majesty. It didn’t make any sense. But it was her way of getting by. Her idea of purpose. Not Queen of the Rubbish Dump but Queen of the Kitchens.

        “Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

        Priscilla’s blue wings twitched happily, wrinkles and all.

* * *

Elevenses—11:00 a.m.

        I tried to renege on my promise during my next shift, but Priscilla pushed me out of the kitchens. She’d spent the rest of the morning obsessing over the perfect infusion of vanilla oolong with cream and white blueberry, raspberry buns, custard tarts, currant cake, cranberry scones, blood-orange jam, as well as that damned soufflé, and she said she’d worked too hard doing double-duty for me to back out now.

        So I headed to the Chrysalis House. The moment I stepped out of the kitchens, the heady tang of pheromones hit me like a blunt axe and made my eyes water. Drones.

        A couple hundred showed up every year for the nuptial flight with Queen Charlotte—local males who’d turned twenty, along with a few from other colonies brave enough to take the lead-lined trains across the toxic flats. But apparently the burgeoning mandibular pheromone of a virgin queen was another matter, because the colony was crawling with more drones than I’d seen in my life.

        Drones had clear wings, but they made up for it by wearing velvet suits in every color of the rainbow. It seemed blue was especially popular this year, paired with brown leather brogues. The drones used canes they didn’t need, constantly doffed their hats at each other, and enjoyed saying things like “An ascot is always a cravat, but a cravat is not always an ascot.” Then they’d laugh with their mouths closed, “Hmhmhmhm!”

        Crowds of them loitered along the colony’s streets, congregated around lamp posts and perched atop the crumbling rectangular ruins of the old world.

        I set a steady pace toward the Chrysalis House and kept my head down. Drone pheromones clung to me as if I had walked through a trail of spider webs. Envy sat heavy in my stomach. But why? It wasn’t the sex that made me jealous. I didn’t really feel a need for it. In addition to keeping the colony calm and staving off new queens, Her Majesty’s mandibular pheromone shrank the workers’ ovaries and subdued our reproductive drives. So sex didn’t happen between workers and drones. We were technically capable of it, probably. But it wasn’t worth the bother.

        So it wasn’t all of that. It was... how could I describe it? The luxury of romance.

        I always imagined the queen, having exhausted her throng of suitors, turning regally in the air and pointing to the last drone flying. The fastest, the handsomest. Then the two of them would find some secluded grotto full of soft moss and moonlight. Feed each other macarons and lick grape juice off each other’s antennae or something.

        Now 4408 would have that, too.

        When I arrived at the Chrysalis House, there were even more drones converging outside the massive geodesic dome, buzzing around, trying to catch a whiff of 4408. I shouldered through the crush, cringing at the body contact. I could feel the drones’ sweat, the heat blazing through their jackets and shirts. I held my breath and pushed harder until I reached the front entrance. A quick pheromone check got me past the guards, and I practically raced across the threshold.

        Entering the Chrysalis House was like falling into a glorious, amber-colored dream. The swelter and noise dropped away, replaced with cool air and stillness. The primitive ninety-degree angles that still haunted the center of town were nowhere to be seen. Here, shapes worked together in harmony. Triangles. Hexagons. Polyhedrons. Cohesion. Even the sound was right. The ambient thrumming of wings, the sussurration of hushed whispers; all resonant, all perfect. Errands to the Chrysalis House were rare, but it felt like a reprieve every time.

        I walked along a colonnade of glowing resin. Each hollow pillar contained a single chrysalis, visible through a membranous window. The newest pupae were white as milk, a few with their owner’s previous skin still attached. Just seeing them made me itch. No one ever forgot their molts, when you scratched and scratched until you sloughed skin from your neck to your ankles like stripping off the world’s worst pair of long johns.

        Five times you shed your skin, until you were ready to take the whole thing off for good, flesh and fat and all. Instinct took over and... sure it was painful, but there was so much satisfaction, so much release, that it didn’t matter. When I hung upside-down in that chamber and shed the old me—writhed until my face split in two and the fissure arced over my skull and seared down my spine like a ripped seam—it felt glorious. My body wasn’t me anymore. It belonged to someone else, someone long gone. Even the pain was someone else’s, and I was nothing but a bag of proteins.

        4408’s pillar was the last in line. Sure enough, her chrysalis had gone completely clear, revealing red wings with striking black veins and blue eyespots. Traces of distress pheromone wafted from her chamber. Jitters, probably. The scent was accompanied by inklings of a queenly mandibular pheromone, familiar in essence but brighter than Charlotte’s. Younger. More potent. The more I breathed in that vapor, the more I loved her. I couldn’t help but love the source of that pheromone. And I hated her too. So much.

        I pressed my hands against the warm membrane protecting her, imagining 4408 wrapping a blue-suited drone in her gorgeous red wings and eating food. Meat and cake and sandwiches. Grape juice.

        “I wish I were you,” I whispered. It wasn’t what I was supposed to say. It wasn’t making my peace. I should have told her it wasn’t her fault. But it felt like it was; like everything my sisters had gained had been stolen from me, like every kind of worker I could have been was curled inside me and every time one of my sisters left they yanked it out of me. I could have been red. It felt like 4408 had pulled her rosehip wings, her future, from the deepest part of me. And the only reason my wings were grey was because everything else had been taken.

        “I hope it’s awful,” I said. “I hope you hate being queen and everyone learns to hate you as much as I do.” And then I was crying, because she was so beautiful. So unmistakably red. And it wouldn’t be awful at all. It would be wonderful. Wonderful, every day for the rest of her life.

* * *

Lunch—1:00 p.m.

        Kitchen maids aren’t servers. But by the time lunch came around that day, so many drones had come spilling out of the train station that Priscilla conscripted me to wait on the entourage. When I reminded her I’d never served food before, she said, “We’ve never had a virgin queen before,” and handed me a frilly apron. How Priscilla planned to cater to a thousand drones instead of the usual hundred or so was a mystery in itself, but why she wanted to was completely beyond me.

        To my relief, however, she asked a dozen other kitchen maids to entertain the drones, and she sent me to the royal pavilion with the lunch crew. We’d be waiting on the queen’s attendants, which meant there was a miniscule possibility that we’d catch a glimpse of the queen herself.

        “Say hello to Alexandra for me,” Priscilla said. “She was always sneaking sips of the cherry sencha. Tell me how she likes it.” Alexandra had been 3001, one of my sisters, before she grew blue wings and became an attendant.

        A pair of yellow guards came and led the other kitchen maids and I through the passages of the palace. The Imago had been loath to waste resources when they’d arrived here, so Her Majesty’s pavilion was built atop another structure, and it shared many of the original hallways and all seven hundred and seventy-five rooms and chambers. Of course the aesthetics had to be improved, so the cold limestone and bathstone of old was reinforced and updated with golden resin that glowed with bioluminescence, with life.

        The dining hall was right outside Queen Charlotte’s bedchambers. I kept stealing glances of the ornate double doors, the only thing standing between us and our monarch, as the larvae and I arranged a banquet of sandwiches: ham on brioche, cheddar cheese and chutney on tomato bread, breast of chicken with terragon creamed mayonnaise. There were also salads, fruit salads, crisps, and croissants, all of it accompanied by a cherry sencha with rose petals. We couldn’t actually watch the queen eat, of course, so once the table was spread we waited in an adjacent drawing room and tried to keep our stomachs from rumbling.

        Priscilla had told me that before the Imago came, everyone ate food all the time. She used to cook for hundreds of people every day, and they traveled from all over the world to taste her cooking. Important people gave her stars it was so good. She had three stars, she said, as many as anyone was allowed to have. I never asked which three were hers.

        An hour later, the guards led us back to the dining hall. Queen Charlotte was gone, but her scent lingered like a daydream. It was her attendants’ turn to eat now, and they situated themselves around the massive table. My old sister Alexandra was among them, and I tried to catch her eye. Maybe she hadn’t seen me.

        But then the attendants started eating—eating-eating—and my jaw dropped. Like most Imago, I’d used my proboscis to suck up nectar since the day I metamorphosed. But the attendants had learned how to consume food with their proboscises retracted like a larva’s stump-tongue. I could almost imagine the sensation of the food in my mouth. Biting into a strawberry. Mashing a hundred layers of a croissant. Crunching fried potatoes. Licking the salt from my lips. But when I swallowed, it was only saliva.

        The entourage took this whole process for granted. They gave no comment, uttered not a word of gratitude. Alexandra, meanwhile, was avoiding my gaze. It figured. She drank two cups of the sencha, though. I’d be sure to tell Priscilla.

        Suddenly, the doors to the queen’s chamber flew open, and the entourage gaped with sarnies and teacups halfway to their mouths.

        Queen Charlotte stood in the doorway. Her ancient face was ashen and etched with lines, but a massive, bulbous abdomen stretched taut beneath yards of silk robes. Her legs shook, and she had one arm looped beneath her enormous belly while the other clutched the doorframe in a death grip.

        “I’m... going... for a walk,” she announced, panting.

        “A walk?” echoed the attendants. “Where?”

        “Nowhere. Nowhere in particular.”

        “Not again,” breathed Alexandra as she and the other attendants dashed up and took Queen Charlotte by the arms. “Your Majesty, I think you need to lie down.”

        “No, I mean it this time.” Queen Charlotte tried to shrug them off. “I want to take a walk!”

        The attendants turned to the guards. “Are you daft? Help us!”

        Two guards joined the attendants, pulling at the queen, prying her white fingers from the doorjamb, but Queen Charlotte wasn’t going without a fight. “Let me go! I’m the queen! I will take a walk!”

        “She’s mad!” wailed a nursemaid.

        “But in your condition, Your Majesty,” cajoled a guard.

        “I swear, if we have to do this one more time...” Alexandra muttered.

        Until finally Queen Charlotte was outmanned, dragged back into her bedchamber, and the doors slammed shut.

        The remaining guards rounded on us. “None of you saw this,” they said, and we scurried back to the kitchens without even remembering to take the plates.

* * *

Afternoon Tea—3:00 p.m.

        I had to serve the attendants again, this time in the gardens. They splayed their wings, basking in the sunshine, flaunting blues deep as midnight. And I, feet aching, head aching, back aching, poured them orange pekoe. All the while, the episode in Queen Charlotte’s dining hall reeled in my mind. Was it just because she was dying, or had she always been mad?

        Even more drones had arrived, and Priscilla had the staff move all the parlor chairs onto the lawn to dissuade the army of fops from sitting on the old stone walls while they ate. But if the attendants’ methods of consumption were like an elegant dream, the drones’ were an epic-scale catastrophe. I couldn’t look away from it.

        The drones had never gained the skill of masticating solids like the attendants had. They managed to get Priscilla’s food into their mouths, but they had no idea what do with it once it was in there. Their mandibles worked the empty air as they tried to force their uncoordinated jaws to chew. Some of them resorted to manually holding their mouths shut to keep their proboscises from involuntarily slipping out—the sweeter the food, the greater the instinct to extend it, so watching them struggle with trifle was a riot. Even when they managed to keep everything in and get it all squishy enough, the biggest problem seemed to be getting it down past their gag reflex. Satisfying though, to watch them try.

        Most of them resorted to regurgitating the mess into their pekoe and using their proboscis to suck up the mash. The impeccable balance of Priscilla’s finger sandwiches—cucumber and cream cheese on white bread, watercress and salted butter on wheat, smoked salmon on rye—was annihilated as the drones pulverized them into their own heretical version of nectar. Of course they tried to look distinguished as they did all of this, with their pinkies stuck out from their teacups like bloody yokels.

        Ugh. Drones.

        Alexandra sat at a table with a few nursemaids and a couple of drones. One leaned back on two chair legs like a complete degenerate, sporting a green flat cap and matching vest. The other would have been handsome had his face not been so dour. He wore the ubiquitous blue suit and brown leather brogues, and he sat rigid, one hand stuck to his tea plate, the other on his cup—pinky up, of course.

        The nursemaids and drones listened, rapt, as Alexandra recounted what seemed to be a hilarious story. “Wait, wait, it gets better!” Her voice rose and she slapped the table. “‘Where do you want to walk?’ we ask her, and she says, ‘Oh I don’t want to go anywhere, I want to walk and walk and go nowhere. Maybe in circles!’ and we’re breaking our backs trying to hold her, and I have half a mind to let her go, just to see her try to get that honking great belly out the door!”

        The drone in the flat cap guffawed, while the rest of the table tittered.

        “But she’s gone absolutely balmy again,” Alexandra continued, “She starts asking to read one of those books full of lies—’just for fun!’—and yammering about those magical pieces of paper you could trade for ‘anything in the world! A pair of shoes! A kingdom! A cow!”

        Alexandra’s audience leaned forward as if this were all too entertaining to be true.

        “And then she looks at me,” said Alexandra. “And I swear she doesn’t even know who I am, and she says, ‘Oh if only you’d seen it. You would have loved this place before the Imago.”

        “And I almost said, ‘If I paint your picture on a million little pieces of paper, then hand them out to all the kitchen maids, will it remind you?”

        Everyone at the table broke into peals of laughter. Alexandra shook her head. Then she saw me, and her antennae perked. She flexed her mandibles as if daring me to comment.

        “I—I think she was just distressed.” I regretted opening my mouth the moment they all looked at me.

        “You eavesdropping, Moth Girl?” called Flat Cap. “Well, don’t be shy. Come over here and give us your side of the story.” He turned to the others. “Pretty sure Alexandra will make up anything for a bit of attention.”

        Alexandra bopped him on the arm. “This is Olive. We had the same mentor. She was in the kitchens with 4408.”

        “Ah, so you know our queen-to-be.” Flat Cap grinned rakishly.

        I clutched my serving tray. “Why are you talking about Her Majesty like that?”

        “I’m only telling the truth.” Alexandra picked up her cup and saucer. “Queen Charlotte’s lost the plot.”

        “Maybe it’s because she’s spent the last hundred years around people like you.”

        Alexandra’s antennae twitched. “Maybe its because her kind spent hundreds of thousands of years without a proper colony, each trapped in their own pathetic, purposeless existence. When she goes into a spell she thinks she’s back there. She’s that old.”

        “Mother of Perga, I’m glad we’re getting a fresh one,” said Flat Cap. The nursemaids shot him a look. “Long live the queen,” he quipped and ducked his head. It was one thing for a worker to speak disparagingly of her majesty. It was another thing entirely to hear it from a drone. I dearly hoped his chair would tip over.

        “It does seem senseless,” I admitted. “But if the queen wants to walk around in circles, why not let her?”

        “Because,” said Alexandra, “we don’t want her to make a fool of herself.”

        “No, you’ll just make a fool of her behind her back.”

        The nursemaids’ mandibles ticked, but Alexandra laughed as if I’d made the cleverest joke. “Olive here has always been a bit of a dung-roller. Never saw her crack a smile the whole time I knew her. Of course, I was only in the kitchens for five years. Olive’s been there for... how long has it been now?”

        I glowered.

        “Oh yes. Thirty years.” Alexandra extended a dainty proboscis and sipped her tea. “Olive, these good fellows want to know a bit about 4408. She was after my time, of course, but you might know something.”

        “Let’s hear it, Olive,” said Flat Cap, and him using my name was worse than him calling me Moth Girl. “You can take a seat next to me, I don’t bite.”

        “Not anyone but the queen,” said one of the nursemaids, and they all fell into giggles.

        Flat Cap patted the chair next to him. I didn’t budge. “So?” He shrugged.

        “Well,” I said, “she was really bad at killing chickens.”

        “What?” Flat cap squinted.

        “I mean, catching them was one thing, she was pretty good at that, but when it came to killing them she was a right wimp. We stood in the garden for two hours one morning with her barely holding on to one panic-stricken chicken—it’s flapping like crazy and she’s crying like an idiot and I’m trying to show her how to “twist and pull!” on at least a dozen hens. I could barely hear my own voice over her wailing, and she still couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t figure out who was more het up, her or that damned bird.”

        The company stared.

        “That’s... not... exactly what we’re looking for,” said Flat Cap.

        Of course it wasn’t. That was the point. But I could do better than that. “Her five molts were the nastiest I’ve ever seen,” I began again. “She’d howl all night, tossing and turning, and when she woke in the morning she’d be swamped in sheaves of skin. We told her not to, but she tried to calm the itch with ointments and lotions. It only made it grosser, because then everything was soggy when it came off. And it stank like wet dog.”

        Alexandra wasn’t amused, and neither were the drones.

        “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what you want to hear. 4408 was a pest. We didn’t really get along.”

        “Well that was a given.” Alexandra sighed. “You don’t get along with anyone.”

        My face heated. Flat Cap chuckled.

        “She’ll never choose you, you know,” I said to the drones. “She’ll pick someone handsome and kind.”

        Blue Suit squinted at me. “What?”

        “What are you talking about?” asked Alexandra.

        “The nuptial flight. When the queen and her mate go off to...” I floundered. I’d never spoken about that in front of a drone in my entire life. Or anyone, really. “You know. Just the two of them. She’d never pick either of you.”

        The drones shifted in their seats. Alexandra gave a little huff of incredulity. “The two of them? Tell me you’re joking.”

        Blue Suit looked like he was going to be sick. The nursemaids covered their mandibles and exchanged glances across the table.

        “What’s so funny?” I asked.

        “Oh, honey.” Alexandra oozed condescension. “Have you even looked around? There are more than a thousand suitors here. She can’t pick.”

        “But she outflies them... and then... when only the fastest and handsomest is left—”

        I couldn’t hear my own voice over their laughter. Flat Cap hee-hawed so hard his chair finally did tip backwards, which sent the nursemaids shrieking into a fit.

        Alexandra took a deep breath and leaned forward in her seat. “On the day of the nuptial flight, the queen flies out, and the drones follow her. All of them. They’re kicking and biting, trying to get ahead, until a few of them catch up to our dear queen and manage to get a hold.”

        “Get a hold?” I stammered. “You mean she hasn’t got a choice?

        “A choice?” Alexandra peered at me. “Why do you think she tries to fly away from them?”

        For some reason there were still words coming out of my mouth. “You mean one of them just...”

        “I didn’t say one.” Alexandra drummed her fingers on the table. “Ten or twenty usually hit their mark before her majesty manages to escape. Their genitals tear off afterward though, rip right out of their abdomen. So there’s that.”

        “There is that,” Blue Suit repeated dully.

        Alexandra canted her head, as if contemplating exactly how much horror to bestow upon me. “Then the drones go spiraling down to the ground. The impact usually puts them out of their misery. Usually.”

        “But then... why do it?” I asked the drones, but Alexandra answered.

        “Because every drone that fails to mate gets banished to the toxic flats, where they’ll either starve or live to experience getting turned inside-out by the poisonous vapors. Wouldn’t you rather have something quick?”

        I looked from one grim-faced drone to another. “I mean... I...”

        “That was rhetorical, honey bee.” Alexandra tapped her fingers on the table. “The fact is, the drones don’t need a penalty. In the end, stubborn or not, they all surrender to instinct. At its full strength, the sexual hormone is as powerful as those that trigger the five molts. Come nuptial day, this brooding fellow won’t remember his own name, let alone any qualms he may have.”

        Blue Suit glared. “I might.”

        “You won’t,” said Alexandra.

        “But why?” I asked. “Why kill all the drones?”

        “Because the only thing they do other than mate is eat. We don’t have the resources for that, and we’ll have a fresh batch of mature drones to replace them next year.”

        Flat Cap smirked.

        “What are you so smug about?” I asked. “You’ll be dead in two weeks.”

        “Eat, drink, and be merry,” said Flat Cap.

        “For tomorrow we die,” said Blue Suit.

        “And you better believe that I’m going to get a piece of that virgin queen before I go.” Flat Cap tipped his cup to me.

        “Purpose is nectar,” said Alexandra.

        “Purpose is nectar,” they all repeated and held their teacups high. Except for Blue Suit, whose cup was still full.

        “But the rest of the year the queen lives in luxury!” I cringed at my own childishness. “She lounges on silk cushions and gets to eat meat and cake and sandwiches.” Is that what I’d really said that morning? It sounded so stupid now—a desperate reach to make sense of things, to make it better. But nothing could make it better. Nothing could make the queen’s annual rape anything but what it was, and nothing could erase it from my mind.

        Alexandra maintained her pained civility. “She gets to eat so much because she has to eat so much. It’s her sole responsibility to sustain the population, and with her only popping out a baby every day or so she can barely support a town, let alone a whole city. Nectar would support a higher birth rate, but Charlotte insists she can meet her caloric quota with her absurd human food. But if Her Majesty doesn’t meet her daily quota—which she rarely does—we bring out the tubes, feed her like one of Priscilla’s foie gras geese.”

        I staggered. Priscilla. Did Priscilla know about all this? Of course she did. She had to know, in order to do everything she did. This was why she did it. The time she put into each meal, the perfection. It was an act of love, to help the queen eat. “Does everyone know?”

        “Most,” said Alexandra. “It’s the kitchen maids Priscilla keeps in the dark.”

        “Why?”

        “So they don’t realize how pointless their work is.”

        “I thought making larvae work at all was pointless,” said one of the nursemaids.

        “But it’s not,” I said, “If it helps.”

        “All that work?” asked Alexandra. “All those resources? For one person? With logic like that, Priscilla can barely call herself an Imago. But I’m not the one who gets a say in all of that.” The hypocrisy of Alexandra sipping her pekoe while defaming Priscilla’s name sent my glands into high production. “Maybe you should scamper back to Mummy,” she added. “Spare us your distress cloud.”

        “You think you worked your way out? You think you earned your station?” I gripped my serving tray tighter to keep it from shaking. “You didn’t. You got lucky. One good rip in your wings and you’d be back in the kitchens.”

        “Wouldn’t that be nice,” Alexandra said. “Priscilla would finally have a daughter to stay with her that she actually liked!”

        My serving tray went flying and I was halfway across the table before I knew it. Alexandra’s wings shot out instinctively, her powder-blue eyespots both fearsome and fearful. I could do it. I could make her no one. Just one good rip.

        We breathed hard, our gazes locked. But, of course, I’d only made it halfway across the table. Inevitably, Charlotte’s mandibular pheromone did its work, slowly bringing us back down, restoring rational thought. The drones and other attendants were frozen in place amid a pool of pekoe and shattered porcelain. I couldn’t rip someone’s wings. I’d go straight to the toxic flats. Looking like this, threatening a fellow Imago, acting like an outlier—any more of it and I’d have one foot out the door.

        “You’re not worth it,” I said.

        Alexandra scoffed. “I’m worth more than you.”

        The air went completely out of me. It was true.

        “Get off the table,” said Flat Cap. The nursemaids clacked their mandibles.

        I crawled back down, my knees soaked in tea. I stood on the grass for a moment, not knowing what to do with myself. Should I clean up? Apologize? I opted to just leave. A collective sigh rose up as I turned away, but their chatter followed me.

        “She just about gave me a heart attack!”

        “Did you see the look on her face when she—”

        “Weren’t you scared, Alexandra?”

        “No,” Alexandra’s voice fell further and further behind. “I knew she didn’t have it in her.”

        My antennae burned. I stalked out of the gardens as quickly as I could and disappeared into the kitchens, amid the dishes and the noise and the smell. My head wouldn’t stop ringing and my wings wouldn’t stop shaking. The truth was, she was right. I didn’t have it in me. I was grey, inside and out.

* * *

High Tea—6:00 p.m.

        Priscilla and I took high tea alone in her kitchen office, sitting at her desk, surrounded by ledgers and recipe books. I told her everything that had happened that day, and she handed me a teacup of watered-down nectar she’d heated on the stove.

        “Remember when I used to do this?” she asked. “And we’d pretend it was Earl Grey?”

        I took the teacup. “It’s not Earl Grey.” It had never been Earl Grey. I didn’t even know what that would taste like. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

        “Would it have made you feel better?”

        “Doesn’t matter. It’s the truth.”

        Priscilla drank her watered-down nectar.

        “It’s not fair,” I said. “4408 didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

        Priscilla set her cup down gently. “First it wasn’t fair she would live in luxury. Now it isn’t fair that she’ll suffer? When are you going to learn, none of us deserve anything we get?”

        “How can you make all that food every day? Knowing it’s not going to change anything?”

        “Because I love her.” Priscilla’s antennae twined. “Every day. I think about making it a little bit better. And it gives me purpose.” Priscilla’s purpose hadn’t just been nectar for the queen, it had been nectar for herself—and it had sustained her, soul and body, through more years and more daughters than even I remembered. I knew it, before. Now I understood.

        “Purpose is nectar,” I whispered.

        “Purpose is nectar,” Priscilla repeated solemnly.

        A waft of the queen’s mandibular pheromone drifted through the office. It hit my brain like a good night’s rest, easing my muscles, soothing my nerves. Across the desk, Priscilla deflated.

        “It’s stronger,” I said.

        “That’s not Queen Charlotte.”

        “4408?”

        Priscilla nodded. “She’s close. It should only be a couple hours now.”

        “I wonder if they’ve briefed her yet. If she knows.”

        “They have,” said Priscilla. “I told you this morning, she’s scared.”

        Not just jitters. Not just nervousness. 4408 was terrified. But what could be done?

        I looked at Priscilla, this worker with so much love for an unseen queen—and so much faith in food—that she’d dedicated her life to giving that queen a few moments of reprieve in a burst of citrus, a flash of comfort in a perfectly crisp ham. A worker who made herself a mother by claiming every larva who came into her kitchens as a daughter. Now one of her daughters would be the queen, and she’d work harder than ever. Every time the dishes went out she’d wonder if it helped at all. If any of it mattered. But she’d do it anyway. And I wanted to help.

        I set my cup down. The same one I’d used when I was young, when I still knew how to pretend diluted nectar was Earl Grey. “Priscilla...” I said tremulously, “Can you teach me how to cook? Like you?”

        No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than Priscilla fumbled her way around the desk and wrapped me in her arms, enveloped me in the scent of tea leaves and cinnamon, pork fat and cheese, chutney and jam, golden brown pastries fresh from the oven, pheromones and sweat. The scent of my mother. Because I was her daughter too.

* * *

Dinner—8:00 p.m.

        Priscilla kept me in the kitchens during dinner. When the servers headed out to the pavilion—with their procession of rind cheese and cranberry sauce, roast lamb with mint chutney, parsnips and potatoes, beef with horseradish, pork chops with cinnamon apple sauce, and Lapsang Souchong for tea—I wondered, which would Queen Charlotte choose? How much would she eat? No, I didn’t wonder; I obsessed. I stewed and sweated, practically tore my antennae out, imagining what would happen if that quota wasn’t met. Hoping that it was.

        Hours later, the wait staff came back with the plates, sent the scraps to the liquefier, and that was the day. No questions answered. The kitchen maids lined up at the towers of dirty dishes, rolled up their sleeves, and began the long night of scrubbing so it could start all over tomorrow.

        I was scouring a crusty soufflé dish when Priscilla called me to her kitchen office. With me at her side, she began planning tomorrow’s five meals for the queen, and I felt like a soldier being trained by a brigadier. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner. Each meal was a battle waged against an onslaught of currant-flavored nectar.

        Queen Charlotte may have had memories of eating food before she became queen, but 4408 had memories of cooking it, of pining for it. We’d make it possible for her to finally taste it. I’d make 4408 a whole roast chicken and hope she stuck her face in it.

        Priscilla pulled a massive folio from her bookshelf and dropped it onto the desk.

        “What’s that?” I asked.

        “Menus,” she said. “I write up a new one every day, but they’re good to revisit for ideas. These are last year’s.”

        “Menus...” The bookshelves lining Priscilla’s office were bursting with folios just like this one. One sheet of paper for each meal, five meals every day, three hundred and sixty five days in a year, and over a hundred of those years belonged to Queen Charlotte.

        There would be a hundred more for 4408.

        Every roast and pudding, every lemon soufflé, could only save the queen for one meal. One piece of paper. And save her from what? Getting a tube stuck down her throat? That was the least of her worries.

        Priscilla reviewed her notes, dipped her pen in an inkwell, and started scratching on a fresh sheet of paper, rejuvenated now that she finally had someone who understood what she was doing and why she was doing it. But the horrible truth roiled in my gut. I started thinking of 4408, the apprehension on her face when it had been time to go to the Chrysalis House, the way her hand paused on the side of the column before she went in, the way she looked back at Priscilla and me... like she didn’t want to go. Crazy, I’d thought. Anything was better than the kitchens.

        I was wrong.

        “I can’t do it,” I burst out, interrupting Priscilla’s breakfast planning. “I can’t do it! It’s not enough!”

        Priscilla’s antennae wilted. “It’s something.”

        “It’s your something,” I said. “And it helps, it does. If only it weren’t her, I could do it. It’s just... it’s 4408. And I can’t imagine... every day... that food laid out in front of her and... she knows if she doesn’t eat it...”

        The image of Alexandra forcing a tube down 4408’s throat rushed into my mind, and instead of shoving Queen Charlotte back into her room she was shoving 4408, and Flat Cap was flying faster than thousands of drones, his teeth bared, to get his piece before he died, and its 4408 he’s catching and...

        “I can’t!” I yelled, slamming my hands on the table. I shut my eyes against the fall of Priscilla’s face, the stillness of her wings, but I could smell her disappointment.

        “Someone has to make the food, Olive. And it won’t be me forever.”

        I stared at her. She was just as old as Charlotte, wasn’t she? Born before the Imago, she’d seen the entire human race transition from larvae into... something else. Something I’d always seen as so obviously superior. Was it? There was no way for me to know. But Priscilla had held on to this, this one aspect of humanity for so long... She knew what I’d never know, and she wanted to pass it on.

        And I considered, for the first time, that Priscilla’s dogged, ridiculous optimism might actually fade one day, that hope must have been a heavy burden to carry alone. And just as Charlotte’s waning pheromone signaled for nature to create a successor, Priscilla’s weary defiance cried out just as fiercely for someone to metamorphose, to become like her.

        Queen of the Kitchens.

        “Olive?” One of the kitchen maids popped her head into the office and jutted her antennae toward the line of sinks. “Did you need help getting this meringue off?”

        Behind her sat the stack of plates I’d been scrubbing. The dirty soufflé dish. A memory from that morning replayed in my mind—flinging open the oven door, the rush of steam, the fallen soufflé.

        “Priscilla,” I said, my mind whirring.

        “Yes, Olive?” Priscilla’s wings fluttered. Dishrag wings. Ruined wings. In that moment, I wished, again, that I would be the one to metamorphose. That I would be the one to fulfill this very special role. Alexandra was wrong. I was wrong. I did have it in me. I had red and blue and purple, and I had dishrag wings in me too.

        Priscilla followed my gaze to her trembling wings. She took a deep breath, and her eyes locked with mine. And in that moment, we didn’t need pheromones to know what the other was thinking. Priscilla knew what I needed to do. What was more, I knew it.

        “I think I should go see 4408,” I said.

        The kitchen maid balked. “At this hour?”

        I nodded. “Before she hatches.”

        “But—”

        My hands, balled into fists, were sweating.

        Priscilla ushered the kitchen maid out of the office, then hugged me just as she had at high tea, but this time she didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. She just held me, tight as a cocoon. A plan was taking form in my mind, swelling, solidifying, until the idea of what I was about to do was too big for me to contain. I was shaking.

        And then came Priscilla’s voice—so careful, so quiet, I could hear my heart beating over it. “Are you sure about this?”

        I buried my face in her apron and breathed her in for the last time. “I have to,” I said. “She’s my sister.”

* * *

        My body itched all over, apprehension like an unwanted skin. I kept moving, and the night breeze cut across my face, sheared my inhibitions. The old me hung at my back. The stars were out, and my breath clouded as I wondered which ones were Priscilla’s. All of them, I decided. I’d give her all of them.

        The Chrysalis House rose up in front of me, sublime and colossal, golden and glowing. I told the guards I wanted to see my sister. I took a deep breath. Calm. Stay calm.

        “Five minutes,” they said. It was more than enough.

        I went straight to the pillar with the red pupa. “Hey, 4408, you know your wings are red?”

        Her royal mandibular pheromone plumed out of her chamber.

        I took that as a yes. Back at the entrance, the guards clicked their mandibles, watching. I edged closer. “You know what that means? What it really means?”

        A hint of distress pheromone, stronger than it had been earlier. Again, yes.

        The guards shifted their halberds. They must have caught a whiff.

        My hands reached for the smooth column, the soft membranous window. “Do you want to be queen?” I whispered.

        Panic billowed out of the chrysalis. It filled the column, spilled through the membranous window and flooded the ground, deep as November fog. The room reeked with alarm, a miasma powerful enough to alert the entire colony.

        No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

        It was the scent of screaming.

        I saw myself from far away. My body wasn’t me anymore. It belonged to someone else, someone long gone. I was someone braver, someone strong enough to punch her fist straight through the protective membrane, leaving a gaping hole that spewed humid air and raw, unfiltered pheromones.

        Guard boots pounded behind me. I tore past the membrane and touched the glassy surface of the chrysalis, all red underneath. Red as rosehip. I found purchase, steeled myself, and pulled with all my might. Wet, fibrous threads stretched. A sound—like a thousand oysters shucked open at once—and the exterior peeled away like a rubbery shell.

        The guards rushed over, but they were too late. 4408 spilled out of her chrysalis and into my arms, a tangle of red and black. Her pheromones seared my receptors like ambrosial kerosene, overloading my brain with love, love, love, like a royal decree. Bliss, blinding bliss. I moved my hands as gently as I could, but her wings—sopping wet, the softest thing I’d ever felt—disintegrated beneath my fingers like soaked tissue paper. They would never dry properly. She would never fly. And she would never, ever, be queen.

        Except, perhaps, Queen of the Kitchens.

* * *

Breakfast—9:00 a.m.

        I entered the toxic flats hauling a cart teetering with five feasts. Enough for a queen to eat for a day, a worker to eat for over a week. The higher-ups wanted me to live—for just long enough.

        I’d like to say that when the guards took me away, my body still wasn’t me anymore. That it belonged to someone else, someone long gone. I’d like to say the pain wasn’t mine. But it was. And it will be again if I’m still occupying this body when the poison vapors start to turn me inside out.

        So I left the food at the gates, abandoned it amid the craters of green chemical dust and goat-head thorns. Five entire meals. Meat and cakes and sandwiches. Meticulously crafted confections decorated with pastel icing and glittering sugar. A whole roast chicken, shimmering with grease. 4408 was right. I did finally get mine. And I left it. Shining in the sun. A banquet for ants and bees and butterflies—what the Imago call proto-colonies. I didn’t take a single bite. I didn’t need to.

        Instead, I took a walk. Nowhere in particular. In circles, maybe. After all, I have a purpose now. And purpose is nectar.

Copyright © 2020 Christine Tyler

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Christine Tyler is an author of the weird, wild, and wonderful. Her stories have (literally) taken her across the Sahara on the back of a camel, sky high on aerial silks, and aboard a working replica of an 18th century tall ship. She is a graduate of the 2019 Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her fiction has been published in Podcastle. She currently resides in Colorado with her dreamboat husband, ebullient children, and a fourteen-foot rubber tree plant named Davy Jones. Follow her writing journey at christinetyler.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE GLASSBLOWER OF GALILEI

by Katrina Smith

        The woman who comes in is no lady nor a lord, but my master sucks air between his teeth and nods at her with a respect he doesn’t show ladies or lords either. My master is a proud man, top of his craft, and ladies and lords are the ones who respect him, not twistwise round. This deference is strange enough that I stop grinding the hollow bones beneath the stone.

        It’s loud work, raspy and deep, and the lack of it rings. My master cuts eyes at me but says nothing in front of this stranger, and that’s strange enough too. I catch her eyes glittering deep inside the black hood she wears pulled over her face, and I look back to my work. Ground ruby, weedwind, platinum, iron, canyon dust, a brewer’s flower—all these go in with the bones, break piece to piece, make something new for my master to breathe will into.

        He bows—bows! Not even to kings does he bow, he always says, having won through a clever application of his art the whole planet for the current king to play god on, and besides, isn’t he bound to spend every third Sunday cask-deep in good whiskey with the king? Weren’t they brothers, king or no, and he the elder?—but to this not-lady clothed in cloth glossy as a green raven’s wing and deep as the noonday shadows, he bows. It takes all my focus to count the tens and grind widdershins lest I ruin everything.

        She sweeps by him towards the back of the workshop, where my master meets those who have come to beg his artistry, gliding more than walking. She is large, bulky, gliding light despite that. As soon as the velvet cloth hanging over the back room drops into place, I give the bones one more good grind, scraping all the pieces into dust, and quick as quick can I’m listening at the curtain.

        Still, I’ve missed something. She’s already speaking, sharp as teeth, answering my master.

        No. I’m not here for you, she says. You had the chance you had once and did what was done. No one promised you a second.

        Chances can be taken when they are not offered. I would give everything, and more, to undo what has been done.

        Her laugh breaks like glass shattering on the workshop floor, and there is no lightness in it. Your everything would not be enough.

        A deep silence, and then:

        Fine, my master says. Why should you trust? Tell me, then, what you have on offer.

        If you do this thing for me, you will never see us again.

        A scrape of chair. A soft huff, something that might have passed for amusement among smaller men.

        If that’s what you think I desire most, you truly know nothing.

        After a moment, he says:

        You know there is no one else, on this world or another, who could do this thing but I.

        She waits.

        If I am to do this, I need something in return.

        What happened to your everything, your desire for atonement? Her voice curdles, hot as the blistering canyon wind.

        The stars. That would be enough.

        This is insolence, she says finally. Even from you. Especially from you, and her voice drops to whispers, the way they all start to whisper when they come to the heart of their need, and in a moment or two my master’s voice answers her, fine and formal and cold enough for me to know he must be heartbroken. So it is.

        When will it be done?

        Next week. One day or another. You’ll know.

        I’m calibrating the forgebox and preparing my master’s tools when she brushes by me and is gone, scenting of dewdown and smallfruit and the stretch of darkness between stars, or something spacewise anyway.

        I was born on Galilei, and like all my kind will die here. I will never go to the stars. I have never smelled anything quite like her before, and I wonder if I will ever again.

        My master watches her go, stops next to the pestle, dips a discerning finger into the mix. The bow, the strange longing in his voice when he spoke with her, these things seem impossible the farther from the moment we travel. He’s back in his full mantle of glory: the creator, a peerless artisan, a craftsman of infinite value, the silver-tongued liar who defeated the fierce winged termagants and handed the rule of Galilei to his brother. He is comfortable under these titles. This is, I think, how he can pretend so effortlessly that nothing real has happened.

        “Dim.”

        “Yes, Master Damon.”

        “Is the grind complete?”

        “Yes, Master Damon.”

        He stops for a moment and looks out at the view from atop our towering spire, the light dropping off the edge of the cliffs, the steep winding path the not-lady must be walking from our peak to the red canyon below, before he moves to the cabinet where artifacts and additives are stored.

        Hidden at the very back of the middle shelf is a small black chest, and he presses his finger to the top to unlock it. I have never seen him use these ingredients before. He moves quickly to the grind, tilting a plain glass vial until two drops of a glittering substance fall into the pestle. I have been told it is not for me to know the ways of the masters, even of Master Damon.

        He takes the grind and tips it through the sieve, runs it through a series of his devices, mixes it with blood from a tiny vial. From there it goes into the melter and turns golden with heat. I have seen him do this mundane alchemy many times.

        “The reactor and crucible?”

        “Ready, Master,” I say, when the fusion is precisely calibrated to his needs, and this is when the real work starts.

        He gathers the material on the end of his iron rod and breathes it to life.

        He once told me that this takes enormous concentration. After the calculations are done and the material prepared, the most important part is to come. He must believe his work has the ability to hold; that his calculations will result in each thin line of information accurately placed in a nexus of complexity the likes of which I couldn’t hope to understand. This, he says, is the work of gods, and he is the only god of the universe who can do this.

        What I know is that it is beautiful, this work Master Damon does.

        He directs the gathered fire with one long intention, his eyes closed and his face peaceful. It swells larger moment by moment until it is a giant yellow-green egg, breathlessly delicate, shot with traces of gold. In the depths of the egg, sparks ignite. Something begins to twist and take shape.

        When the glass begins to cool I take it into my hands and warm it with my own heat. When it needs to be cooled instead, I pull the heat out with my touch. We work this way, twisting it round and round, for hours until Master Damon is convinced the job is done to his satisfaction.

        The eggs are always the same size, nearly as tall as me and half the height of Master Damon, but this one stretches above my head. It glimmers, yellow shot with brilliant gold where the late afternoon light catches it. I cannot reach around it with both arms, but I want to hold it, to put my body against it and feel it dreaming.

        When we’re done, dripping with sweat and panting in the heat of creation, Master Damon points at the shape coalescing in the interior of the egg.

        “See, Dim,” he says. “It’s another one of you, made from raw sand and bone. With necessary differences, of course. A gardener would have no need for your thermoreactive hands, would she?” He claps me on my shoulder.

        I say nothing, too busy watching the face of my sister grow out of the darkness inside the egg.

        “You’ll make delivery to Court tomorrow,” he says. “My work is too important for petty interruptions. I’ll stay. Take yourself to rest, Dim. Tomorrow we start something very new.”

* * *

        The next morning I come in before the first of our suns splits the canyon to make the strong drink my master craves above all else at dawnlight, but he is already up. I think he has not slept at all. His robes are wrinkled and covered in stains, but his eyes are fever-bright and glittering, the way my people’s eyes get at the end of our life cycles when we return to dust and bone.

        “I’m fine,” he says, surprised that I have noticed at all. “Better than fine. Superb. Exalted. This, Dim—this commission will be the crowning achievement of my legacy, the glory that writes my name larger than crude Galilei and these arrogant swine who call themselves masters. This will set me amongst the stars for eternity.” And my master, ignoring the usual repast set under his jeweled awning in the morning sun, bends himself to work.

        He works like a man possessed, but today nothing is good enough. We smash five or six creations before Galilei’s second sun even fully rises. He twists valves, fiddles knobs, slams the reactor with an angry fist. He mutters constantly under his breath where even my keen ears cannot hear him and writes equations madly on his reusable paperglass.

        The egg is still there, pulsing in the corner, the accelerated matrix forcing the thrall within to grow faster than I thought possible. Inside the egg, my sister’s eyes crease and twitch.

        “Master Damon,” I say. “The egg.”

        “Hm?” He jolts irritably from where he is bent over the extractor, fuming. “What damned egg? Oh, yes.” My master bends to the table and scribbles a note on his paperglass.

        “Take this note and the egg to the Master Gardener at Court. Pay particular attention to the fragility of the matrix during transport. Exercise extreme caution. My reputation relies on undamaged merchandise. Be back no later than first sundown.”

        “Yes, Master.” He has already turned back to his workbench. The wheels of the thin, flat cart stick twice, but I manage to position it just underneath the egg. Inside, my sister twists and turns, stretching against the dark. Underneath my hand I can hear her dreaming of soil and green things. By this time tomorrow, she will be digging flowerbeds and watering roslings as if she has been born for this, because she has.

        Master Damon says it is good to know purpose, but I wonder sometimes if his purpose is the only thing we are allowed to know.

* * *

        My master’s workshop is on the edge of all things, far enough away that he will not be bothered by gawkers, fameseekers, and triflers. Those who make pilgrimage to him come on foot, spiraling up a narrow spire of rock overlooking the canyon. There are no barriers, just a razor drop into depths below, and I keep a wary hand on my sister’s egg as the cart and I inch slowly down the incline.

        The road is dusty and quiet. The wheels on the cart jolt up and down against the rough terrain, the egg hanging in the air thanks to one of Master Damon’s devices. The air shimmers with a slow boil of heat, but I have been born to this and what bothers my master and the court does not bother me. I stop only once, underneath the spikes of a thorntree, to check the egg. It should be weeks before the egg is ready to hatch, but hairline fractures are already crisscrossing the shell. Underneath my hands, my sister still dreams of vines and grasses and water.

        I see no one else until midday, when I reach the glittering gates of Court. Its heavy doors are set inside a stone arch with a crested, flying creature, arms and wings outstretched, on the apex. It is the highest noon hour, when both of our suns burn down together, and too hot for most not born of the canyon dust.

        It is another one of my kind who opens the door, a soldier with strong muscles and an innate sense of suspicion. She cannot read, but the sight of my master’s note and the egg is enough to convince her I come from Master Damon.

        “What’s this?” she asks, and raps once on the egg. It rings softly, like a bell, and I put my hand protectively over the space where she touched it.

        “Delivery for the Master Gardener,” I say. “Don’t touch.”

        She grunts and yawns. “Leave it in the garden,” she says. “The bigwise are probly sleeping again. Too hot.” The last a bark of sound—impossible, for she and I, this idea of too much heat driving men to dreaming.

        The gates to Court swing open into an alien expanse of shivering leaves. The Greenway is like nothing else on Galilei; expansive and lush, filled with a shade my planet doesn’t produce without a lot of help. Water is pumped in from deep beneath the surface, spread out over miles of grass, fruit trees, flowers, bowers of hanging vines and square beds swelling with tartroot and sweet cubine. It is unbroken green from side to side with only a few brown spots where something has failed to survive. Here and there redstone pillars stretch towards the sky, crowned with more of the flying statues or topping out into flat platforms of stone. If it were not for the presence of these, the masters would have completely turned this piece of land into something of their own, as different from Galilei’s red rock, yellow sands, and deep purple hills as it can be.

        A half dozen of my kind are moving dreamily amongst the orchards and fields, weeding and watering. The Master Gardener and a master I don’t recognize walk along one of several circular stone paths despite the heat. Moisture hangs in the air and they fan themselves, their skin gleaming with sweat.

        I guide the cart to the side and wait patiently for them to intersect with my path. The egg glows and starts to tremor, small cracks spiderwebbing out from the apex, and I hope they do not take long. I know better than to interrupt the masters at their business.

        “...don’t know why we didn’t tear down the last record of these abominations,” the master I don’t recognize says irritably. “I find them appallingly primitive. They assault the eyes.”

        “The King likes to be reminded of his victory,” the Master Gardener says.

        “You mean his brother’s victory. Damon never lets him forget whose cleverness won the war.”

        The Master Gardener tuts in amusement. “Indeed. But the war was won. None of them remain. The pillars are now strictly ornamental. It does no harm for the King to look on them and gloat.”

        “Here, what’s this?” the other master says, because they have rounded the corner now to find me waiting, my sister’s egg filled with light, her eyes now nearly open.

        “This,” the Master Gardener says, “is Master Damon’s assistant. Ah, and my newest garden thrall. I’d forgotten I’d ordered this.” He bends down, one hand on the top of the glowing egg, and peers into the interior.

        “Good, strong back, solid hands, sun-resistant skin,” he notes professionally. “And nearly hatched, too. Just drop it here and I’ll stay until it’s done. Damon knows his work, at least,” he says, this last to the other master.

        There is a high, clear note and my sister’s egg vibrates, the air around it humming with static and scenting with the sharp, clean tang of rain. I settle it gently on the soft grass underneath a scenting smallfruit tree. I wonder if my sisters who are born here, in the Greenway, find the rest of Galilei as alien and uninviting as the masters do, or if they still feel the call of the canyon in their bones and the heat in their skins.

        “What are you waiting for? Return to Master Damon,” the other master says, and turns back to the Master Gardener, his mouth twisted with distaste. “I find these things unsettling. I suppose it’s only to reason, given the eccentricities of the man himself.”

        “Damon has his uses—much like his creatures. Though I do confess, were he not the King’s brother, we would not stand his place here on Galilei no matter what science he can bring to bear. Dimwit, was it? He always names them Dimwit,” he tells the master. “Give your master my highest compliments and deepest, most sincere thanks for his art. Go.”

        I nod, unable to take my eyes off the egg. I have not been present at a hatching, other than, I suppose, my own. For a moment I watch the cracks grow and light begin to seep through, but I have been instructed to leave and my master’s task awaits. I will be miles and hours away, back at the workshop with Master Damon, before my sister emerges.

* * *

        I arrive before the given limit, both suns just two hours past midpoint, but still Master Damon is elevated, ecstatic, raging.

        “Dimwit! Where have you been? I have needed you and you weren’t here. I should craft a replacement—I should—no, this would take too much time. What happened with my egg? Was it stable?”

        “No,” I tell him. “The first fractures started in the sun, on the road to Court. I was able to deliver it to the Master Gardener before full hatching.”

        “Ahh, of course!” he says. “The accelerated process is overly reactive. I can use that. Dim!” He is shouting, pointing at components, and I am grinding them faster than I have ever done before, in combinations we have never tried. He storms around the room, dashing equations so quickly I wonder that he can read the calculations or remember what they are supposed to represent. He runs projections and tests the thickness of different material blends, modifying his equations after each one. He will not stop to rest or eat. It is like he is possessed by the fires of creation or some kind of relentless fever or both. I manage once to put a cup of cold black protein into his hands, and he drinks it down without thought.

        Finally, sometime after first sundown, when our second sun is just dipping to touch the horizon and the shadows are stretching to meet the canyon, he stops dead, the light from his devices playing across his face. There is a strange easing in his frame, a tightness loosening that has always been there and that I did not realize could be changed.

        “This is it,” he says, more to himself than to me. His lips curve upwards. I watch hunger and exultation play across his face. Master Damon has found the answer.

* * *

        The first of the new eggs takes us all night. It is green-black, the color of midnight after moonrise, and three times as large as my kind’s eggs, taller even than Master Damon himself. Inside, yellow dots glow and spark like a night sky, a set of unknown constellations turning on their own inner axis. Master Damon insists on storing it in his personal chamber. We create a woven nest of silks and velvets next to his own bed. We nestle the egg into as much protective softness as Master Damon’s significant wealth can provide, and we cover it with a sheet of fine linen.

        Five more join it until the nest is full. Master Damon, paranoid of some unknown threat, has me stand guard over them for six nights but does not sleep himself. I do not know what he is doing in the workshop while I am watching thought and form grow inside them. When I spread my hands against the egg and listen, I can hear whoever is inside dreaming of galaxies, sharp knives of matter, stars colliding. Listening to their thoughts, I can almost forget that my master is keeping a secret, even from me.

        He spends the seventh night rotating a telescope and watching the stars move from the observation deck that hangs suspended over the lip of the canyon. None of this is like him—the reckless abandonment of his own comfort, the secrecy, the barely suppressed joy. My master is a man of great confidence and grace, unlike, he says, the other Masters of Galilei. He hides from no one, particularly from his assistant, who is all but part of his own body.

        Every few hours I check that each egg still dreams, and I turn them gently in the nest, and then I check on my master.

        Sometime after midnight the not-lady meets him there, her green-black cloak catching the heat still rising from the depths of the canyon. I must have missed her ascending the narrow spire to our workshop—there is no other way to come, save from the canyon, and that is impossible. They stand apart, my master drinking fermented meadfruit as they speak. I can’t hear his words, but he watches her with something that I think must be close to love, because it is the same way I watch the eggs, the same way my newest sister dreams of plants. Once I think there is the slip of a wingfeather, a gleaming pinion sweeping the night from underneath the cloak, but it must be a trick of the light. Nothing that flies still lives on Galilei. My master did that long ago.

* * *

        I wake three hours before first dawnlight, start the forgebox, make my master’s drink like usual, but he is gone, and the eggs with him.

        Last night, after I checked on my master, I held each egg in my hands and listened to it dreaming. In the time I’d been outside watching my master and the not-lady something changed. Inside each egg there was a new high note, and all those notes together made a harmony connecting each to each. I didn’t know what they were becoming, but it vibrated with longing and belonging and justice and sisterhood. I listened to them sing it to each other for hours, my hands on first one egg and then another, until water fell from my eyes onto the eggs. I jumped straightway to wipe it off with the linen shroud.

        But when I touched the drops of water my eyes had left, there was a sharp zap, an arc of lightning from the drop to my finger, and then a soft curious contact, the mind inside twisting a tendril of consciousness, quick as a morningvine fruiting in darkness, to brush against my own.

        They showed me the stretch of wings spreading between star systems, greenblack and lush; seven sisters with teeth and talons raised in song.

        Who?

        I don’t know all of what I told them. I told them of Master Damon. I told them about eggs and sisters and the masters and their Greenway. I told them about the moon over the canyon, red dust and heat and the shimmer of water at great distance. It could have been a moment or an hour. I stood there, telling them all I knew of purpose and want, every thing I had never said, even to myself, until everything went dark.

* * *

        I have never run so far or fast as I do now. I all but slide down the spire’s narrow walkway, trusting the red rock beneath me to hold.

        I know where Master Damon is taking them.

* * *

        It is minutes before first dawnlight when I come gasping to Court’s gate. The same sister is on watch, her face bored and sleepy.

        “Halt,” she says, and yawns. “Oh, Dimwit. Your master has been inside for hours already. You better hurry. Bigwise don’t like to be waiting.”

        He is alone in the Greenway. I do not see the not-lady, but I am sure somehow that she is here. My master is wearing a strange contraption. A pair of wings sweep out from his back, and as I watch, he flies upwards to deposit an egg on one of the platforms rising above the Greenway. I see now that there is an egg resting on six of the platforms already, leaving just one empty in the center. The platforms glow faintly in first dawnlight, lines of energy pulsing upwards towards the platforms.

        As soon as the egg is centered, he falls like a stone, his wings opening clumsily enough at the end to ease him ungently against the thick grass. His head is high and proud as he stares upwards at the eggs: glittering, priceless treasures on platforms of stone high above us.

        I have known Master Damon all my life. I was born to know him better than I have known my own self. I have never seen this strange emotion that is now on his face, burning like a curse in him. I wonder how I did not see the shape of it before. It scares me, and instead of walking out to him, I duck behind a bower and watch.

        Now that he has landed, I see that the wings are no contraption but a second skin grafted to his own. They collapse into slits underneath his finest robes, settling invisibly against his back. They are thin, dew-light and transparent, and as like the wings the egglings showed me as a moon is like its planet. This must be what he has been keeping from me, growing the wings in secret, grafting them to his skeleton late last night, knowing that the masters have forbidden involvement with all such things.

        He would not have kept it from me for my safety, but because he thinks me too stupid and small to keep his secrets. This is the first seditious thought I have been bold enough to think, and the shock of it runs through me.

        The doors on the far side of the Greenway burst open, and out pour the masters, twistwise and furious, descending on the garden. None of them think to look up, at where the eggs rest on their high pedestals. All of the masters are here, lured away from their morning meal by the promise of unexpected dramatics. In the center of them all comes the King. He is unconcerned. This distraction can only be an entertainment. It is impossible that something unknown should threaten his comfort, let alone his life.

        I have heard the sisters whispering vengeance. I know better.

        “Damon!” The Master Gardener shouts. “What is the meaning of this? You have no authority on the Greenway!”

        Master Damon doesn’t take his eyes off the eggs. “Watch, Master Gardener, and you will see.”

        The suns have crested the horizon, light stretching towards the eggs. They gleam like a blessing. There is a sound. At first I think I am remembering the song from last night, that it is looping and repeating in my mind the way it has been all morning, twisty and relentless as weedwind, until I see the masters looking for the source.

        That’s when the not-lady drops from above onto the last remaining platform, her wings spread and glorious.

        “Masters of Galilei,” she says, loud enough for all assembled below to hear her speak, “Here are your crimes. Through trickery and deceit, you broke covenant with my people, the Arbiters of the Universe, the Termagant. Your arrogance and greed caused you to make an enemy of those who could have been your allies. You hunted my sisters across the sky, breaking their wings and spirits until only I was left, hiding among the stars, to bring you to justice. It is time to render your judgment.”

        The song grows louder. I can see from here how the eggs have started to crack and shake. Together, they shatter at the same time. The shards of the eggs fall, slicing sharp, from the platforms down onto the heads of the masters.

        I have never seen anything so beautiful as these sisters bursting reborn and keening out of their eggs, crested heads held high, unfurling their wings and talons.

        They dive upon the assorted masters, rending and tearing, laughing and singing, and the masters fall before them screaming, all their pride and conquest repaid, all their terrors returned.

        And Master Damon stands in the middle of it all, unflinching, even when the Greenway begins to burn; even when his own brother, his King, catches fire; even as the King runs screaming through the Greenway and falls to ash and bone on the ground.

        When the Sisters are finished, sated and drowsy with the taste of vengeance, they touch each others faces with tenderness and, without a word spoken aloud, turn their gaze towards the waiting universe.

        Master Damon takes a step forward, his wings unfurling behind him, and the seventh Sister laughs at him.

        “Where we are going is not for you.” She looks over to where I am hiding. She cannot possibly see me, but I know it is for me when she says, “And Galilei belongs to another kind, now.”

        “But you promised,” Master Damon says, his voice harsh and assured. “You promised me the stars. I have given you everything for it.”

        “You are welcome to them, Damon, if your little wings can take you there.”

        Without another word, there is the thunder of seven pairs of wings heading onwards, to other planets orbiting other stars, and the sisters have launched themselves towards the sky.

        “Wait!” Master Damon screams. He launches himself at the sky, his wings beating clumsily, trying to keep up with the Sisters. He climbs above the smoke and fire of the former Greenway, an arrow launched at the vault of the universe, and I am still watching when his wings tear high above us in the atmosphere and he drops, an arc of fire falling with him, to break on the ground.

* * *

        At first I and my Kind have no idea what to do. We have always been given breath and purpose by the masters.

        It is the Gardenkind who remember their purpose first in the days after. Their Greenway may have burned, taking with it all the masters and their grass and roslings, but Galilei has plants of its own, tall thorntrees and morningvine and weedwind and smallfruit, and all of these they begin to tend, so that we all can eat. And it is the Soldierkind who stand watching the horizon while they work, some protecting the Gardenkind from Galilei’s wildness while others make shelters, rebuilding what was lost with the masters.

        Purpose is something we have even without the bigwise, as one of my sister Soldierkind says.

        I return to my master’s workshop. I know more about his machines than I was made to know, but if the last few days has taught me anything, it is that we are all made for more than we know, and the Kind will need to be able to create itself in the days ahead independent of men like Master Damon. I work like I have never worked before, and there is no one to tell me what is twistwise or straightway but myself. I grind hollow bones. I replace will with hope. I cry over each one of my new sisters and brothers and hold their gifts in my hands. It takes months, but I fill the canyon floor with our genetic profusion, sustainability, rebirth, choice, the beginning of something new.

        These are the first eggs I ever craft on my own. They are beautiful.

        If I have done what I have done right, they will also be the last.

Copyright © 2020 Katrina Smith

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Katrina Smith writes as many strange things in a year as she can. She lives in Bend, Oregon, beneath the creaking Ponderosa pines, surrounded by animals, green plants, and a suspiciously helpful poltergeist. She graduated from George Mason University’s MFA program. Recent work has appeared in The Future Fire, Daily Science Fiction, and Metaphorosis. Visit her online at www.katrinasmithwrites.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Investigate,” by Andis Reinbergs

Andis Reinbergs is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator and concept artist from Latvia. He works in the video game industry as a concept artist, and he does book covers and sometimes children’s books. To see more of his work, visit www.artstation.com/andisreinbergs.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2020 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.