Conglomerate

Robert Brice

One eye looks out, while the other looks in. The outer eye, red-lensed and inorganic, gazes unblinkingly upon the immensity of the cosmos, studying the poetry of the firmament and distilling it within its vast auxiliary intelligence into pure mathematics. Distant, stromatic washes of nebulae, shimmering incandescent spatters of celestial bodies are transmuted through layers of optical lenses and processors into qubits of blank code.

The other eye gazes in upon the empty Earth. The whole planet is with us, locked inside a space-borne capsule no larger than a human fist.

We walk.

Mind in mind, we traverse the planet’s expanse, from the brutal torridity of the Al Basa desert zone, through the rippling primordial strata of the Son Doong cave system and into the alien hostility of the Marianas Trench. We instruct the simulation not to sanitize the ruthless capriciousness of Earth’s climate; we want not only to see, but to feel the perfect disorder of it. Skin that is not skin at all blisters in the false desert heat, freezes and splits in the fabricated cold. Hypothermia kills us, and we awaken, laughing, in unrendered space, asking to be sent back to pick up our journey where we left off. We search.

It would be easy to request Redondo’s whereabouts from the capsule’s artificial mind. Easier still to merely collapse the partition and absorb his psyche back into our own, but curiosity is at the very epicenter of the human experience, and we wish to reiterate what it is that we are striving to preserve. And so, we walk.

Sometimes one, sometimes many, we chase ourselves across the ridges of dunes in the Gobi Desert, we writhe and giggle in careless ecstasy under the wheeling stars as we explore the limits of each other’s passions and appetites, our animae integrating and blending, contradictory attributes unlocking sectors of psyche we never knew existed, catalyzing rapturous spasms deep within our communal consciousness.

Almost three millennia in virtual time pass inside the capsule before we find Redondo. The Conglomerate has decided to allow geological progression to simulate in real time, and when we find Redondo, he is lying flat on his back on an unbroken expanse of permafrost. He is naked, his skin no more affected by the frigid atmosphere than it would be by a light spring breeze. He dabbles with form and texture, becoming a dense octahedron of nanotubes, flaring into a miniaturized white dwarf, pooling into a puddle of strong-smelling urine, before settling back into a representation of his pre-upload biological state: an unremarkably-proportioned human male of Eurasian descent, lying dejectedly on an ocean of ice.

The Conglomerate confers with itself momentarily, before we decide to join him. We delineate from the amusing kilopedal shape that we have been wearing, and join Redondo in our pre-upload states. Consciousnesses disentangle, collective intelligence particulates, and one mind becomes thirteen. I feel sectors of my psyche shear clean away, whilst others previously nullified by more dominant traits in the other Conglomerate members unfurl from dormancy like the fronds of sea anemones. Attitudes and assumptions transected from the most rational sectors of thirteen minds become vague and recondite, their studied rationality becoming clouded as my own opinions return to cognizance. Still, bleary psychogenic residue from the metabrain remains tangled with my consciousness, embedded cerebrations that don’t belong to me. We stand together, shivering; thirteen naked humans surrounding Redondo’s prone form on a hyperboreal sea. On the horizon, the white Arctic sun slowly sets.

“Stop it, all of you,” Redondo says. “You’re ridiculous.”

The Conglomerate, seconds ago a single awareness, now thirteen individuals, each vocally order the construct to suppress the effects of external stimuli on our virtual bodies. The vocal aspect of the order is unnecessary, but in an effort to break the tension, we make a show of it. Ochet, the architect whose uniquely childish and cruel sense of humor I recognize as an aspect of the Conglomerate’s collective personality, holds his blackened, frost-bitten hands in front of his face, clapping them together with a dull slap, and giggling. Seltz, the mathematician, forcibly overrides Ochet’s custom settings and his fingers return to the pinkish hue. Redondo’s pale flesh desiccates into white ash and flakes away, revealing a crystalline skeleton beneath. His lipless, tongueless mouth intones:

“I think I’m having an existential crisis.”

Bega the programmer, a droning fount of mundane logic, speaks up. “Impossible, Redondo. You don’t exist.”

“When you’re all mind, you tend to overthink things.”

Seltz chimes in: “The infospace is designed to deflect negative neural processes. You want happiness? A subroutine away. Here.” He spins a comically oversized, two-tone oblong an inch above his palm, the prototypical dataform of medication, a cartoonish smiley stamped on its flank.

“Don’t you dare,” Redondo says. The skeleton sighs, glittering in the low Arctic sun. “You are free, and that is why you are lost.”

The capsule travels on, riding a laser-beam toward the fringe of charted space.

Later, sat around an oak table in the candlelit nave of a Byzantine basilica, the Conglomerate decides to kill Redondo. It’s for the best, we reason. Maybe it’s what he wants. Since the encounter on the ice, we have all experienced the emanation of his crisis, draped over our psyches like a shroud. A nagging self-doubt, of both the Conglomerate and the individual’s place within it, swelling in the dark recesses of the metabrain like a tumor.

Bega leans back in his chair, gazing dispassionately up at the elaborate design on the underside of the dome, and suggests we reintegrate, better to make the decision, and so we do. Our consciousnesses coalesce once more.

Cho, the physicist, brings understanding of the material world, bolstered by Seltz the mathematician’s mastery of the numerical. Akwembe the linguist brings us the means to express, and Liebe the critic the ability to appraise. Bogase, the judge, offers resolution, whilst Furrows the soldier delivers a tactician’s cunning. My negotiation skills too are absorbed. I feel empathy slip away. That was Redondo’s contribution.

Such thoughts must not be permitted, the Conglomerate agrees. They cannot be allowed to propagate within the metabrain. And so, without ceremony, we kill Redondo.

It’s simple, really. We reinforce the partition, cutting that sector of the Conglomerate off completely, then purge its data. A shame, the Conglomerate agrees, that the death of data is less ostentatious than that of the flesh it emulates, and leaves little behind to study, but we instruct the capsule’s auxiliary mind to record Redondo’s experience of it anyway, and catalog it for later perusal.

The capsule is six light-years from Earth, barreling through forsaken blankness marked only by hydrogen clouds and lone asteroids on other, more ancient explorations, when its infrared eye identifies our destination. Infinitesimal recalibrations occur, adjusting our flight path towards Lm/-3313, a planet in orbit around a small brown dwarf star. Even from this distance, the capsule is able to commence examination, and verifies that the planet possesses an outwardly Earth-like atmosphere. Life can exist there.

Once we reach the planet, nanoforming technology contained within the ship’s hull will create a temporary environment for the Conglomerate to inhabit until new bodies can be cloned from the capsule’s gene-banks. The capsule itself will return to the planet’s Lagrangian point, there to remain as part of a series of interstellar routers threaded through space like pearls on a string of quantum channels, designed to facilitate light speed optical communication between Earth and potential colonies. In the increasingly likely event of a planetary cataclysm, the nanites will then utilize the chosen planet’s capsule as an anchor around which to manufacture a birthing facility for clone-shells, bodies grown for emigrant human minds transmitted across space via the routers. Our mission is almost at an end.

Although the Conglomerate is incapable of such despondency, alone I feel a pall over the mission, a ghost of Redondo’s perception in the back of my mind that I cannot bring myself to suppress completely. Since Redondo’s death, the appeal of traversing the simulated Earth has lessened. It is obvious that the empathetic, abstractly creative sector of the metabrain that came from him was responsible for much of our wanderlust. I miss it.

I spend my time apart from the Conglomerate, pursuing my own areas of interest. I study texts from the capsule’s boundless database, manifested as ancient, dusty volumes that detail histories of satellite colonies, management of burgeoning societies, the implementation of political and judicial systems, the optimization of resources. The nagging, troublesome fact of Redondo’s death, and with it the death of a part of what has become my own personality, is pushed to the back of my digitally recreated mind. For the time being, I am content.

I sit alone in a vast meadow, my back against the trunk of an ancient elm tree, a hefty volume of Earth history open across my knees. The field’s verdant slopes extend uninterrupted for miles in every direction, a gently swaying plateau that stretches to the horizon. My tree is the only landmark, its foliage offering a pool of cool shade beneath the beaming digital sun.

The silence is total. No wind disturbs the elm’s branches, and no birds cry in the boundless countryside. I am blissfully alone. The sheer number of variables required to populate the simulation were deemed a waste of the ship’s finite resources, and extrapolation of the development of a digitized population garnered uncertain results. Thus, the simulation is entirely vacant, excepting the Conglomerate members. I am alone.

I sit on a frayed patchwork picnic blanket, tracing my fingers along the landscape of disordered textures, spectral echoes of my mother’s inexpert craftsmanship. The blanket is a conjuration from my own hazy childhood memory and the analytical deductions of the simulator’s expectations of patchwork picnic blankets. The blanket’s irregularities somehow feel too perfect, and I can’t shake the certainty of its mathematically imprecise design. It feels like an insult. With a thought, I wipe it from existence, and sit back against the gnarled trunk of the tree. I think about Redondo.

My island of shade becomes a whirl of giddy shadows as the sky darkens and the leaves of the elm suddenly erupt into a ferocious blaze. The book bursts into flame, buffeted by the sudden squall. I close my eyes and sigh as embers rain down around me.

“Knock it off, Ochet,” I say. “I’m not in the mood.”

Ochet’s presence is there, entwined with the tree’s code. I get to my feet and begin to walk away across the scorched field, sternly refusing to participate. The grass beneath my feet begins to undulate, resolving into an earthy image of Ochet’s face that occupies the stretch of ground beneath me, and I stumble within the opening of his huge nostril. I stop, and stand straddling his nose. The tufts of his eyes roll down to look at me.

“What do you want?” I demand. Ochet chuckles, the ridges of his cheekbones rising like molehills on either side of me.

“Just thought I’d come and see how you were,” he says. It’s hard to read his expression from this angle.

“I’m fine.” I perch down on the tip of his nose, and it suddenly flattens, dropping me onto my backside with a thump. An extrusion of earth rises in front of me, assuming Ochet’s human form. The grass draws into itself, like a reversed playback of germination, and the soil coalesces into Ochet’s soft pink skin. He walks over and helps me up, chuckling affably.

“Sorry about that, buddy. Just my little joke,” he says. I search his face, but his smile is fixed, unrelenting. I venture invisible tendrils of consciousness into his mind, trying to gauge his disposition, but he rebuffs them psychically. In an environment where self has become malleable and innermost thoughts are laid bare for casual perusal, this feels like a slap in the face. His smile remains.

“You were thinking about Redondo,” he says. It’s not a question.

“My mother, actually,” I reply.

“Redondo’s dead.”

“So is my mother. Come to think of it, so are we. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but we’re rotting in morgue drawers back on Earth.”

“Somehow, I’m fine with that,” he says, bending down and plucking a blade of scorched grass. It crumbles to dust beneath his touch. “There’s life after this death.”

“Not for Redondo.”

“Only good boys go to heaven.”

“Just say what you came to say, Ochet.”

He turns back to me, his smile vanished. “Redondo was jeopardizing the integrity of the Conglomerate. He was weak. Selfish.”

“The integrity of the Conglomerate,” I repeat, more bitterly than I had intended.

“He’s dead,” Ochet says. “Him and his cretinous existential despair. Make sure he stays that way.” He lets that linger. “We’re coalescing soon. If any part of Redondo’s existential virus exists in your mind, purge it now before it makes you useless, too.” He hesitates for a moment, then: “I’m saying this as a friend. More than that, really, I suppose. This may not feel like ‘life’ for you, but remember, it’s only temporary. Me, I’m enjoying it while it lasts. We’re approaching Lm/-3313. The Conglomerate needs you to be ready.”

He peels away from existence, and I am alone again, standing on a sea of withered black grass.

The announcement comes suddenly, deposited in our minds by the shipboard brain with the impact of sudden euphoric realization: The planet is inhabited. The Conglomerate re-integrates immediately. The capsule remains in high orbit around Lm/-3313 while we discuss our next step.

I took Ochet’s advice. I purged Redondo. As the Conglomerate deliberates, we sweep the metabrain for lingering traces of him, but find none. We are satisfied. The Conglomerate integrates itself with the shipboard mind and we see the planet for ourselves, magnified through its outer eye. Lm/-3313 is many times the size of Earth, with seas the color of dry rot separating four continents, within them massive asymmetrical structures that even unmagnified are clearly defined from the planet’s orbit. We zoom further. The planet’s surface is a jungle of bizarre industrial architecture, tangles of vast mechanical structures arranged in eldritch configurations. It appears damaged, pitted with rusted craters and curlicues of bent metal. No life is visible, nothing natural at all. The metallic substance is unidentifiable, but the ship confirms that a breathable atmosphere is present, perhaps the result of atmospheric processors on the surface. From the data, we discern that it’s possible the life could be silicon-based, could inhabit those massive, decaying structures, that we could even be looking at the creatures themselves.

We think.

Communication is at the top of the agenda, but species loyalty dictates that Earth’s needs outweigh those of Lm/-3313’s inhabitants. If they cannot be bargained with or coerced, they must be destroyed. Nanoforming could simulate a weaponized physiological virus to clear the planet for the Earth convoy, or a mid-sized fission weapon could perhaps be fabricated from asteroid-mined plutonium, the radioactivity then absorbed by the nanites. These options would take preparation and time to implement, and so we resolve to first attempt communication.

We broadcast across all frequencies and mediums, and announce our wish to open negotiations regarding the resettlement of our species. We receive no response. The capsule brings us cautiously to within the troposphere of the planet, anticipating that Lm/-3313’s inhabitants may communicate visually or perhaps psychically, and we initiate a deep surface scan.

The capsule detects traces of radiation, residue and scorch-marks from unknown projectiles. Large swathes of the landscape are shredded and puckered. There was war here. We go deeper.

Technology penetrates the crust of the planet, right to its core, and we come to the astounding realization that the surface is entirely artificial, built to replicate the existing natural surface like a second skin. The oceans must have somehow been displaced, the seabed covered with the strange substance, and the water poured back into those immense metal pools. It’s an impossible feat of engineering. The planet is armored.

We descend lower, sweeping across the lifeless technological waste, over twisted mountains and curved towers like the calcified bones of some impossible animal. We settle into a geostationary orbit, and dispatch a nanite swarm to collect samples from the planet’s surface.

With the ship’s scanners augmenting our own senses, we become aware of severe tectonic movement in the planet’s core, sudden intense concentrations of energy building beneath the surface. The nanites scream a warning to each other, their primitive self-preservation circuits engaging, and they hasten their retreat to the capsule. Miles below, the crust begins to fracture and flex, colossal rifts spreading like lotus petals, yielding brilliant light from within. Briefly, the Conglomerate panics. Through our infra-red vision, the planet’s true structure is revealed to us. There is no life here.

We hurriedly initiate the ship’s emergency shielding procedure, but the brutal efficiency of the planet-trap’s mechanism outstrips even the speed of thought. The bomb contained within the core explodes, and we are consumed.

Psyches are buffeted by a ferocious digital squall, caroming off each other, leaving splintered shards of personalities spinning in the corrupted aether. Identities fragment and resolve in bastard configurations, screaming synapses clutching at each other in desperation, ripped apart again like trees in a cyclone. The space surrounding the capsule becomes unreal, flexes and folds, whipping us into a vicious cosmic eddy.

For a long time, we drift.

Our shattered personalities clutch blindly for realization of self like drifting mariners clutch for life preservers. Glimpses of unknown pasts, lateral experiences and potential futures flood us, whirling past like psychic zoetropes, mutant perceptions morphing in and out of reality.

Cognizance returns in a flash, and I am back in the nave of the basilica, candles around me burning a thousand feet high. The simulation flickers uncertainly between the cathedral’s ornate dome and the underside of the blazing elm tree, carved buttresses shuddering between wood and stone. I watch myself clutch agonizingly at my face, and then perceive that it isn’t me at all but Bega, the programmer. We stare at each other for a long time. The elements of her left eye quiver behind a digitized square of unrendered data, and then resolve into normality.

“Are we okay?” is all I can think to say.

The Conglomerate coalesces in unrendered space.

It was some sort of localized Einstein-Rosen Bridge generator, is the best we can come up with, a targeted wormhole that flung us like a child’s toy across space. We have no navigational readings, no way to determine where we are or how long we remained lost in the digital maelstrom. Despite this, we are lucky. The concentrated blast of ions would have torn apart any biological life forms that stood in its focal point. A full system diagnostic suggests hull degradation that could have been caused by tens of thousands of years in cold soak.

Impossible.

We integrate with the shipboard eye, hoping to glimpse some kind of marker to suggest our vicinity, but all we see is space, and the twinkling of distant, identical stars.

I split from the Conglomerate, and run my own diagnostic which reports zero mnemonic deterioration. My memories, my personality traits are intact. I stare blankly about my surroundings, before realizing where I am.

There is almost nothing left of the basilica. Broken stumps of buttresses jut from tangles of thorny creepers; a curved section of the dome, shorn of its lavish carvings, lies ruined among wind-smoothed chunks of rubble. The remains of a pillar lie broken around the base of a tall tree. The arid plain beyond stretches for miles, punctuated by similar knots of ruined architecture.

Impossible.

I collapse to my knees, and am vaguely surprised by the pain as my kneecap catches on a lump of rock. The simulation’s nullification of external stimuli on our bodies must have reset. How long were we unaware? How long did the capsule whirl through space, its intangible inhabitants blind and insensible, the empty universe within progressing and falling to ruin, unperceived by all except the dumb demi-consciousness of the shipboard mind?

I reintegrate into the Conglomerate, in time to perceive the cumulative understanding that we are no longer alone. Life has evolved within the simulation.

Impossible.

“Impossible,” Seltz says. “What the hell did it evolve from?”

“Biogenic minerals perhaps,” Wenger, the geologist, suggests. “It’s possible that a part of the Earth, the simulated representation of it, was exposed to extreme heat or radioactivity and racemically fostered amino acids during the cooling process. Precise geological progression is factored into the coding, it’s not an unreasonable guess.”

“What would trigger something like that?” Bega demands.

“Well, a supervolcano for starters,” Wenger suggests. “But one would expect the destruction to be more widespread, so my money’s on a meteorite. Xenogenesis. I shouldn’t have thought the simulation capable, but then I wouldn’t expect an alien race in relatively close proximity to Earth capable of booby-trapping an entire planet.”

“A meteor from where?”

“Ask the ship.”

And the ship is there, or the sense of it, all around us. We request an estimate of the time passed since Lm/-3313, and a concise summation of events onboard. Instead we get a garbled stream of corrupted data that screams in our psyches like breaking glass. Concepts and rationales can be gleaned, but they make little sense. The ship has lost its mind.

We sit in a circle in the remains of the basilica. Over our heads, the cosmos wheels, majestic and terrifying.

“So many stars,” mumbles Bogase, perched on a section of fractured masonry. “There were never supposed to be that many stars.”

“This is pure conjecture now, but it looks a lot to me like our universe has expanded,” says Liebe. “The system has only the resources to simulate the Earth and its immediate vicinity, so what are all those stars doing up there?”

“How long did we drift for? How long does it take to create an entire universe?”

“I think it’s safe to say,” Bega says, “that we failed in our mission. We’re adrift, and for all we know, Earth is dead.”

We sit in silence for a long time. A long time.

“Well,” says Harrington, clapping his hands on his knees and rising to his feet. “I’m going to go and meet the new neighbors. Who’s coming with me?”

The creatures are humanoid, with stretched, bovine features, elongated heads and dull avocado flesh. We walk among them, invisible. They have established communities, bigger than towns but not integrated enough to be called cities, built around crude central factory structures that mine minerals from the soil. They seem to have evolved a language based upon the sounds their long fingers make when vibrated at speed. It sounds like crickets.

As we pass one of the tall creatures, its face decorated with ritual scars, Ochet reaches out, fingers puncturing the creature’s skull, and crushes its brain with his bare hand. He withdraws the hand and inspects his fingers, before wiping them on a tuft of grass.

“The question is,” says Bega. “What do we do with them?”

“They could be the cause of the ship’s malfunction. It doesn’t have the resources to sustain them,” says Liebe.

“In which case, we have to get rid of them.”

“We coalesce,” says Seltz. “Let the Conglomerate decide.”

“No,” I blurt. The others turn to look at me. Around us, a small group of the primitives has gathered, lifting the corpse of their fellow above their heads. They can’t see us. A group of what I suspect to be female children stand in a circle around them, fingers humming a mournful dirge.

“And why not?” demands Bogase.

“Because–” I start. I feel psychic fingers probing my consciousness, and battle to rebuff them. “Because we already know what the Conglomerate will say.”

There is a long pause. The creatures’ dirge washes around us, droning incessantly. With a wave of his arm, Ochet metastasizes tumors within their bodies and they drop to the ground, dying. The others don’t even dignify me with an answer.

With final glances in my direction, the Conglomerate exits tangibility and coalesces once more, this time behind a partition that leaves me alone, surround by the litter of green bodies. I swallow, close my eyes, and erase the data within the partition.

The assumption of the Conglomerate’s infallibility as a unit was so complete that it cannot defend itself against attack from within. I kill them all.

It’s simple, really.

Once more, I walk.

I circumnavigate the world in more or less a straight line, straying only to investigate the lights of distant pockets of civilization. Unseen, I sit with the creatures in caves and huts, bathing in the warmth of their fires, the smell of their cooking, the droning texture of their songs. I find them sheltered on mountainsides within dwellings built from the flayed flesh of other animals that have evolved, huge elephantine beasts and vicious fanged predators. I find them high in jungle canopies, in suspended townships connected by bridges of rope and vine. I observe the rituals they associate with birth and death, comings-of-age, the streamlined brutality of the hunt, the unpredictability of the harvest, their glories and their ugliness.

I walk for a long time, in a trance born of guilt, loneliness and awe, the primal simplicity of my own unaugmented emotions, free from the fluctuations of shared consciousness, reducing me to a state of blankness. It takes a long time to readjust to individuality.

The creatures begin their ritual of mourning. The bodies of those killed by the Conglomerate are bathed, rubbed with perfumed herbs and dressed in ceremonial garments. They are lain side by side amidst flaming torches on a stretch of ground next to a forest. Their mouths are filled with soil and planted with seeds. The mourners begin their song.

It begins almost imperceptibly, a subsonic drone created by a group of elder females. Another group gradually joins in, their fingers plucking at the air, creating a delicate throbbing that builds in intensity. Another group joins in, then another, until finally the whole tribe is alive with motion and sound, a swirling, pulsing dirge borne on thousands of years of ritual and tribulation gone joyously unrecorded, that cannot be quantified by mathematics. I stand amongst them, warm tears shining on my face, a conduit for the creatures’ love and sadness, and I think of Liebe, and Bogase III, and Ochet, and the rest of the Conglomerate. I think of Earth, and I think of Redondo. And I make my decision.

A shout rises up, and another, until the song drifts away into a chorus of delighted cheers. One of the blessed dead, the tall male Hunter with the tribal scarification, is rising shakily to his feet. He is smothered with embraces and kisses from the rest of his tribe, who strip him of the ceremonial dress and offer their own garments for him to wear. His tribe-mate is there, with their eldest son, a strong young thing who will one day battle his father for supremacy. His own father, heavily scarred from their own battle, kneels and kisses his feet. The Hunter acknowledges these things as his own, knows them, and more, and realizes that there are things in his mind that are there but should not be. Vague impressions of strange celestial spheres, the sense of time and motion, of shrieking across the desert sands with a smile on lips that are there but are not there, that belonged to him once, but no longer; of Gods who were men once but now are no more, and a blanket that his tribe-mother made for him as a child. And with absolute certainty, he knows of the realm that lies beyond death, a domain of plenitude that exceeds imagination, and of loneliness that will test the resolve of the furthest-traveled Roamer. Tomorrow he will pass these stories to his tribe-mates and sons, and their faith will be restored. Sacrifices will be made. Love will be given. These things fade into the recesses of his mind as he is carried on a tide of rejoicing family and friends, laughing and cheering under the infinite sky, and he offers his own shouts as a blessing to the heavens.

About the Author

Robert Brice lives in Plymouth, UK, and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing. “Conglomerate” is his first published work.

Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus

Bogi Takács

So let’s do it this way. I’ll show you whatever I want and you’ll believe me, because I’m an octopus. I might as well get some benefit out of it, not that we ever had much—especially not since you left. Humans, huh?

Humans.

I slide over the eerily warm surface, watch the tiny but constant stream of bubbles. Run tentacles gently over the crack where the bubbles emerge, adjust my bulk, gently pry.

Scrape swims next to me, caresses the warm object. It’s a giant, bright oblong, textured like nothing else. Scrape trembles with the novelty of it. “I wouldn’t pry,” Scrape signals to me, his skin changing patterns with a fluttery nervousness.

“The field strengthens here,” I say, “this object seems like the focus.”

“What is the field?” Scrape asks, and I push myself away from the oblong, feeling suddenly tired. I signal back, “What indeed.”

You’re a human, you should know. You inflicted the field upon us, without permission, without explanation. Of course you can say, “Why should we have asked? You were an octopus.”

What I am right now is anyone’s guess.

“Please,” Scrape says, “this is a bad idea.”

I swim up to the oblong. “There is someone in there. I can feel the field thickening. There has to be someone in there—a living, breathing mind.”

“That’s exactly why this is a bad idea.” Scrape tries to pull my tentacles away from the surface, but I resist. Flesh against flesh. The patterns on our skin flare.

We struggle. “What do you think is going to happen when you open it?” Scrape yells. “Who do you think is inside?”

That’s what I want to find out. I push him away from me.

“You know what this is?” He quietens down so that I have to swim closer to understand his fleeting, minute signals. “It’s a container where humans put their dead.”

I only saw a dead human much later, but Scrape was right. This was a singularly bad idea.

We didn’t ask the right question. The right question was, “If we open this container, what will happen to the field?”

I decide not to force Scrape. We are crafty, not brutish. I swim away, thoughts tossing and turning in me, and beyond me, in the field. Inside me, I try to gently pat out the border where the self ends and the field begins, as I’ve tried many times before, but it is an exercise in frustration. I can locate points of less self—more field, more self—less field, but it is a smooth transition.

It is also an existential nightmare.

I am going to meet Pebblesmooth. Pebblesmooth, who doesn’t have all the answers, but who has the best questions. Once I am there, I will ask, “Pebblesmooth, can a dead human affect the field?”

Of course you know the answer. This is not about you. Not everything is about you.

“Daughter. Have you touched the field?” Pebblesmooth asks me, twining her tentacles together.

“Yes, many times,” I respond, all too fast, all too snappy. I am impatient.

“Whose field have you touched?”

I am flustered. Confused. Then much becomes clear.

I rush back to the oblong in a daze, then reach outside my mind, try to get a hold on the field. Gently reach further outward, in the direction of the densing, the intensification. But I do not feel another presence, just this pure thickening. I push my mind outward with an effort, bulging out of myself. In the direction of the object, there is more self, but also more field—a paradox, a knot I do not know how to disentangle for all I am good at this type of task. I feel more of myself, more awareness, but also more field-memory; more of everything. The world becomes brighter, more focused, more fluid.

I do not draw back, because I do not bump against another awareness, like I would draw back from another’s mind. We only share field-memory, not self-awareness.

Scrape comes up to me. Has he been guarding the object? Has he been guarding it from me?

“I also tried to push while you were away,” Scrape says. “There is no one inside. Just the field becoming stronger.”

“Do you think this is,” I try to think of words, concepts, “a field generator of sorts? Like a wave generator, except with the field? Some kind of . . . technical device?”

Scrape scrunches up in thought. “But then it might not be a huge issue if we open it.”

I am stunned by the direct reversal of his position. I feel tempted to reverse mine, just so that we could be even. “What if we open it and it breaks, what if this destroys the field?”

“There are other spots where the field thickens,” Scrape says. “Just on the seafloor in the shallows. There is nothing there.”

I consider. “Yes, but has anyone tried to dig?”

You came and you left. But in many, many senses, you will never leave. Even if you yourself get back in your spacecraft and go away this very instant, your echoes will never cease.

It takes much hard work and ingenuity, but we choose a spot where the ground is softer, and eventually we triumph—if this can be called a triumph. Is all discovery positive, does discovery have value in itself, I wonder as Scrape shudders, points at the now-familiar alien surface peeking out from underground. I get closer. Now we know.

“Great idea,” Pebblesmooth says and patterns in approval. “It would be reasonable to claim that these objects produce the field.”

“Don’t we produce it ourselves?” someone from the crowd asks, and certainly we do, but in much more minute amounts. There seems to be agreement about this.

“If you consider,” Pebblesmooth says, “our personal fields would not be large enough to reach across the spaces between us. How big is your extent, when you try to reach out, what do you feel? But the wider field undergirds us, and allows us to store memory.” She seems glowing, radiant. Did she try to reach inside the oblong, too? I was too absorbed in my thoughts to notice.

“Without the field,” I consider, “our knowledge would be lost from generation to generation. Our lifespan is short.”

Pebblesmooth looks around. She has assumed our leadership position, not just by virtue of her age and experience, but also because of her knowledge and poise. “But have you ever tried to reach back?” she asks. “Back toward the beginning?”

Most of us haven’t. Some of us have, and those who did now point out the trail of memories in the field. We reach, grasp. Pull ourselves down into the depths of time. Before the Scrubbing of the Sea and the age of the heroes.

Before the emergence, there is murk. And before the murk, nothing. Emergence is gradual, but we collect knowledge; of the world around us, of the humans who occasionally intrude into it. We understand sea, and land, and map these as far as we can reach. We define coast. We circumnavigate life itself. We teach our youngsters to reach into the field for knowledge, for development. We grow up faster and faster, if not in body, then in mind, as much as these can be distinguished; we make the most of our life spans.

“There was nothing before the murk,” I say into the utter stillness.

“Is that where you would like to go back?” Pebblesmooth asks gently.

I am shaking, but I must continue. I speak. “If we investigate just one of these oblongs, just one, we will probably not destroy the field altogether—but we might understand our origins.”

The water churns with the agitation of many bodies. Some people are for my position, some against.

“I have seen one of these upland!” Scrape yells. “In Cloud-Covered Bay! It is where humans put their dead!”

We scour field-memory, and our attention gathers more and more of us nearby, until there are dozens and dozens of minds acting in distributed concert.

Very ancient memory, a ceremony, simple wooden-box placed on sailboat and pushed on-water. We investigate, clamber on-board. Pry open the box, see the dead human-body, pasty-pale, smooth. The sailboat ignites and we perish in flame.

“Death-memories are some of the strongest,” Pebblesmooth mutters, “it makes sense for the earlier memories to be more tumultuous.”

“This is not the same object,” I remark. “That one was just a box made of wood.”

We search further.

Clasp-clang, the earth of the bay trembling. One of us sneaking ahead in the wet ground. Human agitation. Someone slipping into a dark oblong, then launching into the sea.

“This is a submarine,” Scrape says. “And not the same brightness of surface.”

We find more submarine-memories before the humans vanish. Some are smaller, some are larger. Many are human-size, in various surface brightnesses, but the same texture as far as we can tell.

“Those humans in there are alive,” I say. But when we browse through the memories, we can’t find any time when one of us sensed their minds.

Yes, there were times we did not think you were real. In our defense—if we need a defense at all—you hadn’t exactly made yourselves real in our eyes. At that point, you hadn’t earned our judgment of sentience.

“If there is a human inside,” I begin, “and we open it in-water, the human might die,” I say. “They lived upland.”

“Do humans have life spans this long?” Scrape asks. “Can a human still be alive in there, after so many generations?” No one knows.

“Still, her question was fair,” Pebblesmooth says. “We might want to open the object in the bay.”

There is some discussion. We eventually agree that if we float the object to the shallows, we might be able to open it to the air while keeping ourselves in the safe wetness. We choose the other oblong for this task, the one we found first, so that we don’t have to dig further. I notice that below it there is some disruption in the ground—it must have come loose somehow.

We drag, we push. It is hard going.

We get to the bay shallows, and we pop open the oblong in a very short time.

Inside there is pulsating jelly, and inside the pulsating jelly, a sleeping human. Pale and smooth. Alive. Asleep?

We pull the human out and it keens.

Would you have prioritized human life? Knowing what we knew back then? Knowing what we know now?

The field shudders, but the shudder is localized. It bunches, twists. The human is in pain. We don’t know what to do with it. We withdraw into safe distance.

The keening subsides. The human sits up, shuddering.

“They don’t know how to pattern,” I say. “How will we communicate?”

“They made all these complicated oblongs,” Scrape replies. “They must have a way.”

Yes, we know all about reproductive strategies now. Humans, like many mammals, use a strategy known as K-selection: few offspring, longer lifespan, a longer period of parental care. We, or as you would call us, Octopus vulgaris, use r-selection: many offspring, shorter lifespan, shorter parental care. At least that was how you explained it, though we kept on thinking you were mistaken. The distinction is not as sharp as it sounds: strategies form a continuum, like much else. Like minds.

And some of you, somewhere along the timeline before the murk, must have thought our strategy was wrong. For what else could explain your behavior?

The human shudders constantly and produces multiple kinds of fluid. Finally it looks around. Notices us.

The human pulls its head up sharply and produces a strange behavior. We try to speak to it, but it doesn’t understand our patterning, even when we speak in unison. We try to project our thoughts. Nothing happens.

It makes limb gestures. Tries to get us to repeat our patterning, we assume. Pulls a pouch out of the oblong, opens it, and pulls out some kind of large, foldout board. It stands up the board and begins to make lines on it with a small stick.

Time passes. It is now harder to think of the human as an “it.” We suspected humans were not animals like fish, for fish do not build complicated devices, but we could not be quite sure. Some land-animals build nests, castles.

The human goes upland to eat, but sleeps in the oblong. We do not know what the human eats and we do not ask.

The human is not very good at understanding our language, but it can make pictures, and we are good at understanding pictures; probably better than the human.

Many of our people drift away, but Pebblesmooth, Scrape, and I remain, and our memories are there for all to see in the field. We name the human Seaweed, after its hair that it had cut into stripes shortly after first going upland.

We tell the human that the other humans had left, a long time ago. They simply vanished—we don’t know what happened to them. The human explains that they were seeking to move to another world—not another planet, but another world. This is very hard to draw, and we still don’t sense the human’s thoughts, nor does the human sense ours. Our intent must be at cross-purposes, our minds orthogonal to each other. We only sense a thickening of the field.

The human explains it can produce a lot of field. Not all humans can. Most of them produce as much as us. Some humans who could produce a lot of field were left here, until we could figure this out and maintain our field ourselves.

We ask how we lived before the field. Seaweed says octopuses were supposed to be very intelligent. But yet humans could not communicate with us. They needed our help for the Scrubbing of the Sea. The humans came from another planet, which they had dirtied, and then they dirtied this one too. We also came from another planet—this was startling to contemplate. The humans brought us along because they thought we could help them clean the sea. If only they could give us instructions.

“I thought our ancestors came up with the Scrubbing on their own,” Scrape yells at the human.

“They were guided,” the human draws, then makes a shape for remorse.

You think we learned from Seaweed—but Seaweed also learned from us. At least after we figured out that she had been left behind by you, used by you just as you had used us. For what ends beside dominion?

“You took it from us,” Scrape screams. “You took away the age of the heroes. And you took away what came before!”

I shake with anger, but also with fear.

“They took my life from me and left me here alive in a coffin for the sake of the Obligation,” Seaweed draws, then erases the whole thing, and just draws the sign for remorse. Then Seaweed kicks the board and it collapses, folding back onto itself.

We leave the human alone for a while after that.

“I feel sorry for Seaweed,” Pebblesmooth says and I seethe—with her authority, making statements like that?

“They destroyed our entire way of life so that we could help them restore what they ruined,” Scrape says, and I’m glad that he’s for the moment on my side.

Then suddenly a bright, dangerous thought occurs to me. “This human is good at producing the field. We can surely use that for something.”

Pebblesmooth stands in front of me. “We were made into an instrument, and this human must have been at least complicit in that, but it was also made into an instrument in turn,” she says, and I notice she is not using Seaweed’s name.

She doesn’t need to ask me if it is good to make instruments out of sentient beings. I move away from her, ashamed.

Pebblesmooth follows me. “Listen, daughter,” she says. “We can work together, without using each other.”

But with a human?

You know all about the Obligation, do you? You used it on each other, to justify all manner of heinous crimes, well before you decided to uplift us, as you would say.

Uplifting implies up is better. But we have always lived underwater, in the sea.

“You were supposed to figure out how to produce a very strong field eventually on your own,” Seaweed draws. She is better and better at getting complex concepts across, and we develop a dictionary of increasingly abstract shapes and marks. “You have individual variation in this, much like humans do. Then you can rely on those of you who can make a stronger field.”

“But were you supposed to live that long?” I ask cautiously. Is there a secret here? Sometimes Seaweed doesn’t answer our questions, sometimes she grows upset and begins to bang on things.

This time she replies.

“We live very long, and my lifespan has also been artificially lengthened,” she says. “I will live for very long still, provided I sleep in the pod each night.”

I look at Pebblesmooth, and she knows what I know—that Seaweed just gave us a key to her life.

I ask. I must understand. “Seaweed, did you really mean to tell us that?”

She nods with her head, and by this time we well know that this means yes. But she also looks away, and makes a face-shape that we have learned to associate with displeasure and sadness.

Yes, it was easier to make us form a groupmind to enable us to pass our memories along to the next generation, rather than to change our reproductive strategy. Am I supposed to feel good about that?

I don’t know what was before the murk. I only know that our minds worked differently, and Seaweed and the others told us that we were considered very intelligent. Very intelligent, but animals. I think you humans just hadn’t figured out how to communicate with us, and you had to remake us in your nature. You could not see any other way.

Seaweed tells me she can sense other humans’ thoughts, but in us she can only sense that there is something there—a parallel to the thickening we feel.

If Seaweed dies, will her memories be lost? I talk to her incessantly. And yes, I sometimes feel I am using her, as my only link to the humans that had gone by—and through them, to my own past. And I like being around her—the strong field around her makes me feel better, makes my thoughts move faster.

Sometimes I feel that she is using me, to drag herself out of the loneliness of being abandoned by her own kind. Sometimes I feel that she still thinks of me as an animal, even though she tries to suppress the reaction drilled into her by the same people who shut her into the pod, wired her up to act as little more than a beacon.

Sometimes, through her, I see myself as an animal.

But sometimes we just talk, and sometimes we go swimming in the sea, and make jokes about the fish.

And sometimes we make plans about how we will open the pods and change the course of history.

Before Seaweed and the other humans passed on, they taught us about the Old Empire, but until you came, we did not know that the Old Empire vanished everywhere simultaneously. Yes, when we see humans like you, even when we know you are the descendants of those left behind, we are resentful—even when your shape is a bit different, and your hair does not hang in stripes.

You say you are different. We are supposed to believe. But now I’ve shown you Manyspike’s memories—you specifically, because I trusted you with this, I trusted you with my anger—and now I ask you, for there is nothing else I can do, to understand what lies behind our resentment.

All I ask is for you to tread these waters with care.

About the Author

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person and a resident alien in the US. E has had work published in Lightspeed, Uncanny and Strange Horizons, among other venues. You can find em on Twitter and Instagram as @bogiperson or read eir space opera webserial at www.iwunen.net.

Left of Bang: Preemptive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems

Vajra Chandrasekera

My wrists are my weakest juncture, an enervated air-gap between myself and my aching hands orphaned on their far side. When I go over the railing, I clutch at it desperately and my disconnected hands briefly take my whole weight, and I gasp because I think they won’t work and I’ll fall and then like always I’m shocked when I don’t, until my gyroscopes balance and I purposefully let go—my palms suddenly empty, fingers creaking as they relax after the strain. I land hard and roll. The smoke should sting my eyes. It doesn’t, but I stay low anyway. The fire’s intense. I head for the door, expecting any moment to be crushed by something or to go up in flames, but nothing falls on me and I dodge everything that lands in my path. And then I’m outside, and I’ve survived the first trial assassination, and the crowd—the funders, the commissars, the geneticists, the cyberneticists, the psychologists, the physical trainers, the engineers, the nutritionists, the programmers, the project manager with the harrowed eyes—cheers.

For the second trial assassination they put me in an office environment, a real one. The stakes are higher: I have to maintain my cover as a white-collar government office worker until the attack comes—I must pass for unquestionably human and ordinary in one of the most heavily auto-surveilled social contexts in human history—and I must minimize civilian casualties when it does. The attack doesn’t actually come for three hundred and seven hours, which is either intended to bore me so they can catch me off guard, or a sign of a procedural holdup somewhere far above my pay grade. It’s a very boring pseudolife and I make sure to sink into it like a warm bath, enjoying the prickles of irritation that bloom across my cheeks, the dull ache in my ass from the ergonomic chair, the stuffy feeling of all human interaction filtered through an insulated layer of cotton wool. Boredom is an essential survival skill, as my programmers discovered in previous generations. My emotional range needs to be deeply, thoroughly human: this, not the combat capabilities, is the project’s USP, what will eventually make my mass-production descendants useful for the extreme diversity of scenarios that they’ll be needed for. The attack catches me off guard, as intended—I’m laughing politely at a racist joke at the fifth-floor water cooler, surreptitiously rubbing my fragile wrists, when the bullets rip through the wall. I drop and sweep my legs (balancing my entire weight on my hands for that half-a-second, and my wrists feel hollow like bird bones, like I might take flight) to knock everybody off their feet and out of the line of fire, even the racist, because minimize means minimize. Then I dive through the window. I scream all the way down and falling five stories bruises me up some but it’s okay, there’s no significant damage. Besides, the project manager once sneaked me a look at the evaluation forms so I know they look for a certain amount of devil-may-care disregard for personal safety, especially if it protects civilians. It plays well to the board. They like it when it looks like the movies.

They raise the stakes again and again. After the fifth assassination trial I’m expected to effect countermeasures as well, and after the ninth they tell me I don’t have to constrain myself to non-lethal force. My hands are numb after every mission but there’s no shortage of soldiers, they say. Learning to compartmentalize away moral dilemmas is part of my training, the project manager says. Think, they tell me while I massage the pins and needles back into my palms, of all the soldiers whose lives will be saved the day all police actions and humanitarian interventions are implemented by me. I can’t stop rubbing my wrists, testing their strength. I know the psych team is expecting some nervous tics and other behaviors indicating stress. To show no stress would be sociopathic; to show too much would be neurasthenic: I am baby bear’s cortisol levels. A successful evaluation means my model goes up for mass-manufacture. I’m a very expensive prototype but there will be efficiencies at scale. My expensive training will never need to be replicated: my life will be copied and pasted a million times. I will be the monopoly on violence.

For the fourteenth mission we reverse roles and I’m the assassin. My target is the old project manager, who has become erratic, a security risk. I’m quick. The new project manager tells me she appreciates it and she hopes I’ll do the same for her one day. She has a disturbing sense of humor. She tells me that my wrists are weak because they wanted to make sure that ordinary handcuffs would still work on me. This is a joke, but she doesn’t smile, because it’s also figuratively a warning. I’ve seen the contingency files, so I know how they’ll bring me down when I eventually go out of line. She says not to worry too much about it, and I mirror her sense of the gallows and just nod.

“We love your cruel heart,” she tells me. 

The new project manager talks me through methodically assassinating the original project team. They all have to go at once, she says, otherwise they’ll have too much warning. I blow up the building with the trainers, the cyberneticists, and the nutritionists the same night I gas the engineers and poison the geneticists. I hunt down and shoot the programmers and the psychologists one-on-one, because resentment is an essential survival skill. The commissars run for the bunker but I’m already there. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Even my wrists feel more solid, like my hands are a part of me after all.

I’ve just started hunting down the funders when the project manager calls me off. “Not them, silly,” she says. And just like that, my wrists hurt again.

About the Author

Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and The Apex Book of World SF, among others.

Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth

Juliette Wade

The scent of dying penetrates my sleep. I lift my head, sniff, turn ears to a sound of panting.

Ar, no . . . the scent issues through the slots in my private door. Someone dies, at this moment, in my confronting room!

I scramble to fours among my den room furs, stand to hind-toes, reach for the door. Call, belatedly, “Bow-bow: tell me who seeks Ru-rulii.”

I have used Cold words—marked by the opening hunt-calls—to claim dominance over my visitor. Yet who, dying, would respond? Have my heavy-furred neighbors delivered a dying creature to me out of hatred? Do they show so vicious, vengeful at my new influence in Ro-roghell?

“Hnnn,” whines a low voice. “Dazh. Suffer me . . . ”

Suffer me to tread your territory, he tries to say—politeness, from the nearly dead? I pull back the bolt, step forth without saying make welcome.

Wauuunn!

This is my own lost youth prostrate on the pebble floor: a half-starved adolescent gutter-hound, his mane hardly more than a pup’s nape-ruff threaded with a few long hairs. A wound in his thigh throbs, livid, turning black. And beneath its stench lurks the smell of the riverbank, the Stinking District where I spent my indigent puphood.

As I wrinkle my nose in shock, he draws breath again.

“Help . . . ”

A thought bites me: only the human scientists can cure this. When I lift him, he howls. His blood-fever heat penetrates the downy fur of my arms and chest. I hesitate only an instant so as not to strike him against the edges of my outer door, then hurry into the road and down the hill.

I have regained much strength in the year since I returned to my beloved Lowlands from La-larrai City. Though burdened, and on hind-toes, I don’t stagger. If only I could run full fours, to shorten the distance. Below us, Ro-Roghell sleeps in the cool gray before sunwake: square tent-homes with their leather walls tied down, hardly stirred by the faint breeze.

Dazh has shown brave and strong: not only to cross the river from the Stinking District in such condition, but to climb the hill to reach me past the Cold iron houses of my heavy-furred neighbors. The heavy-furred are descendants of the ice-hunters who once annexed our lands, and these, my neighbors, were chosen by Majesty Gur-gurne to dominate the people of Ro-roghell. They would contempt Dazh, possibly even kill him for his presumption. Me, they contempt already for my Lowlander’s thin fur; they speak of me behind doors as an upstart shiverer who fought on the Barbarian front and failed to die. Yet I bear Majesty’s favor, and live in my own Cold house, which Majesty Gur-gurne himself awarded me for my service in the war.

Indeed, why should Dazh seek me? One like him, contempted by all, would wait for no help from anyone. But perhaps the people of the Stinking District still recall my birth, and have heard of my interdependence with creatures who know no Rank. Likely, Dazh hoped for human help from the first.

I press my feet faster around the down-sloping curve, panting with the stink of the wound and with the heat of my heart-striking burden. I have given the human scientists my Warm house—one of the ancient warren-houses, tunneled into the boundary between hill and river-flat. There I spy their fat-lamp, aglow in welcome: humans know better than to keep a welcoming flame in the usual place above the door, where the hill-grasses might ignite; their lamp glows in a twisted urrgai horn plunged into the ground. They rise early!

I struggle to free one hand for the latch, but the door swings inward. My scent will not have penetrated to their den rooms, even could their flat noses detect it. But humans need not use nose to guard; they have brought their own tools across star territories.

The human scientist Rizvi stands welcome in their confronting room. Opulent swaths of decorative fabric cover everything but her fur-naked brown face—she baffles me. Today she wears yellow like viini grass, bright against the pebble-pressed walls.

“Liaison Rulii! What?” she cries. No linguist, she; and her body-talk muffled by cloth, yet she makes her meanings known.

“Bow-bow,” I demand, “Help me; this pup dies without your medicine.” My arms strain, but there is no appropriate place to lay Dazh. They will not wish his blood to stain the visitor cushions, which they impractically insist on leaving about their confronting room at all times.

“This Aurrel wants us?” asks Rizvi.

“Hark-hark: else he would not have come to me.” Her brows rise. “He wants human help. Quick, he dies.”

“Quick,” she echoes. “Bring him.”

Behind the slotted inner door, a branching tunnel leads us to a room muddled with strange smells. Round roof windows are pale circles at this early hour, no rival for the too-bright human lights. On tables of wicker and wood, humans work with metal cases and complex gleaming structures: like a distillery of ihlu crafted of silver and jewels. Their long, long narrow fingers tickle chiming sounds from glass and metal. Our entry startles them into motion like birds, but they do not retreat. They clear a table.

Dazh moans as I lay him down, yet at last someone can help him. When I step backward, the human scientists gather around. Dazh is too sick to thrill or fear at their alienness: those impossibly flat faces, the blunt teeth, their manes of all lengths subtly shaded, their bodies hidden under the extravagant cloth that is their unifying affectation.

Unnoticed now, I fall to haunches by the wall. My heart gradually slows, but does not bring the recovery I hope for. The ache in my limbs only worsens, tightening my war scars, burrowing into muscles where it cannot be eased.

Ar, no—this is no longer the pain of my effort. This is the old, inescapable need.

I have forgotten to take my medicine.

I brought this upon myself. Years ago, in La-larrai City, I accepted a place on Majesty’s Cold Council—the first of Lowland race ever to do so, and in Majesty’s company I hoped to raise my nape-bitten people. Yet in the far north, shadowed by the snowy peaks of the Dominator’s Teeth, there is only one way a thin-furred Lowlander can escape shiver-shame and expulsion from polite company: to chew the green shoots of the molri tree. Molri, with its gift of blood-heat, and its inevitable betrayal of pain and need-sickness.

Without humans, I might have died of it by now. But the human scientists devised a replacement medicine, urged to the project by their linguist, Parker.

Parker, who no longer speaks to me.

I sigh, and lower my nose upon my hands. The humans continue to speak in their languages. Hidden behind their bodies, Dazh no longer moans. I hope he does not fear. Hope, too, that he does not die. His life, more than any effort of mine, may yet prove that humans and Aurrel can trust their new interdependence—and, further, that soft human fingers have begun to subvert the control of the heavy-furred ice-hunters over my beloved Lowlands.

Ar, Parker! Will you permit me to see you now, huntmate, to tell you our quarry is at last in sight? Have you seen how human cloth now hangs in the confronting-rooms of the rich of Ro-roghell—have you helped your scientists speak to Aurrel people of their health, their hunts? And now, a child of the Stinking District has trusted humans with his life. Wauuunn, Parker-my-brother!

But this, too, I brought upon myself. I can’t hope for remedy.

Human footsteps approach in the tunnel. Someone enters in a scurry, speaking a language like a horn playing alongside a grinder. I force myself up to haunches; Rizvi turns away from Dazh with her eyes wide.

“Rulii,” she says. “A messenger comes.”

I stand quickly to hind-toes, swallow down my pain. “Thank-thank: I shall answer.”

I must, else the humans be taken from Dazh when he needs them most. As I walk through the tunnel, however, I scent the new arrival. She is a stranger to me—but mixed with her identity drifts another, foul and familiar: the favor-scent of the one who sent her.

Majesty Gur-gurne.

My skin prickles, and my mane-hackles rise. This messenger seeks me, in singular, for Majesty would never dignify humans with a direct message. He shows impatient of their very presence on Aurru. With this messenger, Majesty must intend to enforce Cold dominance upon me, even here in the Warm lands.

My lips curl away from my teeth, but I force them closed as I reach the slotted door. With my right thumbs, I disentangle from my mane the lock of Rank-beads that mark me Royal Liaison, so it hangs before my shoulder.

“Bow-bow!” I command through the slots. “Name your intent. Will you grapple?”

“Belly to you, Liaison Rulii,” she replies, her Warm words accepting my higher Rank. “No challenge offered; only words. Suffer me to tread your territory.”

This is fortunate, since I am too ill to fight well. The humans’ cushions may yet survive. “Bow-bow: make welcome; I come.”

The messenger bows to haunches before me. False humility. She knows her own beauty: a strong fine muzzle, dense fur, and a mane streaked with white. She carries her short ears with the Cold pride of the superior race. Beneath the stink of Majesty, her odor is tinged with distaste. Does she disdain my scars, scarcely covered by my Lowlander’s fur? Bite-bite—but I hold back the urge to anger, for she will bear report of me back to Majesty in La-larrai City.

“I bring you greetings,” she says. “Majesty Gur-gurne hungers for Lowland quarry. We have learned of a coming Barbarian offensive, and Majesty intends to confront lazy soldiers, to nip their hinds to act before Barbarians can. But first upon his path he will meet with your human scientists, and speak to them of their projects. He takes foot in Ro-roghell at three days’ pace.”

Shock stirs my sluggish blood. Three days?

“Thank-thank!” I bark too loudly. I refuse to show my teeth. “Majesty grants me Cold honor, yet, sniff-sniff: how should a human scientist speak to him without warming his Cold and exalted presence? Does he think of this? Does he bait me?”

Her fine lip curls scorn. “Liaison Rulii, behold Majesty’s generosity.” With a toss of her mane, she stands, opens a beaded belt-purse at her waist, and taps a skin roll into my hand. I must suffer her to watch me open it.

Oh, the message I find stamped within the roll! Majesty has granted our linguist Parker the Rank of Liaison, chilling him sufficiently that he may request royal audience. This is what he desired from the first! My feet urge to move, to run to him. But he is not here. I bow respect to the messenger.

“Thank-thank: Majesty’s generosity chills me to awe.”

“Upon the three-day morning, then,” she replies, and backs from the room.

With surprise past, I can no longer believe what I see in my hand. Why would Majesty grant Parker Rank now, when he never has before? The scent of hidden intent sours my excitement, and I shake my mane. My pain rouses, snarling. I must return home for my medicine—yet how can I, without first informing the humans that their place here is in danger?

My ears turn: someone is coming. Rizvi’s scent drifts through the slotted door; then she enters like a timid reghi, one careful foot placed before the other. “Dazh will live,” she says.

“Thank-thank.” I can manage no more. This should be news of joy, but my ache tries to swallow me.

“Rulii . . . ” Rizvi lowers her head, pats her belly—her chosen compromise for a submissor’s respectful Warm phrases. From somewhere within her clothes, she draws a small case of smooth metal, which she places upon the pebbled floor. Then she steps out.

I know that case. I have just such a one, hidden at home within my den-room furs. Rizvi shows her knowledge of me more intimate than I had guessed, her manners better than I deserve. It is a gift from beyond star-territories, to rescue me from myself.

I open the case with hands shaking. Inside it, unnatural light glows through layers of glass vials. I remove the instrument, steady it beneath my finger pads, and press a vial in with my thumbs—snap—like clicking teeth. I have accustomed myself to this habit; the fine needle pushes easily into the skin of my wrist. I may snarl at the sting, but it’s nothing compared to the ache of my war scars, the torn gums I suffered when I chewed the molri sticks, the hidden wounds left in my heart by my years on Majesty’s Cold Council. A small price indeed for the calm relief that now spreads through my blood.

When no echo of my need remains, I replace the empty vial and instrument in the case and draw myself up to stand. I have a message to deliver.

I find Rizvi with her back to me, in the room where humans work their strange distillations. Most of the humans have returned to their work, but she now waves open hands at Dazh, who shows agitated, attempting to rise.

“Bow-bow: do not move, Dazh-dazh,” I say, quickly.

Dazh shakes his head. “Belly, Rulii, thank—but I must not stay.”

“Hark-hark: I stand responsible for your safety. Humans know best which action will aid in your healing. Hint-hint: please, lie still.”

He subsides to one elbow. Rizvi looks up at me, releases a breath. “Thank. He not understand me. Dazh—” she turns back to him. “You live. For now, stay.”

Dazh squirms, a discomfort I recognize.

“Hark-hark,” I explain, “Riz-rizvi does not claim intimacy with you, Dazh-dazh. Her language has no Cold words.” Then a terrible thought shudders me. Have I saved this pup only to have Majesty send him to death upon Barbarian teeth in the coming days? “Riz-rizvi, hark-hark: I must tell you. That messenger came with Majesty Gur-gurne’s favor. Majesty himself arrives at three days’ pace, desiring to speak. We must prepare. Hint-hint: If Dazh-dazh remains in your care, he must be kept out of scent, else Majesty will create him soldier.”

Rizvi sucks a breath, her dark eyes white-rimmed. “Majesty comes? To speak? How do we speak?”

This, at least, I may remedy. “Hark-hark: Majesty has granted your linguist Par-parker sufficient Rank to speak to him directly.” My hope swells enough that I dare the words: “Sniff-sniff: Riz-rizvi, would Par-parker permit me to speak to him myself, to tell him such important news?”

Rizvi’s scent thickens. She swallows, a movement of fear like a small animal hiding in her throat. “Rulii—” She closes fists, swallows again. “Parker is lost.”

I don’t always bite when I’m afraid.

No surprise that Rizvi backs from me, though—two steps, then three, before she remembers herself. She looks around at her scientists. Though most do not speak Aurrel, three have understood well enough that they now freeze, watching.

Can I blame them if they show scared? They know what I did to Parker. Even now the memory sickens me: I played with him, having eaten too much molri; when I became ill he offered to call his scientists to help; yet molri-pleasure is always followed by molri-aggression, and in my instinctive fear I bit him, threw him—human blood on my teeth, Parker-my-brother limp against the wall—wauuunn!

“Please,” Rizvi says, pats her belly. “Please, Rulii. Speak to me in singular.”

Alone, she means. I nearly drop to fours in shame, but humans prefer hind-toes and I have no wish to alarm them further. With Dazh watching anxious, I back from the room.

Rizvi takes me to one of the den chambers, off another tunnel near the confronting room. With my heart at running pace and my feet restless, I do not trust myself not to flush her from the chamber accidentally. I say nothing.

“We know—something, of Parker,” Rizvi says. She sneaks a prey-like glance up to my greater height. “He went away, to—make new discoveries.”

I force myself to haunches, make myself smaller, speak low. “Sniff-sniff: why?”

“I discovered—diinnneey, yani . . . a thing, in blood. Lowland Aurrel have some ice-hunter mother-mothers, also some Hnnwan.”

I snort. Does she claim that Lowlanders have mixed with ice-hunters and Barbarians? Ridiculous! But that thought leads to a worse. “Sniff-sniff: where did he go?”

“The hill of urrgai teeth west of Gha-ghallo.”

I almost bark, pant for control. “Bite-bite: Riz-rizvi, Par-parker is lost in the Barbarian lands? With Majesty upon us at close pace and Barbarian attack not far behind? This is news of horror!”

She turns her small brown nose side to side. Light glints rich yellow and gold from her head-covering. “Listen, listen, he was—soft. He knew laws. He has a box.”

“Sniff-sniff: a box?”

“Humans, we made a . . . a box. He hid, in singular; he watched. He not speak to Barbarians.”

I shake my mane. “Hark-hark: Riz-rizvi, I understand his care, but even if he has a box, I fear Majesty is too Cold for such distinctions. Par-parker must speak to Majesty upon his arrival, or he may choose to banish humans entirely.” What then will become of my life’s hunt? To return to molri now would kill me!

“We heard Parker speak, where he hides,” Rizvi says. “If he lives, if I ask an officer, we send a shuttle—”

“Bow-bow! Not a shuttle.” My ears cringe at the thought. “If you send one, every Au-aurrel or Barbarian at a day’s pace will hear, and Majesty will learn of it. Not soldiers, for they would talk. He must be found and returned in secret, else humans be blamed.”

Her gaze wavers. “Maybe he not live? He is silent two days.”

Wauuunn, Parker! But I can’t deny this possibility.

“Riz-rizvi, sniff-sniff: how long must Dazh-dazh remain in your care?”

Her lips vanish a moment, pressed into her shallow mouth. “Days?”

“Bow-bow: let me speak to him, then, so he will consent to your attention. Then, I will find Par-parker.”

She nods her head, flashing yellow; together we return to the table where Dazh lies. Already he shows improved, no longer panting with fever. The wound is utterly changed, the dead and dying flesh removed, now only a red pit in his thigh covered over with . . . saliva? Looks like saliva, but I’m certain it is not.

“Hark-hark,” I say. “Dazh-dazh, I have been called to hunt. Bow-bow: stay with the humans, with this female, Riz-rizvi, until I return.”

He shows indignant, rising again on both hands. “Belly, I wish to go with you. Do not leave me here among barbarians.”

“Sniff-sniff: yet did you not wish to be brought to them?” For that, he has no answer. “Hark-hark: you did, for without them you would be dead already. My hunt takes me into the Lands of Teeth, where death snaps soldiers whole.”

“Thank,” he says. Ducks his head, yet his scent grows daring. “Sniff, I heard you, before—please don’t tell them to hide me. I must be created soldier!”

“Hark-hark: never.”

“But every child of the riverbank wishes for this. How should every one of us not envy your success? The great Rulii, who fought from the Stinking District to General of Majesty’s army!”

“Bite-bite: this you call my success? You understand nothing!” I bite down on the anger that burns my tongue; still, it struggles to escape. “Bow-bow: I go; you do as Riz-rizvi tells you, or I will no longer stand responsible!”

I stride toward the tunnel, flushing humans from my path. The moment the outer door thuds shut behind me, I leap to fours and run.

This is not success. I may tell myself my life’s hunt is noble, but I have been less predator, more prey, constantly in defiance of natural order. At every pace I have striven for escape. Escape from the riverbank, escape from the low Rank that flung me again and again upon Barbarian teeth, escape from the front, escape from shiver-shame—from molri—then from the lands of ice and snow.

Becoming General was my most dangerous mistake. Now, nowhere can I escape from Majesty’s Cold attention. Humans have offered me a different path, but I must make my stand here, in my beloved Ro-roghell, else die in the attempt.

I eat scout’s-endurance in preparation for the fasting hunt: a careful ration of salt meat cooked in urrgai fat. This is the flavor of memory, and creates Rulii soldier once again—brings Warm huntmates’ voices to my ears, Ugluu’s in my left, Llohi’s in my right. Our strength-of-three would feast together, and scout five days hungry. I would help them fasten spring-knives and helmets, and tie their armor turtlewise for fast travel; they would help me with my own battle gear. Such things are not meant to be accomplished alone, but I manage. Last and most necessary is the case that contains my medicine, tucked into my belt-pouch.

Sun stands near its peak when I leave my house and run full fours down the hill—speed is my best ally if I wish to arrive at the hill of teeth before dark. Crowds in the market district beside the animal pens slow my passage to the river bridge where the fishers weave their traps, but on the other side, the road is clear. Residents of the Stinking District stare, but do not approach me.

I climb the hills to the high crossroads, scent for observers in the winds that rush up the grassy slopes from north and south; finding none, I hook leather slippers over my fingers and toes so as not to leave my personal scent upon this well-trodden road. I head west toward the front.

With each stride, running feels better. The gait of the scout returns to my limbs more easily than I had feared—perhaps the firm grip of my armor-straps reminds me. My heart eases into rhythm, and I find I’m eager to face danger in the search for Parker. My feet beat a message: I am no Councilor now, no pretender, no subject. Only Rulii!

A long slope exhales me down into grassland, where the wind from the north moves differently: now a vast flow uninterrupted by hills, scenting of urrgai and herds of small bounding reghi. While still some altitude remains to me I glimpse a supply string far ahead upon the road: one hundred urrgai at least, some of them drawing supply carts.

Here is why Ro-roghell hungers for a peace they have almost forgotten: this many urrgai could feed all the stark-ribbed pups in the Stinking District. How many of those pups watched, pained in the gut and mouth-watered, as this string passed them by? How can I blame Dazh for wanting to join soldiers who never run hungry?

I bark warning to the herders, then come down swiftly upon the string. A quick succession of rumps; the occasional hoof-thud near my ear. Urrgai are never hurried: the horn-blunted beasts scarcely turn their heads. Fortunately for the secrecy of my hunt, none of the herders are known to me.

The message of my feet becomes a chant that lulls me into distance, but hours betray my weakness. My shadow, no longer shrunken by my feet, begins to stretch toward my tail, then creeps further east as the tired sun pushes it longer—and so far yet to go!

At last a gust of wind brings news that I have reached the front. This wind scents of Aurrel and Barbarian soldiers, ash, prey animals, and haali-blossom stink. Ugluu and Llohi hated the smell of haali; a moment, I wish for our strength-of-three, one companion at each shoulder, and my pace slows further. But when I was called to the Cold lands, I chose molri, and cut all ties. In a year free of blood-poison, I have regained much of my wasted strength; yet the sun hangs too low, my armor wears looser than it once did, and my intimacies are gone.

May this hunt allow me to salvage the last one.

Gha-ghallo huddles close to the fighting, a soldier’s city of small leather tents ringed by fences of bound grass. Both tents and fences are supported by dismembered pieces of the carts used to bring supplies. I leave the road, and creep low on a careful downwind path—for though I must not be recognized, how else should I assess the war, the dangers ahead? My eyes lose focus while breezes bring the city to life in my nose.

Dust, grass, wood, ash.

Urrgai, manure, meat, ihlu.

My people, many of them: strangers all intermixed.

I sniff for blood, for medicine, but scent little. The war has ebbed, indeed; in my day it rushed over us swift as snowmelt floods. I creep further along the fences, where a different scentpoint may reveal more.

Someone familiar comes to my nose.

I crouch lower. I do not know to fear or thrill, that I might find a huntmate lost for six years—most will have moved, or died. This one feels young in my memory, not much older than Dazh, perhaps one of the near-pup messengers of my later days before Majesty called me to La-larrai: Ghuula? Burrzhi? Olorr?

“Burrzhi,” I whisper, my best suspicion. I can’t be sure without showing myself, and I must keep secrecy.

But.

I shall soon go into danger. Who can say whether I shall return wounded in the dark, carrying Parker, pursued by a belling mob? Why should I not seek a huntmate here? Should this hunt turn teeth upon me, ready help might sway our lives, our deaths.

I turn away from the forward path, run awhile beside the fences until the wind shifts. Just beyond a wooden gate, I edge into the upwind breeze. Tension knots my muscles; I must not stay. A moment, to be sure my scent carries, then quickly I retreat downwind, bellying low between grass-shadows. I watch the gate. The sun melts slowly against the horizon, my conspirator in stealth.

If guards emerge, I will have to run.

Barks, laughs, and growls burst from somewhere nearby. Soldiers, who have over-drunk of ihlu.

Then someone alone pushes open the wooden gate. I tense.

A low bark. “Rulii?” Then a deprecating snuff. “But, bite, he runs in Ro-roghell.”

A familiar voice; the right voice.

“Bel-belly,” I call. “Burr-burrzhi?”

A soft thump, as he drops to fours. His footsteps come closer. I scent him so clearly; also the favor of a superior, recently stroked into his mane. His head emerges from the grasses—wauuunn, when I knew him he had two ears! But in his mane he wears a captain’s beads.

“Thank-thank,” I say, standing to fours, “that you come to speak to me, Burr-burrzhi.”

His mouth gapes, and his forehead wrinkles, showing shocked. “Rulii? Now fish leap above the sun! Has Majesty sent you to offer Rank dispute to our general?”

I bow to haunches, lower my head. “Hark-hark: no such offer. I don’t run to Gha-ghallo tonight, but scout into the Barbarian lands. Sniff-sniff: what will I find?”

Burrzhi snorts down his scarred muzzle. “The war goes slowly in this last year, but not well. The Barbarians have moved their capital closer, from here northwest, and the lands are more dangerous than they were. The mobs have re-created themselves flower-hounds, and haali grows everywhere, a shield for ambush. I hear murmurs asking why we must still fight.”

Would that I could share Majesty’s news of a coming offensive; yet without his favor I dare not. “Thank-thank: I have smelled the haali; your warning is well taken.”

Burrzhi shakes his mane, near-black in the sunset. “Worse, I have scented alien on the west wind.”

“Alien!” My heart jumps alert. “Sniff-sniff: when did you smell this last?”

“Last night on the gusts. Belly, Rulii, but I have heard of the alien strangers come to Ro-roghell. I am happy to see you escaped their barbarous nudges. They are not to be trusted.”

I will not show my teeth, but how can I reply? For I shall never run free of humans. Nor do I wish to! The last human officer who visited from star territories did hide her motives from us; but so did I from her. And, bite-bite: not to be trusted? Can such truly be said of any people entire?

Of Parker, I could not believe such a thing. He would not belly to a Barbarian dominator. He cares for our trust in him—else why should he have danced around Majesty’s laws so carefully? But I must not speak of him to Burrzhi.

“Hark-hark, Burr-burrzhi: I hunt in secret, but may soon be in need of aid. Bow-bow: if you hold care for me, keep nose to the west wind, for my quarry has gone to ground in the Barbarian lands, and I may return pursued.”

He leans his cheek to mine. “Happy news, then, Rulii: I command the scouts.”

“Bel-belly: happy scouts.” I lower my head. “Thank-thank: I am pleased that we find each other, to enter once again into interdependence.” Also, in raising this alert, may I leave Burrzhi better prepared to face Majesty in the days ahead.

“Thank, Rulii,” he replies. “Run well.”

The road does not extend far beyond Gha-ghallo, but my fighting years rise up to remind me the way. With sun below set, I keep to fours, moving more slowly through grasses tall to my chin. Hind-toes would be no better: I would reveal myself to watchers, and my eyes could do little to open the distances ahead. Here and there, old urine marks the grasses—Barbarian scouts. Once I find a camp has left a wide bald spot, a month old. I tread its edge, soft slippered hands and feet, and search the wind for more news of camps and armies. It brings mostly news of Burrzhi’s flower-hounds.

Haali bushes have been planted everywhere, nursed for survival in this place where they do not thrive. It is against natural order. Over and over I find large clumps heavy with blood-centered blooms, carefully placed with intent to confuse. A perfect hiding place for scouts, provided they could tolerate the sickly smell. Though I keep as far from the bushes as I can, yet with each hour, my nose numbs further. The wind sends moonlit ripples to break upon my face: hush, hush.

Then the grasses speak. My ears turn: something moves, too loud, too large for duun or reghi. The wind shifts for a mere second, but enough to betray the creature for a Barbarian male.

A scout, ready to attack or to report my presence.

Rulii-soldier rouses in my blood. Cautiously, I lift hands, just enough to glimpse my destination: the hill of urrgai teeth, that unexplained hump of earth amid the plain, from which massive moon-frosted stones sprout like the grass-crushing molars of our prey. Are there more, now, than when I saw them last?

I sight my quarry racing across my path.

I dash forward. Leap, leap—ears and nose guide my aim—leap once more above the grass, and now I see as I fall upon him: leather armor, loose ears, and long limbs, the familiar slim shape of the enemy in gleam and shadow. His hinds crumple beneath my greater weight. He yelps and whines, squirms and bites at me.

I cuff his teeth aside and seize his neck in my jaws. A brief slide of armor, and I gulp a new grip, this time find fur-flesh-and-sinew down to the crunch of bone.

His sounds cease.

I release quickly, lips pulled back. The taste of Barbarian blood I have never liked, no matter how many I killed on the battlefield for my huntmates, my people, my greater ambition. This time, though, it is far worse—it drags of my shame, the memory of my teeth sinking into Parker’s soft flesh.

I back from that thought, snort blood and haali from my nose, lift my head and listen for more scouts. Barbarian scouts run in strength-of-three as ours do, the better to fight a single larger foe, the better to scatter for escape.

I hear nothing but grass-whispers. So I am already betrayed.

Time shrinks to a single breath. How close is the Barbarian force? I must scent Parker at the hill of teeth, else my hunt fails!

I pull off my slippers and run. Full fours and full length, the last caution stripped from my muscles. Grass whips my chestplate hissing like the angry zhaa; night air rushes into my lungs. The wind turns, and now I smell them: a large mob at close pace.

Ar, misery, shall I turn back?

Yet—wauuunn!—how should I outrun a rested mob set upon me after so many hours? Only among the teeth, sheltered by giant stones, have I any chance to fight before they tear their vengeance from my sinews.

A belling cry rises from the approaching mob. Something bursts wet against my head. Haali smell overwhelms me—ah, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe! Now I will never find him!

Ahead from the hill of teeth bursts a strange call: “Ruuuuuu!”

My ears twitch, remind me: Rulii-soldier, even should your nose be useless, eyes and ears will not let you die. But who would call from such a place, unless—

Parker!

I push faster. Gagging, I falter, for I am not truly Rulii-soldier of so long ago. But I reach the first stone tooth, scrape some of the stinking liquid from my face. I cast an eye back.

Barbarians run black amid the silver grasses. Dark heads leap in the mob, now here, now there, a river tumbling over stones. Armor or no, they will tear me apart.

“Rulii!” Parker steps out toward me.

I shake my mane, gulp down sickness. “Parker, hide if you can’t fight!”

“No, Rulii, come in here! Quick!”

I follow and find Parker standing before a dark square opening. He waves hands. Yes, into the black space to escape the barking river, the bites that will shred me skin-flesh-bone. I gather my hinds and jump.

In the black, my shoulder slams into a wall.

A clang of metal, a flash of light. Unlike lightning, it remains bright, eye-shocking.

Thunder comes, pounding against a metal door which Parker has just closed. The mob has reached us. Their hands, their weapons beat on our walls, and our tiny room shudders with sound.

I gag again and fumble in my belt-purse for a cloth. My hands shake with the running hours. My cheek feels sticky with haali-juice. Oh I shall vomit!

“Take this!”

A wet cloth lands by my hand. I slap it to my face, rub and rub against the spot, then at last find less tainted air. I gasp breath after breath until my lurching stomach calms.

I look around.

This is Rizvi’s box. The room is tiny as the locker above the water-source where I hang my meat. A metal shelf contains many human instruments, four of them displays. Should I touch their surfaces, I know I will feel no pigment—in Rizvi’s company, I have tested this. The displays show grasslands in every direction, even the mob struggling outside. As their eagerness dies, the thunder slowly ebbs, until they only peer and pry at the door.

“They can’t break in,” Parker says. “They have tried.”

Yes, that is the voice I have wept for! Parker’s voice, his perfect Warm words—with eyes turned away, I could believe he had been suckled at the next nipple. From the first, I never could use Cold words with him—never stand his dominator.

I wish I could smell him.

And now I understand this Barbarian weapon, worse even than Burrzhi warned me. A sling, not for a stone, but for the juice of haali, to snuff the enemy’s senses. Such a skill I have never seen from Barbarians before. No wonder Burrzhi said the war had changed.

“Hnnnn . . . ” I rub my nose between finger-pads and thumbs; shake my head, but it makes no difference. Why must it be my nose? Rather let my hands be weighted!

“Rulii,” Parker says. “Why have you come here?”

I look at him. He has grown new fur since we last spoke. Dense curls hide the brown skin along his jaw, his cheeks, and neck, joining by his ears with the black mane that stands thick from his head. His body-talk is all fear: backed into the corner, wide eyes, nostrils flared.

I make myself smaller: press back to the wall beside the door, sit on haunches, tuck my chin. “I have come to see you safe, Parker.”

“Safe!” He shakes his head, eyes widening further. “Ghaaad, there’s blood all over you . . . ”

Surely this is insult; were he to stand my dominator, I should hear it in his Cold words. He wounds me, but after what I did to him I can’t be surprised. I answer softly.

“The blood is not mine.” Though it and mine are of one color, and Parker’s also.

“You killed someone?”

“Yes. I killed a scout who would have stopped me reaching you. He and his would have killed me quite as willingly. We huddle trapped now because his huntmates betrayed me to the mob.”

Parker lays long-fingered hands against his face—so flat, the tip of his nose scarcely shows. “Ghaaad.”

“Parker,” I say, still careful in gentleness. “These are the Lands of Teeth; here, war and death surround us like skin, like fur. You should know this.”

“I do know this. Yet I also met teeth when I ran in La-larrai City.” His words are calm, but his breath harsh in fear. “You were not to be told that I was here.”

“Ar, Parker, I understand. I have shown barbarous to you indeed. Yet I don’t lie when I say I have no other friend. Am I to hear of your danger, yet abandon you to Barbarian mercies? Do you forget me so entirely?”

Parker’s hands stretch his face-skin downward, release. He wrestles his breath for control, and at last his dark eyes meet mine, cautiously. “I don’t forget you, Rulii. You chose me for huntmate, when I ran alone among your people. No other would.”

“And you chose my life, Parker, when you could have chosen my death. Every day I remember your generosity in freeing me from molri.” I lower my chin. “Perhaps this is why I felt it as ambush, when Rizvi said I should find you in the company of those who wish me dead.”

A glance, his dark eyes less wide now. “Rulii—” He shifts feet. “They wish you dead? You, in singular?”

“I dominated as general once. I killed a great many of their soldiers.”

“And another tonight.” His lips pull back from his teeth—disgust. “Well. I am not in their company. Nor do I prefer them.”

Slowly I unfasten my armor. “Parker, I must ask you about this box.”

Parker tenses, but says nothing.

“Your scientists built it; I know. But do your people stalk us in more places than just this one?”

“Two,” he says. “One in the wilderness where we landed first. And one in the crags bordering La-Larrai City. We had to observe; else I could not have learned your language, known to approach you in singular.”

I must trust him in this. Without him, I could have hunted all my life and never brought such change to my people. “Rizvi explained to me that, hiding here, you show care for the laws. Yet this distinction, Majesty may not care to recognize as you do. Likely he will notice you now speak the Barbarian dialects as though you had run here from the beginning.”

He shrugs, like guilt. “Their language is a cousin to the Warm words. Closer than I expected.” His body eases slightly as his tongue treads his singular expertise.

“Had you asked me, Parker, I could have told you this.”

He tenses again: wraps his arms across his chest, tucks one hand into his elbow. A human defensive move. “Perhaps you have forgotten me, then. I have always said I prefer to learn of a people in their own words. These people name themselves Hnnwan, and precious their children just as Aurrel do.”

“Belly, Parker,” I say, while I set my armor aside. “Yet we remain at war. And here, tonight, we pay a dangerous price for that which you prefer.”

“I’m sorry.” Parker slides down the wall; his long legs fold up. He breathes as if to speak, once, twice, yet remains silent. He rubs his fingers over the cloth tubes that cover his legs. “I did not mean to hide from you, Rulii. When you bit me, you were not yourself. I have always understood that. I tried to return to you; wanted to walk beside you, La-larrai to Ro-roghell. Our plan, our hunt, our triumph. But though my body was healed, yet my blood ran with fear.”

I begin to scent his meaning. “Ahh, Parker . . . ”

“I could not return to you, only to bring you my shiver-shame which would destroy our project.”

My head feels heavy. This fear of shiver-shame, I taught him, and not without reason. In the snowy chill of La-larrai I submitted myself to molri rather than be expelled for such weakness.

Parker sighs. “I thought long. I had lost my courage and likely would lose any Cold honor I might have gained. I thought awhile to abandon Aurru for other star territories.”

“Ar, no!” I lower my useless nose upon my aching hands. “Wauuunnn, belly, Parker, sorry. I understand this. You offered to help me. And you did more; you saved me from molri, though I did not understand your intent. I repaid you shamefully then, and now come to you wet with blood—it’s no wonder you shrink from me. Understand, I would sooner tear out my teeth than injure you again.”

He nods. “Then I thought: I have run here on Aurru many years. What do I hunt for, if not the knowledge of this place, its languages and people? Better to brave the Lands of Teeth and risk the wrath of Majesty than to lose all I have hunted for so long—” He glances at me. “So I thought then. But I was discovered. A Hnnwan scout ambushed me, and as we grappled, stole my communicator. Though his blood answered a question, I have food left for only two more days. Suddenly I stood to lose far more.” He shows me his hands, a human submission move. “Until you came.”

I rise slowly to sit. “Parker, there is a greater risk. Rizvi did not break your trust without cause. This morning we received a messenger: Majesty Gur-gurne himself comes to Ro-roghell, hungry to speak with you in singular. He has created you human Liaison and named you sufficiently Cold to speak in his presence.”

Parker laughs—a laugh like a whine, mouth open upon his blunt white teeth, chin lifted to show his furred throat. “Ah, Rulii! A year earlier, this news would have saved us great trouble.” One of his hands moves to his side, low by his hip where he felt my teeth.

“Indeed. Yet he takes foot in Ro-roghell in two days, and none but you or I may speak to him. I scent he intends us ill.”

Parker wipes a hand across his lips. “He shall certainly bring ill to Rizvi and my huntmate scientists if we die.”

“We will not die.” I toss my mane. “I shall tie on my armor, and yours; we shall run swift as wind, and fight if necessary; our soldiers wait to defend us in Gha-ghallo as we come.”

Parker’s body tenses. He knows I bark too loud. Humans are not runners; I doubt greatly his clothes serve as armor; and we are surrounded, watched by the mobs.

“Rulii,” says Parker, “How shall we avoid ambush if you can’t smell?”

“Indeed, we shall not,” I admit. “I can only think to wait, to rest. The haali will diminish with time.”

“I hope so.” Tension near Parker’s eyes shows him more deeply worried. He busies himself with displays, then opens a large panel on the wall which folds down to create itself a ledge. Onto this he climbs. “I also hope you are not troubled to sleep on the floor.”

“I am not troubled,” I say. But as I lay my head between my hands, I remember what Rizvi told me of the discovery that sent him here. “Parker, did you truly study the blood of the Barbarian who attacked you?”

“Yes. Much as I studied yours, before.”

When he found my molri. “What question did his blood answer?”

“What is the connection between heavy-furred ice-hunters, Hnnwan, Lowlanders?” Parker looks down at me, gleam in his eye. “Do you wish to know?”

I lean my head to one side. Take a breath—his discoveries always shake me. “Yes.”

“Long ago, ten thousand years, a group of ice-hunters came to the Hnnwan lands and stayed among them. All Lowlanders are born of their children. And still, now, children are born between them.”

“You saw all this in blood?” But I must believe him: if humans had not seen more than color in blood, he could not have saved my life.

“I did,” Parker says, sadly. “The scout I fought had an Aurrel father.”

I shudder. Rulii-soldier has seen enough to know what this means. But to us, tonight, it hardly matters. Tomorrow lies in wait. Little chance remains that we will not be torn in pieces, and Rizvi be left helpless to greet Majesty when he takes foot in Ro-roghell.

One thought brings comfort: today I have found him, Parker-my-brother; he is still alive, and he speaks to me.

Let sleep restore both of us, or this will not last.

Between the leaps of my running dream a Warm voice calls from the past:

“Rulii. Huntmate.”

The sound binds me first in armor, then in grief, for this is my fellow scout Llohi, gone four years and more, her voice hoarse with mourning. I must run to her.

Instead, a warm, soft touch, as if with a hairless tail-tip, comes on the back of my hand. Two more join it: three touches now, side by side by side just above my claws.

Ah, but they are alien fingers. Rousing, I smell Parker for the first time. Parker pulls his hand away; he crouches beside me, implausibly balanced upon his hind-toes.

“Rulii,” he says. “Someone is here outside. Someone who knows your name.”

I reply with words born out of sleep: “But Llohi runs no more.”

Parker shakes his head. “Look.”

His displays show the stones, and the grasslands, wide and pale with sunwake soon to come. Near our door someone paces on fours, showing exhausted—no Barbarian, but one of my own Lowland people. Such indeed was Llohi: the same dark-streaked mane, the same pale spots across her shoulders. Turned away as she is, at first I see only a body of ribs and scars, a tail held low, ears turning fore and back as if she expects attack imminent. Then she turns her face.

“Ar, it is!” I sit up on aching haunches, wrinkle my forehead. “Llohi, alive after so long? What happened to you?”

“Rulii,” she calls again, hoarse through the report of human instruments. “Wauuunnn, huntmate. Come out, that we may escape together.”

“Who is she?” Parker asks.

A wound to my soldier’s heart, I do not say. “She is open teeth ready to bite, Parker. What else can she be?” I shake my mane. “Once I ran scout beside her, but she was taken by the Barbarian mobs. We believed her executed. For her to be alive after so long hunting among Barbarians . . . ”

“It means the Hnnwan know you’re here.” Parker grunts. “She may speak of escape, but she lies. A trap.”

“Her hunt has not been much rewarded in these years.” Indeed, her condition rivals mine when I suffered molri-sickness. My joints ache in sympathy, and I reach for my case of medicine. “She is here to lure me out. We should answer her.”

“No!” Parker cries. “Why?”

I sigh. Pride, hope have no purpose now. “Today we are prey. Cornered, watched, and my nose scarcely recovered. Fight as I may, Parker, I could not stop the mob waiting to kill us. But the Barbarians—”

His mouth-corners turn down, showing indignant.

For him, I concede. “—the Hnnwan, to send Llohi they must have some unique intent. This will be the intent of a high general, the Hnnwan Head, or even the Nose herself in singular. Perhaps, not to kill.”

Parker’s brows draw together. “The Hnnwan Nose is a person? Not the Head?”

“The Nose leads the Head, Parker. So she has always done.” Ar, so many questions he could have asked me in safety! I snort, toss my mane. But the gesture multiplies my ache, threading pain along my muscles, the daily painful reminder.

I open my medicine case, prepare the vial and needle. Glance at Parker, who shifts feet and looks away while it bites, insect-like, into my blood. The slow relief makes me sigh.

“If we go out, they will take your armor,” Parker says. “They will take your medicine.”

“I can fight without armor.” He understands, though, too well. My muscles tense at the thought of need-sickness. “You must take my medicine, Parker. They will strip me of all I have, but you they may not.”

He speaks low, almost a growl. “I don’t know.”

Now Llohi has stopped pacing; she sits on haunches outside the door. In the display I see her pant. Her thinness pains me every time I look.

“Do you have meat, Parker?” I ask. “For two days, did you tell me? And shall you eat it all, and then you and I starve together while Majesty flushes Rizvi and her scientists from Ro-roghell? Or shall we chance that the Nose’s wishes do not include our deaths?” Majesty’s may yet, but we can escape only one pair of jaws at a time. “Think, Parker—should we go to Llohi, and live, you will scent more of Hnnwan ways than any other human.”

Now Parker laughs, deep in his chest. “You do know me, Rulii. I hope you’re not wrong.” He glances at the display where Llohi sits between giant stones with sunwake behind her, and rubs a hand over his mouth. “Go,” he says. “Approach her. But don’t let her kill you.”

“If you truly have meat, Parker, let me give it to her.”

He nods and fetches three slick packets. Between us we tear them open: there is jerky inside. Then he presses his hand to the wall. A hiss, and the door disappears sidewise into a crack. I don’t bring my armor with me, only the jerky in one hand. My nose has recovered enough to smell her, and a mix of favor-scents in her mane. Perhaps she serves the Hnnwan now, and will try to kill me. Or perhaps not. I walk on hind-toes to feign I trust.

“Bel-belly,” I call her as I used to, unthreatening. “Llo-llohi, huntmate. I have meat.”

“Meat?” She comes on fours, a cautious nose first from behind a mass of lichen-spangled rock. But at the sight of me she stands. Her mouth gapes wet. “Rulii! So they didn’t lie to me.”

I offer the jerky. She snatches it from my hand and sits to haunches. Three convulsive gulps and it’s all gone. She pants, but her scent is not so frightened now, nor angry. “Ooo, rrr,” she coos, softly as if to a pup, and shakes her mane. “What can have brought you to this terrible place?”

“Hark-hark: the trapped human is my huntmate.”

A snort. “Strange huntmate.”

“Sniff-sniff: and have you no strange huntmates now?”

Her tongue flickers over her lips. Her ears move here, there, searching the wind.

I coax with another question. “Sniff-sniff: do they hunt for me and the human Par-parker?”

“Hnnnn . . . ”

“Hark-hark: sure, they must. But I leap to run as your huntmate again.”

Her reserve breaks. She closes the distance between us, stands and presses her muzzle up beneath my chin.

“You have changed, Rulii.”

“Bel-belly: long running changes all of us.” I nod forward into her complex favor-scents. Amid layers of Barbarian favor, something disturbs me: a scent I should not know, but do. I have scented this one many times in La-larrai, always while I waited outside Majesty’s ice-fang door. “Sniff-sniff,” I ask. “Llo-llohi, have you run before in La-larrai?”

“No!” she barks, backs from me. Shakes her mane. “I already told them; I’m not to be used by ice-hunters.”

But perhaps by Barbarians? No matter that I suspect so, I must not incite her. “Bel-belly: forgive me.”

Her ears twitch, and again she licks her lips. “Rulii, they come.”

Yes—I hear them barking. My feet urge to run, as does my heart, but I only call, “Huntmate, ready yourself!”

Parker emerges from his small hiding place. He has added another layer of gray clothes, perhaps with intent to confuse, for I can’t see my metal case. His dark eyes rest solemn upon Llohi.

“Hark-hark,” he says, daring Cold words to claim dominance over her. “We place trust in you, Llo-llohi, huntmate of Ru-rulii. Bow-bow: stay close to us, and keep us from deadly jaws.”

She licks her lips again, but stands to match his height. “The Nose hunts,” she says, almost whining. “My own running is aimless and of no value. I lead huntmates to death.”

“Hark-hark!” I stand at her side. “Llo-llohi, I value you at my shoulder.” I beckon with my head to Parker. “Look, we are strength-of-three.”

“Wauunnn,” says Llohi.

Parker glances at me, shifts feet, showing anxious.

But only one path lies before us. We leave the urrgai-teeth to face the mob. In the light of sunwake they are no longer simple shadows; spots and mottled patterns of white and brown move constantly among them. Spots are common among Lowlanders, but never ice-hunters; it never meant much until now. I guess their numbers above five hands. I take care not to curl my lip, though the Barbarians gape aggressively, showing full arcs of lower teeth. Once the mob has us surrounded, the nearest hand of them stands to hind-toes: six flop-eared soldiers in leather armor studded with iron, fierce enough to kill, though they stand only to my shoulder. They share some favor-scents with Llohi, but none to match the strange one I recognize from Majesty’s private room.

“The Snapper comes at last beneath our claws,” a soldier declares. One of his loose jowls is spotted, the other gray.

Parker gives a quiet grunt of surprise to hear me named so. I don’t move, though the high-pitched Barbarian dialect makes my mane-hackles rise. Llohi’s ears and tail show submissive, yet she keeps courage enough to stay at my shoulder.

“We speak only to the Nose,” says Parker. Ar yes, he has learned much of their language while hidden behind his displays—even his tone hums higher, as if he speaks from throat and nose rather than chest.

“Wai!” the jowled soldier barks irritation. “Now the draped frog speaks? Shall we next hear demands from the wind, or the grass? Or perhaps from the one who abases herself before our Nose like a hlig?”

Llohi hints a growl, deep in her throat.

“Growl, do,” the soldier says. “That won’t convince the Nose of your loyalty. Maybe nothing will.”

“Bite-bite!” I interrupt in Aurrel. Once their ears turn to me, I use their dialect. “I know the Nose; she wishes to snap me with her own teeth. Take us to her, or she snaps you in my place.” I hint a step toward him.

The jowled soldier tenses—an urge to run, which he defeats by the width of a hair. Not so certain, is he, that I don’t mean to break his neck this instant!

He barks aloud: “Weight them!”

Soldiers mill and bump. Two approach holding blocks, blunt hinged jaws of southern rrghin-wood which they close around my hands. Worn smooth, these blocks, and stained with the blood of past prisoners. Llohi barks outrage as the latch shuts, and the nearest Barbarian hops back from her, dances position. Two more soldiers come for Parker, but these blocks will not admit hands of Parker’s shape. Should our captors force him, he will sustain injuries—

I growl, lunge toward the soldiers with the remaining blocks. They drop heads and back from Parker. So his hands are safe—the ease of their surrender worries me. The mob closes around us, nipping at my shoulders, pushing at my back. I walk; no choice. Amidst the dense bodies, I could not jump to fours even should my hands be freed. The heavy blocks rub my wrists, and strain muscles in my shoulders.

Parker flexes his fingers, looks at Llohi, then at me. Llohi has been permitted fours, but she stays nearby.

“Llo-llohi,” I call. “Sniff-sniff: will you not walk with us?”

She moves closer, but snorts disbelief. “Rulii, your human can’t stand strength-of-three! He runs like a lop-legged roullu.”

I glance at Parker, who says nothing. He is my friend, I want to say. If only that word could work the singular power on her that it does on humans! But I myself, despite years running alongside Parker, still struggled to accept the idea of interdependence without Rank. To anyone else, friend is only meaningless alien mouthing.

“Bow-bow: then at least, tell us why you were sent to bait us out. Sniff-sniff: what do they want with us?”

Llohi only snuffs in reply. But perhaps I scent an answer: loyalty must be what has kept her alive so long. If her loyalty has been questioned, she might use us to prove herself.

Within an hour, this walking, all on hind-toes, wears my hips to exhaustion. The blocks bruise my wrists, pull burning ropes through my shoulders and neck. Gusts of scent from the clumps of haali make me snort in disgust, make me envy Parker’s snuffed nose. All the while Parker walks unbowed, shows no pain—to walk is the human’s surpassing talent. Llohi licks her lips still, and her ears never cease to move. At times she yelps—I think, bitten by soldiers out of the mob. The mob moves, bumps, flows always around us: Barbarians permit touch to huntmates as they would to littermates.

At last we enter a wide region free of haali, and I spy the encampment ahead, upon the crest of a low hill. The wind, which blows from behind us, tells me nothing—but I have spent so long avoiding such a place! Ice thuds through my veins, and the vain old wish for molri’s careless pleasure rears its head.

We climb slowly into the camp. The scent from La-larrai is here, faint and layered. Most Barbarian soldiers sleep uncovered, but officers mob in large dome-tents, layered over with furred leather. The leather is reghi, for Barbarians do not raise urrgai as we Lowlanders do, and a mob would expend much effort in any hunt to bring a wild one down. Each skin dangles a bounder’s long skinny hinds; the tents almost appear covered by human fingers.

At every side, Barbarian eyes emerge to contempt us. They don’t seem busy enough for soldiers preparing an offensive. I scent three possible paths ahead: we are taken to the Head to be torn apart; we are proposed as hostages in the war; we are penned and starved. Anyway, we have no more hope of secrecy.

I tense, look to Parker.

Parker’s brown eyes meet mine; for the hundredth time, he glances down at my weighted hands, wriggles his long brown fingers. True, he could free me in an instant. But as I have done from the first, I shake my head. Where should we escape to, and how? I learned early that humans can’t run; by now, I would run little better.

The breeze balks suddenly, then swings, carrying a sickening smell of blood and waste. As the ground slopes downward again, I see the cage. It is twisted of fang-wire to imitate the domed form of the Barbarian tents, but lacks any kind of floor or covering. Inside are six captives, all Lowlanders strange to me. One has recently been wounded. Their ears turn; their mane-hackles rise. One of three paths, immediate death before the Nose, recedes in my estimation. Hostages, then, or starvation—I glance at Llohi’s standing ribs, her scars.

Llohi growls, soft and low in her throat. Her scent sharpens. “I was told to bring them to the Nose.” One of the caged captives bares teeth at her.

“Wai!” replies the jowled Barbarian soldier. “Quiet, Aurrel.”

The entrapping mob squeezes inward on all sides. A member of the leading hand unlocks the entrance to the cage, and they shove me forward, down the slope. Not until the barrier of wire is almost upon me do I sense that Parker and Llohi have been pushed in a different direction.

“Parker!” I cry.

“Rulii, I won’t leave you,” he shouts. But he’s wrong. I came into danger to keep him from Barbarian jaws—and he has my medicine! We must not be separated . . .

“Parker! Brother Parker!” I lift the blocks they have hung upon me, shove the nearest Barbarians so they fall and scramble back. But more take their place: so Barbarians have always fought. If I attack, will they remain calm, or simply kill me despite the wishes of the Head? I see Parker and Llohi speaking, protesting to captors who will not listen. “Wauuunn, Parker!”

Barbarians close on me like jaws; they shove me into the cage of fang-wire.

The other six captives advance up the mudded slope, panting, hackles raised.

I shake my mane. “Bow-bow, speak to me! I offer no dispute, no threat.”

They continue forward. Outside comes laughter from what remains of the Barbarian mob, watching us turn upon one another. Do they not care for the Nose’s favor? Or was this her plan from the first? What have these soldiers lost, that they would attack me?

Only one of the prisoners retains Rank beads, half-lost in her matted mane. She retains some strength, too; she leaps forward, too short a jump to strike. As I flinch she catches my hands. The weights fall free.

Ar, relief! Without thinking, I drop to fours, but my hands have numbed, and I stumble.

She turns to the others. “Bow-bow: enough, all of you. This is once-General Ru-rulii, now Majesty Gur-gurne’s personal representative out of La-larrai. To grapple amongst ourselves will only weaken us.”

“Thank-thank!” I gasp. Sit to haunches, so I may rub life back into my hands.

“I am named Dunurr,” she says.

“Hark-hark, then, Dun-dunurr. We are caged together; we must run together as huntmates. I shall bring you all a chance to escape.”

Some of the others snort, but Dunurr shows satisfaction in her body-talk, her scent.

Do I deserve her trust? Do I not deceive them? But perhaps I can indeed bring them from this place. Parker remains yet uncaged: my human brother with his subtle glances and dexterous fingers. He will not forget me again.

Time is an insidious enemy, to steal my strength from within; I fight my fear with planning. The latch of our cage is enclosed in a shell of rrghin-wood, much like the weights I wore; whenever the guard has turned away, I have attempted to defeat it, but have only managed to injure myself on the wall of fang-wire. Surely Parker’s long fingers would not struggle as mine do, but he is not here.

I must believe Parker safe, unwounded. I must believe he shall return before night—or surely, before tomorrow sunwake when need-sickness will betray me utterly.

I stand to hind-toes and gaze beyond the woven wire to the encampment. All but the nearest tents are hidden behind the crest of the slope. No sign of Parker, nor do I smell him—my nose is assaulted with the smell of our cage, and even during brief turns of the wind, his scent is drowned in those of our enemies. But the scent from La-larrai is here. Whoever spoke to Majesty behind his ice-fang door has walked along the wall of our cage, often and recently.

“They will come for you.” Dunurr has sidled up to me again. The wind pushes her dark mane around her face.

“Hark-hark: I expect nothing else,” I reply. “But my huntmates run free. They will return for me, and we may escape.”

Her laugh is bitter. “Aliens are aliens, and Llohi is no huntmate to anyone. You will meet the Teeth first.”

I don’t wish to stay long enough to meet the Nose’s honor guard. “Sniff-sniff: why do you say so of Llo-llohi?”

“Why do you think she lured you here? The Barbarian Nose searches for an Aurrel spy. We have all been questioned, but only Llohi runs free; she believed that capturing you would deflect suspicion. Indeed, she wishes for the Nose’s favor.” An indignant snort. “But that, the Nose keeps for the Teeth, her beloved children. It’s an elusive quarry, indeed, that Llohi would trade our company, our lives for.”

Dunurr’s words pain me. I shake my mane. The scent I recognize is certainly the spy; I don’t know to laugh or howl that Llohi has chosen not to betray her Barbarian dominators. “Bel-belly, Dun-dunurr: we must seek some opportunity to escape, to find Par-parker. Once freed from this cage, and fighting together, we might overwhelm sentries and gain enough distance to run.”

A glance at me, showing skeptical. “We might.”

Yes, we might. I could not carry Parker long, nor I believe would the others consent to do so, yet I must believe this possible.

A new voice speaks; ice stabs into my blood. “Wai! Dunurr, still dream of escape, do you?”

Dunurr growls. “Rregl . . . ”

For a Barbarian, Rregl is the largest I’ve ever seen: near as big as Dunurr. His ruff stands thick at the back of his neck; something in his face seems familiar. Fur grows unusually long and uneven before his ears, under his chin. Spots dapple his flanks below a woven leather vest bearing two red stripes of Rank. He has come upon us from downwind while we spoke in ignorance.

“And do I hear the Snapper wants to find his kept human?” he asks, then throws his head back and laughs in a low register. “That Parker creature is the most useless thing I’ve ever seen.”

To this, Dunurr does not object. I won’t, either; it serves me better if they think him so.

Rregl lifts his head in a signal bark. By instinct I stand, though I can’t catch its meaning.

Dunurr murmurs, “He summons the Teeth, Rulii.”

Yes, here they come down the hill, walking on hind-toes. I have heard tell of the fighters who guard the Head—but I never imagined them so tall, so broad. Were Parker to look into their blood, no doubt he would find Aurrel in every one.

They gather around Rregl just outside the wall of fang-wire: a small group of two hands, each in a leather vest with a single red stripe crossing the chest, marking them his submissors. Rregl reaches inside the rrghin-wood shell and unlatches our wire cage; the submissor Teeth drop to fours in dense formation to stop any of us should we try to run.

“Rulii,” Rregl says. His accent doesn’t deform my name as Barbarian mouths so often do. “Out. The Nose demands you.”

I stand, for dignity, and to show that I will not flee. But as I draw near, Rregl’s scent strikes my nose. Shock raises hairs all down my back. This is the scent from La-larrai! How can it belong to a guard captain in the Barbarian lands? I say nothing as I walk to flank him. With each exhalation I doubt, yet each inhalation again confirms the impossible:

I have found Majesty’s spy; he is one whom the Nose most deeply trusts.

And now he leads me into the jaws of death.

In waning light, and surrounded, I crest the hill among the tents. Rregl stalks at my hind haunch. With each step I contempt him more, that he would claim my huntmate’s skin for his own protection. The scavenger!

This time I am pushed to a broad area where the grass has been cut short; likely reghi were grazed here to prepare the camp. Before us stands a bright red tent many times the size of the others, all draped with the dyed skins of the bounders. My escorts push me into it. Furred leather divides against my face, and I find myself in a broad circle lit by fat-lamps in globes of glass. I scent Parker, Llohi, both here somewhere and unwounded. I blink; my eyes adjust.

“Bow before the Head!” Rregl barks. Pain breaks in my right flank—he has hit me with a whip. I fall to haunches, lower my head, but risk a glance up.

The Head sits before me on stools made of Aurrel thigh-bones: the Nose nearest, Eyes and Ears in appropriate positions behind her. Fullblood Barbarians, these, smaller than the Teeth, each one’s vest woven of red leather with stripes in black. The gray muzzles of the Ears reflect their role as advisors, and the Eyes stare aggressively.

The Nose stands. She carries herself with such Cold dignity that I wonder she is truly born of this flop-eared people. On her forehead she wears a jewel set in a stylized setting of copper wire, tied firmly behind her ears and beneath her chin with plaited leather: as she turns her head, it returns lamplight in red. Her eyes settle on me: one warm gold, one the cold blue of ice. I scent now why Llohi finds her Coldness compelling.

“I thank you, my valued pups,” she says to the Teeth, with maternal gentleness. But they can’t all be her own offspring; they are too close in age, too different in markings—and I believe she would sooner gut an Aurrel than take him for consort. “Come, human Parker, I have done as you asked. Will you now speak?”

“Yes,” Parker replies. “With Rulii here I will speak.”

“Good.” She tosses her head. “And I will not contempt you for hunting alongside him.”

An Eye growls behind her. “The Snapper has killed ten hands and three.”

“Come, let’s not speak of a war no one wants.” The Nose gapes a half-smile. “We speak of humans. Your people mistook, Parker, when you chose to take foot in the far north. Aurrel were never suited to nose your bait. You should have chosen Hnnwan.”

Parker says nothing, but presses his full lips into his mouth. His arms twitch as if at a desire to fold them.

“My valued Rregl brought me this interesting thing. See?” From a pouch that hangs at her vest, the Nose draws a small, gleaming object I have seen before. After I bit and threw him, Parker spoke into one of those, to call for help. Parker grasps for it, but she moves it out of reach, examines, turns it between thumbs and finger-pads. “Now. Is it for such interesting things that you hoard and precious them, Snapper?”

“No,” I answer, truthfully.

“You see?” the Nose looks to Parker. “Aurrel do not have a mind to enjoy art, tools, instruments. Hnnwan do. I could take you to the dune lands, show you our Glasstown. Do you not wonder at our lamps? Do you realize our children drink from bowls finer than those possessed by Majesty Gur-gurne himself? What, is it for their size that you chose Aurrel over Hnnwan when you took foot here from your star territories?”

I can smell her anger; I think Parker detects it well enough in her face, her voice. He spreads his hands—a human gesture I know well, but she may not recognize. “Great Nose, I did not choose the course of my people’s hunt here. As talker, I run as submissor among humans.” His dark eyes seek mine.

For the first time, I wonder who did choose: was it their scientists? Their officers?

An Ear speaks from her place beside the leather wall, in a shivering voice. “Submissor or not, you, a talker, came into our lands. Should we not expect talk?”

Parker huffs a breath, but does not mention Majesty Gur-gurne or the laws that enforced his caution, his choice of hiding place. “Amid a war, should I have expected talk?” he asks. “When Rregl found me, he showed more eager to hunt.”

“Parker,” I gasp, unable to keep silent. “Rregl? Was it Rregl who found you?”

The Nose snaps to look at Rregl, scent and body-talk all disapproval. “You were not to hunt him, pup.”

Rregl turns his guilt into a lash of his whip, stinging my shoulder like a wasp. “Silence before the Nose! If I had meant to hunt him, he would not now stand alive. He was my quarry to deliver to my great mother.”

I snap my teeth shut. But Rregl is a spy—did he act for the Nose in this? Or for Majesty?

“He was not your quarry,” Llohi growls. “You had your chance to lure him, and failed. Even allowed him to wound you! I was the one who brought him in.”

“And we all know why, traitor—”

“Enough!” the Nose barks. “Parker, the Head is willing to forget human mistakes, even your association with Aurrel rapists and killers. We are civilized. We must now enter into interdependence with you. We wish human instruments.”

Hnnn—would humans share such things with Barbarians when they never shared them with us? One glance at Parker tells me the answer. His scent now is fear, and there is movement in the fur of his throat.

“Great Nose,” he says, “I recognize the quality of Hnnwan civilization. Your interest honors me. Yet, as talker—as submissor among my people—I may not promise instruments to anyone.”

“Then begin by explaining those I have seen.” She holds up the object they stole from him. “This speaking shell. The shrieking iron bird that carries people.”

Parker bows his head. “That is a communicator. Humans fly in shuttles.”

One of the Eyes gives a snort. “He drags feet, great Nose.”

“No, forgive me,” says Parker. “I can’t explain them.”

“Or you don’t wish to.”

“Great Nose, I’m not a scientist—”

“I didn’t bring you here to teach words I don’t understand!” the Nose snaps. She meets eyes with other members of the Head; her scent changes ominously. “I understand, now, human. This is because of the war. You refuse to explain because you’ve chosen the Aurrel aggressors. Again.”

Parker’s eyes widen, rimmed white. “No, Great Nose—”

“Put him with the huntmates he has chosen!” she snaps. Three of the Teeth shove Parker toward me. If we are returned to the cage, perhaps this time Parker may allow us to escape . . .

But when I try to go to him, the Nose barks, “Not you, Snapper. You remain here.”

“Parker!” I whisper.

He knows my danger, once he is no longer with me. But rough hands are upon him, and teeth surround him, ready to snap. Grimacing, he must suffer them to lead him out.

Now, only Llohi stands my huntmate, and perhaps not even she—wauunnn!

“Snapper,” says the Nose, slowly. Each motion of her tongue strokes my name with hatred.

I bow. “Great Nose, I did not come here to fight. I came only to find the human Parker who was lost.”

Her Cold eye flashes upon me. “That was your first mistake, then. Your second was killing my scout.”

Ar, I see where this path leads. I shall not shiver, but dare a leap of risk before I face death.

“Great Nose, I will not mistake again. You must know: Rregl runs as spy for Majesty Gur-gurne.”

“Wai!” she cries, and lunges for my face.

I flinch—she will tear me open!—but instead she only grasps me. Her teeth cut keen discomfort atop my muzzle and under my chin, and her breath scents of blood.

I hold very still.

Llohi has moved nearer; I scent her fear, hear her lick her lips.

“Nose.” This is the voice of an Ear, hoarse but unwavering. “Think of our search. We know the Snapper runs second to Majesty Gur-gurne; make him explain himself.”

The Nose releases me, leaving pricks of pain behind. She backs by the bare distance of a breath. “Speak, Snapper. I think you lie to spare your wretched skin.”

“Great Nose. I have never seen Rregl before today, but I have scented him. In La-larrai City, his odor issued from Majesty’s private rooms while I waited outside for audience. They have spoken together at length, at least three times.”

Rregl shifts with a growl, but the Nose moves with shocking speed. She drags him by the muzzle down upon the layered skin floor, pins him there with one hand on his ear.

“You!” she snaps.

“Hnnn . . . ”

“I know your blood; you vowed to outgrow it. Do you now reject the honor of my adoption? Did your mother’s life teach you nothing of Aurrel barbarians?”

A thought of horror bites me: Rregl’s features did seem familiar—and Majesty has tolerated him. Could Gur-gurne have sired him amid the fighting? By what ignoble violence, and upon whom?

Llohi howls triumphantly. “See, Great Nose, I have not betrayed you!”

Rregl whines, with his head still held against the ground. “I followed your command, Mother! Not to hunt but to capture the human, for the good of our people! Believe me or not, as you wish, but Llohi is not innocent. She intends to help the Snapper escape.”

“No!” cries Llohi. “He lies!”

“Teeth, hold him,” orders the Nose. She releases Rregl to them, turns, considers me and Llohi with her two-color eyes. “Two Aurrel have done me a service,” she croons. “Llohi brought me my quarry; Rulii showed me a spy. Perhaps they should be rewarded.”

I don’t trust the way she speaks; I remain silent.

“Great Nose, no reward,” says Llohi. “But, just once, believe me.”

“Come, Llohi!” the Nose barks. “You, Rulii, shall fight until death for my entertainment. Whichever survives may go free.”

Wauunnn—I, kill a huntmate?

We are shoved out into the merciless light near sunset. Signal barks echo through the camp; the Teeth spread out to surround us in a broad circle. If I ran full fours, I could break their thin barrier, but outside it too many Hnnwan are gathering: scavengers drawn to death. Who here would not wish to watch two Aurrel barbarians attempt to kill each other?

Llohi’s every breath is a horrified whine.

Rregl has been dragged out beside us. Considering him now in this harsh light, I understand something new: the fur around his face is not uneven. It has been clipped. Left untouched awhile like Parker’s, it would grow to a full mane. In Majesty’s presence, he could pass for Aurrel, pretend to stand ally. Here, he clips for the same reason: to gain acceptance among Barbarians.

“Bel-belly, Llo-llohi,” I say, low. “What can we do?”

“We won’t grapple long, Rulii. I am already dead.”

“Hnn, hark-hark, even should I kill you, they will only tear me apart. Could we break free together?”

“As much chance of that as to escape the prisoner cage,” she sighs. “No. This trap has closed. Just grant me the first jump.”

Two heavy-shouldered Teeth shove between us, force us to opposite sides of the circle. I’ll do as she asks, if only to honor our old interdependence. Does she lie, and hide a spring-knife to end me? Shall I attempt to flee alone? No; to do so would be to invite a different snap of death, while Parker yet remains prisoner. But shall I attempt to kill her, show myself barbarian for a Barbarian’s pleasure?

I glance at the Nose, who has had her stool of bones brought to her by a submissor, and indulgently strokes favor into his mane. “Ready!” she calls.

Llohi, I, confront one another across the broad space of grass stubble. I pant one breath, two. I would have trusted her with my life not so long ago. Were I not surrounded by enemies, fearing for Parker and awaiting Majesty’s arrival, I might choose instead to end my life in Cold honor as Rulii-soldier.

A sound pierces the breath of anticipation: “Ruuuuuuuuu!”

Parker’s cry!

My ears turn, so my head: next, Aurrel war-howls shiver the darkening air. Ranks of Barbarians burst like ants underfoot.

Llohi dashes, not toward me, but toward the sleek-furred Nose on her bone stool.

Upon reflex, I leap after.

My thoughts race to catch up: Parker has escaped, has brought the other prisoners to attack! Llohi planned to jump at the Nose! The Nose will maim her! I must get there first!

I’m not fast enough. The Nose rises with her singular speed, to make meat of the unready. But Llohi knows her, adjusts; they clash teeth. The Eyes close ranks to bite at Llohi, who snarls, tangles, struggles.

I close the last distance. Grab one Eye by neck-shoulder and fling him in the face of Teeth closing in. Llohi goes for the Nose again, fails to grasp but shoves her scrambling backward.

The Barbarian mob are not ants; they’ll close on us in another breath, in spite of our huntmates. If the Nose wins, Llohi dies; but if Llohi wins and the Nose dies, we die with her, because we can’t run, unless . . .

I knock Llohi down, leap at the Nose, and snap—she does not turn teeth in time. Someone’s jaws bite at my right shoulder, but too late: I have grasped their leader’s neck.

I stand, straining, to hind-toes.

Llohi bites at the squirming body in my teeth, but I cuff her away.

“Wai!” cries a voice unlike the others. Parker—ar, yes, Parker!—appears beside me. How well he knows me, for he grasps my intent instantly. “Bow-bow! Hold,” he shouts in Aurrel, then, lithe in his tongue, continues in our captors’ language: “We have snapped the Nose! Should you wish her to live, back now. We leave this place without hunters.”

The Nose’s struggles have slowed; I lower her just enough to loosen the grip that blocks her air. She heaves for life against my tongue.

Every Barbarian yet standing backs from us; every tail is lowered. Out of the jaws of death, now with the entire camp as my prize! Were I still General, such quarry would have seen me richly rewarded by Majesty. We can’t keep it, however; we need our lives more.

Parker approaches, tugs at the Nose’s body in a place I can’t see; soon he produces the object she taunted us with. He studies it a moment, touches it; it glows from somewhere inside. “Rizvi.” This is the only thing I understand among the tense words he says to it. And then to me he says, “Rulii, this way.”

I flank him; we walk with purpose from the circle, and Barbarians clear our path.

Once among the tall grasses, though, we struggle to gain distance. My fight-passion wanes with the daylight, and pain begins in my straining jaw, my neck, my tooth-raked shoulder. Parker still holds the glowing thing in his hand, and murmurs into it. It murmurs back. Perhaps it gives him direction, when his nose will not. Slowly, one by one out of the grass, other Aurrel converge with us: the Ranked female prisoner, Dunurr, and two males whose scents I recognize from the cage. The wounded one does not appear; likely he and the others have been torn apart.

I suck air around my teeth—would that I could breathe through my mouth! I drop to fours, but the moment my captive finds feet, she struggles, and I must dangle her again. Exhaustion will find me soon.

“Rulii, wait,” says Parker. He searches his clothes again, this time extracts something I can scarcely see in this gap between sunset and moonwake. He brings it close, grapples for the hands of the Hnnwan Nose, smaller even than his, while her breath pleads objection between my teeth. “It’s wire,” he says at last. “I’ve tied her hands behind her back; you can let her go.”

Behind her back? Is that possible? I won’t let go without caution; this Barbarian can still bite. When I release her, though, she falls on her face, cursing us in the name of worms and hlig, the lowest of the low. Her hands are not truly behind her, but wound to one another by wire which crosses her back. At last I can gulp the air, toss my mane.

“We have to move,” says Parker.

I know this. “Southeast—is Gha-ghallo,” I pant. “Suffer me—a few more breaths, first.”

“Rulii,” barks Dunurr. “Someone comes.”

Our weakness shows in a desperate scramble to face the enemy—but instead, Llohi limps out of the grass.

“Llo-llohi,” I cry. “Hark-hark: you run still! This is news of joy!”

“For now,” she replies.

Dunurr hints a growl. “Traitor. Shall she not bring enemies upon us?”

“Par-parker, bow-bow,” I say. “Take up the prisoner, quickly.” I hate to use Cold words with him, yet the others will take offense if I address him so intimately. Parker obeys, drags the Nose to her feet. She is our best, our only defense. Now, “Bel-belly, Llo-llohi,” I say, “we have no time to care for your wounds.”

“I know. I have scented Rregl among a mob sent to follow us at hunter’s distance downwind.”

They have permitted him freedom? No time to wonder. “Bow-bow: don’t hurt the Nose. If she dies we lose all protection. No matter your condition, Parker can’t run.”

She huffs, full of amusement though her scent speaks of distaste. “I understand.”

At last, with an enraged hostage and mistrustful allies, we begin the long night’s walk to Gha-ghallo.

Beneath a lowering moon, we straggle across the lands I once ran so easily. Close to Gha-ghallo, yet still out of howl; and slower with every pace. The Hnnwan Nose has become too exhausted for hind-toes. At present, it is Dunurr who drags her by her neck-ruff, while Llohi keeps careful distance. Though the Nose has not resisted, we dare not release her to fours, because the Barbarian mob trails us still. Among us we split the burden, yet this work wears us like a long hunt does its prey. The mob taunts us now with closeness; we will soon be brought to ground.

“Rulii,” Parker says, walks beside me in a faint bubble of green light from his speaking instrument. “What can we do?”

I breathe in the scents of our company, the dirt, the grasses. Our tired footsteps whisper in a fragile peace, which the next breeze might disperse. “Before long we must turn and grapple, else have no fight left in us. Sniff, Parker, can you not bring human help?”

He shakes his dense, curled mane. “I have spoken with Rizvi of our danger. But a shuttle would be a mistake.”

I shake once, nose to tail; it gives me little relief. “Parker, I once told Rizvi no shuttles, because shuttles shriek their presence across great distance, and Majesty Gur-gurne was not to hear of your disappearance. But now—”

“Now Majesty will hear of this surely, for his spy still runs free. Shall he not banish me in any case?”

I feel my mane-hackles rise, but my strength ebb. He has matched my thoughts exactly. “Were you to leave us, Parker—you know my life’s hunt would end hungry. I could not run longer.”

Parker grumbles discomfort. “As I told the Nose, I am not Ranked to summon shuttles,” he says. “I have asked Rizvi to call an Allied Systems Officer, but messages travel slowly across star territories.”

Not good news, with our lives in danger. “Better to get help from Gha-ghallo, then, if we can. For the question of Majesty, I can think only to offer him the Nose in return for his continued favor.”

“NO!”

This bark, sharp as a fang, pierces the night. Llohi joins us, lips pulled back from her teeth. “Do you understand nothing, Rulii?”

“Wauuunn,” I reply. “What choice do Majesty’s threats leave me?”

“The Nose leads with sharp teeth to her enemies, generous hands to her own people,” says Llohi. “She shows mercy to war pups whom others would contempt, raises them to her own.” A snort. “Even if she never showed such mercy to me.”

“Bel-belly: more mercy than Majesty himself,” I can agree. “I understand what it means to wish better for my people. Yet it is not her mercy upon which our lives, deaths shall depend, but his thin patience.”

“Wai! Iirr-aa! Hia-hia! Haurr!”

Signal barks?

I whirl: Dunurr has stopped, snarling, shaking the Nose, though the Nose makes no further sound.

“Stop!” Llohi snaps. “Leave her, she has called the mob to retreat!”

Dunurr drops the Nose into the grass, faces Llohi as if for Rank dispute.

I move between them, teeth bared. Scant moonlight suffices to convey my message: it’s not time to grapple. I turn ears to the darkness a moment, but no answering signals return from it.

I move to where the Nose struggles in the grass. “Speak, Nose, if you care to argue for yourself.”

“Hnn—unbind me, Snapper, if you would negotiate.”

A risk. But if we don’t invite speech, we invite the mob. “Bow-bow, Par-parker: release her hands.”

Parker approaches in his green bubble of light; casts me a glance, showing doubtful, but unwinds the wire.

The Nose painfully gathers herself to haunches, tests fingers against the crushed grass. As I thought: unable to bear her full weight. It should still be some time before she can run on fours. “You must not trust Gur-gurne,” she says. “He lives to rape and destroy.”

“No one must trust him,” I agree. “He is too Cold to be trusted. Yet he may snap my throat if I don’t provide tribute won, to justify my incursion into Hnnwan lands.”

Her ice-blue eye gleams. “Hrr, wai! He wanted incursion.”

“Ar, did he?” I snort. “Surely you don’t claim he would reward me.”

“No; he’d punish you as I did—for enjoyment. The incursion of Parker, he accepted as perfect tribute. He might not have expected you to follow the human, but he will relish that gift, just as he relishes war.”

“This Barbarian barks without meaning,” interrupts Dunurr. “Majesty strides in this war with victory as his quarry. He fights for the safety of the tribute nations.”

“No,” the Nose growls. Were she not surrounded, she should most likely bite.

Dunurr feints a lunge at her.

“Bow-bow: wait,” I say. “Nose, how should he want war?”

She answers easily. “He fights to win safety for his people, and for himself in singular.”

One of Dunurr’s companions, behind her in the dim, barks a rough laugh. “He stands safe now. He runs in La-larrai.”

“Hrr, yes,” the Nose answers, all contempt. “Safe among a few submissors of his own fur, while in the far distance, thousands of Lowlanders at his command fling bodies against us, and we at them.”

I back one step, shake my mane. To hear a Barbarian speak so, know so intimately of the secret I have suspected for half my life! It confuses me. “What? So he has always done. Our lives to him are grass.”

“Just so,” says the Nose, intent now. “Grass tied tight into a wall, lest it break loose and grow vengeful teeth. The perfect strategy for his own hunt—until humans came.”

Parker nudges close by my shoulder, showing nervous. “We should move.”

“Surely you see,” the Nose continues. “The war slowed when humans came to Ro-roghell. Soldiers could be replaced with haali bushes. Pups were born and happily parented among the companies. Wai! we thought, will a messenger come to offer peace? Only instead does my Tooth Rregl come, speaking of covert movement of the enemy, urging for new weapons, new strategies, quick action before the Aurrel can fully mobilize. Incitement.”

I shake my mane. If she speaks true, then Majesty himself provides incitement to both sides. And I scented no evidence of any coming offensive.

The Nose tests her hands again; her scent sours and she breathes a faint hnnn. “Then one day Rregl comes scented all excitement, tells me of a human come to our lands, a talker bearing the instruments we have sought. In all certainty he speaks, yet, mark! When sent by my command, he takes days to find him.”

As the first hint of sunwake now creeps into the sky, I begin to scent her meaning. I had wondered that Rregl was the one to find Parker—how was he to learn of a human carrying tools into the Lands, except from Majesty?

“Parker—” I shake my head, murmur in Aurrel. “Majesty knew of your presence here from the first. With intent, he sent Rregl to flush you from your careful shelter, into the bite of his own laws.”

Parker utters one of his own words that hisses and ticks. “But not to flush me in singular, I think. To flush all humans from Aurru.”

“And then, in sending a messenger to me in singular, he baited me into a rescue.”

Parker’s voice is a growl. “We can’t argue our intent, nor our people’s interdependence, if we are both dead.”

Wauuunn, can it be true? Do I scent the end of our project, and my own death imminent? Panic rouses my need, though full sunwake needs some time yet. When it subsides, it leaves a deep ache behind. “Hnnn, Parker . . . ”

Dunurr approaches in the deep grass-shadows, still tensed for Rank dispute and scenting anxious. “Rulii, why do you listen to Barbarian lies? We may as well offer our bellies now! Will the mob obey signals to retreat, or understanding their leader was forced, come upon us belling?”

She is correct to scent danger. “Thank-thank, Dunurr,” I say. “We must go.”

“Rulii,” says Parker. “To move risks worse, if we spend our fight strength needlessly. We need help.”

He should say so! His people are those who possess shuttles, weapons—yet always they have backed from aggression, and kept instruments to themselves. If I insist to involve them, will they not judge the price too great, and leave Aurru of their own will? Yet we do need help, and further, we need proof that the Hnnwan Nose speaks true, which can only come from Rregl, or from Majesty himself, or both.

I scent a way forward, narrow as a single hair.

“Sniff-sniff.” I wave to one of Dunurr’s companions. “How close does the hunting mob run now? Can you scent them? Bow-bow: go, and return swiftly.”

He makes a single sighting leap into the air, and runs crosswind into the grasses.

“Nose,” I say, low. “If Barbarians, Lowlanders both are victims of Majesty, are we truly enemies? My killing orders always came from him, and still, now, he runs to incite us against one another—perhaps even to kill Parker, who might negotiate between us. But what if we find proof of his intent?”

She snuffs. “How?”

“Run my huntmate in this and I shall guarantee your safety. We shall bait Rregl here, and in Ro-roghell, put Majesty to the test.”

The Nose says nothing, but her scent changes.

“This is a risk,” says Parker. “Should she turn teeth—”

I lean to his ear. “We may die, yes. But we may die in any case. We have allies in Gha-ghallo, perhaps within reach. Shall we not attempt to uncover Majesty’s scheme? To break his hold upon Lowlander and Barbarian lives alike?”

Parker hesitates, shifts feet. He has told me of human reluctance to stand between the teeth of enemies here, yet Majesty has now betrayed his people also; he does understand me. “If we can live so long . . . ”

Panting breaths approach—Dunurr’s companion. “General,” he says, “Except Rregl, these are Barbarians, not Teeth. They have retreated, but not far, from here downwind, where I suspect they attempt to understand the Nose’s intent.”

“Thank-thank. Bow-bow: now we move. Dun-dunurr, run to within howl of Gha-ghallo and summon Captain Burr-burrzhi and his scouts to fight for us.”

“Ar, bite! Must we call you General now?”

“Bow-bow! Orders upon the instant, else die with us!”

Her ears flick back, but with no more objection, she leaps to fours and away. May she run swift as wind, and the scouts faster!

“Llo-llohi, you shall remain here with Parker and the Nose.” Llohi gapes as if to laugh; her flickering ears suggest she doubts still, but she makes no sound.

“You set me for bait,” the Nose snorts. Her understanding of our language surpasses my expectation.

“No; you three are lower jaw,” I explain, in hope she will understand honor meant, and hunt with us. To Dunurr’s two companions I add, “Bow-bow: we three move as upper jaw, with your guidance to avoid the enemy.”

“This way, General.”

We crouch low as riverbottom llirr, seeing little more between the grasses than we would in mud. Nose-to-tail, intent, but limping since we ache in every limb. As our path curves, I lift my nose to where the wind brings me faint report of those we left behind. I should struggle to count them were they not each so distinct: Aurrel, Hnnwan, human. This scent I hope will pose mystery enough that Rregl will think before he acts.

Creep, creep further—ar, I fear my limbs shall fail in a fight! But I must breathe deep, keep on, believe I remain yet Rulii-soldier. The night still ages; impending sunwake grays the open sky, and the breeze weakens. If this be my final strength, I must use it well.

My ears bring me sounds of a charge through the grass, ahead and to our right.

In silent agreement, we leap toward it. But a swift pain penetrates to my bones, steals half my stride. The ache eases as I run—how I had longed to do this!—but I can’t recapture my place between my huntmates. I leap once, sight the mob ahead: two hands of Barbarians who crush the grass, speed toward the bait head by head by head.

Rregl is not there.

My weakness turns strange advantage: no longer between huntmates, I turn back toward our first intended path. Two strides, and I dare another sighting leap.

Ar, here he is, too close!

Perhaps he intended to seize us three from behind; now he gapes teeth as Barbarians do—

I don’t try to land, but roll to one side. Good fortune carries him past, and me unharmed, though his armor has scraped my flank. I roll to my feet, turn teeth and bite—slash blood from his hind knee but can’t hold. Ar, his teeth at my nape! I thrash him off.

Now he comes for my shoulder; I bite for his neck. We each snap mostly mane, though our shoulders clash.

Already I am all pain. He has walked as far as I, but he has youth—also, has not had to carry a prisoner. And sunwake breathes downfall at the back of my neck. I won’t beat him.

I scramble up, run.

Crushed grasses guide me in the mob’s path toward the Nose, Llohi, Parker. My dash has surprised Rregl, for his harsh breath trails me at some distance. My effort can’t match his, but so long as they are not too far ahead . . .

I spy the mob by their tails, their spots. No breath even to howl, so I will use this surprise in aid of my friend. I stride, leap; when I come down two pairs of hinds splay beneath me; I bite fast one and two. The taste of Barbarian blood. Yelps of pain and rage, and teeth turn to tear me. I bite again, gasp for breath, bite, push forward, not even a stride’s distance but can’t see Parker, Rregl will pounce upon my hinds! Though blind to where he comes, I hop to one side. Rregl barks—surprise? A Barbarian screams. Still I push forward; I must be all teeth else they will down me. Sudden enemy feet pound my back, teeth seize my nape—I roll—the teeth tear away, but my legs do not bear me up again. I have not won Dunurr enough time.

Rregl stands over me on fours; his eyes glitter hate.

I gasp, “Bel-belly: Majesty Gur-gurne uses you, Rregl. This is not honor.”

He doesn’t answer. Soldiers squeal and he looks up, away.

I follow his gaze, though it puts my neck at risk. Ar, Llohi! Parker! Llohi comes on fours atop Barbarian backs, Parker less nimble on his two wades through beside her, spring-knife in hand, which she must have given him. In the instant of my enemy’s inattention I gather, struggle, find my feet. Ar, we are strength of three now, hearts strong in interdependence, and teeth sharp! We shall die with courage!

Rregl leaves us to his soldiers this time. They are too many, and all teeth, taking blood everywhere they lunge. Llohi crumples first. I lose her under Barbarian attackers.

Parker shouts, stumbles—I glance to him—here’s Rregl, who fastens his teeth on my already-wounded shoulder. Wauuunn! I roll to crush him, but my strength is not enough. I am down in the tumble crush of bodies, scent death coming to snap—

“Wai! Rrrrrrai-ii! Uurrr hia! Hau!”

The struggle stops at once; unique amidst my agony I feel the sick pull of fangs withdrawing from my flesh. I gasp for air.

The Nose walks, tall on hind-toes, between Barbarian subjects who back from her path. They lower their heads, lick her hands. Rregl sits to haunches, bows, calls out:

“Great Nose, we here deliver you from Aurrel barbarians. I shall send scouts to muster our troops in support. I shall kill these now, and thus prove to you my loyalty.” He steps forward, but she gapes a full set of teeth—unblooded.

“You? Deliver me from Aurrel barbarians?” she demands. “Do you think that proves your loyalty? And do you think you deserve three lowly kills?”

“Kill them yourself, then, Mother.”

Llohi breathes still, but flows with blood; Parker has balled his body like a brogh though he possesses no natural armor, only shreds of cloth; here I lie while throbbing wounds and my own need-sickness tear me apart.

The Nose says, “Not yet.”

Sunwake brushes the sky with color; distant howls reach my ears.

Is this Dunurr, Burrzhi come at last? But sure the distance is yet too great, the speed of death too sudden while we lie at their mercy.

Rregl’s ears have turned to the faraway howls; he steps foot to foot, impatient. “Mother!” He gapes, gathers his hinds to leap.

The Nose moves first. The shock of their skulls rings out; she snaps, downs Rregl by his muzzle in the grass, while Barbarians whine in confusion.

“If you knew only one loyalty, Rregl,” she growls, “you would not have offered to kill the human.”

Then another kind of whine grows in the air, high and loud—oh, it shrieks in my head! A shadow slashes across us.

It is the shuttle.

The mob breaks at the shuttle’s shriek to run. The Nose has flattened herself upon Rregl, and the huge thing lands. Humans emerge to stand among us—three of our scientists, I recognize—but in the bright of sunwake their colored cloth blazes like fire. They carry weapons in their hands. One raises a weapon, which belches a green flash upwards into the sky. Any Hnnwan who still hesitated are soon fled.

Parker unwinds painfully, cries out to them in his language. I understand none of it.

The Aurrel howls grow louder. My ears recognize an unexpected cry: “Hold, Barbarians!”

Ar, no—Burrzhi believes we lie now at human mercy! I struggle to fours, manage only three, unable to put any weight on my right hand. My head spins.

“Bow-bow!” I shout. “Captain Burr-burrzhi, hold! Do not—my friend—” Words and legs fail me at once.

“Rulii!” Parker’s voice.

“Parker-my-brother, do not . . . ”

“I understand,” Parker says, solemn. “I will speak to Captain Burrzhi.”

I sigh back into the grass.

I live, still. This is some surprise.

Further, I suspect I have become one of the first Aurrel ever to fly—a strange distinction. I remember little more than the sense of rocking. Now I lie exhausted under the weight of doom, eyes on a circle of bright light: a roof-window above my head. This is my own Warm house in Ro-roghell. I feel no pain, yet I shake in hands and feet; every fiber of me feels sick, wrong.

I should not lie helpless. I must rise, else Majesty’s jaws close on us all!

I strain, lift my head. Look there: Llohi lies motionless but for the rise and fall of her breath; and beyond her, the soldier who stood my scout in our doomed strategy. My neck is tired; I lie back again.

Now footsteps approach—Parker’s, must be Parker’s, those are human footsteps, and his walking gait is longer than that of the other scientists. Yes: here he comes, stands above me, showing grave concern. He has shorn his neck- and face-fur, revealing pup-soft brown skin.

“Rulii?”

Ar, how can such a creature have become so normal to me, so welcome?

I draw breath. Strange that I feel no pain, while I lie in unbearable distress that binds the base of every hair. “Parker. You—impress me. You wield a knife well.” My voice also shakes.

“Thank,” he says, “and may I wield this better. Lie still.”

I don’t feel his weapon, only recognize its influence in the comfort that begins in my right arm, spreads inward and through me. My medicine—ar, relief! Yet I could weep, for even relief weighs me with despair.

“See how even my blood is bound to you, Parker,” I sigh. “Majesty must not brand humans barbarians. He must not remove you from Aurru. Not this, above all else he has done.”

“I did not mean to bind you,” Parker says. “I meant to free you.”

I close my eyes. “I bound myself first. Such was my choice, to further my life’s hunt. If I yet live, it’s because yours is the gentler trap.”

Parker makes a face of pain, rubs one hand over his thick mane. Carefully, he removes a needle from my arm, waves a lighted instrument over it; next I bend it, I find it whole.

“Rulii,” he murmurs, “were Majesty to banish humans, would you leave Aurru with us?”

I don’t growl, for he would never intend me hurt or outrage. “You know I would not. I have already driven away siblings in my larger pursuit. I no longer fear death. Already I have lived longer than I thought possible, many times over. Even today, because you called your shuttle.”

“I shouldn’t have,” he says, shrugs shoulders but cannot hide his nervous scent. “I reassured Burrzhi to return to his camp. Then we flew you here, and your companions; also the Nose, and her captive, the large Hnnwan, Rregl. I have trespassed on the expertise of Allied Systems Officers to change our rules of action.”

I understand this; to place expertise above Rank is the human’s way. “Do you risk your place here, then?”

He chuckles, still anxious. “Perhaps not, if Majesty has truly created me Liaison.”

“He has; summon Rizvi for the skin-roll, if you wish to see it.”

Parker nods. Makes no move. “Rulii, I shouldn’t laugh. My place here is at risk. But better I face banishment than cause your death, cast your people back into war for what I did. I began this. I, in singular, risked the banishment of all humans from Aurru when I walked into the Lands of the Hnnwan.”

“Parker, hnnn . . . ”

“I told myself I put no one in danger because my intent was good, because I did this for science,” he says. “I lied to myself and to my huntmates. You once told me I was no scavenger; yet in this I have shown no more honor than prey.” He huffs a sigh, pats the place above his hip where once I bit him. “You knew better than you imagined.”

“No, Parker, no.” I gather myself upon my elbows on the padded table. “That day—I didn’t hunt you; I threw you as I would have thrown a Barbarian in battle.”

His furred brows leap up, but he doesn’t chide me for naming them so. “How thin is the fur of manners,” he says. “Beneath it each of us—Hnnwan, Aurrel, human—shows barbarous in our own way.” He touches my arm through my thin fur, meets my gaze with dark eyes serious. “I will fight them before I let them take me from here. I don’t wish to leave you. Rulii-my-brother.”

Wauuunn! I must not think of him punished by his people, nor of humans banished, but only of the single pace before my feet. “Parker, we run scarcely ahead of Majesty.”

“Belly,” he agrees, walks to the door. “I shall bring Rizvi.”

But it is not Rizvi who comes next; instead the young Dazh walks in on fours, his still-wounded leg raised carefully out of use. He scents all excitement, tosses his head before remembering his greeting. “Belly to you, Rulii!”

I jump down from the table, rather than force him to hind-toes on a single foot. “Sniff-sniff: Dazh-dazh, how do you heal?”

“Rizvi obeyed your orders. She has tended my wound, defeated my pain.” An instant, he gapes a full smile, but his ears twitch. “Now . . . she commands my help with her instruments, baits me to learn her language.” Showing embarrassed, he covers his nose; on a single hand, a single foot, he wobbles off-balance.

Though he lightens my heart, yet I must be sure to speak in seriousness. “Hark-hark: you would do well to take her as huntmate.”

“Hnnn . . . But Rulii, I should instead belly to you.” He falls to haunches, the wounded leg not fully bent. “All of Ro-roghell knows of your courage, your battles, your rescue of four Aurrel prisoners!”

“Bite-bite: do they so?” Ar, and what of the two Barbarians?

He shrinks, bows head before my insult. But secrets melt faster than ice; among so many witnesses, much was bound to seep forth. Even Burrzhi scents too sharp to have missed the identity of our new guests. What did Parker say to him?

I shake my mane; I must sight forward, not behind. “Dazh-dazh,” I say, “Hark-hark: you know that Majesty comes upon us at close pace. He will put you in danger.”

Dazh straightens. “I will not hide. Let him create me soldier!”

“Bel-belly: you shall not hide.” It would be impossible now, anyway: his days here have filled the air with his scent. “Yet I will not have Majesty hurt you. Riz-rizvi’s is the better hunt for you.”

Dazh squirms a little, though it is not distaste I detect in his scent. Curiosity? He pants a breath, tumbles out, “Belly to you, Rulii, ar! Please, let me hunt at your hind haunch as I have dreamed from a pup!”

I toss my head. “Bite-bite: do you so easily reject Riz-rizvi who saved you?”

“Hnnnn . . . ” Dazh ducks head, shifts feet; were he whole, I think he should belly to me indeed. “No, no. I thank Rizvi each day for her care—Rulii, belly, please, I will do anything you say. Suffer me! Suffer me to do anything you say . . . ”

My heart objects to adoration, but in one respect he scents true: Rizvi can’t protect him from Majesty’s attention so well as I. I raise my right hand to him.

He quivers, nose to tail, and nods to meet my outstretched hand. His mane is not fully grown, so I stroke favor-scent from between my fingers into the dense hairs of his ruff. Now, as my submissor, he will await a command.

“Bow-bow: Dazh-dazh, by my word you will continue your work with Riz-rizvi. Now, summon her to me.”

Tail joyful, he opens the door, but finds the passage blocked: Parker, Rizvi stand there already. Their eyes speak of fear.

“Majesty comes!” Rizvi announces, her mouth in an unaccustomed scowl.

Fatigue drags me all at once, but I can feel no surprise that Majesty works to trap us in yet one more way. “Sniff-sniff: how so?”

Parker licks his lips. “Our instruments have spied him leaving a riverboat upstream in Zhi-zhirr, but he does not stay; he will take foot in Ro-roghell tonight.”

My mane-hackles rise; and I with them. “Bow-bow: then somehow we must stand ready.”

The fear of teeth is as old as Aurru itself: Majesty’s teeth scare me no matter how many times I have faced them. How should we force him to reveal his schemes without inciting him to bite? He is terrifying even at a dinner table; it seems folly to bring him to a confronting room, but what other lock could protect the Nose, Rregl? Before his demands, all backed by violence, our plan seems fragile as a spinner’s web. Likely enough he will burst it, even should none of its many strands fail.

Alone, unarmored, unthreatening, I go to meet Majesty and twelve heavy-furred submissors upon the East Riverside road. They run still on fours after their journey from Zhi-zhirr. They don’t bare teeth as we approach one another; I can’t guess how many spies they may have met, how much they may have heard of my departure, our return.

Today Majesty’s smell disgusts me. Powerful—not only with the scent of his favor, but the scent of my old need rising from his molri-cured leathers. Across those armored shoulders roll the heavy strands of his mane, weighted with silver-glass beads of royal ice. His mane is less dark than when I last ran in La-larrai, as if the ice has touched him with Cold.

As his submissor, it is for me to speak first, yet I struggle to find words. I have changed more than he: now I see through the dense fur of nobility to the barbarian beneath.

“Bel-belly,” I manage, using Cold words as his exalted honor demands, so as not to taint the royal chill that surrounds him. “Majesty, make welcome to Ro-roghell.”

“Bow-bow: Ru-rulii, I will see the human talker, Par-parker, at once.”

Straight to his purpose! He makes no mention of my injuries—but after the human healing instruments, they show older than they are. I bow to haunches, lower my nose to my hands. “Bel-belly: the talker Par-parker eagerly awaits you in my Cold house.”

Majesty snorts—surprise, disbelief? “Bow-bow: break the way, Ru-rulii.”

I rise to hind-toes, lead enemies through my Lowland city. The day’s heat has passed its crest, and the wind breathes cool from the river; my downy-furred people work the animal pens, the fish-traps, the workshops and forges with mouths open, seeking its relief. No relief, it seems, for the heavy-furred ice-hunters behind me, who smell of frustration. Will a few more minutes aid Parker, Rizvi, Llohi, the others in their preparations? I don’t know, but I haven’t run here long enough to die yet.

We climb the hill. Carefully, I give no attention to the door of my Warm house, where the human scientists huddle. A royal submissor behind me snorts distaste at their smell, but Majesty remains singular in his intent. I suspect he scents Parker’s passage up the hill earlier this afternoon; the Hnnwan, fortunately, didn’t pass this way on foot.

The few Cold houses of Ro-roghell, with their iron walls, peaked roofs, and heavy-hinged doors, stand pretender above this city of tents and tunnels. Majesty ignores all but my own, highest upon the hill, though the residents here would surely belly to him. Someone has remembered to light the fat-lamp in the urrgai horn above my door.

I bow. “Bel-belly, Majesty: tread my territory and make welcome.”

As the Coldest predator among us, he has no reason to fear, and does not hesitate. I push past a submissor to be sure I enter at his hind haunch; I must stand present for this, and be sure to exclude as many of his fighters as possible.

My confronting-room is intended to tell a lie: that Parker’s, my incursion into Barbarian lands was made with intent to rescue prisoners of war. Parker wears rich clothes of blue and silver, showing himself the representative of human power, with no hint that he was trapped by Barbarians. His body-talk is calm and noble despite the nearness of teeth. To the right of my slotted inner door stands Llohi, scarred and thin but unbowed, scented with the favor of Barbarians which we hope may confuse the scent of true Barbarians that wafts through the door-slots—and beside her, Dazh?!

Ar, Dazh, why would you break your promise to stay away?

Arrayed against those three in the too-small space, Majesty and two royal submissors loom large and dangerous. I place myself carefully beside my empty fireplace, to guard the neutral space between Majesty and Parker.

“Bow-bow.” Majesty shakes a threatening chime from his beads of royal ice. “I have come to hear you speak, human. So speak.”

Parker bows. “Bel-belly to you, Majesty Gur-gurne,” he says. No fear in his voice, though all here can recognize it in his scent. “In Cold honor I have received your gift of Rank. In the name of humans, I bid you make welcome to the home you have granted us in this your Lowland tribute nation. Thank-thank: with your favor, we run well in our hunts.”

The two submissors snort surprise at his skill, but though pride fills my breast I will not let them distract me. I watch Majesty Gur-gurne. He tenses shoulders and hips as if he might attack; instinct tenses me in response.

“Bite-bite,” he barks, “Fine Au-aurrel manners from a traitor! Your—thing that flies and shrieks—it has betrayed you. You have consorted with Barbarians, in violation of our laws.”

Parker glances at me. “Bel-belly, Majesty: Ru-rulii and Captain Burr-burrzhi enlisted my help to rescue war prisoners from the Barbarians.”

A snort, perhaps even an insult I might expect, but Majesty gapes. His eyes bulge as if at the sting of a swamp hirrzhil.

He charges.

I lunge to block Parker—Llohi, Dazh cry out in shock—iron clangs protest against iron—and I land, untouched.

What?

“Bite-bite: I’ll kill you for this, Rre-rregl!” Majesty howls, shoulder against the inner door. “I’ll tear out your throat myself!”

Our suspicions confirmed! But with restraint now cast aside in rage, will he turn on us? Else his submissors mistake the object of his command, and we all die? I gather myself to grapple, but the submissors show confused—a gap of uncertainty into which I leap.

“Bel-belly, Majesty: no one here threatens you.”

“Bite-bite, Ru-rulii!”

Gur-gurne turns ears, faces me, enormous with rage. Wauunnn! I must not flinch, nor cringe, though I have lost pace in my hunt, and my strategies have become scattered grass. Remember, Rulii, the ice-hunter’s fury is mostly fur . . .

“Sniff-sniff: Majesty?”

“Bite-bite: have you lost your nose along with your judgment? No; more likely you know that the human talker broke our laws, but ignore the extent of his transgression. Hark-hark: these you keep locked in your den are not war prisoners. He has fraternized with the Barbarian Nose herself, interfered to slow our conflict.”

“Sniff-sniff: has the war slowed? Bel-belly: if we faced defeat, surely by now Gha-ghallo, Ro-roghell would be overrun with Barbarian mobs.” At least I need not feign my consternation. My trap has worked too well; now it works to snap me, too. What can I say to distract him? “Sniff-sniff: do you mean Par-parker has intervened to bring us peace? Hark-hark, Dazh-dazh, perhaps I was wrong to say you would be created soldier.”

I am wrong to involve Dazh—can’t even see his response, for Majesty holds me in his stare.

“Bite-bite: peace, Ru-rulii? Do you forget so quickly that we fight to preserve natural order? Would you scatter our efforts to scavengers? I’ll kill you first.”

Dazh howls, “No!”

He jumps at Majesty.

I fling myself at him, but, sure, it is too late—

By luck Dazh is more wounded than I: my shoulder hits him in the side, flings him against the outer door with a sharp yelp. No time to wonder whether I’ve broken him, whether he chanced to touch Majesty in his misguided leap. I turn terror into anger:

“Bite-bite! Dazh-dazh, this is not the way to serve me, nor to save me. Bow-bow: Get out! Go back to where you began!”

Dazh utters no sound, but stares at me. I stand panting, showing as large, as angry as possible—his life depends on my contempt, but I can’t manage it truly. Do my enemies see how my heart cries to do this to him?

A heavy-furred royal submissor cuffs Dazh in the head, and another laughs, strikes him in his wounded leg. Dazh whines, but pulls the iron door inward, stumbles on fours into late afternoon light. I glimpse his eye, cast back—then another royal submissor blocks the light, steps in.

They are four now, well-fed and muscled; we are only three scarce recovered from our hunt, and one of us human.

“Hark-hark, Ru-rulii,” says Majesty, with calm now in his voice that his scent belies. “You can’t have known of this human talker’s deception. Bow-bow: give the two Barbarians to me; when they are dead and the humans flown from Au-aurru forever, I shall reward you.”

My mane-hackles rise, unbidden, with a new certainty: Majesty will not suffer me to run much longer. He knows nothing of my human medicine; can’t know that his offer is meaningless, even were I to believe it. I must at least try to protect Parker.

“Hark-hark: Majesty, when you raised Par-parker’s Rank, his superiors in the Allied Systems rejoiced; now they too have chilled Par-parker until he stands able to propose terms in the human presence on Au-aurru. He now speaks for all his people across star territories.”

Parker steps to my shoulder, tall, certain in my eye-corner though he still smells of fear.

Llohi comes to my other side, unexpected. “Hark-hark, Majesty: you have not deceived us. We know you do not wish for peace, nor for victory. We will not allow you to harm your pup Rre-rregl, who has stripped bare your intent, nor shall we deliver up the Hnn-hnnwan Nose.” A deep bark of “Wai!” bursts from the slots of the inner door, answered by a high laugh.

Here we stand, exposed; I expect outrage, attack, worse, yet Majesty says nothing. The first rule in strength-of-three is loyalty; I can only commit to the path we now run.

“Bite-bite,” I say, “we have uncovered your scheme to trap Par-parker, to flush him into Hnn-hnnwan jaws, to blame him for the banishment you have long planned for humans. But perhaps you have downed a quarry you did not intend, for humans feel no further need to recognize your authority.”

Now Majesty growls, low and dangerous. “Bite-bite: and whose authority do you suppose he recognizes? Yours, Ru-rulii? When you’ve shown your quality as Warm as the stinking child you permitted into my presence?”

I can’t answer him, but Parker speaks. “Hark-hark: yes, the authority of Ru-rulii for the Lowland Au-aurrel, and the authority of the Head for the Hnn-hnnwan people. Humans who cross star territories, who negotiate with worlds, need not tolerate betrayal.”

Majesty bares his long teeth. His submissors urge foot-to-foot, ready to lunge. Anticipation brings the cold sensation of teeth penetrating my flesh. I begin to wish my empty hearth did contain firebrands against the northern Cold, that I might use them.

Snap!

This sound is not teeth, but the bolt of my inner door. The Nose enters, small and predatory, showing fearless in ears, scent, arcs of sharp teeth. I see she has freed Rregl from his weights, for he now stands her second.

“I too recognize the authority of Rulii,” she says. “And of the human Parker, to call a breath-peace amid our war.”

“Bite-bite: then you will all die,” Majesty barks. “Every life in this house will fall prey to the natural order of Au-aurru. Bow-bow: open the door!”

He calls his soldiers. My hairs stand, but none of us move; even the Nose’s speed would not suffice to stop the submissor who now opens the outer door. Majesty has nine more outside, refreshed, ready, and we are already trapped—

The door swings wide on afternoon light, warm breeze . . .

A multitude.

So many Lowlanders that beyond a body-length, the road itself disappears beneath them. Is this all of Ro-roghell? Herders, fishers, half-trained soldiers, blacksmiths in leather aprons who carry iron hammers, even some from the Stinking District! Majesty’s submissors I spy here, there, none in strength-of-three but isolated all, heads held low, surrounded by our people. Humans, too—scientists with weapons stand by, not a one shunned by Aurrel companions.

Nearest stands Dazh, on one foot but grimly gaping, leaning on Rizvi.

“Rulii,” he says, “I have found a better way to save you.”

I shake my mane in shock. The submissor at the door gapes a moment, then looks back to Majesty. Majesty blinks.

I speak quickly into this breath of silence. “Bow-bow, Par-parker, Llo-llohi, come.” We emerge from my house in strength-of-three, the Nose following with Rregl.

Majesty and his two emerge last. Their presence raises a miasma of fear from the crowd, but they hold position.

“Bow-bow: submissors, with me,” Majesty barks. “We return to Zhi-zhirr.”

But they must not reunite for strength. “Bow-bow,” I announce, “in Cold honor we shall escort them from Ro-roghell.”

As the crowd slowly parts for Majesty, those who have isolated his submissors remain flanking them down the hill road.

“Hark-hark, Ro-roghell,” I cry. “Majesty Gur-gurne departs, and as he turns tail a great change comes to our city. Our human talker Par-parker has returned from a secret hunt in the Hnn-hnnwan lands. At great risk to himself, he took language, knowledge as his quarry—but also the peace you have so long desired.”

Barks of surprise, disbelief rise from the assembled people. Even Dazh shakes his head.

“Hark-hark! You, your families, have fought all your lives. You know the cost of war: in labor, in urrgai, in the lives of those we love. Our bodies have fed scavengers in the name of faraway dominators and their Cold complacency. We have hated the violence the Hnn-hnnwan have brought to us, but ignored the violence done by ice-hunters who claim to protect us. When humans came, they brought us silver, but they also brought reasons to keep tools, food, people here in safety. The war slowed—we breathed deeper again at last—and, we have learned, so did the Hnn-hnnwan. Only one person, Majesty Gur-gurne in singular, shuddered at this change and sought to rouse us once again to blood. He feared we would see how he used us against one another.

“Ro-roghell! You were summoned because when Par-parker, Ru-rulii, and a representative of the Hnn-hnnwan rejected Majesty’s urgings, he wished to tear us flesh from bone, to deliver us to the silence of grass. He has failed.”

The crowd’s scent sweetens. A single incredulous howl rises into the cooling breeze. I hear them inhale as one, but interrupt them.

“Bow-bow!” I cry. “I must have a messenger to deliver this news to Captain Burr-burrzhi and the soldiers of Gha-ghallo. Hark-hark: Majesty will return, and we must be ready. And, bow-bow: look here at the representative of the Hnn-hnnwan who offers us this breath-peace!”

The Hnnwan Nose stands, advances into sunlight where her red stone blazes. Rregl stays behind, closely watched by Llohi.

“Bow-bow: suffer her to make welcome here. Hark-hark: Au-aurrel, Hnn-hnnwan shall speak together, with Par-parker and humans to guarantee the truth of our intent. May our talks bring interdependence out of strife, life out of death.”

Now howls burst from all throats, a cry of change into the wind that carries across the Lands of Teeth. I lower my head.

Beside me, Parker smiles his blunt smile. “Hnnwan, Aurrel—a very old interdependence made new.”

Llohi laughs. “So was mine with Rulii, who convinced me you could run strength-of-three.”

“Great Nose,” I say. “Let us leave behind talk of Barbarians, and hunt together in the name of Aurrel and Hnnwan.”

“In this I name you Rulii,” she replies. She scents now of satisfaction, and glances approval with her eyes of Warm and Cold. Merciless fighter turned brave diplomat when she scented opportunity for her people—indeed, her life’s hunt is not so different from mine. “We must send to my people; we have much to do.”

I can’t call this joy in my heart: I know I still stand between powerful jaws. Majesty Gur-gurne will return with armies, and Parker’s Allied Systems superiors come to take him, with consequences for his scientists and for our people that I can scarcely imagine.

Yet even in this danger, I no longer hunt alone. I will inhale this breath of peace, and push forward—for a life’s hunt never ends until the body’s final pace.

And I run still.

About the Author

Juliette Wade has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her academic background in linguistics, anthropology and Japanese helps her communicate with aliens. She lives the Bay Area of California with her husband and two children, who support and inspire her. She runs the Dive into Worldbuilding video series and workshop at www.patreon.com/JulietteWade.

The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales

Fei Dao, translated by Ken Liu

Once upon a time there was a king. He was brave and clever and blessed with good luck. As you might expect, he ended up unifying the world, and even made plans to conquer the sun. Most remarkably, he did everything aboveboard and never lied. The people loved him and wanted to emulate his example. Let’s put it this way: there had never been a realm in the history of the universe so pure and good as his.

Unfortunately, he had a son who enjoyed lying. From childhood, the prince exaggerated and bragged, and his shameless whoppers made his parents blush with shame. The courtiers and ladies-in-waiting were so tickled by his tall tales that they wanted nothing more than to roll on the floor and howl with laughter, though courtly etiquette forced them to hold it in, and they all ended up with stomachaches. Unavoidably, his colorful yarns spread throughout the kingdom. At first, the common people tried to remain silent out of politeness, but eventually their bellies hurt so much that they had to laugh out loud. Everyone agreed that they had not heard such fantastic stories in ages.

The boy always said, “I’ve never fibbed in my life! You’ll know after you’re dead.”

The king gathered the most skilled doctors, the wisest philosophers, the most reputable priests, and the most elegant musicians, and charged them to cure, enlighten, redeem, and reform the little rapscallion. All these efforts came to naught.

The prince was the king’s only heir. Only a kingdom of liars would deserve such a braggart for their sovereign—the thought kept the king up at night. Eventually, he became bedridden from worry.

It was said that as the king lay dying, the young man, bless his heart, did not say anything outrageous. Tenderly, as he gazed at the old man, he declared, “Dear Father, don’t worry. In your stead, I will conquer something even more terrifying than the sun.”

And so the “Bullshit King” ascended to the throne, and the people’s lives descended into depravity.

To be sure, the kingdom didn’t fall into ruin, though the prevailing mood of order and trust was corrupted by a new sense of dissolution. Like snakes emerging after a long winter, frauds, cheats, rogues, and petty criminals—long absent from the realm—reappeared. Honest people could no longer sleep soundly at night. Fortunately, the old king had laid a solid foundation, and loyal ministers continued to do their best to help their new sovereign. Despite the changes, the Bullshit King managed to rule in peace for many years. Although things weren’t as stable as before, the kingdom didn’t collapse, either.

The young king continued to tell wild, unbelievable stories day after day. After more than a decade of this, even those who despised him had to admire his consistency. The people settled on a new consensus: our king is the greatest fibber in the world.

With the passage of time, the king gradually approached wisdom—let’s not exaggerate here; his progress was about a centimeter. The judgment of the people worried him.

“This is unacceptable,” he mused. “I can’t go to my grave with such a reputation.”

He decided that the solution was to find someone else who was even more of a liar than he was. Nobody ever remembered number two in any category.

The old king had built an army of robots. These machine soldiers, fearless and dependable, had done great service for the throne and pledged perpetual fealty to each successive king. After careful screening by scientists, one particular robot soldier was brought to the palace.

“Listen carefully,” the king ordered.

The robot strained to capture every buzz and hum in the air. It was unable to decode any useful information.

“The silence is terrifying, isn’t it?” The king shook his head helplessly. “I dare say that at this moment, all ears around the globe are perked up, waiting for me to amuse them with some tall tale. I bet you that my stories have done such a good job of curing indigestion that an extra ten thousand sacks of rice are being consumed each year. Sigh . . . What is the point of a life like mine? No one takes me seriously. I’d rather discuss the history of the patches of rust staining your torso, my most honored pile of scrap metal.”

The robot saluted him. “I am at your service, Your Majesty.”

“You know, I wasn’t born like this. One time, I remember going into the royal garden to play and dig for ants under an ancient tree. I dug deeper and deeper until I fell into a bottomless pit. It turned out to be an actual black hole! The black hole was filled with secrets: more than five moles of secrets gathered from members of nine trillion species spread over a million galaxies, secrets that the tellers felt compelled to share but were also terrified of sharing. Wow! What an experience! I climbed back out and wanted to discuss these secrets seriously, but everyone treated my stories as made-up tales. Once people made up their minds, it was simply impossible to convince them otherwise . . .

“Anyway, this is why I need you. I want you to leave behind the honesty that you obtained from my father. I want you to lie shamelessly, to exaggerate unabashedly, to fabricate castles in the air without remorse. You must become the teller of the tallest tales, an unprecedented master of bullshit. This is how I will be saved, and how you will achieve absolute freedom.”

And that was how the robot got his mission.

Fictioneering was a skill that could not be taught in a classroom, and the mechanical soldier had to go seek knowledge in the world. It left the palace and wandered the earth, gathering wisdom, gaining experience, associating itself with a variety of absurd acts, nurturing its soul in the company of delirious souls, feeding on the diseased ravings of lunatics, learning to tell breathtaking lies, spreading the seeds of chaos—until it also gained a measure of notoriety.

One day, the robot was trekking alone on a trail through the wilderness when the sky suddenly turned dark, and a thunderstorm drove it into a run-down rest stop. In the cramped and dark stone hut, three men were drinking around a small stove. In a corner, another drunken man lay asleep, his pale face hidden under the hood of a black cloak full of holes.

The drinking companions were glad to have a newcomer. They shifted around the stove to make room for the robot. After pouring a cup of strong liquor for the soldier, they continued their conversation.

“The two of you have indeed had some exciting adventures,” said a tall, slender man with eagle-like eyes. “However, I have to say that Death is the most terrifying opponent of them all.” The other nodded in agreement. “I’ve had multiple run-ins with Death, but I’ve always managed to escape. As a painter, I’m known for intricate, dazzling portraits of imaginary cities. Each time, Death was fascinated by my pictures. He would step into the scene, stroll through the streets and avenues, traverse the squares and alleyways, brush shoulders with inhabitants with blurred faces—before realizing that he had been trapped by my carefully-designed mazes and had been wandering up and down infinite staircases whose tops circled around to their bottoms.

“As Death isn’t without a sense of humor, he would tolerate my little jokes. We also have to admire his sense of duty. Since he’s more powerful than anything else in the world, ultimately he would find the exits to the mazes, though the delay would afford me the time to escape.”

He brandished a paintbrush. “This is how I’ve been able to get out of each invitation from Death, and now let’s drink to it.”

Everyone lifted their cup and toasted the brush. Even the black-cloaked drunkard asleep in the corner snored especially loudly in tribute.

The man dangling a pipe in his mouth spoke up next. “I’ve had the good fortune of observing some of your paintings. They’re truly admirable for their lofty taste and rigorous execution. I, on the other hand, do not take myself seriously at all. It’s true that people call me an author, and I’ve derived plenty of benefits and honors from the title, but I’ve never thought that anything I’ve written has any value. I don’t mean to offend, but I’ve always been of the opinion that the universe itself is worthless. We ourselves are insignificant, and all our actions mere absurdities. Art is no different.

“Instead of the pursuit of excellence that you engage in, because I don’t value what I do, I’m more interested in pure speed. When I write, the words simply spill out of me, a nice metaphor for the unrestrained outpouring of time that makes up a meaningless life. Despite this, others praise me as a giant of thought. Funny, isn’t it?

“In the race against Death, I think speed trumps everything else. All discussions about a soulful exchange between the writer and the reader are mere nonsense. The only goal for my writing is keeping up the pace.”

The pipe-smoking author took out a thick, beautifully bound hardcover book. “This object is as hard and strong as marble. I use it and other volumes like it to construct a staircase to heaven. As I finish each book, I lay it at the top, and another step is added. I build as I climb, and Death is always right behind me. As you well know, the aged gentleman has been running around for eons, and his legs are no longer as limber as before. Climbing a spiral staircase is hardly an easy task for him. So long as my pen-wielding wrist moves faster than his creaky legs, I can keep him at bay. It doesn’t require a lot of brainpower.”

“Do you intend to build your staircase all the way to the front door of the Creator then?” asked the painter.

“If such a door really exists, I’d love to kick it open to see what’s behind!” The writer laughed as everyone clinked cups and drained them. A sudden gust of wind swept large raindrops through the window. The drunkard in the corner turned over and pulled the black cape tighter about his body.

The third man who spoke was plump and smooth-chinned. Years of rich drink had filled out his belly like an overstuffed pillow. “Although your technique isn’t bad, I daresay that my response to Death is more thorough. Since everything is meaningless, I have decided to do nothing but drink. My considerable inheritance has all been transmuted into piss as I sought out the best vintages in the world. I can’t say for sure whether there’s a door behind which sits the Creator, but I can guarantee you that there is indeed an entrance to heaven located in this sublunary world.”

He raised his cup. “It’s right here! When Death comes for me, I never act shocked or unhappy. Instead, I invite him to have a drink. In vino amicitia, and there is no bond stronger between two beings than the duty of drinking companions. Despite his considerable powers, he cannot match my years of practice, and a few drinks later he is flat out on the table, snoring. By the time he wakes, I’m long gone from the scene. What do you think, my friends? Isn’t my method of escape so much easier and more fun to carry out?”

“Doesn’t he ever learn his lesson?” the painter asked. He took a sip and savored the wine.

“He has never turned me down when I asked. Sometimes I suspect that his visits aren’t timed to when I’m supposed to die, but just because he has a craving for my fine wine.”

“I imagine you must be able to outdrink anyone in the world. Otherwise your approach is far too risky.” The writer drained his cup.

“I don’t worry about that. So long as I’m drunk, why would I care even if he takes me away?” The connoisseur refilled everyone’s cup from a drinking gourd.

“Most honorable sirs, I’ve never heard such amazing tales,” said the robot soldier, who had been quietly listening this whole time. It was now the robot’s turn to tell a story. “Permit me to make an observation, however. Although each of you possesses a unique skill that has allowed you so far to thwart the greatest power in the universe, I think each of you remains driven by fear. You’re obsessed with how to overcome Death in your next match. This means that you can never be truly relaxed, and that’s no real freedom.”

The others, who had always had rather high opinions of themselves, simply smiled politely at this, though there was now a chill in the air. The storm outside the window had abated to a drizzle, and even the snores of the drunkard had lightened.

The robot continued. “Each time Death invites me, I go to the appointment happily. That’s right. I’m telling you that the fear of Death is completely unnecessary. He wants nothing more than to bring us to another country, where the scenery is beautiful in its own way. The living think that it’s impossible to return from that country; though that statement is not entirely wrong, it’s not the full truth either. I’ve been there many times already. Although the rules forbid me from returning, I’ve always managed to come back by dint of my wits.”

The other three sat stunned for a moment until they had fully processed the robot’s fantasy and burst into uproarious laughter. The painter guffawed so hard that he could hardly sit upright; the author shrieked and slapped the table; the wine connoisseur’s face was so contorted with mirth that his eyes had disappeared under folds of flesh. The drunkard in the corner impatiently turned over. The robot joined in the merriment until the laughter gradually died down from exhaustion.

The writer, one-quarter serious, said, “I think there’s a logical hurdle standing in the way of your story: if anyone were to return from death to life, that person would have not truly died. The very definition of death is that there is no way back to life.”

“Do allow me to disagree,” said the robot. “It’s illogical to assume in the first place that no one and nothing can leave the realm of Death. Obviously, Death himself can leave.” Seeing that the writer was about to object, the robot hurried on with its explanation. “First, since Death is the sovereign of all brought to that country, he himself must perforce belong there. At the same time, he always leaves there to come here to take us away. Accepting the truth of these premises, why should we assume that no one else can do the same? For example, one time, I was wandering over there . . . ”

He continued to spin outrageous tales that drove his audience mad. However, as the other three could not think of an effective rebuttal, they had to endure growing headaches as expressions of rage gradually replaced their smiles. Abruptly, the drunkard who had been lying in the corner under his black cape shuddered, and opened his eyes. The other three around the table jumped up in surprise.

“Damn you! Now look what you’ve done!”

Before the drunkard could get up, the three adventurers grabbed their bags and rushed out of the rest stop, disappearing over the muddy ground into the misty horizon.

The black-caped man got up and dusted himself off. As he straightened his clothes, his face took on a serious expression. The stare he directed at the robot was as cold as icicles.

The rain dissipated. Sunlight pierced what was left of the clouds, revealing three figures running toward the end of the rainbow.

“Now I know who you are,” said the man, “but I have more important business to take care of right this moment.” Just before he exited the room, he turned around. “If you’re hoping you’ll never see me again because you aren’t made from mortal flesh, you’d better think again. Seize the day. Seize everything you can get your hands on.”

And so the robot soldier finished every drop of wine that was left, even though it found the drink tasteless. It also took all the fish bones left on the plate with him and tossed them to a feral cat by the side of the road.

After that encounter, the robot lived an uneventful life for a while. By then, most people had heard that there was another bullshit artist who was almost as good as the king himself. To advance further in his career, the robot decided to seek adventures in new lands.

It joined a fleet led by a notorious explorer who wasn’t completely right in the head. The explorer believed that there was a massive black hole at the heart of the galaxy where magnificent lost treasures could be found. Even fragments of those treasures scattered at the edge of the black hole would be enough to make the expedition a success. But only halfway through the voyage, the fleet was destroyed by asteroid strikes. The shipwrecked robot was tossed into the infinite vacuum of space. Weightless, it nonetheless managed to sustain a good mood, and allowed itself to be pulled hither and yon by the chaotic gravity fields all around.

The universe was so grand that the robot had plenty of time to look around. Yet everything was so dark that other than the endless star field, it could see nothing. Only after drifting for hundreds or thousands of years would it encounter an occasional star system approaching through wisps of space dust. Some of the systems had three suns, and some suns had already shrunken into cold white dwarves. Sometimes it even encountered artificial entities like itself, drifting aimlessly like the wreckage of some space fleet. One time, a beautiful, rose-shaped nebula appeared straight ahead. The robot stared at it for about two million years, excited about the possibility of exploring that lovely sight. However, halfway there, the robot was seized by a momentary bout of greed and reached out for something that looked like a battery. The movement, unfortunately, shifted its course just enough that the rose nebula gradually disappeared from view. Only seventy million years later did the nebula reappear behind the robot.

And the “battery” turned out to be nothing more than an alien ashtray.

Drifting, drifting . . . was there no end to this aimless wandering? The robot grew sleepy. As it floated in and out of consciousness, it thought, “At least the ashtray will serve as proof. When I get back, I don’t need to make up anything. All I have to do is to tell the truth of what I experienced, and everyone will acknowledge me as the master of tall tales . . . but then again, if we’re talking about tall tales, why do I need proof?” Even in its confused state, it still remembered the final words from that black-caped drunkard, and it tightened its fist around that bit of flotsam that served as the sole trophy of its long odyssey.

The robot fell asleep and dreamed that an electric sheep rushed at it, its horns made of crimson lasers. The robot’s own legs, however, refused to obey its commands to flee. Terror heated all the robot’s circuits until, with a loud bang, the sheep slammed into it. The robot opened its eyes and found itself mired in a dirty pool of water.

The edges of the pool were as smooth and slippery as the walls of a well, and the scrambling robot could not get any purchase. Just as it thought it was going to drown, it grabbed on to something and felt itself being hauled out of the water and tossed through the air. After a dizzying flight, it found itself on the shore of a black river.

The sky glowed with a rainbow sheen, and all around were tall mountains. A cat wearing a cape squatted next to the robot, expressionlessly casting a fishing line back into the river.

“I’m sorry to bother you.” The robot bowed to the cat. “Where am I?”

The rolls of fat on Mr. Cat’s face betrayed no trace of kindness. The robot noticed a dangling cigarette under the quivering whiskers. It was a remarkable cigarette too, longer than all the cat’s whiskers added together. Moreover, the cigarette had been lit for a long time, as almost seven-tenths of it had turned to ash. Nonetheless, the crooked column of ash stubbornly remained attached as the lit tip marched toward the cat’s whiskers.

“Aha, it just happens that I have an ashtray!” said the robot. “Don’t stand on ceremony if you need it.” The robot respectfully presented its sole treasure to the smoking cat.

Mr. Cat turned to it, and a green light shone from its vertical pupils. Joy gradually softened his face. “Meooowww—”

And that was how they became friends.

It turned out that Mr. Cat had lost his ashtray, and as he didn’t want to litter the river’s shore, he had no choice but to remain squatting, moving as little as possible. It was fortunate for the robot to rescue him from such an awkward predicament. To express his gratitude, Mr. Cat agreed to grant the robot one favor.

“I just want to return home,” said the robot.

Mr. Cat frowned, explaining that it was impossible for anyone fallen into the black hole to leave. Everyone was supposed to report to the Castle sooner or later, so it was best for the robot to accept its fate. But the robot insisted that it had not yet accomplished its mission, and it would never be satisfied with staying here. Regardless of how slight the ray of hope, it was determined to seize it. Mr. Cat, touched by the machine’s dedication, sighed.

“All right, I’ll help you. Why don’t you seek out a picture-dodger who’s always smoking a pipe? I heard that he has successfully escaped Death multiple times.”

Having thanked Mr. Cat for the advice, the robot continued its journey. All the sights it saw along the way were strange beyond description. Following the course of the river, the robot came to a wasteland where two massive armies were engaged in a heated battle. The field was covered with broken limbs and corpses.

A patrol of three-dimensional barcode soldiers caught the robot and asked, “Whose side are you on?”

“My allegiance will always belong to His Majesty, the Glorious Bullshit King.”

Unsatisfied with this answer, the patrol threw the robot in jail as a spy. In the next cell sat a man smoking a pipe.

The robot explained who it was looking for, and the man nodded. “You’re looking at him! Since you’re a friend of Mr. Cat’s, I’ll help you—provided you agree to help me. As you know, most here go obediently to the Castle when summoned, since it will end their journeys and release them from their mortal troubles forever. A few troublemakers, however, will play hide-and-seek with Lord Death. To capture me, he painted strange picture after strange picture and placed me in the paintings, hoping to trap me in those carefully-designed-but-impossible-to-construct buildings. I’ve always managed to escape though. Still, he won’t give up. I’m hoping to find out just how many more pictures does he intend to paint, and how much longer will he torture me before he’s had enough.”

The robot stood up and held a fist over its chest, promising the picture-dodger an answer no matter how much work it required.

“Excellent.” The picture-dodger slid next to the robot and nimbly revealed a hidden trapdoor at its feet. “Go! Hurry!”

The trapdoor led to a tunnel that was like a long slide, from which the robot finally emerged by falling onto a pile of straw. Getting up, it found itself in a valley at the feet of snowcapped mountains. A clear, placid lake shone like a mirror, and a bearded man with bared shoulders and arms was splitting wood under a towering, ancient tree. As the man swung his ax with full concentration, a woodchip covered by sentence fragments spun through the air and fell at the robot’s feet.

The robot explained its mission to the woodchopper, who asked, “Why do you have to go home?”

“I’ve got to go back and tell some tall tales,” the robot answered honestly.

“That’s a pretty good reason,” said the man, grinning from ear to ear. “All right, I’ll help you—provided you agree to help me. I’m a poet under a curse. The curse was probably the result of my theft of the seed of language, from which I wrote magnificent poetry. My plan is that as long as the tree keeps on growing, I’ll be able to climb up and leave Death behind forever.” They both glanced up at the ancient tree, whose lush canopy of branches disappeared into the clouds. The trunk of the tree, however, was full of knots and burrs. A passing gust of wind brought down a shower of withered leaves. “This tree had once been full of life and glory, but now it has stopped growing due to some disease. I want to know: what has blighted its soul?”

The robot stood up and held a fist over its chest, promising the poet an answer no matter how much work it required.

Despite not trusting the robot fully, the poet stood up and recited:

“ . . . est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer . . . ”

As though heeding a summons, a massive albatross descended from the heavens and seized the robot with its claws. In a moment, the great bird had ascended above the snowcapped mountains and plunged into the thunderbolt-riven sea of clouds. The robot was feeling a bit tired from its long journey, and a lightning bolt struck it just then directly in the chest and recharged it with vim and vigor. The surprised albatross let go, and the robot tumbled from the sky and landed on a ship. The undulating dark sea reflected the brilliant dawn, and a plump man sat at the bow, drinking.

The robot wished him good health and explained its mission.

“You’re indeed kind,” said the man. “I’ll help you—provided you agree to help me. Every time Death comes for me, I become fearless as soon as I gulp down a bottle of my drink. He can’t do a thing to me when I’m in that inebriated state. But after the alcoholic haze leaves me, I again grow weak and terrified. I want to know if there’s some way for me to never sober up.”

The robot stood up and held a fist over its chest, promising the drinking man an answer no matter how much work it required.

The man, overjoyed, invited the robot to join him. The wine was truly exceptional as even the metal tongue could tell the taste was peerless—though it lacked the words to do the flavor justice. After a few rounds, even its always-sober electronic brain grew hazy. The wine was like a wonderful experience of annihilation itself. The robot seemed to see its drinking companion’s body puff up and expand . . . until he had turned into a giant. The robot saw itself sitting on the giant’s shoulder, and the once-boundless sea was nothing but a puddle at the giant’s feet. The giant grabbed the robot and tossed it with a long swing of his arm. The mechanical soldier tumbled through the air, zipping along at an incredible speed, until it fell into a volcanic crater.

Next to the boiling lava, a man sat deep in thought. The robot instantly sobered as it recognized the gloomy figure.

“A pleasure to meet again,” said the robot, bowing. “However, I still can’t go with you. In fact, I have to ask you to send me back, as I’m on a mission. I understand that you’re a gentleman who can be persuaded by reason. Would you hear me out?”

“What you ask for is impossible.”

“Let’s discuss it at least. Maybe I can help you in some way—”

“There is no problem that I can’t solve. I have no need of anyone’s aid.”

“I do beg your pardon. However, I think there are a few questions that perhaps even you can’t answer.”

“Ask away.”

“I know a picture-dodger who has always been able to escape from your maze-paintings. Do you know how he’s been able to accomplish this?”

“Although I can’t tell you the answer right now, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m curious . . . if he can always escape, why don’t you give up the hunt?”

“Without pictures, how can there be picture-dodgers?”

The robot, having experienced and seen so much of the world, was now able to think deeper. After churning the man’s words in and through and around its circuits, it decided that the logic was not unsound. So, it continued. “I have a friend who planted a language tree that had grown almost as tall as the sky itself. The tree has fallen prey to some infestation. Do you know the cause?”

“It’s possible that the tree is afraid of heights.”

It was so wonderful to speak with the truly wise! The robot’s mind had been opened even wider.

“One more question. I heard that inebriation causes people to feel brave and honest. Is there a drink that will intoxicate permanently? Why doesn’t the Creator allow the drunken to feel the same courage and confidence once they’re sober?”

“Aren’t the very things that intoxicate people also created by people?”

The answer basically confirmed the robot’s guess. It felt it had a good grasp of the situation.

“If you already know the answers to these questions,” said the robot, “why don’t you explain them to my friends?”

Death sighed. “Because they run away as soon as they see me, giving me no chance to explain . . . and also . . . ”

“I’m going to be so bold as to suggest that you probably enjoy the interminable hunt,” said the robot gingerly. Death probably doesn’t have any friends.

“All right,” said Death wistfully. “If you’re willing to take my answers to them, I’ll help you. It’s time to end these games.”

“You can count on me,” said the robot, holding a fist over its chest.

Death walked up to the robot and placed a hand against its back. One hard shove sent the robot into the boiling lava. But instead of being harmed, the robot sank through the lava, fell through the clouds, and landed back on the ship. The giant had shrunken back to his usual, plump form, and he was sitting at the stern of the ship, drinking by himself.

“Have you found the answer to my question?”

“It is said that wine does not make a man drunk; the man makes himself drunk. My friend, have you tried to see this world for what it is when you’re sober? Gaze at yourself; gaze at Death.”

The man was silent. He had never, in all his life and death, done this. “You’re right . . . ” He set down his cup and stared at the ship’s wake for a long while. His mind awakened as his gaze cleared. The roiling, savage black waves seemed to be a mirror for his soul. For a moment, his rotund body shivered, as though he wanted to take a step back, but he forced himself to stand his ground. Yes, he saw it all clearly; he understood all his duties and honors. He turned and went into the ship’s cabin. When he emerged, he was dressed in full armor.

“This is my gift to you,” the aged warrior said as he untied the drinking gourd from his belt and handed it to the robot. The wind howled and the waves rose higher. “He’s coming for me. I shall face him head on this time.”

As the raging waves heaved and dropped the ship, the robot was thrown overboard into the sea. The drinking gourd grew until it lifted the robot out of the water like a lifeboat. The robot looked back and saw that the old warrior in his rusty armor was standing on the tempest-drenched deck like a bronze statue, his sword at the ready.

Riding the drinking gourd, the robot drifted over the ocean until, somehow, he found himself in the lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The poet’s beard was now much longer, and he was trying to feed some Möbius grass to a clockwork horse.

“Do you have an answer for me?”

The robot uncapped the drinking gourd and poured a shot for the poet. “Drink up! You’ll be inspired after this. But you must decide that this is what you want.”

The poet hesitated for a moment. Why not? Isn’t this what I want? He drained the cup. The sweet nectar, distilled from the food of the gods, poured into the parched soil of his heart, nurturing it with hope, life, and youth until the seed of love germinated and grew into a towering vine that thrust into the heavens, proudly sporting layers of lush leaves. The poet, delighted, climbed up like a swinging gibbon, and soon disappeared from view.

The robot waited. As we all know, the robot was very patient.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, the poet returned. He was covered in bruises and wounds, and twigs and leaves lay tangled in his beard and hair. His whole body trembled as he held up a single branch to show the robot.

The mechanical soldier wanted to ask whether the poet had climbed to the top of the tree and what he had seen there. Had he managed to lift the veil over the face of the world? Had he found eternity? It managed to hold its metal tongue, though, because it didn’t want to sadden the poet.

“Take this branch as a keepsake,” said the poet. Then he helped the robot mount the clockwork horse and began to wind up the mainspring. Creak, creak, the coils of the spring grew tighter; clack, clack, the horse pawed the ground. “Farewell, my friend! It’s time for you to go. We’ll see each other again when everything starts over. I shall now construct my own tomb, so remember to never look back, no matter what.”

The poet let go of the reins, and the clockwork horse galloped away, joy punctuating every step. The robot respected the poet’s wishes and didn’t look back. From behind came the fading sound of an ax biting into wood. Eventually, all it could hear was the sound of the howling wind.

The mechanical pair traversed the wilderness until they came to a ruined city. In a square surrounded by broken walls and fallen beams, a faithful crowd was in the process of crucifying an apostate. The robot dismounted from the horse and joined the watching throng.

The victim was tied to the crucifix, a familiar pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth. His gaze was tender, without pride or anger. As his eyes swept through the onlookers, they stopped on the robot. “Ah, there you are. Do you have anything to say to me?”

“You’re always on the run, unable to tarry in any world. In your heart of hearts, do you not yearn to be embedded in a picture? Perhaps you’re waiting for a perfect masterpiece worthy of being your home. Or perhaps you seek through your escapes to become the focus of everyone’s attention because it’s the blank space in a painting that draws our eyes. However, you’re thus doomed to be a formless shadow.”

“Aha, he is wise,” said the painter in an admiring tone. “He has pointed out the root of my unhappiness. I must repay him . . . All right, it’s time. I shall carry out my duty. Please, take my pipe and give it to him as a token of my gratitude. This is my last wish.”

A black-robed priest hesitated for a moment before approaching the man to take the pipe from his mouth. The priest then walked up to the robot, revealing his pale face. The robot accepted the pipe without a word.

The mob agitated, demanding blood. The headless executioner swung his hammer and drove long nails into the bones of the man on the crucifix. The clangs reverberated; rose-colored flesh and blood scattered through the air; the crowd shouted and screamed in a festive frenzy. The black-robed priest took out a sketchpad and began to draw. His slender, nimble fingers roamed over the page precisely, and the sketch of the victim showed an expression of sorrow and peace. All his suffering had come to an end.

The crowd approached the bleeding body to kiss it, and then scattered.

“Once again, only you and I are left.” The black-robed man’s gaze seemed sad.

“I’ve fulfilled my promises,” said the robot.

“All right, I’ll send you to the end; only there can you find the beginning. The rest is up to you.” The black-robed man flipped the sketchpad over and began to draw on the black side.

The robot had no doubt of Death’s honor. It waited patiently until its sight began to blur. The world faded, like a dying fire. All shapes and colors lost their reality, and then only silence remained.

The feeling reminded it of drifting in space, though even more pure and peaceful. The robot tried to turn around. There was nothing in its way, though it seemed to have fallen against something soft and curved. The robot’s presence and movements seemed to have no result other than turning itself into a deep depression in space. Or perhaps it was floating on a lake in which every slight movement resulted in endless ripples.

“Stop struggling,” said a voice out of the darkness. Had it spoken out of sympathy or impatience?

Always courteous, the robot stopped moving, pondering what to do next. The voice seemed familiar.

“Your Majesty?” it asked. It couldn’t be sure whether the voice belonged to the honest old king, or the shameless new king.

There was no answer.

After its eyes had had some time to adjust, the robot noticed a faint pixel that seemed to glow just a bit brighter than the background some distance away. If the robot hadn’t been so steadfast of will, it would never have noticed it. Still, now that the robot had a target to aim for, courage returned. It swam toward the pixel, and the fabric of space itself neither permitted the motion nor forbade it.

Slowly, the bright pixel got closer. It took an enormous amount of effort from the robot before the pixel got close enough to reveal itself as a bonfire that had almost gone out.

“I suggest you leave it alone,” said the voice from the darkness.

“I’m sorry, but I have to depart from here.” The robot never refused to converse with strangers. It believed that as long as it sincerely explained the situation, others would always show understanding and kindness.

“I know about your mission,” said the voice in the darkness. “Fidelity is praiseworthy, and if possible, I would pin a medal on you myself. However, the last spark is about to go out, and there won’t be anything to worry about anymore . . . ”

After some thought, the robot retrieved the branch that was the poet’s last gift and carefully poked it into the embers of the fire. The final wisp of flame poofed back to life like a dancing cobra and illuminated a spherical region of space. An old man wearing a crown emerged from the darkness, looking both like the young old king and the aged new king.

“Oh . . . ” His eyes squinted against the bright firelight. “I guess you really are determined. Why do you want to go home so much? Nowhere else will give you the eternal peace that you can find here.”

“I’ll never give up even if there’s only a single ray of hope.”

“That’s touching,” said the old man. “You are not acting just for yourself, and that’s admirable. All right, let me ask you a few questions. If your answers delight me, I’ll help you.”

“I shall answer truthfully!” The robot held a fist over its chest.

“When I was a young ruler, I thought solemn honesty was the pinnacle of virtue. I rewarded those who worked hard and tried to reform those who deviated from the straight path. My subjects were thus preserved from petty sins, and their hearts untroubled. However, it would be wrong to declare my kingdom back then as a heaven on earth. As I matured, I began to understand the frivolous and irresponsible better, and grew more lenient with the ridiculous and disrespectful. The people’s lives grew more relaxed and joyful, but moral corruption followed. As an unbiased observer, tell me, between the solemn and the absurd, which is more worthy of encouragement? Between the hero and the clown, who is more lovable?”

“Your Majesty, my view is that Fate has always loved to give birth to twins. Each person you named is their own twin.”

“Ha! What an interesting answer. I see you are possessed of more than a bunch of etched circuits.” The old man smiled.

“You’re right. Some water had gotten into my electronic brain,” said the robot, who was determined to tell the truth. “Strange negative electrons thus made their way into my mixed-up thoughts.”

“Now, for my second question. A human being is a bundle of contradictions. One can sacrifice oneself like an angel, but one can also devote one’s whole life to hurting others like a demon. Tell me, which is stronger: love or hate?”

“I have observed that all finite beings crave to cleave to something more lasting. This is the only way for us to become fearless, though it doesn’t matter what we pledge allegiance to.”

“Very good,” said the old man as he stroked his white beard. “I like you even more now. One last question, which you must think over carefully before answering. It’s very important.”

“I will make use of each and every calculation module in my body,” said the robot solemnly.

“Excellent. Then let me ask you: do you believe you can carry out your duty? If you return home, will you truly qualify as the unprecedented, peerless, one-and-only, unparalleled, unsurpassed, irreplaceable, unreproducible, history-defying, future-mocking master of bullshit?”

As the robot promised, it invoked 256 different verification routines and carried out 97,466,000,000,000,000 calculations. After exhausting nearly every ounce of energy, it answered, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

The old man nodded slowly. “We’re obviously in the middle of a very serious and solemn situation right here, so I won’t ask you to prove yourself with a few demonstration tales. Maybe you could tell me about your understanding of the art of bullshit, and I’ll then be able to assess whether your confidence is warranted.”

Having devoted almost its entire life to this career, the robot launched into its answer without delay. “I believe tall tales please both the teller and the listener. This is partly because the sharp glare of the truth can injure mortal senses and strike fear into the hearts of the common people. It’s thus necessary to disguise the truth in the form of ridiculous stories so that they may then seep into fragile and suspicious nerves. Even if these dull minds cannot extract the beneficial truth hidden therein, at least the blunted instrument would not injure them too much . . . ”

The old man’s frown, which had relaxed just a fraction, tightened again. He was not entirely satisfied.

The robot continued, “ . . . However, after many years of worldly experience, I think tall tales give pleasure simply from the imagination’s leap into the infinite. It’s no different from humanity’s desire to fly. The pleasure alone is reason enough; no other explanation is needed.”

A relieved smile crinkled the old man’s face. “That is a good answer.” He retrieved a sword-shaped pencil from a sleeve. “When I was in the mortal realm, I once wielded this to conquer the world and build my kingdom. Here, in the country of Death, I used it to erase light and trap everything in darkness. Now I pass it on to you with the hope that you’ll find a good use for it. Ah, there, the fire is about to go out. Everything is going to sleep.”

The branch added by the robot had turned to ash. Dull, thudding footsteps echoed not too far away.

“You don’t have much time,” said the old man, whose smile faded as the light dimmed.

“Would you come with me?” The robot held on to the pencil tightly.

“I’m a slave who belongs here for eternity. Go now. Remember, I help you not out of some deep plot or scheme, but simply a desire to see the look of defeat on his face. Even once would be enough for me.”

Only a few dying sparks remained among the ashes, just enough to illuminate the white beard, shaped like the curve of a smile. Then, nothing but darkness.

Without wasting a moment, the robot pulled out the pipe. Earlier, when it had rummaged around for the branch from the poet, it had discovered that the pipe was made from an eraser. Now it swept the pipe through the darkness, and an arc of light tore apart the primeval chaos. The noise of footsteps halted momentarily before redoubling as the unseen hunter rushed forward.

The robot erased with all its might until it managed to rub out a circle in the darkness, which was just big enough for it to crawl through—this had been computed earlier as the result of its 97,466,000,000,000,001st calculation. It fell through the hole onto muddy ground and immediately turned around to color in the hole with the pencil.

By the faint light from the hole, the robot could see the pale hand of Death reaching out of the portal between the worlds. Fortunately, the robot had already drawn an X across the hole, which barred the hand from coming through. The robot worked hard to color in the four quadrants. At first, the pencil strokes were rushed and uneven, and it was possible to hear Death’s sighs on the other side. Later, after reassuring itself that everything was all right, the robot patiently, meticulously, and evenly filled out every millimeter of space, ensuring that not even a single pixel would be left untouched. It colored until the pencil was just a stub too small to hold. After checking over everything to be sure the seal was tight, the robot relaxed and fell asleep.

By the time the boy woke up, he felt sore all over. All around him was muddy soil, and he found himself leaning against a thick tree root. The boy finally remembered that he had fallen into a deep pit in the ground. Overhead the shape of the sky was irregular, and a few people were leaning over the edge of the hole, looking down. The noise of more anxious people filled the air as they argued about how to rescue him.

Some bug was crawling over the back of his neck. Carefully, the boy caught it and gazed at its wriggling, tiny legs in his palm. His stomach rumbled with hunger. Everything was so new, so interesting, and he wanted a big meal to reward himself for everything he had been through this afternoon.

After filling his belly, the next order of business would be to regale his audience with his adventures. Even without any poetic license, he was sure that they had never heard such strange tales.

The adults always think they’re so wise and they know everything. They’d never take a kid’s words seriously. They’ll say I made it all up . . . But who cares! Someday they’ll know I’m telling the truth.

Well, it doesn’t matter if they call me a liar. As long as they enjoy my tales and laugh heartily, I’ll help them.

Originally published in Chinese in Zui Found, November 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

“Fei Dao” (the name should be treated as a single indivisible unit) is the pen name of Mr. Jia Liyuan. Born in 1983 in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China, Fei Dao received his Ph.D. in Literature from Tsinghua University. Currently, he pursues research at Beijing Normal University. He is the author of short story collections Innocence and Its Fabrications, The Storytelling Robot, Chinese Scifi Blockbusters, and The Long Journey to Death. Previous publications in translation include Italian and English editions of “A Story of the End of the World” and “The Demon’s Head.” He has also been published academically in journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Literary Review, Contemporary Writers Review, Dushu, and Comparative Literature in China.

Thing and Sick

Adam Roberts

It started with the letter.

Roy would probably say it started when he solved the Fermi Paradox, when he achieved (his word) clarity. Not clarity, I think: but sick. Sick in the head. He probably wouldn’t disagree. Not with so much professional psychiatric opinion having been brought to bear on the matter. He concedes as much to me, in the many communications he has addressed me from his asylum. He sends various manifestos and communications to the papers too, I understand. In all of them he claims to have finally solved the Fermi Paradox. If he has, then I don’t expect my nightmares to diminish any time soon.

I do have bad dreams, yes. Intense, visceral nightmares from which I wake sweating and weeping. If Roy is wrong, then perhaps they’ll diminish with time.

But really it started with the letter.

I was in Antarctica with Roy Curtius, the two of us hundreds of miles inland, far away from the nearest civilization. It was 1986, and one (weeks-long) evening and one (months-long) south polar night. Our job was to process the raw astronomical data coming in from Proxima and Alpha Centurai. Which is to say: our job was to look for alien life. There had been certain peculiarities in the radioastronomical flow from that portion of the sky, and we were looking into it. Whilst we were out there we were given some other scientific tasks to be keeping ourselves busy with, but it was the SETI business that was the main event. We maintained the equipment, and sifted the data, passing most of it on for more detailed analysis back in the UK. Since in what follows I am going to say a number of disobliging things about him, I’ll concede right here that Roy was some kind of programming genius—this, remember, back in the late ’80s, when “computing” was quite the new thing.

The base was situated as far as possible from light pollution and radio pollution. There was nowhere on the planet further away than where we were.

We did the best we could, with 1980s-grade data processing and a kit-built radio dish flown out to the location in a packing crate, and assembled best as two men could assemble anything when it was too cold for us to take off our gloves.

“The simplest solution to the Fermi thing,” I said once, “would be simply to pick up alien chatter on our clever machines. Where are the aliens? Here they are.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he said.

We spent some hours every day on the project. The rest of the time we ate, drank, lay about, and killed time. We had a VHS player, and copies of Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, The Neverending Story, and The Karate Kid. We played cards. We read books. I was working my way through Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. Roy was reading Immanuel Kant. That fact, right there, tells you all you need to know about the two of us. “I figured eight months isolation was the perfect time really to get to grips with the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” he would say. “Of course,” he would add, with a little self-deprecating snigger, “I’m not reading it in the original German. My German is good—but not that good.” He used to leave the book lying around: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Meiklejohn. It had a red cover. Pretentious fool.

“We put too much trust in modern technology,” he said one day. “The solution to the Fermi Paradox? It’s all in here.” And he would stroke the cover of the Critique, as if it were his white cat and he Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

“Whatever, dude,” I told him.

Once a week a plane dropped off our supplies. Sometimes the pilot, Diamondo, would land his crate on the ice-runway, maybe even get out to stretch his legs and chat to us. I’ve no idea why he was called “Diamondo,” or what his real name was. He was Peruvian I believe. More often, if the weather was bad, or if D. was in a hurry, he would swoop low and drop our supplies, leaving us to fight through the burly snowstorm and drag the package in. Inside would be necessaries, scientific equipment, copies of relevant journals—paper copies, it was back then, of course—and so on. The drops also contained correspondence. For me that meant: letters from family, friends, and above all from my girlfriend Lezlie.

Two weeks before all this started I had written to Lezlie, asking her for a paperback copy of Children of Dune. I told her, in what I hope was a witty manner, that I had been disappointed by the slimness of Dune Messiah. I need the big books, I had said, to fill up the time, the long aching time, the (I think I used the phrase) terrible absence-of-Lezlie-thighs-and-tits time that characterized life in the Antarctic. I mention this because, in the weeks that followed, I found myself going back over my letter to her—my memory of it, I mean; I didn’t keep a copy—trying to work out if I had perhaps offended her with a careless choice of words. If she might, for whatever reason, have decided not to write to me this week in protest at my vulgarity, or sexism. Or to register her disapproval by not paying postage to send a fat paperback edition of Dune III to the bottom of the world. Or maybe she had written.

You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

Roy never got letters. I always got some: some weeks as many as half a dozen. He: none. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I asked him, once. “Or any friends?”

“Philosophy is my girlfriend,” he replied, looking smugly over the top of his copy of the Critique of Pure Reason. “The solution to the Fermi Paradox is the friend I have yet to meet. Between them, they are all the company I desire.”

“If you say so, mate,” I replied, thinking inwardly weirdo! and loser and billy-no-mates and other such things. I didn’t say any of that aloud, of course. And each week it would go on: we’d unpack the delivery parcel, and from amongst all the other necessaries and equipment I’d pull out a rubberband-clenched stash of letters, all of which would be for me and none of which were ever for Roy. And he would smile his smarmy smile and look aloof; or sometimes he would peer in a half-hope, as if thinking that maybe this week would be different. Once or twice I saw him writing a letter, with his authentic Waverley fountain pen, shielding his page with his arm when he thought I wanted to nosy into his private affairs—as if I had the slightest interest in fan mail to Professor Huffington Puffington of the University of Kant Studies.

He used to do a number of bonkers things, Roy: like drawing piano keys onto his left arm, spending ages shading the black ones, and then practicing—or, for all I know, only pretending to practice—the right-hand part of Beethoven sonatas on it. “I requested an actual piano,” he told me. “They said no.” He used to do vocal exercises in the shower, really loud. He kept samples of his snot, testing (he said) whether his nasal mucus was affected by the south polar conditions. Once he inserted a radiognomon relay spike (looked a little like a knitting needle) into the corner of his eye, and squeezed the ball to see what effects it had in his vision “because Newton did it.” He learned a new line of the Aeneid every evening—in Latin, mark you—by reciting it over and over. Amazingly annoying, this last weird hobby, because it was so particularly and obviously pointless. I daresay that’s why he did it.

I read regular things: SF novels, magazines, even four-day-old newspapers (if the drop parcel happened to contain any), checking the football scores and doing the crosswords. And weekly I would pull out my fistful of letters, and settle down on the common room sofa to read them and write my replies, whilst Roy pursed his brow and worked laboriously through another paragraph of his Kant.

One week he said. “I’d like a letter.”

“Get yourself a pen pal,” I suggested.

We had just been outside, where the swarming snow was as thick as a continuous shower of woodchips and the wind bit through the three layers I wore. We were both back inside now, pulling off icicle bearded gloves and scarfs and stamping our boots. The drop-package was on the floor between us, dripping. We had yet to open it.

“Can I have one of yours?” he asked.

“Tell you what,” I said. I was in a good mood, for some reason. “I’ll sell you one. Sell you one of my letters.”

“How much?”

“Tenner,” I said. Ten pounds was (I hate to sound like an old codger, but it’s the truth) a lot of money back then.

“Deal,” he said, without hesitation. He untied his boots, hopped out of them like Puck and sprinted away. When he came back he was holding a genuine ten pound note. “I choose, though,” he said, snatching the thing away as I reached for it.

“Whatever, man,” I laughed. “Be my guest.”

He gave me the money. Then, he dragged the parcel, now dripping melted snow, through to the common room and opened it. He rummaged around and brought out the rubberbanded letters: five of them.

“Are you sure none of them are addressed to you?” I said, settling myself on the sofa and examining my banknote with pride. “Maybe you don’t need to buy one of my letters—maybe you got one of your own?”

He shook his head, looked quickly through the five envelopes on offer, selected one and handed me the remainder of the parcel. “No.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I told him. Off he went to his bedroom to read the letter he had bought.

I thought nothing more about it. The four letters were from: my Mum, my brother, a guy in Leicester with whom I was playing a tediously drawn-out game of postal chess, and the manager of my local branch of Lloyd’s Bank in Reading, writing to inform me that my account was in credit. Since being in Antarctica meant I could never spend anything, and since my researcher’s stipend was still going in monthly, this was unnecessary. I’m guessing it was by way of a publicity exercise. It’s not that I was famous, of course; even famous-for-Reading. But it doubtless looked good on some report somewhere: we look after our customers, even when they’re at the bottom of the world! I made myself a coffee. Then I spent an hour at a computer terminal, checking data. When Roy came back through he looked smug, but I didn’t begrudge him that. After all, I had made ten pounds—and ten pounds is ten pounds.

For the rest of the day we worked, and then I fixed up some pasta and Bolognese sauce in the little kitchen. As we ate I asked him: “so who was the letter from?”

“What do you mean?” Suspicious voice.

“The letter you bought from me. Who was it from? Was it Lezlie?”

A self-satisfied grin. “No comment.”

“Say what?”

“It’s my letter. I bought it. And I’m entitled to privacy.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I was only asking.” He was right, I suppose; he bought it, it was his. Still, his manner rubbed me up the wrong way. We ate in silence for a bit, but I’m afraid I couldn’t let it go. “I was only asking: who was it from? Is it Lezlie? I won’t pry into what she actually wrote.” Even as I said this, I thought to myself: pry? How could I pry—the words were written to be read by me! “You know,” I added, thinking to add pressure. “I could just write to her, ask her what she wrote. I could find out that way.”

“No comment,” he repeated, pulling his shoulders round as he sat. I took my bowl to the sink and washed it up, properly annoyed, but there was no point in saying anything else. Instead I went through and put Romancing the Stone on the telly, because I knew it was the VHS Roy hated the most. He smiled, and retreated to his room with his philosophy book.

The next morning I discovered, to my annoyance, that the business with the letter was still preying on my mind. I told myself: get over it. It was done. But some part of me refused to get over it. At breakfast Roy read another page of his Kant, and I saw that he was using the letter as a bookmark. At one point he put the book down and stood up to go to the loo, but then a sly expression crept over his usually ingenuous face, and he picked the book up and took it with him.

It had been a blizzardy few days and the dish needed checking over. Roy tried to wriggle out of this chore: “you’re more the hardware guy,” he said, in a wheedling tone. “I’m more conceptual—the ideas and the phil-os-o-phay.”

“Don’t give me that crap. We’re both hands-on—the folk in Adelaide, and back in Britain, are the actual ideas people.” I was cross. “Philosophy my arse.” At any rate, he suited-up, rolled his scarf around his lower face, and snapped on his goggles, zipped up his overcoat. We both pulled out brooms and stumped through light snowfall to the dish. It took us half an hour to clear the structure of snow, and check its motors hadn’t frozen solid, and that its bearings were ice-free. Our shadows flickered across the landscape like pennants in the wind.

The sun loitered near the horizon, a cricket-ball frozen in flight.

That afternoon I did a stint testing the terminals. With the sun still up, it was a noisy picture; although it was possible to pick up this and that. At first I thought there was something, but when I looked at it I discovered it was radio chatter from a Spanish expedition on its way to the Vinson Massif. I found my mind wandering. Who was the letter from?

The following day I eased my irritation by writing to Lezlie. Hey, you know Roy? He’s a sad bastard, a ringer for one of actors in “Revenge of the Nerds.” Anyway he asked for a letter and I sold him one. Now he won’t tell me whose letter it is. Did you write to me last week? What did you say? Just give me the gist, lover-girl. But as soon as I’d written this I scrunched it up and threw it in the bin. Lez would surely not respond well to such a message. In effect I was saying: “hey you know that love-letter you poured your heart and soul into? I sold it to a nerd without even reading it! That’s how much I value your emotions!”

Chewed the soft-blue plastic insert at the end of my Bic for a while.

I tried again: Hi lover! Did you write last week? There was a snafu with the package and some stuff got lost. I looked over the lie. It didn’t ring true. I scrunched this one up too. Then I sat in the chair trying, and failing, to think of how to put things. The two balls of scrunched paper in the waste-bin began, creakingly, to unscrunch.

Dear Lez. Did you write last week? I’m afraid I lost a letter, klutz that I am! That was closer to the truth. But then I thought: what if she had written me a dear-john letter? Or a let’s-get-married? Or a-close-family-member-has-died? How embarrassing to write back a jaunty “please repeat your message!” note. What if she hadn’t written at all? What if it were somebody else?

This latter thought clawed at my mind for a while. What if some important information, perhaps from my academic supervisor at Reading, Prof Addlestone, had been in the letter? Privacy was one thing, but surely Roy didn’t have the right to withhold such info?

I stomped down the corridor and knocked at Roy’s room. He made me wait for a long time before opening the door just enough to reveal his carbuncular face, smirking up at me. “What?”

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I want my letter back.”

“No dice, doofus,” he replied. “I paid for it. It’s mine now.”

“Look, I’ll buy it back, alright? I’ll give you your ten pounds. I’ve got it right here.”

When he smiled, he showed the extent to which his upper set of teeth didn’t fit neatly over his lower set. “It’s not for sale,” he said.

“Don’t be a pain, Roy,” I said. “I’m asking nicely.”

“And I’m, nicely, declining.”

“What—you want more than a tenner? You can go fish for that, my friend.”

“It’s not for sale,” he repeated.

“Is it a scam,” I said, my temper wobbling badly. “Is the idea you hold out until I offer—what, twenty quid? Is that it?”

“No. That’s not it. It’s mine. I do not choose to sell it.”

“Just tell me what’s in the letter,” I pleaded. “I’ll give your money back and you can keep the damn thing, just tell me who it’s from and what it says.” Even as I made this offer it occurred to me that Roy, with his twisted sense of humor, might simply lie to me. So I added: “show it to me. Just show me the letter. You don’t have to give it up, keep it for all I care, only—”

“No deal,” said Roy. Then he wrung his speccy face into a parody of a concerned expression. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Anthony.” And he shut his door.

I went through to the common room, fuming. For a while I toyed with the idea of simply grabbing the letter back: I was bigger than Roy, and doubtless had been involved in more actual fist-flying, body-grappling fights than he. It wouldn’t have been hard. But instead of that I had a beer, and lay on the sofa, and tried to get a grip. We had to live together, he and I, in unusually confined circumstances, and for a very lengthy period of time. In less than a week the sun would vanish, and the proper observing would begin. Say we chanced upon alien communication (I told myself)—wouldn’t that be something? Might there be a Nobel Prize, or something equally prestigious, in it? I couldn’t put all that at risk, even for the satisfaction of punching him on the nose.

Maybe, I told myself, Roy would thaw out a little in a day or two. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all. Maybe I could coax the letter out of him.

The week wore itself out. I went through a phase of intense irritation with Roy for his (what seemed to me) immensely petty and immature attitude with regard to my letter. Then I went through a phase when I told myself it didn’t bother me. I did consider returning his tenner to him, so as to retain the high moral ground. But then I thought: ten pound is ten pound.

The week ended, and Diamondo overflew and tossed the supply package out to bounce along the snow. This annoyed me, because I had finally managed to write a letter to Lezlie that explained the situation without making it sound like I valued her communiques so little I’d gladly sold it off to weirdo Roy. But I couldn’t “post” the letter unless the plane landed and took it on board, so I had to hang onto it. I couldn’t even be sure, I reminded myself, that the letter Roy had bought from me had been from her.

On the fifth of July the sun set for the last time until August. The thing people don’t understand about Antarctic night is that it’s not the same level of ink-black all the way through. For the first couple of weeks, the sky lightens twice a day, pretty much bright enough to walk around without a torch—the same dawn and dusk paling of the sky that precedes sunrise and follows sunset, only without actual dawn and dusk. Still, you can sense the sun is just there, on the other side of the horizon, and it’s not too bad. As the weeks go on this gets briefer and darker, and then you do have a month or so when it’s basically coal-colored skies and darkness invisible the whole time.

Diamondo landed his plane, and tossed out the supply package, but didn’t linger; and by the time I’d put on the minimum of outdoor clothing and grabbed a torch and got through the door he was taking off again—so, once again, I didn’t get to send my letter to Lez.

That was the last time I saw that aircraft.

There were two letters in this week’s batch: one from my old Grammar School headmaster, saying that the school had hosted a whole assembly on the “exciting and important” work I was doing; and the other from my Professor at Reading. This was nothing but a note, and read in its entirety: “Dear A. I often think of Sartre’s words. Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. Where is freer than the very bottom of the world? Nil desperandum! Yours, A.” This, though slightly gnomic, was not out of character for Prof. Addlestone, who had worked on SETI for so long it had made his brain a little funny. No letter from Lez, which worried me. But, after all, she didn’t write every week. I re-read the Professor’s note several times. Did it read like a PS, a scribbled afterthought? Did it perhaps mean that the letter Roy bought had been from Addlestone? Maybe. Maybe not.

We got on with our work, and I tried to put the whole letter business behind me. Roy did not help, as far as this went. He was acting stranger and stranger; simpering at me, and when I queried his expression (“what? What is it?”) scurrying away—or scowling and saying, “nothing, nothing, only . . . ” and refusing to elaborate.

The next thing was: he moved one of the computer terminals into his room. These were 1980s terminals; not the modern-day computers the size and weight of a copy of Marie-Claire; so it was no mean feat getting the thing in there. He even cut a mousehole-like n in the bottom of his door, to enable the main cable to come out into the hall and through into the monitor room.

“What are you doing in there?” I challenged him. “That’s not standard policy. Did you clear this with home?”

“I’m working on something,” he told me. “I’m close to a breakthrough. SETI, my friend. Solving Fermi’s paradox! You should consider yourself lucky to be here. You’ll get a footnote in history. Only a footnote, I know: but it’s more than most people get.”

I ignored this. “I still don’t see why do you need to squirrel yourself away in your room?”

“Privacy,” he said. “Is very important to me.”

One day he went out on the ice to (he told me) check the meteorological datapoints. It seemed like an odd thing—he’d shown precious little interest in them up to that point—but I was glad he was out of the base, if only for half an hour. As soon as I saw his torch-beam go, wobbling its oval of brightness away over the ice, I hurried to his room. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I told myself. I was just checking the identity of the letter’s author. Maybe have a quick glance at its contents. I wouldn’t steal it back (although, I told myself, I could. It was my letter after all. Roy was being an idiot about the whole thing). But once my itch was scratched, curiosity-wise, then everything would get easier about the base. I could wait out the remainder of my stint with equanimity. He need never even know I’d been poking around.

No dice. Roy had fitted a padlock to his door. I rattled this uselessly; I could have smashed it, but then Roy would know what I’d been up to. I retreated to the common room, disproportionately angry. What was he doing, in there, with a whole computer terminal and my letter?

I had enough self-knowledge to step back from the situation, at least some of the time. He was doing it in order to wind me up. That was the only reason he was doing it. The letter was nothing—none of my letters, if I looked back, contained any actual, substantive content. They were just pleasant chatter, people I knew touching base with me. The letter Roy bought must be the same. He bought it not to have the letter, but in order to set me on edge, to rile me. And by getting riled I was gifting him the victory. The way to play this whole situation was to be perfectly indifferent.

However much I tried this, though, I kept falling back. It was the not knowing!

I tried once more, during the week. “Look, Roy,” I said, smiling. “This letter thing is no big deal, you know? None of my letters have any really significant stuff in them.”

He looked at me, in a “that’s all you know” sort of way. But this was, I decided, just winding me up.

“I tell you what I think,” I said. “You can, you know, nod, or not-nod, depending on whether I’m right. I think the letter you bought was from my girlfriend. Yeah?”

“No comment,” said Roy, primly. “One way or the other.”

“If so, it was probably full of inane chatter, yeah? Fine—keep it! With my blessing!”

“In point of fact,” he corrected me, holding up his right forefinger, “I do not need your blessing. The transaction was finalized with the fiduciary transfer. Contract law is very clear on this point.”

I lost my temper a little at this point. “You know how sad you are, keeping a woman’s letter to another man for your own weird little sexual buzz? That’s—sad. Is what it is. I don’t think you realize how sad that is.”

“Oh Anthony, Anthony,” he said, shaking his head and smirking in that insufferable way he had. “If only you knew!”

I swore. “Suit yourself,” I said.

Then the airstrip lights failed. I assumed this was an accident, although the fact that every one of them failed at the same time was strange. Diamondo came through on the radio: “fellows!” he declared, through his thick accent. “I cannot land if there are no lights to land!”

“Don’t know what’s happened to them,” I replied. “Some manner of malfunction.”

“Obviously that!” came Diamondo’s voice. “Can you fix? Over.”

Roy suited up and went outside; he was back in minutes. “I can’t do anything in the dark, with a torch, in a hurry,” he complained. “Tell him—no. Tell him to toss the package out and we’ll fix the lights for next time.”

When I relayed this message, Diamondo said “breakables! There are breakables in the package! I cannot toss! Over.” Then, contradicting his last uttered word, he went on. “I can take out the breakables and toss the rest. Wait—wait.”

I could hear the scrapy sound of the plane in the sky outside. Then, over the radio: “is in chute.”

“Wait,” I said. “Where are you dropping it? If there’s no lights—I mean, I don’t want to go searching over a wide area in the dark with . . . ” There was a terrific crash right overhead, as something smashed into our roof.

“You idiot!” I called. “You could have broken our roof!”

Static. And, through the walls, the sound of the plane’s engines diminishing. Roy looked and me, and I at him. “I think it rolled off,” Roy said. “You go out and get it.”

“You’re already suited!”

“I went out last time. It’s your turn now. Fair’s fair.”

It was on the edge of my tongue to retort: stealing my letter—is that fair? But that would have done no good; and anyway I was hoping that there would be a new letter from Lezlie in the satchel, and if so I certainly wanted to get to that before Roy did. So I pulled on overclothes and took a torch and went outside.

It was extraordinarily cold—sinus-freezingly cold. The air was still. The sound of Diamondo’s plane, already very faint, diminished and diminished until it vanished altogether. Now the only sound was the whir of the generator, gently churning to itself with its restless motion. I searched around in the dark outside the main building for ten minutes or so, and spent another five trying to see into the gap between the main prefab and the annex, which was half-full of snow. But I couldn’t find it.

When I went back to the main door it was locked. This was unprecedented. For a while I banged on the door, and yelled, and my heart began blackly to suspect that Roy was playing some kind of prank on me—or worse. I was just about to give up and make my way round to try the side entrance when Roy’s gurning face appeared in the door’s porthole, with the graph-paper pattern woven into the glass. He opened it. “What the hell were you playing at?” I demanded, crossly. “Why did you lock the door?”

“It occurred to me that the lights might have been sabotaged,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “I thought: security is valor’s better part. Obviously I was going to let you back in, once I was sure it was you.”

“Have you had a nervous breakdown?” I yelled. “Are you high? Who else could possibly be out there? We’re three hundred miles from the nearest human settlement. Did you think it was a ghost?”

“Calm down,” Roy advised, grinning his simpering grin and still not looking me in the eye. “Did you get the package?”

I sat down with a thump. “Couldn’t find it,” I said, pulling off my overboots. “It may still be on the roof. Seriously, though, man! Locking the door?”

“We need to retrieve it,” said Roy. “It has my medication in it. My supplies are running low.”

This was the first I had heard of any medication. “Seriously? They posted you down here, even though you have medical problems?”

“Just some insomnia problems. And some allergic reaction problems. But I need my sleeping pills and my antihistamines.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “What is there to be allergic to, down here?”

He gave me a pointed look. But then he said: “come and have a drink. I’ve got some whisky.”

Now, I knew the base was not supplied with whisky. Beer was the most they allowed us. I should, perhaps, have been suspicious of Roy’s abrupt hospitality, doubly so since I knew he hardly ever drank. But I was cold, and cross, and a whisky—actually—sounded like a bloody good idea. “How have you got any of that?”

“I brought it with me. My old tutor at Cambridge gave it to me. Break it out when you’ve solved the SETI problem, he said. He never doubted me, you see. And solve it, I have.”

And then a second thought occurred to me. It came to me like a flash. I could get Roy drunk. Surely then he would be more amenable to telling me what was in the letter he’d snaffled from me. I couldn’t think that I’d ever seen him drunk; but my judgment was that he would hold his liquor badly. He’d be a splurger. OK, I thought: butter him up, some, and get some booze in him.

“I’ll have a dram,” I told him. Then: “kind of you to offer. Thanks. I didn’t mean to . . . you know. Yell at you.”

He ignored this overture. “You didn’t go to Cambridge, I think?” he asked, as we went through to the common room. “Reading University, isn’t it?”

“Reading born and bred,” I replied, absently. I half-leaned, half-sat on one of the heaters to get warmth back into my marrow whilst Roy went off to his room to get the whisky. He was gone a while. Finally he came back with a bottle of Loch Lomond in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He handed me the former.

I retrieved two tumblers from the cupboard, but Roy said: “I’ll not have the whisky, thank you anyway. I don’t like the taste.”

This was about par, I thought, for the weirdo that he was—bringing a bottle of scotch all the way to the end of the world, only not even to drink it. On the other hand the seal was broken, and about an inch was missing, so perhaps he had tried a taster and so discovered his animadversion. I honestly didn’t care. I poured three fingers, and settled myself in one of the chairs.

“Cheers!” I said, raising a glass.

“Good health,” he returned, propping his bum on the arm of the sofa.

“So,” I said, smacking my lips. “The fact that we’re drinking this means you’ve solved the Fermi paradox?”

“We’re not drinking it,” he said, with a little snorty laugh of self-satisfaction. “You are.”

“You’re such a pedant, Roy,” I told him.

“Take that as a compliment,” he said, smirking, and making odd little snorty-sniffy noises with his nostrils.

“So? Does the fact that I’m drinking this mean you’ve solved it?”

“The answer to your question is: yes.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

I took another sip. “Congratulations!”

“Thank you.”

“And?”

He peered blankly at me. “What?”

“And? In the sense of: what’s your solution?”

“Oh. The Fermi Paradox.” He sounded almost bored. “Well, I’ll tell you if you like.” He seemed to ponder this. “Yeah,” he added. “Why not? It’s Kant.”

“Of course it is,” I said, laughing. “You complete nutter.”

He looked hurt at this. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—the best part of a year of our lives, millions of pounds sunk into this base, probably billions spent worldwide on SETI, and all we needed to do was open a seventeenth-century book of philosophy!”

“Eighteenth-century,” he corrected me. “And the kit, here, certainly has its uses.”

“Glad to hear it! But—Kant? Really?”

Roy took the smallest sip from his beer bottle, and then rubbed his own chin with his thumb. “Hard to summarize,” he said. “Start here: how do we know there’s anything out there?”

“What—out in space?”

“No: outside our own brains. Sense data, yes? Eyes, ears, nerve-endings. We see things, and think we’re seeing things out there. We hear things, likewise. And so on. But maybe all that is a lie. Maybe we’re hallucinating. Dreaming. How can we be sure there’s anything really there?”

“Isn’t this I think therefore I am?”

“The cogito, yes,” said Roy, with that uniquely irritating prissy inflection he used when he wanted to convey his own intellectual superiority. “Though Kant didn’t have much time for Descartes, actually. He says I think therefore I am is an empty statement. We never just think, after all. We always think about something.”

“You’re losing me, Roy,” I said, draining my whisky, and reaching for the bottle. Roy’s eyes flashed, and I stopped. “Do you mind if I have another?”

“No, no,” he urged me, bobbing forward and back in an oddly bird-like way. “Go right ahead.”

“So,” I said. “You’re saying: we can’t be sure if the cosmos is a kind of hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat. So what? I’ve got to act as if the universe is real, or,” I directed a quick look at Roy, “they’d lock me in the loony bin. So? Does this hallucination also include ET, or not?”

“Quite right. Well, Kant says: there is a real world—he calls it the ding-an-sich, the thing as it really is. There is such a reality. But our only access to that real world is through our perceptions, our senses and the way our thoughts are structured. So, says Kant, some of the things we assume are part of the world out there are actually part of the structure of our consciousness.”

“Such as?”

“Quite basic things. Time and space. Causality.”

“Wait, Kant is saying that time, space, and causality aren’t ‘really’ out there? They’re just part of our minds?”

Roy nodded. “It’s like if we always wore pink-tinted contact lenses. Like we’d always worn them, ever since birth. Everything we saw would have a pink tint. We might very well assume the world was just—you know, pink. But it wouldn’t be the world that was pink, it would be our perception of the world.”

“Pink,” I repeated, and took another slug. I was starting to feel drowsy.

“We’re all like that, all the time, except that instead of pink contact lenses on our eyes, we’re wearing space-and-time contacts on our minds. Causality contacts.”

“Space and time are the way the universe is. Just is.”

“That’s not what Kant says. He says: we don’t really know the way the universe just is. All we know is how our perceptions and thoughts structure our understanding.”

“Wait,” I said. “Kant says that cause and effect are just in our heads?”

“That’s right”

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “If space and time and causality are just inside my head, then what’s my head in? It takes up space, my brain. It takes time to think these thoughts.”

“There’s something out there,” Roy agreed. “But we don’t know what it is. Here’s a thought-experiment, Kant’s thought-experiment. You can imagine an object in space, can’t you?”

I grunted.

“OK,” said Roy. “And you can imagine the object being taken away. Yes? Then you have empty space. But you can’t imagine space and time being taken away. You can’t imagine no space, no time.”

I grunted again.

“That shows that space, time, causality, and some other things—they’re part of the way the mind perceives. There’s no getting behind them. Is the ding-an-sich itself structured according to that logic? We cannot know. Maybe, maybe not.”

“Ding,” I said, my eyelid slipping down my eyeballs, “like a microwave oven?”

“We’re looking for aliens with visual telescopes and radio telescopes,” said Roy, standing up and putting his beer bottle down. “But whatever tools we use, we’re looking for aliens in space and time, aliens that understand causality and number. But maybe those things are not alien. Those things are the way our minds are built. And that means we’re looking in the wrong place. We should not be looking in space, or time. We should be looking in the ding-an-sich.”

“Sick,” I said, My eyes were shut now. I didn’t seem to be able to open them. Such muscular operation was beyond my volitional control. “I feel a bit sick, actually.”

“Ding,” I heard him say, at the other end of a very long corridor. “You’re done. Let’s open the microwave door, now, shall we?”

I suppose I was asleep. I tried to shift position in bed, but my arms were numb. Sometimes you lie on an arm and it goes dead. But this was both my arms. They were up over my head. A scraping sound. Distantly. I tried to pull my arms down but they were already down. This is the chance, somebody was saying, or muttering, or I don’t know. Perhaps I was imagining it. We’ve never had this chance before. Because although human consciousness is structured by the Kantian categories of apperception, there’s nothing to say that computer perception needs to suffer from the same limitations. It’s all a question of programming! A program to sift the Centauri data so as to get behind the limitations of consciousness.

I was moving. Everything was dark, dark, dark. My arms were trailing behind me, I thought; and something was pulling my legs, I thought; and I was sliding along on my back. Was that right? Could that be right?

We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability—and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways our minds structure the ding-an-such according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability. We look out and we see no aliens, and are surprised. But the real surprise would be to see aliens in such a vista, because that would mean the aliens are in our structures of thought. Sure there are aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the ding-an-sich.

The motion stopped, but I was still too sluggish to move, or speak, or even open my eyes. The next thing I knew, somebody was kissing me on the lips. Goodbye, was a word, and it floated around. Then nothing.

O dark, dark, dark, they all go into the—

Or.

Or something. It came upon me slowly. It, as it were, crept up on me. I couldn’t as yet put a name to it. Let me think through the necessary and contingent possibilities, I thought to myself. It could have been a letter from my Mum, in which case it was full of family trivia and Roy’s just yanking my chain for the hell of it. He’s certainly capable of that. The thing, whatever it was, was closer now, or larger somehow, or in some sense more present, although I still couldn’t put a name to it. It could have been a letter from a friend, or from Leicester Lenny, but if so it would only say Q-B4 ch! or Kn-R7 or something, and that could mean nothing at all to Roy. Or it could have been a letter from Professor Addlestone of Reading University, blathering on about something. Or it could have been, the thing was all around me now, or all within me, or otherwise pressing very imminently upon me. Or it could have been from Lezlie. But then, what? It was full of the usual blandishments? In which case Roy’s hoarding of it is creepy but, in the larger scheme of things, unimportant. That’s not what I’m afraid of though, is it? I’m afraid the letter says: I’m leaving you, I’ve found someone else. But but but, if it is, then I’ll find out eventually—won’t I. I just need to be patient. I’ll find out in time. Assuming I have time—

Cold. That was the thing.

That was what had crept up on me.

I sat up. I was outside, in the darkness, in my indoor clothes. Scalded with the cold. My whole body shook with a Parkinsonian tremor. I angled my head back and the stars were all there, the Southern Fish, the Centaur and the Dove; the Southern Cross itself; Orion and Hydra low in the sky; Scorpion and Sagittarius high up. Hydra and Pegasus. I breathed in fire and burned my throat and lungs. It was cold enough to shear metal. It was cold enough to freeze petrol.

I got to my feet. My hands felt as though they had been dipped in acid, and then that sensation stopped and I was more scared than before. There was nothing at the end of my arms at all. I tried rubbing my hands together, but the leprous lack of sensation and the darkness and my general sluggishness meant I could not coordinate the action. My hands bounced numbly off one another. I became terrified of the idea that I perhaps knocked one or more fingers clean off. It looks ridiculous as I write it down, but there, in the dark, in the cold, the thought of it gripped my soul horribly.

I had to get inside, to get warm. I had to get back to the base. I was shuddering so hard I was scared I might actually lose balance with the shivering and fall down—in which case I might not be able to get back up again. Ghastly darkness all about. Cold beyond the power of words to express.

I turned about, and about again. Starlight in the faintest of lights. I could see my breath coming out only because of the vast ostrich-feature-shaped blot that twisted in my field of vision, blocking out the stars. I needed to pick a direction and go. But I couldn’t see any lights to orient me. What if I stumbled off in the wrong direction? I could easily stagger off into the wilderness, miss the base altogether. I’d be dead in minutes.

I addressed myself: take hold of yourself. You were dragged here—Roy dragged you here. Runty Roy; he couldn’t have removed me very far from the base. Presumably he figured I wouldn’t wake up; that I’d just die there in the dark.

“OK,” I said, and took another breath—knives going down my throat. I had to move. I started off, and stumbled over the black ground through the black air. I began to fall forward—my thigh muscles were cramping—and picked up my pace to stop myself pitching onto my face. My inner ear still told me I was falling, so I ran faster. Soon I was sprinting. It’s possible the fluids in my inner ear had frozen, or glued-up with the cold, I don’t know. It felt as if I were falling, but my feet were still pounding over the ice, invisible below me. I felt like a diver, tumbling from the top board.

And then I saw the sea—I was at the coast. Obviously I wasn’t at the coast because that was hundreds of miles from the base. But there it was, visible. There was a settlement on the shore, a mile below me, with yellow lights throwing shimmery ovals over the water. There was a ship, lit up like a Christmas decoration, balanced very precisely on top of its own lit reflection. I must have been ten degrees of latitude, or more, further away from the pole, enough to lift the moon up over the horizon. The texture of the sea was a million burrin-marks of white light on a million wavelets, like pewter. There was no doubting what I was seeing. My whole body trembled with pain, with the cold, and I said to myself I’m dying, and I’m hallucinating because I’m dying. I must have run in the wrong direction. I felt as if I’d been running all my life, all my ancestors’ lives combined.

There was a weird inward flip, or lurch, or clonic jerk, or something folding over something else. I was conscious of thinking: I’ve run the wrong way. I’ve missed the base.

And there was the base. Now that I was there, I could see that Roy had covered the common room window on the inside with something—cloth, cardboard—to make a blackout screen. He had not wanted me to see the light and follow it as a beacon. Now that I was there, I could just make out the faint line of illumination around the edges. I couldn’t feel my hands, or my feet, and my face was covered with a pinching, scratchy mask—snot, tears, frost, whatever, frozen by the impossible cold to a hard crust.

I slumped against the wall, and the fabric of my shirt was so stiffened it snapped. It ripped clean away when I got up.

The door. I had to get to the door—that was when I saw . . . ” I was going to say when I saw them but the plural doesn’t really describe the circumstance. Not that there was only one, either. It is very hard to put into words. There was the door, in front of me, and just enough starlight to shine a faint glint off the metal handle. I could not use my hands, so I leaned on the handle with my elbow, but of course it did not give way. Locked, of course locked. And of course Roy would not be opening for me this time. Then I saw—what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that “it” did not burn, or gleam, or shine. “It” is the wrong word for it. “It” felt, or looked, like a great tumbling of scree down an endless slope. Or rubble gathering at the bottom and falling up the mountain. Forwards, backwards.

It was the most terrifying thing I ever saw.

There was a hint of—I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air particles. It was a pulse in the mind. It was a shudder of the soul.

I could not get inside the base, and I was going to die. I felt the horrid cold in the very core of my being. Then “it,” or “they,” or the boojummy whatever the hell (I choose my words carefully, here) it was, expanded. Or undid whatever process of congealing that brought it—I don’t know.

Where I stood experienced a second as-it-were convulsive, almost muscular contraction. Everything folded over, and flipped back again. “It,” or “they” were not here any longer. In fact they had been here eons ago, or were not yet here at all.

I was standing inside the common room.

Do not demand to know how I passed beyond the locked door. I could not tell you.

The warmth of the air burned my throat. I could no longer stay standing. I half slumped, half fell sideways, and my arm banged against one of the heaters—it felt like molten metal, and I yelled. I rolled off it and lay on the floor, and breathed and breathed.

I may have passed out. I have no idea how I got inside. I was probably only out for a few moments, because the next thing I knew was that my hands were in agony. Absolute agony! It felt like the gomjabbar, like they had both been stuffed into a tub of boiling water. Looking back I can now say what it was: it was sensation returning to my frostbitten flesh. But by God I’ve never felt such pain. I screamed and screamed like the Spanish Inquisition had gone to work on me. I writhed, and wept like a baby.

Somehow I dragged myself into a sitting posture, with my back against the wall and my legs straight out on the floor. Roy was standing in the common room doorway. In his right hand he was holding what I assumed was a gun, although I later realized it was a flare pistol.

“You murdering bastard,” I said, “have you come to finish the job? You going to shoot me down like a dog?” Or that’s what I tried to say. What came out was: “yrchyrchorchorchorch.” God, my throat was shredded.

“The thing-in-itself,” he said. There was a weird bend in his voice. I blinked away the melting icicles from my eyelashes and saw he was crying. “The thing-as-such. The thing per se. I have experienced it unmediated.” His face was wet. Tears slippy-sliding down, and dripping like snot from his jowls. I’d never seen him like that before.

“What,” I croaked, “did you put in my whisky?” Oh God, the pain in my hands! And now my feet were starting to rage and burn too. Oh, it was ghastly.

He stopped crying, and wiped his face in the crook of his left arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. Even at this juncture he was not able to look me in the eye. He lifted his right hand slowly, holding the flare pistol, until he was holding it across his chest, like James Bond in the posters.

I was weeping—not because I was scared of dying, but just because my hands and feet hurt with such sharp and focused intensity.

Roy took a breath, lifted the flare pistol to his own head, and pulled the trigger. There was a crunching bang, and Roy flopped to the ground. The common room was filled with fluorescent red-orange light and an extraordinarily loud hissing sound. For a moment we were in a luridly lit stage-set of Hades.

What had happened was this: the tip and fuse of the flare projectile had lodged itself in Roy’s skull, and had ejected the illumination section and its little asbestos parachute at the ceiling, where it snagged against the polystyrene tiles and burned until it was all burned out.

I sat in that ferociously red-lit room, with molten chunks of polystyrene dripping onto the carpet. Then the shell itself burned free and fell to the ground, where it fizzled out.

Roy was not dead. Nor was I, amazingly. It took me a while, and an effort, and the whole way along I was sobbing and begging the cosmos to take the pain away; but I got to the radio, and called for help. They sent an air ambulance, which laid a pattern of flares on the unlit runway during their first flyby and landed alongside them on their second. It took four hours, but they got to us, and we did not die in the interval.

I crawled back to Roy, unconscious on the floor, and pulled the shell-tip from the side of his head. There was no blood, although the dent was very noticeable—the skin and hair lining the new thumb-sized cavity all the way in. There was little I could do, beyond put him in the recovery position.

Then I clambered painfully on the sofa, my hands and feet hurting a little less. Then, surprisingly enough, I fell asleep—Roy had dissolved a sleeping tablet in the whisky, of course, to knock me out; and when the pain retreated just enough the chemical took effect. I was woken by the sound of crashing, and crashing, and crashing, and then one of the ambulance men came through the main door with an axe in his hand.

We were flown to Halley, on the coast—the subject of my vision, or whatever that had been. We were hospitalized, and questioned, and my hands were treated. I lost two fingers on my left hand and one on my right, and my nose was rescued with a skin graft that gives it, to this day, a weird patchwork-doll look. I lost toes too, but I care less about those. Roy was fine: they opened his skull, extracted a few fragments of bone, and sewed him up. Good as new.

I don’t think they believed his version of events, although for myself I daresay he was truthful, or as truthful as circumstances permit. The official record is that he had a nervous breakdown, drugged me, left me outside to die, and then shot himself. He himself said otherwise. I’ve read the transcript of his account. I’ve even been in the same room with him as he was questioned. “I saw things as they really are, things per se, I had a moment—that’s the wrong word, it is not measured in moments, it has always been with me, it will always be with me—a moment of clarity.”

“And your clarity was: kill your colleague?”

He wanted the credit all to himself, I think. He believed he was the individual destined to make first contact with alien life. He wanted me out of the way. He didn’t say that, of course, but that’s what I think. His explanation was: my perceptions, my mental processes and imagination, would collapse the fragile disintermediating system he was running to break through to the thing-as-such. I confess I don’t see how that would work. Nonetheless: he insists that this was his motive for killing me. Indeed, he insists that my reappearance proved the correctness of his decision, the necessity for my death—because by coming back at the time I did, I broke down the vision of the ding-an-sich, or reasserted the prison of categorical perception, or something, and the aliens fled—or not fled, because their being is not mappable with a succession of spatial coordinates the way ours are. But: I don’t know. Evaporate. Collapse away to nothing. Become again veiled. He wrote me several long, not terribly coherent letters about it from Broadmoor. I still prefer the earlier explanation. He was a nerd, not right in the head, and a little jealous of me.

So, yes. He happened to buy Lezlie’s Dear John. She couldn’t cope with the long-distances, the time lags between us meeting up, she’d met someone else . . . ” the usual. After he drugged me and left me outside to die, Roy left the letter, carefully opened and smoothed out, face up on the desk in my room. It was going to be the explanation for my suicide. People were to believe: I couldn’t handle the rejection, and had just walked out into the night.

His latest communication with me from Broadmoor begged me to “go public” with what I had seen; so that’s what I’m doing. You’ll grasp from this that I don’t know what I saw. I suppose it was a series of weird hallucinations brought on by the extreme cold and the blood supply intermitting in my brain. Or something, I don’t know. I still dream about them. It. Whatever. And the strange thing is: although I know for a fact I encountered it (them, none, whatever) for the first time in Antarctica, in 1986, it feels—it feels deep in my bones—as if I have always known about them. As if they visited me in my cradle. They didn’t, of course.

I saw the John Carpenter film The Thing for the first time recently. That wasn’t one of the VHS tapes they gave us, back then, to watch on base. For obvious reasons. That’s not what it was like for me at all. That doesn’t capture it at all. They, or it, or whatever, were not thing-y.

They are inhuman. But this is only my dream of them, I think. But it is not a dream of a human. It is not a dream of a thing. Or it is, but of a sick kind of thing. And, actually, no. That’s not it.

He keeps writing me. I wish he’d stop writing.

Originally published in Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates.

About the Author

Adam Roberts is the author of sixteen novels, many short stories and various works of academic criticism. Recent works include The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, 2nd edition and his latest novel,�The Real Town Murders. He lives a little way west of London, with his wife and two children.

Ancient Engines

Michael Swanwick

“Planning to live forever, Tiktok?”

The words cut through the bar’s chatter and gab and silenced them. The silence reached out to touch infinity and then, “I believe you’re talking to me?” a mech said.

The drunk laughed. “Ain’t nobody else here sticking needles in his face, is there?”

The old man saw it all. He lightly touched the hand of the young woman sitting with him and said, “Watch.”

Carefully the mech set down his syringe alongside a bottle of liquid collagen on a square of velvet cloth. He disconnected himself from the recharger, laying the jack beside the syringe. When he looked up again, his face was still and hard. He looked like a young lion.

The drunk grinned sneeringly.

The bar was located just around the corner from the local stepping stage. It was a quiet retreat from the aggravations of the street, all brass and mirrors and wood paneling, as cozy and snug as the inside of a walnut. Light shifted lazily about the room, creating a varying emphasis like clouds drifting overhead on a summer day, but far dimmer. The bar, the bottles behind the bar, and the shelves beneath the bottles behind the bar were all aggressively real. If there was anything virtual, it was set up high or far back, where it couldn’t be touched. There was not a smart surface in the place.

“If that was a challenge,” the mech said, “I’d be more than happy to meet you outside.”

“Oh, noooooo,” the drunk said, his expression putting the lie to his words. “I just saw you shooting up that goop into your face, oh so dainty, like an old lady pumping herself full of antioxidants. So I figured . . . ” He weaved and put a hand down on a table to steady himself. “ . . . figured you was hoping to live forever.”

The girl looked questioningly at the old man. He held a finger to his lips.

“Well, you’re right. You’re—what? Fifty years old? Just beginning to grow old and decay. Pretty soon your teeth will rot and fall out and your hair will melt away and your face will fold up in a million wrinkles. Your hearing and your eyesight will go and you won’t be able to remember the last time you got it up. You’ll be lucky if you don’t need diapers before the end. But me—” he drew a dram of fluid into his syringe and tapped the barrel to draw the bubbles to the top—“anything that fails, I’ll simply have it replaced. So, yes, I’m planning to live forever. While you, well, I suppose you’re planning to die. Soon, I hope.”

The drunk’s face twisted, and with an incoherent roar of rage he attacked the mech.

In a motion too fast to be seen, the mech stood, seized the drunk, whirled him around, and lifted him above his head. One hand was closed around the man’s throat so he couldn’t speak. The other held both wrists tight behind the knees so that, struggle as he might, the drunk was helpless.

“I could snap your spine like that,” he said coldly. “If I exerted myself, I could rupture every internal organ you’ve got. I’m two-point-eight times stronger than a flesh man, and three-point-five times faster. My reflexes are only slightly slower than the speed of light, and I’ve just had a tune-up. You could hardly have chosen a worse person to pick a fight with.”

Then the drunk was flipped around and set back on his feet. He gasped for air.

“But since I’m also a merciful man, I’ll simply ask nicely if you wouldn’t rather leave.” The mech spun the drunk around and gave him a gentle shove toward the door.

The man left at a stumbling run.

Everyone in the place—there were not many—had been watching. Now they remembered their drinks, and talk rose up to fill the room again. The bartender put something back under the bar and turned away.

Leaving his recharge incomplete, the mech folded up his lubrication kit and slipped it in a pocket. He swiped his hand over the credit swatch, and stood.

But as he was leaving, the old man swiveled around and said, “I heard you say you hope to live forever. Is that true?”

“Who doesn’t?” the mech said curtly.

“Then sit down. Spend a few minutes out of the infinite swarm of centuries you’ve got ahead of you to humor an old man. What’s so urgent that you can’t spare the time?”

The mech hesitated. Then, as the young woman smiled at him, he sat.

“Thank you. My name is—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Brandt. There’s nothing wrong with my eidetics.”

Brandt smiled. “That’s why I like you guys. I don’t have to be all the time reminding you of things.” He gestured to the woman sitting opposite him. “My granddaughter.” The light intensified where she sat, making her red hair blaze. She dimpled prettily.

“Jack.” The young man drew up a chair. “Chimaera Navigator-Fuego, model number—”

“Please. I founded Chimaera. Do you think I wouldn’t recognize one of my own children?”

Jack flushed. “What is it you want to talk about, Mr. Brandt?” His voice was audibly less hostile now, as synthetic counterhormones damped down his emotions.

“Immortality. I found your ambition most intriguing.”

“What’s to say? I take care of myself, I invest carefully, I buy all the upgrades. I see no reason why I shouldn’t live forever.” Defiantly. “I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“No, no, of course not. Why should it? Some men hope to achieve immortality through their works and others through their children. What could give me more joy than to do both? But tell me—do you really expect to live forever?”

The mech said nothing.

“I remember an incident happened to my late father-in-law, William Porter. He was a fine fellow, Bill was, and who remembers him anymore? Only me.” The old man sighed. “He was a bit of a railroad buff, and one day he took a tour through a science museum that included a magnificent old steam locomotive. This was in the latter years of the last century. Well, he was listening admiringly to the guide extolling the virtues of this ancient engine when she mentioned its date of manufacture, and he realized that he was older than it was.” Brandt leaned forward. “This is the point where old Bill would laugh. But it’s not really funny, is it?”

“No.”

The granddaughter sat listening quietly, intently, eating little pretzels one by one from a bowl.

“How old are you, Jack?”

“Seven years.”

“I’m eighty-three. How many machines do you know of that are as old as me? Eighty-three years old and still functioning?”

“I saw an automobile the other day,” his granddaughter said. “A Dusenberg. It was red.”

“How delightful. But it’s not used for transportation anymore, is it? We have the stepping stages for that. I won an award once that had mounted on it a vacuum tube from Univac. That was the first real computer. Yet all its fame and historical importance couldn’t keep it from the scrap heap.”

“Univac,” said the young man, “couldn’t act on its own behalf. If it could, perhaps it would be alive today.”

“Parts wear out.”

“New ones can be bought.”

“Yes, as long as there’s the market. But there are only so many machine people of your make and model. A lot of you have risky occupations. There are accidents, and with every accident, the consumer market dwindles.”

“You can buy antique parts. You can have them made.”

“Yes, if you can afford them. And if not—?”

The young man fell silent.

“Son, you’re not going to live forever. We’ve just established that. So now that you’ve admitted that you’ve got to die someday, you might as well admit that it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Mechanical people are in their infancy. And nobody can upgrade a Model T into a stepping stage. Agreed?”

Jack dipped his head. “Yes.”

“You knew it all along.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you behaved so badly toward that lush.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to be brutal here, Jack—you probably won’t live to be eighty-three. You don’t have my advantages.”

“Which are?”

“Good genes. I chose my ancestors well.”

“Good genes,” Jack said bitterly. “You received good genes and what did I get in their place? What the hell did I get?”

“Molybdenum joints where stainless steel would do. Ruby chips instead of zirconium. A number seventeen plastic seating for—hell, we did all right by you boys.”

“But it’s not enough.”

“No. It’s not. It was only the best we could do.”

“What’s the solution, then?” the granddaughter asked, smiling.

“I’d advise taking the long view. That’s what I’ve done.”

“Poppycock,” the mech said. “You were an extensionist when you were young. I input your autobiography. It seems to me you wanted immortality as much as I do.”

“Oh, yes, I was a charter member of the life-extension movement. You can’t imagine the crap we put into our bodies! But eventually I wised up. The problem is, information degrades each time a human cell replenishes itself. Death is inherent in flesh people. It seems to be written into the basic program—a way, perhaps, of keeping the universe from filling up with old people.”

“And old ideas,” his granddaughter said maliciously.

“Touché. I saw that life-extension was a failure. So I decided that my children would succeed where I failed. That you would succeed. And—”

“You failed.”

“But I haven’t stopped trying!” The old man thumped the table in unison with his last three words. “You’ve obviously given this some thought. Let’s discuss what I should have done. What would it take to make a true immortal? What instructions should I have given your design team? Let’s design a mechanical man who’s got a shot at living forever.”

Carefully, the mech said, “Well, the obvious to begin with. He ought to be able to buy new parts and upgrades as they come available. There should be ports and connectors that would make it easy to adjust to shifts in technology. He should be capable of surviving extremes of heat, cold, and moisture. And—” he waved a hand at his own face—“he shouldn’t look so goddamned pretty.”

“I think you look nice,” the granddaughter said.

“Yes, but I’d like to be able to pass for flesh.”

“So our hypothetical immortal should be, one, infinitely upgradable; two, adaptable across a broad spectrum of conditions; and three, discreet. Anything else?”

“I think she should be charming,” the granddaughter said.

“She?” the mech asked.

“Why not?”

“That’s actually not a bad point,” the old man said. “The organism that survives evolutionary forces is the one that’s best adapted to its environmental niche. The environmental niche people live in is man-made. The single most useful trait a survivor can have is probably the ability to get along easily with other men. Or, if you’d rather, women.”

“Oh,” said the granddaughter, “he doesn’t like women. I can tell by his body language.”

The young man flushed.

“Don’t be offended,” said the old man. “You should never be offended by the truth. As for you—” he turned to face his granddaughter—“if you don’t learn to treat people better, I won’t take you places anymore.”

She dipped her head. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Let’s get back to task, shall we? Our hypothetical immortal would be a lot like flesh women, in many ways. Self-regenerating. Able to grow her own replacement parts. She could take in pretty much anything as fuel. A little carbon, a little water . . . ”

“Alcohol would be an excellent fuel,” his granddaughter said.

“She’d have the ability to mimic the superficial effects of aging,” the mech said. “Also, biological life evolves incrementally across generations. I’d want her to be able to evolve across upgrades.”

“Fair enough. Only I’d do away with upgrades entirely, and give her total conscious control over her body. So she could change and evolve at will. She’ll need that ability, if she’s going to survive the collapse of civilization.”

“The collapse of civilization? Do you think it likely?”

“In the long run? Of course. When you take the long view it seems inevitable. Everything seems inevitable. Forever is a long time, remember. Time enough for absolutely everything to happen.”

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then the old man slapped his hands together. “Well, we’ve created our New Eve. Now let’s wind her up and let her go. She can expect to live—how long?”

“Forever,” said the mech.

“Forever’s a long time. Let’s break it down into smaller units. In the year 2500, she’ll be doing what?”

“Holding down a job,” the granddaughter said. “Designing art molecules, maybe, or scripting recreational hallucinations. She’ll be deeply involved in the culture. She’ll have lots of friends she cares about passionately, and maybe a husband or wife or two.”

“Who will grow old,” the mech said, “or wear out. Who will die.”

“She’ll mourn them, and move on.”

“The year 3500. The collapse of civilization,” the old man said with gusto. “What will she do then?”

“She’ll have made preparations, of course. If there are radiation or toxins in the environment, she’ll have made her systems immune from their effects. And she’ll make herself useful to the survivors. In the seeming of an old woman she’ll teach the healing arts. Now and then she might drop a hint about this and that. She’ll have a database squirreled away somewhere containing everything they’ll have lost. Slowly, she’ll guide them back to civilization. But a gentler one, this time. One less likely to tear itself apart.”

“The year one million. Humanity evolves beyond anything we can currently imagine. How does she respond?”

“She mimics their evolution. No—she’s been shaping their evolution. She wants a risk-free method of going to the stars, so she’s been encouraging a type of being that would strongly desire such a thing. She isn’t among the first to use it, though. She waits a few hundred generations for it to prove itself.”

The mech, who had been listening in fascinated silence, now said, “Suppose that never happens? What if starflight will always remain difficult and perilous? What then?”

“It was once thought that people would never fly. So much that looks impossible becomes simple if you only wait.”

“Four billion years. The sun uses up its hydrogen, its core collapses, helium fusion begins, and it balloons into a red giant. Earth is vaporized.”

“Oh, she’ll be somewhere else by then. That’s easy.”

“Five billion years. The Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy and the whole neighborhood is full of high-energy radiation and exploding stars.”

“That’s trickier. She’s going to have to either prevent that or move a few million light-years away to a friendlier galaxy. But she’ll have time enough to prepare and to assemble the tools. I have faith that she’ll prove equal to the task.”

“One trillion years. The last stars gutter out. Only black holes remain.”

“Black holes are a terrific source of energy. No problem.”

“1.06 googol years.”

“Googol?”

“That’s ten raised to the hundredth power—one followed by a hundred zeros. The heat-death of the universe. How does she survive it?”

“She’ll have seen it coming for a long time,” the mech said. “When the last black holes dissolve, she’ll have to do without a source of free energy. Maybe she could take and rewrite her personality into the physical constants of the dying universe. Would that be possible?”

“Oh, perhaps. But I really think that the lifetime of the universe is long enough for anyone,” the granddaughter said. “Mustn’t get greedy.”

“Maybe so,” the old man said thoughtfully. “Maybe so.” Then, to the mech, “Well, there you have it: a glimpse into the future, and a brief biography of the first immortal, ending, alas, with her death. Now tell me. Knowing that you contributed something, however small, to that accomplishment—wouldn’t that be enough?”

“No,” Jack said. “No, it wouldn’t.”

Brandt made a face. “Well, you’re young. Let me ask you this: Has it been a good life so far? All in all?”

“Not that good. Not good enough.”

For a long moment the old man was silent. Then, “Thank you,” he said. “I valued our conversation.” The interest went out of his eyes and he looked away.

Uncertainly Jack looked at the granddaughter, who smiled and shrugged. “He’s like that,” she said apologetically. “He’s old. His enthusiasms wax and wane with his chemical balances. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I see.” The young man stood. Hesitantly, he made his way to the door.

At the door, he glanced back and saw the granddaughter tearing her linen napkin into little bits and eating the shreds, delicately washing them down with little sips of wine.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1999.

About the Author

Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-one years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels In The Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of SF. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing With Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

Narrative Perception:
A Study in Interspecies Stimuli

Calden Wloka

Perception is the gateway to cognition; it is the difference between awareness and ignorance. Although we are often not consciously aware of how our senses operate as they perceive the world, their physiology nevertheless dictates our understanding of reality. The realm of speculative fiction is filled with characters that possess sensory abilities different from those of an average human, differences which can lead to dramatically altered viewpoints. Whether they are keen-eyed elves, super-powered humans, or visitors from another planet, it is interesting to consider how the way these alien entities sense the world might affect their outlook and behavior.

But what does it mean to say something is or is not a “sense”? For any type of stimulus, such as physical texture or rays of light, if information about that stimulus can be detected, then it is being sensed. A specific class of stimuli is referred to as a modality. The process of detecting and converting a stimulus into information about the environment is referred to as transduction, and in animals, it takes the form of sensory neurons converting that information into neural signals. By transducing sensory information into these signals, all of our different perceptual modalities can be brought into a common computational format. The combined information from all of our senses constitutes the components that build our perceived realities.

The animal kingdom is a great place from which to draw inspiration when imagining the behavioral effects of differing perceptual abilities. Within the zoological diversity of our planet we find fascinating sensory variations in forms that are shared with humans, as well as completely novel forms which humans can only glimpse through the aid of specialized technology.

Before delving into alien forms of perception, it is good to briefly review a human baseline for comparison. Classical thought famously names five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In actuality this list fails to acknowledge a number of additional senses, including the vestibular system (sometimes referred to as the “inner ear”), which perceives motion of the head and enables balance, and proprioception, which is the sense of posture and body position. Likewise, categorizing sensory modalities is not always cut and dry; pain and temperature sense are sometimes classified as their own separate categories, but other times they are lumped in with touch and proprioception to form one larger category referred to as somatosensation, or “body sense.”

Even within each sensory category, there is typically a limited range of stimuli that can be perceived. For example, in vision, we see only a sub-band of electromagnetic radiation, which we have dubbed the visible spectrum. Likewise, our ears detect vibrations in the air, but only for those frequencies which create resonance within the cochlea. Smell and taste are marvels of chemoreception, but the gamut of possible molecules massively dwarfs the set of those that interact with our receptors. Even somatosensation has its limits, with a wide range in detectable resolution across different body surfaces (for example, fingers can detect much finer details than the skin on the back). It all ultimately boils down to a simple truth: if a stimulus occurs but there is no receptor to detect it, that stimulus is not perceived. For every sensory system we have, its limits and strengths are a product of evolution’s twin facets of selective pressure and stochastic whimsy.

For example, on Earth, visible light is a highly useful subset of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, it is not the only set of radiation that is regularly present in the environment. In addition to visible light, the sun gives off appreciable quantities of both ultraviolet (UV) and infrared radiation (IR). Humans detect light through a set of photoreceptors in our retina; each type of photoreceptor is tuned to a range of wavelengths that interact with the receptor to create a neural signal. Although some human photoreceptors can have limited interaction with the longer wavelengths within UV, we have no dedicated receptors that optimally respond to these wavelengths. Additionally, many materials readily filter out UV, including those that allow visible light to pass through (such as glass and the lens and cornea of our eyes). Thus, most UV never reaches our photoreceptors, restricting even marginal detection. A number of non-human animals have evolved eyes that can detect UV, including some types of birds and bees. However, because UV is invisible to us, it is hard to appreciate its role in the lives of these creatures without dedicated study of each specific species’ behavior and environment. Nevertheless, we have found some important impacts of UV perception. For example, a number of flowers have striking features visible only under UV that makes it easier for bees to forage and pollinate. Likewise, some species of bird have evolved plumage with UV reflective pigments, aiding in gender identification and mating displays. Unusual for mammals, reindeer, though lacking a specific photoreceptor dedicated to UV detection, appear to have evolved an eye structure that does not filter out UV. They are therefore able to see some portions of UV, aiding them both in foraging for food as well as in spotting predators like polar bears and arctic wolves who, even though they are well-camouflaged in the visible spectrum, stand out against a snowy background in the UV spectrum.

In a world occupied by warm-blooded creatures, IR is potentially even more useful than both UV and visible light, as it is frequently present in the environment independent of sunlight. However, seeing in IR is also more difficult for a warm-blooded creature, because any IR receptors would have to be shielded from the emissions produced by one’s own body. Nevertheless, some cold-blooded animals, particularly a subset of snakes, have evolved the ability to detect IR. Interestingly, snakes do not see IR with their eyes, but rather sense it through a separate set of sensory organs known as pit organs, which are usually located further forward along the snout. The pit organ is useful not only for targeting warm-blooded prey, but also for the snakes’ own thermoregulation needs.

When it comes to aliens, it is important to consider what conditions might prevail in their native environments. Would they be exposed to a different set of wavelengths of ambient radiation? Perhaps they have evolved under different conditions pertinent to another sensory modality? If they do see a different range of wavelengths, for example, consider how many different aspects of life this might affect. Aesthetics may be completely different; perhaps goblins and orcs prefer ruddy, earthy tones because their vision, tuned for underground living, is skewed more toward red and IR wavelengths, and they simply do not see blues and purples. Alternatively, an entity whose vision centers on UV might find human dwellings oppressively dark and smothering as the glass of our windows filters out incoming UV and our indoor lighting fails to produce appreciable amounts. Beyond aesthetics and comfort, a different range of detectable stimuli between two factions will also have a profound effect on conflicts between them. Camouflage and stealth suddenly become much less intuitive when one species lacks an understanding of what the other sees.

Even when a creature can see wavelengths invisible to humans, or hear frequencies that we do not, it is still relatively straightforward to imagine what it might be like to sense that information. We know what it is like to see and hear, so we can readily extrapolate to what it might be like to perceive outside our normal range. There are some sensory modalities, however, for which humans have no natural equivalent; these are sensory systems that frequently require advancements in other domains of knowledge before we even know to go looking for them.

Arguably the most famous example of such a system is echolocation, which is an active form of sensation. With echolocation, animals project a wave of sound and then listen for delays and distortions as it strikes objects and reflects. As early as the eighteenth century it was known that bats navigate by hearing rather than sight. However, it wasn’t until 1939, after the development of our own sonar systems, that the mechanism by which bats accomplished this feat was understood. The discovery that bats could perform such a remarkably precise perceptual task, which only a few decades prior had been cutting edge military technology, was met with shocked disbelief by many in the scientific community. Since then, we have discovered a number of additional creatures that utilize echolocation for navigation and hunting, including dolphins and swiftlet birds.

Academic furor aside, animal echolocation is still somewhat intuitive for humans. We have both an auditory sense as well as the ability to vocalize, so it is simply the combination of these two capacities which is novel (in fact, there have been reported cases of humans teaching themselves rudimentary forms of echolocation). There are some senses, however, for which we lack any comparable ability.

Magnetoreception and electroreception refer to the ability to perceive magnetic and electric fields, respectively. Magnetoreception is most commonly used for orientation and navigation via the Earth’s magnetic field, whereas electroreception is most common in aquatic environments in which vision is unreliable. For both of these senses, even after the initial discoveries of electricity and magnetism, it took people centuries of observation and interaction with many animals possessing these senses before they were discovered.

Identifying an entirely new form of sensory perception is an incredibly difficult task. To even get started, it requires a confluence of knowledge about both the existence of the phenomenon producing the stimulus and observance of a behavior that is indicative of information derived from that stimulus. Encountering a wholly alien species, even when non-hostile, is almost guaranteed to be fraught with a disconcerting lack of knowledge about what environmental information the aliens are privy to. A great deal of narrative tension can be built around the sudden discovery of unexpected knowledge on the part of an alien visitor.

Of course, this trope can easily be inverted as well. Aliens who lack the sensory abilities of which we take for granted might miss our own capabilities and be taken off-guard. Take for instance, an alien species that senses its environment predominantly through vision and electrical fields but never evolved audition. They might send in stealth commandos with camouflaged suits sporting thick electrical insulation, only to be completely flummoxed as to how humans keep catching them as they tromp with heavy footfalls through our world. However, in the same way that we will frequently develop specialized tools to supplement our own senses and tap into the secret sensory lives of the other creatures which inhabit our world, an intelligent race of aliens is likely to also actively work to develop their own equipment to circumvent any sensory shortcomings they may have.

One form of interaction which deserves special note is that of communication. While not exclusively a matter of perception, our sensory abilities form a vital component in the communicative exchange. If you cannot sense the information being presented, you cannot successfully interact. However, there is no single perceptual modality that is by default suited to communication. Most people typically think of communication as being an auditory process, but humans frequently utilize visual media to communicate in the form of both writing and sign language. Other forms of less semantically specific communication include pheromones and body language.

For communicating certain concepts such as spatial structure, other animals may actually possess a more natural signal-sensory pair than we do. For both echolocation and active electroreception—meaning the organism projects an electric field and perceives based off the interaction of the field with the environment—an entity possesses the ability to generate stimuli that can be directly received by another animal. Like the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, this would be analogous to simply transmitting a picture of an object instead of having to carefully describe its characteristic traits. We have developed tools and skills to do this for each other through art, photography, and computer graphics, but these methods require the appropriate equipment and are frequently much slower than such an inborn system might prove to be.

Although we usually take them for granted, senses define the avenues along which we can interact with and experience our environment. We learn from birth to interpret and rely on the information gleaned from the senses available to us. Because of their fundamental nature to worldly interactions, the specific features of the available modalities will impact all aspects of life, from art to engineering, diplomacy to war. Consideration of these wide-ranging effects can lead to rich and engaging narratives.

About the Author

Calden Wloka is a PhD Candidate at York University studying computer vision in the Tsotsos’ Lab for Active and Attentive Vision. Through his research, he tries to understand how the brain acquires and interprets images in order to develop artificial systems which can do the same. When not in the lab, Calden is an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy and devoted cat parent.

Enlightenment Voices and Norse A Cappella:
A Conversation with Ada Palmer

Chris Urie

History and the future are inexorably intertwined. It’s impossible to predict what will happen without first considering what has come before. Empires, dynasties, religions, and philosophical movements ebb and flow, pushing forward towards the horizon. This is why some of the best science fiction has one foot rooted deeply in history.

In Too Like the Lightning Ada Palmer introduced us to a world where everything was within commuting distance, national boundaries had been redrawn to encompass like-minded thinkers, the outward practice of religion had been banned, and we met a child with the inexplicable ability to breathe life into inanimate objects. And so began the Terra Ignota series. Written with the eloquent voice of Enlightenment thinkers, pulling from the philosophical annals of history, and told through the eyes of a witty and somewhat unreliable narrator, Seven Surrenders picks up where the first book left off and leads you deeper into the complex machinations of the utopia Palmer has created.

Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department at University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafras. Her newest novel, Seven Surrenders, is the second in the Terra Ignota series and was released on March 7th from Tor Books.

The voice chosen for Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders is unlike anything I’ve read in sci-fi before. What made you choose the particular Enlightenment style?

I had been reading Enlightenment science fiction. Though we think of SF as a 20th or perhaps 19th century genre, Voltaire wrote a short story called “Micromegas” where giant, many-mile-tall aliens come to Earth from another star, and encounter humans. And when they make first contact, the first things they ask each other are whether Descartes is right about the dualistic nature of the soul, whether the existence of Providence can be deduced from observations of Nature, and whether or not God made the universe for Man.

These are absolutely not the questions we have humans and aliens ask each other in first contact stories, which made me realize that our first contact stories are equally distorted in a sense, so that our aliens and humans ask each other about the hot issues of our day: whether technology will outstrip human control, the limits of the human, whether faith is in tension with science. I wanted to use the more sophisticated tools of modern science fiction, with all our development of tropes, cues, imagined technologies, but to interrogate a classic SF future (with flying cars, robot assistants, etc.) using the palette of questions that Voltaire and his colleagues had been concerned with in the 18th century, to see what happens when we put these amazing tools at the service of a different and non-modern set of questions.

Keeping the Enlightenment voice made sense to me, especially since authors like Diderot used direct address and dialog between the reader and the author so fruitfully, to create a special kind of intimacy with the narrator, and to ask questions about free will and power dynamics, such as the reader’s power over the author.

Your novels use different punctuation marks to highlight the language being spoken whether it is Spanish or Japanese or English. What inspired you to make this choice?

I read comic books, and they use different kinds of quotation marks all the time to differentiate things like telepathy, or radio communications, and many of the marks they use are quotation marks from non-English languages. That made me think I could use the same marks to differentiate my polyglot world and help bring readers’ attention to the fact that so much of the action wasn’t happening in English.

Since 20th century SF has been so dominated by America and the UK, English-speaking nations and their future descendants tend to loom extra-large in a lot of science fiction, so I wanted to write something where other cultures and their linguistic traditions were more visible. This is a polyglot future where English is the lingua franca but hasn’t erased other languages, far from it. Other languages are powerful as identity markers, and I wanted to make that visible.

I’ve read that you like to outline your books and really stick to them. What did your planning and writing process look like for Seven Surrenders?

I worldbuilt first, mulling on ideas and ingredients for the world, for about five years. Characters developed as part of that process—I would have an idea for an interesting character, or an interesting situation or relationship a person might be in, and then spin out from that the structures necessary to make that person exist and make sense. After the world was fully mature and populated, I spent six months outlining the series, made a complete chapter-by-chapter outline of the first two books, and a less-thorough but still detailed outline of the later two as well. Then I sat down and started book one, and, immediately after, book two, all in one flow, usually writing for an hour in the morning every day. The actual writing process for the first two books took me a little over a year.

The world you created is a utopia built on trade-offs. There is peace, but at the cost of some freedom and the banning of religion. Some people can gain incredible computing power but they give up some of their senses. Do you think that compromise is inherent in being able to move forward?

I don’t think it’s inherent, but I think it’s been the common historical experience, and while I think humanity will gradually get better and better at things, and that progress will have fewer negative effects, I don’t think we’ll be there by 2450. I’m a historian so, looking 400 years in our future, it made sense to me to look 400 years back, look at how much change there has been, and imagine a comparable if somewhat larger amount of change, with comparable sacrifices. One of my goals is to make the reader of Terra Ignota have an experience similar to the experience Voltaire or Diderot or Mary Wollstonecraft—great future-builders who shaped our world by working hard to make a better one—would have if they came forward to our present.

Some things would make them weep for joy: advanced medicine, 80-year average life spans, universal suffrage, widespread education, footprints on the Moon. Others things would be depressingly familiar: religious violence still raging, sexism still rampant, judicial torture still rearing its head. And other things they had held precious would be shockingly absent: France losing its worldwide cultural dominance, fashion and music incomprehensible, mores and daily behavior alien and frightening.

If you asked such an Enlightenment time-traveler, “Was it worth-it? You dedicated your life to making this world—are you content with the result?” they couldn’t give an easy “Yes” or an easy “No” because so much would be right, and so much would be unfinished, and so much would be gone. I wanted this world to ask the same question of us: if this were the future our efforts made, with some invaluable improvements, some frightening losses, and some cultural battles still depressingly unfinished, would that be worth-it? Because, realistically, that is what we would see if we could look forward 400 years.

Do you think that civilization is cyclical or is it more of a collection of building blocks that get mixed and matched as time passes?

I think more in terms of humanity acquiring more tools over time. Some tools are technologies: fire, the moldboard plow, the steam engine, and the computer. Others are social or intellectual technologies: voting, banking, consequentialist ethics, the scientific method; like mechanical technologies these too have traceable origin moments, and disseminate through societies, becoming permanently available thereafter. Each new tool in our toolkit adds more complexity, and complexity yields both new solutions and new problems, broadening the range of strategies we can use while also introducing new threats, generated either intentionally through conflict or unintentionally when we disrupt systems (social, biological, or geological) that we don’t fully understand.

Sometimes as things change people reach for the old tools, just as sometimes when the high-tech tool doesn’t fix our broken machine we hit it with a rock. And sometimes the rock works, just as sometimes a strategy which was abandoned in the Middle Ages turns out to work better in a later period. This can make things feel cyclical but they aren’t, since the new tools in the toolkit are still there and the old ones won’t have the same effect now that they did then—authoritarianism with the Internet cannot be the same thing as pre-modern authoritarianism, it just can’t.

Things may feel cyclical when old things are tried anew, and especially when old problems are re-unleashed. However, we’re steadily gaining in power, and in our understanding of the local and global systems that we’re continually disrupting—as our knowledge increases, we’re becoming better at correcting, and even avoiding side-effects of our actions. We can’t stop new tools from entering the toolkit, or remove them once they’re there, but one thing we can do is change ourselves, and how we choose to use them.

Another thing to keep in mind is that humanity is actually quite new to the process of intentionally trying to change our world with every generation. Oversimplifying briefly (for more detail see my blog), it wasn’t until the early 17th century that we really had the idea that constant intentional progress which could make each generation’s experience better than (or at least different from) the previous generation. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment matured in the 18th century that humans started to make intentional mass interventions in our own society, like universal education or legal overhauls.

Enlightenment mass social experiments had enormous benefits, but also explosively destructive side-effects, ranging from the French Revolution and colonial atrocities to the countless life-shortening effects of industrialization. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century if not the early 20th that we came to understand that mass attempts at change disrupt a much more complicated system than we had imagined. That interconnectivity of society is an order of magnitude or two more complex than our Enlightenment predecessors had imagined (similarly at the same time we were learning that biology and disease are an order of magnitude more complex too, which is why our sanitation victory over cholera resulted in a disastrous increase in polio).

In that sense, we’ve had less than a century of understanding how complex the systems are, so we as a species are in the very early stages of learning how to make changes in such complex systems. I do think we are getting better at it, and that we will get better at it over time, but also that we’re really just starting that process, and it’s a new process, so it will be a few centuries until we understand systems enough to be really good at it.

In the meantime, as with baby steps, we’ll keep stumbling and hurting ourselves. That’s what raises very painful moral questions, such as when it is and isn’t appropriate to risk hurting/endangering people in the present to save/help greater numbers in the future. Which is why one of the biggest questions I ask in Terra Ignota is whether you would destroy a good present world to save a better future one. That’s a question we face every day without naming it, when we think about progress.

When you created a world where everything was in commuting distance, what was one of the most surprising implications that popped up while you were outlining these books?

We don’t see this much in the book, but it created a different kind of scarcity: the physical capacity of unique spaces. This is a prosperous future, with plenty of all resources and no one living below or even near a poverty line. However, no matter how efficiently your tech-printer, kitchen garden, and meat maker can supply goods and food, only ten thousand people a day can physically fit in the Uffizi Gallery, and each restaurant only has so many tables. Of course, every other restaurant and museum on Earth is within reach as a Plan B when one is full, but those places which are considered the most famous, the most popular, the best in some sense, would still have enormous demand. Every time a newspaper poll names somewhere one of the top ten ramen shops on Earth, that shop will suddenly have a two-year wait list for a table. In such a society, ostentatious opulence isn’t a suit covered in diamonds, it’s being able to afford spontaneous visits to in-demand places, paying someone $10,000 to give you the restaurant reservation they’ve been waiting on for 2 years, or paying $1,000,000 for a lifetime Uffizi line-skipping pass.

Sex has been used as a weapon and a way to gain power throughout history. Does Madame D’Arouet have any historical inspiration?

Madame de Pompadour is the obvious corollary, the incredibly powerful mistress of Louis XV. That’s how Madame sees herself, but for me it is more directly based on some of the fictitious stories of devious and powerful women told in the course of Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, and also in de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.

Diderot and de Sade were interested in the artificiality of social mores, how patterns of power, and seduction, and marriage, and relations are largely arbitrary rules invented by human society, and how it’s easier to manipulate those rules if you start thinking of them as arbitrary and not real.

But unlike de Sade, Diderot believed that it’s very hard to do that because society works so hard to ingrain belief in social mores in us, and that even people who can distance themselves from and manipulate social mores in some circumstances often remain viscerally locked in to other social mores. And Madame’s plans for her son are modeled partly on the version of the Roman Empress Livia (Augustus’ wife) as depicted in Robert Graves’ I Claudius.

Writers with other jobs frequently have that career impact their writing in unique and interesting ways. How has being a professor impacted your writing?

Being a historian, especially a historian of the pre-modern world, makes me think about longer timeframes than many people. For me 200 years is a very short time, and I have a good sense of how quickly change moves in a century or half-century. It also means that I have a deep palette of historical examples that come to mind instead of just modern ones.

When speculating about ways the future could be, a lot of people look at trends that we have experienced in our lifetimes, things that are different now from ten or twenty or fifty years ago, but I tend to think more readily about what’s different from 400 years ago. So a lot of things that seem stable to others feel like they’re in flux to me, like what grouping of people lives in one house (the nuclear family is a very recent thing!), or whether political units are defined by borders (since in my period they were usually defined by the ruling family, as borders shifted with every frequent war).

In general I think the past is a great tool for writing science fiction. Sometimes people joke about the expression “different as night and day” by pointing out that there’s nothing more similar to night than day (a 12 hour time period characterized by a particular light level). Similarly, there’s nothing more similar to the future than the past, so having experience working with the past is the ideal training for working with the future.

Do you have another project in the works for after the Terra Ignota series? Can you tell us anything about it?

Since I worldbuild slowly, I build several worlds at once, so I have several other series well worked out, ready to hit the outlining stage as soon as the last book of Terra Ignota is done. I have others that are less mature and need some more years of development.

The next series I plan to start after Terra Ignota will probably be Hearthfire, a story centered on Viking mythology, drawing on my reading of primary sources, and the themes of Norse myth that I’ve developed in my music. I also have another about ready to go which is darker and grittier, sort-of survival horror, and a few others slowly maturing, some fantasy, some SF, some historical.

Will Children of the Forest ever see the light of day or is that something you’re going to keep in your desk drawer for now?

No, that one was very well-suited to a twelve-year-old playing with Robin Hood toys in her backyard, and a wonderful first learning experience about creating characters, stories, and learning how to introduce them to an audience, but I only ever wrote about half a chapter of it, and there isn’t really much of a there there.

I do have some other more mature early projects, worlds I developed in my college and early grad school years, that I used for the writing projects that eventually got my prose good enough to write Terra Ignota, and I do plan to go back and write some new works set in those worlds at some point, between the new ones.

Have you composed any a cappella music lately? Maybe more music about Norse gods?

I have a song about Frey and Freya slowly percolating in my quiet moments. My current musical projects are to finish “Friend in the Dark,” a half-finished album of new higher-quality versions of a lot of my older music, and to record a new CD of Renaissance polyphonic music that I’ve been working on editing down from six and five part pieces into trios. I’m concentrating on ones that aren’t available in recorded form anywhere, and on pastoral madrigals, the ones about shepherds and nymphs dating and dumping each other, which I’m weaving together into an ongoing narrative, so the whole selection, by different composers, will tell one story if you listen to it all the way through.

Since you’re a historian with a particular focus on Italy, where is the best gelato in Florence?

Ha! I have put a lot of real world experience points into studying gelato, and perhaps the most important conclusion is that there is no one best gelato place, instead many different gelato places excel at a particular thing, so it’s best to visit several to get the best of both.

In Florence my home-away-from-home is Gelateria Perchè No . . . ! (which means Why not . . . !) which I love for its extraordinary sorbets, always made with the best seasonal fruit: figs and pears in the autumn, mandarins and Sicilian citrus in the winter, berries in the spring, then cantaloupe, and the summer masterpiece of watermelon granita (I don’t even really like watermelon but it’s just so good!!!)

But for a creamy dairy gelato I go to Rivareno, which has an extraordinarily smooth texture, fantastic for “fior di panna” (pure cream), and in summer a mango yogurt flavor that’s out of this world. For chocolate gelato I go to the chocolate shop Vestri, which does an amazing affogato with chocolate gelato covered in either espresso, liquid chocolate, or liqueur. And there’s such a fabulous dark caramel at GROM, and apple and pear in the autumn.

I have a cunning scheme someday to go to Florence with three friends, synchronize our watches, and go to all four shops at the same time, get the three best flavors from each, then meet in front of the Palazzo Vecchio and EAT THEM ALL TOGETHER! Then we will have the best gelato in Florence! (Wahahaha!) Of course, then we’ll have to go to Rome for San Crispino’s meringue semifredi, and for Giolitti’s sour cherry sorbet, and their chocolate-dipped cones stuffed with whipped cream.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Being James Tiptree, Jr.

Kelly Robson

In 2013, my wife Alyx and I blew up our life, lunged across the continent, and started afresh in Toronto. After twenty-two years of comfort and stability in Vancouver, we were on the hunt for a new home and new jobs, and had to renegotiate all the relationships one takes for granted when one is settled: doctors, allergists, ophthalmologists, dentists, dental hygienists, massage therapists, chiropractors—an entire battalion of life-maintenance professionals. As a lesbian couple, this meant coming out to various strangers.

It’s not a terribly big deal. Usually coming out to a stranger goes well. Most humans are fair-minded, but you always run the risk of getting punched in the nose by ugly prejudice.

We also needed a new accountant. A friend recommended someone and when we met him, we were thrilled to find out that he’d long been involved in science fiction. Of course we immediately began talking books. Which went fine for about thirty seconds until he said:

“I don’t read women writers. Ever.”

This was not the punch in the nose I was expecting.

The book talk shuddered to a halt. We went back to talking about taxes. I was offended, but I swallowed it. Alyx and I are pragmatists. Nobody has to pass a reading preferences test to do our taxes.

But I haven’t forgotten. It stings because it’s not a matter of simple individual prejudice. In a world where lists of essential books a man should read contain perhaps one woman author, in an industry where genres women dominate are disparaged despite being highly lucrative and successful market sectors, in a field where the conversation about inclusivity bursts into flame on a regular basis, women’s writing being pre-judged as undesirable is neither simple nor individual. It’s policy.

What does it mean to write in a gendered way? Two hundred and twenty five years after Mary Wollstonecraft, we’re still thrashing this question from every angle despite the fact that many of us reject binary m/f gender. Gender is fluid. Gender is a spectrum. Gender is an illusion only visible through cultural lenses.

Yet, women writers are less lauded, less awarded, less read, less valued. And many men don’t read women. Some, like my accountant, even take pride it.

Why? James Tiptree, Jr. knew the answer. She told us, too, in an essay she wrote in 1974 to be published in case of her death.

Tiptree’s story is well known. From 1968 to 1976, Dr. Alice B. Sheldon played a highly successful gender trick on the entire field of science fiction. Writing under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., she drew on her personal experience with hunting, fishing, military service, covert intelligence, and international politics to craft famously successful short stories that changed the field of science fiction forever. She also engaged in voluminous correspondence with many leading members of the genre community of the time, concealing her true identity—and her gender—from everyone.*

In 1974, before having surgery, Alice Sheldon sent a packet to her literary agent with instructions that the enclosed envelope was only to be opened if Tiptree stopped contacting him—in effect, to be opened in case of her death. Under those circumstances, she suggested the contents should be published in the SFWA Forum. The envelope contains an essay titled “The Secret of James Tiptree Jr.”** It’s just over three typewritten, double-spaced pages. Alice Sheldon takes less than seven hundred words to reveal her true identity to her friends, editors, colleagues, and fans.

The envelope wasn’t opened; the essay was never published. The surgery was successful. Alice Sheldon recovered, and her identity remained secret for another two years.

I’ve long been fascinated by everything Tiptree wrote. “The Secret of James Tiptree Jr.” is an interesting piece of SF history but it also holds broader significance. It tells us why a woman writer might choose to conceal herself behind a male persona, what she gets out of that strategy, and what she stands to lose if her gender is revealed.

Alice Sheldon begins the essay with a joke: “James Tiptree Jr. was born in October 1967 in the imported jam section of the McLean Supergiant.” Then she quickly turns serious, claiming the pseudonym was fateful: “A circuit in the cosmos clicked.” She explains that she was 52 years old at the time, in the process of defending her PhD, and overtaxed by research and teaching obligations. She didn’t think her stories would sell, and she chose a name she thought would be unmemorable to editors.

This is only partly true. Though a writer may submit stories expecting rejection, nobody hopes for it. She certainly wanted those first Tiptree stories to sell. Also, in a series of letters written in 1976 and 1977 to her literary executor Jeffrey D. Smith,*** she says she took the pseudonym to avoid damaging her reputation as a PhD candidate.

Next, she assures her friends, with whom she’d exchanged hundreds of personal letters, painstakingly typed with one finger, that everything she’d written to them was true, “Including, most especially, my feelings.” Knowing her friends would be upset by her deception, she takes care to assure them that, “I have only told the lie of the signature.”

And then she cuts to the chase: “But I know what is really wanted here: the appearance.” Alice Sheldon knows women are judged by their appearance. On discovering James Tiptree is a woman, her looks are the first question on everyone’s mind. She could have simply enclosed a photo, but instead—tellingly—she makes fun of her appearance.

Alice Sheldon was a beautiful woman even in her sixties. She may not have thought of herself as attractive, but she certainly knew that others did. In “The Secret of James Tiptree Jr.,” however, she cannot possibly say so. She knows that just as a woman suffers if she’s unattractive, a woman who displays vanity also suffers. She cannot possibly own the reality of her looks; the social cost is too high. Instead, she says she “was considered good-looking, still look[s] at least clean,” and makes a joke about trying to hold her stomach in.

In short, she disparages herself. After years of hiding behind a male persona, in an essay she intended to be published only after she was dead, she hides under the hair and skin of an unremarkable woman.

Having disposed of her appearance, she quickly changes the subject. She states that every biographical detail she claimed as Tiptree is true, including her liberal politics, her army experience, and her knowledge of hunting and fishing. Another joke: “But I’m not a butch type—more of a farmer woman with over-achievement problems.”

Then, after two and a half pages of half-truths, jokes, understatement, and self-disparagement, she asks with great earnestness, knowing no answer is forthcoming:

Now how do you feel?
I wonder what you feel, about this.

She asks this because she feels guilty for a very specific reason:

Tip has been conscious of no dishonesty. Not him. But I have. As I saw my brave sisters I went through terrible qualms.

The brave sisters are her fellow women science fiction writers, such as Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Having avoided gender discrimination by pretending to be a man, Alice Sheldon is nonetheless conscious of how deep those gender traps are, and how dangerous. Through her correspondence with Le Guin and Russ, she knows the challenges women face when writing while gendered. She suspects her women colleagues may feel double-crossed. She adds: “I tremble to find out what you feel.”

Finally, before signing off, she offers two tantalizing tidbits, which could be expanded into entire volumes of books.

First, she offers her reason for continuing the deception after having made so many close friends among her fellow writers, and even while suffering those terrible qualms of guilt:

Everything sounded so much more interesting coming from a man. (Didn’t it. Didn’t it, just a little? Be honest.)

This is key. Alice Sheldon has put her finger on the whole reason why my accountant doesn’t read women writers, and why a gender gap exists in all measurements of a writer’s success, including reviews, awards, advances, and fame. Everything sounds more interesting coming from a man—not just to men, but to everyone. More important. More serious. More worthy of attention. More laudable.

Writing as Tiptree, Alice Sheldon didn’t just avoid gender discrimination; she supercharged everything she wrote with gravitas and authority. When Tiptree spoke, people paid attention. They took his writing very, very seriously. Of course she couldn’t give that up. I’d find it hard to give up, too.

Finally, she hints at what she learned by being Tiptree:

Tip is real, you see. And Tip says, sisters, this was very, very informative. Maybe something we should all try. Of that more later.

Of that more later. This is an odd statement considering the essay was intended only to be published after her death. And it’s frustrating. I want to know, what did you find out, Alli? Why didn’t you tell us?

We are left to conjecture. But I suspect that what she found out was this:

Writing as a man gave her freedom that was missing when she wrote as herself. Tiptree’s gender and anonymity granted her psychological permission to take risks, make mistakes, and devote thousands of hours to her solitary art and craft, excluding and ignoring other obligations on her time and attention. Being Tiptree certainly allowed her to avoid gender discrimination, but more importantly, it allowed her to overcome the barriers in her own mind.

And I agree: Maybe this is something we should all try.

I’m not saying we should all impersonate white men to avoid being buttonholed. I’m simply saying that enough external barriers to our work exist, not just for women, but for writers of color, for gender non-conforming writers, for writers with children and families to nurture and support, for writers with physical and mental health challenges. The only barriers completely within our control are those within our own minds. We should embrace whatever tactics help us overcome them.

* It’s not my intent to give a precis of Alice Sheldon’s fascinating life. Short versions are available online (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/slow-unveiling-james-tiptree-jr/) but cannot begin to do the subject justice. I highly recommend Julie Phillips’ award-winning biography James Tiptree, Jr., the Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which illustrates a life rich with contradictions, and with more twists and turns than a whodunnit.

** The letter is held in the Special Collections of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas in the records of Tiptree’s literary agent, Robert Mills (MS 307, Box 22, Folder 28). Many thanks to Kij Johnson for bringing it to my attention.

*** Reprinted in Meet me at Infinity (Tor; 2000), a collection of Tiptree’s uncollected fiction and nonfiction.

About the Author

Kelly Robson’s novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award, and in 2016 she was a finalist for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sunburst Award. Her time travel novella “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” will be published by Tor.com imprint in 2018. Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
It’s Real?

Neil Clarke

I left my day job at the beginning of February, but it’s only now beginning to feel real. Previously, whenever I had vacation time, I’d shift to full-time editor, so when I finally did quit, it just felt like one of those vacations: lots of work, little downtime. The same here, initially: I had a small mountain of tasks on my to-do list and I’ve been head-down plowing through them. It’s hard to notice your world has changed when you are that focused.

It took nearly two months for me to clearly notice that this is my new life. I’ve been doing some freelance consulting for my former employer—a few hours here and there—so I haven’t fully disconnected from them. It’s all been remote assistance, so when I stopped by to help them with a more difficult problem, I noticed that stress that I had felt while working there, was gone. While there, I talked with friends about the ongoing situation and I sympathized, but it didn’t generate any anxiety. I walked to my car knowing that I was free.

A few days later, I left for a week of back-to-back events completely related to my new life. The first was an academic symposium at Penn State, where I was the only industry professional presenting alongside academics. I didn’t quite know what to expect. Despite working for over twenty-five years in academia, I never felt science fiction was welcome or respected. Being invited to participate was both flattering and frightening. In the end, I had a very positive experience, felt like I belonged, and learned a lot. Armed with that knowledge, I would have done things a little differently, but I have no regrets.

From there, I drove home and then flew to ICFA, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, which I’ve previously attended. While heavily academic in nature, ICFA has a significant number of authors and editors in attendance. I didn’t have any presentations to make at this one, it was purely work social: four days in the Florida sun chatting with fellow attendees by the pool. In this context, vacation takes on yet another role closer to what the word is meant to be, but not quite.

Coming back from all the travel was a return to my new routine. Taking care of a sick child, reading story submissions, sending out contracts, paying the insurance bill, vacuuming the house . . . This is my career now. It’s no longer just what I do on the side. It’s not a vacation, so maybe I need to add one of those to my to-do list. I like the sound of that.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthology, Galactic Empires was published earlier this year and will be followed by the next volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year series later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Giraffe Mech

Eddie Mendoza

About the Artist

Eddie Mendoza is a concept artist based in San Francisco. He primarily works in the video game industry and has contributed to titles such as Epic Game’s Paragon, Unreal Tournament, Star Wars Armada, and Warhammer 40K. He has also worked for a wide variety of clients some of which include Warner Bros, EA DICE, Unity VR, and Scribble Pad Studios. His passion for all things architectural and robotic inspires his work and he enjoys dreaming of both dystopian and utopian visions of the future. In his free time, he enjoys world-building and crafting his own video games–the latest of which is “Hunted”–a first person shooter where humans are pitted against dinosaurs on reality TV.