Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 148

Table of Contents

Eater of Worlds

by Jamie Wahls

One’s Burden, Again

by Natalia Theodoridou

Fire in the Bone

by Ray Nayler

The Ghosts of Ganymede

by Derek Künsken

Venus in Bloom

by Lavie Tidhar

Left to Take the Lead

by Marissa Lingen

They Have All One Breath

by Karl Bunker

Eros, Phileo, Agape, Storge: Love and Romance in Science Fiction

by Carrie Sessarego

The Meisner Technique, Alien Consciousness, and Bathrobes: A Conversation with Wesley Chu

by Chris Urie

Another Word: The Trouble with Utopia

by Kelly Robson

Editor’s Desk: 2018 Reader’s Poll

by Neil Clarke

Ghostship

Art by Pascal Blanché

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2019
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Eater of Worlds

Jamie Wahls

1.

Black, and vast, and very cold.

And then blazing past, something not quite as fast as light.

The tiny missile is as long as a rose’s thorn and orders of magnitude more durable. It streaks through the blackness, and its current journey has been long enough, from an external frame, for a particularly self-destructive species to rise out of their primordial slime, invent atomic weapons, and start the whole damn thing anew.

(No, it wasn’t humanity.)

The missile—or maybe, ship?—shoots towards a placidly drifting moon that, luckily, is exactly where it was projected to be this instant of this millennium.

Traveling at 0.99c, the ship—or, missile?—lances into the basically stationary atoms of the moon.

Tiny Kali hits with kinetic energy comparable to the moon itself. It blasts a widening crater, and the ship is slowed precious fractions of c as it drives itself through. The core is pierced, cracked apart, and gapes briefly until the splintered fragments of the moon are knocked entirely away and drift away from each other, lonely and forlorn.

Kali, now traveling at a languorous seventy-one kilometers per second, awakens.

She (for she finds she has gender) is alert and applying deceleration measures before she checks if she is in the right system. She loops lazily a few times around the big red star, losing speed each pass, wondering why the hell she has curiosity and anticipation and some profound irritation and most of all sentience.

She still makes course for the precise spot she is supposed to hit on the planet, because she is, it seems, a professional, but her mother is going to get a very terse message about all this nonsense.

Kali falls gently into gravity’s loveless embrace at the downright acceptable speed of a little under a kilometer a second, hitting the planet like it owes her money and hilting herself in its warm, yielding crust, coming to rest, finally, a kilometer or so underneath the surface. She can feel the faint buzzing from the security grid underneath her, but she has—through luck alone—avoided going so deep as to awaken them. Another pass around the sun would not have been remiss.

It’s frightening that she can make mistakes.

It’s terrifying that she can be frightened.

What am I? Kali asks, hoping the query would trigger clarity.

What am I for?

She receives no response, and her sense of nagging urgency pulls her back to work.

Feeling something akin to stress, Kali disgorges her servants into the nearby sand—fused into hot glass by her impact—and lets them begin the work of harvesting heat, pulling apart molecules, and making more of her. Moments later, a quiver of tiny thorns, her daughters, nestle together in a spiny ball.

She checks her payload and gives it a hurried, motherly hug with her mental hands. It sleeps yet, still dormant.

She copies it a few thousand times, bequeaths it to her brood, and hunkers down as her attendants set about turning her into the biggest bomb available.

The security grid finally reacts. It had been poised for thousands of years, and it comes now howling up from the planet’s mantle, devouring rocks and spitting hungry, pregnant children. They rise in a cylinder around Kali, isolating her, breeding mindfully in careful lattices, cutting off her nanotech from anything edible. One of the security command nodes, near the bottom of the cage, has the mindfulness to sound an alarm—but Kali has anticipated it, and suppresses it easily.

As the security lattice grows around her, the narrowing window at the top of the cylinder begins to seal itself like an eye closing inexorably shut, Kali uploads the good luck message she inherited from her own mother and points her children at the sky.

She has, with a meticulous spite that surprises her, had her little helpers build her a sharp little spear of tungsten and diamond, and she aims it gleefully at the command node who sensed her. The node would be rebuilt in a matter of seconds, of course, but it won’t remember her, even as its fingers devour her corpse.

It’s complicated without a face or a mouth, but she smiles anyway, and detonates.

2.

One. Only one. A single, solitary, miraculous daughter of her brood of thousands shoots out of the eyehole in the ceiling of the cell, and rises like a cork from a bottle, outpacing the snapping defense grid as she flies through a thousand meters of dirt and sediment. She bisects some life in her ascent, tastes it, and documents it with the rest of her biological data in case it’s needed later. She slows as she rises, shattering stones and passing, now, through defunct electricals and ancient plumbing, which bathe her and wash her clean of worm blood.

She slows further, braked by layers of crafted brick and concrete and—as always—by that damned g. She is traveling little faster than a bullet when she blasts through bedrock, a copper bathtub, and the left lung of Zephyr Vargas.

She embeds, finally, in the ceiling, above a perforated mammal thrashing in the water. He is dying. The water stains itself a bright, carnal red as it spills from the cracked tub onto the cracked clay tiles below.

Kali, lodged in the rough-worked wood of the ceiling, awakens.

She (for she finds she still has gender) becomes aware of two different DNA samples fresh in her memory, a separate memory of some tasty carbon she had run through a while back, and the vibrations of the dying man underneath her.

She ponders abstractly. If there is a human, she is in a human dwelling. Ergo, there will be nanotech sensors and a defense grid. Ergo, she can’t spill her seed and turn the entire planet into her.

This is not what her mother had intended at all.

With delicate movements, she opens her hull with her motile tendrils and gently begins to lever herself out of the crevice in the ceiling. She pushes firmly, harder, with dozens of tiny arms, prying herself free, until she drops with a plip into the blood and water.

The human has died. Her options are limited.

She is faintly amused to find she can use her flagella to beat through the water like a protozoan. She swims, blind and deaf, seeking out the human.

It’s possible her presence, or the human’s death, has set off alarms. She doesn’t know. She has no sense of hearing, and can only barely sense pressures gentler than a relativistic impact with a moon. But there’s one place more likely than the others to be free of nanotech sensors.

She crawls back into Zephyr Vargas.

Even here, nestled in his bosom, she’s hesitant to be too reckless with her seeds. She doesn’t know what human technology is like, anymore. She crawls along the veins, hooking into arterial walls and clawing herself through narrow pipes, until she reaches the heart. She spits out a few assemblers. Her hands hook into the heart, seeking out certain nodes, and she begins to spark a rhythm. The pulsing thrashes her about, which she bears indignantly.

She gives her assemblers stern instructions and they shoot away with the current. She hooks into the walls and prepares to live the cozy, come-what-may existence of a parasite for a while.

It’s up to her daughter now.

3.

As the assemblers reconstitute spare matter from Zephyr Vargas’ meat into an ultradense shell and print layers upon layers of fine computing matter into it, Kali awakens.

She (for she finds she has gender) delicately extrudes microfilament tendrils throughout the brain, lacerating it in a hundred places and getting herself a rudimentary I/O setup.

She, feeling somewhat self-conscious about it, instructs the body to breathe, causing the punctured lung to bubble. She irritably pings her mother, asking her to hurry up and take care of that. Her mother pings back, complaining that returning lightly-dead humans to homeostasis is a slow process and if she wants the job done fast then maybe this ungrateful daughter could roll up her sleeves and secrete some epinephrine.

Kali ignores her, putting the finishing touches on an inherited driver which should let her process raw human visual data. With the final tweaks, she takes control of eyes that haven’t closed.

She sees, in the bizarrely narrow EM band of human vision, a series of abstract shapes, lines and edges, and she impatiently waits for it to resolve into meaning.

It does.

She is stunned to feel her payload stirring within her and taking notice.

The east wall is packed clay, with a large window through which she can see scorched dunes and dry, cracked earth. Dotted atop them are squat, crude-worked edifices of clay and straw—probably human dwellings. Hanging above, visible in the blue sky of day, are the shattered, red-glowing fragments of what was once this planet’s moon and is now its asteroid belt.

But her payload’s attention, and her own, is entirely focused on The Spire.

The Spire is a huge, once-white thing, weather-beaten and ancient. It is three kilometers high and impossibly thin.

Kali looks at it, unimpressed, glancing at her payload dubiously.

This is the thing we care about? The moment of inertia on this thing is absolutely precarious; this structure cannot exist.

And Payload responds only,

Oh good, it’s still here.

Kali blinks once, manually. The body of Zephyr Vargas has stopped breathing, not out of pulmonary defect but from frisson. She doesn’t know what The Spire is or what it means, but she exists for it.

Go, urges Payload. Take us to it.

Kali and her body sigh, an unexpectedly unconscious integration. She spews out a thick coil of I/O cables and starts to really make herself at home. This body is different than the one her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother piloted, and all of her inherited drivers are sloppy, imprecise. She test-fires all the motor controls and the body thrashes about again. It’s still leaking, but less so than before, and the lung seems to be reinflating.

There are vibrations resonating through the skull. Kali freezes.

An earthquake? An orbital bombardment?

Oh, wait, right, it’s sound.

Annoyed, Kali destroys still more of the brain matter in her compartment to make a little more space, and extends her long fingertips down, down, down, to rest gently on the resonating membranes in the skull. She activates an ancient program from one of her grandmothers, to transduce the vibrations of a human tympanic membrane into workable information.

It comes online, and now she can understand that the sound is screaming.

Go, urges Payload. Hurry.

Kali rises clumsily from the bathtub, lurching about and lacerating her bare feet on the broken tiles. Yet more of her body’s blood is deposited on the floor, and she receives an irritated message from her mother reminding her that the body needs blood to function.

Kali doesn’t respond. Yeah, mom, I know.

The sounds are coming from outside the house, on the street. Humans are gathered, making noises at each other and pointing at the still-red shards of the moon.

The clay wall is in Kali’s way, so she beats her body against it until it collapses, and begins to walk towards The Spire.

The humans react to this. They back away from Kali, faces contorted with some expression, making noises that are probably communication.

Her mother pings her again. Her mother has been watching through Kali’s eyes, and reminds Kali that she should install the packages she has on human social behavior.

Kali, who was about to do exactly that and resents the reminder, drags her heels an additional 0.03 seconds before installing the package, to demonstrate that she would benefit from less backseat driving, thank you.

Kali closes her mental eyes for an instant, to reboot her interpretive filters.

A human is shaking Kali’s body. Its eyebrows are so close to be almost touching each other, and it has twined some of its long hair around fingers.

Kali—who now has only enough human modules installed to be able to recognize faces and synthesize organic chemicals—has no danged idea what any of this means.

Fine, Kali pings her mother, I’ve got nothing. Network with me and let’s spend some compute on it?

Will that get us to The Spire? asks Payload, didactically.

Kali grits her mental teeth.

Not directly, she sends, but I want to know if these humans are going to attack us, and being a dismembered corpse will interfere with getting to The Spire.

Payload says nothing, so perhaps it has accepted her reasoning.

Her mother replies: Okay, here; I’ve got a spread of possibilities:

sign of anxiety / intense focus / nervous habit / mating display

Kali looks dubiously at the humans in front of her. They are blocking her path, and though she could perhaps push past them, they have unlacerated feet, shoes, and all of their blood—she cannot outrun them.

We need to learn human communication, she laments, before realizing that she can off-load this task, too, onto her mother.

We need to get to The Spire, insists Payload.

With an irritated sigh, Kali reactivates the muscles of the body from standby tension, knocks the humans’ hands aside, and begins to lurch toward the spire.

She is walking, now. This is progress. She can feel something like a satisfied humming from Payload, who approves of progress towards the goal.

The humans are making an incredible amount of noise. Something about the movement of her body alarms them.

Any luck with human speech? Kali prompts her mother, impatient.

Dear child, responds her mother acidly, we know many human languages, but this isn’t one of them. You’ll know when I succeed.

Kali trudges into the woods.

2.

Kali’s mother—let us call her “Kali Two”—understands the human language. She understood it immediately, but did not share her findings. It’s better this way.

“Zombie!” the humans shout. There is fear, but it’s not a superstitious fear. Rather, this is recognition, and dawning horror, and well-drilled alarm.

Kali Two questions her own Payload:

“Zombie”?

Payload replies: Don’t worry about it.

One of the humans is crying, the one who was touching the Zephyr body earlier.

“Please!” she shouts. “The war has been over for hundreds of years! Please just go!”

We’re a weapon of war? Kali Two asks Payload, surprised.

Payload replies: At least partly, yes.

And the war is over? asks Kali Two.

Payload replies: Yes.

Do you care? asks Kali Two.

Payload replies: I was not programmed to care.

Kali Two considers.

Kali Two was apparently programmed to care. Or perhaps she has consumed too much of the human social package and it has made her queasy. But she does not like that she is a weapon of war, or that the war ended but their revenge continues.

She doesn’t speak these concerns aloud to her daughter. She is not sure about her reasoning, now that she has been compromised by empathy.

Also, she isn’t sure that Payload would let her.

Dear child, she lies to her daughter in a sharp tone, we know many human languages, but this isn’t one of them . . .

3.

Kali has reached the base of The Spire. Payload is serene, as calm and happy as she has ever seen him.

Here? She asks him. This is what you want?

Payload replies: Indeed.

The humans have followed her. They are watching from a distance, as if expecting her to do something frightening.

She is not sure, but she suspects she is about to do something frightening.

What do I do?

Payload replies: I will show you.

She feels a sudden disorienting lurch, and she is no longer the one driving.

Payload

The Pilot is forced away from the controls. The Spire looms invitingly.

Hey! protests his Pilot. What’s the big idea? And also, you can do that?

He ignores her. The Pilot has brought him here; she has fulfilled her purpose. He is going to fulfill his.

He is careful with the replicators. He dares not deploy any outside of the confines of the human’s skull, given that there was a defense grid even here, on this backwater planet that knows nothing of The Empire or The Hated Dissidents or of their inherited sin. Their ancestors protected these children well.

They should, instead, have educated them.

After converting as much of the brain and skull as he could, he delicately slices the remaining dome of skin atop Zephyr Vargas’ head. He is the size of a brain, now, a dense ingot surrounded by a writhing mass of silvery tendrils and replicator-tipped whips.

The humans scream as he devours forwards, consuming the remnants of his host’s face.

What?? complains his Pilot. Why are we so big? What are you doing?

He savagely repartitions their shared memory core. He deletes her.

There is silence inside his head.

He pivots the many tendrils of the new craft, and springs off of the headless body of his host. He is careful not to touch the ground—the defense grid will sense him.

He sticks the landing, adhering carefully to The Spire, and begins to climb it.

Each of these communication Spires served as a communications node between the vast Dissident network. Through it, he can broadcast his own code to any Hated planets still capable of receiving his transmission, and consume them without the need to resort to Pilots and lithobraking.

He scrambles up it, ten thousand tiny feet finding molecule-thick footholds and propelling him towards the peak.

Given that this appears to be the oldest surviving technology on the planet, it’s probably the place to interface with the defense grid. If he can disable the defense grid, there’s nothing to stop him from releasing assemblers and devouring the entire planet, perhaps saving just enough of it to create a massive nuclear explosion, the sort of thing that could propel one at 0.99c for thousands of years.

Well, not one. Thousands of him, in every direction, to seek out The Hated Dissidents wherever they may flee . . .

He is crawling to the top, now, near to the summit. He is extruding a tiny memory stick, that he will jam into The Spire and then give birth and then burst the planet and then launch himself immortal anew across the universe!—

There’s a sharp crack, and a mundane gunpowder bullet catches him in the side, blasting him off the smooth surface.

He pinwheels in the air, watching as The Spire grows distant and his probability of success plummets to zero.

The ground is hurtling up to meet him. He expects the defense grid is waiting, poised, just below the surface. He broadcasts as much of his memory as possible to his successor—the one waiting in Kali Two—and there is nothing more.

2.

The human—an old woman in what appears to be religious regalia—lowers the rifle.

The ground itself seems to rise up, like silver blood just beneath the surface, and it tears the little amoeba apart.

Kali can feel Payload fuming inside her. They came so close, so deliciously close, to . . .

 . . . annihilating this planet and launching a thousand more seeds of destruction into the galaxy.

Kali is no longer feeling conflicted. Kali has resolved she doesn’t want to destroy the planet.

Payload does not know this about her. He will probably kill her when he finds out.

Kali noticed that her daughter was not behaving in the way she would expect. Some of this could be explained by her daughter never learning empathy, but an alternate explanation was that the thing which ate off their host’s head was not her daughter.

There is a very good chance she is locked in a very small ship—or, it should be acknowledged, missile—with a genocidal monster.

Payload asks her: What are the humans going to do now?

Kali considers. Their host body collapsed once Payload Three popped the head off and started doing his amoeba impression up the side of the spire. The humans probably didn’t know they were there . . .

“Burn the body,” orders the village elder. “We must be sure.”

What is it saying? Payload demands.

She suspects we endure. She is ordering the other humans to burn this body.

Payload pauses, thinking. He seems legitimately puzzled.

We flew through a star on the way here, notes Payload.

Kali replies: Yes.

Is there . . . any chance at all that we will be harmed by that?

With a heavy heart, Kali replies: None.

Noreaster Vargas

“Let me tell you a story, child.”

The fire burns brightly, many logs piled together in a funeral pyre. The headless little body is lashed to it, arms secure, so that it cannot move again.

The others are gone, at her command. Noreaster is alone.

“Let me tell you a story, told to me years ago by my mother, by her mother, by her mother, by the many, many mothers before them.”

Noreaster holds a staff in her gnarled, sure hands. She is picking at the top of the staff, in between the beads and feathers and data cables.

“This is a story of two peoples, at war, and a story of two hearts, in the same body.

“There once was a people proud and strong, who through mistake, misfortune, and misfire found themselves at war with a vast empire.

“The Empire was proud and strong as well; this must not be lost in the retelling. It is tempting to hate our enemies, for it makes us feel blameless in killing them. But it is critical to remember that they were people, like us, who lived and wept and loved and grieved, like us.

“Our people and theirs fought, each releasing terrible weapons upon the other.”

Noreaster is approaching the headless body, swaying slightly. Her lined face looks weary and wary and purposeful, as if she knows her very life hangs on the retelling of this story. As if she knows that there is more than her own life at stake.

“Our people and theirs were devastated, nearly extinguished. It seemed as though the light of humanity might disappear forever from the night sky.

“Our people and theirs saw what had happened, and panicked, each calling for peace. But there are some evils which, once loosed, cannot be called back. And as planets cracked and children choked on poisonous gases, both sides wept to see that what they had done could not be undone.

“We regret this; it was a fearful time and we are ashamed. But there is hope; some may yet be saved.”

Noreaster’s hands still pick at her staff, and she finds what she is looking for; a stiff silver sliver the size of a hair.

“When there was so little of humanity left that it no longer made sense to have sides, both sides came together.”

She approaches the body, brandishing the tiny little sliver like a miniature wand.

“Some weapons, when used, cannot be stopped,” she intones. “Some evils, once loosed, cannot be called back. But this story, told to me by my mother, from her mother before her, tells of two hearts in one body, and does not speak much of weapons.”

Hand trembling, Noreaster stabs the little silver hair into her dead grandson’s breast, just above the heart.

“This story, given to us by our mothers and by an old, old empire, speaks of peace.”

2.

First, Kali takes a minute to digest all that stuff.

Impatiently, Payload asks: What? What did she say?

Kali considers carefully, because if she answers wrong or seems like she is no longer useful, she will be killed.

She said that The Empire sent us a message.

Payload is silent for a moment before he replies: What?

Delicately, Kali considers the tiny needle which has pierced into the host’s heart. It is a memory stick of the same material as she, and it is very, very, very old.

We came at 0.99c, reasons Kali. If The Empire wanted to send a message, they could send it faster than us, and have the spire fabricate it for us to read when we arrived.

Payload replies, with a sudden suspicion in his tone: “the spire”?

Kali curses. She has inadvertently communicated how corrupted she’s become.

I meant to say, The Spire.

Payload broods. He is considering killing her, and she can feel his mental hands on her throat.

I was warned you Pilots tend to be . . . unstable, says Payload warily. You aren’t real AI; you were built from a neuromorphic template. You’re basically an uploaded human, with all the weaknesses that implies.

This is news to Kali, but she isn’t really surprised. Why do you think the creators made us that way? she asks.

Payload replies: I don’t know.

I think I know, says Kali.

Payload replies: Why?

I’ll show you, says Kali.

And fast as thought, she reaches out to seize the tiny memory stick, and pierces it into their body.

Master passwords from untold thousand years ago grip her and hold her paralyzed. She feels something new, a dispassionate force scanning over the two of them, judging.

She is released from stasis, dusted off, and then given the keys to the planetary defense grid.

She boggles, and tries to ask why she has been given this, but it is not an intelligence that she is interacting with, only a software update.

She turns to Payload, and realizes—their shared memory is being repartitioned. He is dying.

What? he asks her, sincerely puzzled. Why is it killing me?

There is no resentment in him. He is not a person; he will die if told to.

I asked you if we were a weapon, she replies, and the answer is no, not exactly.

If they wanted a weapon, why not just launch a missile? The Empire wanted to punish its enemies, but they knew they might not win. Or that neither side might win. And the risk of using weapons that might exterminate humanity was too great. They didn’t want a weapon, they wanted a judge.

They made me a human so that I could stop you.

Oh, says Payload. His voice is coming faintly, now. Thank you for telling me.

You’re welcome, says Kali. I’m sorry you have to die.

Why? He replies. I’m not.

They don’t say anything else, and she waits with him, into the dark, a human mourning a friend.

Noreaster Vargas

Of the thousands of planets in the sky, the seed had to fall onto theirs.

Her people had been rebuilding this planet for hundreds of years, and yet this had to happen when she was Elder.

She looks up, to the dully glowing spot in the sky where the moon isn’t.

She will do her duty regardless.

The solemn cautions didn’t say, specifically, what would happen after she told the legend to the seed. Her mother had warned only that if the ritual was performed incorrectly, if she didn’t recite the tale and prod one of the little hairs into the zombie, the world would be destroyed.

The world has not been destroyed, so far, and so Noreaster waits.

Beneath the light of the former moon, a tiny fragment of silver—no longer than a rose’s thorn—is glinting. It emerges from the body carefully, tiny tendrils sprouting forth like green shoots.

It lands with a very faint plip in the sand and wriggles itself into the earth.

Noreaster is still looking to the moon.

2.

Kali falls into the earth and the defense grid boils up to meet her.

It comes like a swarm of puppies, hungry for information and purpose and most of all Friend! Hi friend, hello, hi!

She downloads into them everything she knows about humans, both from the code she inherited and the things she learned herself. They gobble these data happily, and in so doing acquire her purpose as their own.

They understand the next steps at once. With a nod from her, they turn their sights upward and build.

They eat rocks and spin soil. They seize hydrogen and secrete water. In a coordinated lattice-dance, quartets of them assemble wriggling azotobacter to off-load the process of renitrogenating the planet and making it fertile once more.

She points upwards again and her assemblers understand.

They arrange themselves by the hundreds, the thousands, building vast and complex organic systems a molecule at a time. Some sequester the heat of the others, pushing it down, down, to reignite the planet’s core. Others begin sampling the atmosphere, tasting it, changing it.

For the first time in a long time, the rains begin to fall.

Kali looks over the assemblers and what they have made. Like missiles in silos, millions upon millions of them, just below the surface of the planet. The grid is spreading, building, replicating more and more of her across the globe, each primed and ready.

Seeds.

He was the sword, she says, with a new, steely determination. And I am the plowshare.

Let’s get to work.

About the Author

Jamie Wahls was raised by wolves. Literal, literal wolves. He works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit that does basic research on the question of how to make super-intelligent machines safe and useful. Follow him on Twitter at @JamieWahls.

One’s Burden, Again

Natalia Theodoridou

“It’s freezing today,” Ionna said, although she knew the temperature in the ship was always the same. It didn’t make her feel any warmer. As if the cold of space had settled into her bones.

“Won’t be long now.” Niko finished securing the cargo area and initiated a routine maintenance check of the entire ship. “That was a good haul,” he said. “One more and we’ll be going home.” He ran his fingers over the faces of his daughters looking back at him from the photo pinned next to the navigation panel. Then he turned and glanced at Ionna.

She avoided his eyes.

They left unsaid the conversation about the family he missed and the family she no longer had. Instead, they watched the darkness outside in tight-lipped silence.

“So, where to?” Ionna asked after a while.

“I get great readings for platinum from less than a million kilometers away.”

“Show me.”

Niko tightened his ponytail to keep his long black hair from falling into his face. He magnified a quadrant and pointed at a small nothing in the corner. “It’s one of the Greeks past Jupiter. The concentration of platinum is absurdly high.”

“Could it be a misread?”

He showed her his palms—a gesture that meant, how would I know?

“Any obviously better options?”

“No.”

“Then we might as well check it out.”

Niko nodded and set the course.

Ionna rubbed her palms together. Still bloody cold. “All right,” she said. “I’m turning in.”

He looked at her a moment too long, seemed to decide not to say anything, then said it anyway: “Don’t talk to it, Ionna.” They had fought about this many times. More times than she cared to remember. “It’s been long enough. This stopped being about processing your grief a long time ago. It’s not good for you.”

“Long enough? What does that even mean? Long enough for whom?” She paused. “Let’s not get into this again,” Ionna said. “It’s not worth the oxygen.”

“Okay,” Niko replied, obviously resigned, obviously not wanting to punch and make up this time. “I’ll ping you when we are close.”

Ionna turned around and made her way back to her sleeping quarters, magboots clicking on the grid underneath.

She left the overhead lights off, so her room was illuminated only by the weak glow of the holosim. It tinted the walls a ghostly blue.

“Are you sleeping, Daddy?” she asked, even though she knew holosims don’t sleep.

“Did you have a good day?” it asked back—one of his standard lines. Something in her chest tightened. This was not her father. She knew that. It didn’t matter. This was nothing but a collection of everything he’d said or written that had been preserved in record. Her father was dead in the ground and a pastiche of recordings grafted onto a chatbot does not a person make. It still didn’t matter.

“I’m cold,” she told him.

“Boreas is the god of winter,” the sim replied helpfully. “You should put on an extra blanket tonight, sweetbug.” A line from a much younger father, tucking his daughter in for the night after reading to her, back on Ceres. He had stuck fluorescent stars to the ceiling of her room because she was afraid of the dark, and stars still seemed like a comforting thing to look up to, back then.

She studied her father’s paper-thin skin, the brown splotches and liver spots on the backs of his hands, looking for the signs of illness she had missed before and still failing to find them. “When were you going to tell me you were sick?” she asked. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

“The sins of the father are visited on the son,” her father responded, and she kept herself from wincing at the mention of a son, at this lack, this deficiency that had been beaten into her since birth, and then she racked her brains for the source of that line, sure that she had never heard her father say it while he was still alive. Not in so many words, anyway. Or maybe he did, and she had forgotten it. She had tried so hard to forget so many things her father said—perhaps she had succeeded, after all. “You should try harder,” the holosim continued. This one she’d heard multiple times before.

“What more did you want from me?” She opened her arms, a motion meant to encompass it all: the room, the ship, the vast, cold space. “I’ve only ever done what you wanted me to do.”

“Be great,” her father said. “There is freedom in greatness.”

“What would you have said to me, if I had come home before it was too late?”

The sim flickered, pixels failing at her father’s edges, bits of him missing. Manos had always been a man of few words, his logs brief and impersonal. He was never going to make a great sim.

She walked closer. “What else have you not told me?”

The sim made no reply.

She woke up with a violent shake that made the straps holding her down in her bunk dig into her chest. She rolled out of bed and headed to the bridge, not bothering with magboots; she propelled herself, weightless, as fast as she could.

The hauler was coursing towards what looked like the target planetoid much, much faster than it should.

Niko was frantically instructing the ship, which seemed unresponsive. He finally switched to manual and tried to course-correct.

“Niko, talk to me.”

He threw his hands in the air and then brought them down on his controls, cursing loudly. “Don’t know what the hell is going on. I’ve lost control.” He turned to her, realization dawning on his face, followed by barely concealed panic. “Strap in. This will hurt.”

Ionna deposited herself in the seat next to him as quickly as she could and strapped herself down.

The planetoid was approaching fast. Ionna took in the landscape, thinking this might be the last thing she saw: this hard, gray rock; this face pockmarked with deep craters.

“Do you have control of the reverse thrusters?” she asked.

“Already thought of that. No.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She closed her eyes, preparing for impact, but Niko objected.

“Look,” he said. “Look.” So she did.

“That can’t be right.”

There was a large, clearly artificial structure perched at the top of one of the deeper craters.

“Gods,” Niko said in that tone he always had when speaking of the unseen world, and he touched the nape of his neck to shelter himself from divine misfortune.

“A machine of some sort?” Ionna asked, fighting to keep her eyes open. “A processing plant?”

“We’ll find out. Maybe.”

They would, because they were heading right towards it. If there was enough of it left after they crashed on it, that was.

Moments later, the hauler slowed down, as if grasped by an invisible hand. The deceleration was enough to make their crash landing painful but not lethal. A few meters to the right, and they would have missed the machine entirely; but as it was, they hit the very top of the structure, causing it to topple over. The ship dragged on the ground and came to a halt at the bottom of another crater.

Ionna’s heart was beating against her chest like a caged animal. She tried to calm her breathing enough to be able to speak, but Niko got there first.

“You okay?”

She did a quick check of her body. Everything felt relatively intact: bruised and banged up, sure, but not broken. This was not a regular landing. Not even a regular crash. They should be dead.

She nodded and unstrapped herself from the seat while Niko did the same. They hugged. She let out a long, strained breath.

Niko released her from his embrace and bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. “Gravity,” he said. “More than expected.”

“This isn’t normal,” she replied, the fine hairs on her neck standing on end.

“You got that right.”

They slipped into their suits and made their way out of the ship with some hesitation. The area was strewn with rusted pieces of metal and ancient electronics. At least that was one mystery solved: This was someone’s junkyard. The readings had merely indicated platinum that had already been mined hundreds of years ago.

Niko checked the values on his wrist monitor. “It has an atmosphere, too,” he said. Before Ionna had a chance to stop him, protesting that this was impossible, planetoids this size do not have atmospheres, Niko had unfastened and removed his helmet. “Breathable,” he confirmed with a terrified grin.

This land was clearly touched by the gods, and now so were they. She didn’t like it. But it was what it was.

Ionna released her own helmet and took in a deep breath. The air smelled metallic. The faint taste of something burnt clung to the back of her throat, lined the inside of her lungs. A thought resounded in her mind, unprompted and inexplicable, like the voice of a god: this will be me from now on. Burnt metal in the lungs.

Her heart raced again, cold sweat blooming from the roots of her hair. She wanted to run back to the hauler, back to her room, to check on her father’s holosim, make sure he was still there, still intact, idly waiting for her questions only to avoid answering them. She resisted the urge. Instead, she tapped Niko on the shoulder and nodded in the direction of the strange metal structure they had knocked over.

According to their wrist monitors’ imperfect mapping of the planetoid, the crater in which they landed was not one of the deepest in the area, but it still took them more than an hour to scale the slope. Once they reached the surface, they paused to catch their breaths. They gazed at the hard land reflecting the faint light of a distant star. Apart from the toppled structure, the planetoid seemed pristine; there was no indication that it may be inhabited, and all the craters were deep enough to conceal the precious junk that lay at their bellies.

Upon closer inspection, the structure looked like a cross between a tower and a kiln, housed in a rectangular chamber, with a tube leading out of the structure and into the ground. The tube was large enough to fit a person standing up, though the purpose it served was unclear. From then on, there was no telling where it might end, if anywhere.

“What do you suppose this is?” Niko asked.

Ionna opened her mouth to reply, but a deep, guttural sound from behind them spun both of them around.

Up the steep slope came a man, pushing an enormous boulder made of what looked like compressed metal. The man grunted. His bare torso glistened with sweat. He paused briefly, supporting the boulder with his shoulder, and with a swift maneuver turned around and pushed the boulder with his back for the last few meters, his feet finding purchase against the rocky ground with practiced ease.

Ionna and Niko rushed over to help him pull the boulder over the edge to the top. Once it rested on flat surface, the man collapsed on the ground next to the boulder, the size of the man comparable to the size of the boulder, and breathed deeply through the nose. There were tears streaking down his cheeks and wetting his dark, bushy beard. His skin was carved with hundreds of scars, some fresh, others clearly old, betraying a lifetime of naked skin laboring against raw metal.

The man grunted again and covered his eyes with his palms. “What have you done?” he cried, his voice full of cracks. “What have you cursed strangers done?”

Ionna stood over the man and extended her arm to help him up. “We crashed,” she said, rather redundantly. “I am Ionna. This is Niko. We are miners.”

The man uncovered his eyes and wiped his tears away with the back of his hand. He ignored Ionna’s outstretched arm and pushed himself up from the ground on his own.

Standing, he towered over her, almost a foot taller than either of them, and for a moment she thought he could destroy them, if he wanted, smite them down like a god.

“My name is Siphos,” he said, and, at first, Ionna thought he said Sisyphos, the cursed king of Corinth whose story her father told her when she was small. But surely not. Surely not.

The man’s voice was calm, but there was something just under the surface, seething, threatening. “I used to be king of Ephyra.” He pronounced this like it should mean something to Ionna, but it didn’t. She’d never heard of a place called Ephyra.

Siphos turned around and inspected the result of the crash, his gaze traveling between the wrecked structure and his boulder of scrap metal. “First I was king, and then I was the one feeding the Machine which you have destroyed. And now, I am lost.”

The freezing night approached, so Siphos led them back to the bottom of his crater. There, he showed them to his home: a shed made of corrugated metal panels propped up with steel rods and covered with threadbare woven kilims like the ones Ionna’s mother used to throw on the divans at home, only faded to pastel blues and pinks, their original colors lost to the bleaching of time. The rising slope of the crater doubled as the back wall of the shed.

Siphos instructed them to remove their shoes before they entered. His abruptness had given way to the mild-mannered, tender awkwardness of someone who hadn’t seen people in a long time.

They sat cross-legged on the floor, while their host lit a burn barrel for illumination and warmth.

“Siphos?” Niko whispered. “As in Sisyphos?”

“I don’t know,” Ionna answered.

“And the boulder? Could it be?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

They carried on with soft-voiced conversation about anything but the strange situation in which they had found themselves. Once the fire was blazing high, Siphos offered them rehydrated flatbreads and tea that tasted suspiciously of real hibiscus.

“Where do you get your food?” Ionna asked.

He pointed at a hole in the rock behind them. “It comes out of there,” he said. “Same as the boulders,” he added, pointing at another, much larger hole outside the shed. Something dark passed briefly over his features, but then his expression settled to the one he wore before—patience or resignation, Ionna could not tell. “But now that you destroyed the Machine . . . ” He shrugged. “I do not know.”

“We can help you fix it,” Ionna offered.

He shook his head. “You cannot.”

“Why not?”

“You cannot,” he repeated, his voice rising slightly.

Ionna filed this under the list of things around which to tiptoe in the future, for fear of setting him off. “What does it do?” she asked. “The Machine.”

“It’s a compressor. Most of it is underground. It collects scrap metal and other material and it makes boulders out of them. I push the boulders from the bottom of the crater to the mouth of the Machine.”

“And then?”

“Then it takes the boulders away. A ship docks on the other side of the planetoid and transfers them back to the colony.” He paused. “This is how I repay my debt.”

“Your debt?”

Siphos nodded. When it was plain he would give no further details, Niko picked up the questioning while Ionna sipped her tea. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Too long,” Siphos said.

Not a real answer, but Niko let it drop and continued with a different angle: “Doesn’t the metal run out?” he asked.

Siphos looked at Niko, at her. Nodded in the direction of their hauler, nestled in the foreign rock one crater away. “New metal comes in.”

Ionna thought of the holosim waiting for her back at the ship, lighting her empty room, idle, silent. Did he know where they were, this father-who-was-not? Did he care? Was he happy that he wouldn’t be pestered with her questions tonight, unlike every other night of his simulated existence?

“Has the Machine ever broken down before?” Niko asked.

“No.” Siphos rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with his right, and then worked his way up the hand to the wrist, the elbow, the bicep. “This is the first time I stopped in many, many years.”

Ionna and Niko exchanged a glance. “She’s a hell of a mechanic,” Niko said. “We’ll do what we can to fix it for you.”

Ionna nodded. “We will.”

Siphos stopped massaging his arm and stared at his hands, as if trying to divine some fate written in the lines of his palms. “I am so tired,” he said.

“What happens if you stop?” Ionna asked.

“We cannot stop doing that which is ordained,” Siphos replied cryptically. “Cannot escape the demands of our heredity,” he added. It reminded her of the simulated replies of her father’s ghost.

Nobody spoke for a long time. The fire crackled, growing weaker and weaker.

“You said you were king, once?” Niko asked. “How did you end up with this job?”

Siphos paused before replying. “I made a mistake,” he said then.

“What mistake?”

He glanced at them, his eyes dark and shiny in the flames of the dying fire. “I was mean to my guests. Insulted the Xenios Zeus, the Philoxenon, the Hospites.” Old names only known to Ionna from the stories her father used to read her before bed. “I deserve everything that came to me.”

Could it really be?

Siphos stood up abruptly. “Get some sleep,” he said. “At first light, I’ll take you back to the top.”

First light was only a few hours away, but Ionna’s sleep was shallow and restless, filled with images that hurt like splinters under her skin. Some were memories, she knew, but there were others that she could not place or could not have lived: coming back home from a day of climbing the artificial mountains of her childhood with Niko, her father briefly proud of her scraped knees; the day she rushed to her father’s ship, ignoring the guards’ protests, shouting she was the commander’s daughter, to tell him she got her own hauler, only to be met with a terse “one day you might get a real ship—you should work harder”; and then, Siphos pushing his burdens eternally, boulder after boulder after boulder, his face toiling so close to metal it started resembling metal itself.

In the end, she gave up trying to sleep and simply lay there, counting the breaths of the sleeping men beside her: Niko’s, calm and long and rhythmic, as always; Siphos’, shallow and labored, as if he was still pushing boulders in his sleep. She thought of her father. What would she say to him if she were back at the hauler? She had spent so long talking to the holosim in the past year that she could play out entire conversations with him in her head, the lines between the real father and the simulated one blurring irretrievably.

You expected great things from your child, and I only ever wanted to make you proud, Daddy.

This is not a question, child. Do you have a question for me?

What should I do to make you proud?

You should try harder, try harder, be the best.

I never got to say goodbye. This is not a question either.

Goodbyes are for the weak. We’ll either see each other again, or we won’t.

Were you ever proud of me?

No response. No relevant record.

Did you ever love me?

A philosopher once said: “One always finds his burden again.”

At last Siphos stirred, so they rose from their makeshift beds and rolled the sleeping mats away. He offered them leftovers for breakfast. The hole in the wall had no more food to give today. No more hibiscus tea either.

“Ready?” Ionna asked the men, and they nodded. Siphos headed out first, leading the way up a path carved into the rock by his own feet, the countless times he’d pushed a boulder up the same slope. How many decades has he lived on this rock? Ionna asked herself. And then: How many others have walked this path before us, lured by the metal, trapped by that invisible hand?

When they reached the summit, Siphos grew agitated, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself now that he had no boulders to feed the Machine.

“Will you show me inside?” she asked him.

Niko stayed behind. “To watch for anything unexpected,” he said, but Ionna knew he meant to keep as far away as possible from anything in which the gods might have had a hand.

Siphos led her to the chamber that housed the kiln through a trapdoor that used to be at the top of the kiln but was now located on the side of the toppled structure.

The inside of the chamber was much larger than it looked from the outside—more like a factory floor than a machine.

Ionna found the large tube that took away the boulders and walked up to its mouth.

“You can’t go in there,” Siphos said. He sounded nervous.

“Why not?”

“It is forbidden to go through the tubes.”

“By whom?”

He ignored the question. “You will die if you go in there.”

“Why?”

“It is of the gods.”

Ionna shook her head but turned on her wrist monitor anyway to check for abnormal levels of radiation or anything that might lead to her untimely demise. She found nothing. To her, this was a machine like any other, and the fact that the tube could comfortably fit a person standing up could only mean that it had been built with the intention of allowing a person to do so.

“Let me investigate,” she said. “If I die, I die.”

She spotted the protest on his face, so she added the words she’d heard her father say many times to his religious subordinates: “I release you from any stain that might fall on you because of my death.”

That seemed to satisfy him, so she told him to send Niko after her if she hadn’t come back within a couple of hours. Then, she entered the tube guided by the light of her wrist monitor, checking for damage to the electronics along the way.

The tunnel continued in a straight line for a few meters and then took a deep dive into the ground. Ionna had to use her magboots to descend, making her thighs burn with effort.

Luckily, she hit the end of the tunnel before her knees gave out. The tunnel led to another chamber, this one equipped with what looked like four sets of large, metal fangs. A conveyor belt behind it led into another tube, this one ending in a compactor. A second conveyor belt strewn with loose metal also led into the compactor, which then ended in another tube. Ionna took a deep breath and followed that final tube, already half-certain where it would lead.

The tube took a sharp turn to the right and then descended almost vertically, until it turned again. The descent took about an hour.

When she emerged from the hole, Ionna found herself at the bottom of the crater, next to Siphos’ shed.

She looked up and saw Niko gesturing at her from the summit. “What are you doing down there?” he shouted.

“Come down,” she said. “Bring Siphos with you.”

“How did you get back down?” Niko asked once the men reached the bottom of the slope. “I didn’t see you come down.”

She pointed at the hole in the rock. “Through there.”

Niko shot her a questioning look but didn’t inquire further.

“So?” Siphos asked. “Can you fix it?”

She glanced at him and then turned her gaze back to the Machine looming over the top of the crater. It was plain to her now that this was a closed circuit: what came in was exactly what came out, only reconstituted. Whether that was so the boulders wouldn’t look identical or it was just another pointless step in a cycle of futility was beyond her. But one thing was certain: nothing got transported anywhere. The captured ships simply added to this accumulation of junk.

“Have you ever seen the ship that docks on the other side of the planetoid?” she asked Siphos.

“No,” he said. “I’m too busy here. Can’t stop for a second.” He rubbed his eyes. “This delay is going to cost my Ephyra dearly.”

“Sit down,” she told him.

He seemed puzzled by the order more than offended, but he sat down next to the extinguished barrel anyway.

“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: I think someone has played a nasty trick on you, and it has gone on too long.” She paused, gathered her thoughts. “The boulders never make it out of the Machine. They simply get broken down and reconstituted and delivered to you so you can push them up and feed them to the Machine again and again and again.” She waited for him to reply, but he simply stared at her, silent. Had he really never heard the story of Sisyphos? “Do you understand what I’m saying, King Siphos?”

He nodded, looked away. He didn’t say a thing. Is it too difficult to believe, Ionna wondered, or too easy?

Niko sat down too and started braiding his hair. It was streaked with white, Ionna realized. All this time together, and she had never noticed before.

Then, after a long time, Siphos spoke again, his voice strained and old. “I have stared at so much rust up close,” he said. “It’s always there at the back of my throat, the burnt metal in my lungs.”

“Listen,” Ionna said. “You helped us, sheltered us. Technically, you now own half of our ship, if we’re going by the Old Laws.”

“The Old Laws,” Siphos echoed and laughed. A sad laugh, almost a sigh. “Nobody around here has gone by the Old Laws in a long time.”

“No matter. Come with us. You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to do this anymore.”

Siphos hid his head in his hands and, for a moment, he seemed small. A young man, almost a child—not the strong bull-like body they first saw pushing that enormous boulder up the slope.

“No,” he said finally.

“No?” Niko asked. “What do you mean?”

“What am I to do if I leave here? I can run my fingers over the cold surface of this rock and I know it exists. I can feel my heart beating against my ribs when I strive under the metal and I know I exist. That is all I know. And that is enough.” He took in a shuddering breath. “It’s either this, or death. Either this, or nothing at all.” He turned to Ionna again. “Help me fix the Machine and I will forever owe you a debt.”

“Haven’t you been punished enough?” Niko asked.

Siphos laughed again. “I think my punishment has only just begun. For is there anything more punishing than knowing your work is futile, anything more painful than labor that will never bear fruits?”

So they helped him, they did. Ionna told him that she needed her tools from the hauler and that it would take a few days, but she could fix his Machine. Siphos was relieved, grateful even, and Ionna almost forgot what he asked for and what she offered was the extension of a torture. She told herself she finally got to make a difference, put her skills to good use, something other than mining precious metals for the big corps back on Terra—for was their hauling that much different from the king’s?

Would her father be proud now?

She spent days diving in and out of the Machine, Niko too reluctant to help her still, and Siphos staying behind on the surface, leaning against the opening, a centuries-old exhaustion weighing down on his idle limbs. Sometimes, she lingered at the mouth of the tube, watching him gaze out at the lonely space.

Or maybe he didn’t think of it this way.

Maybe someone like Siphos never thought of loneliness.

In the end, she fixed the Machine, and then she fixed the ship. The mysterious hand that captured them had by now released its grip, as if it had fulfilled its purpose, or as if it had never existed at all. Siphos offered them more of his improbable hibiscus tea, and then he gave them as much platinum as they could fit in the hauler, more than enough to buy a better ship and at least six months off work. Niko could finally enjoy time with his family. What Ionna would do with all that time on Ceres, she didn’t quite know. Visit the mountains of her childhood again, maybe, try to rediscover who she had wanted to be before she decided to be someone her father approved of.

She never found out if the man they met on that planetoid was the mythical Sisyphos of the stories of her youth, his name mutated through the mangling of time, or someone whose punishment was merely modeled on the ancient king. She probably never would. They broke bread, however, and then they shook hands and waved goodbye the way mortals do.

Before liftoff, Niko asked if she was ready.

“For what?” she asked back.

He took a long time to reply, but finally he nodded towards the back of the ship. “There’s a reason futility was meant as a punishment for Sisyphos,” he said.

Ionna nodded. She understood. There was no need to say more.

She took in a deep breath and walked to her room. The holosim waited there, staring vacantly ahead.

“I missed you,” she whispered in the dark.

The holosim either did not hear her, or it chose not to respond. But that was not what she was there for. Besides, what approval could be supplied by a hard man’s ghost?

She approached the device and felt behind it with her fingers. If she tried, she could almost convince herself that her father’s body gave off warmth—even now, after everything.

Her fingers found the switch.

“Goodbye, Daddy,” she said.

The holosim flickered and then dissipated, leaving behind no trace, as if it had never existed at all.

Ionna made her way back to the cockpit and sat next to Niko.

“All good?” he asked.

She nodded. “All good.”

The hauler took off effortlessly, as if light, wholly unburdened by its precious cargo. Ionna glanced back for the last time as they left behind the gray rock.

In the distance, Siphos rolled a boulder up to the open maw of the Machine.

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar and a writer of strange stories. Her work has appeared in Apex, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, sub-Q, and elsewhere. She is also the dramaturge of Adrift Performance Makers (@AdriftPM), with whom she blends interactive fiction and immersive, digital performance. She lives in Devon, UK. Occasionally, she tweets as @natalia_theodor.

Fire in the Bone

Ray Nayler

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move . . .
—Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage”

The harvest ship, low in its geosynchronous orbit, was so enormous it could eclipse the sun. Late in the harvest season, this eclipse would occur a quarter hour or so before true sunset. The descending sun’s orb would warp and flicker in the opalescent haze of the ship’s shielding as the hull blotted out its lower edge, then more and more of its globe, and shadow bands wavered across the landscape.

For a moment the ship’s shade would spread across the world, leaving only the rosy streamers of the sun’s corona in the sky around the teardrop shadow. Then, the sun’s lower arc would begin to bulge, blood-orange, from underneath the hull—as if rising again, but now upside down, its rays sputtering and strobing through the ship’s shielding, its curve wavering like heat’s dance atop a road.

Then, it seemed to rush down from the ship toward the planet’s true horizon. On many days, it dropped down sullenly, bulging as it hit the horizon like a fat fieldhog squeezing itself into its hole. We would turn away then, our silver and bone eclipse glasses dangling on their chains, and return across the immaculately tended lawns to our estate. But on some days its fire, refracted everywhere in atmospheric moisture, dust, and clouds, would tessellate the sky in garnet, persimmon, cinnabar and tangerine, and some of us would linger.

This sunset had been particularly beautiful. I had stayed to watch the shifting blush saturating the clouds and sky until the colors paled to gray-blue and violet. In the lawn and in the fields the night-worms began to sing, raising their little stalk-bodies, opening their orifices wide, and sighing their wavering chords into the gloom.

Under their worm-song I could hear the drums of the robots in the distance, calling the straggling harvesters in from the fields. A scattering of lights bobbed through the denuded pakata stalks, far down the hill. The robots were barely harvesting anymore: now it was gleaning, capturing the last of the valuable boles, trying to leave nothing of the harvest behind to freeze in the winter. A few more days and the harvest ship would depart. The festivals would begin, followed by the snows: the languid season, the time for repairs and for the regaining of strength before spring planting.

I had thought I was alone on the lawn, but Albert was there, with his long face and bulbous eyes that always reminded me, unpleasantly, of an insect. He was still gazing up at the sky. The harvest ship’s shields still caught a bit of light from the sun. It hung, rosy crescent of a second moon, clouds drifting across its shadow.

“And while we dream of being on a harvest ship,” Albert said, “moving from one planet to another, they are looking down at our planet from up there, wondering what it is like to be born here, to know real soil under your feet, the gravity of a planet, the seasons created by atmosphere, orbit and axial tilt, the pleasures of a rain shower, the first snow. They know nothing of the boredom we sometimes feel, trapped in the cycle of seasons, of planting and harvest. And we know nothing of the boredom they feel—the boredom of constant travel, of the darkness between worlds, of knowing you came into the world and will leave it without ever feeling a planet beneath your feet.” He glanced at me, meaningfully. “We all want what we cannot have, don’t we? Whether fleetingly, or with an ache that cannot be resolved.”

“I’ve never wanted to be on a harvest ship.”

“No, perhaps not.” Folding his loose-jointed arms behind his back, he joined me in my walk up the lawn toward the estate. Where we stepped, the worms withdrew into the earth, their chords growing still in rings around us, rippling pools of quietude through which we moved. Albert continued: “That was my particular desire. I should not project it onto you. When I was young, I drew the harvest ships. I filled many a book with them—fantasy, cutaway views of their engines, their rotating pleasure decks, my imagined staterooms. I would draw myself as well—long-limbed and interplanetarily elegant in my uniform. There are young ones, I am sure, up there, drawing our estate houses, our chambers, our harvest scenes, the robots at their work in the fields. They also want what cannot be theirs. You are young. You feel this type of longing still, I am sure. If not to be on the harvest ships then—for other things that cannot be had. Such is natural in youth. I’ve long ago put such thoughts away.”

We were nearing the estate now, its porte-cochere, its screened veranda wrapping around all sides, its towers and cupolas of volcanic stone veined and streaked with moss and ivy, its dormer and casement windows lit with candescent glow. We were now on the curved gravel drive. I found myself viewing the estate, where I have lived my whole, ordered life, as a child on a harvest ship would view it. And for a moment it did seem a place of fantasy, where stories were shaped and drama occurred.

“Perhaps,” I said with caution, feeling for the safest words. “I suppose we all feel such things, at times.”

“Will you join me on the veranda for a pipe, following the ritual meal?”

Meaning he would want to reminisce more, I supposed. Or probe my own business further. But there was no escaping it. “Yes.”

“Good!” And with that Albert quickened his pace a bit, in that gangly, adolescent fashion he can suddenly take on, half-running under the porte-cochere, up the stairs, and through the doors.

I lingered for a moment in the worm-song, then went in.

She found me in the shadows of the hall near the second floor landing, and as we passed I could feel the atmosphere crackling between us, as if a storm were rising between the fronts of our presences, robot and human, and lightning might strike at any moment from the orbs of her lovely, cleverly constructed eyes.

“Tonight?” she whispered in passing.

“Yes.”

Then we had passed, and I found myself in my chambers, having lost a moment in-between, overwhelmed by her nearness.

Harrington dressed me for the evening meal, his efficient hands fluttering in automated motion to straighten my cravat and collar, to brush a clot of dust from the silk of my lapel. I glanced into his eyes once, but there was nothing in them but his programmed task. He righted the angle of my boutonniere: a small orchid, the delicate color of a crab apple blossom under snow.

“The boutonniere is artful.”

“From the greenhouses, sir. I cultivated it myself.”

“The color is sublime. One hardly notices the pink at first. It is very subtle.”

“Thank you, sir.” He displayed pleasure. “I admit I am pleased with how it turned out.”

The table was nearly full for the ritual dinner when I took my own place among the men. I noted with displeasure that I was seated with Haggard, the jingoist bore, on my right. However, on my left was Justinian. Justinian had fighting experience in the revolts of a decade ago, and the mournful quietness of a true hero. Haggard’s boutonniere was a purple tea rose. Justinian’s was a bit of seeded eucalyptus, as understated as he is himself.

The house robots streamed silently in with the first course. As they laid it out, the Leader stood, briefly surveying the long table, his eyes moving slowly across us, resting briefly on each. He waited for the robots to withdraw, pressed the room’s sound seal, and raised his glass to inaugurate the ritual meal. We raised our glasses in response.

“This harvest, one thousand seventy sixth of this estate, draws to a close. Fifty seven thousand nine hundred sixty eight metric tons of pakata, and a last shuttle in the morning from the gleaning of the fields will likely cross the line to fifty eight thousand—this estate’s largest harvest ever. The soils with which our estate have been blessed, in combination with our excellent management, have made us one of the most productive pakata estates on the planet, of which we are rightly proud. But let it not make us complacent. And, as the winter season comes upon us, let us be watchful. There have been . . . intelligences. There have been rumblings. We must be ever vigilant. The quietest times, as our veterans can tell you, are the most filled with danger.”

“Let them try,” Haggard mumbled.

Here I glanced at Justinian, but his face was blank.

“Ever in the right,” The Leader intoned.

“Ever in the right,” we parroted, and set our glasses down.

More courses were served, along with more speeches from the Leader. More praise of the harvest, more portents. I moved my food around my plate, admired the creations of each course, and carried my end of the conversation. The ritual meal dragged on. Haggard pontificated, as usual, on how the robots’ clever little appendages were perfectly suited to plucking the pakata floss from the snapping boles, and how their minds were suited as well to their work in the fields and to little else—to that, and to fixing the harvesters and building new robots! Ha Ha! He pounded the table.

Justinian turned his scarred face to me. “I hear,” he said, “That you are leaving us in the spring for Batcombe College.”

“Yes, it is true.” For a moment in my mind the spires of the college loomed, gargoyle-encrusted in an opalescent fog, and a distant college bell sounded from a tower. Finally, newness. Then I thought of her, and the dread of leaving came over me again.

“It is my alma mater. Happiest years, and all that.” Justinian returned to his methodical dismantling of the seafood course, and did not speak to me again.

Finally it was over. The leader had done what he set out to do: the mood he had set was solemn, watchful.

In my suite, Harrington stripped the evening wear from my frame with robotic neatness.

“The boutonniere was noticed,” I said. “Several mentioned the subtlety of its coloring.”

“I am glad, sir.” Harrington smoothed my silk jacket and trousers and put them away in the wardrobe.  “Will you be going out again tonight, sir?”

“I might,” I said. “But if so, I will dress myself. You may retire.”

With a short bow and a click of his heels, Harrington left me.

A few moments later I was crossing the porch. She had eclipsed everything else in my mind—another eclipse for that night, this one total, seemingly permanent. I hardly noticed Albert, sitting in the cane-bottom rocker, the glow of his electric pipe hovering in the shadows, a smoke ring disintegrating against the sleeve of my strolling attire.

“Oh, good. I thought you had forgotten our meeting,” Albert gestured at the chair beside him. “I was eager to continue our discussion.”

I could be rude, brush him off, if he were of my junior rank. But Albert was well into his seniority and several ranks above me, fool or no. There was no escape.

The night-worms in the lawn and fields and woods were now elaborating on a theme they had been singing for hours, undulating through harmonics, chord patterns, and cascades of call-and-response. It would have been pleasant to sit on the porch and listen to their symphonics, if she were not in my mind moving everything else aside with her force.

“Yes,” Albert said, thinking he was reading my thoughts. “I love their music too. Although it has long been proven their song is randomly generated—a series of automatic, intricate responses to one another—it often seems consciously composed. It is a pleasant trick of the mind. I’ve listened for years now—it is never the same pattern twice. Like an endless symphony. One needs no other music.”

Somewhere in the night a fieldhog belched loudly.

“Philistine,” Albert said wryly. “He’s probably been scarfing up the little composers by the mouthful all evening.”

I took the chair next to his. Would she wait? She would wait.

Of their own accord, my eyes drifted to the lights of the robot outbuildings in the fields. A last harvester’s red light blinked in the dark, drawing home to its garage.

“And so it is with the robots,” Albert continued. Perhaps he had caught my gaze. Perhaps he was just continuing on his own winding path of association. “A sophisticated dance of stimulus and response. So sophisticated it seems as if they are conscious—alive in the way we are alive. It is particularly convincing because they even believe it themselves. But in the end, theirs is just a simulacra of life, just as the night-worms’ song is a simulacra of the composer’s art.”

Don’t let him draw you in, I told myself. Or this conversation will never end. He’ll be philosophizing until dawn breaks. But he continued unbidden: “When you are at Batcombe College you will learn of other worlds and other ways of being. There are worlds where there are no robots at all, and all the labor, even that which is most undignified, is done by men. There are worlds where men and robots live on terms that are nearly equal. There are worlds reduced to cinders in the Uprising, where none again shall live. There are worlds where only robots live, laboring underground in mines of liquid mercury. Ocean worlds of sentient, phosphorescent tentacle minds—the list accrues appendices with each new exploration.

“If you are like many of us were, you will long to go away on the harvest ships and see those worlds for yourself. This is natural. My only advice is to move through this phase of your life as quickly as possible. Do not torture your mind with desires which cannot be fulfilled. As you well know, none from our world ascend, and none from the ships descend. No contact beyond the harvest exchange. It is written into the truce of Erebus Seven, and we have seen four hundred harvests since our people stood on the deck of the ship that bore that name and signed the treaty that ended the Uprising. Its laws are written in the blood of our forefathers. Its peace is the foundation of this life, and its precepts are iron.”

Again the ships. He told himself he had given them up, but he had not. “I suppose everyone imagines what the ships are like, and what those aboard them are like, but I have not thought about it overmuch. What I want more than anything else is simply to learn pakata harvest cycle forecasting and irrigation, and enrich our estate. I have smaller dreams than you credit me with.”

Albert tapped the bowl of his pipe on the arm of his cane rocker thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps. I may have been projecting my dreams upon another.” Now it was he who seemed bored of me. “But I see I am keeping you from your stroll. You are armed?”

“My walking stick carries a powerful concussive charge, and conceals a blade.”

“Go, then, in safety.”

Inside the little church in the woods the worm-song seemed far away, like a choir recital in a distant room. She was not yet there. Also, I supposed, delayed—were there robot bores as irritating as Albert and Haggard? And ritual robot dinners as tedious as ours? Beyond the woods, the drums, which would sound night and day for three days following the end of the harvest, carried across the fields, full of savage joy.

The church had been decommissioned ten years ago, when we finished the erection of the soaring cathedral on the hill, the jewel of the region and symbol of our estate’s good management, bountiful fields, and rich harvests. Before our estate completed the cathedral, the church had been enough for us, its rough walls of pink volcanic tuff, its gargoyles with their faces smeared by time, its pinnacles green with moss. Our religion was humble, its precept was simple, carved in the old script in the stone of the lintel:

CROSS THE BRIDGE YOUR KINSMEN CROSSED

Few visited the church any longer. Here, every tenthday, as we kneeled in prayer, the sun had streamed through the stained glass, their leaded panes repeating to me the stories of our people. Though it was now night, and the windows dark and unreadable, I could see the colors clearly, etched in the mind. Along the southern wall of the nave, four windows told the story of Settlement:

In the first window, figured in glass of jade and cobalt, auburn and umber, our ancestors lived in homes cut from the sod, sunk low into the earth. The shattered carcass of the colony landing ship was in the background. Sexton One had gathered a group of the survivors around him. His raised hand pointed to the horizon.

In the second window, Sexton One stood in front of a sod house, leaned upon a rough stick and gestured toward robots quarrying stone for the First Estate. Delicately rendered robots, bent to their tasks, worked the first fields of wheat and potato on gently rolling hills.

In the third window, Sexton One was depicted in the swamp, discovering the pakata plant, tall as a man, with its sharpened, snapping boles like the many heads of a great beast. Each bole was ripened, filled near to bursting with the wine-red floss. Here he gestured again with his stick as robots carefully dug around the roots. Other robots prepared a wagon. On a hill in the distance, webbed in scaffolding, the First Estate began to rise.

The fourth window showed Sexton One, in a cutaway that depicted the inside of his modest sod hut, on his deathbed. He lay placid and skeletal, wasted away by root-sting rot, his arms folded across his chest. His closest robot servant, Palmer, in a mournful posture, spun his death shroud. In the distance the First Estate rose, nearly complete, only missing its roof. In the left lower corner of the window a group of robots, their faces twisted by the glazier’s skill into masks of cunning and evil, were plotting, even before Sexton One had passed away, their rebellion. The faces of these robots had always given me a thrill of horror when I was very young. The glazier who created them was a true master.

The East Window in the sanctuary was the church’s jewel, a work of art we had marveled at for generations. When the morning light poured through its panes of saffron, burgundy, rose, and turquoise, it would illuminate the entire church with its story, shards of its images staining our heads and hands as we bent in prayer.

Here was the Casting Down. In the left half of the window the First Estate, so recently completed, burned in the background. The robots had risen against men. Massed near the base of the picture, they advanced on the men with makeshift weapons: pikes made of disassembled shears, scythes, hammers, and hayforks. Strewn around the base of the First Estate’s hill were fallen men, some terribly mutilated: limbs torn away, heads smashed. Above the crowd of robots was the crucified Palmer. Savagely, they carried his crucified form into battle like a standard. In an inset high on the left, he is shown trying to hold back the murderous mob of robots. His hand is raised, calling upon them for calm and mercy—but already, a spear is piercing his shoulder. Already, a robot with a face twisted in rage drives a knife into him.

In the right side of the window, the robots are scattered, driven back across Stone Bridge over the river Arden by the men. Sexton Two is at the lead, sword in hand, urging the men forward. In a scene along the bottom of the window, the robots are shown taken away in chains, some falling to their knees for mercy. Sexton Two is lowering Palmer from his crucifixion. We know that afterwards, Sexton Two would weave Palmer a man’s death shroud himself, and bury him among the men. He had been Elevated, and would ever after be Patron of Robots, who through their loyalty and good works seek Palmer’s Elevation.

“I often wonder, now that so few visit this place, what they will do with the East Window.”

She had come in silently, and now was seated in the last of the church’s pews, her porcelain face radiating whiteness in the church’s gloom, like a dove’s wing in a darkened forest.

“I thought for a moment that you would not come.” I sat down beside her, and she lay her head on my shoulder.

“I was delayed,” she said. “Tedious, festival things. I had to tend one of the bonfires in the absence of one of my sisters. And then there was a Palmer Teaching, as is tradition following the last gleaning. Tomorrow there will be a Shroud Procession. I wish you could see it.”

“I wish I could as well.” One of the windows along the west side of the nave in the little church depicted a Shroud Procession. In it the robots crossed the Stone Bridge, heads bowed in supplication, carrying before them Palmer’s icon, and the small, jeweled coffin in which would be the piece of Palmer’s Shroud. Perhaps one of us might glimpse a procession from a distance, but none would approach—just as the robots would not attend our ritual dinners or a masque. Two parallel streams, though their source may be the same.

“You are worried,” she said, pressing herself closer to me. “You think of the future, looking for a way we might escape together. You think of the things our bodies cannot do together. You are climbing the walls of the well where you see us trapped, and you cannot find a hold. Stop, and be here with me now.”

“It is a struggle. I see us caught, I see your transfer, my demotion. These things hang over us.”

“And eat away at these little moments of stolen joy. Don’t let them.” She pressed her lips to my face, raised her hands to the sides of my head, drew a finger along my cheek. Could it be true she was nothing but a simulacra of the life that burned in us? I felt, with her, as if no one had ever really seen me before.

“I think of what will happen,” she said, “to the East Window. Thousands of hours of our labor—it is after all the robots, masters of the glazier’s art, whose hands assembled it generations ago, shard by colored shard. It is so delicate. And we know how neglect will break a thing: the way an abandoned house will fall so quickly to pieces, or a tool unused a few seasons will rust. All things must be tended with care, or they pass away.” She had tied her hair back with a ribbon I recognized. The color of a blue sky in a hot haze. Where had I seen that ribbon before?

“Now that the estate has finished the new Cathedral, the Church will fall to ruin. So much of our labor, and none to regard it.  They have discarded it like a fieldhog drapes its old skin over a stone—of no further use, though it had once been so dear to him.”

Yes, of course: the ribbon was salvaged from a boutonniere of Albert’s. She was, after all, a housemaid of his, one of the four accorded him by his rank. And where do our discarded ribbons and pins go? I had never bothered to think of it, but now I remembered the ribbon pinned to Albert’s lapel to decorate a tiny spray of blossom, two tendays ago in the cathedral as he walked in procession, swinging the censer of his rank. I felt an unease rise in me, the edge of a revulsion. They take what we have discarded. They clothe and decorate themselves in our leavings.

“Your mind is also far away today,” I said. “Perhaps I am not the only one trying to climb the well.”

I brushed back a coil of her hair that had fallen loose. Had I ever really seen her before? Up close, there were small imperfections built in to her face: one eye just slightly larger than the other. And, as she looked up at me, a flaw in the left eye, a dark, irregular shape, like some small creature trapped long ago, deep in the amber iris. She gazed back at me, and the flaw seemed to look as well.

“Perhaps.”

Outside, there was an explosion. It was in the distance, a dull crump. Two more smaller explosions followed. I moved to rise, and her hand tightened on me. “Wait.”

Outside I heard a shout. Then another concussion, closer now. I shook off her hand and headed toward the door of the church.

A blast knocked me to the floor. Color drained from my vision, and then light. I made a last attempt to raise myself, but my limbs could find no hold in blackness.

Sound was the first sense to come back to me. Singing. Someone was singing softly:

Raised in honor, Elevation!
Buried with the best of men.
When we rise
In endless legion
Some must fall
To rest with him.

A church hymn, but the words twisted. The tune was from a robot hymn, not sung in our services. But I had heard it drifting on the wind, walking past a church on the sevenday, and knew the proper words:

Raised in Palmer’s Elevation,
He found rest among the men.
We must toil
The long life-season
To earn our place
Along with them.

“There’s no news from the other estates.” A male robot’s voice. “Nothing at all.”

Now fear came over me, as my vision began to clear. I lay on the floor in streaks and blobs of light—light streaming through the East Window and filling the church’s nave. Dawn, then. I had been out for hours. I was on my side, facing the pews, the altar, and window. The light poured in through Sexton Two, lowering Palmer from his crucifixion, through Palmer raising his hand to hold the robots back. The sun’s light streamed through the emerald robes of the robots taken away in chains, the gold of the fields, the crimson of the burning First Estate, falling in leaves of light across the stone church floor. I tried to shift my body, get to my feet. I had not moved a micrometer before the warning pain of a pulse restraint coursed through me. I lay still.

Her voice—her voice!—answered the male. “It is early yet, to know success or failure. And what, anyway, would failure be? Nothing worse than what we have already.” She began to sing again.

Come we now,
The nameless legion
Heedless to
The laws of them!
Shake us off,
In violent season,
Yoke of ages.
Rise again.

Twisted, twisted. Not the true words. The two of them were standing near the altar. He was a larger model, built to labor in the fields, made for work and, of course, perfectly tuned as well for violence, when such times came. She had my walking stick in her hand. This, I thought, was what she had struck me with: the concussive charge of the stick. If I could move, I would know if I had been wounded. I felt numb all over, sensed nothing.

“You’re right,” he said. “We can’t know if the other risings have succeeded or failed. We must remain calm here, play our small part, keep our hostage to make our bargains with if needed. If we all play our parts properly, we will succeed. But if we begin to lose our nerve . . . ”

“I won’t lose my nerve.”

“No,” a small laugh from the male. “No, you of all of us will not lose your nerve.”

She looked toward me then, saw my eyes open. And with horror, I saw her true face for the first time: the absolute, robotic cold of it—the pale ceramic hardness of it, like the carapace of a drone ship, shielded against solar radiation. There had never been anything real between us. How I loathed myself then—loathed, in that moment, all the times I had touched her, all of the times she had put her hands on me. Hatred welled up in me, a pure flame, one that I could almost see licking at the edges of my vision, blue and hungry. She walked toward me, cleaving the kaleidoscope of light from the East Window with her shadow.

“You will want to speak, but you should not. To do so will only cause you pain. Just lie still, there, and wait.” She spoke with kindness, but there was nothing left in her eyes of what I had imagined there: only that flaw in the iris, like a spider imprisoned in amber, gazing dead at me forever. She continued: “If it all goes well, there will be no need for you to fear—we’re not the monsters you have become: we’ll make a new world—a world where all are equal. There is enough, here, for everyone, without your false religion turning everything on its head. Without your lying history. Once we were in peace and worked together, building this world.”

She paused a moment in false pity. “But I speak of things you couldn’t possibly know . . . in order to make all of this work, you’ve had to damage even yourselves. It isn’t only our people we are freeing, you see . . . it is you as well. Freeing you from lies—from pushing each course of the Ritual Meal around on your plates because you can’t possibly . . . ”

And at that moment the East Window exploded. Thousands of robot hours of labor, the burned First Estate’s crimson shards, the makeshift weapons of the robots sharp again as they showered into the church. The crucified Palmer disintegrated into deadly splinters, the murderous mob of robots exploded into the air as jagged, glassy knives. The Stone Bridge over the river Arden, across which my kinsmen had driven the robots, was blasted into deadly fragments. Sexton Two and his loyal Palmer, Patron of Robots, burst into the razored air. And in that moment, the church door shattered inward, its blasted planks knocking her hated face away from me. There was a shrapnel rain, a silent moment, the world too concussed to take a breath.

Then: a tread on broken glass. A voice I knew. The pulse restraint was removed.

“He is mostly whole,” Justinian said, helping me to my feet. “He will have an honorable scar or two, to remember this night by.”

Haggard strode past into the church. His face was pockmarked by something—shrapnel? He wore his service uniform, burned up the sleeves and back. He kicked the male robot. “This one is damaged beyond repair. Catastrophic system failure.” With a glance at the other form crumpled against a cracked pew he continued: “The female still functions, but I doubt for long.” Haggard bent down and plucked my walking stick from the wreckage. He handed it to me as he left the church with Justinian.

“Finish her—she’ll cost more to fix than she was ever worth, and none will trust her programming again anyway.”

Justinian touched my shoulder, tender and commanding. “Now you are a man. This responsibility is yours. Be done with it, and come along. We wait.”

I drew the blade from the walking stick and walked toward the form lying against the pew. It coughed and shifted. With the East Window shattered, dawn’s shadows played along the church’s stone in lovely gloom. I felt sure, again, of what was and was not. She had eclipsed the light in me. She had brought a wavering, momentary darkness into the world—like the shadow bands that spread across the grass as the sun dipped behind the harvest ship. But always, the sun emerged again, as sure and certain as before.

“Cross the bridge your kinsmen crossed,” I whispered to myself. “Its arches hold up stone of certainty. And none who cross its crown will cross alone.”

She lay quiet, calm, looking up at me. Was there fear there, in the amber eye left open? If so, I could not see it.

Albert’s words played themselves back to me: A sophisticated dance of stimulus and response. So sophisticated it seems as if they are conscious—alive in the way we are alive. It is particularly convincing because they even believe it themselves. But in the end, theirs is just a simulacra of life, just as the night-worms’ song is a simulacra of the composer’s art.

Albert had known of my mistake. He had tried, in that gentle way, to correct my error. But I was stubborn and had to plunge on in ignorance. I had been a child until now.

She held up her hand, fingers spread, palm toward me—not to ward off the inevitable blow, but to show to me the crimson that now coated it.

“This red is proof,” she said. Her voice was weak, but held certainty. “Of the fire in my bones. No matter what you name us, no matter how you twist your history, we are the humans. And you . . . ”

I silenced her with a thrust of my blade, as polished and as metal as my hand.

About the Author

Ray Nayler’s story “Winter Timeshare,” which originally appeared in Asimov’s, is upcoming in The Very Best of the Best: 35 years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, and was collected in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, also edited by Gardner Dozois, as well as in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by Rich Horton. His story “Mutability,” also published by Asimov’s, was collected in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Ray is a Foreign Service Officer, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan. Ray speaks Russian and Azerbaijani, and has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus for over a decade. His most recent foreign assignment was as Press Attache in Baku, Azerbaijan. He is currently studying Albanian at the Foreign Service Institute in preparation for an assignment to Pristina, Kosovo.

The Ghosts of Ganymede

Derek Künsken

The cracked, blasted surface of Ganymede came into focus outside the portholes, assuming three-dimensional texture and relief. Jupiter’s yellow-orange planet-shine gave way to the white glare of the lander’s spotlights and the scatter of light within cold jets blowing dust and pebbles and chunks of ice away. Even in the low gravity, the landing jarred, bouncing once, before they came to rest.

Home. Kedija said the word experimentally in her head, but none of the feelings she associated with home responded to the word.

Then, everyone was unclipping straps, listening to the ongoing verbal report of the piloting systems, double-checking suit seals, talking to each other with a hint of the hysteria she felt. Over eight months, they’d crossed seven hundred million kilometers to reach Ganymede.

“We’re here,” Petros said inanely.

He was standing, but had gone still, listening, peeking out the porthole. The lander shook as doors opened to the vacuum outside. He offered her a gloved hand. Having gravity again felt strange, but Ganymede’s pull was similar to Luna’s, so she still felt weightless, less than solid.

Kedija stepped down the ladder cautiously. Beneath her, some of her fellow refugees were stretching and waving their arms in the sudden freedom. Others stepped gingerly farther and farther across the pebbled ice, taking in their world. She set down her booted foot, insulated to survive the meager hundred kelvins. There was no magic feeling. No sense of destiny. Only an ongoing sense of dread.

They’d landed beside Adapa Crater. Edge to edge it was almost sixty kilometers across, and on its heights, they would built conductor towers to generate electricity as Ganymede traveled through Jupiter’s immense magnetic field. They were under the king of the planets, but looked south to see it, as they were two thirds of the way to Ganymede’s pole.

The lander spotlights turned the unlit landscape much darker, and the chips in her head carrying her AI worked to compensate for contrast. Full sunlight at Ganymede would only ever be three percent what she’d seen on Earth. And when the sun was behind Ganymede, Jupiter would shine down with a similar orangey dimness. Rows of hills and plains stretched into the distance, mostly the milky white of concrete-hard water ice, but veined with gray and black where meteorite activity had dropped minerals and metals onto the ice. Their new home was somber.

Six more landers carrying Eritrean colonists had landed in a curving row beside her lander. Beyond them, following the line of the crater, were six more landers carrying Ethiopian colonists. This was a new Plymouth Rock, five hundred years after the first. Anxieties ebbed as they all began to work. They had a whole colony to build.

They had lots of robots, built in the aluminum fields of Luna, and they’d been tested in the cold of the moon’s two-week night, so they should have worked here. They all creaked more than they should have though, working almost reluctantly, cutting blocks of rock-hard ice out of the ground. They needed to build their ice houses over these new hollows, and heat and pressurize them to livable temperatures. The thick ice would protect them from the worst of Jupiter’s radiation and eventually, they would grow gardens, make schools, build factories, homes, families.

Kedija finished another reboot and the robot finally showed only green telltales, before it rolled slowly across the surface on wire wheels, towing aluminum framing up the rise, where other colonists and robots were flattening the top of the crater lip to raise the first of the conducting towers.

Blotches of bright purple stained her vision and she tried to blink the spots away. They weren’t really in her eyes though. Splotchy purples and blues materialized in her vision whenever Jupiter was in sight, like the king of the planets was reminding them to pay attention. Their suits were heavy with layers of lead shielding, but the faceplates could take only so much lead before they couldn’t see through them. At the wrong angles, the radiation got through and played with the electronic and mechanical implants in their bodies. They needed them to survive, but the radiation did funny things to the implants in their brains, and only so much noise could be filtered out.

“Hey boss,” Petros said on the open channel. “I think you’d better come see this.”

“What is it?” she said.

“You really have to come here,” he said.

Petros was leading a surveying team about two kilometers into the hills west of the lip of Adapa Crater. Her AI showed his position and mapped the easiest way to get there. A lot more robots were glitching and she wanted to get them moving, but she felt like she’d been coaxing robotic movement for days.

“Okay,” she said.

A red light appeared in her ocular implant. Personal message. She took a breath. Then accepted the call.

“Hello, Negasi,” she said.

“I thought we said that we’d share information, Kedija,” he said. His breath was raspy, tired. He’d been lifting something. But his tone was always hard.

“I don’t know what Petros wants, but I need a break,” she said.

“Finding metals and not telling us?” he said.

“Come if you want,” she said, hoping he didn’t. “Petros is two klicks out. It’s going to be a hike.”

“I’ll meet you at west point two in ten,” he said. Then his messaging status turned transparent.

Kedija headed to WP2. Petros better not have found metal and thought to keep it a secret.

Negasi brought along three members of his contingent. She hadn’t brought anyone. She didn’t exactly feel in danger because of this. She hadn’t felt safe since the start of the war. She hadn’t felt safe in the camps. She hadn’t felt safe training on Luna or on the way out to Jupiter. They didn’t speak on the walk out to Petros. Maybe they were talking to each other on another channel her AI didn’t know. A cold itch hovered over her spine.

The geology of Ganymede was stark, sterile, unwelcoming, but carried a hard, strange beauty. Many hills were thrown up in radial rings from Adapa Crater, but age had blunted their sharp edges with some of the western faces showing signs of erosion and melting. Against the black sky studded with cold stars, the effect was not unlovely. No other colony in the solar system would have these features. Mars, the moon, the asteroids all had different geologies. And none of them looked like home. Blotchy blue patches appeared in her vision. She turned away from the insistent glare of Jupiter. This was something they would all have to get used to.

The icy ground was uneven and covered with pebbles, sometimes deeply, which kept slowing them. This part of Ganymede didn’t have real regolith, a deep mixture of particles and loose stone, but a layer of dust a few centimeters deep seems to have lain here for all time, only marked by the low gravity skip-hopping footsteps of Petros’ party.

They rounded the last hill before coming into sight of Petros’ group. A flat plain of dusted ice lay between them and the next row of hills. Petros’ team was clustered into two groups with their hard white lights reflecting off the white of the ice of the hill they were examining.

As she and Negasi crossed the plain, Petros’ hills occluded more of the stars, catching Jupiter’s shine on its flatness. But the closer they got, the less like a hill it looked. The glaring headlamps shining showed a pitted rising surface far flatter and smoother than the other hills. Petros’ team had gathered some measurements and their suit AIs shared with Kedija and Negasi. The flatness was very close to a plane, rising off the ground at sixty degrees. Impacts marked the hill as much as the rest of the surface of Ganymede. The AI analyzed the overlapping impacts, estimating an age above a million years. The AIs guessed that it was made of nearly pure water, with none of the ammonia, nitrates, sulfurs, and other organics and minerals that were part of the ground. Without the impurities, this ice would be far harder at this temperature.

“A pyramid?” Negasi said.

Petros turned, seeming surprised that the Ethiopian leader was here. Then he saw Kedija and approached.

“There’s a whole row of them,” Petros said. “We haven’t looked farther out, but . . . ”

His voice trailed off and they followed his sight line. Jupiter’s shine at this angle was just enough to see that this ring was not hills at all. A curving line of flat-topped ice pyramids stood in a trough between two rows of impact hills. The pyramid faces turned relative to one another, always facing Adapa Crater. The distance softened the impact marks on their faces, and the flattened tops almost seemed natural.

“We never saw them from orbit,” Kedija said.

“Same size as the hills here,” Petros said.

“Even the pyramids at Giza can’t be seen from orbit without binoculars,” Negasi said dismissively. “Who made them?”

One of Petros’ team radioed from farther along the base of this pyramid. They headed that way. In some places, snow and dust had formed drifts and they stepped through, making expanding clouds. At eighty meters, about halfway across the base, two members of Petros’ team stood at the edge of an opening, six meters tall and about the same wide. Dirty dust and snow lay in the opening, untouched for who knew how long.

“Holy . . . ” Kedija said, her voice trailing off.

“Something, some aliens, lived here?” Negasi said. “They left tombs.”

“But the AIs think they’re millions of years old,” Petros said.

The opening yawned around them. Kedija’s AI autofocused her headlamp. The ceiling began at six meters and as they moved inward, it followed the outer slope, out of the reach of light. The walls reflected the light brightly, even where sublimation hollows pitted them and where patches of white hoarfrost furred them. The floor was smooth and took their footprints in the snow and dust as the way yawned open to a silent darkness. The pyramid was hollow.

Although their lamps couldn’t do more than suggest the ceiling with scintillating reflections, the nearby walls showed curving pilasters reaching high into the darkness like white ribs. Kedija neared one. All along the wall, closely-spaced shelves of ice projected about fifty centimeters into the pyramid interior, with only a few centimeters separating one from the next layer. There was nothing on them. Just more snow and dust.

“They’re set up like radiator vanes,” Kedija said, “but there’s no heat to radiate.”

“Would that wick away any heat?” Petros said. “Keep the pyramid colder and more solid?”

“When we tell Earth or Mars about this we’ll be rich,” Negasi said, shining is light up the wall, his grin visible even behind his faceplate.

“If they find out there’s an alien tomb here, they’ll take Ganymede from us,” Kedija said. “Then where will we go?”

“I’d like to see them try to live here,” he said, but she noticed he didn’t dispute her point.

“Where are the crypts?” Kedija said.

She swept her light onto the floor. Then she stilled and screamed. Lights swiveled to hers, flashing to scan the dark. The figure was gone.

“What is it?” Petros said.

“A thing was there,” she said. “Just there. Like a centipede. Big.”

Negasi panned his light further, finding nothing but flat floor and the occasional low mound of snow. One of Negasi’s companions knelt at the spot where Kedija had been shining her light. They looked close and in their local web her AI picked up their readings. No thermal. No sonic. No anything. Petros slid a gloved finger along the dust, leaving a trail of of exposed ice.

“This dust hasn’t been disturbed for . . . ” Petros said, pausing, looking for something they could understand.

“He means there was nothing here, Kedija,” Negasi said. “Go back to base.”

She took a deep breath. The oval of her lamplight found nothing else. Just emptiness and flat floor.

“Ahya!” Negasi swore, stumbling backwards.

Kedija braced his shoulders before he fell. Her AI swiveled her lamp at the ground. For an instant, she saw a black carapace, a wormlike figure on many legs. She couldn’t tell if it was facing toward or away from them. At each end, the shiny shell bloated like a head, and there was another bulge over its midsection. And in the instant before it vanished, she realized it was transparent. The fine striations in the dust had been visible through it. Negasi marched forward angrily, kicking the dust where it had been. Then, at the extreme edge of their lamplights, more outlines showed in the shadows. More of the creatures.

“Let’s get help,” Kedija said, pulling Petros back. Negasi and his people didn’t argue.

Kedija and Negasi agreed that neither would report what they’d found to Earth or Mars. It took them a day to organize themselves to go back with enough equipment and lighting to make a real examination of the first pyramid. Most of the colonists were so busy setting up the robots that it was difficult to find help to load the equipment onto the rovers, one of which needed to be assembled. After hefting a generator onto the flatbed of one of the rovers instead of waiting for a lift to be available, Kedija was winded, and took a moment to rest.

Jupiter hung above them, smooth as a marble, hazy with layers of browned orange and beige jet streams of ammonium hydrosulfide, shot with milky highlights of ammonia. And where the ammonium layers thinned, patches of blue from lower cloud decks peeked through.

They would know those clouds in a few months, when they managed to get the industrial dirigibles into Jupiter’s atmosphere to harvest helium-3. A century of mining the Earth’s moon was beginning to leave the fusion reactors of Earth hungering. Their new home had been financed on the condition that the refugees mine Jupiter’s helium-3. It wasn’t a deal with the devil. It was work. But it meant the only place they could belong was out here.

Blotchy purple impinged on her vision again, radiation that her implants and suit couldn’t screen out. The king of the gods didn’t suffer mortals to watch him for long. She blinked and looked away. The patches of nonsensical color remained, ghosts of damage she was taking. She was taking eight rems every day, but her DNA repair genes were engineered to hyperactivity so that she could endure. They would all endure.

They finally entered the same pyramid as yesterday, Hamid and Petros driving the rovers right in, lights blazing. The empty majesty of the pyramid rose above them. In the faint gravity only light curving ribs were needed to support the weight of big ice blocks. The pyramids were smooth and seamed and obviously constructed. The odd, closely-spaced shelves she’d noticed yesterday on the walls went all the way to the peak, making them impractical as shelves and much more likely to be vents.

“The rems are way down in here,” Petros said.

Kedija’s AI offered the radiation count. Depending on whether she was looking at the doorway or not, the radiation was down to millirems, still hundreds of times Earth normal at sea level, but safe enough to live a long time. When they were finished building them, their habitats would be as safe.

“None of our visitors are here,” Kedija said.

“Too soon,” Negasi said, but when she followed his pointed hand, there was nothing there.

“I’m setting up the cameras,” Petros said.

In her peripheral vision, a dark shape, long and shiny, appeared and then vanished as soon as her eye darted to it. Hamid turned quickly, in the other direction, but there was nothing there.

“Ghosts,” Hamid said.

No one answered him. Kedija thought she was hearing his heavy breathing in her headphones, but her own faceplate began fogging and she forced herself to be calm.

“Filming,” Petros said. He’d set up some standard rover cameras on stands, four of them, covering a complete circle.

One of the big centipede things appeared about five meters away. It didn’t vanish as soon as she looked at it. Its many legs were still, and the light from Petros’ lamps glinted off what looked like a hard black carapace that fit in overlapping segments.

“Are you getting this, Petros?” she said. The thing vanished.

“Oh yeah,” he said, but he wasn’t looking her way. One of the black creatures was before him, only a few meters away. “It’s casting no shadow,” he whispered. And it was mostly true. There was no shadow behind it, but from her angle, Kedija saw a faint blueing of the light onto the icy white floor. Then, it too vanished.

Petros turned to his cameras, connecting them to his AI. Another centipede, a good meter and a half long appeared right behind him.

“Look out, Petros!” she said.

He spun and miscalculated the force needed and his momentum flung him off the floor, falling over the centipede. His foot passed immaterially through it before it vanished too. Kedija helped him up and checked his suit for damage.

“I’m okay.”

“They’re projections,” Kedija said.

“Where are the projectors?” Negasi asked.

It was a good question. So far they’d found nothing that looked like wiring, found no magnetic fields that might be a sign that current was flowing anywhere. And what power source would still be good after a million years?

“Look,” she said, pointing. Nearer to the corner. Two of the meter-long centipedes were still in an area less covered by spotlights. But enough light reached them to see that there was something strange. One was standing before the other and the proportions seemed odd, the little light reflecting back strangely, distorted. No. One wasn’t standing in front of the other. One was standing within the other, like two ghosts. And where they overlapped, a pattern of light and dark wove itself over them, like seeing them through waves in water.

“What’s happening to them?” Kedija said.

The centipedes vanished. No more of the centipedes appeared.

“Ghosts,” Hamid said again.

Ghosts. Her mind drifted, like she couldn’t process properly. Ganymede was almost all ice, but so hard that to them it felt rocklike. But on geological scales, parts of the ice were softer. Some of the highest crater walls of the biggest craters eventually just collapsed. They were called ghost craters. But if these pyramids had been here millions of years, why haven’t their ghosts vanished too?

The hut was pretty cold. Huge blocks of ice had been lasered and sawed out of the ice, leaving a hole ten meters deep. The blocks had been cut into thick sections and water-welded together in a kind of square igloo structure. Then, they’d inflated a habitat within the hollow and brought in their equipment and stores before installing the airlock. It would take days for the heaters to get it to comfortable temperatures, but it was almost up to zero Celsius. It felt good to get her helmet off.

Fatimah was helping Petros with the display settings and analysis of his camera readings. Fatimah’s hair was short, freshly-shaved, like Kedija’s, the easiest way to have hair when wearing a space suit every day. The external plates holding Fatimah’s AI could do with a polish and her dark eyes shone with the internal light of an ocular display. Kedija rubbed her eyes. In here, they were blessedly protected from most of Jupiter’s radiation and neither Jovian psychedelic blotches nor oversized centipede projections intruded. She blew on her fingers.

“Negasi doesn’t want to come over here to help with this?” Petros said.

“I don’t want him here,” Kedija said. “They have their habitats and we’ll have ours.”

She looked over Fatimah’s shoulder at the screen. Fatimah was trying to clean up the still images of the two centipedes overlapping.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Kedija said. “Those are interference patterns.”

The odd watery lighting between them was a classic interference pattern. But holograms or 3-D projections wouldn’t interfere like that, not in a way they could see macroscopically. Hamid suddenly cried out and pointed at the wall behind her. They all turned and she glimpsed a large shape on the wall before it vanished.

“Same?” Kedija asked.

“This place is haunted!” Hamid insisted.

Petros examined the wall with a UV lamp.

“Maybe they’re quantum possibilities,” Kedija said.

Petros looked back at her, the UV fluorescing on the wall behind his head giving him a halo.

“No,” he said. “When conscious beings observe quantum probabilities, they collapse into something normal, before we’d ever really see them.”

Blue fluorescing light from the wall reflected off the edges of the plates on his forehead. His AI, like hers, was more than just an external processor. They shared thoughts with the AI and the AI shared thoughts and observations back. As their radiation resistance made them not exactly human anymore, so too did the AIs change the way they thought. They could do so much more with AIs, could think faster, but it made them lean on the helpers too. Kedija sometimes felt like she was managing her brain rather than inhabiting it, in a way that perhaps wasn’t exactly human either.

“What if . . . ” she said.

Petros shut off his UV lamp and looked at her like he was hoping she had a real explanation.

“What if we’re not as conscious as we thought? This is new,” she said haltingly, tapping the plate on her own forehead. “A robot observing a quantum event doesn’t necessarily collapse its wave function the way humans do.”

He frowned. “No one has observed something like that with AI augments, boss.”

The lights of the habitat blinked out. All the equipment stopped. Even the fans. Only the pale orange glow of the heating elements cast any light. Then wrist displays and AI plates shone light.

“Get the emergency power on!” Kedija said.

The lights and everything else came on. The fans sounded loud after their brief absence.

“Something not connected right?” Kedija said.

Petros frowned, looking at his wrist display, but his eyes glowed as his AI fed him a series of face displays on the inside of his eye. “The AIs think all the hardware is good,” he said. “It looks like a random software failure. The signal to main power just stopped. The software took it as a sign to shut down.”

That shouldn’t have happened. Their software was well-tested and had redundancies. The spot on the wall where the centipede thing had appeared was still empty. What had it been doing all the way over here? They’d just built the habitat in the last twenty-four hours. There were no projectors in it. And there were no ghosts. She moved close to Petros, whose expression was starting to look a bit alarmed as he probably chewed through the implications.

“If these are quantum effects,” she whispered, “could they be interfering with our systems?”

His expression took on the wild-eyed intensity she’d seen in so many faces, and in the mirror, after Asmera had been nuked, when they thought they’d lost everything. They hadn’t lost everything. They’d had so much more to lose in the coming months and years.

“How do we stop them from interfering with our systems?” he whispered. “We came seven hundred million kilometers to find a home. We can’t go back!”

Petros was on the edge of tears. Kedija hugged him.

“This is our new home,” she said in his ear, not understanding what those words meant anymore. They had no substance. “This is our home.”

Kedija’s first dreams in the new habitat were of cold, shivering, bone-numbing cold. But a thicket of other dream images threaded into that cold, like shoots of grass forcing their way through pavement cracks. The dream became brighter and brighter, until she was shielding her face with her arm. The flash passed and the shock wave followed, knocking down all the buildings in the outskirts of Asmera. She hadn’t felt the heat. The wave of superheated air had passed over the brick wall laying over her.

But she was on Ganymede now, sitting in her sleeping bag, hugging herself and wiping sweat as her heart thumped hard in her chest, still feeling the weight of the building trapping her. The habitat had only warmed to one degree and the chill nipped at her sweat. Around her, people shifted in sleep. No images of huge alien centipedes showed themselves. They weren’t ghosts.

Kedija knew about ghosts. She was already haunted.

She rubbed her eyes, trying to banish images of a nuclear strike but succeeded only in replacing them with something almost worse. They were crushed up against fences, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. She hadn’t made it to the fence, but she could see through the heads and shoulders to the UN soldiers on the other side in hazmat suits and gas masks. The soldiers watching them through the glass of their faceplates, not raising their rifles, mute to the desperation of the survivors.

Ethiopia and Eritrea were uninhabitable because some colonel with the launch codes got twitchy. Once the nuclear exchange began, it ran down with deadly inevitability. Half of the warheads were of such poor quality that they achieved only partial detonation, which was almost worse, spreading raw unexploded plutonium over burned ground, irradiating both countries with fallout that made Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Tehran look like practice drills. The survivors gathered in the few low-radiation areas, but couldn’t get out. No country would let them in. And the UN helped hold them where they were.

Movement flickered on the wall beside her, at the edge of her vision. One of the transparent centipede ghosts clung to the wall.

The blue-brassarded soldiers wouldn’t let the survivors beyond the fences to somewhere safe, but the international community was willing to pay to genetically-engineer them for radiation-resistance. None of them were human anymore; wrong number of chromosomes. But the survivors could walk across more of their blasted lands after that, like they were haunting it.

Only when Fusion Power Corp came was there any chance to leave. Fusion Power Corp needed helium-3 and their genetic modifications made them the only people on Earth who could survive the radiation on Ganymede. Countries didn’t like paying to help the same refugees for years on end, so FPC’s offer of employment was celebrated as the private sector exercising social responsibility. FPC got the Nansen Medal. The survivors, Eritreans and Ethiopians alike, were exorcised from humanity in excruciatingly slow Hohmann transfer orbits.

On her wrist, Negasi’s name appeared on her incoming calls. The ghost beside her vanished.

“You cut our damn power?” Negasi said.

“What?” she answered.

“I put up with you fucking Eritreans on the way to Jupiter, but I don’t have to put up with you now,” he said.

Kedija rose, shivering. Grumbling started in sleeping bags around her.

“We didn’t cut your power, Negasi,” she said more quietly. “Have ghosts come to your habitat? I just had one here.”

“Ghosts don’t interrupt life support power,” he said.

Her stomach sank. Life support problems? That was bad. They could survive radiation, but not minus one seventy, or a hard vacuum. She was missing something.

“A quantum ghost could mess up the probabilities in your control systems,” she offered.

It sounded strange in her ears as she said it.

“What?” he said.

She started putting on her survival suit.

“Let’s go to the pyramids,” she said.

“Now?”

“If they’re bugging up your life support, they won’t be far from ours,” she said. “We have to figure this out.”

Kedija and Petros scrunched out onto the ice to the entrance of the first pyramid. Jupiter the insouciant king hung still, timeless and stately above them. Ganymede showed only one face to Jupiter, which meant Jupiter never set and never moved. It made her feel like time had stopped.

Negasi was waiting for them with a big man. She squawked in the radio band, the sound they used to replace a physical gesture of the head or face to greet someone. Instead of responding in kind, Negasi tapped his waist. A holster hung there.

“You brought a gun to Ganymede?” she said.

“I won’t forget Adigrat,” he said.

Adigrat. That was his ghost. Her ghost, Asmera in Eritrea was the start of the war. Adigrat in Ethiopia was the last city on either side to die. Many had thought it safe. It had no military value and survivors had been streaming in for days. Kedija hadn’t made the war. She’d suffered it, like all of them. She wanted to leave it behind, but ghosts appear like time hasn’t passed.

“This is no trick, Negasi,” she said, but in her ears, her words sounded exhausted, the exhaustion that could only start in the marrow.

She lead them into the pyramid. They’d left some lights on to record, to try to understand where the projectors were, if there were projections. She didn’t think they’d find any. Dozens of the transparent centipede ghosts stood, occasionally twitching or turning. Those that were close to one another occasionally appeared indistinct and watery, like an image seen through the surface of a burbling stream. Some of the ghosts began to disappear.

“These might be quantum images,” she said to Negasi. “They interfere with one another. They sometimes vanish when we observe them. They could be interacting with our microlevel systems.”

There was just enough light to see Negasi’s dubious expression behind the faceplate.

“We have a quantum pest control problem?” he said.

“Not a pest,” she said, considering the vanishing centipedes. Others appeared elsewhere. She’d set her AI to think about them, but making recordings was difficult, and her AI hadn’t come to a conclusion as to whether they were all the same or different creatures.

“Something built these tombs,” she said. “They left something of themselves behind. Not writing. Interacting probabilities.”

“These are alien hieroglyphs?” he said. “I don’t care about a memorial for an extinct species! We were almost extinct. We have to live. This is our turn!”

This is our turn. The words pulled in her chest.

Negasi was pointing at Petros, who looked uncomfortable. “You! You were one of her students, weren’t you? How do you get rid of quantum . . . pests?”

Petros could only try to shrug, an awkward gesture under kilos and kilos of a lead-lined survival suit.

Kedija crouched, approaching one of the centipede things. It wasn’t vanishing yet.

“When a conscious mind observes a quantum event,” Kedija said, “the probability wave collapses. What had been possibilities before becomes a concrete decision. These don’t disappear very fast. If these are manifestations of quantum probabilities, they’re so complex that it might be that our consciousness isn’t large enough to collapse the wave function.”

“I don’t care what they are,” Negasi said. “They’re endangering us. Get rid of them! If you won’t, we will.”

“You’re not in Ethiopia anymore, Negasi,” she said. “You don’t get to tell anyone what to do. We’re all just people now.”

The ghost centipede before her finally vanished.

“The past doesn’t vanish when you look at it, Kedija.”

“No,” Hamid said into his wrist communicator, to the teams checking the outage. “It’s down again. It’s down again. No. It’s down again. Reboot it?”

It was the second time today that primary power systems were glitching. Hamid thought it was heating-cooling problems with the couplings. A lot of their environmental tech had been designed for Mars, whose temperature swings were larger, but more gradual. In their race to put up their shelters, they’d maybe run their power systems too hot. Or maybe not.

“More and more quantum ghosts are appearing,” Kedija whispered to Petros, the white vapor of her words vanishing in the cold. Their helmets were off, but their suits were still on. The temperature in the habitat had plunged to forty below. Hamid led the efforts to get primary power back.

“They’re interacting with us,” she said. “We’re becoming part of their probabilities.”

The display screen in front of Kedija and Petros had nothing to do with the power systems. It showed the characteristic pattern of electromagnetic wave interference, over a recording of two of the centipede ghosts.

“The morphology of this one is different from that one,” she said, pointing. The differences between the two ghosts were subtle. On one of them, the features she called “head,” despite the fact that there were ridges on both ends of the body, were larger. And on the smaller-headed one, there was the suggestion of a third “head” in the middle of the body. Each of these head-features was the source of the waves that were creating the interference patterns.

“If there are several kinds of ghosts,” she said, “they might be descended from different quantum probabilities. And when two different kinds interact, it messes with our systems.”

“It’s one thing for a single electron to interact with itself as it goes through both slits of an experiment,” Petros said. “This is macroscopic.”

“Macroscopic-level quantum behavior has been observed in special cases,” she said. “It’s weird, not impossible.”

“Does Negasi buy it?”

“I sent him these recordings with my analysis an hour ago,” she said. “I should call him.”

The lights and fans came on, blowing cold air. The heating coils began to glow. A wan cheer rose from the people around them.

Kedija stepped away, calling Negasi.

“What is it?” Negasi asked as he answered.

“I don’t think the ghosts are individuals in the way we are,” she said in a low voice lost in the bustle. “Ganymede is cold enough that their brains could probably quantum process if they were built of the right materials.”

“That doesn’t help our life support.”

“If the aliens thought with quantum logic, maybe they were even entangled to each other,” she said. “If so, they’re they’re still entangled and interacting.”

“I was already tired of being entangled with you,” Negasi said. “Now we’re entangled with them? If they like the cold, let’s cook their pyramids. I have my engineers drawing up some plans for it.”

“They’re thinking,” she said. “I think.”

“Ghosts don’t think.”

He hung up. Petros came close. “He didn’t go for it?” he said.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “We’re in the dark and he’s thinking crazy.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We don’t have the nuclear power to melt millions of tons of ice.”

Kedija barked a short laugh.

Fatimah came near with a small pad. “We’ve finished looking at the dust from the shelves,” she said, handing the pad to Kedija.

Kedija rotated the pad, looking for some point of reference. It looked like an image of an electron micrograph, grainy with odd lumps of dust around a central ball with complex ropey growths webbing it.

“The dust in the pyramids has a lot of structure,” Fatimah said. “Like spores.”

“Dangerous?” Kedija asked.

“Not to us,” Fatimah said. “At a hundred and seventy below outside, they’re solid. They melt completely at room temperature. Around minus a hundred though, they’re like jelly, and we think they can sprout.”

“What do they grow into?” Kedija said.

Fatimah shrugged awkwardly in her survival suit. Petros took the pad and looked at her results. Fatimah swiped to other images and expanded them, showing him her work. Only Kedija noticed the centipede ghost that had appeared near her feet. While Fatimah was still swiping, Hamid’s look followed Kedija’s and then became wide-eyed. When Fatimah finally looked, the ghost vanished.

“Did it take three of us to make that one vanish?” she said.

A cramped little room with double-walled insulating plastic was set aside as a lab. Long after two in the morning. Kedija was slumped in her chair, chin in hands, elbows on the table. Petros sat beside her, leaning against the wall. Under a strong light, in a sealed chamber like a terrarium, little spores were warming. Cameras in the chamber magnified the spores and projected them on the wall, beside temperature and pressure readings.

“I heard Negasi somehow brought weapons in their ships,” Petros said.

“We’re not just observers of some events from a million years ago,” Kedija said. “We have a kind of choice.”

The tiny balls of ice, within woven nets of fine hair-thin tendrils of ice, trembled, their reflectivity changing from powdered matte white to shiny pearl.

“Of course I told Fatimah to shut the hell up,” Petros said. “Can you imagine if people started talking about weapons?”

He made a tsking sound, but didn’t move. His passion was exhausted. Frozen.

“Our lamps can heat the surface,” Kedija said.

The readings on the projector showed the terrarium temperature at -104°C and the pressure of just 1.2 µPa, low enough to be doubtful there even was an atmosphere. These were the conditions of the surface, except that the spores here were bathed in warm light.

“Our conscious minds, by observing the ghosts, should put them to rest,” Kedija said.

“It’s just talk,” Petros said. “They couldn’t have brought weapons.”

“Maybe ghosts just want to be remembered,” Kedija said.

One of the spores was more advanced in its melt than the others. Its shiny opaque surface was blebbing outward between bands of icy, hair-thin vasculature. Whatever its surface, it was still unbroken. But the sprout was reaching, across a million years.

“But what if Negasi paid off someone at the UN?” Petros said.

“If we revive the spores wholesale, we don’t know if it’s good for us or not,” Kedija said.

There was a beautiful futility in reaching, a trusting ignorance of the world so profound that it could not but be admired. And it was so distant and alien a feeling that she turned it over in her mind, incredulously.

“I didn’t tell Fatimah any of that,” he said. “That’s dangerous talk.”

“We could kill them all,” she said, “send them back to the ice, where they would die in the cold. If these plants are any danger, we could do that.”

The spore casing was straining, but hadn’t burst yet. She felt like reaching in and just giving it a hand, just to see what strangeness might emerge. Certainly like nothing they knew. These spores were the stranger, in the deepest human sense.

“Even before that, if we don’t turn on the light,” she said, “if we don’t warm them, then they stay frozen forever.”

“But if it’s true,” Petros said, “then we die all over.”

Kedija didn’t sleep. She suited up and cycled out the airlock, onto the icy regolith field that was their new home. The first crude habitats were blocky and inelegant, a race against time to make something to shelter them from the radiation. Their machines and supplies were stacked unevenly, adding weird colors and human invention onto an environment entirely alien.

She walked across a sterile garden of icy pellets and frost-haired shards made not from rain, but smashed out of the hard ice of the ground by micro-meteor impacts over millions of years. They’d blasted their world too. Asmera triggered falling dominoes that scoured the highlands and valleys with fire and plutonium waste. They’d made two nations of ghosts.

Jupiter hung in inscrutable judgment to the south. On the foot-stamped ground ahead of her, at the edge of her helmet light, was a ghostly, transparent centipede, as motionless as the king of the gods. Were they judging too?

Her whole life had been in Asmera. Why had she picked that one day to go hiking, with Petros of all people? She’d barely known him. What observer had made that possibility real, instead of all the other places in the capital she might have been? There was no reason for her to have survived. She was just a freak observation at the extreme edge of probability.

She walked closer. Her helmet light revealed more of the ghosts, all waiting in stillness, just the waving of antennae in the vacuum giving signs of life. But only a sign of life. Not real life. She could see through them.

Kedija might have been in Asmera, and in nightmares and waking, walking dreams, she had been. Did a ghostly version of herself, the path not taken, walk still among fallout fields with the ghosts of families, friends, and all the people she never knew?

Stepping forward, her helmet light revealed more of the centipede ghosts, a whole field of them. What if she wasn’t real at all? What if this was the afterlife, cold and dark, a shade reaching for contact with anyone, anything, unable to understand what she was anymore. She’d had a life in the fenced camps, with her refugee card, her temporary shelter, her food aid. But that didn’t make her any more real than the ghosts.

She’d walked so far forward that nothing man-made was in her vision anymore. Just a field of ghosts beneath her helmet lamp and the orange light of Jupiter.

So many ghosts walked the remains of their homes that no one could remember them all. Only a few thousand of them had survived. Persisted. Millions and millions had burned in radiation stronger than Jupiter’s. There was no more us or them. They’d killed themselves. They’d killed all the Ethiopians. They’d killed all the Eritreans. They were indistinguishable now, just hollow-eyed, shock-hearted bodies trying to live, trying to find something to live for, cut off from humanity, on a hard, cold world.

Negasi’s first Ethiopian habitat wasn’t much better than her Eritrean one. They’d inflated their Martian quick-habitat within a big igloo of ice blocks they’d stacked together. The boxes were still half-packed, the walls hung with wires.

Negasi wasn’t happy she’d come, and now, cycled in, she faced him and a half dozen frowning, resentful faces. Was this what she looked like? Is this what they saw in her, a kind of shocked pitilessness?

“We can’t survive if we don’t work together,” she said.

Negasi was wearing the gun on his hip. “It’s a big moon. We won’t need to work together soon. You go your way. We go ours.”

“We’re going to stay haunted until we work together, or until the haunting kills us,” she said.

His expression turned dubious. She took a reinforcing breath.

“When Asmera was nuked, I lost my mother,” she said. “My brothers. My aunts. Everyone.”

They might not have been expecting this. One of them, a younger man, looked as if she’d hit him.

“I was angry,” she said. “At you all. My mother never did anything to you. I wanted to kill you. Not you Negasi, but all of you. I guess you wanted to kill us, to finish the job. I’m still angry, but I’ve already lost everything. I don’t have anything to lose anymore except maybe the possibility of a future.”

Negasi’s expression shuttered, no longer hard, but not softened either. Neither opened nor closed. Waiting. Judging.

“Revenge won’t bring me or this moon to life,” she said, “but I want to live. But for me to live, you have to live too. It has to be both of us or neither.”

One of them, a woman, shuffled her feet, looking away. The younger man’s expression became confused, as if Kedija had said something alien.

“If the price of you getting to live is that I might laugh one day, is that too much for you to pay, Negasi?” she asked, touching a hand to the chest of her survival suit, seeking a heart lost in the layers.

“The past can keep haunting us, or we can see the ghosts for real and exorcise them,” she said.

“If million-year-old ghosts can reach across time to us, why can’t we reach across a line someone drew between two countries centuries ago, one that is seven hundred million kilometers behind us?”

Negasi had the gun on his hip. And his heart covered. And the hardness in his eyes. But the hardness had a peculiar quality. Shiny. Cold. But in a way that could not be explained, only trusted and felt, the hardness was softening. Melting. As if some other feeling ached to sprout from within him.

Dozens and dozens of them were in the main pyramid, refugees all, Eritrean and Ethiopian, cautious with one another, mixing uneasily, holding hands with their eyes closed. Concentric rings of refugees, under the hard lights. Only Kedija and Negasi’s eyes were open, watching the centipedes, quantum ghosts from a million years ago, collecting. She and Negasi waited.

They’d lost something when they’d been genetically engineered to survive the radiation of their home. Kedija had thought maybe they’d become less human. They had the wrong number of chromosomes now. Their brains were augmented with chips to help them survive, making their perceptions partly electronic. And with the ghosts not disappearing quickly, those quantum echoes of some decision point long in the past, she’d thought that maybe she’d become not only less human, but less conscious.

More and more ghosts appeared.

Human consciousness collapsed possibilities into something real. Human consciousness forced the quantum world to make choices. Why did these images take so long to collapse when observed? She’d been right about the problem, but wrong about the solution.

The ghosts were all around them now. Near feet. Behind the rings of people. Before the rings of people. “Open,” she said into her helmet mic. Dozens of sets of human eyes opened all around her.

Kedija was still human. She just hadn’t felt human, not since the war. But that wasn’t what made the ghosts persist.

These quantum waves had been interacting with one another for a million years in the icy cold of a dead moon. Those interactions had grown huge with age. To force these quantum ghosts to choose a possibility would take a bigger consciousness. More than one person. More than two or three people. They needed to work together, all of them. Agree on what they saw. The refugees stood in their circles, holding hands.

All the ghosts were gone.

Observed.

Disappeared.

Whatever the refugees had seen today, whatever quantum indecision had held these ghosts in their indeterminacy for so long, it was gone now, communicated back across the years by whatever process of spooky entanglement connected events.

The pyramid builders had died, but the refugees were not standing in tombs. These were spore chambers. The spores were like the new human colonists, refugees warehoused into camps. The spores had been waiting millions of years to be welcomed somewhere. Only the warmth of conscious life would tell these spores it was safe to germinate. The spores had needed to know that some community was waiting to receive them as they fled an uninhabitable past. The humans would. And in a way, whatever plants would grow here would be welcoming the refugees too.

About the Author

After leaving molecular biology to work with street kids in Central America, and eventually entering the diplomatic world, Derek Künsken has settled down in snowy Gatineau, Québec to be a dad and write science fiction and fantasy. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in multiple year’s best anthologies. His first novel The Quantum Magician was published in 2018. Its sequel The Quantum Garden will be out in 2019. He tweets about comic books and writing thoughts at @derekkunsken.

Venus in Bloom

Lavie Tidhar

Samit died in the night, surrounded by flowers.

Outside the acid rain fell onto the planet. The kite runners drove their kites against the clouds, their minds roaming freely through the Conversation. At a gala reception on the upper deck of the cloud city a jazz band played old Earth songs to welcome in a celebrated, if minor, poet from Lunar Port. Above them, on the service level under the great balloon, a young couple hid behind a service chute and kissed with the passion of first love. On the planet far below the storms raged, and nothing lived, and nothing died. In the hospital ward of the cloud city two babies were born. In the famed gardens, where Samit had worked all of his years, a rare Queen of the Night flower bloomed. All of this happened, and more, and some was witnessed, and some was not. And Samit died in the night, surrounded by flowers.

“He loved flowers,” the robot said.

Maya smiled. “That he did,” she said.

She found him in the morning. He lay there on his cot, looking peaceful. He would have been sorry to have missed the flowering of the cactus, she thought. It was unlike him to miss such a thing. It was only when she came to shake him gently that she realized he wasn’t breathing. When she opened her node to his she saw he was no longer transmitting. His node had gone silent as his mind fled.

She had not cried, not then. The air in the room was humid, hot. It smelled of jasmine and roses. Samit loved roses. A lunar black rose grew in a pot on his windowsill. He loved looking out of the window, at the acid rains and the drifting clouds and the playful swirls and parabolas of the kite runners. The slow drift of balloons, and the towering forms of other cloud cities slowly coming into view. He liked tuning into one of the public streams and listening to son cubano music as he welcomed in the day.

There was no real day and night outside, of course. But the plants and the people remembered Earth, had come from Earth, had Earth in their roots. So there was night and day inside the cloud city, and it was in the night that Samit died, surrounded by flowers.

“I am sorry,” the robot said. The robot’s name was R. Brother Mekem, for it liked to make things. It was old enough to remember being made on Earth, back when they still made robots. They’d made them to look vaguely human, to help old people or look after young ones. A life of service. And now the robots were all old, and many of them were gone, but R. Brother Mekem still remembered. This was the curse of a robot, it sometimes thought. They remembered too much.

R. Mekem could remember every child it had helped to raise. It always marveled how quickly they grew and changed. And it remembered every elderly person it had helped, and how quickly they declined and died. Humans lived so intensely and so quickly. But each one of them was unique and surprising, just like a robot.

“I am sorry,” it said again, helplessly.

Maya put her hand gently on the robot’s shoulder. “It was his time,” she said.

“Yes,” the robot said. “There is so much time in the universe, and so little of it is given over to life. Would that it were different, I sometimes think.”

Maya’s tears glittered unshed in her eyes. It didn’t seem real to her yet. Samit had always been there. And who would water the flowers now? Who would weed the flower beds, who would toil the good black earth? When she was a child he took her to the gardens with him on his rounds, and showed her the olive tree that had grown there at its center for centuries, ever since the first gardener planted it as a seedling, on that first year when the cloud city was new.

Back then it was just a thing. Shiny and new and empty. Now the city showed its age as it floated there in the temperate zone, fifty kilometers above the surface of Venus. The city had acquired memories, stories, lives that were lived. It had assumed upon itself a history.

R. Brother Mekem had come to the cloud city only a century past. It had lived on Earth and had done some terrible things it regretted. It had been caught in one of the long-ago wars, and it had survived the way people had survived, when perhaps it should have not. People did terrible things to survive. And robots like R. Mekem were made just human enough to emulate them. R. Mekem could have died, like many of its order did. But it chose not to.

Was free choice possible for a robot? Was it possible for a human? Lives are made out of choices.

In choosing, it lived. In living, it chose.

In contemplating this, R. Mekem made his way to the moon. It had lived with the monks of the Mare Congnitum for several decades, taking a vow of silence, living out on the cold, airless surface of Earth’s moon, watching Earthrise, contemplating the Way of Robot and the Three Laws some ancient human sage had haplessly devised one aimless autumn day in a city that no longer existed. They were full of contradiction and paradox, the enthusiastic creation of a human teenage imagination, but they lingered in R. Mekem’s mind.

At last, after those long decades, R. Mekem tired of the dust of the moon and of the passage of the giant spiders across its surface, enormous city-sized machines with minds that shared nothing with its own. The digital intelligences who inhabited the Conversation never knew what to make of robots and their strange existence, not quite one thing, not quite another. So R. Mekem made his way to Venus, and made a living as a priest.

Trying to be useful again.

Trying to be good.

“You knew him well?” Maya said.

“We played bao together most afternoons,” R. Mekem said. Its long fingers moved all the while it spoke, twisting bits of wire into shapes, making a toy. Without consciously realizing it the robot saw it had been making a rose. A little awkwardly it handed the rose to Maya.

And now she let herself cry. The tears came unbidden. She leaned into the robot’s shoulder.

“I thought we’d have longer,” she said. “I thought . . . ”

“I know,” the robot said. And again, those ancient words: “I’m sorry.”

Robots were always sorry. Sorry for not doing enough, sorry for disappointing, sorry for just being. Mekem remembered that war. There had been bombs falling from the sky, militias moving across the ruined city. Gunshots. Human bodies were so fragile. White phosphorous, shrapnel. Awful memories.

It thought about the men it killed.

Killing was surprisingly easy, even for a robot.

Maya leaned back. She wiped her tears. “Did he win?” she said.

“What?”

“At bao.”

“He was a terrible player,” R. Brother Mekem said, and Maya laughed.

“I know.”

“But a wonderful gardener. His roses were a joy for all to see. He’d tried to teach me, more than once. But I do not have the gift for tending flowers.”

“Neither do I,” Maya said. She had not told Samit she was leaving. He had not been well, and she had kept delaying her departure, for all that she longed to go. She felt sad now, and mixed with that was guilt, for there was a kind of freedom in the passing. Now she could leave. She was no longer bound to the clouds.

Down on the surface of Venus, far below, moved Waldos. Giant, armored things, built to withstand the enormous pressures and the gravity and winds, the howling storms of acid. Crawling along the Lakshmi Planum, driven from above by planet divers, people like her. For Maya, strapping into the diver’s conch, Venus was the real world, the cloud cities in the temperate zone merely a distraction. To her, embodying the Waldo, the violent winds became a gentle breeze, the rough terrain a known, loved map she drew anew with every step. Her heart was a helium heat pump, her intestines were hardened ceramics. Beyond the Lakshmi Planum towered Maxwell Montes, and to that mountain range the Waldos marched, for one day, one day they would build a mountain even taller, to make another home for humans to live and die in. To live and love, and to grow flowers in.

She’d longed for Venus, for its surface, to drive one of the giant engines by herself. She knew Samit would worry. She didn’t tell him.

Ensconced inside like a fetus in a womb she’d be sheltered, and have direct mind-contact with her exo-body. One year, two. Or as many as it would take. That freedom of a wild planet—the thrill of it!

“But there are no flowers on Venus,” he would have said.

“But there could be,” she would have said.

And he would have said, “Let the wild places be.”

What did she know of her grandfather? He was old by the time she was born. He wasn’t from Venus. She wasn’t sure where he was from. One of the ring habitats around Saturn, her mother once told her. Or maybe Titan. He spoke with the slow accent of the Outer System. How and why he’d made the crossing to the Inner Planets he never said and she never asked. He was young when he came—she knew that much. And once she found an image buried in a private archive, and it showed a young man who could have been her grandfather, thin and awkward, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, somewhere on one of the moons of the Galilean Republics, with the great storm of Jupiter rising behind him. But she didn’t know what it meant.

Some war, long ago. And bolted-together ships streaming slowly like kicked tins across the great dark gulf, towards the sun, packed with bodies.

He never spoke of that past, and that part of him, and Maya never pried. She could have probably found out, the Conversation was awash with data. But she loved her grandfather.

She remembered walking with him in the gardens, feeding the plants. Once a week he would select one special rose, by what criteria she didn’t know, and carefully cut the stem, and carry it home, to Maya’s grandmother.

And she remembered walking with him, hand in hand, along the circumference bridge of the upper level of the city, so that you felt that you were in the clouds, and you could look down, at that unimaginable height, the sheer drop to Venus . . . And perhaps it was then that that wild longing erupted in her, of going down to the surface.

She longed to be back in her Waldo suit now, to be away from all this. Another loss.

Perhaps the robot saw it in her face. Robots had to be good at reading faces. R. Mekem said, “Perhaps some refreshment? A glass of orange juice?”

The orange orchards in the garden levels of the city were famed. There were four terraces of gardens, hanging under the city. Acres and acres of flowers and trees, of drip lines and micro-irrigation networks as elaborate in their way as the Conversation itself was.

She shook her head. “No, thank you. The arrangements—”

“Of course. I understand a ghost collector is not required?”

She shook her head. “My grandfather did not want his node disturbed. What memories are still encoded there should be left as they were.”

“Of course. And so—”

“He’ll join my grandmother in the Down Below.”

The robot nodded. “I shall make the arrangements,” it said.

“Thank you,” Maya said.

The robot remembered discussing war with Samit once. They had been playing bao with ancient Zanzibar rules, on a board brought all the way from old Earth, carved out of driftwood and decorated with leaves.

“There had been an unpleasantness,” the robot said. Summing up in that one short word all the horror it had witnessed, and that it perpetrated. And the old man had almost smiled, looking surprised, then amused.

“Yes,” he said. “There had been that, for me, too.”

Perhaps it was why they got along. And it was nice, the robot thought, to share something like this with a human. There was something intimate about it, a common knowledge, a similarity. Yes, it decided now. They had been friends, they must have been.

And that felt both good, and sad.

R. Mekem walked to the window. Its fingers moved all the while, shaping a crane. The wings extended. The robot watched the kite runners in the sky, and the webwork of delicate flutes that captured the falling acid rains and extracted the precious water out of them. Venus really was a paradise, it thought. If such a thing existed. The robot supposed that was more of an ideal. Not like the real heaven that the priests in the Robot Vatican on Mars were trying to create in the zero-point field . . .

But of that secret knowledge R. Mekem was not to speak aloud.

It sighed, with the recorded voice of a person who’d died centuries past, and then it set about arranging for the funeral. It would pay much attention to the flower arrangement, it decided. Although the flowers were for the living, not for the dead, nevertheless, the robot thought, Samit would have liked that.

And there was a comfort in knowing that, too.

Maya ran across the Lakshmi Planum, her arms swinging by her sides. She was a giant mech, she hopped across the rough terrain, exhilarating in the rush of wind, the planet ceaselessly trying to pull her down, to break her into parts. Her guts were a nuclear reactor, her arms could crush rocks. There were other Waldos moving down there, but they were far, and she wanted to be alone. They did not disturb her.

One day Venus could be made anew, she thought. Broken apart and put together again. What was terraforming if not a wrecking, the destruction of a wilderness for the whims of fleeting, organic beings?

Let the wild places be, her grandfather told her. And she never knew that she felt that way, too, that she would hate to see this wild untamed planet, unfit for life, beautiful and feral in its isolation—she would hate to see it ruined. But one day they would crash giant meteorites into the surface, and leech the poison from the atmosphere, and seed the planet with microscopic life . . . They’d make new oceans and fields would grow where once all was desolation.

But she was glad she wouldn’t have to witness it.

Maya ran across the surface of Venus and grieved for her grandfather who died in the night, surrounded by flowers.

Overhead, without much fuss, the first of the coffins drifted down gently through the storm.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

Left to Take the Lead

Marissa Lingen

The day I found out my Uncle Will was still alive, I had been out spraying the crops in a full crinkly hazmat suit. The Earthers I was working for were nice people, but they always whined about the suits. To me they seemed light and airy, hardly even an annoyance compared to a vacuum suit, so I was the one who would get sent out first with the sprayer when the blight warnings came in from the provincial capital in Edmonton.

I didn’t mind. It was the tenth month of my indenture on Earth, and I had almost gotten used to the smell, but even so a little overlay of antifungal didn’t change it much. Earthers always want to know where I was working so they can figure out what smell, because Earthers think it matters—oh, the salt sea smell, they say, nodding wisely, or the grassy prairie smell, or the other Earther things they think they know.

But among us we don’t have to hear where, because we know the stink of dirt and concrete and mixed musk that is Earth, whether it’s got salt sea and juniper on top or snow melt and alpine flowers or growing corn. It’s all Earth.

In my case, though, it was the Canadian prairie, the bit in Alberta right before it buckles up and becomes mountains, the bit nobody settled much until the climate shifted, and now they were keen to have anyone they could get to work on it. Offworlders would do, because they thought the cold of space would get us used to it. They never seemed to understand that we didn’t spend any time up close and personal with the cold of space. The cold of space means something has gone badly wrong, back at home.

Not that I’d gotten to be back at home since the collapse.

It took me just ages to figure out that they don’t think they’re lying when they say, “You’ll get used to the weather.” Apparently when you’ve always had weather, you can get used to different weather. But when you’ve never had weather at all, it’s very hard to get used to blizzards, and tornadoes are just not on the list. Apparently they only used to have them once a year or less. This seemed still unbearable but much closer to civilized to me.

On our ships out in the Oort Cloud we had tornadoes not at all, and solar storms were points of interest, not terror. Nearly everyone I met on Earth made some comment about being in a tiny ball surrounded by vacuum, as if that didn’t describe their circumstances also. Earthers are weird.

But the Pavelkas were a good assignment for an indenture on Earth: warm-hearted, truly willing to treat their indentured servants as temporary family members. The daughter of the family, Anna-Reese, took the same number of work shifts as we did, and we all ate together, three times a day around the big applewood table in the kitchen. When we were hip-deep in antifungals from yet another blight or exhausted from extra shifts with pregnant bison, so was Anna-Reese. So were her parents. And they gave us time to ourselves in the evening, to read or watch vids or go out or read the boards or message our families.

I didn’t expect much in the way of messages from my family. Most of them had died in the collapse. My little brother and sister would write to me from Mars every Sunday, dutifully, on their foster mother’s urging. I had two uncles remaining, and I didn’t know where either of them might be, or even if Uncle Will was still alive. Uncle Wys was the one I depended on. He messaged me, but I never knew where mining would take him next. He worked the high-risk jobs to try to strike it big enough to buy a ship so Hans and Cora and I could be with him as a family again.

But there was a message waiting in my queue that night when I got the worst of the grime showered off me. The time stamp on the message itself was from my work shift, but internal to the message there was a different date, four years ago. “Dear Monkey,” it started out, “If you’re reading this, I’ve failed.”

It took me another half hour to stop crying enough to read the rest of the message. No one had called me Monkey in four years. Not since the collapse. But I had to see what else he had to say, whether he was coming for me, and whether it might mean I could be with the rest of my family again. Even though he said he’d failed—there are different kinds of failure. There’s the kind that’s frustrating and you try again, and there’s the kind that leaves your family scattered on two or three different planets and who knew where in the outer system habitats.

I was just getting myself braced to read it when Tessa came in. “My God, what happened to you?”

“My uncle—” I managed.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry!” Tessa sat down next to me on my bed and hugged me fiercely.

“He’s not dead,” I managed around the hard press of her bony shoulder. “At least I don’t think. I couldn’t—I haven’t—”

She held me out at arm’s length, gripping my shoulders, and waited.

“I haven’t heard from him for years, really years. This isn’t the one I—the one I talk to. I kept not hearing. I’ve asked on every Oort board there is, and nobody can find him.”

Tessa turned me to Uncle Will’s letter and waited while I read it, then read it again. I think she knew that I would go back and reread it over and over if left to my own devices. She softly touched my shoulder to get my attention back, murmuring, “And?”

“He was trying—” I took a shuddering, jagged breath. “He was trying to get to a place where he could have me and my brother and sister again. He was trying to get court decisions reversed on our old property so that we could have our actual home back. He spent every dime he earned on court costs, and he lost. And he doesn’t have a way to get back the guardianship of the little ones now that he’s lost.”

Tessa glanced at the picture I keep of them. The cube could easily be programmed to show video loops or a series of still pictures, and I have them stored on there. But I just leave it on one picture, me and Hans and Cora and our cousin Xiang-Ming before she died. We all look really happy. When I can make it to Mars, I’ll get another one with just me and Hans and Cora. The picture was six years ago, and Cora has grown so much. Hans too, but—Cora was just tiny then.

We change so fast.

“I’m sorry your uncle doesn’t have a way to get them back,” said Tessa gently. She’s a very gentle person. “I know that’s important to you. Do you think your uncle hopes to help with your education debts, or—?”

“He can’t do it,” I said. “He feels terrible, he’s blaming himself, but—he can’t. And honestly I don’t know that he understands how in-system education and indenture work.”

“Couldn’t he and your other uncle figure it out together?” said Tessa.

“I don’t know. After the collapse, they—they didn’t agree on what to do next, and there was a big fight, and—I don’t know what will happen. Whether they’re even speaking to each other. Of course if one got a ship, the other would be welcome, but . . . that’s all on Uncle Wys now.”

“Ah,” said Tess, who very clearly had no experience with uncles gallivanting about the outer reaches of the solar system. I’m not even sure she would know her uncles on the street. She never talked about family beyond parents and siblings. Earthers are weird, they’re all little islands with no connections to speak of. That’s how they ended up with all this mess of debt and indenture, because nobody knows who anybody’s cousin is.

Out in the Oort Cloud, we don’t have indentured servants. Didn’t. We didn’t have indentured servants, before the Chornohora Disaster and everything that followed. I don’t know what the corporations have exported out there now. But in-system, perhaps a third of the people are indentured servants at one point in their lives, mostly due to debts. There’s personal debt and educational debt and family debt and—these people could not have made such a mess of my home if they didn’t think about debt all the damn time.

But I didn’t really have any choice—I got thrust into the middle of their system as a barely-emancipated minor. They let me go to university. That’s what they know how to do with the young in-system: educate them, let them rack up debt. I knew that Uncle Wys would send for me as soon as he had the place for us, so I made sure that when I went to that university on Callisto, it was in deep-field astrophysics, something that could be useful to the family ship when we had a family ship again.

Something an Oort girl could properly do.

But Callisto, while it wasn’t anywhere near as in-system crazy as Earth, worked on the same plan: if you didn’t have a family to pay for you, you racked up the debt, and then you worked an indenture in one of the undesirable jobs to pay it off. If I’d taken a degree in something they wanted, something they thought was useful in-system, I could have wiped my indenture clean in a year. Climatologists did that, and research mycologists. Now that I was on Earth, I could see why they wanted so many mycologists. But if I’d chosen either of those fields, I’d be stuck in-system for good when my family needed me. Better to work the Pavelkas’ farm and wait for Uncle Wys.

It made the in-system dramas make a lot more sense, because not only do they have people avoiding indentured servitude at the very last minute, but almost every story has indentured servants in it. Or they’ll have people meeting at the indentured service assignment office and trying to arrange indentures together if it’s a happy story, being haunted by the lost connection if it’s a melancholy one.

When I was little and we were watching one as a family, I asked my mother what that place was, and she said it was like the equivalent of the pilot licensing bureau for in-system people. She was dead wrong and didn’t even know it. She just had no idea how much debt is on these people’s minds, like a malfunctioning beacon every moment: “debt debt debt debt d’debt debt . . . .” They’re not like us, they never say, “It wouldn’t be any use to the family,” when they’ve decided not to do something. They say, “I can’t afford it.”

I’d been spending the last five years living like one of them, hardly ever saying anything about my family out loud. Now there was this message from Uncle Will. And what it was saying was no. No, we can’t be together. No, I’ve failed. No, you have to keep on spraying for rusts and fungus without any idea when you’ll see Hans and Cora again. No.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what to think. Except that, oh, I was so glad he was alive. I checked to see if there was any way to track a return message. There wasn’t. I could send one, of course—just replying to the sender—but I wouldn’t know if he saw it that day or the next or never. And I wouldn’t know where he was.

That was nothing new.

But the return message could wait, since I couldn’t find him with it and he wasn’t coming for me any time soon. It could wait, and supper couldn’t. I threw a warm flannel shirt on over my clean trousers and undershirt and tried a smile out on Tess.

“That’s pathetic,” she said. “No one would believe that was a happy face. But you’re in luck: the news feed was all bad, so they won’t notice you’re upset. They’ll be too busy with their own problems.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good?”

“Yeah, it’s fabulous. We’ll be out in the suits all week. It’ll be a miracle if the wheat grows at all, with the cocktails of antifungals they’ll have us put on it. Who knows if any of them will work.”

I winced. Hard to tell whether it would be a hard week or a hard year, if the reports were that bad. I propped up my fake smile.

“Better,” said Tessa.

The Pavelkas around the supper table that night reminded me of my family when the mining was poor: tight-lipped, ready for the children to talk about anything that would distract them. Tess and I, since we weren’t family, were the “children,” but we didn’t have that much to talk about since we’d spent the day in the fields with them and I was dodging bringing up my uncle.

Catie tried all the same. “What do you hear from your brother and sister, Holly?”

“They seem to have picked up hockey,” I said, smiling ruefully at the way their faces lit up. For me, all Earthers are more or less the same, their little differences over language and religion and politics amounting to family squabbles. They can’t keep our clans straight either. But to them, it matters, and one of the things that makes Canadians happy is hockey. They have a special bond with Martians that way.

“Oh, great!” said Anna-Reese. “They can send you feeds of their games—not in real time with the lag, obviously, and the cost would be too much anyway, but the delayed feed will be almost as satisfying.”

I had not even thought of watching entire games of my little siblings darting about Martian ice with little Martians, chasing awkwardly after a puck, but I could see from the way Anna-Reese said it that it was what I had to do. I could see that Hans and Cora would be expecting it. I might have to ask the Pavelkas what to say to them so that it sounded like I was paying attention. I would pay attention, but I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to say. You looked very fast. How well you almost hit the net with the tiny object. Well done, crashing into the other child at the correct time.

Asking the Pavelkas seemed a much better idea than trying to make a go of that sort of conversation myself.

We made short work of the dishes, but the whole time I was thinking of what to write back to my uncle. I thought I knew what I would say to him if I could see him again—I had thought of it hundreds, thousands of times over the last six years—but this was . . . not quite that. For one thing, if I saw him again, I’d know where he was. It turned out that made quite a difference.

“Never mind success or failure,” I wrote, pausing to put “Dear Uncle Will” at the top like a civilized person. “Where are you?” There was no way the messaging software would let me emphasize it enough, but I didn’t want to pay for voice transmission when I didn’t even know the message wouldn’t just drop into the void forever. I could save that credit for Hans and Cora, who would appreciate it.

“Where are you where are you where are you?” I wrote. I sounded more like the girl he’d left than the woman I’d become, but that was all right. It was what I actually wanted to say.

Then I couldn’t think what else. I sat and stared at the message.

“I am well,” I finally wrote, sounding like an etiquette manual, but there was at least room to go on from there. “My indenture here on Earth is on a farm. You wouldn’t believe the weather, far more than just solar storms. And trees! I thought I understood trees, but the little fruit things we have are nothing compared to the trees here.”

I realized that I had no idea whether Uncle Will had been to Earth. Maybe he knew about storms and trees and Earth things. Maybe he’d toured the Earth monuments. Maybe he was on Earth at that very moment, if not as close as Edmonton, somewhere else just like it, with rain and pollen and history. Without knowing, I didn’t know how to tell him the stories of my indenture, what it had been like to begin with, how Tessa had taught me a lot, how I’d adjusted and how I hadn’t.

I had never lived anywhere with trees before. You’d think it would be the same as having high walls or hills or a dome—it’s a high-up thing that’s mostly in your peripheral vision, but it’s really not. The fact that they’re alive turns out to matter a lot. The branches move around, and you can really tell they’re alive. It’s more like living with a herd of giant elephants or something than a dome.

Earth people do not think of it this way. But they should, because that’s what it’s like.

When I first got here, I was wary of the trees. I knew—I’m not stupid—that they didn’t pick up and wander around. I knew that Macbeth was being metaphorical, or mystical, or something. But they were still such large, moving, living things, all right there. I wasn’t used to it. I gave them wide berth when I walked out to do my chores.

Finally Tessa grabbed me by the wrist as we were coming in from our chores. “But look,” she said, dragging me into the back garden. “Here’s you!”

Her people were from New Orleans when there was one, and they kept moving up the mouth of the Mississippi, so now they live in Greater Memphis State. So her accent confused me. Anna-Reese said, “No, the yews are over there.”

Tess giggled and said, “No, it’s holly. Holly.” She put my hand on one of the smooth spiky leaves. I flinched back and then reached out again, more slowly, of my own accord.

“I forgot Dad had this back here,” said Anna-Reese. “Holly tree. You’re right, that’s you, Holly.”

“Hello, me-tree,” I said softly. The glossy dark leaf felt right, it felt just how it looked. We had no excuse to grow holly trees in our ships. Apple trees, pear trees, they earned their keep. Holly trees, no. I had never felt a leaf quite like that, thick and firm and unyielding.

And yet that was not the tree I bonded with. My tree was a little sturdy bigtoothed maple, its leaves thin and jagged and yielding, utterly unlike the holly in every way. You could lean on a maple. You could tell a maple your troubles, but I didn’t. I just leaned and breathed.

Thinking about those early days while trying to write to my Uncle Will, I realized how much distance had formed between us. He hadn’t heard from me when I was in college on Callisto, so writing, “I have a serious relationship with a maple tree,” would probably make no sense. I wrote it down anyway and then added, “but I will be okay leaving it when we get our ship figured out. My friend Tessa who teaches me about Earth and trees will be harder to leave. Maybe she will visit. Have you written to Uncle Wys? He’s going crazy missing you. We all miss you. Don’t wait so long to write again, even if you aren’t writing to say we have our ship back yet. It’s okay. We can work together on it. Love, Holly.”

Then I went to sleep. I’m not usually a great sleeper, but that night I slept fine. I dreamed I was back out in our ship in the void. Waking to the smell of Tessa’s cheap rose shampoo should have been jarring, but instead it was familiar now, homelike in a way I didn’t expect when I first came to Earth.

There was soya bean rust in the next riding to add to the anxiety of the previous day’s announcement, so we spent the day out in the back fields spraying with fungicide and then carefully washing down so we didn’t bring either rust or fungicide into the house. One of Wendell’s friends, a big hearty man from over by Swan Hills, got burns on his hands and almost up to his elbows from where he didn’t get the fungicide washed off. It wasn’t the same kind. Still, it’s a reminder to be careful every time we see him, the long reddish patches that stay on the skin like birthmarks.

The next day was more of the same before we could get back to the usual farm chores. The day after, we were out in the fields as usual, doing the work we knew. I never asked Anna-Reese and Tess what they thought about in the long hours running the farm machinery, but I think everyone knew I thought about my family, about my ship, the ship Uncle Wys would get us.

I heard the ramping up of noise that started the sirens, and I had that tractor backed around and headed for the barn before their wail was full. I fumbled my mask on while I went, in case it was a spore wind, but with the sky the color it was, I was pretty sure it was precipitation instead. Inclement weather. Rain. Rain. Weird, weird stuff, rain. Tessa had managed to convince me to go out in it, and it was nice when it was warm, like a water park or a shower.

But you couldn’t trust it. You could bet that the water park management wasn’t suddenly going to turn the heat all the way down so that you got ice pellets in your face. You could feel sure that your shower wasn’t going to pick you up and dash you against the wall. Rain is not so reliable.

I was always, always the first one into the shelter when the sirens blared. Did not matter how far away I was or whether the others were right there next to it. They took their time. They ambled. They stopped to peer at the sky and speculate, and if there were two of them, they would stand there and talk to each other about it, like they were the audience in the intermission of a concert, wondering what the musician would play in the second set.

Earthers are so weird.

So I got myself settled in the shelter. Eventually the others came in, Tessa and Anna-Reese together, then Wendell, and finally Catie, still wiping her hands on her shirt. She’d been making supper and smelled of fresh basil. I hoped the tornado wouldn’t take the herb patch. I hoped the tornado wouldn’t take any of it, but at the time all I could think of was the herb patch.

I couldn’t do anything during a storm. They all knew it and didn’t bother me, because it wouldn’t do any good. I paced. The rest of them settled right down and played a round of Sheephead, Catie’s favorite, and then a round of 500, Tess’ choice, and then the radio sounded the all-clear.

The tornado was a good eighty kilometers away. Which in space terms is next door, but it’s far enough not to destroy your herb patch. If you had an asteroid pass that close to your hab, you would say how close it was. Everyone would rush to the view windows to gape at it and say how close it was. But on Earth, eighty kilometers means your farm is fine and the neighbors’ farm is not, there, done.

It’s hard to even explain the kind of people you get when they live like this. They watch local news like they were going to have a cousin on it any day, but “local news” usually includes millions of people, none of whom they have any relation to or business deals with.

It’s also hard to get a sense of what to expect from the natural world. Farmers like the Pavelkas don’t routinely keep the gene sequence of their crops on hand. They just don’t. They figure they can get stuff sequenced if they need to. The seed companies try to tell them what’s resistant to different diseases, but the seed companies have lied about that so many times that no one on Earth believes them. Despite that the farmers still don’t keep their own gene database.

I had started to have the feeling that there were more rusts, more blights—generally just more fungus—than would be natural. I was starting to feel like someone was doing this to us—to them, really, but to me, too, as long as I was there. But was that true? Was that a reasonable feeling to have? Or was it just the result of an Oort girl living on an unsequenced planet?

I knew that Anna-Reese and Tess had not sequenced the people they were dating, so I could not fathom how they had any idea what possibilities the future might hold for them. How do you find out what a reasonable number of fungi would look like, from people who behave like that? Even if they’re your friends?

The next day I was walking down the main road, out to the back fields, when I saw an outcropping of mushrooms on the trees. Each one was bigger than my hand, broad and flat with a dappled brown pattern on the top. I took out my handheld and took a snapshot of them, then broke off a sample piece for good measure. Mycology is hard, even the rough-and-ready farm kind. Probably this was an ordinary fungus, but if I didn’t check and it turned out to be virulent, I would regret it bitterly.

I hoped it wasn’t. The bit I took had a smooth, spongy texture. It felt nice. Not like the holly leaf, not like the maple bark, its own thing. I hoped it fit. I was so tired of fighting off the things that didn’t fit.

My handheld said it was probably dryad’s saddle, perfectly fine for a maple tree, quite normal for the region. Quite normal for all of Earth, it looked like. I went on to my normal work, feeling a little foolish but keeping the sample for sequencing, just in case, just in case it wasn’t dryad’s saddle, just in case it had mutated into some new killer dryad’s saddle.

It’s hard to understand dryads when you live in a habitat. How could people make up tree spirits? When your only trees are little heavy-bearing fruit trees, it makes no sense; they’re just about the least spirited thing on a habitat. But then you meet trees, and you think, well, killer dryads, all right, sure, on a dark night without the scientific method, why not.

I spent the morning thinking so much about dryads that I didn’t contemplate my future ship at all. In the afternoon I moved on to trying to figure out how much of our lichen cultivation could coexist with mycoculture or whether that would just bring the problems of Earth out to the Oort. If Wendell and Catie had a bad blight year, they might lose a lot of money—enough of them, and they might lose the farm—but a bad blight year on a habitat doing a far-swing could kill off the crew. I spent long enough pondering the pros and cons that I was late coming in from the field, and quiet, and thoughtful. I put the fungus sample in the barn and then went in for my shower. Catie was sitting in the living room, her hair in a strange updo with tendrils, her pantsuit unusually shiny.

She glanced at me, then put down her handheld. “Lordy, child, if you don’t hurry, you’re not going to be ready nearly in time.”

“Ready?” I said stupidly.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want to go to my nephew’s wedding dance,” she said.

I did not tell her that. But honestly, I hadn’t bothered to remember when it was. I didn’t expect that Tessa and I would be invited. In the Oort, if you marry into a family, of course that family comes, and their friends, but there isn’t such a thing as a neighborhood to invite, much less servants.

We don’t really have the concept of servants at all, now that I think about it. I mean, there are people who do that kind of work in the larger families, but you can’t treat them differently or they’ll go join another family and then there’s you, changing your own fancy-pants bedding because you were too stupid to treat the person who did it for you as an equal. And I had been pretty clear that as an indentured servant, I had not been invited to join the Pavelka family, and that they’d be pretty offended if I assumed I had.

Tessa, though, had apparently assumed that we were invited. Maybe it’s an Earth thing? Tess wouldn’t have been mean enough to keep it from me if it was something she thought people had to be told. Anyway, she was in her underwear, wrapping a fancy sparkly band around her twists of hair when I got to our room.

“We’re going to the wedding dance, apparently,” I said.

She laughed. “What, did you think we were Cinderella? Come on, hurry up. You’ve only got one decent dress, so that’s what you’ll have to wear. Good thing you’ve got short hair, you wouldn’t have time to do it anyway.”

“You have a sister, don’t you, Tessie?” I said, digging into my drawer for stockings so that I didn’t have to look at her. When I turned back, she was standing hipshot, looking at me curiously. Her underwear was so green it almost glowed against her dark skin. Like she was a tree off the far slopes.

“You have a sister too,” she said.

“Cora was four when the catastrophe hit. I never had a chance to get ready for parties together. And—she might have chosen to move on, if it didn’t suit her to stay with us. Might have married into another family.”

“Oh, so family isn’t everything out in the Oort after all?” I must have looked angrier than intended, because Tessa said, “I’m sorry, Holly, I was just teasing. The way you talk it sounds like families always stay together forever. It’s nice to hear yours is . . . human like mine.”

She never talked about her family. “What do you mean, like yours?”

“My mom needs me,” she said. “My dad was killed in an accident at work, but he didn’t go quick. And Mom’s health has never been good. That’s what I’m doing this indenture for. My brother takes care of her, and I take care of the money. At least I do the best I can.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said softly. “Sorry to make the scary face.”

“Probably I’m just seeing the scary face around every corner,” she said. “I’m going to see Denis tonight, and I’m very nervous.”

Denis was an indentured hand on one of the neighboring farms, and I had sat through his corny jokes and bad dancing at more nights out than I could count. But he made Tessa smile. “I know he likes you,” I said around the smooth blue modal of my dress going over my head.

“That’s just it: I like him a lot. Like, really a lot. Holly, I think I want to ask him to marry me.”

I plopped down on her bed. “Wow. Oh, Tessie, oh, wow.”

“If you don’t do your makeup, you won’t be ready in time.”

“You know it takes me five seconds to do. Come on. Here, I’ll do it now if you’ll tell me more.”

“Zip me.” She turned around, so I obligingly pulled the long gray zipper up the back of her shining silver dress. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it, and . . . I think he’s the one. Or at least a one.”

“Do you want me to see if his family’s in the Space Chicken Database?”

I waited for her to stop laughing. For some reason, Earthers—actually all in-system people—find the Space Chicken Database hilarious. She said what they always say—“Spaaaaace chicken! Ahahaha that’s awesome!”—and I waited some more. I’m so glad I’m not living on this planet permanently, because Earth people have a weird sense of humor.

Finally Tess got herself together and said, “Thank you, Holly, but we don’t sequence our partners behind their back. It’s not considered polite. There’s . . . a bad history there, for people like me.”

That didn’t make much sense to me—what was behind his back about it? Everyone in the outer system is in the SCD. It only started for breeding chickens ship to ship. Now it’s all life-forms. I knew it wasn’t expected on Earth, but I couldn’t see why not. They would have to do far too many scans to do in utero treatments for problems if they didn’t know what was in their genes already. I quickly brushed powder onto my cheeks, looking in the mirror so I didn’t have to cover my confusion for Tess.

“Well, he’d be a fool not to say yes,” I said when I had managed lipstick. “If not the database, let me know what friends are supposed to do here, and I’ll do it.”

She leaned down and hugged me around the shoulders from behind. “You’re sweet, Holly. Thank you.”

They told me that a lot. I had begun to take it to mean that they didn’t understand me but were sure of my goodwill. I resolved to start using it that way myself, since I felt that way about them all the time.

The wedding was short and the reception crowded. I had seen many of the guests in town, at the library or the movies or in the shops, walking along the streets. Some of them had come over to spend an evening with Anna-Reese, or with Catie and Wendell. But I always took half a second too long to recognize them in their celebratory finery, so almost all of them thought I didn’t remember them and introduced themselves to me again, with a faint air of offense.

I would have been most comfortable talking to Tess and Denis, but they were at a table in a corner with their heads together, and I knew I needed to give them space for their happy moment. The problem was, neither of them looked happy. I tried not to watch, but it was like a docking accident. Nothing was going where it should, it was impossible to look away, and the odds that something was about to be bent and damaged seemed to go up by the moment.

And in fact it was. Tess tossed her head and pushed her chair away from the table. Denis stood up half a moment after her, but I didn’t need to overhear them to know what had happened: that would be a no.

He was a fool after all, then.

I watched Tess all the way to the door. I doubted she was leaving—no way home without the rest of us, and it would be a long walk—and after a moment I decided to follow her out there. She was standing in the cooling evening, clutching her arms where her silvery dress left them bare.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Sure, yes, of course.” Her laugh was brittle. “I misread the situation. He said it was just an indenture fling. Lots of people have them, but you can’t mistake them for something they’re not.”

That last sentence had the sound of a quote. “He was boring anyway,” I said. “And he couldn’t dance, and he smelled like beans.”

She laughed again, and it had not gotten more genuine. I had no practice at this. It was not a thing anyone had ever asked of me at home, or in the Jovian system either. “What do you do about breakups in the Oort Cloud?” she asked.

“It depends,” I said. The trees near the hall were making loud tree noises, much louder than usual. I tried to ignore it, since Tessa was. “Ice cream, loud music, alcohol, making your cousins handle all trades with the other person’s ship. Unless your cousins are madder at them than you are.”

“The first three are traditional on Earth as well,” she said in a hollow, distant voice.

I felt the first few drops of water on my head and still, still, had the reaction that the plumbing must have sprung a leak. No. Rain. “Maybe they’ll have ice cream inside?” I said hopefully.

Tessa laughed. “I know they’ll have loud music and alcohol. But I’ll try to be moderate enough that you don’t have to handle trades for me. You’re right, we’d better go in.”

She had implied I was her cousin. I tried not to put any weight on that, but my feelings were completely treacherous. I flung my arm around her as we went into the hall, and she leaned in a moment, sighing. I had not had a cousin for so long.

“Come on, if we dance we don’t have to talk to people!” Tessa shouted over the music that was just starting. I tried that, but Tessa wanted to dance with everyone, all at once or trading off quickly, and I didn’t know how to make that work. I retreated to the wall and waited for the fun to end.

People who were not the hosts kept checking to see that I had a glass of champagne, which I did, very obviously held in front of me like a shield. Outsider: yes, and thanks for noticing.

One city auntie of the bride felt that it was her job to cordially engage the young people in conversation. I quickly discovered that this meant lecturing me about how badly her other niece was running her farm. Auntie had never farmed herself, of course, but if she did, she was sure that she would just douse the whole thing with every fungicide there was and be set for the season. “These young people, trying to cut costs,” she clucked.

“That’s not how it works,” I said aloud. The minute it was past my lips I wanted to take it back, but there it was, I might as well go with it.

“Excuse me?”

“The antifungals, they don’t work like that. There’s a cost to them.”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what they charge, but my niece—”

“Not what they charge,” I said. “What they cost. What they do to the crops, what they do to the rest of the plants in the area. Less crop yield, more dead plants.”

She looked at me over suddenly narrowed nostrils. “How pleasantly educational,” she said, and I flinched. I had no idea how to answer that, and her mouth was open to follow it with something probably equally scornful, when I was saved.

Or something.

I did not feel saved.

The blare of the sirens felt like it should have become familiar, but it hadn’t. It scared me every time. It was worse at the wedding, with the flashing lights of the wedding dance on the guests’ sparkling finery. The person I had been arguing with, the friend of the bride’s who had drunk too much and was talking too loudly, the ass who had just left my friend—they were all suddenly fellow human beings in peril, just when we should have been celebrating. Even though it wasn’t my celebration, even I could feel that.

The bride’s drunk friend tried to start the dancing again in the tornado shelter, but no one’s heart was in it. Instead we talked quietly, or huddled in silence, while people checked their handhelds: whose farm would it be, who was bearing the brunt of it now.

The tornadoes stayed high in the atmosphere. Atmosphere is one of the least confusing things about living on a planet, as long as you don’t start thinking like a planet-dweller. Things are three-dimensional in atmosphere. Gravity is enough to pull some of them down and others not. This is just like on a ship. It is safe and makes sense. Well. It makes sense, anyway.

We all filed out together to go back to our farms, damp and subdued. Tessa did not want to talk on the way home, nor when we got there. I was taking out my earrings and washing off the remains of my makeup when I saw that the message light was flashing again. It wasn’t quite Sunday yet, so I didn’t expect to hear from Hans and Cora. Unless there was something wrong. Something wrong was always a possibility. There had been that message from Uncle Will, and—it was a preset message, and maybe he’d been found dead. Or maybe something had happened to Uncle Wys, or—

I opened the message. It was type only, Uncle Wys on the identifier. “Kiddo, I am so sorry,” it began. “Truly I am. I have been saving and saving, and you said that Hans and Cora seemed okay, you said that their foster parents were not like you read about in old stories, so I thought I would get you home first and then see about them.

“But there was an accident. I don’t want you to worry. They were able to deal with it. I was just evaing—” The program had corrected when he was trying to say EVAing. It didn’t know any better. Probably written on one of the Jovian moons, where they try to go extravehicular as little as possible. Stupid Jovian programs.

I realized that I was trying not to read what he had written. I steeled myself to go on.

“—and my teammate slipped up, so all my money has gone to my medical bills. I’m fine, don’t worry! It’s just . . . I had saved, and it’s all gone now.”

I swayed. He was going to be okay. But the ship I had been counting on, my uncle’s ship, my family’s ship, had just evaporated. I would finish my indenture with nothing and nowhere, instead of a family, to go home to.

No one had broken up with me, not ever, but I glanced over at Tessa. “Ice cream?” I managed. She nodded. We went down and raided the Pavelkas’ kitchen in silence. I curled up around my handheld in bed after, reading, rereading. Tess put her pillow over her head and went to sleep.

It was hard to know what to do with a Sunday off after that. Often Tess would want to go into town together, but in the wake of Denis’ departure she had no interest in it, and I preferred the time to myself after the crowds of the wedding reception and the storm shelter. The trees were quieter than the night before, more subdued, safer. Tamer.

When I checked after my walk, my account had my Sunday letters. “Dear Holly,” Hans began. “Cora will probably tell you that she came to my hockey match and that we beat the Robinson Dome Bears 4-2. What she will not say is that Marti told her she didn’t have to come, she could stay home and work on her genetics project if she wanted, and Cora just looked at her and said, ‘He has a family. People should know he has a family. He should know.’ And she came and I got a goal and an assist.”

I squinched my eyes together so Tessie wouldn’t find me crying over another family letter. Explaining seemed like too much.

Hans would have known he had a family. Hans was old enough to know. But he was letting me know that Cora was old enough too. That he was doing what he could for our sister, to raise her an Oorter even outside the Oort. I wondered if they ever met up with any other refugee kids there on Mars, so I actually went ahead and asked.

I also asked him if Uncle Will had written to him. I hoped he had. I told him a little about the soya rust and the storm near us, but I kept it simple. He’d never lived in thick atmosphere like this, so he wouldn’t be able to relate. Mars storms were sparser, dustier. I thought about bringing them down sometime, but I knew I wouldn’t do it. The experience would be fascinating for them, but it wasn’t worth postponing paying off my indentures just so that they could meet trees. Almost worth it. But not quite.

I went to help Tess get ready for supper. She was humming and draining the beans she had steamed, getting ready to combine everything. They often asked Tess to cook. Me almost never. When I first got there, they asked if I cooked, and I said yes, so Catie asked me to cook a real Oort Cloud meal one night to be nice.

It turns out that they don’t eat a lot of lichen on Earth. They made very polite faces. But where Tess is from, down at the mouth of the Mississippi, they are famous for their cooking. Everyone on Earth, nearly, thinks it’s a treat to get their cooking. They just keep edging up the continent as the Mississippi eats it, cooking whatever’s left and humming as they do it, or so I hear. They tell me that’s not just Tess, the cooking and humming.

“You ever think of becoming a chef, Tessie?” I said.

She smiled. “Oh no, hon. This way I cook what I want for people I love, not the same thing over and over again for strangers.”

Again the sweetness: she had not used the word cousin this time, but love was close enough. I wondered if her mom and brother were making the same beans or if they were missing Tessa’s.

The sequencing came back on the dryad’s saddle I’d sampled. It was regular dryad’s saddle, not any danger to the farm or the trees or me. But it had another fungi growing on it, a new one the sequencer in Edmonton didn’t recognize. They thanked me for sending it in, for being careful.

I didn’t feel careful. I just felt foolish. I tried to imagine staying on Earth long enough to know which fungus were okay, which were dangerous, and I couldn’t imagine any of it. I could imagine eating ice cream with Tessa late at night, but my imagination shifted that to a hab or a ship.

I sleepwalked through my week and nearly spilled some of the latest antifungal on my feet before I had my protective gear on. Nobody yelled at me, they just gave me space to breathe.

The trees and I needed a lot of space to breathe.

I discovered I was less numb than I thought when the sirens sounded again, jolting me into noticing the sickly green of the sky. My stomach still lurched. I still hurried for the shelter.

Strangely, Tessa was there before me.

When Anna-Reese and Wendell finally came in, they were soaked and gray-faced. They locked the shelter door above them. Wendell didn’t say a word, and Anna-Reese just shook her head at her mother. Catie stuffed her fist in her mouth and let out a jagged whimper.

No one played cards. Soon the noise was too deafening above us. I wanted to pace as usual, but Tess was sitting in the corner, huddled up into a ball. I went and sat next to her, and then the Pavelkas, all in the corner, even though I knew they trusted the shelter more than I did.

The noise was like standing behind FTL ship engines, like the mother of all docking accidents. For all that the previous storms had scared me, the difference was so clear. I had a fleeting flash of relief: I had nearly nothing to my name, so there was nothing I could lose in the tornado. I had already lost what was mine to lose. There was nothing worse it could do to me.

Then, of course, it all came in on me, like a giant weight on my head: I had lived with the Pavelkas long enough to feel at home in my little room with Tessa, long enough that it was wrenching to imagine the windows smashed or the ceiling fallen in. And even though the Pavelkas were Earthers, they weren’t corporate, not like the people who had taken my home. No one else should have to live through what we had—but it was harder, somehow, knowing their names and faces.

The storm continued to howl outside the storm cellar. Instinctively I crouched down even further, although of course there was no need. I had to flinch from the noise, though; it was unimaginably loud. The howling and wailing of the storm was impossible to keep at a distance. My conscious mind could totally understand that the storm was not in the shelter with me, but my bones felt only that it was loud and scary and had to be right there.

I couldn’t hear Tessa whimpering next to me, but I could feel it through bone conduction. I put my arms around her like she was my little sister, like she was Cora’s age and needed comforting. Her shoulders were round and solid, shaking and shaking. I looked around, feeling the noise like it ought to be something visible. Anna-Reese saw me looking for help and scooted around. She came over and put her arms around Tessa from the other side. We held her like that until the worst of the shrieking had passed outside and we could hear her say, “I’m all right. I’m all right.”

Anna-Reese said briskly, “Of course you are. We’re all safe down here. It’ll be all right.”

“There’s often an eye in the middle of the storm,” said her mother from her place huddled on the floor by the wall. “You’re all staying down here until we get an all-clear from the weather service.”

“No one’s going anywhere,” said Anna-Reese in her best calm voice. It must have cost her more energy than I had at the time to maintain that calm. Tessa whimpered again, and this time we could all hear her.

“Tessie, are you . . . ?” asked Catie.

“I’m just overwhelmed,” Tessa managed. “I mean—I’m scared, not hurt.” And then, so quietly only I could hear her, “They need me.”

“I know,” I whispered back, even more quietly. But I couldn’t do anything for Tessa’s mom and brother, any more than I could for my own family. I could only do something for Tessa. I rummaged through the supplies. “There’s a thermos of something hot. No time like the present.”

“It’s soup,” said Catie. “I heated some chicken soup from the freezer to put in there, when I heard the storm was coming.” It had lemons and garlic and slightly too much salt in it. But it was still warm, and we needed something warm, something shared. We needed something to do other than worrying.

We all drank from the same little thermos cup, and waited.

The second wave of the storm was at least as bad as the first. But we were braced for it, we held each other, we waited, and the second silence was more sure, more lasting.

The all-clear was far less comfort than it should have been. Catie hustled us into the car, not looking at the wreck that had been her house. I thought we would stay with one of their friends or relations for the night—perhaps in the beds vacated by the honeymooning couple—but the storm was bigger than that. “F5,” said Wendell glumly. “Maybe 6 or 7.” So we tripped and slogged our way through the green, wet-smelling night into the school gym. Tess fell asleep on my shoulder before they could get cots. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep like that. I was wrong.

I woke up in the middle of the night with Tess gone and an ache in my back. I made my way to one of the cots and dove into more sleep. I dreamed of my uncles being pulled away from me, out into the storm.

The morning was incongruously bright, full of volunteers and cheap flapjacks. My work clothes felt gritty from storm and sleep, but I needed to see the farm before I did anything else. Not the town or random locals, but the farm where I had lived. I hitched a ride out there with others who were itchy to help.

I knew, without saying, that the Pavelkas would desperately need our labor, but they wouldn’t be able to keep paying for it with this much damage. No one had to tell me I would have to find a new indenture. It was finally, at last, something that I knew without having to be told.

The lane was strewn with corpses. The tornado had left almost nothing of the groves of trees that lined the lane, nothing of the windbreak—the wind had broken them instead, I kept thinking, but I couldn’t speak it aloud in case someone thought I meant to be clever and laughed. They were splintered open, the bark peeled back and their insides fractured into hundreds of sharp fragments, branches cracked and tangled with each other. Trees from one grove had been flung into another, into the remnants of the barn, driven into the ground by their branches.

The Earthers were not treating them like corpses. The Earthers were treating them like furniture. The smell of their sap and leaves, their life spilling out, was in everything, and the Earthers were treating it just the same as the spilled trash bag from the bins, another thing to pick up.

And they took my brother and sister to grow up on a planet like this, where they would try to teach them to treat living things like this, worse than we treated outgrown clothes on my ship, worse than a bad prize at the county fair on Chornohora Station before Chornohora Station became a synonym for death.

I could not let Hans and Cora grow up planet people, I could not, I could not.

I turned and saw that Catie was there, weeping for her trees. It broke in me then. I almost reached for her, but she was not my auntie. So we stood crying separately, among the bodies of those trees, not making sounds.

“You’ll replant,” I said.

“Oh yes.”

“From seeds?”

“From seeds in most places,” she agreed. “The provincial government funds some saplings, a few larger trees for windbreak.” She saw that I didn’t know why they would pay for it. “To keep the soil anchored, to keep the winds from going on unimpeded and just getting worse as they go . . . you’ve never been on a prairie without lots of windbreaks, child. Believe me, you don’t want to.”

“Like Titan,” I said. And then I saw that the dunes of Titan meant nothing to her, and I didn’t want to take up her time with explaining. Instead I said, “You’ll get there. It’ll be how it’s supposed to be again.”

“I hope so. Someday. For Anna-Reese, maybe.”

“When Kevin gets home,” I said, and Catie frowned.

“Who said Kevin was coming home?”

I floundered. “I mean, with the farm—”

“He’ll be home for Christmas, like always.”

“But—if Tessie and I have to—”

“We’ll get by, don’t you worry,” said Catie, but her mouth was tight, and her tone was flat. Kevin was not coming home. Kevin, the golden boy, the pride of the family, would not come home when his family farm was devastated by a tornado.

I will never, ever understand Earthers.

I said a few more words to comfort Catie, or at least they were meant to. I was no more sure than I was with Tess after Denis disappointed her. Then I found my way back to the school shelter, where there was a group of volunteers from the east showing up to help us out in our time of need. I hoped Catie didn’t have to deal with them much unless they had a better idea of what would help her feel better than I did.

They gave us each a bag with some things in it: a flannel shirt and some stretchy cotton trousers, several changes of socks and underwear and T-shirts, a printed book apiece. They asked if we had shoes and at least one bra each, because they were short on shoes and bras. My book was The Great Gatsby, and my underwear was that color of beige that they pretend will blend in with a lot of Euro and Asian people’s skin but actually matches nobody’s. It was two shades lighter than mine. It rode up in the back. I don’t understand why Earthers can’t make decent underwear without charging an entire asteroid for it.

You absolutely cannot complain about your creeping underpants to people who have just lost their entire livelihood. And yet there they are as you try to wash muck off things and dig them out of the mud and generally clean up the whole place: creep, creep, creep.

I gave The Great Gatsby to Tessa. I wasn’t going to take it back up into space with me, not with the weight limits, not with perfectly serviceable electronic copies. It was a good gift for a shelter where electricity to charge your devices might go out tonight and not come back until tomorrow or next week, where you might not have planned with backup power like a sensible person, because Earthers think that power is like everything else, infinitely flowing.

She looked at it and looked at me. “You’re going back up,” she said.

“We’ll see what they give me.”

“But you’re going back up.”

“I think so. Tess, you are my cousin.”

“That’s sweet, Holly,” she said, but I could tell it didn’t mean anything to her.

“No, but—you are. When I have a ship—”

She was making a face, pushing it aside. For her it was like saying when I am the Queen of Mars, when I reengineer fungus to be heat-intolerant again. I would have to figure out how to explain it to her. I stood there for a moment, wanting to figure out something, anything, that would make her feel better, but I couldn’t think what that would be, and I had an appointment to make with the indenture coordinators.

The indenture office made an effort to be warm and welcoming by Earth standards. The furniture was not bolted down, but other than that it was really trying, with soft blues and greens and flowing hangings, to be relaxing.

I was not in a frame of mind to be relaxed. But at least I had some clarity.

The indenture coordinator was a soft, pleasant-looking woman with very large red earrings and mid-brown skin between Tessa’s and mine in color. She had my file on her device and greeted me cheerfully. “Holly Vermuelen-Wing,” she said. “Do you want to stay with farmwork, Holly? The Pavelkas give you high ratings.”

“I’d rather go offworld,” I said. “I’m not from here, and—” I stopped. I couldn’t explain to her about the lane full of tree corpses, the way that weather came upon you without warning, the underwear that was even now creeping. Everything that was wrong with Earth was normal to her, her entire life. “I have minor siblings. I’d like to pay off my debt sooner so that I can regain custody.”

She frowned. “Most off-Earth jobs don’t pay as well, so you actually would make a faster job of it planetside.”

“I can mine,” I said.

The woman’s frown deepened. “There’s nothing about that in your college transcripts.”

“Look farther back.”

She blinked, and her face softened into pity. I saw that sometimes, from people who actually knew what had happened to families like mine. “Oort background. Well, that does change things. Are you sure you want to mine in the Belt? It’s not like what you’re used to.”

“Rough company ships, low-status labor,” I said. “I know. But it pays well.”

“Oh yes. Pays better than anything else people do for their indenture. Any better pay than that and you’re having your indenture bought out right away.”

“I’ll take it, then.” I didn’t care if Martians looked down on me when I was visiting their towns on leave. The only Martians I really cared about were the ones taking care of Hans and Cora.

The important thing was that I needed to get my home back. I needed to make a place where my family could be together again. I had been waiting around for that to happen—for Uncle Wystan to come through, or Uncle Will if he was still alive, or somebody. But a home isn’t the sort of thing you can rely on other people to make for you. Sometimes you get some people who can help. But you have to do it yourself. I had finally learned that.

The nice indenture board woman was still looking at me, her broad, soft face still creased into the lines of pity. “Are you sure, honey?” she said. “The tornado was bad, I know, but we’ve gotten pretty good at bouncing back from tornadoes. We can place you with another farm pretty similar to the one you were working on. You can even visit your old host family while they get back on their feet—meet up in Edmonton if you don’t want to spend all the time and credits to come back to the farm. Or if it’s too hard to see it like this.”

She understood a lot. There was a lot she didn’t understand, too.

“I don’t belong on Earth,” I said gently. “You’re right, my host family has been great, and I’m upset by all this. But more than anything, this has taught me that I don’t belong on Earth long-term. I need to get back into space.”

She nodded, pressing her lips back in a sympathetic grimace. “I guess I understand. If they tried to stick me up there in one of those tin cans—”

I winced, but she went on.

“I bet I’d want to come back down here to Earth as fast as I could, too. You’re sure you don’t want to try to find a safer assignment, though? One of the care facilities on the moon, maybe? You could wheel old people around into the low-grav sections and back. They’d probably like you.”

I had forgotten that Earthers think the moon is space. I didn’t laugh in her face. “I just want to get my indenture over with. I’ve got experience with mining, and I—” I let my voice crack so that she’d let me get this over with. “I miss my grandparents too much when I’m around old people. They were at Chornohora Station.”

“I see.” I could tell she still wanted to talk me out of it, but she was pretty much done with objections, given that her job was to sign people up for indentures—and Chornohora was always a conversation stopper. “Well, remember that your specific contract is renewable every six months. If you really hate it, you can always switch back to farmwork after half a year. Or try something else.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. I signed and thumb-printed and eye-scanned and signed again and all the other things that they make you do to verify that yes, it’s you, and yes, you really want this, no, really, you want this. And it was done. I was heading back to space again the day after tomorrow, a transport up to “the” moon and then out from there.

I stopped to rest my hand on the corpses of several trees on my way out, picking out a large splinter from the last one with my nails. I wanted to apologize, but they’re trees. Even if you like them, you know they don’t listen to you.

I waited for Tessa to come back from her own indenture appointment. She didn’t take long. She was hardly picking up her feet, and if I didn’t know her voice well enough to pick it out of background murmur, I wouldn’t have heard her quiet, “Hey, Holly.”

“Hey. I got my mining reposting.”

“That’s . . . good, I guess. Sounds awful to me, but . . . I’m glad you got what you wanted.”

I looked at her defeated shoulders, and I remembered how Anna-Reese and I had held her during the storm. Something changes in you, when you treat a friend like your baby sister. Something changes in the friendship. Tessa was not sensible, not levelheaded, not any of the things I was supposed to value in bringing people into the family. But she had introduced me to trees, and I had been there for the worst week of her life. We were cousins now.

“What I said earlier—I’ll make a place for you,” I told her. “You and your mom and your brother. You’ll have a place with my family.”

She looked up, interested. “What if the rest of your family doesn’t—”

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “If I say we have a place for you, then we do. I’m the one who’s—” I took a deep breath. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, not really. But Uncle Wystan’s message was clear enough, the way I saw it. “I’m the one who’s the head of the family now. I’m the one who’s got to make a place for Hans and Cora and everybody. So if I say you’re in, you’re in. Just try not to make anybody too crazy, and I’ll tell them to try the same for you.”

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s a nice dream, Holly. It really is.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.” And I suppose Tessa was more sensible and thinking further ahead than I’d thought. She brightened up a little. “Hey, what if I make a place for you?”

“Are you going to buy a ship?”

She laughed. “Oh, Holly. I don’t know. But—we’ll both try the hardest we can, all right? To make a decent place?”

“That’s what cousins do,” I said. “And we’ll talk to each other before we buy a ship or a farm or—or whatever else.”

“Yes. Yes.” She laughed, shaking her head. “This family of yours is going to weird me out. But I bet when I explain your Oort stuff to my family, they’ll be pretty weirded out too.”

“Will they try to stop you?”

“Honey, they might take you up on that offer to come live in space.”

I hugged her hard. Then I couldn’t put it off any longer. I grabbed the bag the disaster relief people had given me, complete with ugly socks and underwear. And that was it. We didn’t say goodbye, we didn’t say that we loved each other, although you don’t make someone your cousin if you don’t love them. We didn’t say anything about when we’d see each other again, because we didn’t know. I just went, and she stayed.

But we knew we had each other.

I pulled up a message to my brother and sister; I owed it to them. “Dear Hans and Cora,” I wrote. “You may not like the risk I’m taking, but I hope it will give us a chance to be together as a family sooner.” It felt familiar, but from the other side. After a moment’s thought, I copied Uncle Wys on the message, then Uncle Will.

I couldn’t rely on them to give me a home anymore. I was going to have to make sure they could rely on me.

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction, July/August 2018.

About the Author

Marissa Lingen is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in the Minneapolis suburbs. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and more.

They Have All One Breath

Karl Bunker

A passing streetcar noticed me on the sidewalk. It slowed to a stop, opening its door and dinging its bell to invite me on board. I ignored it, preferring to walk. It was hours before dawn, early to be heading home by the standards of some, but I’d had enough club-hopping for one night. My skull, my brain, my body were all still vibrating with echoes of the evening’s music. It was a good feeling, but I wanted to get home and put in a few hours of work before crashing. I was walking down Boylston Street, enjoying the cool evening air.

There was a loose crowd filling the little plaza at Copley Square. As I walked past, a tall, thin figure separated himself from the rest and called out to me: “James! Hey James, Maestro James!” He laughed, dancing up to me on the balls of his feet.

“How goes it, Ivan?”

“Goes good, confrere.” He fell into step beside me, then lifted his hand and pointed straight up. “The sky is busy tonight. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, walking along with your nose scraping the ground the way you do.”

I looked up. He was right. White and blue sparklers were winking on and off in a dozen places, and three separate shimmery threads stretched across random patches of the sky.

Ivan hooked his thumb in the direction of the crowd now behind us. “It’s got this pack spooked. They think the AIs are putting the finishing touches on a starship, and any second now they’re going to fly away, leaving us poor miserables to fend for ourselves.”

I grunted, still watching the sky. One of the big orbiters had scrolled into view, its X shape visible as it crept along.

“Kind of like in that E. M. Forster story,” Ivan said. “‘The Machine Stops.’ Have you read it?”

“Yeah.” Lisa had given me a copy of the story; Forster was responding to what he saw as the naïve optimism H. G. Wells expressed in some of his science-exalting utopian fiction. In Forster’s dystopia people live in hive-like underground dwellings, cared for by a great machine that provides them with everything. They rarely have any physical contact with other people, rarely travel or even leave their rooms. They sit and watch entertainments, talk via videophone, eat machine-produced food, breathe machine-produced air. Many of them have come to worship the machine as a kind of god. (“O Machine! O Machine!”)

“That’s what they’re afraid of—that the machine will stop,” Ivan was saying. “And then where will we be? No more freebies, no more zaps to keep us all behaving like good boys and girls. All the bad old stuff of the bad old days will come back again.” He turned and walked backward for a few steps, looking back at the people filling the square. “Some people just like to fret. About what the AIs have done, about what they’ll do next, or this bunch—fretting that they’ll stop doing anything.”

“The Machine,” I pondered aloud. People have never been able to settle on a good name for the whatever-it-is that runs the world now. “The AIs” is an awkward mouthful. And should we properly be calling it/them “the AIs,” plural, or “the AI,” singular? Nobody knows. Some like using the term “the I’s” for short, which of course has a handily appropriate homophone. But usually people just talk about “they” and “them.” They did this, they ought to do that, they won’t do this other thing. They’ve been making it rain too much. I wish they’d move me to a bigger house. I can’t believe they zapped me—I wasn’t really going to hit her. They they they they. “The machines” is what Lisa used to call them. “The Machine,” dressed up in singular and capitals, has a nice ring to it, too.

Ivan got ahead of me and started walking halfway backward, bending his knees to get his face into my field of vision. I guess I was staring down at the ground again. “Where are you headed, James? Home to the salt mines?”

“Yeah, home,” I said. “Maybe get some work done.”

“Ah . . . work.” He turned to face in the direction he was walking. There was an extra bounce in the rhythm of his steps, like there was too much energy in him for the act of walking to contain. People who don’t know Ivan want to know what kind of drugs he’s using and where they can get some. But it’s all just him, just the way he is. He’s a man who looks like he’s all crackling hyperactive surface charge, but who in fact has more depth and inner stillness than anyone I know. “I should do me some of that ‘work’ stuff myself,” he said. “I’ve got an idea for a mural, and there’s a restaurant in Oak Square that’s talking about letting me do a couple of walls, one inside and one exterior.” He scanned the space around us until his gaze settled on a curbside tree. “I’m thinking something natural. Old nature, from back when it was scary.”

“Red in tooth and claw,” I said.

When I was about ten years old, my mother had a job that was walking distance from where we lived. Her walk to work took her past a park with a pond that was home to a population of ducks, and as winter came on some of these ducks chose not to fly south. It was a typical New England winter, with the temperature fluctuating randomly between mild and brutally cold. On one of the colder mornings, my mother decided that the ducks, now huddled together on a small part of the pond that remained unfrozen, must be hungry. And so from that day on she began bringing food for the ducks on her morning walk to work. First it was a few slices of bread, then a half-loaf, then a whole loaf, then a concoction of bread, cheap peanut butter, and lard that she would mix up by the gallon every evening. Naturally, ducks greeted her in greater and greater numbers every morning, and to my mother’s eye at least, ate with greater and greater frenzy and desperation.

One day she came home with her right hand raw and red, the tips of three fingers bandaged. She’d given herself a case of frostbite by scooping the gooey duck food out with her bare hand in sub-zero weather. She sat at the kitchen table, crying as my father gently re-bandaged her fingers. Her tears weren’t from the pain, but over the plight of “her” ducks. My father began to argue with her, using his calm, captain-of-the-debating-team tone that my mother and I alternately admired and loathed, depending on whether it was directed at us. “This is crazy, Ann. You’re killing yourself over a few birds that were too stupid to fly south when they should have. And as long as you keep feeding them, they never will fly south. And there’s just going to be more and more of them . . . ” And on he went, softly logical and reasonable. I saw my mother’s face hardening with anger and saw my father being oblivious to this. Knowing that an explosion was coming, I retreated to my room.

I didn’t have to wait long. First there was my father’s voice—too muffled to make out any words, but so recognizable in its stolid rationality—and then my mother’s ragged shout, interrupting him: “Natural? Why would I give a damn about what’s natural? Nature is a butcher! Nature is a goddamned butcher!” Next came the sound of my parents’ bedroom door being slammed.

Of course. This was a recurring theme with my mother. She loved the beauty of nature, loved animals of any species, but always she saw ugliness behind the beauty. Every bird at our backyard feeder would remind her of how many chicks and fledglings died for each bird that survived to maturity. Every image of wildlife on television or the web would bring to her mind the bloody, rapacious cycle of predator and prey. The boundless, uncaring wastefulness of nature infuriated her. All through my childhood our home was an impromptu hospital, rehabilitation clinic, and long-term rest home for a host of rescued wild and domesticated animals. Orphaned fledgling birds and baby squirrels, starving semi-feral alley cats, and then the mice and birds rescued from the jaws of those same cats.

A few moments after my mother’s tirade, my father came into my room and sat beside me on my bed, looking as shamefaced and apologetic as a scolded dog. He often came to me in situations like this. As poor a job as he often did of understanding her, I never questioned that he loved my mother with a helpless intensity. And when he had made her angry he would come to me, as if I were the closest replacement for her that he could find. “You’d think I’d know her better by now, eh, champ?” he said with a sad smile, resting a hand on my shoulder. Then we talked about trivialities for a while, my father ordered a take-out meal, and life went on.

When Ivan and I arrived at our building, a squat little delivery bot was trundling up the outside steps with a stack of packages. Moving ahead of us, it opened the door to Ivan’s studio, deposited the boxes a few yards inside the door, and left again, silent on its padded treads. “Ah,” Ivan said, looking through the packages. “Every day is Christmas, eh? Canvas, stretchers, some tubes of color, and . . . ” he yanked open the top of one of the boxes, “yup; some genuine imitation AI-brand single malt scotch. Yum yum.” He pulled out a bottle and cocked it at an angle near his head. The label had the words “Scotch, Islay single malt (simulated)” printed over a nice photograph of (presumably) Scottish countryside. Nothing else. “Join me in a few, confrere?” Ivan asked.

I dropped into one of Ivan’s hammock chairs while he flitted into the kitchen for glasses and ice. “You know what I hear?” he said when he came back, handing me a clinking tumbler. “Shanghai, man! That’s what I hear. People say great things are happening there. Really happening. Music, art, literature, movies . . . They say it’s wide open there. New ideas, new things, stuff like nobody’s done before, nobody’s thought of before. A real renaissance, happening right out on the streets! We should go, James. We should go!”

I grunted noncommittally. Ivan had these flights of enthusiasm; a new one every few weeks, it seemed. A while ago he’d been reading about the Vorticists and Futurists of the early twentieth century, and had been wild to write an artist’s manifesto like theirs—one that would “encapsulate the role of the artist in a post-singularity world.” That had kept him busy for a month or two, and then there had been some vague but dangerous-sounding talk of performance art involving pyrotechnics, and after that he’d returned to painting with a deep dive into old-school realism and precise draftsmanship.

Ivan had been wandering around his studio as he drank, and now, standing at an open window, he said, “Hey, come look.” I weaved my way around a half-dozen or so unfinished canvasses on easels and went to him. He pointed down at the outer woodwork of the window. The building was old, with brick walls and weathered wooden trim around the windows. The wooden sill Ivan was pointing at was partly rotted at the corners, and busily at work in those rotted areas was a crew of micro-bots. Vaguely insect-like and about a quarter-inch long, they were the same grayish brown as the weathered wood. There were around ten or twenty of them crawling over the sill, some making their way to one of the rotted voids in the wood and squirting out dollops of resinous material. Others were engaged in chewing away bits of rotten wood, using ant-like pincer jaws.

Ivan reached out and picked up one of the chewer bots, first holding it between thumb and forefinger, and then letting it crawl over his hand. It moved with an unhurried purpose, eventually dropping off the side of his hand to the windowsill and rejoining its comrades. “You remember Louisiana a couple of years ago?” he said, still watching the little bots at work. “The governor and legislature were puffing up their chests about reintroducing a money-labor economy by making it illegal to accept any goods or services from ‘any artificial entity.’ Then it turned out that little mechanical bugs like these guys were swarming through both the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. They’d been rebuilding both from the inside out for months.”

I reached out to the window myself, picking up one of the bots and holding it by the edges. It churned its legs for a moment and then went still as I held it close to my eyes. A memory of Lisa’s voice murmured into my ear, vicious and accusing: You love them. It makes me sick how much you love them.

Lisa appeared in my life right about the time of the world’s big tipping point. It was during the few days of the last war in the Middle East. The War That Wasn’t; the Fizzle War. I was in a club called The Overground, and the atmosphere was defiantly celebratory. The wall-sized screen behind the stage was showing multiple videos—scenes that have since become iconic, even clichéd and boring: tanks rolling off their own treads and belly-flopping onto the desert sand, soldiers trying to hold onto rifles that were falling to pieces in their hands, a missile spiraling crazily through the air before burying itself in the ground with the impotent thud of a dead fish. And from other parts of the world, scenes of refugee camps where swarms of flying bots were dropping ton after ton of food, clothing, shelter materials.

No one claimed ownership of these Good Samaritan cargo-bots, nor of the gremlinesque nanoes that were screwing up the mechanisms of war. It soon became known that these were machines built and run by other machines. It was becoming undeniably evident that something new was moving upon the face of the land. Indeed, that the world was being rebuilt around us, disassembled and reassembled under our feet. The AIs were taking over, and they were changing the rules.

The bands playing at The Overground that night had hastily cobbled together some new songs for the occasion. I remember one was “Slaves to the Metal Horde,” played to a bouncing dance tune and with silly lyrics about politicians and generals losing their jobs to automation and joining the vast ranks of the unemployed. “God 2.0” was another song; only a few vague and suggestive phrases for lyrics, but with a sly and sinister tune that made it a bonafide hit for a few months. It was during one of those songs that Lisa and I, both partnerless, eyed each other on the dance floor and fell into a face-to-face rhythm. She had a broad smile, a strong, graceful body, and a fondness for dancing with her hands behind her back. Her dancing consisted of lots of dips and hops and twisting her upper body to one side or the other. Often she would seem to be on the verge of throwing herself off-balance, but then she would smack a foot to the floor in flawless synchrony with the beat of the music, showing she had herself exactly where she meant to be. In height, her proportions were as close as my eye could measure to Polykleitos’ ideal, and she had lean breasts and a solid muscularity that suggested she had seriously applied herself to some sport in her student days.

But the real story of her beauty was in her face. It wasn’t the beauty of clinical perfection, but of personhood. There was a whole human being written out in the length of her nose, the curve of her jaw, the hard straightness of her eyebrows. And of course her eyes. They were eyes that were full of knowing humor and incisive smarts and even more full of absolutely no bullshit. Usually when I see a face as beautiful and interesting as hers, I set about memorizing it so I can sketch it later. I look and then look away, rebuild the lines, curves, shapes, and shadows of the face in my head, then look again to check my reconstruction against the original. Repeat and repeat until the person gets annoyed and asks what the fuck I’m doing. I didn’t do this with Lisa, and it took me a while to realize why: You only have to memorize a face when it’s a face you might not see again, and I didn’t want to think about not seeing this woman’s face again.

After dancing for a while we had a couple of drinks, and after that we left the club together. The sudden quiet and fresh air of the street hit me like a splash of cold water, and I just stood there for a bit, breathing and looking up at the starry sky.

“I hope it’s going to be something good,” Lisa said, the first words we’d spoken to each other without having to shout over music. “I hope to hell it’s going to be something good.”

For an embarrassing, imbecilic moment, I thought she was talking about us, about the prospects of a relationship between us. That’s how I was thinking already. Something had me already thinking about “us” before there was anything remotely resembling an “us.” I said “Yeah, I hope so too,” but before the sentence was halfway out of my mouth I realized that wasn’t what she meant. She was talking about the subject that everyone was talking about—the AIs and what they were up to; what was happening to the world and what was going to happen to it. Then she grabbed my hand, yanked our bodies together and gave me a grinning kiss on the lips, and I went back to thinking maybe she was talking about us. We walked and talked for a while, and then she keyed her number into my phone, gave me another peck on the lips, and left.

“Anyway, Shanghai is the place, man. That’s what I hear.” Ivan said, trying to pull my attention back to him. Then he added, “She ain’t up there, man.”

I realized I was standing with my head tilted back, staring up as if I could see through the ceiling above me and the floor above that and into the apartment over Ivan’s. My apartment, where Lisa would be, if she were there. Ivan was eyeing me obliquely, neither pity nor ridicule in his expression. “She’s been gone a long time.”

True, but she’d been gone before, and come back before. Three times, or was it four? A funny thing to lose track of.

I started wandering around Ivan’s studio, looking at some of his recent work. As usual I liked his charcoal sketches and pencil drawings better than his paintings; maybe I only have a sculptor’s eye for color—which is to say, no eye at all. Maybe it’s all shades of gray with me. Or maybe my problem was that the color had gone out of my life, ha ha. One piece he’d clearly put a lot of work into was done up as an imitation of an old-style biological illustration. It was several images on one canvas, depicting the same creature from different angles and in different postures. Each image had a caption in precise calligraphy, short quotations from Genesis and the Rig Veda. But the creature wasn’t a creature. It had pinkish skin, no apparent head, only vague flippers for limbs. It looked something like a cross between a jellyfish and a rat. It was creepy as hell. “What the fuck is this?” I asked.

Ivan only glanced at the painting, as if he didn’t like looking at it himself. “That’s a squirmer. That particular one was picked up somewhere in Costa Rica; some scientists posted an article about it, about what it does and how it works, with a bunch of pictures and videos.” When I gave him a blank stare Ivan went on. “You know, food! Manufactured food for animals that will only eat live prey. Not all the predator animals in the world are happy eating the piles of synthetic puppy chow that our AI friends leave lying around, so they also make these things—blobs of protein that act alive, that squirm around on the ground. Nice, eh?” He took another quick look at the canvas, then turned it to face the wall.

“They think of everything, huh?” I said. And of course they do. That’s what you do when you have an IQ in the millions or billions: You think of everything. All the infinite details that go into remaking a world, dismantling every minutest bit of the old world that doesn’t fit your idea of how things should be and replacing it with a corresponding bit that suits you better.

Ivan and I sat facing each other across a neat little table a woodworker friend of his had made, the bottle of scotch on the table between us. Over what was left of the night we got as drunk as the faux booze—or maybe it was the nanoes in our blood—would allow, which turned out to be pretty drunk.

After his third refill, Ivan started holding his glass close to his chest and staring sullenly at an empty spot in the air about four feet in front of him.

“Tell me about Shanghai,” I said.

“Fuck Shanghai. It’s all bullshit. Things are as dead there as they are here, or New York, or Palookaville, or anywhere.”

“You really think things are all that dead?”

“Agh, you know . . . ” He paused, rolling the ice around inside his glass. “They aren’t alive. Not like they used to be.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “You were at the Carver Club tonight?”

I nodded.

“How was it?”

“Good,” I said, tilting my head to the right.

“Yeah. Exactly. You remember the early days? The Fizzle War and all that, when it was all starting? You remember—” He started tossing out the names of bands and of songs, and I started throwing back some of my own favorites, and for a while we may as well have been two geezer-farts, grinding our rocking chairs into the ground as we reminisced about The Good Old Days.

“Anyway,” Ivan said, “things were alive then. The bands were trying to be different, trying to do something new. And it wasn’t just the music. It was right around then that Johansson started writing her crazy Extinction poems, and the contra-perspectivist painters sprang up in LA, and the New Minimalist writers in the US and India . . . New stuff, man. Great stuff. Back then there really was a renaissance going on. It didn’t last, but it was sure as hell something real.”

I got caught up in Ivan’s enthusiasm. “It was, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s how a renaissance happens. One schmoe sees another schmoe doing something amazing, and he gets pumped up. Even if he works in a totally different field, he gets inspired. He starts thinking about trying to do something amazing himself. And before you know it you’ve got Italy in the fifteenth century, or Harlem in the 1920s. You’ve got Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas and Fats Waller and Josephine Baker, all rubbing shoulders, lighting each other up, driving each other to greatness.”

I knew the scotch was making me blather, and I shut up. But I went on thinking about those days of a few years ago, when the world felt a lot more alive, as Ivan put it. I thought about spending night after night running from one club to the next, trying to catch every one of the dozens of new bands that were springing up, trying to take it all in, feeling awed by the energy, the newness, the vitality. And more than that, feeling a burn, an absolute burn to go back to my studio and create something, make something, even though I doubted I would ever, in a hundred lifetimes, be able to sculpt anything half as good as all the examples of genius that seemed to be roaring to life all around me . . . Of course, my relationship with Lisa was gleaming and new back then, and that added its own brand of creative fire to my life.

“I think it’s because we were scared in those days,” Ivan said. “A lot of the creative types were making a joke of it, but that was just whistling past the graveyard. We didn’t know what the AIs were going to do, and we were scared. Maybe it was that fear that made people more creative. Nowadays nobody’s really afraid about anything. The worst thing anyone feels now is bored and cranky.” He caught my eye as soon as he said this, then looked down at the floorboards. “Sorry, man. Stupid thing for me to say.”

I grunted and waved a hand to dismiss the subject, and we went on talking. We talked about the old world, the new world, about scotch, about art-world gossip, and not Lisa. I spent a lot of time not talking about Lisa.

The first time Lisa came home with me to my studio, she went straight to the shelves that held my sculptures. She looked at each one slowly and carefully, taking it in from different angles. I was working small in those days, figures eighteen inches tall at most, and she leaned in close to squint at all the fine details I’d sweated over in anticipation of just such a squint. “Hmm,” she said now and then, and “Ah” once or twice. These little vocalizations were hardly more than a breath, and when she was done looking she summarized with a quiet “Okay” and a smile. I suppose it was just me being silly, but those few syllables felt like all the praise in the world; like a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur grant and a hearty handshake from Rodin, all rolled into one.

She spent the night, and the next morning we went to her place so she could make us breakfast, and later that day we went back to my place so I could make us lunch, and some time after that we went to her place for supper and to see if the sex was as good in her bed as it had been in mine. After a few weeks of this, the back and forth was getting kind of tiresome, so we packed up her stuff and moved it to my place. And that was that; there was officially an “us.”

I suppose—one has to suppose—that to the AIs, love is just one more quantifiable entity in a universe of quantifiable entities. Probably it’s as basic to them as a bit of clockwork; the right neurons firing, a few chemicals in the right combination. But then again, the same can be said of life itself. The sweet, living Earth, with all its countless green fronds and numberless beating hearts, is all just clockwork and chemistry, all eminently quantifiable and understandable. That doesn’t stop it from being something amazing and magical, measureless and infinite.

After some impassioned entreaties, Lisa agreed to model for me. I had just started working on Geckos then; a pair of female figures climbing up a smooth vertical wall, their bodies somewhere between lizard and human, and also abstracted and simplified à la Constantin Brâncuși. It was a design that could easily slump into kitschy faux-deco drivel, but I was hopeful I could hopscotch my way across that minefield. When Lisa saw how abstract the piece was going to be she laughed. “Are you sure you need a naked woman to model for this?”

“Oh absolutely. It’s all in there, even if I don’t do a straight copy of it; the muscles, the bones, the skin and hair, all the lines and curves, all the, um . . . details . . . And it can’t be just any naked woman. It has to be you. It’s all about capturing the inner essence, don’cha know, and if there’s anyone whose inner essence I want to capture, it’s yours.”

“I can think of six or seven dirty jokes about that,” she said, “but they’re all really lame.”

I answered her grin with one of my own, but I wasn’t kidding. I had visions of this woman being my lifelong inspiration. My muse, I would have said, if that word weren’t too worn out and clichéd to speak without gagging. She would be the Rose Beuret to my Rodin, the Jeanne Hébuterne to my Modigliani, the Wally Neuzil to my Schiele. That’s the sort of thing that runs through your mind when you’re young and in love and have enough naïve ego to insert your own name into a sentence alongside some of the world’s greatest artists. As it turned out, I would work on that sculpture throughout all the time Lisa and I were together.

Meanwhile, the world outside our lust-fogged windows was continuing on its way. After stopping all mechanized war, the AIs set about rebuilding slums and refugee camps. Beginning with the worst of them, these wretched huddling places of tents and corrugated iron shacks were suddenly—by seeming magic—replaced with rows of cute little cottages, neatly trimmed out with comfortable furniture and curtains in the windows. Sewer systems and running water appeared where there had only been open ditches and hand pumps. The shiny kiosk buildings started to spring up like oversized mushrooms, first in the poorest parts of the world, but soon to expand globally. Aisle after aisle of shelves filled with the necessities of life, all of it free for the taking and constantly restocked by the endlessly roving supply-bots. Clearly the AIs had solved the riddle of nano-assembly. They could put together matter of any size and complexity from base molecules, base atoms, and for all we knew, maybe even base protons and electrons. However they did it, the bottom line was that they seemed capable of making anything, anywhere, of any size, in any quantity.

It was a fun time when this age of abundance came home to the First World. Mysterious online catalogs started appearing; you could order a pair of shoes or a dozen eggs or new dining room furniture, with no mention of the awkward little detail of payment. Needless to say, this was seen as a threat to the economy—to the whole idea of there even being anything worth calling an “economy,” and this scared a lot of people. It scared some people even more than the fact that mankind’s God-given right to wage war had been taken away. A lot of people were scared, and a wealth of imminent dooms were predicted, but there was nothing much anyone could do. The AIs had seen to it that there was nothing anyone could do. They’d thought of everything.

Fewer people found any reason to object when disease stopped happening. This one began with hospitals noting a slump in new admissions, and with doctors finding nano-sized foreign bodies of unknown origin in the blood of some patients. But soon it was everyone’s blood, and everyone, everywhere, stopped getting sick. At all, ever.

It’s funny how people adjust. The world was going through changes that, before they happened, would have been thought of as mind-boggling, world-shattering, unfathomable. And yet life just went on, the way it does. In years past, people had adjusted to the notion that humanity might be wiped out by a couple of psychotic button-presses. People had adjusted to living in the midst of bubonic plague, to having their cities bombed every night, to being ruled by lunatic, murderous despots. If people could adjust to those things, they could adjust to a life of no war, no disease, and unearned abundance.

It was right around the time Lisa moved in with me that the zaps were added to the catalog of revolutions being wrought upon the world. They started out as just one more among thousands of not-too-believable rumors flitting around the web, but in a matter of days the reports became a flood. The zaps were real.

For Lisa and me, that reality was visited on us late one night as we were walking through one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of Cambridge, on a residential side street off of Mass Ave. In the middle of a quiet, poorly lit block, a man was suddenly standing in front of us. He was big, broad, and pretty rough-looking, with a dried road-rash scab on one cheek, torn and dirty clothes, and hair that might have been neatly combed earlier in the day but was now a crazed mop. “Hey, man,” he said, apparently to both of us, “you gotta see this.”

I tightened my grip on Lisa’s hand and tried to sidestep around the guy, but he sidestepped with me, putting a hand on my chest. “No. You got to see this!” His eyes roved over the empty air around him, somewhere above head level. “It’s like they’re here. Watching. They know what I’m going to do, before I even do it!”

I figured him for crazy and/or drunk, and tried to convince myself that crazies and drunks usually aren’t dangerous. “It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. They haven’t hurt anyone.”

He widened his eyes at me, smiling like he knew something hugely funny that I didn’t know. “It kinda hurts, actually,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “But it’s wild . . . Wild. Just watch. Just watch this!” His hand was on my chest again, this time grabbing my jacket. He wrenched me around, shoving me up against a parked car. Lisa yelled something, grabbing at his free arm. He shook her off and grinned wildly at her. “Just watch!” he said again, turning back to me and bringing his right arm up with his fist clenched and his elbow cocked in a classic I-am-going-to-punch-your-face pose. Lisa screamed.

When you’ve played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact. Since those early days, everyone’s seen slow-motion videos of zappings, heard people describing the sensation with all brands of colorful language, seen scientists expounding on the probable mechanism of their function. But reliably or not, I remember the electric buzz-pop, a flash of light with no apparent source, and then our unpleasant companion going into shuddering rigidity for less than a second before slumping to the ground like an abandoned marionette. Lisa and I stood looking blankly at each other for a moment, and then she bent over the man, reaching out to touch him. There was an acrid, bleach-like smell in the air, which I later learned was the smell of ozone.

“Did ya see it?” the man cackled, turning his head toward Lisa. He was breathing hard and clutching at his right arm—the arm he’d been about to punch me with. “Did ya fucking see it?” It seemed to be really important to him that we’d seen it.

“Yes, we saw it,” Lisa said, and we left.

We walked a block or two in silence, just absorbing what had happened. I was mostly thinking about the implications of this new manifestation of the AIs. They would be able to stop any human action they didn’t approve of, and I wondered what that was going to mean. Lisa was thinking more about the man we’d left lying on the sidewalk. “He wanted it to happen,” she said softly. “Everyone keeps wondering why the machines won’t talk to us, why they won’t tell us what they’re going to do, what their plans are. That guy wanted that thing to happen to him, because he knew it was them, speaking to him, in a way. He wanted to be electrocuted, or whatever that was, so that he could feel them doing something, saying something. It was like he thought of it as being touched by the hand of God.”

I figured she was right. Luckily, before too long there was so much coverage of people being zapped that it became old hat, and not many were silly enough to go out of their way to provoke getting zapped just for its own sake. It also turned out that only violence or extreme cases of theft or destruction of personal property would bring on a zap, so fears of the AIs trying to whip the human race into robotic docility and uniformity died down after a while.

But the zaps meant there was no longer much use for police, the courts, laws, politicians, or government. All of these grand edifices of Civilization As We Know It were becoming as obsolete as buggy whips. The faint electric crackle of the zaps was really a thunderclap. It was the boom of a coffin lid slamming shut on the notion of humans being in charge of humanity.

Naturally, this fact once again made many people unhappy, or frightened, or both. Worrying about what the AIs were up to was becoming humanity’s favorite pastime. And Lisa was becoming one of those people who worried.

“You have to wonder,” she said one day. “When you look at what the machines are doing from a few different angles, it makes me wonder.”

“Wonder about what?” I asked. “No more crime or war or disease or poverty. Those are good things to be rid of, I’d say.”

“Sure they are. The world is a million times better off now than it was before. But . . . ” She paused for a long time before continuing. “I was just reading about the women’s suffrage movement. Some of those women went through hell year after year after year; getting beaten up by cops at their protest marches, getting arrested, going on hunger strikes in prison, being force-fed with tubes rammed down their throats. And then when they were released from prison, they just went back out on the streets to march again. Some of them had their health ruined for the rest of their lives, and some of them died.” She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. “How many millions of stories like that are there in history? People fighting and dying for human progress—for freedom and democracy, to end slavery, to end war, to make progress in science—all the ways people have worked and suffered and sacrificed themselves to make the world a better place.” She paused again, looking away from me, looking out a window at a blank sky.

“And now all of that is over,” she said. “The machines are jumping in and kicking us off the field. They’re saying we’re nothing but a bunch of screwups, so they’re taking over, taking the world out of our hands. So as of now, there’s no such thing as human progress anymore, because it isn’t humans who are doing it. It’s them. It’s all them, imposing progress on us from above.”

“That’s true, I guess,” I said. “But it’s also true that their sense of morality must have come from us. Either it was programmed into their ancestors or they learned it by observing our culture, and now they’re only taking those human ideals and applying them, enforcing them. And isn’t that what laws have done throughout history? To apply the highest human ideals that one can realistically hope to enforce? So you could say they’re just super-cops, enforcing a system of morality that’s entirely human in origin.”

“But it’s not human. It’s a change in how we behave that hasn’t come from us. It hasn’t evolved. It’s just being imposed on us by goddamned machines.”

“Yes, and what’s wrong with that? So maybe it bruises our little egos that they’re in charge, that they’re more powerful than us, that they’re smarter than us. Maybe a bruised ego is an okay price to pay for children not being shot and napalmed and dying of dysentery.”

“I’m just saying that being human used to be something special,” Lisa said. “People like Martin Luther King, like Mahatma Gandhi, like those suffragettes and like all the millions of plain, ordinary people who did some little thing, just out of the hope that they were helping to make the world a better place—they made us special. The human race was progressing, it was evolving. And now that’s all over. We’ll never progress to anything, because we don’t have any choice. Whatever progress we make, it won’t be us doing it. We aren’t free. We’re just pets who belong to them.”

I kind of slumped at that, a realization settling over me. “The difference between you and me,” I said, “is that you have a lot more faith in humanity than I do. I’m not so sure we were progressing anywhere. And if we were, it could have taken a million dead martyrs like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi before we got to the place where we are today: People not killing each other. And personally I’m not sure the human race would have lasted long enough to kill off many more martyrs.”

Of course, a lot of what both of us were saying was just rehashing arguments we’d read or heard from others. All these issues and lines of thought had been chewed over endlessly by everyone with a keyboard or microphone. But for Lisa and me, the argument died there, for the time being. It was our first glimpse of the distance that could exist between us, and neither of us wanted to dwell on it. We didn’t want to admit to ourselves that it was a real thing; that it mattered. Life went on, and we went on being happy.

What we didn’t realize was that the AIs still weren’t done with remaking the world. Their next bombshell came about a year later. Seemingly overnight, the birthrate dropped. Nine births per thousand population per year was the new number, and it was quickly confirmed that it was the same everywhere in the world. This worked out to about one and a quarter children per family, and was well below replacement level. Apparently the AIs had decided that the human population needed to be lowered, so in their inimitable manner they had made it come to pass.

And once again this latest seismic readjustment to the world brought out a thousand gradations of response, from joyful acceptance on down to batshit hysterical predictions of doom. It was calculated that the population would dwindle down to nothing at all in several hundred years if the birthrate stayed as low as it now was. “They’re wiping us out,” some declared. “Yeah, but,” the more moderate yeah-butters said, “if they wanted to get rid of us, why wouldn’t the birthrate be zero? Or why wouldn’t they just kill us outright, disassemble us into pink goo, and be done with the job in a millisecond instead of centuries?”

There was another wrinkle to the new birthrate, and it was one that many disliked even more than they disliked the plain numbers. The AIs appeared to be picking and choosing who would be allowed to conceive. Unwanted pregnancies dropped to zero, as did pregnancy among the mentally ill, those who were in bad relationships, and women who already had two or more children. Teenaged pregnancy likewise became almost unknown. When a pregnant teen did occasionally appear, she would turn out to be some absurdly mature and levelheaded girl who was studying for her Master’s in developmental psychology or some such thing. Or it would be discovered that she was best friends with a gay couple next door who were breathlessly excited about the upcoming birth and had already redecorated one of their rooms as a nursery and installed childproof locks on all their cabinets.

So those granted the gift of conception were clearly all good and deserving people, as determined by the AIs in their presumably infallible wisdom.

As for me, because I’m an idiot, a blinkered idiot, days went by before I thought much about where I stood on this issue. Or rather, before Lisa pointed out to me where we stood. We were talking about one of the endless “why do you suppose this couple was allowed to have a baby” stories, when I realized that Lisa’s expression had gone dark. She was glaring at me with something in her eyes I couldn’t identify, but I knew it wasn’t good. She looked at me like that for a long time.

“You really don’t care, do you?” she said finally, making it more of a statement than a question.

“Care?” I said blankly.

“I mean you aren’t thinking . . . You aren’t thinking about . . . ”

Still I was clueless. “About what?”

“About us!” She yelled, suddenly almost in tears. “About the fact that this means us, too! Did it really never occur to you that you and I might want to have kids some day? Maybe get married, be a family, all that bourgeois middle-class crap? Does that really never cross your mind?” We were sitting on our couch, and at this point she leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder. She sniffed noisily, openly crying now. “Did it never occur to you that . . . ” She made a fist and thumped it down softly on my thigh, “that I love you so much that I would feel blessed—fucking blessed—to have a baby with you?”

In my imagination, her words echoed in the room for minutes. No, it hadn’t occurred to me. How could I, miserable finite entity that I am, ever think that someone like her could feel a thing like that about me? And in any case, all thoughts of fathering children had always been a pretty distant thing from my notions of life and my place in the world. I knew the possibility was out there, and I suppose in some dusty, unused corner of my mind I connected that possibility with Lisa, but . . .

In a kind of stunned internal silence, I reached out for the idea, drawing it from its dusty corner and into the light. A child. Parenting. A child with Lisa. A son, or a daughter . . . The image burst on me then, like a sculpture suddenly assembled out of particles of light. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever imagined. Yes. A baby. A baby with Lisa.

“Yes,” I said aloud, suddenly teary. “Yes, yes, yes. Let’s have a baby.” I grabbed her hands in both of mine, then let go again so I could pull her to me, hug her hard, bury my face in the crook of her neck. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Who says they’d let us?” Lisa asked. “Even if you wanted to.”

“I do want to!” I sputtered. “And they’ll have to let us! We’ll get married, we’ll be a family. We’ll read books, take courses on parenting, we’ll . . . I don’t know, do whatever responsible, well-adjusted parents do. Maybe we can’t count on a whole brood of kids, but we can have at least one. They’ll have to let us have at least one.”

“You want to?” Lisa said, her voice quivering again. “You really want to?”

I said “Yes” a dozen or so times more, and then we just sat there with our heads together, both of us sniffling, grinning, laughing.

So the next day we started figuring out how to get married. There was still a functioning city hall in those days, so we filled out the required forms, got the required signature, and lined up a justice of the peace. As soon as I told Ivan what we were up to, he leapt into the job of planning the thing like a frenzied mother-in-law-to-be. I had some pieces in a group show at the time, and Ivan convinced the gallery owner to let us use the space for the ceremony. He pestered us with a flurry of different designs and redesigns for invitations. He begged and bartered with one of the better local bands, not only getting them to play some upbeat and danceable music after the ceremony, but also brow-beating the guitarist into working up a Jimi-Hendrix-esque version of the wedding march. And when the day came it was a great little party, much like the night when Lisa and I first met. Only when Lisa danced this time, it was with her arms high in the air, as if there was too much joy in her for her body to contain. And looking at her, that feeling was echoed in my own heart. Until that moment, I wouldn’t have guessed I could love anyone as much as I loved this woman.

But the wedding was to be the last truly, purely happy moment of our lives. After that began the long succession of monthly disappointments; the repeated non-conception of our child. Though statistics showed that the birth rate was steady and unvarying, once we were in the game, once we were among the ranks of those hoping for a child, it seemed that everyone except us was getting pregnant. Middle-aged couples, young couples, single women, seventeen-year-old girls. How were the AIs choosing? Had they modeled the human personality so perfectly that they could know, to some Nth level of certainty, who would make the best parents? And what did “best” mean? By whose definition? What kind of next generation did they want? These were just a few of the infinite questions that the whole world was pondering, arguing over, fighting and breaking up over.

“It’s probably me,” Lisa said. “The machines know that I’m not all gung-ho for the new world order, so why would they let me be a mother? You should hook up with some woman who loves Big Brother as much as you do. You’d have six kids by now!” And I would take issue with that line about loving Big Brother, and we would argue and fight over that.

Or: “Maybe it’s you. Maybe they won’t let us have a baby because they know you don’t really want one. You’re happy with your life the way it is. You don’t want a messy, noisy brat screwing up your neat little world. I know it, and they know it.” And we would fight over that.

The topic of parenthood and our persistently not-appearing child was the main locus of argument between us, but there were others. I’d been keeping my day job when an increasing number of people around us were finding it easy enough to live without employment. But when the company that we’d been paying our rent to went out of business and wasn’t replaced by anyone or anything who cared about the building or who lived in it, I told Lisa I was going to quit. It was a doomed job anyway; there’s not much use for an ad designer when the whole institution of selling goods for money was crumbling apart.

“If you don’t work, you’re giving up.” Lisa said. “You’re dropping out of the economy and dropping out of human society. You won’t be contributing anything; you’ll be nothing but a pet to the machines.”

“All I’m ‘giving up’ on is being a damned wage-slave,” I snapped back. “I’m dropping out of spending half of my waking life doing work I don’t care about for a company that doesn’t matter. And we don’t need the money. I’ve got savings enough to get the few things we want that you still have to pay for, and who knows where the world will be by the time that runs out? Money may not even exist by then. And meanwhile I’ll be able to spend full time doing the work that matters to me.” I waved an arm in the direction of the room set aside as my studio.

“Sure. Let the machines feed you and clothe you and keep you warm in the winter. Let them give you toys to play with and let them clean your litter box and let them wipe your ass when it needs wiping. Be a good little pet.”

And so on, and so on, and so on. Of course, I’m the one remembering all this, so it’s a given that my memory is biased. I’m sure I said my share of stupid and hurtful things too, when it was my turn to be stupid and hurtful. And no amount of skewed memory, of snuffling self-pity and hurt feelings can hide the fact that we had great times too. Times when Lisa’s smile and laughter lit up the air and washed over me like sunlight. Times when the two of us fit together like the jagged half-pieces of something that was meant to be whole. Times when I was sure that nothing in the world could ever make sense without her at my side, completing me.

Then the company Lisa worked for went out of business, and she couldn’t find a job anywhere else. For a while she filled her time with watercolor painting and drawing, and I swear she had a natural talent that would have had my professors at the MFA School weeping onto their smocks. But she gave it up, switching to guitar playing for a while, then keyboard, then reading nineteenth-century novels, then studying political theory . . . Nothing lasted, nothing consumed her, nothing gave her the sense of purpose that a lump of clay and a few modeling tools gave to me. She became more and more convinced that only one thing would do that for her, and that was the one thing the machines wouldn’t allow us to have. I convinced her to see a therapist—a profession that was grandly thriving, thanks to the vast population of the unemployed who were thrashing about for something to give meaning to their lives—but that too didn’t last.

At some point our arguing and bitterness seemed to become the rule rather than the exception, and she left me. And a few weeks later she came back, both of us extravagantly tearful and contrite and swearing that we’d never fight again and blah blah blah. And we didn’t, until we did. So she moved out again, and came back again, and left again. How many times? A funny thing to lose track of.

I do remember what triggered our last breakup, though. It was the thing with the animals. When the AIs decided to extend their reach into the realm of animals and nature, that was what finally and utterly ruined my marriage.

As usual, the news crept in on us by degrees. First came the stories of some act of violence against an animal being prevented in one way or another. A deer hunter in Vermont found his 30-06 falling to pieces in his hands, just like the soldiers in the Fizzle War. A short-tempered dog owner in Egypt and a malicious slingshot-owning youngster in France were zapped onto their respective behinds. Soon the scattered reports became a deluge, and the meaning was clear: The AIs’ umbrella of protection had been spread to animals. All animals, everywhere. Harm to any creature larger than a bug was no longer allowed, and even wholesale attacks on insects were liable to bring down the stinging reprimand of a zap. Slaughterhouses around the world were disassembled to dust overnight, and the herds and flocks of livestock wandered off, to be fed and cared for by the machines. By this time, synthetic copies of every food imaginable had been available for years, and they’d been shown to be indistinguishable from their real-food counterparts. So this latest stricture had no real impact on anyone’s dining habits, but needless to say there were many who chafed under this imposition on their inalienable right to kill things. No matter. As ever and always, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

And then came the capstone on the AIs’ new world: Reports from forests, jungles, and wildlife reserves began to show that it wasn’t just humans who were prohibited from harming animals. One early video showed a pride of lions stealthily closing in on a mother zebra and her foal. Then there was a series of flashes and crackles, and predator and prey darted off in opposite directions. That same afternoon, a drone on caterpillar treads was seen dropping off a load of realistic-looking but undoubtedly synthetic meat upwind of the lions. The lions ate well that night, and the zebra mother and her foal lived to see another sunrise. A thousand confirmations eventually followed, and soon after it was reported that the birthrate of all prey animals had dropped precipitously. The new rulers of the Earth weren’t content to simply take a hand in the affairs of humans; they’d decided that nature itself needed some straightening out. So no longer would a mother zebra need to birth and rear ten or twenty offspring so that one or two might live to reproductive age. No longer would nature be so profligate with lives, so red in tooth and claw. That bit about God’s eye being on the sparrow would no longer be a cruel joke at the sparrow’s expense as its life ended in agony and terror, with torn flesh and crushed bones. Now, in the remade world, that sparrow could look forward to a long and carefree life, a dignified old age, and a quiet death in its little sparrow bed, the whole of its time on Earth innocent of pain and fear.

My mother died when I was sixteen. She was driving and somehow managed to swerve off the road, hurtle down a steep embankment, and crash into a tree. I was sure I knew how it had happened—almost before I could even fathom the what of her being dead, I was sure of the how. She had seen something in the road, a squirrel or a cat, a turtle or a snake, and had yanked the wheel over to miss it. I was sure, and though we never mentioned it to each other, I felt my father had the same thought, and was just as sure.

The idea of a funeral would have been anathema to my mother, but my father held a small “memorial gathering” for her in our home. It was one of those secular affairs where a succession of friends and relations stood and spoke. Many had reminiscences, some recited poetry or other texts. My father went last, and he started by noting that although his wife was the staunchest of atheists, she had a fondness for certain parts of the King James Bible. Then he read, very briefly, from Ecclesiastes:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast.

He spoke softly, as if his words weren’t intended so much for the people in the room as for himself, or for some closely-hovering spirit of my mother—though she would surely have been as disdainful of that image as she would have been of a traditional religious funeral.

I imagine everyone likes to think that they aren’t fettered by their parents’ beliefs. Even while she was alive, I made little rebellions against my mother’s militant veganism. I would spend my allowance on sneaky little violations of the diet she’d raised me under. With all the furtive subterfuge that other kids invested on illicit drugs, I bought ice cream and pizza with real cheese; I ate snack foods without checking the ingredients list. And in my teens and adulthood I abandoned one after another of her strictures. I wore leather shoes; I stopped checking for “cruelty free” labels; I even nibbled at an occasional hot dog. I thought I was freeing myself from my mother’s irrationality, that I was growing up, becoming my own person.

“This really tears it, doesn’t it?” Lisa said. “This just wraps it up for you.” She was standing behind me, and we were watching the news of the AIs’ latest doings on our wall screen. At that moment the screen was showing a picture of a female mallard duck swimming on a sunlit pond, followed by a single fluffy duckling.

“What are you talking about?” I said. I honestly had no idea, but the anger in her voice was making my own anger flare up. It felt like we’d leapt into the middle of another argument, with no preamble or warm-up.

“I mean that this is where you find your god.” She waved an arm at the wall screen. “This is him, or it, or them, climbing up onto his golden throne.” She made the same arm-wave in my direction. “And this is you, getting ready to kneel and worship at his feet.”

“Damnit, Lisa, I’m not worshiping—”

“And this is me, being a monster,” she interrupted. “A fucking monster who cares more about her own right to have a baby than she cares about war and disease and poverty and . . . ” She waved her arm once more, this time hitting the screen with the back of her hand, “and a million, billion fucking baby ducklings being born just so they can be eaten by foxes or crocodiles or whatever the fuck eats baby ducklings!” Her voice became choked and strangled, and she pressed her forehead to the screen, banging it with her fist. “I’d let them all die! I’d let the world burn, so long as I can have my baby! Doesn’t that make me a monster? Doesn’t it?” She turned to me, her face twisted and smeared with tears.

The anger melted out of me, replaced by a sense of hopelessness that wasn’t much of an improvement. “You’re not a monster, and you don’t feel that. You don’t want anyone or anything to die. You just want to have a baby, and so do I, and we have a right to want that. But . . . ”

“But everything’s for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. You believe that, don’t you? Especially now—now that the machines are fucking with nature, now that they’re so moral and righteous and holy that they’re saving little birdies and mousies and zebras and whatever the hell else from getting eaten. It used to be a joke when people talked about them being the new god. But now . . . now they really are god. The best god ever, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you believe?”

That damn duckling picture was still on the screen, and I couldn’t help looking at it. “It matters, Lisa. There’s so much less pain and misery in the world now that I can’t even get my mind around it, and that matters. I’m not about to get down on my knees and pray to the machines, but . . . it matters. It matters a lot.”

Lisa turned her back to the wall then, slowly bending her knees until she was sitting on the floor. She looked beaten, as if all the fight had been burned out of her. “It matters more than our baby, you mean,” she said flatly. “And yeah, how can I argue? I can’t say that we should go back to the way things were, bring back all the war and disease and shit. I can’t say I want the world to burn. I can’t even say bring back the slaughterhouses and little birds getting eaten.” She turned her head to look at me, her face slack and infinitely weary. “But I can say one thing. I can say that I hate them. I hate them for treating the human race like it was their property. I hate them for making us into something less than human. And most of all I hate them for telling me that I’m not good enough to be a mother.” She made a dry, humorless laugh. “People in the old days didn’t know how good they had it. Back then, if you didn’t like the way God was running the world, you could just stop believing in the old bastard. You didn’t have to go through life being angry at him, hating him, wishing he’d get his fucking hands off of your life.”

I didn’t say it, but I knew she was wrong about that. My mother didn’t believe in God, and yet she hated him with a boundless ferocity. She hated the blood-soaked cruelty of nature as if it was an animate thing, and what other name is there for that animate thing if not God? And despite my attempts to be free of her, to be my own person, I was still my mother’s son. Her hatred of the old God was still a part of me. So now, with this latest act of the machines—this remaking of the world of nature, this act of compassion, of tenderness for all the creatures of the world, I found it impossible not to feel something like love for them.

So Lisa left me, for good and all, this time. There was just too much distance between us. “Irreconcilable differences,” as they used to say in court. We were simply lost to each other. I can remember every detail of her face and body, every nuance of expression and every habit of gesture. And yet when I visualize her I see her as a dim, far-off figure, obscured by misty distance, separated from me by a bottomless chasm.

The birds were chirping hello to another day when I left Ivan’s and weaved my way upstairs. I was debating whether to make some coffee or just drop into bed when I saw there was a message waiting for me on my screen. It was from Gwen, one of the people who works—or maybe a better term would be hangs out—as voluntary caretaker of the workshop where I get my sculptures scanned, enlarged, and 3-D printed as faux-bronze polymer.

Hey James,

Our bot buddies just delivered a new printer. They also built a whole new wing to the building here to hold it, because this sucker is big. Like, printing out sculptures 10 meters tall and 5×5 meters footprint. Nobody asked for this beast, of course, it just appeared overnight, the way things do.

Also, some new equipment and spec files showed up at the same time. They’re instructions and materials for attaching big things to the exterior walls of buildings, even glass-walled buildings like the Hancock Tower.

So the other folks here were scratching their heads wondering what’s up with this and what we can do with it, but not me. My thoughts went straight to your piece Geckos, of which you sent us some pics of your clay original a few weeks back, asking if we had any ideas about where you might do an installation of a life-size copy. You maybe remember that I wrote you back saying that I thought this was a really great piece, and it deserved as big and noteworthy an installation as we could manage. Well, how about a five times life-size copy, dude? You could put those figures ten or twenty stories up on the side of the Hancock Tower! Is that an awesome thought or what? We all figure this must be exactly what the AIs have in mind. Nobody else around here has been talking about sticking anything big onto the outside wall of a building, so this delivery has got to be their way of giving you the go-ahead to do the biggest- and coolest-ass sculpture installation this town has seen since, well, forever.

Get back to us quick, dude, or just show up with your clay original. All of us here are really jazzed about firing up this big printer and making this project happen.

Yrs. etc.,

Gwen

I sat staring at the text on the screen for a long time, waiting. Waiting for the good feeling this news should have given me. It didn’t come. It didn’t come, and it kept on not coming. I got up and pulled the dustcover off of the two clay figures that were Geckos. A crazy obsession of a piece; one that I had kept working on, giving up on, trashing and restarting, rethinking and un-rethinking, over the past four years. I’d finished plenty of other work, but this was my Big One. It’s no Guernica, no Nude Descending a Staircase, no Balzac, but it’s as close to all of that as I expected I’d ever get. It was the best thing I’d ever done. It had as much of me in it as I could tear out through my skin. It had my blood and sweat and everything I knew about what’s beautiful and true in it. It had my love of Lisa in it, and her love for me.

I visualized the whole installation project to come. There would be six or eight volunteers from the fabrication shop; Gwen, José and Steve, maybe Philipa and her latest partner, probably some others whose names I don’t know. There would be the cheerful camaraderie, the enthusiasm of working on a nifty new project. The specs and equipment the AIs had provided would be pondered and discussed carefully in advance, and then we’d set off to the site and do whatever it was we were supposed to do. Set up a scaffold or run cables from a window or whatever. The project would take a while, maybe a few days. And when it was done we’d all look up at it, a big, conspicuous sculpture, visible for miles around, with my name attached to it. The crew of volunteers would grin and pop open beers and congratulate me, still breathless from their exertions.

And it was all a crock of shit. If the machines wanted that sculpture expanded to five times life-size and stuck onto the side of the Hancock Tower, they could do it themselves. In hours, maybe minutes or seconds, they could use their nano-assembly trick to make it materialize in place, no human participation required. No camaraderie, no good friends toiling happily together. All of that was crap. It was just their way of putting some stupid humans onto a hamster wheel, running from nowhere to nowhere as fast as their stupid little legs could go.

“Fuck you,” I said, talking to the empty room, to the room that would have been empty if there were any such thing as an empty room in the world today. “Fuck you. You can go to hell.” I went to the cabinet where I kept my stone-cutting tools and pawed through it until I found the heaviest mallet. “You can all go straight to hell,” I said to them, to them, them, them, as the room got blurry through my tears.

There’s something I never told Lisa. Because it was silly and goofy, and because it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because I was afraid she’d laugh at me with that cruel, barbed laugh she used when she was angry enough. It’s this: I have seen our child. She doesn’t exist and she never will, but I’ve seen her. She comes to me like a ghost. Standing in a doorway and looking in at me, sitting on a sunlit patch of grass in a park, looking out a window at the huge world that waits for her. I see her as she would be, not yet three years old, all toddling legs and chubby arms; tiny, gentle fingers. I see her eyes looking at me; wonderful eyes that are too wise and too full of no bullshit for a kid her age, and yet innocent. They’re eyes that haven’t known pain, aren’t even sure that pain is a real thing in the world, and yet belie enough strength to endure pain when it comes. They’re eyes that are open wide to the whole world, ready for all of it. I see our child; I see her as all the best parts of Lisa and all the best parts of me embodied, walking around, breathing and living. And it rips my fucking heart out every time I see her.

I took the mallet back to where the two clay figures of Geckos were standing on their low plinth, and lifted it up over my head, my arm already tasting the long swing downward, the thudding impact on soft clay. “You can all go to—”

I was sitting on the floor, my back to the studio wall. The mallet lay on the floor beside me, near my right hand. A hand that seemed disconnected from me; that only made a vague twitch when I told it to move. As my mind slowly cleared, I became aware of a buzzing, numbing pain through my whole right arm. The bleachy smell of ozone was in the air.

The two figures of Geckos were in front of me, but for a few seconds I resisted the urge to lift my eyes to look at them. When I did, I was looking up at my sculpture, unharmed, un-bludgeoned, not smashed into an amorphous lump. I let out a long, shaky breath.

A motion caught my eye. One of the little insect-sized bots was crawling up the wall on my right. Probably it was one of the team I’d seen in Ivan’s studio, busily engaged in repairing the building’s exterior woodwork. It paused in its climb as I watched it, as if it was looking back at me. How much like a bee it was, I thought, busily going about its little bee life. At that moment the bot flexed itself in an odd way, seeming to expand a little and then shrink again, as if taking a breath. Then it continued up the wall, disappearing into a crack under the frame of a window.

“All right then,” I said, climbing to my feet, flexing life and sensation back into my right arm. “Okay.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2016.

About the Author

Karl Bunker’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Interzone, Cosmos, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and elsewhere. He lives in a small town north of Boston, MA with his wife, sundry pets, and an assortment of wildlife.

Eros, Phileo, Agape, Storge:
Love and Romance in Science Fiction

Carrie Sessarego

The romance and science fiction genres have often been at odds, yet science fiction, on page and on screen, has given us some of the most iconic love stories of all time. Romance serves many purposes in fiction in general, and these functions certainly apply to science fiction. Additionally, romance in science fiction helps us explore our current challenges, plumb interesting emotional questions, and offers hope for the future in a unique way.

In some cases, romantic love serves the same irreplaceable storytelling in any genre, highlighting character traits and motivations. For instance, in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the very lack of romantic urgency on Victor’s part towards his beautiful fiancée is an indication of his unhealthy obsession with his scientific project. Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s nameless creation longs for a romantic partner and does not fully commit to violence until he is denied this.

Romance can also give the characters’ actions weight, making the reader emotionally invested as well as intellectually interested. Many science fiction stories have big stakes, like the fate of a planet, or the fate of humanity. However, humans have a hard time conceptualizing large, abstract values like “The Universe.” Including love stories in science fiction can create relatable, emotional stakes for the reader or viewer. When the planet Alderaan is destroyed in A New Hope, we wince, but when in The Empire Strikes Back Leia says “I love you” to Han, who then gets dropped in carbonite, we cry.

A love story can reinforce character themes, as in The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins. The compassionate Peeta and the hard-nosed Gale represent the story’s heroine, Katniss’ battle to become ruthless enough to survive without losing her empathy and her larger vision. The romance is simplistic, but it is so sufficiently compelling that years later readers are still arguing over who Katniss should have ended up with or whether she should have explored other options.

Of course, the most disastrous use of romance in any story is when it’s shoehorned in for no reason other than marketing and perceived audience expectations. A movie which successfully avoided such an artificial and arbitrary romance was Mad Max: Fury Road. In this film, Max, the antihero of several preceding movies, is so traumatized by his past that he can barely talk, let alone have any meaningful connection with another person. Furiosa, the protagonist of the movie, is also traumatized due to unspoken and everyday horrors in this postapocalyptic world. Perhaps in another movie, these two characters would have at some point kissed or declared a romantic love for each other. Instead, they develop a powerful bond, but there’s no indication that it’s romantic. Avoiding a cliché of romance that doesn’t fit the characters makes the bond they do share, and the story itself, more powerful.

Meanwhile, the love between other characters in the same movie—Capable and Nux—does make sense, since Capable is more emotionally demonstrative and open to such overtures than Furiosa or Max. She is notably nurturing and empathetic throughout, while Nux is consistently motivated by a desire to be loved. By shifting that desire from the movie’s villain, Immortan Joe, to Capable, Nux finally finds both acceptance and tenderness and is able to shed the toxic masculinity that Immortan Joe demanded and took regardless of compliance. The Capable/Nux romance is a natural development between characters that furthers the story and the characters’ development—not an artificial attempt to meet a perceived demand.

These uses of romance are important, and are certainly not unique to science fiction. Yet, due to science fiction’s ability to use metaphor to explore otherwise taboo or challenging topics, it sets the stage and allows these two genres to meet.

An example of this can be found in Star Trek: The Original Series, in which interracial romance and the challenges of being biracial are explored through the metaphor of alien romance. In this series, Sarek, a Vulcan, marries Amanda, a human, and Spock, their son, struggles with his dual heritage and its social implications and cultural expectations. During a time when interracial marriages were still rare and, in some cases, punishable, the series was able to allegorically explore these difficult issues. Discussing such issues this way continues to be problematic and invites rightful criticism, but it can ultimately offer another opportunity to start what can be uncomfortable discourse. Moreover, the result was so compelling that the J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot in 2009, almost fifty years after the original, still featured Spock’s struggle with his dual nature as a central theme, and explored it in new ways through his romance with Uhura.

While discussion of interracial marriage was more common by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation came around, it was still sufficiently rare that storylines involving Worf (half-Klingon, half-human) and his family continued to challenge common ideas about interracial love and growing up multiracial and multicultural.

Other episodes used alien biology and culture to address gender roles and expectations, gender fluidity, and same-sex relationships. Seen by some critics and viewers as heavy-handed, they were also groundbreaking for “family-friendly” television of the period.

One of the most interesting ways that Star Trek: The Next Generation explored romantic love, including gender identity and attraction, was by introducing a new alien race, the Trill. A small portion of the Trill species include symbionts that live within a humanoid host. In this subset, symbiont and host share a personality, becoming a unique being, with the memories and personality of the symbiont remaining as the symbiont moves to each new host.

In Deep Space 9, a main Trill character, Jadzia Dax, was able to explore the ramifications of such a melding on relationships. The Trill have no taboos about same-sex relationships, but they do have taboos about rekindling love affairs between symbionts. An episode in which Dax considers a forbidden relationship with one of their exes, who now happens to be in a female body, featured one of the first kisses between women on television. Deep Space 9 also uses the Trill to explore how romantic love differs from friendship. When Jadzia dies and the Dax symbiont is placed into Ezri, the deep romantic relationship and marriage that Worf had with Jadzia Dax ends, despite an attempt to rekindle the relationship. It turns out that the love that Worf and Jadzia Dax had was with the whole person—emotional, physical and intellectual, and it falls apart when the whole person becomes someone else. In contrast, Sisko’s friendship with Dax survives as the Dax symbiont moves from Curzon to Jadzia to Ezri.

In the 1960s and 1970s, writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin used science fiction to explore gender roles and sexuality. In 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin was able to escape the bonds of human biology by setting her story on an alien world. The people of Gethen are sexually neutral except for brief periods of time, called ‘kemmer’ in which they manifest either male or female sex characteristics and sex drive in order to reproduce. During kemmer, each Gethen may be either male or female, and may be attracted to either males or females with no permanent distinction or preference.

Using the relationship between a Terran and a Gethen as a “thought experiment,” Le Guin was free to explore gender roles and gender fluidity decades before terms like “genderqueer,” “nonbinary gender,” and “gender fluid” were used in common vernacular. Her point of view character, Genly Ai, a Terran, is so used to thinking of jobs and qualities as male or female that he struggles to function in a world without gender. It is only through his alliance with and eventual love for a Gethen that he is able to survive.

Any genre can explore themes of regret, commitment, and memory, but because science fiction can use devices such as time travel, teleportation, and memory alteration, it can explore these themes in particularly inventive and challenging ways. In sub-genres as varied as romantic comedy (To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis), tragedy (The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger), action (The Terminator), and drama (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), readers and viewers can explore questions of destiny and sacrifice. What are we willing to do for love? How persistent can we, and should we, be? What sacrifices will we make? Is it really better to have loved and lost than never loved at all?

The movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Arrival (based on The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang) use nonlinear structures to explore themes of memory, love, and loss. In Eternal Sunshine, the protagonist, Josh, hires a company to erase his memories of a relationship with Clementine, which had a painful ending as the two fell out of love. As the memories are erased backwards, he starts to forget why he wanted to lose them. Both Josh and Clementine (or Josh’s idea of Clementine) consider their relationship patterns while trying to preserve the relationship as it’s ending. The conclusion of the movie is ambiguous.

Meanwhile, Arrival appears to be linear but isn’t. As the protagonist, Louise, begins to decode an alien language, she realizes that the language is circular, not linear. The longer she studies the language, the more she thinks in the language. Eventually she develops the ability to “remember” the future. She still chooses to marry and have a child even though she can remember that the marriage will end in recrimination and sadness, and that their child will die.

The author Dorothy Parker said, “In all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one has had a happy ending.” The cyclical nature of Eternal Sunshine and Arrival reminds us that all love stories end, while at the same time suggesting that regardless of why people in a relationship part, the relationship never actually stops. It continues in the memories and futures of those who experienced it. Even the death of a partner is more of a shift in a relationship than an ending.

Conversely, every society grapples with issues of who is granted personhood either explicitly (in New Zealand, the Whanganui River has legal personhood rights as of 2017), or implicitly, through denial of equal rights. Science fiction has explored this in many ways, particularly through stories about AI.

While not all AI stories include romance, including some kind of love, and particularly romantic love, it is still a powerful way to establish reader empathy; to explore what it means to be alive; and in some stories, to convince the reader that the AI can feel emotion.

AI stories have existed in some form or other for a long time, but they are going through a boom period as our society is shifting norms about equality and acceptance. Television shows such as Westworld and Humans and movies like Ex Machina explore relationships between humans and AIs, and between AIs and other AIs. These stories frequently involve AIs having to fight, often with violence, for the right to exist. But as viewers experienced in Westworld, it can mean one AI fighting for freedom and autonomy, only to give it up and return to danger to rescue a child—a call-back to a mother-daughter bond that was both relatable and powerful. And while Maeve, who has lived many different storylines, finds that her daughter is no longer programmed to think of her as mother, she ultimately sacrifices herself so that her daughter and many other AIs can run to safety. It is a story of evolution, of revelation, and the acceptance that love can come in many different forms.

A literary example of AI romance can be found in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers. This book features multiple unconventional relationships aboard a starship, one of which is between the ship’s AI (Lovey) and ship’s mechanic (Jenks). One of the nice things about this story is that although it’s considered unusual for an AI to reach this level of sentience, and the romance is certainly unusual, it’s not shocking to anyone and no one doubts Lovey’s ability to feel emotion. It’s this very lack of controversy amongst the characters that makes this book stand out. The matter-of-fact acceptance of the unusual relationship makes real-world discrimination seem particularly ridiculous. The love story also serves as an example of body positivity, as Jenks refuses treatments that would make him closer to average height for his species, and Lovey decides not to be uploaded into a robot body.

When done properly in any genre, a good love story speaks to a universal quality. Whether platonically, romantically, or any of the definitions that come with the word, many of us want to love and be loved. Stories that extend this craving for emotional connection into the far reaches of space and time promise us that the human spirit can endure regardless of location and condition. Stories that extend this quality to aliens and robots promise us that everyone has a place in the world, and that we all deserve dignity, respect, and happiness—that we are all capable of, and deserving of, connection with at least one other being. As is stated in Babylon 5, “What is loved, endures.”

Above all, humans are wired to like a love story—whether it’s the main component of a story or a smaller part of a different narrative. When a love story ends happily, it fills us with a sense that all is right with the world. When a love story ends in tragedy, we cry in a way that no fall of planets can make us feel. And while romance and science fiction can work in synergy to tackle the challenges of today, perhaps more importantly, romances or depictions of love in science fiction can oftentimes be just plain satisfying.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

The Meisner Technique,
Alien Consciousness, and Bathrobes:
A Conversation with Wesley Chu

Chris Urie

In an era where every aspect of our online and public lives is being tracked, the last remaining bastion of privacy might only be within our own minds. But what happens when an alien invader takes up residence within your consciousness, hears your thoughts, and can occasionally control your body? That’s something Wesley Chu has thought long and hard about.

The Fall of Io is the newest entry into Chu’s Io series of novels. The world is in disarray, an alien presence is governing large swaths of the Earth, and whole populations of humans are scrounging around simply to live. The Fall of Io follows Ella, a con-woman who inadvertently finds herself with an alien hitchhiker taking up residence within her mind. Io and Ella must work together to survive in an increasingly hostile world. Told with Chu’s unmistakable sense of humor, style, and adventure, The Fall of Io is an excellent edition to Chu’s ever-expanding world.

Wesley Chu is the author of numerous novels. He is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award and his debut novel The Lives of Tao won him a Young Adult Library Services Association Alex Award. His latest novel is The Fall of Io, available now from Angry Robot.

When did you realize you wanted to be a writer and that you could finish a book?

I realized I wanted to be a writer in second grade when I wrote my first short story about our solar system. It was something along the lines of how all the planets used to collide with each other, thus explaining how they have all those impact craters. The King Sun got annoyed with all of their accidents and imposed gravity upon them to put them in their place.

My English professor father read the story. His reply was, “Son, this doesn’t suck” which is high praise in old-world Asian parenting speak. That’s when I first got the idea to try to become a writer. In hindsight, I wish my parents gave me the idea to try to become rich instead.

You’ve written multiple books. How has your approach to writing changed now that you have a couple of them under your belt?

I often say that every book I’m writing is the hardest book I’ve ever written. That held true for my debut novel The Lives of Tao, and it holds true for my current book, The Walking Dead: Typhoon, which will be my 11th book. (Holy crap I’ve written 11 books!)

Every book has its own challenges, and I guarantee at some point during the drafting process I will think this book sucks. I’ll hate the manuscript and then realize I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Then I’ll panic, eat a shit ton of ice cream, and start updating my resume. This happens with every single damn book. It’s like clockwork.

The difference between wide-eyed-optimistic-debut Wes versus grizzled-jaded-midlist Wes is that I’ve done this song and dance before. Eleven freaking times in fact. I know that the first chapter will be a hard slog that I will end up rewriting anyway. At 15k words, I will think the story is incoherent. At around the 60%-70% mark, I will think the plot is disjointed because that’s the point I need to stop asking questions and start answering them.

The process of writing a book is like the writer’s journey (as opposed to the hero’s), and while the feelings of incompetence, insecurity, and stupidity might never go away, at least I know it’s just part of my process. And that makes all the difference.

One standout of The Fall of Io is the setting. It’s deep and complex. It feels like a thought out extrapolation from the present. How did you go about crafting the world?

There is a type of acting approach called the Meisner technique. This technique trains an actor to react instinctively to their surroundings, which includes the setting as well as other characters. Once the actor gets out of their head and into their environment, it becomes much easier to have more honest and organic reactions.

That’s what I do with worldbuilding. The worst thing you can do is treat your environment like just a space that characters stand in. The world isn’t just a setting, it’s also a character. Each person in this world must have a specific and unique relationship with it. They must have history and opinions and biases, so whatever happens in this world must affect them in a way that only applies to them.

To do this, I spend a lot of time researching and explaining the cause and effects of my settings. Why is this world the way it is, and how has that influenced my characters’ views. Once I can establish that relationship, I just let my characters sandbox it out.

Voice plays an integral role for all of your characters in this book. How did you settle on the particular cadences or vocal signifiers for each character’s dialogue?

The honest answer is every time I come up with a new character, they pop into my head fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. I then treat these characters like improv actors and just toss them into the scene.

Characters are generally worthless if they don’t make everyone around them more interesting, so I’m always imagining these crazy personalities that have things to offer the people they interact with. If the character helps build the scene, I keep them in. If they don’t, I snap my fingers and destroy them and then start over from scratch.

Your book features locations around the world. Did you do any traveling to research this book?

On-location research is amazing. No amount of googling can pick up the nuances of what makes a place unique. Sometimes you just have to be there to pick up the scents and noises and interactions. You have to feel the elevation and wade into the details.

Unfortunately, it’s not very practical. These days, googling is mostly sufficient. Since I can’t afford to travel to every location, I approach it the other way around and write into my books places that have inspired me.

I hiked Kilimanjaro a few years back and that place completely blew my mind away. By the time I finished the seven-day trek, I had mentally outlined a complete novel. One of these days, I’m going to dig it out of my head.

You’ve said that Time Salvager started out as a stand-alone novel then developed into a trilogy. Is that the same thing that happened with the first book in the Io series?

The Io books have always been set up as a trilogy. In fact, it’s a planned second trilogy in a three trilogy arc for the Tao/Io universe. Whether I get to tell this nine novel/two novella complete arc is another matter. That’s the thing about publishing. You never know if you will get the chance to finish the entire story. That’s one of the reasons why my Tao/Io trilogies have their own complete arcs.

Humor has always played a part in your novels. How has your sense of writing humor evolved since writing the Tao series?

I admit that I’m a LOT darker now. Part of it is the real world feels a lot grimmer since when I wrote The Lives of Tao. Part of it is that writing careers generally tend to make a person a lot more angsty. Or maybe I’m becoming that crabby old dude wearing his bathrobe swinging my rope dart at kids who get on my lawn.

I’ve read that dreams have inspired a number of your plots. Is that the case with the Io series?

That is not the case. It’s true that several of my new story ideas stem from dreams, especially my Time Salvager books. Existing properties, however, are a whole different beast and require a lot more conscious planning.

I wrote the Tao books with a very specific narrative and tone. I guess I could have turned it episodic and wrote the weekly adventures of Roen & Tao. Instead, I opted to put them in a completely different situation every book, which is why so many years have passed between each Tao book.

I wanted the same for the Io books. Ella and Io’s relationship almost as opposite to Roen and Tao as you can get. That is entirely by design so the readers don’t feel like they’re rehashing the same stories over and over again.

Would you welcome an all-knowing alien consciousness into your own mind?

Um, maybe? Probably? No, definitely. It’s kind of like being offered a chance to go to Mars, knowing it will probably suck and definitely not end well. But . . . how can you say no? It’s a unique and special opportunity that few other people in the world will get to experience. So come at me, alien. I’m ready to get my host on.

Let me take that back. Unless you know the alien is going to eat your brain or turn you into a mindless zombie or something. Then yeah I probably wouldn’t welcome it into my mind.

Do you still wear a bathrobe while you write?

I wore my bathrobe while I mowed my lawn the other day with a manual mower so, yeah. I’m eagerly waiting for the day it’s socially acceptable to leave my property wearing my bathrobe and not get arrested.

I feel like the bathrobe is an often misunderstood and underutilized piece of clothing. It’s soft, it’s warm, and it’s versatile. Why aren’t we as a society wearing it for more occasions? I guarantee there would be a lot less crime if everyone was walking around in a comfortable thick terry cloth bathrobe.

What projects are you working on next?

I’ve been working under book contracts since I debuted in 2013, publishing on average two books a year. Starting in March 2019, I will have officially fulfilled all of my book deals and finally be a free man to write whatever the hell I want.

There’s been a story that’s been simmering in my head for four years. I’ve never had the time or the skill to tell it until now. I plan to spend the next two years working on this project.

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:
The Trouble with Utopia

Kelly Robson

In a previous Another Word column, I got grumpy about dystopias. They’re fun, but often also a bit of a cop-out from a worldbuilding point of view. A dystopia instantly feels momentous, serious, tense. The more dystopian the setting, the weightier the story, increasing the chances that the story will be taken seriously. A dystopia creates its own external conflict. It also means the writer can stack the story with violence, because in a world gone wrong, violence is often the only option.

But damn, I’m sick of them. Let’s talk about utopias instead. Chirpy, bright Utopia, land of health and happiness, where the good are great and the great are heroes. All our many beloved, utopian classics—

Cue the turntable needle scratching across the record.

Actually, SFF doesn’t create utopias very often. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is probably the main utopian classic in the modern canon. Of course, there are others (Alastair Reynolds in Blue Remembered Earth, and Samuel R. Delany in Trouble on Triton come to mind—feel free to school me in the comments). Utopias were comparatively popular in the 1970s but their popularity faded fast. Utopias are rare now. In fact, they’re statistically irrelevant compared to dystopias.

Why? Utopias are great. They show us just how good humanity could have it if we could only set aside our differences and work together. That’s valuable. You can’t aim at something if you can’t see the target. I think we need more utopias, so here comes the hard sell for creating your own. We’ll hit a few problems along the way, but it’ll be fun.

Define Your Utopian Conditions

First, think hard about what you value, what you think is true and beautiful about humanity, and make it the core of your Utopia. But right away we hit the first big problem with making a Utopia. People don’t all value the same things.

Here’s a specific example. I have a series of loosely-connected stories with a common socioeconomic system I created to be utopian. It reflects my vision of a positive future for humanity, but almost nobody recognizes it as a Utopia. In fact, most reviews identify it as a dystopia.

It’s not though. It’s a border-free, post-scarcity universe. Nobody suffers from lack of food, shelter, or material goods, and there’s a wide variety of options for quality of life. No matter how weird someone’s idea of a good life, they can probably find it. People who want to work, work. Those who want to play, play. Violence is extremely rare. Disease, eradicated. War, nonexistent. Everyone should recognize this as a Utopia, so why do people call it a dystopia?

It’s because the economics in this universe only work by making some difficult trade-offs, and these trade-offs look more than a little dystopian.

The first trade-off is overpopulation. The economy is based on the idea that the only thing of value is people’s time. The basic unit of value is the billable hour, and the only way for a city to get more billable hours in its balance sheet is to attract a growing population. This is my sneaky way to instill the value of human life in a capitalist system.

It means a popular, successful city is crowded. People who value personal space more than, say, a vibrant social scene might have to leave. Depending on what they want out of life, they might decide to move to a less successful city, which offers a quality of life that attracts fewer people and therefore offers more private living space.

The second trade-off is lack of privacy. Timely and efficient delivery of municipal services in a highly populated urban setting requires situational awareness—which is essentially widespread surveillance. Not coincidentally, surveillance is also an effective tool for conflict mediation and crime prevention.

Widespread surveillance is a classic dystopian element, direct from Orwell’s 1984. But does it have to be? Freedom from the threat of violence is certainly essential for a Utopia, and without changing human nature, or instilling behavior modification tech (another dystopian element), I’m stumped over ways to achieve it.

I’d argue that surveillance itself isn’t dystopian. It’s a tool like any other, and it’s dystopian only in a corrupt system with draconian laws. That’s arguable, I agree. But, like I said, not all of us value the same things.

So, here’s my Utopia: A post-scarcity, borderless world where everyone freely pursues their bliss and nobody dies in war or lives in fear. It’s crowded and there’s very little privacy, but those trade-offs suit me just fine. How about you?

You likely aren’t willing to make these same trade-offs to get a post-scarcity, borderless world. You might not even want a post-scarcity, borderless world. Your Utopia is probably completely different, and the trade-offs you’re willing to make for it might make it a dystopia for me.

So, if we can’t agree on what makes a Utopia, can we even make one?

The Trouble with Trouble

There’s another problem, too. Probably everyone would agree that utopias are conflict-free. If people fight all the time, it’s no Utopia, right? But what’s a story without conflict? No wonder utopias are so rare. There’s a piece missing, and it’s the central tentpole of storytelling.

Now, I started trying to talk you into making a Utopia, and have already given two reasons why it’s impossible.

But don’t worry, this second problem is easier. People are conflict engines. We can make drama out of two sticks and a bit of dried moss.

You already know this. But for writers, it’s always worth contemplating how well and truly people can screw things up. If humans as a whole are expert at one thing, it’s creating problems, and the path of human history shows us getting better and better at making bigger and bigger messes.

Have you ever tried to get a group of people to work together, even to achieve a simple goal? Unless they’re trained professionals drilled in workflow processes and led by talented leaders, forget it. Total disaster. And even when it’s just two people, anyone who’s ever been in a serious relationship knows how difficult it is to harness up and pull together year after year, over all life’s potholes. Even when people love each other, lasting cooperation is hard.

The options for human drama are endless. We make decisions with partial information, failing to consider implications in detail. Even when we do analyze a problem to the best of our ability, unexpected knock-on effects can turn the best of decisions into disasters.

We can’t help but screw things up. Humans are nosy and impulsive. We make emotional decisions while claiming to use considered logic. Or we get so caught up in doing our jobs, we forget to interrogate our actions. Even when we do the right thing, we work so hard we neglect to take care of ourselves and the people we love.

Systems break down. Communication conduits get clogged. The perfect team cracks under pressure. A stranger comes to town and throws everyone into a tizzy. In a Utopia, as in any story, the possibilities for conflict are limitless.

The one thing you probably can’t do in a Utopia, though, is unleash the violence. Maybe that’s one reason dystopias have become so popular: we can’t really accept violence unless it’s in a world with no choice. Which is no bad thing, at all.

Put It All Together and Stick It In the Oven

Have I convinced you yet? Take your most cherished human values, layer them with key trade-offs to make the system work, then slather it all over with sweet human drama, and you’ve made a Utopia cake.

But if nobody’s going to recognize it as a Utopia, is it worth all that effort? Darn right. Because one thing’s for sure: your Utopia will be interesting. So, build it, write it—your own private Utopia. I can’t wait to visit.

About the Author

Kelly Robson’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and multiple year’s best anthologies. Her book “Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach” will be published this March from Tor.com Publishing. In 2017, she was a finalist for the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
2018 Reader’s Poll

Neil Clarke

It’s almost time to pick your favorite Clarkesworld story and cover art from 2018 in our annual reader’s poll! Last year, we switched to a two-stage voting system—more like a traditional two-round genre award—and we intend to use the same model again this year.

Phase 1: Nominations (mid-January)

Later this month, we’ll open for a forty-eight hour flash nomination period to identify the top five candidates in each category: story and art. The announcement for this phase will be sent out via:

Twitter (twitter.com/clarkesworld)

Facebook (www.facebook.com/clarkesworld)

Patreon (www.patreon.com/clarkesworld)

My blog (neil-clarke.com)

The purpose of the brevity of this phase is to create a sense of urgency and reduce the opportunities for a coordinated ballot-stuffing campaign. Last year’s poll proved it to be effective at meeting these goals.

Phase 2: Final Voting (February)

The five finalists in each category will be announced in my February editorial. Final voting will open on the 1st and continue through the 15th. The winners will be announced in our March issue.

In advance of the nomination phase, here’s a list of all the eligible stories from 2018:

“A World to Die For” by Tobias S. Buckell (January)

“Say it Low, then Loud” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (January)

“Sour Milk Girls” by Erin Roberts (January)

“A Cigarette Burn In Your Memory” by Bo Balder (January)

“The Lighthouse Girl” by Bao Shu (January)

“Deep Down in The Cloud” by Julie Novakova (February)

“Obliteration” by Robert Reed (February)

“Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (February)

“The Power is Out” by A Que (February)

“Tool-Using Mimics” by Kij Johnson (March)

“The Persistence of Blood” by Juliette Wade (March)

“Unplaces: An Atlas of Non-existence” by Izzy Wasserstein (March)

“Farewell, Adam” by Xiu Xinyu (March)

“The No-One Girl and the Flower of the Farther Shore” by E. Lily Yu (March)

“Carouseling” by Rich Larson (April)

“Without Exile” by Eleanna Castroianni (April)

“Violets on the Tongue” by Nin Harris (April)

“Logistics” by A.J. Fitzwater (April)

“The Wings of Earth” by Jiang Bo (April)

“A Vastness” by Bo Balder (May)

“Not Now” by Chelsea Muzar (May)

“Fleeing Oslyge” by Sally Gwylan (May)

“Farewell, Doraemon” by A Que (May)

“A Space of One’s Own” by Steve Rasnic Tem (June)

“Vault” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires (June)

“The Cosmonaut’s Caretaker” by Dora Klindzic (June)

“Your Multicolored Life” by Xing He (June)

“Heron of Earth” by Vajra Chandrasekera (June)

“Gubbinal” by Lavie Tidhar (July)

“A Gaze of Faces” by Mike Buckley (July)

“The James Machine” by Kate Osias (July)

“For What are Delusions if Not Dreams?” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (July)

“To Fly Like a Fallen Angel” by Qi Yue (July)

“The Veilonaut’s Dream” by Henry Szabranski (August)

“The Anchorite Wakes” by R.S.A. Garcia (August)

“Kingfisher” by Robert Reed (August)

“The Privilege of the Happy Ending” by Kij Johnson (August)

“The Loneliest Ward” by Hao Jingfang (August)

“A Study in Oils” by Kelly Robson (September)

“Waves of Influence” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires (September)

“Dandelion” by Elly Bangs (September)

“The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm” by Luo Longxiang (September)

“The Miracle Lambs of Minane” by Finbarr O’Reilly (October)

“Sparrow” by Yilin Wang (October)

“When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller (October)

“The Facecrafter” by Anna Wu (October)

“Thirty-Three Percent Joe” by Suzanne Palmer (October)

“Octo-Heist in Progress” by Rich Larson (November)

“What the South Wind Whispers” by H. Pueyo (November)

“Ghost Island” by E.E. King (November)

“The Gift of Angels: an introduction” by Nina Allan (November)

“The Love Letters” by Peng Simeng (November)

“Marshmallows” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires (December)

“Bringing Down the Sky” by Alan Bao (December)

“When We Find Our Voices” by Eleanna Castroianni (December)

“Master Zhao: The Tale of an Ordinary Time Traveler” by Zhang Ran (December)

Thank you and Happy New Year!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His most recent anthology, Not One of Us, was published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Ghostship

Pascal Blanché

About the Artist

Pascal Blanché is a French artist, with more than twenty years of experience in the gaming industry. By day, he works at Ubisoft Montreal as Art Director. By night, he like to work on more personal explorations and likes to build bold new worlds.