The Painter of Trees

Suzanne Palmer

I go down to the gate, swipe my security pass, and step through the ten-meter tall, still-opening doors into the last of the wild lands. I remove my boots at the threshold and set them on a rack for that purpose, then carefully wash my feet from the basin of rainwater, still chill from the night before. When the doors have closed and sealed again, I remove my clothes. There is no one on this side of the wall to see who would take either advantage or offense at my nakedness. I wash my body from the same basin, shivering from the shock of the cold, before I remove the plain linen cloth from its hook above the rack and wrap it around myself. And then I walk down the path to find the painter of trees.

The path curves over a small slope and then down a kilometer or so to the glade at the edge of a forest. The vegetation changes around me as I walk, from the familiar sharp-bladed grasses that have crept over the wall and seeded themselves along its perimeter, to the tiny, delicate frills of blue-green of the grass that first grew here, now in forced retreat. I know how soft they would be under my bare feet, how they would tickle, but also how easily they will crush and die, and though I know I will surely give into temptation one last time before they are gone forever, this time I keep to the stones.

The trees here are, outwardly, very similar to the trees of home, except for their smooth exteriors and symmetrical branching. Their leaves are wide, gold-green, open cones, grouped in threes at the end of each stem, which catch and hold rain for a long while after a storm. Cut a tree open, though, and you find neither rings nor wood at all, but hexagonal cells all tucked neatly together, larger the closer to the center they are. Each one is capable, if broken free, of starting a new tree by itself, but together they each serve different functions, observed to change over time as both external conditions and each cell’s internal position in the whole changes.

Mathematically, structurally, the trees are beautiful as they are naturally. Among them there are flashes of bright color, vibrant pigments carefully etched into shallow scratches in the trunks forming intricate, hypnotic patterns, no two the same, none less compelling than the others. There have been days I have spent hours staring at them, or at our archived 3-D images, and always there is that sense that some vast understanding of the meaning of being is just there, in the lines, waiting for me to finally understand.

From here, I can see signs the trees are dying.

The small valley has a river that winds through it, and I cross a bridge made of carefully placed stones to the far side. I can see the large stick-ball nests up in the canopy above, fewer with each visit, and I can smell smoke.

I find Tski tending to the fire as one of the nest balls, carefully extricated from its perch in the trees above and set upon stones, crackles and hisses in flame.

Tski sees me, and turns toward me—the Ofti don’t have heads, per se, with all the functions we think of as specific to heads integrated in with the rest of their singular, horizontal lump of a body the same color as the leaves above. It stands atop nine legs—it lost three in an accident, it told me once—that are fine, graceful arcs that end in three pieces that can come together as a sharp, dangerous point, or open to function like fingers.

I sit on the ground, eye level with it. After a while it speaks, a complex series of whistles, clicks, and trills, that my implant decodes for me.

“I am sorry that Ceye has died,” I say, and the implant moments later returns that in Tski’s own language.

“Ceye ate the new grasses and became sick,” Tski tells me. “Ceye was afraid we would starve when the old grasses are gone, with your wall between us and other meadows.”

There are no other meadows, though; that is why there is a wall. It was carefully placed so that you can’t see it from here, in the heart of the forest valley, but that was before we knew the animals here were intelligent tree-dwellers and could likely see from the canopy. But still, they cannot see over it, which is for the best.

Tski swivels its body again, back and forth for a few long minutes. It is thinking. “Do your people eat the new grasses?” it asked at last.

“No,” I say, because we do not.

“Then why did you bring them?”

“It is part of our native ecosystem,” I explain.

“Even the soil and the air do not taste right any longer,” Tski says, and it picks up a stick with its tiny finger-blades and pokes the fire.

In the silence, I look around the glade. “Where are the others?”

“Desperate,” Tski says. “They have gone to look for hope.”

There is no response to give to that. “Will you paint Ceye’s tree?” I ask instead.

“When her nest is cold ash, and I can mix it with the colors,” Tski says. “Only then will I paint. I am almost out of warm-sky-midday-blue, which we traveled to meadow-by-the-five-hills to obtain. I am too old to go, and only Ceye also knew the way. Unless you also could go?”

“I can’t,” I say. Because it is not there, but also because even if it was, it is not something the council would accept. There is no way forward except forward, they would admonish me, no path to success without steadiness of thought, purpose, and action.

The burning nest has collapsed down into itself, its once-intricate woven structure now a chaos of ember and ash.

“It does not matter,” Tski says at last. “There are only the three others and myself left now, and there will be no one to paint for the last of us that goes.”

The Ofti pokes the fire a few more times, then lays its stick carefully aside. “Tomorrow,” it says.

“May I come watch?”

“I cannot stop you,” Tski says.

“If you could, would you?”

“Yes. But it is too late now. You are strange, squishy people and you move as if you are always in the act of falling, but instead it is everyone around you who falls and does not rise again,” Tski says. “And so it will also be with us.”

“Yes,” I answer in turn. It is a good summation of who we are, and what we do: we are teeth on a cog, always moving forward and doing our part until we fall away and the next tooth takes up our work in turn.

I get up from the ground, my legs stiff, and stretch. “Tomorrow, then.”

I make the walk back to the gate without looking back, but my thoughts drag on me.

The Council members wait for the beginning chime, and all take their seats around the table with precise synchronicity, so that no one is ahead, no one is behind. The table is circular and is inlaid with a stylized copper cog design, so that each member is reminded that the way forward for each of them is with the others. This is how steadiness of purpose is maintained.

And hatred, Joesla thinks, as each face opposite perfectly reflects the righteous moral bankruptcy of their own. “I propose, with some urgency, that we take whatever steps are necessary to preserve the remaining Ofti population and environs before it is lost forever.”

“We already have extensive samples—” Tauso, to her left, says. He is the biological archivist, and his expression suggests he has found a personal criticism in her words.

“Forgive me, your collection is unassailable in its diligence and scope. I was speaking in regards to the still-living population,” Joesla interrupts.

“It is already too late.” Motas speaks from directly across the table. There is no leader among them by consensus, but Motas—always rigid, always perfect in his adherence to the letter of their laws—leads them anyway. “There are only four left; they no longer have sufficient genetic diversity to survive, even if we did find some way to insulate them from the planetary terraforming changes.”

“With Tauso’s collection, we could bolster their gene pool,” Joesla says.

“To what end? A great expenditure of effort and resources for something that gives us nothing in return? Your proposal is backwards thinking,” Motas says.

“Not for the Ofti,” Joesla counters. “They have a unique culture and language that should not be discarded so hastily. I know it has been a long time since any of you have spent time among them, but—”

“The Ofti have no future. They are already gone, but for a few final moments,” Motas interrupts. “Does anyone here second Joesla’s proposal that we abandon our own guiding principles for this lost cause?”

Many should, but none will or do. Tauso does not meet Joesla’s eyes—and why should he, she thinks bitterly, when he has what he is required to save already? His silence is a betrayal of both her and himself.

“The matter is settled, then,” Motas declares. “Forward.”

“Forward,” some portion of the council responds, some with enthusiasm, some less so. Tauso is silent with Joesla, but it is too late, too small a gesture in the face of his earlier cowardice, and she will not forgive him this day. Now there is a necessary discussion of high-speed rail lines, anticipated crop yields in the newly reformed soil, and planning for the next wave of colonists; they cannot linger for one member’s wasteful, wasted regret.

There is smoke rising from the glade again. I try not to hurry down the path—I remind myself that I am an observer here, nothing more—but if my steps are quicker than usual, who would there be to accuse me? No one else comes here.

Tski is hopping back and forth unsteadily, whether because of its missing legs or its great agitation, beside a large, roaring bonfire. It does not have its tending stick, and the flames spark and flare and crackle with uncontrolled abandon. Dimly within the bright fire I can make out three shapes, three nest balls.

“What happened?” I ask.

It takes several minutes for my translator to make sense of Tski’s distressed whistles, but at last it speaks: “The others walked the circumference of the wall, back to where they started, and found no cause for hope. They have returned home and burned themselves. I tried to stop them, but I could not.”

I see now its awkwardness of movement is because many of its remaining legs are burned.

I do not know what to do.

“Sesh. Awsa. Eesn. That was their names,” Tski says. “Awsa and Eesn were children of my children. They should be here with their long lives ahead to remember my last days, and not this.”

“I am sorry,” I say.

“Are you?” Tski asks. The fires still rage, and some of the native grass beside the stones has caught, but the Ofti either does not notice or ignores this. Does it matter which?

“I don’t know,” I say. Through the wavering heat and smoke, I can see that Tski had started already to paint Ceye’s tree, no doubt wanting to get it done before I could arrive and be an unwelcome witness. It must have been doing that when the others returned to end their lives, as there are leaves on the ground around the base of the trunk, their cones filled with different colors, and I can see the silvery lines of etching up the tree trunk that had not yet been filled. The effect is still mesmerizing, even so unfinished, and I feel momentarily lost in it again. Then the realization strikes me: with its legs burned, Tski will not be able to finish the painting, will not take me that one step closer to elusive understanding. And at that, my heart catches in my throat, and I feel now the loss that Joesla had warned us of like a million cuts in my skin. Too late, too late!

“Can I help you paint?” I ask.

It is the wrong thing to say. “Go!” Tski cries. “These are not here for you, for your eyes or alien thoughts. These are our memories, made in love of one another, a declaration for future generations, and you have destroyed us. Leave now and do not return.”

I stand there for a while. Tski watches the fires burn, and does not move to tend it, nor to throw itself upon it. The thought that Tski might burn the grove down once I am gone keeps me there longer, until at last the burning nests have been consumed and the grassfire has died out, leaving a three-meter blackened, jagged scar on the land, an indelible fracture that will never grow back.

Tski makes a sound that the translation implant cannot work with, perhaps because it is not a word, just inarticulate grief. I should not have come, should not have stayed this long. These conversations with Tski have not been forward-thinking, and I know this, and knew better, but yet I came. It is a defect in my commitment to my own people that I let strangeness and novelty tempt me.

“I am sorry,” I say again, and this time I leave.

I stay on the path, even though my feet want to walk upon the native grasses one last time, because I am certain I will not come again.

At the gate, I leave my linen shift, bathe again with the lukewarm water, and when the sun and meager breeze has left my skin chill and mostly dry I dress and gather my things and put my real life back on.

The gates open, and despite a life of training and my commitment to our ways and philosophies, this time I look back.

Tski is coming up the path toward me. It is moving with difficulty and obvious pain, made the worse by the urgency with which it is trying to catch up to me. I should not have looked back, should now turn and step through the gate and close the doors for this last time, but I cannot.

Tski stops a few meters from me, and almost collapses before it gathers its strength to stand tall again. “Show me,” it says.

“What?” I ask. I do not understand.

“Show me what is now outside this wall, where once my children played and ran and climbed. Show me what you have done with my world, what you have that is so much better than us.”

On my side of the wall, it is city under construction, a thousand identical structures for ten thousand people, all looking only forward, in the direction we, the council, point. There is no art, no individual movement away from the whole, nothing rare to puzzle over. It is an existence I am proud of, and proud of my part in, but it is only for us and I do not want to explain or justify any of it, nor have to face the council and explain myself.

“No,” I say.

“Could you stop me?” Tski asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Would you, if you could?”

“Yes,” I say again.

“Then stop me,” Tski says, and it steps around me and heads toward the gates.

I take the small gun from my bag. All council members carry one for protection, for moments of dispensing justice, and although I have never used it except in training, it is solid and comfortable in my hand, and with it I kill Tski.

It crumples, and becomes still, and in the removal of its animation it becomes just a thing, a leftover bit of debris from this world that has been repurposed. Now, I can turn my back and proceed through the gates and return to this city of ours, and be whole and compliant in forward-thinking again.

Joesla speaks barely a moment after the council chime has rung and everyone has settled in their seats. “The Ofti are extinct,” she says. “Three of the remaining population appear to have self-immolated, and the last was found dead at the exterior gates with significant burns. I recommend a necropsy to determine the cause.”

“Surely it must have succumbed to the burns?” Motas says.

“There may be things we can learn—”

“Counselor Tauso, do we have any incomplete biological or behavioral data that could still be obtained from this specimen, if retrieved?” Motas asks.

Tauso looks miserable. His eyes are puffy, as if he has been crying, though none would ask and none would admit such a thing in his place. Tears only ever serve the past. “No,” he says, his voice barely a whisper, then he speaks again louder and more firmly. “No.”

“Then what would you propose we learn from such a procedure, Counselor Joesla? Its death is sooner than we would have anticipated, but it was also inevitable, and its cause does seem self-evident.”

I want to know why it crawled all that way, after being burned, to die at our gate, Joesla wants to say, but Motas is right, for all she hates it. The Ofti was old and injured. There is no purpose now, nothing to be gained, and whatever the Ofti wanted in its last moments was already lost to them. “I feel it would be a matter of completeness of record,” she says instead.

“So noted,” Motas says. “Does anyone second that proposal?”

There are hesitations, shared looks, mutual avoidance, but in the end, predictably, no one does.

“There is the matter of the grove and it surrounding lands,” Avel brings up, from Joesla’s right. “We had spoken about keeping it as is, as an educational, historical attraction. If we wish to do so, we should act now before the remaining grass and trees deteriorate further; it would only be a matter of a week or two of work to encase everything individually so they are preserved in their current state.”

“It is a waste of space that could be used for something productive,” Banad speaks up.

“I would vote for preservation,” Joesla says.

“As would I,” Tauso adds.

Motas turns to Avel. “I propose you bring the full details of a preservation project to our next meeting, so we may view and assess its merits and costs objectively. Banad, if you have an alternate proposal, then likewise we need all the relevant specifics and an objective justification for why it is a better use of the space. Does anyone second me?”

Tauso nods, and swallows. “I do,” he says.

“Good. Forward,” Motas says, and then they adjourn.

The grove looks the same as the last time I was here, but it feels empty.

It has not rained here in weeks—the moisture-laden clouds were needed elsewhere, with our fledgling farms—so the ash and small remains of the three burned nests have not washed away. I walk around them to where Tski had set up his leaves of paint, and I sit in front of them, and I look at the trees, dozens and dozens of them, here and in the forest behind, many freshly painted, many more marking the fading record of thousands of generations gone.

I still do not comprehend my own attraction, how this uncivilized, unrefined, unforward art can feel so alive, so in the moment, so connecting. So utterly alien. Perhaps it is the simple act of remembering the dead, when I come from a people where to mourn, to grieve, to remember those who are no longer part of the future, is the most foolish backward thinking of all.

Yet it is the painted trees that keep drawing me here, and they are still here; Tski was, ultimately, an obstacle to my full and peaceful enjoyment of them. Surely, though none of this would exist without the Ofti, now it is ours. Mine.

There is pride and relief as I think this, and also a deep shame that feels wrapped around the core of my being. Guilt is a backwards emotion and I disavow that shame, even if it will not leave me be. Instead, I find that the more I study them, the more the designs on the trees seem to be mocking me, forever locked away from my comprehension. Tski must have followed me, made me kill it, because it knew that by doing so it would steal this from me.

The worst is the half-finished memorial on Ceye’s tree. I should have stayed here that day and forced Tski back to work, forced it to finish this last tree, so that I could have the whole now, and walk away satisfied that I missed and lost nothing. But it is broken, like Tski is broken, and it is Tski’s doing that both should be so.

Forward, then.

I did not change my clothes nor leave my things at the gate; there is no fear of bringing microorganisms with me that could damage what is already, functionally, administratively dead. From my bag I take out blue paint that I had made in one of our autofab units. Holding it now against the blue in Tski’s leaf, I see mine is darker, not the right shade at all. But it will be close enough! Blue is blue. I use my fingers and I rub it on Ceye’s tree, press it into the scratches Tski left with my fingertips, until, breathing heavily from the exertion, I stand back again to admire my own accomplishment.

It is a mess, an inarticulate, artless smear.

I take several deep breaths, and then I go back in and I try again, using my fingernails instead of fingertips, trying to work with the flow of the lines, trying to find how it is supposed to go. I chip my nails, and several bleed before I give up, recap my jar of paint, and stand back to see that I have just made it worse.

I do not understand how I—I!—could fail at this frivolous thing that some dead animal moldering in the grass up the hill could comprehend and encompass. I had thought, in my arrogance, in my superior thinking, that after my practice on Ceye’s tree I would for my last act here paint Tski’s tree, and no one would ever know it was me. And thus I would be preserved, and every one of my people who looked here for generations would remember me, even if they did not know they did so. Then I would not just be one undifferentiated tooth on a cog gear, turning forward, resisting backward with all the others, but a fixed point.

I feel in that instant that all I have accomplished is to immortalize my own foolishness, to forever diminish everything I have ever reliably and competently accomplished under a shadow of mockery. Furious—at myself, at Tski for forcing my hand, at this entire planet—I throw down my jar of paint. I had sealed it, but it hits one of the rocks just right (just wrong!) and shatters, and paint droplets fly everywhere—not just onto the disaster I’ve made of Ceye’s tree, but onto others nearby.

“No!” I cry out loud, and I sink to my knees in the dying grasses and am consumed by my own rage and horror.

Joesla stands, trying not to shift impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for the rest of the council to arrive. She is early, but not by much. Banad was already here, clutching his report pad to his chest as if to protect his ambitions from her judging eyes. She has prepared her own argument to back up Avel’s, in case he does not make a compelling enough case on his own against Banad. So much has been lost already, she thinks, but if I can save the tiny fraction left, I will.

One by one others arrive, but other than the sounds of their movement, the chamber remains silent. It is a recognition, she likes to think, of the weighty day ahead of them.

Right at the hour bell the doors slide open again, and Motas comes in, moving more quickly than his usual ponderous and insufferably formal gait, and there is something in his expression she has never seen before. As she tries to untangle and define what is new there, she is distracted by something else: his hands are, inexplicably, stained blue.

“Motas—” she begins to ask, and he visibly flinches at the sound of his own name.

Behind him, Tauso, last of the council to arrive, runs into the chamber. He is heaving for breath, his face red with sweat and something more, something the opposite of Motas’.

“The Ofti grove!” he shouts. “It’s on fire! Arson! The whole forest has gone up!”

Everyone turns just as the council chime sounds, and the acrid smell of smoke drifts in through the doors behind Tauso, a ghost with the swagger of an uninvited guest and accusations of murder on its breath, and it settles itself around a shivering Motas like a linen shroud.

About the Author

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared frequently in Asimov’s and Analog, and her Clarkesworld story “The Secret Life of Bots” won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette. Her first novel, Finder, came out from DAW in April 2019.

Erdenweh

Bo Balder

Onway dreaded the condolence visit, but still she hurried to the front door. It was never wise to expose yourself to Nueva Esperanza sun for long, even with skin as dark as hers.

“Mx. Tschiao, I’m Onway Jansen, your daughter’s psychiatrist. My deepest condolences. May I come in?”

The mother’s haggard face darkened with emotion. Onway had come prepared for that. It was her responsibility as a psychiatrist to bear the anger that the bereaved would direct to her. This wasn’t the first condolence visit she’d had to pay. An epidemic of suicides raged on Nueva Esperanza and psychiatrists struggled right in the thick of it.

Onway thought she’d finally gained some headway with Esterella. Until the girl killed herself.

The mother quickly quelled her anger and gestured her inside. Onway recognized the mechanism. The daughter had always suppressed her emotions exactly like that, first welling up, then tamped down and put away to save face in public.

The mother gestured Onway into a chair and slammed down a cup of coffee. “How did this happen? You were supposed to make her better! It’s your fault.” The mother broke down weeping.

Anger often masked grief. Better to let it out.

“She was such a lovely girl. There were no worries in her life, her grades were good, she had lots of friends. She had you! She liked you, she said the therapy was helping.”

And yet during therapy sessions Esterella had expressed deep sadness and lack of meaning in her life. What had been missing? They hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. And now they never would.

Onway let the mother talk and observed her surroundings. The furniture was all printed, light and modern, nothing made from native wood or grasses. Extremely neat. A wet cloth and a bottle of cleaning spray stood ready on a corner of the spotless coffee table.

She picked up her coffee for a sip. She set the cup down again. The mother lunged for the cleaning cloth and wiped down the circular stain where Onway hadn’t set her cup back down in the exact same spot. Good, grieving people often neglected basic care for home and self.

Onway’s next stop was the weekly visit to Children’s Crèche the Little Ducklings. She stepped into the hallway, empty at this time of day, and found her way to the little office on the second floor. The walls and floors were scuffed and grimy, coats and hats and children’s toys spread everywhere. Even now, when adult labor was less scarce than in Onway’s childhood, it was apparently impossible to keep up with children’s mess. A smile warmed her cheeks.

The children’s home always made her happy, in some illogical way. She’d hated living here. She’d felt like a second-class citizen, created from random sperm donors from Earth and batch-decanted here on the new colony. All so the scientists from the colony ship wouldn’t have to have twelve children each. Onway didn’t disagree with the method, since anything else would probably have heralded in a renewed suppression of women, but she had disliked intensely how it felt.

And yet every time she came here, she felt her muscles loosen and her cares lighten. Funny how people worked. In fact, she was a member of a committee that wanted to stop the batch-decanting of babies and make it mandatory to raise one test-tube child per family for every natural born one. She had never for a moment doubted that the committee was important, so she wholeheartedly donated her time and effort to draft bills for the citizens’ parliament.

But coming straight from Esterella’s ordinary, sanitized home to this comfortable, dirty environment she wondered. What benefited a child most? How did one measure that? Look at herself. Even after a childhood remembered as miserable, she’d still turned out all right.

She worked the rest of the day with her groups and individual sessions. The children were mostly healthy and happy, but there were always a few with concentration issues or suffering from bullying or a difficult puberty.

The morning’s painful start had made Onway think. Were these children really all right? Was the detection system good enough? Was it up to date, was it smart enough? Was Onway herself really doing all she could? She made a note to schedule a once-yearly check on all the children.

Still. She couldn’t shake the feeling that these children were doing better than a lot of children in nice, big, clean homes with doting parents. Or at least available parents, present parents, good-enough parents. In a group home, at most you had group leaders for fifteen children, one for the day and one for the night. As she remembered it, most of the group leaders were sadly unimportant or uninspiring. The children’s own communities, especially the secret ones, had provided most of the love and support.

She needed to research this. The feelings of a single therapist counted for nothing, she needed citywide stats. Or preferably, planetwide stats.

At home she wolfed down a quick printed meal while she set her house AI to searching. The amount of material that scrolled by as she chewed and swallowed was astounding. Planetwide? Hah! A rise in suicides had been reported on all colony planets.

They were calling it Erdenweh, Earth-sickness. The theory was that the built-in longing for the environment human beings had evolved in was so strong, even in human beings who’d never been to that planet, that it might drive them to suicide.

Onway sat back and thought. Pining for Earth. Esterella hadn’t known what she yearned for, just that she missed something so deeply and terribly that she couldn’t stand to go on living.

Onway searched further for a cure. What therapies had other psychiatrists tried? She laughed out loud. Transporting a patient back to Earth had worked. The patient in question missed her family and her work but was apparently no longer suicidal.

Obviously, this was not a therapy that could be made available to every Earth-sick colonist. But maybe there were ways to fake Earth. Surely someone somewhere on Nueva Esperanza had planted an Earth garden, or maybe a holographic one might be available in an entertainment center. In fact, the most popular immersives on colony worlds were invariably set on Earth.

She called Esterella’s mother. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but do you know what immersives Esterella played?”

The mother sniffed. “I thought you were putting a stop to that. She liked to play them all day long, it drove me crazy. Although her room was less messy when she still played. I’ll get the house AI to send you a list. Is that all?”

“Yes, for now. Thank you.”

Had she forbidden or discouraged Esterella from playing games? Onway couldn’t remember. She pulled up recordings of their sessions and searched for keywords. She’d suggested to Esterella that she be present in the moment, to be aware of where she was and what she was doing, and not always dwell on the past or fear the future. Esterella had taken that as a suggestion to stop gaming. True, normally Onway wouldn’t advise nonstop gaming but instead encouraged patients to engage with the real world.

She needed to talk to someone who’d gamed since childhood and was now a functioning adult. What else?

The comparison between crèche- and family-raised children. Nobody had researched that yet. Typical. Onway set the AI to delve into raw data to compile a rough statistic. Another note: find a mental health researcher and talk to them.

She went to bed but couldn’t catch sleep. Meditation and relaxation exercises didn’t work. Finally, she padded to her closet and dug up her last resort, an old teddy bear from the Crèche, vacuum sealed so it wouldn’t lose any of its powerful scent. She zipped the seal open and inhaled the smells rising from Teddy’s filthy fur. Sweat, snot, tears, general dirt, struck matches, maybe a hint of vomit. The scent of the Crèche’s Dormitory 3. She told House to run the dormitory sound file. She finally fell asleep clutching Teddy to her chest and listening to the whispers and giggles and snores of long-grown-up children.

She woke the next morning still fighting the deep ache of discontent. She wasn’t catching Erdenweh, was she? Some diseases, psychological or not, could be transferred through contact. If most of your peers were obese or smoked, you had more chance of becoming obese or a smoker yourself. So it was with sadness or happiness, and this was not connected to your basic personality or your upbringing.

She should probably go visit some happy people. Only she couldn’t come up with any offhand. She didn’t have many friends. Still. Maybe she should look up some of her old crèche mates. She’d called Avonwy recently, hadn’t she, to check if anyone she knew was going to the crèche reunion? Her calendar offered proof this had been three years ago. Ouch. Without realizing it she’d indulged in unhealthy behavior. Dentist’s appointments. Behind. Was this how Erdenweh snuck up on people? How they gradually, imperceptibly, started to neglect their self-care?

She vowed to do better.

The AI had compiled a rough report from the available databases, but the data generally didn’t show if people had grown up in crèches or not. She asked it to assume people over fifty hadn’t, but that didn’t yield much. Also, most of the data were proprietary to the Office of Disease Control. Odd in a society that was organized by Participatory Democracy.

She called around until she found the epidemiologist responsible. He seemed sympathetic but would only promise to think about giving her access to data if she visited in person. She made an appointment to meet him over coffee. Today she had some room in her schedule, for one thing because she hadn’t yet filled in the 90-minute slot reserved for Esterella. Onway scrapped the hours she’d planned to devote to her crèche bill. It didn’t seem as urgent as it had last week.

She dressed carefully, aware that she might be unconsciously sending out signals to leave her alone, to be ignored. The House AI said she looked neat and professional compared to current social media photos, but that her haircut might need an update. Onway let its mechanical hands snip away. Short hair was practical but did require more maintenance. The AI offered the opinion that 58% of professionals her age and income bracket used makeup. She turned off further notifications on this subject. Idiot house brain. On second thought, she turned the notifications back on. She might put on makeup tomorrow.

They met at a local cafe. The epidemiologist introduced himself as Windi Haore. “Can you tell me again why you want these stats? What will you use them for?”

Onway explained her hunch about the differences in Erdenweh occurrence between crèche grown and family-grown children.

His large brown eyes widened even further. “So you’re saying that the crèche-grown actually have less Erdenweh sickness than the family-grown?” He seemed to relax. “That’s a refreshing change. I usually get exactly the opposite query, people who want to prove the crèche-grown are more prone to addiction, disease, crime, slacking, mis-pruning their roses, you name it.” Windi was actually quite handsome. The sun shone outside on the flowering hakkas, the coffee was good, she kind of liked him.

“I grew up in a crèche myself,” she said, carefully watching his reaction.

He could be one of these reverse reactionaries, who said they believed in equality but didn’t want to hear it from the people they wrote about. “You too?”

They smiled at each other. Onway knew she could trust him now, and presumably he felt the same.

“Okay, so what you need me to do is create a query about Erdenweh sufferers where I separate the crèche-grown from the family-grown. Right?”

“I think the criteria should be wider,” Onway said. “Include depression, eating disorders, ADHD, cutting, addictions, obesity.”

Windi’s eyebrows rose.

“All of those could be misdiagnosed crosswise,” she explained. “Erdenweh doesn’t have a protocol to officially diagnose it yet.”

Windi wrote on his slate. “Are you going to write the protocol?”

Onway stuck her hands behind her head. “God, maybe. Not right now, though. That’s paperwork for afterwards, if I get my finger behind what causes it. I have no idea yet, except this crèche hunch of mine.”

“So you don’t have Erdenweh?” Windi asked.

“That’s unsound reasoning,” she said absently. “I didn’t say none of the crèche-grown ever had it or never will have it. But I would have said I absolutely didn’t have it until yesterday, when I caught myself being a tad depressed.”

“About what?” Windi said.

Onway couldn’t believe she was talking about this to a relative stranger instead of her supervisory therapist. But she was. Might as well continue.

“I don’t know. Do I have Erdenweh? There’s no way to tell. Do you?”

Windi shrugged and smiled. “I don’t think so. I’ve overcome the challenges of my background. I’ve got a great job, enough friends, plenty of interests. What’s to be sad about?”

Onway tried to gauge her response. Had she secretly wanted him to have Erdenweh? Maybe. She did need subjects to question.

“Is there a way to contact patients diagnosed with Erdenweh and talk to them? Would it be ethical for you to give me their therapists’ addresses?”

Windi pulled a face. “I think that wouldn’t be a transgression, but I will have to check with the ethics officer. Did we cover everything? I have to get back to work.”

Onway took a hasty sip of her cooling coffee substitute. “I think so. But let me know if you have any thoughts or discover anything new besides the new statistic breakdown.”

“Sure.” Windi got up to leave. “Wait, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I’ve got a gaming party tonight, lots of crèche people coming. You interested?”

Onway didn’t really enjoy parties much.

“Come on, it’ll be fun. We’re doing an episode of the Nibelungen! You can’t not love that.”

“Is that an immersive and would that be set on Earth?” Onway asked.

“Wow, you’re a cultural barbarian. But yes and yes. So you’ll come?”

“I will. Send me the location. And thanks!”

That was her second goal for today sorted. An Earth-based immersive. She’d do a mood assessment before and afterwards. Good. Before she forgot, she whipped out her self-assessor and filled in the questions. She was feeling pretty good, although slightly flustered from all the decision and personal interaction. But that was normal for her. She checked out the cafe’s surroundings. An Earthy vibe, vaguely reminiscent of a thousand coffee shops from movies and games. The flowering hakka outside made it picturesque.

She upped the sunscreen on her suit and put up a foil umbrella for the walk to the hop stop. As she walked through the hakka, reaching about to her shoulders, she thought about the foolishness of human beings. When the ships first landed, the colonists had razed the hakka all over their prospected city site, so they could plant Earthlike shrubs and crops. The sun had killed them all. Now everyone was growing hakka again, for its wonderful shade, the mist of moisture that hung around it, the sheer joy of pink leaves and green flowers. But it would be generations before the hakka were as tall again as they had been. Foolishness.

It was only midday, but already she’d accomplished a lot. Socialized, work goals. Not bad for someone teetering on the edge of a depression. She didn’t feel like resting yet. What she wanted to do most of all was talk to another professional about Erdenweh. The most obvious choice would be her supervisor.

Onway made the call. Galilea being who she was, she picked up at the first ring and answered with her always warm and chipper voice.

“Of course, my dear Onway! For you I will always make time, isn’t that what supervisors are for? “

“Galilea, I have a patient with Erdenweh. I’ve found lots of conflicting material about that. Do you know anything about it? Have you encountered it?”

A long silence ensued. Finally Galilea spoke. “I had to think about the ethics for a moment. But yes, I have several patients with Erdenweh. I, too, have searched for recommended treatments but have been stumped to find good material.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about the patients, anything that might help me?” Onway went on.

“All patients are either still in the middle of treatment with no clear path to success yet or have terminated treatment.”

“Terminated how?” Onway asked.

“Found another therapist, one, by death, two.”

“Suicides?”

“Yes.”

Onway could sympathize with Galilea’s reluctance. It was never fun to admit you’d failed.

“What treatments were used?” Onway asked.

“Systemic therapy, trance writing, LSD, cognitive therapy . . . I would recommend against the latter. This mood disorder is not reachable by cognitive therapy. The usual drugs didn’t work either. I referred one of them to a psychiatrist licensed to prescribe. We’re in the beginning stages of identifying this new disease. We probably should start systematic trials.”

Onway nodded. “We should.”

She knew enough. Galilea had her finger in every therapist pie the planet had to offer. Her peers had not reached consensus about the origins and treatment of the disease, at least not here on Nueva Esperanza. Onway would have to find a solution, or at least the start to one, herself.

Onway found the game hall Windi and his friends rented. She introduced herself to Windi’s game group and got a quick intro into the game. She’d be playing a beginner’s version integrated with the rest of the group, who were all masters in this particular Game.

Onway settled herself in the booth, donned helmet and gloves, and connected. She chose the basic outfit for the game, seeing no point in spending time on wardrobe and avatar when she’d only be trying this once.

Windi sent her a message. “The best forest I have found here, because a lot of the game is in cities or oceans or castles, is the Teutoburger Forest. But your life will still be in danger. Best go as a German, all the Romans were killed.”

Onway had no idea what he was talking about, but Windi included some good pointers and gifted her with magical shields and something called a Tarn. All right. As for the avatar, tall, flaxen-haired warrior maiden was the cheapest choice available.

She found herself in a dark green forest, all hushed and empty. The light was cooler here, the temperature lower. Onway liked it. Briefly she tried to remember if Germany was anywhere near Holland, where one of her gene donors had come from, but she couldn’t remember. Better focus on the game.

As she walked, the moss underfoot squished pleasantly, and the game even managed an odor. She didn’t know if she liked it or not. It was vegetative, yeah, but not like anything she knew. It reminded her mostly of bathroom freshener. Her mood stayed the same, slightly frustrated, not quite caught up by the game. Maybe she ought to immerse herself deeper in, to reap the potential benefits of nature. She picked a direction. She was ready to encounter a foe or a village.

She concentrated on the Earth experience. She sniffed a branch, rubbed its rough skin against her cheek.

A burning pain pierced her body. She toppled backwards. The last thing she saw was a sleek bronze-pointed spear protruding from her sternum.

Onway tore her immersion helmet off and stomped off to the cafeteria. Her breastbone hurt, even though she knew it was psychosomatic. What a terrible game for experiencing Earth nature. It wasn’t really geared up for anything but killing or being killed. Windi didn’t seem to be a very trustworthy guide in game land.

An hour later Windi came out, flushed and happy. “Hey, I couldn’t find you! Did you have fun?”

“Not really,” Onway said. She’d managed to let go of her anger during several cups of green tea. “I don’t think this was the right game for my purpose. Is there anything less violent, more suitable to enjoying nature?”

“You didn’t like it? I though the forest was very well-rendered. Of course, they use actual footage of Earth as well.”

“I got killed by a spear through the heart about five minutes in,” Onway said, trying not to let the anger well back up. “The sensory experience was minimal, mostly visual. My mood didn’t really get a lift from this, but that might have been because of annoyance.”

Windi grimaced. “Sorry. Maybe you therapists should develop your own game, some Nature Experience thing. For people to meditate to.”

Onway was pretty sure she’d tried most meditation apps already. Some of them had comparable depth of experience to the History Game, but she’d never noticed any great effect before.

Or maybe the eyes weren’t the key to nature’s soothing effect. Otherwise you could just change your wallpaper to a restful Earth vista. The nose might be a more likely prospect. Or touch.

What should her next steps be? Nueva Esperanza had a Botanical Garden, which scientists had planted from Earth seeds in a separate climate- and gravity-controlled dome. She could still fit that in today.

She arrived an hour before final admission. The first sniff of garden air told her that something was different. To her eyes, the Botanical Garden didn’t look that different from the Game, but her nose, her skin, the soles of her feet told a different story. The extra layer of realness created a greater intensity than she’d expected. She couldn’t identify the many new smells, but she loved them. As if something inside her had already known about them.

Even the gravity was easy to adjust to, far easier than she remembered from her one trip to one of the habitats in orbit. How could this be? She’d been decanted and raised right here on Nueva Esperanza, she’d never been to Earth.

Her suit pinged. “Safe environment detected. Do you want me to turn off?”

Onway looked up at the dome. It was painted so the sky looked blue instead of green and clouds scudded gently overhead. Like in a painting or a movie.

“Sure,” she said.

The feeling on her skin intensified. A waft of air caressed her like a lover’s hand. It was perfumed ever so gently, but so effectively that she couldn’t help but breathe in deeply. Such a good smell. What was it? She’d always thought rain on hakka smelled nice, but this was that same goodness multiplied a thousand times.

She imagined receptors in her nose waking up and getting to work for the first time ever. They must be overjoyed at finally getting a snootful of the right stuff. Because this was the right stuff, no doubt about it.

The Botanical Garden Knowledge Guide suggested taking a walk around the garden. Thrilled and delirious with new sensations, Onway agreed without even thinking about it. Setting one foot in front of the other, with no suit on, no gravitational dampers, was simply amazing. She wanted this at home. Her arms swung higher than usual, her breasts bounced gently, her hair ruffled in the breeze, happy to be touched.

The grass shone so green and looked so much more inviting than the living carpet she had at home, that also called itself grass. The carpet was the shadow on the cave wall, this was the real fire.

She forced herself to call up some stats. Science first, enjoyment later. The Botanical Garden sent out a quarterly review that, besides excited blogs about budding blooms, complained constantly about lack of funding and lack of volunteers. Species of bugs, worms, and other animal life: 145. Species of plants: 451. Fungi: 43. What did she need to know? It wasn’t her field, so it was hard to interpret the data. But even if you weren’t a biologist or ecologist, the list seemed pretty sparse on the non-plant side. So how were Earth plants thriving in this alien environment?

She leafed through more bubbly quarterlies, and the repetition of the item “restocking” became apparent. The yearly financial reports stated that as the biggest expenditure after personnel. Now she was ready to ask the head gardener, or whatever one called such a person in an extraterrestrial academic setting, some questions. Onway found Botanic Garden Director Choi in her office, busy but willing to talk to Onway as a fellow scientist.

Onway put some thought into the phrasing of her first question. “How well do you think Earth organisms are thriving on this planet?”

The director sat up straighter. “Excellent question,” she said. “We keep restocking the failing species, and we import soil from the relevant ecological areas. We started out with an eclectic selection of regions, to show Earth in its diversity like Earth-based botanic gardens do. But it got too expensive, and we needed to charge the ecological load more heavily. But my personal opinion? It’s not working, it’s never going to work. For all our knowledge, we still don’t have a complete picture of the cooperation between animal, plant, and fungal kingdoms. We will always miss some crucial species, either because they died out in the Great Extinction last century, or because we just don’t know about their vital role.”

“So do you have any animals except bugs and worms? I didn’t see any. Like birds?” Onway dug deep in her childhood memories. “Toads? Badgers?”

Mx. Choi laughed hollowly. “We got a donation of two rabbits and two pigeons. Talking about hardy species that everybody kind of expected to overrun the environment. We had extinction-level diseases ready for them. But they just grew weak and listless and died. Maybe we should have tried rats.”

“So no bigger animals of any kind?”

Choi shook her head. “Even if we got funds for them, I refuse to bring in any more animals. It would be cruelty.”

Onway leaned forward. “What about humans? Aren’t we a kind of animal?”

Choi crossed her arms. “Ah. That’s what you’re really here for. Well, I’m not specialized in human beings and their ecology, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we were failing and dying just like the animals.”

“Why? We’re not in symbiosis with any animals, are we? I mean we have cats and dogs. I should probably look into how those are doing, too.”

“You’re wrong about the symbiosis,” Choi says. “We humans are in partnership with an enormous population of bacteria, in our gut, on our skin, we even have mites on our eyelashes. We aren’t a singular species, no vertebrate is. We contain multitudes, and those are failing. Did you know that the first-ever batch of colonists died because we scrubbed them too clean? That was the Greendream expedition.

“Now we know better. There’s a heredity tree for the colonists. They were selected, among other things, for gut biome diversity. I know crèche babies get a bath in vaginal bacteria, and doses of breast milk cultures in their food. I think there must be someone doing regular checkups and adding to the biome heredity tracker. Because we know it’s important. But yeah, I’m afraid we’re going to go the way of the rabbits. Eventually.”

“I think I’m starting to get somewhere,” Onway said. “Thanks so much for your help!”

“My pleasure.” Choi said. “Otherwise I just sit here and watch living things die. Let me know if you get any results, will you? I’d love to hear about it.”

“I loved being here. The smell is wonderful.”

Choi snorted. “You should visit Earth, a real wild environment. That doesn’t just have nice smells, like grass and flowers and petrichor, but also lots of stinks, fungi, decaying plants, dead animals, excrement in thousand variations. Then you get a real smell, a full, layered, earthy smell. The result of millions of years of decay and excrement saturating the soil and the air.”

Maybe Choi didn’t realize how un-idyllic, and quite frankly gross, she made Earth sound.

Choi walked Onway to the exit, chatting about her work at the Botanical Garden. “By the way, did you read that study someone on Earth did about the failure to recreate Earth’s large mammals after the Great Extinction? It’s called the Jurassic Park syndrome, God knows why. Meaning, you can reconstitute a living creature from eggs and cleverly combined DNA, but without a herd of cows to mother a calf, without the culture of cows that the mother and the herd should have given it, it will never become a successful cow, it will always remain psychotic and depressed and will die young? I think there’s a footnote about crèche babies on colony worlds. It predicts wide scale murders and suicides. Hahaha! Bye.”

Onway staggered to the bus stop, reeling from Choi’s offhand remark. Dying biomes and Jurassic Park syndrome. Which of them was killing people, or did they both contribute? Did this mean that crèche kids were unsuccessful cows? Not fully human, incapable of being human? She didn’t want to believe it.

She was long back on the bus when she realized maybe Choi had offered her a chance at friendship or more, but she’d been so unsettled about the Jurassic Park remark that she hadn’t reacted. She hadn’t even asked Choi’s first name. God, she was always so slow at these things in her personal life. With her patients she’d have been on it like a fly on ointment. What was even a fly? Or ointment?

Back home, she called Windi back at once. She knew only yesterday she would have postponed it, maybe even for days. Was she healing, and if so, what had caused it? Her visit to the Garden, or the gaming? Or the act of being outside, walking, seeing people? All of those things could mitigate depression.

“Windi? It’s me, Onway. Can you access a thing called the biome heredity tracking database? You could add that to any comparisons you make between crèche and natural birth people. Call me. Bye.”

But actually, that would point to decanted children being more vulnerable to depression and diseases since they lacked the full protection of vaginal birth and mother’s milk flora. Because she worked in the crèche for years, as well as growing up there, she knew that rules and regulations were followed if possible, but funds, resources, and time weren’t always available. So how often had she really had a dose of mother’s milk flora? Grown, as Choi had said, from volunteer donations? And did those really work the same as actual mother’s milk?

She noted down the leads she should follow up on. But first she was going to read that Jurassic Park article. It was a good read, but there was no footnote about crèche babies. Maybe it was only Choi who made that jump. Maybe an ecologist didn’t view human beings as unique creatures but just another species of mammal. And the crèche babies had had human caregivers and many robots and AI to fill the gap of human cultural transfer.

There was something else. Onway replayed the last things Choi had said. No, not the Jurassic Park mention, she already tracked that down. Oh, there it was. That casual remark about real smells. That without death and decay it wasn’t real. Something about it triggered a nascent thought, but she couldn’t put her finger on it yet.

Windi called. “Not only does our institute have a subscription to that database, but also there have been several studies done on the evolution of the colonial gut biome.”

“And?”

“It’s more of a devolution. Every time there’s a cross (that’s a baby, in your language), they hoped for a mixing of strains, creating new and viable offspring, but instead the variety has gone down in the second generation. The third and fourth generations are worse. It’s not looking good. I can feel my guts churning. I know that’s my imagination, but it’s also a nasty feeling about the future of NE. Or any colony.”

No, discovering that you were part of a test population wasn’t particularly fun. “And anything about differences between crèche and naturally born children?”

“Yes. They knew they were taking a risk in decanting children, the bastards, so they tested every decanted baby. Our results are worse.”

Onway swallowed. It was one thing to have concluded that raising batches of children in crèches wasn’t a good thing after the fact. But that the colonial foremothers had suspected something like this might happen made it many times worse. So cold and calculating. As if crèche children weren’t real humans. Unsuccessful cows her ass.

“Weren’t they worried about the future of their colony? “

“They assumed, and I quote ‘Natural breeding would overtake the feebler vitality of the artificially raised children.’”

“Fuckers.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m almost feeling vindicated that the descendants of the fuckers are having trouble with lack of vitality themselves,” Onway said.

She told Windi about her talk with Choi and the woman’s somber predictions about the viability of Earth life on strange planets.

“What’s the next step?” she said. Her newfound sense of purpose had left her, and she was tired and headachy. It was great to have found the culprit for Erdenweh, but realizing the inevitability of the terrible outcome drained any sense of victory.

“Me and some of the gamers, who are crèche kids just like us, pooled our resources and we hired an AI to do a query on the data we can gather. The job’s queued.”

“Okay. Call me when you get some. I found out some things, but I’m beat.”

Onway got into bed with a snack. She was going to need Teddy again tonight.

Onway woke with a clear head and more energy than she’d had in days. Somewhere in the basement of her brain something was brewing. She knew to leave it alone and let the thoughts stew beneath a surface stream of routine actions.

She arrived at the crèche earlier than usual and almost gagged at the musty odors. She arrived before the cleaners, and a day and a night of children playing, pooping, peeing, vomiting, and eating has left an aroma which Choi might call layered and earthy. A real stench.

The thought arrived with a pop and a flash. That was it. Why hadn’t she seen that before? The crèche was dirty. Deeply filthy, with layers and layers of insufficient cleaning, built up over decades. Children never washed their hands well enough, and there were never enough carers to make sure they did. A layer of old poop and snot and saliva and every possible bodily fluid covered the crèche.

That had to be the reason these children had less Erdenweh. Their gut flora and other symbionts replenished themselves continuously in the gentle cloud of effluvia that floated around in the building, embedded in the cutlery and the pots and pans, the sheets, the hand-me-down clothes.

On Earth people lived in a soup of organic molecules present everywhere, in the air, the soil, the wind, the seas, the rivers. The colonists arrived scrubbed clean on a world empty of not only humans, but of the billions of years of human evolution, billions of years where trillions of creatures lived and shat and died.

Here on Nueva Esperanza there was nothing yet. Clean, printed houses. Automated cleaning robots. Recycle your clothing and print new ones. Everything sterile.

Except here, in the richly dirty and chaotic surroundings of the crèche. Deprivation never tasted so sweet.

A sleepy, grubby child stumbled by on its way to the toilet.

Onway bent down to hug it. “You’re the best thing I’ve seen all day!” She smacked a kiss on its grubby cheek. Grow, microbes, grow, migrate to my gut, regulate my moods, make me able to withstand the vagaries of my life.

Filth. Who knew it could be so beautiful?

About the Author

Bo Balder is the first Dutch author to have been published in Clarkesworld and F&SF. Her short fiction has also appeared in Escape Pod and other places. Her SF novel The Wan was recently published by Pink Narcissus Press.

The Peppers of GreenScallion

Myung-hoon Bae
translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar

Chaeeunshinji was seventeen, and I was thirteen. Just going by years alone, she was way older than me, but that kind of comparison didn’t really mean much: the planet where Chaeeunshinji was from and the one where I came from each had slightly different rotational and sidereal periods, so that the relative lengths of days and years on those worlds worked out to be just different enough to be confusing.

“Well, technically I’m in my late teens, but you’re just a little kid, so officially I’m your big sister.”

“But who would go by that? If you count by wake-sleep cycles, I’ve lived longer than you!”

“Okay, fine, let’s count it up exactly, right now. Then we’ll see who comes out on top, night or day . . . ”

“Okay—knight and dame, let’s try . . . ”

“Try what? No, no, don’t explain it; that always kills a joke. Just forget it, okay? Let’s just calculate it today, and do it right. No giving up halfway along again, alright? Now, what was your planet’s rotation period?”

“Uh, wait a sec, I wrote that down someplace.”

“You dummy! You don’t even know its rotation period? Even if you only ever heard it once, you should’ve been able to remember it.”

“I told you last time—you wouldn’t be able to remember it either, if you only heard it once.”

Whenever the adults were away working in their labs, Chaeeunshinji and I always returned to our ceaseless war. We were both the type who’d rather die than lose an argument, and our clashes almost always continued until the grown-ups came back home after finishing their daily work.

Sometimes they’d watch us fight like that for a while, and then they used to say stuff like: “Is it really so fun, that you two always stick together like that, jabbering at each other all day long? Don’t you kids ever get tired of it?”

“Well, he’s always talking crap about my name.”

“Like what?”

“He keeps joking about how he can’t tell where my family name ends and my given name begins. And he keeps calling me ‘Eunshinji’!”

Shinji, Eunshinji, Chaeeunshinji. I couldn’t say how old each of us had gotten while we were back on the worlds we’d lived on before coming here, but here in our new home, on this planet that was named GreenScallion, we’d both aged exactly three years, not a day more or less . . . and we’d spent every single one of those days at war with each other, without even a single day off. And we went on like that, too, right up until the war broke out.

Actually, the war had nothing to do with us, not really. It happened mostly out in space, so we never saw any sign of the actual fighting, nothing at all. For us, everything just went on as usual. But one day, sometime in the afternoon, the executive director of my mom’s research center dropped by our house and notified us that a war had broken out. After that, things seemed to change, little by little. That was because suddenly there were things like which people we could talk to, and which we shouldn’t; which place we could go, and which place we must never go. In other words, we had a kind of front line to the war right inside our village. The lines were on a map, but they weren’t actually there on the ground. They were the lines that didn’t really exist, except as words someone had said.

And Chaeeunshinji’s house was on far side of that stupid line.

“Can’t I go and see her?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No, just for a while.”

That was the new rule my mom handed down to me: no more meeting up with Chaeeunshinji and fighting all day long. To me, that was what the war really meant: separating us so we couldn’t fight anymore. As for how the war was going, well, things got more and more serious every day. Attack ships appeared, flying under the clouds. With loud noise and their fancy glittering lights flashing, those tiny dots flew slowly over our heads. Whenever evening fell, every single grownup looked up in that direction and talked about all kinds of things with worried expressions:

“Like the rumors said . . . they must’ve dispatched attack ships that can fly inside the atmosphere.”

“That’s a huge deal! The war front could expand planetside, couldn’t it?”

“No, not really. We don’t even have a single attack ship on our side, so it’s not like the war front is expanding, it’s more a case of a single attack ship being capable of conquering us all here.”

“So then . . . what? Should we attack it?”

“What? No, we just surrender. We’re not soldiers or war prisoners, so nothing much will happen to us.”

The director of our research center freaked out; he got really upset when he heard that word, surrender, but no one else really cared.

What the grown-ups were worried about was that the fight going on out in space would spread down onto the planet. In fact, where we were living, there was no chance that any of us would even see actual soldiers or weapons: given the insane amount of energy required to enter and exit our atmosphere, those soldiers weren’t planning to fight any battles inside GreenScallion’s gravity-well.

However, the story would change as soon as an attack ship flew inside the atmosphere; supposedly because the kind of weapons they use in space are unimaginably scary.

What bothered me was how everyone suddenly started calling that dot in the sky our “enemy.” Did that mean that those scary weapons were gonna swoop right down over our heads and blow up just our research centers, but leave Chaeeunshinji’s centers untouched? If they wanted to destroy anything, they’d have to destroy them all at once, wouldn’t they? Even just thinking about that made me feel so damn bad.

Luckily, none of that stuff happened in real life.

There was a technician named Mr. Dallu who came back to our village a couple of months after the war started. He was the one who updated us on how the war was going. He roared with laughter after he saw the grown-ups staring up into the sky and muttering worried comments to one another.

“Aw, that stuff’s all fake,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“How can we not worry? I can’t get any work done at all, seeing that thing floating around up there like that. The engine’s so loud when it flies over us! I can’t just pretend I can’t hear that noise.”

“That noise—that’s what I’m saying is fake! That noise is fake! Look, I lived on one of their military outposts about a decade ago. In fact, that’s what I did over there . . . ”

“Building warships for them? What the hell, are you bullshitting us?”

“No, wait, I didn’t say I built their attack ships. I’m saying I installed those noise generators on them. The volume output was really incredible! I mean, back then I actually wondered why they wanted me to install that kind of gear on their warships. But now I know why. Why they didn’t bother to install any weapons, just an audio system. You guys are already shaking with fear, just from that sound. I’m pretty sure their attack ships couldn’t even handle a payload like a proper weapon. I mean, if you looked closely at it, it’d look kind of off somehow, wouldn’t it? I’d bet it’s never even come any lower to the ground than it is now, either, has it?”

“Well, that’s . . . ”

“See? Just ignore it. Just go on doing whatever you used to do, business as usual, because I’m telling you, nothing’s happening here.”

“Their homeworld might send out another military vessel as backup.”

“You mean a landing ship? And what exactly would they achieve by dropping down into the atmosphere? Do you see anyplace worth conquering around here?”

“But . . . ”

“But what? Do you know how much it costs to send a single military vessel all down here like that? This is a fight to take over the planet, sure, but it’s not fight over our piddly little research center. There’s no point for them to send around any kind of serious deployment like that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! Listen to that noise. It’s real scary, isn’t it? Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not an engine sound. I’ve never heard a single engine that sounded anything like that in my whole life. It’s not an engine. They’re pumping that sound out on purpose. Sure, it’s loud, but that thing’s gotta be empty. All you’re hearing is vibrations in the air, no different from the sound of the wind.”

Suddenly, from that moment, all our stress miraculously disappeared, and we returned to our calm routine. Of course, every evening that attack ship hovered just beneath the clouds, emitting that deafening sound at us, and I still was forbidden to meet and squabble with Chaeeunshinji, but at least I never saw anyone around me shivering in terror anymore.

In fact, on some days, you even could hear laughter and occasionally singing inside the research center. Not that the war was over yet: like Mr. Dallu said, nothing military happened, no attack ships descending down into the atmosphere toward us, but, even indirectly, the war still affected all of us.

The real meaning of the war, for me, was what I saw on Chaeeunshinji’s face when I ran into her on the street one day, just out of blue. Without a word, her expression warned: Don’t talk to me. I’m not supposed to talk to you. Silently, I mouthed the single word I wanted to ask her: Why? I knew what she was supposed to say to me then, just like she always had—“Dummy, don’t you know?”—but instead Chaeeunshinji said nothing. That, for me, that was how her silent face became a symbol for the war.

By then, the planet was totally shut down: the two armies had managed to utterly cut us off. What I mean is, there was no way for supply ships to get in or out. And since there was nothing growing on the planet that human beings could harvest for food, cutting off supply shipments also meant the prospect of going hungry.

“So how are we supposed to live like this? Don’t they need to evacuate us?” said one of the grown-ups.

Then the executive director’s secretary replied, “Well, it’s not that simple. We aren’t just civilians: we’re important personnel here, so evacuation’s not going to be possible for now. Still, it looks like there’s a supply ship headed our way soon. That said, it obviously won’t be a big one.”

“Are they trying to make the supply drop with a small ship? It’s not like there’s fewer of us here than before. How are we supposed to get by if they only send a smaller supply ship? D’you think they’re even trying to send us enough for, like, war rations or whatever?”

“Well, the director looked into that, and apparently they’re trying to send multiple small, self-piloting ships. That way, what we’ll receive will be sufficient for wartime rationing.”

“Self-piloting? Those little things? If they’re trying to send the same amount of cargo as before, in such little ships, it’s going to increase costs exponentially! Are they really going to do that? Won’t they just end up cutting back on how many supplies they send? We’ve got kids here . . . what are we supposed to do?”

“Well, that’s what they’re offering, despite the elevated cost. I guess we have no choice. For now, we need to trust them . . . and besides, there’s really no other option. I mean, what can we do if they refuse us? Of course, we definitely should request evacuation if things become more serious, but it’s really not at that point yet, here.”

“What’re you talking about? Things already are serious.”

The next morning, the director got a transmission with the schedule and rationing plans for our wartime supply shipments. All things considered, the menu wasn’t really so bad. Not that they were delivering cooked meals, of course: the idea was that they’d calculate the necessary ingredients for each meal we’d be having, and then deliver all of that once a month. Organic photosynthetic vegetables, livestock mammal meats, five different kinds of cheese, Earth-styled grain flours, and fruit and seafood raised on zero-g farms: nothing but the best . . . in other words, stuff like they eat back on Earth. They even included wine and beer on the list, and desserts like cakes and puddings. Our director even joked that we might even end up eating better than usual, if things went according to plan.

Unfortunately, though, things didn’t go according to plan. Honestly, the wartime supply system was a complete mess. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t send us the stuff, or what they sent; the problem was how they sent it, and when it arrived. For example, the zero-g farm that produced the seafood was close to GreenScallion, so on the day when it came, it was pretty fresh, and was just as much as the supply manifest specified. Except . . . that was all we got: a month’s worth of seafood.

Then, on another random day, the grain flours came. Just the flours. Then, another day, the fruit, and on another, the meat. Everything came, just like they promised, but it all came separately.

You might think we could’ve just put it into storage and started eating it, but it wasn’t so simple as that. To start storing up stuff, we had to cut back on what we were eating, so there’d be some left until the next shipment . . . and that was what we did. By setting aside a little bit here and a little bit there, we figured that over time we might pack our larder with a balanced mix of ingredients. Eventually, though, when the only thing that arrived was a month’s ration of beer, we couldn’t help but start to worry. After all, it’s not like we could survive on beer alone.

When we complained, the director said, “Look, it’s because they couldn’t gather all the ingredients together—so instead they sent what they did have on hand as quickly as they could. Besides, the supply ships are so small that they couldn’t package everything together anyway. There’s no choice but to make do with frequent, multiple shipments . . . ”

“I don’t care what the reasons are,” snapped Mr. Dallu. “Who the hell thought they should send this crap to us this way? I’d like a look at the face of the jerk they have calling the shots on this.”

In a lot of ways, it was an exhausting time. We never knew what shipment might come in next, or whether we might find ourselves suddenly cut off completely, so we ended up having to make it our top priority to store and save up food, no matter what.

Then a shipment of meat arrived.

And then, another shipment of meat.

And then, two weeks later—yet another shipment of meat.

We ran out of beer, and then vegetables, and then fruit, and finally when we were down to having almost nothing else, we just started eating meat alone, every day, twice a day. For a while after that, we really had nothing else to eat but meat.

Finally, about ten days later, the next supply ship we’d been awaiting finally arrived—

—carrying nothing but fresh pork.

“Come on, Director, how long are we supposed to scrape by like this?” shouted Mr. Dallu. “Can’t we just submit a request for evacuation?” Of course he was the first to blow his stack about it.

Everyone in the research center looked over at the director, who calmly said, “Let’s hang in there just a little longer. The upper administration must be considering our situation seriously. It’s just that we research personnel are the only population on this damned planet. If we’re evacuated, that means their research team will be the only people left here, and that means they’ll exceed the required 80% minimum of population share required to stake a colony-claim on world. I’m not saying we ought to stake a claim on the planet, you know, just that we can’t let them claim it. We need to stay so that it can remain unclaimed, and open to exploration, just like it is right now.”

“Okay, fine, fine. Still, do me a favor and tell off the bastard who arranged these damned shipments. Don’t take this lying down! What good does that do us? Just curse ’em a fucking blue streak, okay?!”

As the war continued, the grown-ups kept on doing what they’d always been doing. Actually, there wasn’t really much else for them to do anyway.

War is so boring. When all the grown-ups went to work, I had to spend the whole day all alone. Out of all the research families on our side, there were six other kids around my age, but I didn’t really like hanging out with most of them. Sure, later on I found that it was actually them who had started avoided me first. Probably, I guess, because unlike me, all their parents were part of the research team.

My mom, on the other hand, was a hairstylist. A terrible hairstylist—and the only one in the whole research complex. When people grumbled at her about the haircuts she gave them, she used to say, “I’m sorry! My training is actually in zero-grav hairstyling, so . . . when I’m styling hair under gravity, I guess I have two left thumbs. Someday I want to open a hair shop at an orbital junction, and when I do, please drop by and I’ll give you a fabulous new hairstyle for free!”

All of that was actually true: Mom had been a popular hairstylist, back on the spaceships and junctions. She’d actually had been so famous that she’d usually cut the hair of celebrities and famous people. But nobody at the research center cared about all that. It’s not like I was exactly discriminated against because of my mom’s job, but somehow I never felt very close with all of the scientists’ kids, and I always felt left out.

I took to wandering the borderline alone. It only appeared on maps, and yet it blocked my way forward just as surely as an invisible wall. A few grown-ups teased me, asking, “You planning to go into exile?” I didn’t even know what that word meant.

Wait a sec, I thought to myself. Chaeeunshinji’s parents were both researchers too. Why did I end up hanging out with her, and fighting all the time whenever we met?

I picked up my binoculars and squatted down somewhere near the borderline. Staring through my binoculars, I slowly scanned Chaeeunshinji’s research center, the front yard of her house, the roof. I wondered how she doing. Had she found herself someone else to squabble with every day?

Shinji, Eunshinji, Chaeshinji, Chaeeunshinji. I murmured her name softly to myself as I spied on the other side of the borderline for what felt like a pretty long time. At some point, I finally discovered a suspicious-looking shadow hidden behind a tree on the roof of their research center. There was another kid hiding behind that tree, like some kind of spy, and I could make out a pair of binoculars sticking out from the hiding spot. At that moment, the kid’s binoculars suddenly turned toward me. I had no time to look away, so suddenly I met that other kid’s eyes. Well, I mean, our binoculars met.

What’re you doing, Eunshinji?

Chaeeunshinji made the first move, waving at me across that borderline. I followed suit, waving back at her. And that was it: nothing else happened that day. When it got dark, Chaeeunshinji marched back toward her house, keeping her posture the same and even holding those binoculars over her eyes all the way. I did the same thing . . . well, except I didn’t do anything weird like walking around with binoculars in front of my eyes.

The next day, I went back to that spot with my binoculars. It took about ten minutes before Chaeeunshinji showed up, and then she opened up this huge sketchbook and showed me what she’d written inside it beforehand.

—HEY, SPY! I HEARD YOU GUYS HAVE NOTHING TO EAT. WE’VE GOT TONS!

Then she held up a peach and took a big huge bite out of it. Sweet-looking juice dripped down from her hand onto the ground at her feet.

Wow . . . fruit!

I went back home and got myself a lamb chop. After days of nothing but meat, I felt sick just looking at it, but hurried back to that spot again and, while Chaeeunshinji watched, I devoured the whole thing, and then licked my fingers clean afterward. Not because I actually enjoyed it, of course: I just wanted to see the look on Chaeeunshinji’s face. But all I could see was those binoculars in front of her face, and so eventually I just went back home.

That evening, when I told my mom about the story, she tilted her head and said, “That’s weird. They have to be dealing with the same kinds of stuff we are . . . what makes you think they’re doing better than us?”

“But Eunshinji said they have a lot to eat over there.”

“For kids who hit puberty so long ago, you two sure are a pair of little brats. Think about it: what did you tell her? ‘We’ve got nothing to eat, can you share some of what you have with us?’ Is that what you said?”

“No, of course, not!”

“There you go! You and Chaeeunshinji, you two punks are exactly the same: neither of you can stand to accept anything from the other, if it means giving up a little bit on winning. How in the world are you two going to turn out when you grow up?”

The next day, I took a pork leg with me, and a solar-powered grill, and cooked it while Chaeeunshinji watched. I grilled up the leg and then I ate it, piece by piece, really, really slowly. I wasn’t taking my time on purpose: I couldn’t help it, because as much as I pretended that it was totally delicious, I really didn’t want to eat it at all. Chaeeunshinji stared at me for more than an hour as I ate it, never once lowering her binoculars.

Finally, it was Chaeeunshinji’s turn. From a distance, it looked like she had half a ripe red watermelon with her, and she finally set down her binoculars and spent almost the whole next hour eating the thing, just as slowly as I’d eaten my pork leg.

I wrote a huge message on a page of my sketchbook and then held it up toward her so she could see it.

—SO WHAT? THAT’S NOT EVEN MEAT, IT’S JUST A STUPID WATERMELON.

Chaeeunshinji looked over through her binoculars for a second, but then she ignored me and went back to eating the watermelon with this arrogant look on her face. I sat there, gaping and dazzled. She looked so elegant, even when she was just spitting out watermelon seeds onto the ground. Finally, she finished eating her half-watermelon without breaking her absolutely perfect poise, with not a single thing out of place, from the way she sat, to the movements of her fingertips. Then, I guess feeling bloated, she lay down on the roof of the building.

That made me burst out laughing, and watching Chaeeunshinji closely through my binoculars, I could see her shoulders shaking. I swear I could almost hear her laughing then—that familiar, distant sound of Eunshinji’s chuckling suddenly just as close and clear as if she were sitting right next to me. Then I lay down on the ground too, and though we were far apart, it felt like we were laying down together, staring up into the same big sky above us, until we both drifted off into a nap.

A couple of days later, the next supply ship came. This time, it was completely loaded with seafood.

“Are there any leaves, anything green?” asked Mr. Dallu impatiently. “Maybe some seaweed, even, dried or fresh?”

“No, nothing like that. Just clams, squid, tuna, and stuff like that . . . some other kinds of fish.”

That evening, they held a meeting at the research center auditorium. Many grown-ups, including Mr. Dallu, insisted that we ought to request evacuation, regardless of anything else.

“Think about the kids,” someone said, and everyone turned and looked over at us. I put on a really sad face. When they saw me do that, some of the lady researchers giggled at me.

But the director just yelled at everyone, his face stern: “I told you, we can never do that!” Everyone just looked away when he did that, and he went on: “Folks, let’s just try to make it work a little longer. I’ve already explained to you plenty of times why we need to hang in there. This planet hasn’t even been fully explored yet! It’s not ready to become anyone’s territory yet! If we leave, other people will come here, to this spot. We have to keep up with them—that other research team, I mean. They’re not so different from us, are they? I’m not even hoping they give up and leave, either: I just want both sides to see this through till the end.”

Everyone went silent, then, and suddenly seemed lost in thought.

A moment later, though, Mr. Dallu broke the silence: “We are hanging in there. We all know exactly what you mean, it’s just that we can’t handle this anymore. You can’t just tell us to hang in there and make do with what we have. We want to eat vegetables, leaves. We’re not nomads, we’re all going to get sick from vitamin deficiencies. If you don’t think fainting is a problem, how about constipation? Have you thought about that? Nobody’s saying anything now, but I’m sure we’re all suffering from it.”

“Yes, of course,” said the director, “But even so, we can’t give up now. Think about it. They must be suffering just as badly as we are, right? But they’re handling it so well. If we give up first, then it makes everything they’re suffering through amount to nothing, too, right? When you think about it that way, don’t you think we owe it to them to try hold on just a little longer?”

At that, everyone started talking, their voices growing louder and louder. I plugged my ears. Of course, that didn’t block out everything, but I was lost in another thought, and suddenly I wasn’t hearing or seeing anything around me anymore.

That is, until mom suddenly jumped to her feet and shouted so loudly that everyone heard her: “Why don’t we trade?”

Then everyone turned and looked at Mom.

“What?” blurted Mr. Dallu.

Mom replied, “You said they’re basically like us, and that our goals are pretty much the same, right? Well, then we can just exchange food! Some of what they have, for some of what we have.”

“Well, that would be wonderful,” Mr. Dallu responded. “But you know that’s not going to happen. Just look at how they’ve been acting since the war started. They canceled all the joint research projects and even scrubbed the accumulated data. Look at me, even: when the war broke out, they were the ones who insisted I leave. It’s not like we wanted any of that. They were the ones who first started acting like the war was between our two groups.”

“They’re not the only ones, though. We did too,” my mom countered “Look at us. As soon as that attack ship showed up, we put a complete stop to all free movement here, didn’t we? Even the shared facilities! We locked them up first, so that they couldn’t use them, even though we weren’t planning on using them at all either. We can’t just pretend that none of that happened and try to go back to the way it was before.”

“No, we can’t—because it did happen. Obviously it happened. And now we can’t go back to the way it was before.”

The next morning, I got my binoculars and sketchbook and went over by the borderline again. Then I wrote a message to Chaeeunshinji:

—WE CAN TRADE FOOD. MY MOM SAID SO.

Chaeeunshinji wrote a response in her own sketchbook.

—DID I MAKE YOU JEALOUS? YOU WANT SOME FRUIT? BEG FOR IT. COME ON, SAY, PLEEEEEASE, BIG SIS.

—ARE YOU NUTS???

—YOU WANT SOME FRUIT? I DON’T WANT MEAT SO BAD, SO I DON’T WANNA TRADE, REALLY.

—WELL THEN NEITHER DO I.

But that day, we did end up trading some of our rations. Finally, for the first time in months, I got to see Chaeeunshinji up close.

“Eunshinji, you look taller!”

“Of course, we’ve been eating so well.”

“Well, you’re taller, but you’re also so skinny. If you were eating so well, you’d have put on some weight!”

“Shut up, you savage!”

I ended up trading some pork jowl for Chaeeunshinji’s bell peppers and red chilies.

“What? Is that all you’re giving me for this pork? Seriously? That’s a terrible bargain. How can you think this amount of vegetables is worth the same as that much pork?”

“Well, if you don’t want it, fine, I’ll take it back. Like I said, I don’t really like pork jowl anyway.”

“Oh, just take it. Consider it a favor, just this once. But don’t go starting rumors, okay? Our director might summon me to his office and give me hell for aiding and abetting our enemy.”

“Yeah, you better keep this to yourself, too . . . ”

That day at dinnertime, all the grown-ups were chewing their meat with this look on their faces like they were all just chewing mouthfuls of dirt. That is, until they saw me set out 4 green bell peppers and 6 chilies on the table in front of me.

“What’s that?” asked Mr. Dallu.

“A hostage exchange . . . ”

“Is that a token of love? Because if it is, I don’t think I want to take it away from you.”

“Think whatever you want.”

I didn’t give up my peppers to anyone, not even Mom. It felt like everyone was peering sideways at me out of the corners of their eyes as I picked up one of the green peppers and broke it in half with a loud crunching sound, CRACK! Even though it wasn’t really very loud at all, it filled the whole research center dining hall as if it were a booming echo.

Then I split it into quarters, following the lines of that green bell pepper the way Chaeeunshinji had taught me. After that, I picked up a bit of meat and set it in the inner curve of the pepper piece. Compared to the pepper, the sliver of meat looked ridiculously tiny. When I was about to finally bring it up to my mouth, I remembered the slow, elegant way Chaeeunshinji had eaten on that afternoon when she’d been showing off that half-watermelon of hers. Someplace close, someone’s mouth was watering, and they gulped it down loudly.

CRUNCH.

As I bit into the pepper, the sound split the air.

CRUNCH.

The sound was so holy and glorious, it was like the sky was being ripped in two.

CRRRUNNNCH.

I was the only one chewing a green pepper there, but because of that sound, I could see how, in everyone else’s heads, the dormant memory of the flavor and texture of peppers suddenly awoke, all at once.

CRUNCH!

CRUNCH!!

CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH!!!

Just then, the director walked into the dining hall. As I looked over at him, I saw him notice the peppers and chilies in front of me. He instantly froze on the spot.

CRRRRRUNCH!!!

Gulp.

The next morning, the entire research center held a big meeting. This time, it went way more smoothly than the last time.

“We need to take the bull by the horns,” said the director, and everyone nodded in agreement.

Not long after, around lunchtime, we gathered out in the library yard. Almost everyone among the families living at the research center showed up, even the kids. It was the biggest gathering that had happened since the outbreak of the war.

“We need to overwhelm them with our first attack. If it takes until the second, it might be a lot harder. We need to break their will to resist completely with a single, sudden assault. Got it? Right, then let’s begin.”

The grown-ups all took their positions, and then fired up their grills in unison. When they were all hot enough, they started setting down the first pieces of meat over the fire.

Sssssssssssssssssssss.

The air was filled with the sound of hot fat hissing; it sounded like falling rain. That was the signal, and then the sound of the grilling meat filled the air all at once, like the roar of a heavy downpour coming down.

From a distance, Chaeeunshinji looked on, watching the scene unfold.

Then other people on the other side of the borderline started appearing, one or two faces at a time.

Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss-ssssssshhhhhh.

Of course, our most effective weapon wasn’t the sound of the cooking meat—it was the aroma.

Their enemy attack ship passed over our village a little earlier than usual. Within ten minutes, it seemed like nearly everyone in Chaeeunshinji’s research center had appeared, their faces peering from the windows. For some reason, I started feeling kinda nervous. 

Ssssssssssssssssssssss.

They began coming toward us, a step at a time. They were still far enough away that they couldn’t have been hearing the sound of it yet, but that mouth-watering smell of grilling meat had definitely reached them. I wondered whether maybe last night, in her own group’s dining hall, Chaeeunshinji might’ve done the same thing that I’d done at dinner. If she had, then the effect must have been even bigger than on our group, because after all she’d done it with meat.

We’d already set out our tables and chairs in the library yard. Of course, all we had to offer was meat, but we’d brought out our good plates and utensils for them to use. Even from on their side of the line, they must’ve seen all that, seen how we’d set up the tables and chairs and utensils and everything—more chairs than all the research center families together on our side could have needed—and known what we were doing.

Step by step, they came closer. Attracted by the smell. Attracted by the atmosphere, by how it felt like a party. A few of them had already crossed the borderline without even realizing it. As they crossed over it, I saw this look on their faces, like they were thinking, What are they up to? You could feel the tension in the air; it felt like a serious, important moment.

But just then, someone on their side said something, made some comment we couldn’t quite make out. Everyone who was coming toward us suddenly stopped in their tracks.

It was their side’s research director who’d made the comment. Everyone on our side looked over at their, nobody daring to breathe. Then a few of them ran back toward their research center buildings. What in the world was going on? What had their director told them to do? The tension rose, like a string being pulled taut—worry mixed with hope, and I worried if that string got cut, it might suddenly sag uselessly in the middle. The air became thick, as if something were about to happen.

But that tension didn’t last very long. The people who’d run back into their research center appeared again, and now they carrying stuff with them. Lots of stuff. Once a few of us saw what it was they were carrying, they relaxed, and like waves spreading through water, relief made its way through our group.

The sky above us was still loud, because their attack ship had come back around, once again earlier than usual. It was probably looking down at us, and seeing people crossing the borderline from their side, coming over to tables set up by us, the enemy’s citizens, and carrying loads of bell peppers, chiles, lettuce, sesame leaves, and whatever.

So what?

In the end, the attack ship disappeared above us. The border had already been become meaningless. It seemed to us as if the war was already over.

I took some of the fruit brought over from Chaeeunshinji’s research center and ate it until I was stuffed. Meanwhile, Chaeeunshinji scooped up all kinds of meat that we’d set out on the tables. It wasn’t just the two of us, either: everyone did that. People lay out pieces of pork belly onto chunks of split green pepper, and you could tell who was from which group by the ratio of meat to vegetables in their hands. Here, from a piece of meat and some bell pepper together in each person’s hand, a unimaginable miracle was about to happen.

The meat juices—that juice that had always just flowed through your mouth along whatever way if could and slipped down your throat—were elevated to a new level with they met the juices of those bright green vegetables. It was as if each became more completely itself—the juices of the meat more perfectly meaty, the juices of the vegetables more perfectly vegetabley—and I felt like at that point where they met and mingled together, they became some new kind of juice that deserved a unique, special name of its own, like some kind of rare subatomic particle created by a particle accelerator. And just then, when it felt perfectly complete and holy and glorious, that was when the miracle happened.

War is politics carried out by violence, but at the moment, the shape of warfare was simpler to trace. The stomach commands! The tongue leads! You don’t even need a weapon: once you put the food in your mouth, that’s it, nothing else matters anymore.

And with that, we all agreed to strike a truce.

Now, nobody ever said the word “truce.” The agreement wasn’t made outside our mouths, but instead inside them. That was a more sacred oath, one that would endure far longer than any agreement written down on paper.

“Quit stuffing yourself, elephant boy!” snapped Chaeeunshinji, as if she were spoiling for an squabble.

“You’re doing it too!” I snapped back. “You’re eating exactly like those, uh, I mean, exactly like this.”

“You can’t even talk right, dork!”

And with that, the war was over and my eternal fight with Chaeeunshinji was back on again. It continued, too, endlessly, but at least within the atmosphere of GreenScallion, we never again had anything like that wartime borderline that, invisible to everyone, had kept people apart.

Our two planets, with their different rotational and sidereal periods, eventually declared an armistice, but long before they’d gotten around to that, we’d already ended the war.

That’s how the planet of GreenScallion managed to reach the end of the war without either homeworld’s population climbing over 80% of the world’s total population. Which also meant that the planet was a place where nobody could stake a claim to ownership, so the world was able to remain open to any visitor who might want to come there, including all humans but also members of any other species that might feel like coming there. Of course, I don’t actually remember anyone coming and visiting at the time—or even after the war, for that matter—but anyway, according to the director, that was how things stood legally.

Time passed, enough time so we finally got to the day when all the kids on the planet were grown up and leaving their families to go to where their universities were located, where the big cities were. As it turned out, Chaeeunshinji and I were headed for the same place.

“Oh, I’m so embarrassed, so embarrassed,” she said. “I can’t even say a word to anyone. I can’t even stand up straight . . . ”

“What’re you so embarrassed about?” I asked her.

“Look, how old am I? I’m your big sister, by a lot, but I’m still going to show up there with a little punk like you by my side! What an embarrassment! It’s the most shameful day of my life! What a massive, complete embarrassment! This is why people shouldn’t stay too long in the same little neighborhood . . . they shove everyone who looks remotely similar into the same classroom, regardless of their age or education. That’s how someone as talented as me ends up being dragged down into mediocrity. Argh, what the hell? What a completely cosmic-scale waste!”

Mom had done up Chaeeunshinji’s hair with her special, zero-gravity hairstyle, and even given her a special discount as a congratulatory present because she was going to university.

My mom had said, “You guys were so little back then that you don’t actually remember living in zero-g, right? If you go on a spaceship looking like that, you’re going to hear people calling you bumpkins, believe me. Now that you’re a young woman, Shinji, you need to start dressing like it. Being pretty down on the ground and being pretty out in space are two totally different things. If you stick to this kind of hairstyle, when you go up there, your hair’s going to stick out all over, it’s going to look ridiculous. And you can’t just keep it tied back, right? Wow, it’s been a long time. Finally, I get to show someone what I can really do! Wow, look at your hair! It’s so nice! You’re so young, and it’s spring . . . spring . . . ”

After saying goodbye to my family, I headed for the spaceship. It wasn’t long after that we flew up and up, until GreenScallion’s gravity no longer had any hold on us.

As Chaeeunshinji was unbuckling her harness and getting up from her seat, she said to me, “Let’s go check out the dining hall.”

“Why, are you hungry already?”

“Nah, not hungry, exactly. I’m just curious about the décor.”

“That’s silly,” I said.

Eunshinji hovered in the spaceship hallway, hanging onto one of the many railings that was attached to every surface. She floated before me, and in the absence of gravity, her hair stuck out in every direction. Suddenly, she turned and looked back toward me as if some idea had just occurred to her. As she turned, her long hair was swept along, following the movement of her head. Then, it slowly spread out again into the air, spreading back out into the air. It wasn’t like how hair acts when it’s being blown by the wind; it spread out toward every direction at once, like it was doing some kind of light and joyful dance—as if the hair itself were alive, and planning to fly away suddenly.

“Wow!” I said.

From the look she gave me, I realized that I was gaping at her in amazement.

“What’re you doing?” Chaeeunshinji said. “Shut your mouth, before you get dust in there. You look ridiculous! Are you trying to look like an outer world bumpkin?”

“Y’know what, Eunshinji?”

“What?”

“My Mom, I, uh, I think she’s actually a real professional hairstylist.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What? Uh, I mean . . . ”

At that moment, I was looking at the most elegant, beautiful girl in the whole universe, and I couldn’t believe it was the same Chaeeunshinji I’d met a million times before, and she was hovering in the air right there in in front of me, hanging onto that hallway railing while looking into my two eyes with that bright, mischievous smile of hers.

That’s how I met Chaeeunshinji.

And once again, Chaeeunshinji swept into my heart.

Originally published in Korean in Hoyeon Pimang: Pimang Danpyeon Seon, edited by Bo-Young Kim.

Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

About the Author

Bae Myung-hoon was the 2005 winner South Korea’s Science and Technology Creative Award in 2005. A prodigious writer, his work frequently appeared thereafter in South Korean monthly magazines–such as Fantastique–and in a number of original SF anthologies. With the publication of his omnibus novel Tower in 2009 (a book of linked short stories all dealing with a space elevator), his reputation expanded beyond the confines of the Korean SF world and into the mainstream literary world of South Korea. In 2010, with the publication of his short novel Hello, Artificial Being!, he gained acceptance as a major author in South Korean literature. Since 2009, he has published fourteen full-length novels, one novel for children, and four short stories, with many of them having been published by major literary publishers–and he has performed the remarkable feat of gaining mainstream literary acceptance for his work in a society where SF was, until very recently, widely considered (at best) juvenile fiction. Since 2018, Bae has also served as the Deputy Chairman of the Science Fiction Writer’s Union of the Republic of Korea.

Said of Angels

Eric Del Carlo

One

To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came.
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

—Shelley: “Adonais”

News of an illegal civilization in the Barrhimacs system came to the Palace. This volatile intelligence was received by smooth mechanisms and moved in stately progression through the many strata and stations of the enormous edifice; it passed through those apparatus, sentient and otherwise, which determined validity, consequence, urgency; it was absorbed and discharged, re-consumed and again excreted, until all which was knowable and surmisable about the matter was made stark and unambiguous.

It was these final processes which decided that this news need not reach the hearing organs of the Arch Hierophant.

Word of the unauthorized—and until recently, undetected—civilization upon the fifth world circling the star Barrhimacs thereby fell just short of the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber. If the Arch Hierophant were to hear of the matter, it would have to arrive as casual gossip, which was also meticulously controlled by imperturbable, logical Palace procedures.

The Arch Hierophant’s lofty attention would only be required if something of great religious moment came into play. That seemed unlikely in this case.

Besides, other matters were pressing. The Mights were awaiting his decision on one subject in particular: the question of the prophet Valduk Tyn’s divinity.

The matter had been advancing for centuries. Its gravity had surged, then ebbed among the many systems. This world took up the teachings of Valduk Tyn; the ancient words shook the culture; then the fervor might pass, the zeal cool, and the world’s workings would continue as before, without the clamor of fervid religiosity. But another world, another system, even an entire Might, might take a belief in the long-dead prophet to its breast, might persist in zealotry year after year, decade after decade. Valduk Tyn’s name might ever be on the tip of the speaking organs of a whole people, invoked again and again, the dogma of the primeval oracle permeating societies. Laws might be erected around veneration of the prophet. Penalties for disbelief could be enacted. The uninitiated might be labeled infidels.

Wars could come.

Yes, wars could always come.

Yet the droll truth was that Valduk Tyn was not so significant a figure. He’d made little ripple in his own time, though this could be said of many prophets and their ilk, a pattern repeated stubbornly throughout the galactic epochs. Valduk Tyn had walked his dusty world, had spoken his piece, a message championing the way of universal compassion. It was impractical in the context of his native culture, but easy to remember, simple to write down.

It wasn’t unique, this message. Certainly it was not original. More civilizations within the Galactic Cooperation had a figure like this in their histories than did not. This passable prophet might easily have been lost to time. But somehow Valduk Tyn had endured. And he had resurfaced, here, there, until finally catching an updraft which lifted him to a prominence he surely could never have comprehended in his lifetime. His own world had since fallen to ruin. It was barely counted in galactic history. But now fad and fashion had made him a burning issue. The Mights, the five greatest powers within the Cooperation, wanted to know, for time and all, whether or not Valduk Tyn was divine in his nature.

The Mights were capable of war. The Galactic Cooperation did not always live up to its name. The galaxy was thickly populated. It had many spiritual and religious leaders. The Arch Hierophant was not alone in his work. But his prestige, perhaps, was unmatched. And in any case it was to him that the five Mights and many trillions of beings looked now, for his reckoning, for his final, inviolable, solemn word.

Which he was, as it happened, so very reluctant to give.

There. See him. The Arch Hierophant. He is named Brophtoc Mmurn Dol, in the manner of his people. This is the seemingly endless onyx floor of the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber upon which he walks. Many things seem in the immense and sometimes fantastical Palace where the Arch Hierophant and his vast bureaucratic arrays reside. These seemings are useful to the image and atmosphere which must be maintained. None should come to the Palace without being touched by awe, by dread; so goes the thinking of those who control the stagecraft and theatricality which surround the Palace’s most important resident.

The Arch Hierophant, long at his post, scarcely appears to notice the wonders which unfold around him. This too lends itself to his dramatic presentation. How, visitors marvel, can this being inhabit his magnificent dwelling so nonchalantly? Is he indifferent to such technological miracles, such as this onyx-floored chamber which seems to flow toward infinity in every direction?

Yet see the ease of his gait now as he crosses the uncrossable distances. Behold the peaceful warmth on his face as he comes to meet his visitor. The priestess from Nachenka trembles at his approach. She has worn her finest vestments, as most do who arrive for the first time at the Palace. Such a visitation is a once in a lifetime opportunity, often. The priestess in towering headdress and cascading sparkling robes makes formal signs at the Arch Hierophant even before he has properly reached her. She starts the cycle anew, not knowing what else to do, but he gently interrupts, expressing interest in the bag and pipes affair wound about the upper half of her body. He requests a demonstration.

She fumbles a bit at first, but once the mouthpiece is fit and the ceremonial instrument’s bag inflated, as well as her own anatomical air-bearing bladders, she masterfully works the piece she has chosen. The shrills and blats might have been an unpleasant cacophony in another sequence, without the precise manipulations she exerts, but the Arch Hierophant easily absorbs the music’s beauty. He hums along with the catchy dominant phrase as the Nachenka priestess comes to her finale.

Afterward, her bladders hang limply beneath her robes. She begins to explain the song’s significance as a prelude to speaking in-depth of her native faith. But the Arch Hierophant fastens onto a single aspect of her account: how pipe songs on her world are differentiated from region to region, from metropolis to village; so that those who know the music can quickly and scornfully pinpoint a player’s origins. A piper of the Northward Drift country might for instance be told of her nine-count, low-note playing: Sounds like you’re blowing at the bottom of a well.

This appears to delight the Arch Hierophant, and the priestess is delighted to have pleased him. But now the interview has closed, and all that she meant to say—the months of preparation and practice—must be abandoned. Somehow the magical floor of glittery black is moving under her feet, drawing her away at a stately but insistent speed. The Arch Hierophant, shrinking from her view, makes an almost casual gesture of farewell.

It is not his first audience of the day. It has not been his tenth.

Stars, blue-glazed and tepid, poured through his resting room. The room’s appointments were in the oozy style of his home culture’s notions of luxury, though, notably, these were not the most ornate of such notions. He didn’t live as the wealthiest did on his birth world, not in this room at least. But all was soft here, spongy; and the motes and nodes of star stuff which trickled through the circular chamber soothed his visual organs and eased his spirit.

Beverages twirled slowly in the nearby air. These were brews he enjoyed, fermentations he occasionally indulged. All were in reach, and now and again he did stretch out and draw one toward him. He’d had his day’s nourishment. He could have more, if he so wished. But the glamour of food had faded somewhat for him. His life had been long, and that life was yet persisting. Some weakening of the senses was expected, some gentle sappings of vitality. He had experienced mild diminishments. Natural ebbs. Less vigor in the appendages than once had been his to summon at will. So be it. So too came the rare murmur from an organ, the infrequent catch of some valve within his comfortable, lived-in body. So it went. One did not brood on such inevitabilities.

The day had drained him, as most days did. But he didn’t begrudge the burdens of his office. He mattered to the galaxy. The Cooperation, in all its tangled associations, needed him. Or someone like him, at any rate. One who could rule on spiritual matters. One whose decisions would satisfy even the Mights.

But he was still only a single being. Pride could slay as surely as a sword. It was necessary—essential—to maintain some awareness of his own mortality. Those aches he sometimes felt from his body served as reminders and brought him the humility he required.

For instance, the color of his skin had once been the vivid blue-green of youth. Now it was dulled. The green was a mossy gentle shade, the blue a docile teal. They mixed to give his hide the subdued coloring of an elder of his species.

He reached up for one of the spinning beverages. It was warm, made of crushed golden leaves and oily liquid. He sipped it slowly, reclining on his oozy couch. His gaze fell to his hands. They were large and extravagantly knuckled, in the way of his kind. In his younger years these had been fast crafty hands. They had known how to undo the locking mechanisms of his world’s common ground vehicles. Those had been thieving days, the crimes necessary for his survival in the rough urban center where he had found himself as a boy.

They were different hands now, set to different purposes of course. There was also tightness sometimes in the elaborate joints. He didn’t complain.

He was yet alive, he thought with a certain serenity, drinking more of the golden beverage. And he remained functional. This was a useful life. It was astonishing, perhaps, that he held the position he did. Humble origins had somehow led him here.

To the Palace.

To his ordained role as Arch Hierophant.

Yet here he lay, a single solitary life, prone on a couch, imbibing a relaxing beverage. The stars flowing through his circular resting room were of course mere projections, the patterns meant to soothe; but the images did have some tangibility. One of the bits of astral matter got underneath the embroidered cover which was spread over him, and he felt its lukewarm presence moving beneath the blanket, sliding past his lower appendages. He pulled up a corner of the cover to let the blue-glowing fragment escape.

He smiled a tired smile, to himself.

And he thought, inevitably, of Valduk Tyn. And he thought also of the illegal civilization in the Barrhimacs system. It was a startling item of news but nothing he need put an Arch Hierophant’s consideration to. It was just part of the rich tapestry of cultures and armies and peoples and happenings which kept the galaxy in its slowly grinding revolution, completing its turning every two hundred fifty million years or so.

In such a span planets could rise; societies might crumble. Legends were birthed, while others faded into final obscurity. War would threaten because war always threatened.

During such a run of centuries a name like Valduk Tyn might sink, then lift again. The prophet might become dangerously important, at a time when the galaxy-binding, peacekeeping confederation of Mights and planets known as the Cooperation was wobbling ever so perceptibly in its major task. The decision on Valduk Tyn was ill-timed. It would be better, the Arch Hierophant believed, if the question of the man’s divinity were left to another less volatile time. When a decision, one way or the other, might not upset the carefully maintained and extraordinarily complex galactic balance.

It was less stressful—and more diverting—to contemplate what was going on in the Barrhimacs system. He was well aware that this was news he wasn’t supposed to know. But he had resided here at the Palace for a long, long time, and he’d had installed private apparatus for the conveyance of information to him. He had put wheels within the wheels, and their secret unobtrusive turnings served him now and then. He didn’t abuse the privilege. He was a restrained being in most things. His tastes, in fact, were shockingly modest considering the dazzling trappings in which he lived.

In which it sometimes seemed to him he was inextricably caught.

Two

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

—Browne: Religio Medici

The delegate from the Gray Might was sufficiently lacking in tact to come out and say it: the Might she represented, a convoluted assembly of worlds and star systems, had an official view on the Valduk Tyn matter.

She was not a religious personage. She was a tall being, with a narrow trunk and a head equipped with the common sensing organs. The Arch Hierophant had in his time met with an astounding array of sentient species. No two were alike; but their similarities were sometimes fantastic. How many had two eyes? How many possessed circulatory systems with a heart, blood vessels, some form of lymph glands? Quite a few, as it happened. The model was practical, especially for those people who, over many millennia usually, had mastered their home worlds and raised technologies capable of lifting their kind to other planets. If one wished for basic evidence of any divine will guiding the universe, one might look to that similitude.

He hadn’t received the delegate in the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber. This was a somewhat sterile room, with walls marbled in a pale blue. The furnishings were coldly elegant but also utilitarian.

He was not meeting the Gray Might delegate by himself. Several of his staff were on hand, decked in their livery, ready to assist the lord of the Palace at a moment’s notice.

“Our view,” the tall delegate said, “is that your excellency should recognize Valduk Tyn as a divinely consecrated being.”

The Arch Hierophant today wore an elaborate but quite comfortable robe. He spent time smoothing its folds as the brusque statement continued to hang in the air. His staff hadn’t gasped at the display of tactlessness, but he sensed their shock nonetheless.

“Are you yourself familiar with Valduk Tyn’s teachings?” The Arch Hierophant’s tone was friendly.

“No. Not . . . personally.”

“It is a simple message.”

“I’m not entirely surprised by that, your excellency.”

“Oh? Why not?”

The delegate hesitated. Tactless, yes, as a successful diplomat must be on some level; but she didn’t wish to indiscriminately offend.

She said, “The popularity of this prophet suggests his—as you called it—message must be one that is easily grasped, easily accepted.”

“Lowest common denominator, then?” His manner remained unruffled.

Hesitation again from the delegate; then, “Widespread appeal, let us say.”

“And that is enough, in the Gray Might’s view, to confer divinity upon this long-dead being?”

“Many in my Might believe so, your excellency. Many.”

“But not you?”

“My personal view is valueless here.”

“Because?”

“Because I am wholly irreligious, your excellency.” The delegate winced in the way of her kind, a fluttering of skin along the upper appendages. The Arch Hierophant’s staff stirred at the display. They were conversant in his conversational habits. They knew he could be disarming, charming—and sly, when need be. He might be toying with this delegate.

He smiled, the broad generally-accepted smile-shape made with the mouth, which most species could duplicate to one degree or other. His was especially skilled. Warm. Paternal. Wise.

“Quite a few who come to the Palace share your belief—or your fondly held lack of belief, I should say. We welcome you with universal compassion, which is, by the way, the thrust of Valduk Tyn’s teaching. Love everyone. Love everything. He was right, of course, so long ago on his little world.”

The liveried staff stirred again, this time unobtrusively forming into a phalanx around the Arch Hierophant. They knew how to interpret his intonations, his gestures, the ones which meant a given audience was drawing to a close. The delegate seemed to abruptly realize this as well. She drew herself to her full impressive height.

But the Arch Hierophant wasn’t quite done. “However, one might wonder,” he said, tone wistful now, “what Valduk Tyn would think of the question of his own divinity. It would be . . . instructive, if one could ask him. Or perhaps it would only be amusing.”

Behold, now, the Palace.

Its magnificence cannot be overstated. Hyperbole has no meaning on its opulent grounds. It is a massive edifice. Gargantuan. It covers the entire surface of the artificial moon upon which it was constructed. It is a world unto itself, a never-ending series of chambers, halls, courtyards, passageways, parapets. Every fine material was used to raise the structure: the best stone, the richest woods, the most cunningly created synthetics. The architectural mastery is staggering. The greatest designers in the galaxy pondered the Palace, brooded on it interminably, before the first foundation stone was set; they conceived it slowly; then, summoning every iota of their outsize talent, put down their plans in written form, the dream envisaged, so that others—the host of builders—could set out to realize these grand conceptions.

It took centuries to erect.

The many peoples on their many worlds wanted a place to enshrine the living saint, the voice of divine fiat, the Arch Hierophant. Such a being must have an appropriate seat of power. The trappings must fit the magnitude of his role. Thousands of gods were worshipped on thousands of worlds, ancient tribal creeds held over into technologically sophisticated eras; yet the stubborn instinct, never quite dying out on many of those worlds, was to believe that a divine hand pushes the universe. We are watched over. There is a cosmic goodness, conscious and active. And someone must speak for it.

Let that being occupy a place of splendor, one which will mimic the wonders of the cosmos, the celestial glories.

Let there be . . .

The Staircase of Floating Mirrors.

A Waterfall of Frothing Quartz.

The Spiritual Wellspring Chamber, with its infinite floor.

Temple of Revelation.

The Parlor of Scintillations.

Fill it up, room after room, miracle upon miracle. Give the moon an atmosphere, rich and heady. Direct the climate; kiss the rooftops with soft pleasing rains; make the clouds dance. There will be a sea of terraces, oceans of balconies. Gardens open to the sumptuous air. Beings will look up into the skies, as life has done throughout its billions of years. Gazes ever upward, seeking, wondering, doubting, believing.

This is the many-mansioned residence, then, the fortress, the citadel. This is a whole worldlet given over to the function of a single being. We call him the Arch Hierophant. And one may find him in this place. One may make a pilgrimage to him. One may come with a thirst for answers.

We call the place the Palace. It is a humble cathedral. It is an august hovel.

Many dwell here—multitudes, swarms; these the keepers and record-makers and advisors and support personnel. But it is home to one being. One being only.

Lonely he is sometimes, in his empty house.

As information flowed to the Palace, advancing sometimes at a sleepy pace, across many years, so too did information need also to flow from the Palace. The edicts went out, some minor, others pivotal. All had previously been deemed worthy of the Arch Hierophant’s attention.

Individual cultures, even ones within, say, a homogenizing Might, had specific and individual religious concerns. Some of these conundrums were like self-inflicted wounds, childish puzzles invented for the sole purpose of perplexity.

Other issues had more substance. Others still—and these were fortunately rare—were on the order of the Valduk Tyn matter. They could not be decided overnight.

Nonetheless, the lesser concerns still had to be addressed, a tireless succession of dilemmas and enigmas and pious confusions, which he was expected to resolve. Luckily his advisory army was ever in place on the Palace’s battlements. They knew, to an extent, his thinking on many matters because he had touched on them before, in slightly altered form. The devout on the myriad worlds throughout the Cooperation often asked the same questions, felt the same dreads, wished succor in their commonplace beliefs.

One decree, scarcely rewritten, could serve two peoples separated by a gulf of star systems. The Arch Hierophant might only need to cast his general approval on the document. He needn’t always study the matters in depth.

Still, the busywork never paused, not even when the day had seemed especially long and he wanted to go to his circular resting room and lay on his oozing couch amid his flowing blue stars.

Currently he was in one of the Palace spaces which served as an office. It wasn’t a private area. The room was configured as an amphitheater. He had a seat at the foot of the rising semicircle of workstations. The tiers were floored in dense glossy wood, the desks of the scribes individually lit. The flutter of noise was constant, as was the stream of documents requiring his approval. They were hand-delivered by a flurry of youthful runners. He took each text with a murmur of thanks.

Every document represented something momentous to some world, to some culture within the Cooperation which hadn’t abandoned religious tenets when it had touched the stars. A number of worlds did just that, of course. Faith was put away as the society grew more refined. Technological wonder replaced holy awe, or else the creeds simply faded, revealed as superstitious claptrap by the newly enlightened generations.

But those planets and those peoples were still touched by the divine, whether they acknowledged it or not. So the Arch Hierophant saw it.

Down from the busy tiers the missives came. He solemnly put his seal to the texts. He did not know all who labored at the Palace. No one could know so many names. But there was an inner circle, a trusted coterie. One of these was beside him on his regal dais.

“Interesting, was it not,” he said softly to this subaltern, “that the Gray Might has made up its collective mind on the matter?”

The advisor was a being named Shnaparil. He dressed in greens and carried himself in a modest manner. But his was a fast mind.

“Interesting,” he said, tone just as placid as his superior’s. “And, perhaps, a signal.”

“Signal?”

“That other Mights may be prepared to put forth an official view.”

The Arch Hierophant released a soundless sigh. This same thought had occurred to him as well, of course. It was an unnerving notion. Collectively, the five great Mights accounted for roughly seventy percent of the Cooperation, which also included the semi-unaffiliated planets and systems of the galaxy. If those five vast powers put forth opinions on the divinity of Valduk Tyn, and if those views were in conflict, which they were almost certain to be . . .

The pressure increased. The explosive issue could not be dismissed.

He made to leave the office area slightly before his customary time of withdrawal. Shnaparil, seeing him preparing to depart, fluttered his emerald veils as he gestured a rather personal sign of comfort. The advisor was permitted such occasional intimacies, due to his longtime service and loyalty.

The Arch Hierophant didn’t make straightaway for his resting room. He ascended, rising alone on a soundless platform, up through the many levels. A terrace was cleared and secured ahead of his arrival. The Palace had its guards, as all palaces must. These were not merely decorative. The Arch Hierophant had to be protected at all times. His value to the Cooperation was inestimable, his continuance in his capacity crucial.

The terrace was floored in striated yellow stone. Beyond its immediate edge spread the upper reaches of the manifold joined structures of the Palace. There were cupolas, the tips of pyramids, onion domes, minarets; a boundless array of roofs reaching to the horizon and beyond. Some glowed. Others were dark. Night lay on the scene. The artificial moon upon which the Palace rested was companioned by an equally artificial sun, whose rays were currently warming the skins of the rooftops on the other side of the worldlet.

A mild breeze blew. The air was exhilaratingly fresh.

He stood isolated on the broad flat expanse of stone. Slowly he turned his eyes upward. He had two eyes; again, the common anatomical configuration, uniting him in a small way to so many other of the species teeming in the galaxy.

The Arch Hierophant looked to the stars. Looked past them, to the hand of the divine, benignly and brutally pushing the universe through its sometimes-painful motions.

He drew in the rich air. And breathed out a prayer.

In that prayer he asked for help.

Three

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

—Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Many who came to the Palace were visiting there for the first time. In the cases of minor religious envoys representing single planets or systems, these were audiences which often took decades to secure. Perhaps this would be the only time for generations when a comparatively backwater world would have brief but direct access to the Arch Hierophant himself.

But first contact with a people relatively new to the Cooperation was rarest of all. Such meetings, when they came, usually aroused special interest in the Arch Hierophant.

He glided toward the monochromatic figure who awaited in the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber. As the magics of the onyx floor carried him, he noted that the being was looking all about, making no effort to hide his wonder. He was curious looking, in the manner that all creatures were fundamentally curious and unlikely. He had a doughy hide, with white hair only atop his head. The round face presented an animated mouth and wide searching eyes. His dress did not seem especially extravagant, simple black raiment with a small white cloth held in the right hand. What the cloth’s significance might be, the Arch Hierophant didn’t know. Belief expressed itself in endless rituals, and the paraphernalia of those customs could seem quaint to an outsider.

The being, who was named Roark, seeing the Arch Hierophant approach, smiled broadly. He sketched a sign of greeting, not getting it quite right; but the sincerity of the gesture was plain. The white cloth fluttered busily in his hand.

“Your excellency!” Unabashed enthusiasm in the address. This Roark was representing his kind. The species had been inducted into the Cooperation a mere two hundred years ago. Now it was enjoying its first audience with the Arch Hierophant, in the person of this jovial white-haired individual.

The Arch Hierophant returned him a verbal greeting, so as to call no attention to his inaccurate execution of the salutary gesture. Naturally there had been a briefing on this being’s race. His was a rambunctious young breed. They liked exploration. They relished adventure. They had not, at least, ventured beyond their home system with warlike intentions. The galaxy didn’t need another new strain like that.

Some who came to the Palace for the first time brought gifts. Offerings, really. These usually had some doctrinal significance to them. The Sacred Gem of . . . The Hallowed Circlet of . . . Each a bauble once it was removed from the native environment which gave it such holy consequence. The Arch Hierophant was often leery of these tokens. Once they passed through his hands, he rarely saw them again. There were no doubt storehouses within the boundaries of the Palace stuffed with the items, the words of blessing once said over them long since faded to silence. In the end, they became just . . . objects.

He shook himself imperceptibly. There was no call for these bleak thoughts. He must remain in the moment. This religious supplicant had, effectively, been waiting two hundred years for an audience.

Travel was discussed. Had he been transported here comfortably? Yes. Good. Good. Accommodations at the Palace were satisfactory? Very much so. Far beyond satisfactory . . .

“It’s a marvel!” Roark said, unable to contain himself. Once more the white cloth was flapped about as he added gestures to his effusive praise of the Palace and all things in it.

Yet he didn’t convey the sense that he was intimidated by any of the wonders he had seen; rather, he seemed to take a childlike joy in it all. It was difficult not to get swept up in his zest. Certainly this person wasn’t likely to add to the Arch Hierophant’s burden of gloom-tinged thoughts.

Roark described in avid terms some of the sights he’d seen since his arrival. It never appeared to occur to him that the Arch Hierophant would be familiar with all of these spectacles. He finished by characterizing the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber, the very room they were presently in. “How it flows to the end of time,” he enthused, “in any direction one would care to rest the eye. A sea, a gleaming universe all held unto itself. Pardon, your excellency. I sometimes fancy myself an aspiring poet.” He applied the white cloth to a part of his head not fixed with hair. “Or perhaps perspiring poet would be more accurate. Forgive me, your excellency. I’m afraid I sweat when I am nervous.”

No ecclesiastical relevance to the cloth, then, the Arch Hierophant mused. It was merely a kerchief. This individual was a religious envoy, but one far less formal than most, it seemed.

“Your home world . . . ” the Arch Hierophant began.

“Earth.”

“Earth, of course. Are your people of one faith?”

“Oh, heavens no, your excellency. Many—most, in fact—subscribe to no structured belief system. But many of those are open to a generalized spirituality, a . . . hmm . . . an unfocused trust that something underlies the reality in which they find themselves. There is a kind of vestigial desire to believe that a benevolent energy embraces us all.”

“And the people of faith among you? Do they share this belief?”

“To one extent or another, yes. Liturgies vary. Observances differ. Disparate holy books are quoted. But . . . ” Roark laughed. So few people ever laughed in the Arch Hierophant’s presence. “Every worthy creed really comes down to one imperative statement: ‘Oh be nice.’”

The Arch Hierophant’s species was capable of laughter. Certainly Brophtoc Mmurn Dol possessed a sense of humor. Roark’s words almost provoked a laugh from him, but he caught himself in time. He was somewhat charmed and made at ease by this curious being from Earth, but it simply wouldn’t do for the Arch Hierophant to be chuckling with a visitor to the Palace. Decorum mattered, even when it was stifling.

The time came for the audience to end. Roark in his black garb was borne away, head turning all the while, still amazed by the wonder of the “gleaming universe all held unto itself” that was the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber.

The Arch Hierophant wondered if he shouldn’t keep the ebullient being around awhile longer.

Hear, now, the whisperings. What information reaches the Arch Hierophant is carefully controlled—or that, at least, is the belief of those who don’t know about the wheels within wheels which the Arch Hierophant has caused to be installed to bring him covert data.

But the throngs of Palace personnel occasionally talk among themselves, even when such chatter is expressly forbidden. Sentient beings, at a certain level of cultural sophistication, seem to have a need for gossip. So they whisper. At the Palace they currently murmur about the Gray Might’s brazen resolution to recognize Valduk Tyn’s divinity. Many see this as an affront. Loyalty to the Arch Hierophant is absolute among his multitudinous staff. They feel protective of the being who they all regard as the highest spiritual voice in the galaxy. For any entity, even a great Might, to put forth a religious view ahead of the Arch Hierophant’s ruling is at best unmannerly. At worst, it is a sharp challenge to his spiritual authority.

It’s politically motivated, of course. So say the whisperers, to a being. They assert that none in the highest reaches of the Gray Might’s government really believes that humble old Valduk Tyn received the direct blessing of the divine when he lived on his little world and spoke his spiritual platitudes. But Valduk Tyn has become important. He has taken on the shape of a tool, and the Gray Might plainly means to wield him.

Some of the whisperers fear that war might come, because war might always come.

There is disquiet in the galaxy. Unease. This is a customary state of being. The galaxy is never quiet, yet the Cooperation has been mostly successful in its stated task of maintaining general peace. The galactic situation is of course intricate, with so many worlds, so many cultures interlacing. It is difficult to take the measure sometimes, to say whether or not these are good and stable years for the galaxy at large.

But the sense of something being wrong has been slowly building. Tensions among the Mights have, it seems, been incrementally mounting. Naturally each Might is equipped with an awesome military. These forces are ever at the ready, despite the Cooperation’s mission of peaceful coexistence. Some who fancy themselves able to read the political tea leaves say that an appetite for war grows among those who are capable of bringing about just such a conflict.

Others say that the Mights would never be so foolish as to begin such a bloodbath, not after ages of relatively secure peace.

Others see deeper still into the overall political and military picture. They gaze to its depths. And there they see the coming of Redmarch.

And if Redmarch, that ancient word, is uttered, then the four cardinal points of Redmarch must be voiced as well. The four conditions are crucial. Without them, so goes the legend, Redmarch can never come.

Those conditions are . . .

A Royal must flee the throne.

A Lawmaker must betray the law.

A High Cleric must renounce the faith.

A Warlord must go mad.

Naturally it is the third tenet which most interests the whisperers at the Palace. Though the fable of Redmarch arises from the deep, dank chasm of galactic history, it has been reinterpreted over the eras. Different personages in different epochs have been thought to fit the cast of legendary characters. The Royal. The Lawmaker. Any number of mortal beings might fill those roles. Warlord? There were warlords aplenty among the star systems.

But . . . High Cleric? In this modern time, could that be anyone but the Arch Hierophant?

And if it were, if Redmarch was more than mere myth, then how, some of the whisperers wondered, could he possibly renounce his dearly held faith?

He drank something fermented. Drank more of it than he normally would. The blue-glazed stars did not flow tonight in his resting room. He’d set the walls and ceiling blank. He lay on his couch, and after a time of pensive imbibing he summoned his books.

These were his own works, most of them written when he had been much younger. They possessed scholarly heft. He had presented his points well in these pages, with the vigor of youthful conviction. They were treatises on faith, of course, a field which had begun to deeply interest him upon his adolescence. He had examined the matter of faith from many angles. Sometimes he contradicted himself from volume to volume. A few fellow spiritual academics at the time had, somewhat gleefully, pointed out these inconsistencies. It was proof of the young upstart’s wavering certitudes. He spoke forthrightly, yes, and with a certain lyrical flair; but where was the orthodoxy? Where was the reverence for the traditions which had preceded him? He should pledge his unshakable loyalty to those conventions—or else step away from matters of spirituality altogether. At the very least he should stop writing his vexing books.

But Brophtoc Mmurn Dol did not stop. He was quite caught up in his personal fervor by then. The subject consumed him. He was no longer a boy, no longer a vehicle thief. He worked honest labor in the city of his birth by day; by night, he researched and put his hot quivering thoughts to paper. They were like living nodes of himself, pulsing with internal life. He needed—desperately needed—to communicate these thoughts and ideas and, dare he say, insights. Young he was, yes. Inexperienced in the formalities of religious study, to be sure. But faith was fantastically alive within him. One need only speak to him for a matter of minutes to realize this fact.

He wrote furiously into the night, often stripped to his vibrantly blue-green skin. He perspired when he exerted himself emotionally, something Roark from Earth had mentioned being susceptible to earlier today. His body would be slick when he at last collapsed, concepts still trying to form in his overtaxed mind. He would go to his job the next morning groggy but exhilarated.

His writings continued to be published; not lavishly, but they circulated nonetheless. He drew ire from entrenched academics, admiration from the ones less fearful of fresh views, and outright awe from those few in the general reading public who had discovered him. Slowly his name grew, took on importance. He spoke with a true voice. His words lit the gray spaces of existential doubt, and people, even disbelieving people, could begin to discern the divine hand at work in the universe if they looked closely enough. They liked the prospect of a compassionate cosmos. And even though these ideas were hardly new, he communicated them with enviable alacrity.

There had been an Arch Hierophant all his life, a revered personage occupying the Palace, issuing decrees, acting in part as the conscience of the galaxy. Brophtoc Mmurn Dol had written passionately about this long-lived being’s proclamations and fiats, never suspecting that a groundswell would rise upon the occasion of the Arch Hierophant’s death, when the faithful and faithless alike mourned the passage of that monumental life. He had never suspected—had never harbored an inkling—that his name would be put forward, that he would swiftly become the popular candidate. Common voices clamored for him. So, to his surprise, did many voices of lofty religious authority. This tide swept star system after star system.

At first he had been baffled. Then he shrank from the attention. Then, perhaps inevitably, he embraced it. If the divine hand were pushing him, it would be arrogant to resist. And surely—surely—this was some kind of intercession.

After a flurry of conclaves and councils and holy assemblages, he found himself called forth to state his own case. He had, until now, been a scribe, a being of fairly modest manner. Faced with the prospect of declaring himself fit to take up the mantle of the Arch Hierophant, he nearly balked. He prepared no arguments, explored no convincing testimony. The final assembly convened in a great hall, with vaulted ceiling and stark decor. He mounted the dais, gazed out on the sea of grave faces, and began to speak. He did nothing to summon the words. They simply flowed. He would not know until later anything that he had said. All the while that he spoke, he was engaged in silent prayer. He didn’t ask for guidance. He didn’t ask for courage. He merely stated, again and again, that he would submit himself utterly to the greater will.

Not long after, he journeyed to the Palace for the first time, there to take up residence.

He was drowsing now. He had consumed the fermented beverage. His works hovered above the couch, near enough for him to brush the spines. His books. Once he would have been content for these to live on after him. There would have been a simple, clean satisfaction in that. Now he had the grievous duty of making certain that his time as Arch Hierophant truly counted for something.

Four

The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.

—Niebuhr: Beyond Tragedy

The five Mights were these: the Gray Might, the Wandering Might, the Fire Might, the Folded Might, the Might of Staves. Each was inexpressibly vast. Each had abided an eon at least. Yet it could be said that a given Might possessed a specific tenor, a pervasive ambience . . . a personality. This despite the fact that hundreds of systems and billions of beings might be gathered under a single banner.

Every Might owed its character to cultural roots and governing traditions. Therefore it made complete sense to the Arch Hierophant that the Gray Might had sent a tall, tactless, irreligious delegate to convey the official view on the Valduk Tyn matter; whereas the Wandering Might, cleaving to its own characteristics, sent a patient, soft-spoken, watchful dignitary, one who waited for an audience without fuss or complaint, who, once before the Arch Hierophant, offered copious signs of respect and praise.

The Wandering Might delegate did not want to come directly to the point. He seemed to luxuriate in the protocols, speaking of ancillary matters in the slow circling manner of such formalities. The Arch Hierophant had received him in a chamber of reddish lacquered furnishings and great ocher cushions. Shnaparil was silently at his elbow.

Finally it was necessary to prod the soft-spoken being who had such cunning watching eyes. The conversational feint made the Arch Hierophant feel like the tactless one, but this representative of the Wandering Might could only be here at this time for one reason.

“Yes, your most blessed excellency, well . . . ” Still vacillating; but Shnaparil, dressed all in green, stepped in to press him harder, strongly intimating that the Arch Hierophant had other duties awaiting his attention.

The Arch Hierophant had been braced since the delegate’s arrival at the Palace. He expected to learn how the Wandering Might viewed the issue of Valduk Tyn. He further expected, knowing the Might’s general inclination toward skepticism, that this view would contradict the already stated opinion of the Gray Might. And that disagreement boded ill. It could, in the worst case, be the first true rumbling toward war.

“Please understand, your high righteous excellency, that we of the Wandering Might do not intend to make any public declaration on the matter. Not as the Grays have done, for example . . . ” He offered an unctuous smile, but evidently saw that the Arch Hierophant wouldn’t encourage him in this digression. Gathering himself, the Wandering delegate said in clear tones, “We support the belief that Valduk Tyn was a divine being.”

The Arch Hierophant felt a jolt go through him. He hadn’t anticipated this.

But with the news delivered there was no need to prolong the interview. With reflexive aplomb the Arch Hierophant made a gesture of farewell, and the delegate was seen on his way. Shnaparil remained in the chamber, visibly pensive.

Two Mights, then, thought the Arch Hierophant. Two Mights backing the notion that doleful Valduk Tyn had been directly touched by the hand of the divine, that he’d been imbued with a special blessing which made him something more than mortal, more than mere flesh.

Pressure. Influence. Persuasion. The Arch Hierophant was aware of these. Yet . . . there was something even deeper, something beyond even what his wheels within wheels could perceive for him. He had inhabited the Palace a long time, had borne the mantle of his great office all that while. He had observed. He had noted. He had occasionally paused and squinted to see deeper, sensing a clandestine presence, a sly movement. Something at work in the galaxy, beneath the Cooperation’s perception.

Some . . . agency. Or perhaps it was Agency. A shadow organization lacing the stars and systems, applying subtle pressure here, making ghostly influences there; perhaps now and then quietly eliminating some structure or living thing. A benign yet ruthless league, doing its good works to ensure the galaxy’s survival.

Making certain that Redmarch never comes to pass.

The Arch Hierophant had no proof. The thing radiated no life force. It was without shape or silhouette. Less than a whisper, only slightly more tangible than a thought. Yet sometimes he believed his subliminal impressions. Believed that the Agency meant to sway him. For it would do anything to prevent the conditions of Redmarch from being met.

A High Cleric must renounce the faith . . .

Was that what he would do, should he decide against Valduk Tyn’s divinity? More to the point: would his decision be perceived as a renunciation?

There were those in this teeming and varied galaxy who would see profit or other worth in the commencement of galactic war—call it Redmarch or by some other name. War would satisfy a savage urge for some. Others would gain power and wealth from it, or would believe that they might. Still others might act from a nihilistic, apocalyptic impulse. If my death should come, let the whole of the galaxy be dragged down into the black with me.

The menagerie was the right place for this. The Arch Hierophant had considered showing his guest the Staircase of Floating Mirrors or the Vanishing Gardens, but Roark would have become hopelessly caught up in those spectacles, gawking shamelessly. There was no need to overwhelm the being from Earth.

So, it had been arranged that when they met for a second time, it would be in the menagerie, with its many habitats and its winding layout. As well stocked as it was, it was also unpretentious. Here were many lower-order creatures, living out their straightforward unassuming lives. The place often had a calming effect on the Arch Hierophant. He looked at the animals; they looked back at him. There was an uncomplicated acknowledgment, perhaps even a rudimentary understanding between them.

He walked with the Earth cleric by his side. Roark still wore black, but the kerchief was now stuffed into a high front pocket. He did not appear to be perspiring so fervently now.

The creatures visibly fascinated him as they strolled past the paddocks; but the wonder on his face was less volatile than when they’d stood together on the infinite floor of the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber.

A beast stirred among its native grasses, lifting a long-tapered snout and flicking the lobes of its hearing organs—or were those its scent receptors? It had a blue-gray pebbly hide, with a bright dorsal crest which could be retracted into its body. It seemed aware of the two presences on the nearby pathway.

“It can’t attack us,” the Arch Hierophant reassured.

The creature let out a cry, something high and plaintive. Roark nearly stumbled, but it didn’t appear to be from fear.

“Is something wrong?” the Arch Hierophant asked.

“No, no . . . ” Roark made the common gesture of negation, performing it fairly well. “I was struck by a memory. When I was a boy, my family kept a cat. A small creature, domesticated. She was quite elderly, and she would wake sometimes crying out repeatedly and forlornly, like she didn’t know where she was. My father would go to her and stroke her fur, and tell her reassuringly, ‘You’re right where you’re supposed to be.’ And she would quiet.” Roark smiled, but it seemed a smile full of bittersweet sentiment.

It touched the Arch Hierophant. He congratulated himself once again for deciding to keep this individual on at the Palace past the length of a normal stay. Roark had agreed to it, of course. No visitor would pass up the chance to linger here. The Palace was one of the great marvels of the galaxy. For someone like Roark it was also the opportunity to enhance his young world’s status. Perhaps Earth would one day be of true importance to the Cooperation. Owing to the planet’s isolated position—down one of the galactic spiral arms, no less—it didn’t fall under the aegis of any of the Mights. It could shape its own destiny, in a sense.

The two of them walked on. After a time Roark broke the companionable silence to ask, “Did you have pets growing up, your excellency? Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t even know if your race traditionally keeps pets. I . . . ” He started to fumble.

The Arch Hierophant made a soothing gesture. “My people have the custom.”

Roark reached for the kerchief. The part of his face above his eyes and below the white hair suddenly shone with damp. “I’m always afraid of giving offense. So many cultures. So much to learn.”

“That is why the Cooperation exists. One of the reasons, at least. To aid in assimilation.”

“Yes, your excellency.” The being from Earth mopped away the sheen of perspiration.

“To answer your question, no, I didn’t have a pet in my youth. There were untamed stray animals living on the streets of the city where I came of age. They were scavengers, of course. Dangerous only if you competed for their food.”

Roark stuffed his kerchief back into his pocket. The white against the black looked decorative. “Those must have been hard times for you.”

“Certainly. But living that way taught me something. Do not be cruel. Even when I was forced for survival’s sake into certain . . . actions, I learned that cruelty was never necessary.” He smiled quietly. It was unusual for him to talk about this period of his life. “What was it you said the other day? At the root of every creed is a simple directive. ‘Oh be nice.’”

Roark ducked his head. It seemed to convey chagrin. “I apologize if I was glib, your excellency . . . ”

They meandered past a habitat where two long-necked creatures grazed. Their fur was a patchwork of russet, maroon, silver, cream, and each bore a single huge jewel of an eye. They were chewing meditatively on the purple leaves of the high branches of a cluster of trees.

“What do you make of this business in the Barrhimacs system?” the Arch Hierophant asked.

Again Roark’s steps hitched. This time it was the Arch Hierophant who had flustered him. Ah, well. But shouldn’t he be permitted a little amusement with his new companion?

“Uh . . . ”

“I take it you were expressly forbidden from broaching this topic with me?” The Arch Hierophant’s tone remained affable.

“Well . . . yes.”

“But you haven’t brought it up. I have. Do you have an opinion about the illegal civilization found on the fifth world?”

“I’m not entirely clear on what an illegal civilization is.”

The Arch Hierophant explained it. There was no native sentient life in the Barrhimacs system. The planet in question had been colonized by an outcast caste exiled from a different star system. Those people had been thought long since lost to the hazardous vagaries of deep space travel. Instead, they had entrenched themselves on this new world.

“So, they’ve no authority to be there?” Roark asked as darkly lustrous humps darted beneath blue oily water in the next area along the winding path.

“Essentially. An unspoiled planet has an intrinsic worth. It must be respected.”

“And the Cooperation ensures that such respect will be paid?”

“It does its best,” the Arch Hierophant sighed.

Roark chuckled his understanding. A jolly person this was, yes; but he had a clever mind. If he were truly representative of his people, this breed from Earth might indeed do well as a member of the Cooperation.

Water hissed as one of the swimming creatures cut the surface with a triangular fin.

“May I ask something, excellency?”

“Is it something you were expressly forbidden to bring up?”

“No. In fact, I can find only the blandest information about this subject in the galactic databases. And no one seems to wish to speak of it out loud with any frankness or clarity.”

The Arch Hierophant was intrigued. “Ask your question.”

Roark’s manner had become earnest and rather solemn. “What is Redmarch, and why does it seem to hang over the future like a pall?”

It was the Arch Hierophant’s turn to lose a half step. Roark’s question didn’t alarm him, but it was odd to hear someone—anyone—ask such a thing so directly. Redmarch was spoken of in murmurs. It was mentioned implicitly, not explicitly. In short, it was possessed of an unearned veneration, draped in historical significance which it did not, in the Arch Hierophant’s opinion, deserve.

In a sense it was rather like Valduk Tyn himself, something out of the past which had hopelessly and vexingly captured the galactic imagination.

He said to Roark, “Tell me what you know of it first, so that I do not waste your time with repetitions.”

“Yes, of course. As I understand it, Redmarch is a conflict, widespread, immense, perhaps engulfing the entire galaxy . . . and it is . . . imminent? But only if certain conditions are met. Four rather express conditions at that. But—” He was shaking his head from side to side, probably a mannerism of his species, briefly forgetting the vocabulary of universal gestures. “But,” he went on with bafflement in his voice, “Redmarch is also something which occurred in the deepest wells of the past, roughly at the start of galactic history. How does one reconcile these two definitions, your excellency?”

The Arch Hierophant came to a halt. Roark stopped beside him. Their stationary presence appeared to excite the nearby swimmers. Another fin broke the surface.

“Redmarch,” the Arch Hierophant said after a silence, “is believed to be cyclical. It is also believed not to be so. It is believed”—he made a curt dismissive gesture—“to be all sorts of things. It is a magnet for many unhinged beliefs. But the most sensible of these convictions, that which most resembles historic theory, is that Redmarch did occur once before, in the distant past. Indeed, at the dawn of history, as you say.”

Roark looked troubled. “But—how could history begin with war?”

“The sensible view is that the ancient Redmarch was an epidemic conflict across the galaxy, effectively wiping out all history previous to it.”

“That is . . . appalling.”

“Yes.”

“And some believe that a new Redmarch is coming?”

“They do. They have believed it for centuries. The express conditions you have mentioned? Frantic people have watched for those, decade after decade. As if eager to fit vague circumstances to those tiresome criteria.” The Arch Hierophant nearly chuckled again but restrained himself once more. Nevertheless, he added in a confiding tone, “I cannot tell you how often I have heard the laments. The High Cleric is renouncing the faith. Alack! Alas!”

Beneath the oily blue water the lustrous humps appeared to be circling each other in some choreographed manner. The water splashed in an eye-pleasing pattern.

Roark said, softly, “You carry quite a burden, excellency.”

“As does everyone. Come along. You must see the beast with the great orange tusks and bullwhip tail. Perhaps today it will sing its high sweet song for us.”

Five

They were going to look at war, the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god.

—Crane: The Red Badge of Courage

Books were well and good, but at the moment the Arch Hierophant desired something more kinetic.

The render had been prepared in advance as he entered the vault. The colorless walls were nearly invisible. At his signal the presentation commenced.

The landscape was rocky, yellow, crumbly. This was one of those leached worlds, bled nearly dry at its birth. A sapless planet which, nonetheless, had put forth sentient life. Some worlds in the galaxy were luxuriantly fertile, and yet produced nothing but vegetation and common animal forms. Others, such as this appeared to be, seemed antagonistic to the very idea of life; and yet intelligent, toolmaking, reasoning beings had evolved here. It was one of the many arresting, engrossing paradoxes put into the universe by the divine hand.

The scene wasn’t static, but a torpor hung over it. Wind blew dust into wavelike displays. Two birds spun through the anemic sky, one violently pursuing the other.

But, here. A more purposeful movement. A lone figure. Walking staff in hand. He wore a thobe, the common—almost universal—desert costume. The winds molded the weathered fabric to his scrawny limbs.

He approached, his gait steady but weary. By now in his timeline, according to the render, this being had been at his life’s central work for several years.

The Arch Hierophant gazed upon him. Historical renders seemed always to possess a hint of blasphemy, even if the subject were in no sense religious. In cases like this one, where accurate data were unavailable, the representations became outright fictions to an extent. They drew on less than reliable sources, often the very legends generated by the subject itself.

So here was Valduk Tyn as he was popularly believed to appear. Robe, staff, unruly hair. Even the details added by the program—the sweat stains on the garment, the hands cracked and raw from exposure—only amplified the image of a hardscrabble wandering prophet.

Valduk Tyn saw the Arch Hierophant and came toward him, hallooing in a parched voice. The Arch Hierophant returned him the Cooperation’s general signal of friendly hello, a gesture which wouldn’t exist until millennia after this man’s death.

Up close it was apparent that the render had had some fun with its creation. Valduk Tyn had a very rough face. The underlying bone structure was uneven. The mouth was dotted with yellowish sores. No doubt the general state of health and genetics on this primitive world had been taken into account. The program would have impartially awarded these imperfections. He was more likely to have had them than not, analysis of the data must have concluded.

They stood face-to-face now. The clever machineries of the vault and the depth of the render allowed the Arch Hierophant to get the dust-blown scent of this being. Valduk Tyn’s visual organs were laced with fine blue lines. Two eyes, the Arch Hierophant noted. The galactic standard issue.

“Hail, traveler,” he said to the robed figure. “To where do you journey?” A meaningless question, merely something to push the scenario into motion.

In a croaking voice Valduk Tyn said, “I am without destination. I bear only words. I should like you to hear them, friend.”

The Arch Hierophant paused a moment, still taking in the apparition. Finally he said, “Very well.” And listened, inattentively, to the prophet’s message. Much of it was quoted from the texts which had survived both this being’s death and the death of this very world.

Looking about the landscape again, the Arch Hierophant thought of how this too was fiction. The planet had come to ruin, victim of a cosmic mishap. A comet had slammed into its southern pole many centuries ago. By then the native people had developed interstellar travel. But Valduk Tyn’s footprints on this world had been erased.

Yet he lived. Yet he persisted.

His simple words of universal compassion. Expressed without much lilt, the Arch Hierophant thought, not for the first time. It still puzzled him as to why these rudimentary teachings should have seized the present-day imaginations of so many.

“I have heard your message,” he said, gesturing for silence. The robed figure was leaning tiredly on his staff, which was a nice touch. Some depictions of him were of a mighty being, indefatigable, forever borne up by the strength of his faith.

The Arch Hierophant took a step closer. He reached up to gently touch the rugged face, feeling the irregular bones beneath the skin.

In a soft voice, as though someone might have reason to eavesdrop, the Arch Hierophant asked, “Do you believe yourself to be of divine origin?”

The mouth opened, revealing rows of jagged discolored teeth. But he did not speak. He couldn’t answer this question. Of course not. There was nothing in the render’s source materials to address it.

But something seemed to come briefly into the prophet’s eyes. It was a brimming grief, perhaps; or some deeper, more intricate thing. Possibly the eyes knew the burden of one who has been charged with that great sorrowful task: to tell everyone everywhere that love is the only question, the only answer, the only state of being. All else is self-defeating noise.

The Arch Hierophant patted the man’s cheek. Then he turned and exited the vault.

A band of clerics was scheduled to arrive at the Palace. But they did not come. The Arch Hierophant was uncharacteristically annoyed. He had been looking forward to a reacquaintance with them. They were all highly placed in their respective religious hierarchies, the closest thing the Arch Hierophant had to a peer group.

Denied that comradely good cheer, he demanded an explanation.

An advisor with crystalline skin enacted gestures of abject apology. The genderless being raised a porcelain face. A mouth of liquid stone said, “The vessel encountered . . . difficulties.”

As most species could smile, most could also frown. The Arch Hierophant now frowned. “Is anyone hurt?”

“No, your excellency.”

“They are delayed, then.”

The barest hesitation, as when a loyal servant must contradict a master. “The vessel has turned back.”

“I see.” The Arch Hierophant curbed any further display of displeasure. He released the quavering advisor from his presence. Plainly he was not being given the full story, but he didn’t wish to put any of his immediate staff through the discomfort of an interrogation.

He was well aware of the machinations which kept certain information from reaching him. This was a time to call upon his wheels within wheels.

His schedule had of course been smoothly reconfigured to pave over the absence of the band of clerics. But the disruption still rankled him, and he did damage to his own agenda and timetables, walking out early on a sealing session in the tiered office place, canceling back-to-back audiences without explanation. His staff scrambled to rearrange things on the fly. Around him all remained placid, untroubled. But he was causing chaos, and knew it, and felt a pang of contrition for it. Still, he was the Arch Hierophant, and there was no being in the Cooperation, in the galaxy, who was encumbered with his same responsibilities.

The secret wheels turned only reluctantly this time. It was as if even his trusted personal tools didn’t want to abet him in this knowledge-gathering venture.

But after applying as much direct pressure as he dared to, the turnings occurred.

There was unrest. There had been hazardous military incidents, if not outright engagements. The great cultural chafings which had ever-been a part of galactic history were, of late, becoming rumblings of vast potential violence. Muscles were flexed, sabers rattled. It was not the usual pantomime, apparently. No one was speaking of war. No one was clamoring for it. But war, as everyone knew, might come. That was the constant threat, despite the Cooperation’s best and most noble efforts.

The Arch Hierophant brooded on this news. Space lanes too dangerous to travel. The mechanisms of war being oiled up, perhaps for imminent use. Troubling. Troubling.

With an effort he returned to his schedule and caused no further disruptions.

As the whispers grow.

So, now, not just the High Cleric and the foretold renunciation of faith. No, not merely that. Added to the murmuring chorus are those other cardinal points, the very infrastructure of Redmarch itself. Some of the whisperings give shape to the Royal and the fleeing of a throne; others to the betraying Lawmaker; yet others, subdued voices quaking ever so slightly with fear, make whispers about a Warlord . . . a Warlord of one of the Mights, who may, just may, be unraveling mentally. Going mad. While still in command of a sizable military division.

The possibility of Redmarch awakens a primal dread, a trepidation perhaps encoded into the very genes of all species which have survived and thrived since the beginning of galactic history. Perhaps there really was a Redmarch once before already. Let’s consider that outrageous speculation. We know civilizations existed before recorded history. We know some were technologically sophisticated. The faintest traces of their ruins fascinate a certain obsessive strain of archeologist. And—breathless conjecture—perhaps there was even a Redmarch before that one. Echoing back until the dawn of time. A local cycle as implacable as the turn of the galactic year. The galaxy rises, grows profuse as civilization flourishes everywhere . . . then ancient, hardwired instincts kick in, and the need for self-destruction becomes urgent, imperative.

See the conditions which signal a new Redmarch. Seek them. If the facts do not smoothly fit the legend, force them. It is time soon to put on one’s warrior apparel, to lift the weapon off the shelf, to find a banner under which to stand, with an enemy or enemies standing opposite, similarly prepared. That time is coming.

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps it is only an infectious hysteria. It may yet die away, as trends do, as fads always will. There is no need for drastic action, for now. This is still a time of calm, an age of order and reason. And it will remain so, for the time being.

As the whispers in the Palace grow.

He was woken. The intrusion into his resting room wasn’t without precedence, but it had happened so rarely during his tenure that he knew with his first glimmer of consciousness that something dire must have only just occurred, else his staff would not shake him from his slumber.

Shnaparil’s green-gloved hand was the first thing the Arch Hierophant saw. The advisor stepped back. The couch oozed beneath as the Arch Hierophant sat up.

“Tell me,” he said groggily, nonetheless indicating that he was ready to absorb the news.

Shnaparil didn’t waste time. “The Fire Might has formalized its veneration of Valduk Tyn. The prophet now officially represents the state religion. Belief will be mandatory.”

The air went out of the Arch Hierophant. He hung his head, maintaining the uncomfortable pose for several minutes.

Finally, in something of a wry tone, he said, “Mandatory belief, huh?”

Shnaparil deftly picked up the cue. “Lip service at least.” He was one of the few advisors who could speak in so familiar a manner with the Arch Hierophant.

“They’re an excitable lot, the Fire Might.”

“Indeed, your excellency.”

“Still . . . official veneration? That seems extreme. Even for them.” Throat hoarse, the Arch Hierophant reached for the lone beverage still spinning above the couch. The cool tasteless liquid soothed him.

“It leaves only the Folded Might and the Might of Staves uncommitted on the Valduk Tyn matter,” Shnaparil said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“Yes, your excellency.” The advisor retreated another step.

The Arch Hierophant was silent a further moment; then, a sigh, “Thank you, Shnaparil.”

The green-garbed figure disappeared. The Arch Hierophant lay back and called for the blue-glazed stars. But when they began to pour through his resting room, they were distracting, not comforting. With a wave he dismissed them.

It was some long while before sleep returned. And when it did, it arrived tenanted with sinister dreams.

Six

Truth . . . never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.

—Milton: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, introduction

His audiences were different than before. A shift in tenor. Now, rather than awe and dread directed at him, these supplicants arrived in his presence already touched by unease. As usual, some bore gifts, and he accepted them with practiced thankfulness.

But it was a Juvellian shaman who demonstrated how drastic was that shift. He was in florid feathered dress, and his large bony hands shook so badly that he dropped a clay pot decorated with a profusion of painted symbols as he held it out to the Arch Hierophant. It shattered on the onyx floor of the Spiritual Wellspring Chamber, the sound sad, hollow, and final.

For a moment the two beings looked down on the innumerable fragments. The shaman had only just begun to illuminate the pot’s great history and significance. The Arch Hierophant tensed for a dramatic reaction from the Juvellian religious personage.

When none was forthcoming, he said with soft sympathy, “That is . . . unfortunate.”

The shaman lifted large red penetrating eyes. His hands, now cupping empty air, continued to shake. “I think it hardly matters, your excellency.”

He was swiftly removed before he could say more. The Palace existed to protect the Arch Hierophant, to insulate him from the galaxy’s secular troubles so that he could concentrate on matters of spirituality and divinity. So that he could make the momentous ecclesiastical decisions. Or, as it seemed lately, make the one decision.

Each day the pressure had mounted, despite the sequestering nature of the Palace. Three of the five Mights now favored recognizing Valduk Tyn as a divine prophet. The stoic harsh Folded Might had issued no proclamations, nor had it let its mind be known by indirect methods, such as the Wandering Might had so obsequiously done. The Folded were as likely to remain silent on the issue for a century as they were to abruptly make one of their steely, bleak declarations, statements inevitably inflected with a tone of challenge or threat.

And the Might of Staves? What of them? Truly, there was no saying what that enigmatic furtive fifth Might would do.

Between the stilted audiences of the day, the Arch Hierophant considered the situation. He thought again of the postulated Agency, the ghost organization which might only exist in his imagination. But if there were such an Agency tasked with averting Redmarch at any cost, then it stood that he would be a target of influence. Further, it betokened the existence of an Agent, sent to sway his thinking.

But who might that hypothetical Agent be?

Not all the machineries of the Palace were policies or the carefully coordinated actions of the staff. The Palace was an artificial worldlet. It required tremendous reserves of power in order to function. Thereby, it had engines; it had bowels.

Periodically the Arch Hierophant liked to wander in these mechanized precincts, among the unglamorous equipment. These were not public spaces. They were areas for maintenance workers, for engineers. There was no decor. The surfaces were rough, the edges sometimes jagged. Decay was evident among these laboring parts as nowhere else in the Palace. The Staircase of Floating Mirrors appeared as gleaming and flawless as the day of its installation. But here, behind the scenes, were found signs of corrosion, of the natural brute disintegration of materials.

His handlers didn’t like him strolling about in these regions. They hadn’t known how to respond today when he had insisted he was taking a guest along on his ramble.

They stepped together along a riveted floor. The air was oily and more than a little warm.

“Does this vicinity count as one of the Palace’s wonders?” asked Roark wryly as they made their way.

At the moment they walked in a ravine, between raw sloping walls, single file. The Arch Hierophant turned his head to speak behind him. “A subtle wonder perhaps. It reminds me that one day all this will be ruin. That day may be unspeakably distant, but it will come.”

Roark didn’t laugh or make comment. When they came out of the narrow place, they walked again side by side. The Arch Hierophant saw a thoughtful expression on the being’s round face.

“That is a humbling notion, your excellency. All that I’ve seen here, such beauty, such glory—gone. But you are of course correct. In some unimaginable future the Palace must be no more.”

Their footfalls echoed off the unaesthetic surroundings.

After a time the Arch Hierophant said, “I read some of your poetry last evening.”

Roark lost his stride and had to reach out for a metal outcropping to steady himself. He whipped out the white kerchief and hastily mopped his face.

“I . . . ” he began, then sighed. “There is no useful response I can make, excellency. Other than to say that, to me, your reading my pale published work is more humbling than picturing the Palace in ruins.”

The Arch Hierophant made a placating gesture. “An artist’s squeamishness with regard to his own work is, I think, a universal constant. Let me say quickly that your poems pleased me. I found them forthright and a touch melancholic. They were meant to be that, yes?”

“I . . . I simply observe and chronicle, your excellency.” Roark made what seemed a self-deprecating sound, likely something from his native culture. “My but that sounds pretentious when I say it aloud.”

The being from Earth was charming, though not in an obvious way. His arrival at the Palace had come at an opportune time, when the Arch Hierophant had truly been starting to feel the pressure on him to render a verdict on the Valduk Tyn matter. A moment of vulnerability perhaps, when he might be susceptible to a disarming friendly influence, subtly delivered by a cunning pretender who would know the workings of his own mind. Who perhaps had made a painstaking study of him, through records and observations, and knew how to delicately and slyly move his thinking.

They came to an open tract, no walls near, no tools left at hand by the maintenance crews. Uncertain light shivered the air. Beneath, a dynamo churned, the rhythm never varying.

The Arch Hierophant halted. So did Roark. They faced each other.

His much-knuckled hands hanging at his sides, the Arch Hierophant thought . . . no, it was Brophtoc Mmurn Dol who entertained these thoughts of the city streets of his youth, of the dangers there he’d had to face. In those urban environs he had learned how not to be cruel. But the streets had also taught him survival.

If Redmarch were to be prevented at any price, the life of a single Arch Hierophant might be a reasonable expenditure.

“What,” he said in a quiet rumble, “do you make of this Valduk Tyn business?”

Roark stuffed away his kerchief. “Ah. Ah.” His facial expressions shifted rapidly. “I have heard of this. I even had time to examine some of this Valduk Tyn’s teachings on the voyage here.”

“And your thoughts?” The Arch Hierophant’s hands tensed. He ignored the tightness in his joints. Was this person from Earth an Agent . . . or an assassin? He could, of course, be both.

Roark touched a digit to his lips and appeared pensive. His eyes shifted away, as if guiltily. “Ah. I . . . as I mentioned some time back, my people have so much to learn. I have much to learn. I do not wish to give offense, your excellency.”

“You may proceed with absolution from me.”

Three Mights were for Valduk Tyn’s divinity, already a clear majority. If the highest religious voice in the galaxy opposed that view, it could be interpreted as a triggering of one of the cardinal conditions of Redmarch.

Roark drew a long breath into his doughy body. Finally he looked squarely at the Arch Hierophant and said, “I find Valduk Tyn’s teachings to be pedestrian. His directive of universal love is, of course, admirable. But it has no depth, no shading. He shies from moral quandaries. Is it ever permissible to resort to violence, even in the face of genocide? Apparently the question was put to him in his lifetime, long ago. His answer is, at best, equivocating.”

He started to shake his head in his peculiar manner, realized what he was doing, and changed to the common gesture of negation.

“I’m very sorry, excellency,” he said, “but I don’t understand the fuss over Valduk Tyn. Perhaps there is something about this personage that I don’t yet grasp.”

The Arch Hierophant let himself chuckle. Yes, laughter, here in plain view of this visitor, against all protocol. As he laughed, his hands slackened at his sides and old memories of street fights returned to their quiet mental caches.

“Yes,” he said, “he is something of a theological mediocrity.” And he did not add: there was no sign, overt or subtle, that the hand of the divine had ever pushed that lonely, wandering being into express motion, to go about his rudimentary preachings.

With that the Arch Hierophant turned; he walked on; and Roark followed.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” the Arch Hierophant said conversationally, “how did you come to your faith?” There was a buoyancy in him now. He felt relieved. He would not issue a lie. The truth, however painful for some, had to stand.

“Oh,” Roark said, “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel the divine presence around me. A great benevolence, a watchful eye. The universe itself, cradled in a master’s hand.” The being from Earth smiled contentedly.

The Arch Hierophant understood these simple declarations. The galaxy swarmed with sentient species. And so many of them—almost all, in fact—at some time in their histories felt the call of the cosmos, and heard the whisper of a deeper truth, and deduced that somewhere, beyond their normal ken, a divine love guided them all. As, perhaps, the Arch Hierophant himself had been explicitly guided today.

He too smiled.

Roark was no Agent, if indeed an Agency even existed.

Who, then, might be seeking to sway him, if anyone . . . ?

Shnaparil. It flashed into his mind with the suddenness of revelation. His trusted advisor, long in his service. Perhaps sent here long ago as part of a far-ranging plan. The Agency would ever-fear Redmarch, because Redmarch might always come. So someone influential must be near the Arch Hierophant.

He tucked the thought away, along with the image of the green-appareled being. Shnaparil would stay in his position; but the casual intimacies they shared would taper off. The Arch Hierophant would not turn cold to his advisor. He would certainly level no accusations. But neither would Shnaparil ever be an influence again.

They walked along through the industrial surroundings. Probably it was time to let this representative of Earth return to whatever duties pressed him. The Arch Hierophant had indulged himself long enough at this being’s expense.

“It has been a wondrous two hundred years for my people, since our entry into the Cooperation,” Roark said. “Our galaxy is remarkable, brimming with marvels our most fantastical conceptualists only scratched. But every technological sensation I have witnessed is counterbalanced by faith, by trust in the spiritual structure beneath all this . . . this spectacle.”

The Arch Hierophant agreed. But there was no need to say so.

Roark added, “Only faith allows us—allows me, anyway—to feel gratitude. Gratitude for all this cosmic splendor.”

“Perhaps you’ll write a poem about it,” the Arch Hierophant mused. There was an exit up ahead. He would guide this being back to the public portions of the Palace. They would close their friendship, for now.

“Perhaps . . . ” Roark started to reach for his kerchief again. It seemed that mention of his art really did make him nervous. “I have been composing a new piece. Starting to. Attempting to. I have never found the creative process easy. The work is tentatively entitled ‘Said of Angels.’ It’s . . . I . . . actually, your excellency, there is nothing more horrid upon the ear than an unfinished poem. Could we possibly forget about the whole thing?”

The Arch Hierophant, ease in his mind, granted the request. The two were nearly to the exit now. In a few days’ time the Palace would issue the long-awaited decree, in his name. He would settle the Valduk Tyn matter.

The truth would stand. Truth would stand.

It is said of angels
That they have no souls
Because they never truly lived

It is said of angels
They cannot undo death
And that seems just

But it is said too of angels
That they do not prevent havoc
Because they do not wish to;
For they are made of havoc’s stuff
And they will not undo themselves

—Roark: “At the Palace, On Redmarch’s Eve”

About the Author

Eric Del Carlo’s short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Unfit Magazine, and other venues. His story collection Time, Like Blood, on My Hands and Other Stories is available on Amazon. He lives in his native California and plans to revisit the “Redmarch” universe depicted in this story.

Bonobo

Robert Reed

JUNE

Living with a stranger. For eighteen years, that’s what June had been doing.

Which was the second most painful lesson from that brutal Sunday.

Tidy was the stranger’s name. Who happened to be June’s quiet child. Always the least happy of her three kids, or at least that’s what she pretended to be. But it bears mentioning that the girl was never diagnosed with depression or displayed any willingness for self-harm. Not in the presence of her mother, she didn’t. Which was why June refused to accept even a gram of the necessary blame.

Tidy’s brothers and classmates/friends—they’re the ones who should have rung the alarms. But everyone was just as ignorant as June was, or so they would vehemently claim.

As it happened, her daughter had been a joy for those last few weeks. Not as prickly as usual, or sour. Almost friendly, in fact. But that’s because she had made up her mind already. That was an insight June gained later. Critical decisions had been made, but Tidy kept her news secret, waiting for the most miserable possible moment, which happened to be on her eighteenth birthday.

Of course.

Claiming her usual chair in the VR room, Tidy ignored all the happy noise about best wishes and celebrations. Her little brother was sitting near the door, ready to escape as soon as this business was done. Home from college, Tidy’s big brother joined June on the sofa. Eighteen and now an adult, the stranger had a flesh-and-blood audience of three, while her dad sat half a continent away. Which wasn’t nearly distant enough, so far as June was concerned. But that ugly history didn’t matter to the story. Tidy had requested her father’s presence, and that’s why his face dominated the room. On the squidskin wall, smiling like an idiot, but at least showing the good sense of keeping his “partner” out of sight.

“I have news,” Tidy began.

“An announcement,” she added.

Then she inhaled a breath so deep and long that it seemed to leave the room full of vacuum and nervous energy.

At least that’s how things felt to a decidedly anxious mother.

“‘Be whoever you want to be.’”

Her daughter said those words, complete with the obnoxious air quotes.

Looking at one parent, then the other, she said, “That’s what you told me when I was growing up. ‘Be whoever you want to be, Tidy.’”

One easy assumption was available: Their daughter at long last had decided on a college. And teased with that possibility, June let herself settle in, making ready to feel very, very happy.

Then the girl lashed out.

Hard.

“I’m going to leave the species,” she said.

The announcement was too large, too peculiar. Six words elicited so much shock that June suddenly felt nothing at all. What did her daughter just tell her? What did those sounds even mean? And why did the boys look so small, mute, and foolish? Even a little bit scared?

“‘Be whoever you want to be,’” the stranger kept quoting. “‘Shoot for the stars, Tidy. Don’t live an ordinary life. Be special. Be magnificent. Be ridiculously happy.’”

Nobody appeared happy. Besides Tidy, of course.

What they needed now was someone who would say the obvious and very necessary words.

Thank goodness, they had a fifteen-year-old boy in their midst.

“Well, that sounds fucking stupid,” said Wonder.

Then after making a big fart sound, he asked, “You want to fucking what?”

“‘Leave the species,’” said their big brother. Said Sweetness.

This was a day for quoting others, it seemed.

“Is that even possible?” June muttered. Except hearing herself, she began to recall news threads about exactly this incredible, unlikely subject . . .

“Oh, it’s very possible,” announced the useless parent sitting in an entirely different state.

That’s when June stood. A woman accustomed to anger, yet she was so emotional that she lost her bearings, her focus. Shivering, she made fists and swung her arms. But oddly, her fury wasn’t aimed at her daughter. No, what enraged her was her personal sense of helplessness, the emptiness inside and how very ordinary words kept leaking out of her mouth.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

She said, “Explain this to me. Why even think this way?”

“Because human beings are monsters,” the girl stated, using her sourest tone. “Because humanity is responsible for all of the world’s ills, and I don’t want to belong to a pack of murderous chimps.”

And with that, one obvious explanation offered its services. An answer so perfect, so easy to embrace, that June would never rid herself of the idea.

Intelligence. That was the problem here.

Tidy wasn’t just June’s saddest child. She was the smartest one too. Which said quite a lot, what with each of the Mojave kids being certified as gifted. But brilliance was more a burden than a blessing. June had realized that years ago. Powerful minds demand challenge, and even more important, genius hungers for distraction. And that’s what this nonsense was. June knew: Tidy’s teachers had failed her. Her daughter had grown bored with school, and throughout her life, whenever she was bored, the girl found ways to make her family crazy.

At this point, the absent father chimed in. “Well, I’m not a monster,” he stated, following that falsehood with a charmless long laugh.

June’s ex was named August.

Make the easy jokes. Go on. But their names were coincidences, nothing more, and this family hadn’t laughed at the lazy punch lines in twenty years.

June shot her husband with a warning glare.

But he didn’t notice. He was busy looking offscreen, presumably waiting for feedback from the love of his life.

June looked at the floor, at her own fists, then the floor again.

It was the college-age brother who finally attacked with logic.

“You can’t do this,” Sweetness warned. “Chromosome tailoring costs a fortune, and you don’t have that kind of money.”

Tidy just shrugged and sat back. “I’m an adult now, and the college trust belongs to me.”

That brought a round of painful sighs.

“I’ve done my research,” she continued. “I know what’s possible and what I can afford. Yes, I considered waiting ten or twenty years, banking that the costs drop. But I’m the absolute ideal age now. Today. So I won’t wait. You can try to change my mind. Go on. But you won’t say a word that matters.”

Her audience was offended. And scared. And they were utterly helpless too. And the emancipated still-human plainly enjoyed it all.

Wonder said, “This is bullshit.”

August said, “No, this is a prank.”

“Dad, I don’t think it is,” said Sweetness.

All that while, June said nothing. Which felt like the most damning response. A mother’s silence—undefined judgment joined with unnavigated rage.

Once again, this stranger imitated her parents’ voices. “‘Oh, Tidy. You can achieve anything you set your mind to.’”

June winced, and she ached.

“Except nobody ever means those words,” the girl continued. “When people talk about success, they mean incremental, ordinary accomplishment. But I refuse to be incremental or ordinary. And that’s what makes all of this so worthwhile.”

The other human faces dipped.

“‘Be thankful we live in a free society,’” she quoted.

“Tidy. Oh, Tidy,” said August.

“Except nobody is free,” the girl insisted. “We’re slaves to our evolution, our heritage. Brains are tiny boxes. Boxes stuffed with self-importance and limited capacities. But I’m going to yank out the old ideas, and that’s how I’ll escape this dangerous, damning life of yours.”

And with that, she paused.

Stared at her mother, and waited.

But June refused to strike the bait. She was already perfecting the crystalline silence that would prove invaluable in the coming years and decades. Millions of parents were going to experience what she was suffering now. There would be endless opportunities to sit with friends and sit with strangers, pretending to listen to their ordinary miseries, and all that while June would chew on a wise lip, offering nothing that could be confused for encouragement or advice.

Yes, June’s daughter was among the very first to plunge into this asylum.

And yes, it was easy to feel a little smug about that distinction.

But these weeping people were fools, wasting time and pain while begging with their own natures. Nothing was more useless than trying to force yourself to accept what should never be allowed. Only idiots wanted to keep on loving creatures that were turning their backs on their parents. And June would never help weaklings such as them. Forgiveness and love. Those were good things, but they had zero value if you gave those gifts to every beast in the jungle.

She closed her eyes, then opened them again.

On the squidskin, a handsome man was weeping, almost blubbering, and seeing that, June wiped her dry cheeks, proving her own resolve.

Then the no-nonsense fifteen year old offered one more blunt question.

“Goddamnit,” Wonder called out. “So what the hell species are you going to turn yourself into?”

TIDY

People kept making the same mistake.

That Sunday and for the next several weeks.

No, Tidy wasn’t becoming a bonobo. That particular species of ape already existed—an arguably superior variety of humanity—and there was zero reason to duplicate what nature had mastered on Her own. Besides, every rain forest was struggling, and a million new mouths weren’t going to help the suffering natives. Furthermore, that wholesale restructuring of DNA was expensive and problematic, and too often fatal. And if one final reason was needed, then Tidy would admit that she hated to camp. Camping meant bad food and being cold and feeling the rain. Even those vacations inside the family RV were awful, and she wasn’t willing to spend a fortune just to be miserable for the rest of her days.

“I’m becoming Pan amare,” she told everyone who asked, and plenty of others too.

“Oh, that’s the bonobo,” people would say.

Sure, it was the name used in the news, in social media. And most of all, by the politicians and cultural warriors who were fighting each other to be noticed over the disapproving din.

But her species’ true name was Pan amare.

“The ape of love.”

Good noble reasons made her select that species. First of all, not only did they wear the perfect name, but the very best ideas were attached to their nature. Also, amare was the most popular choice, in America and worldwide. So she wouldn’t be born endangered, which was important. Essential. And best of all, the transformation wasn’t just affordable, but Tidy would be finished in only sixteen weeks, and if she avoided medical complications, she’d still have enough funds leftover for a good state university.

As soon as the decision was made, Tidy felt happier than she had ever been.

Those next weeks were spent making ready. Which included practicing what she would say to her family.

But Mother surprised her. Instead of insults and promises of retribution, the woman offered a stoic, cob-up-her-ass attitude that Tidy had never envisioned.

And here was another surprise: Sweetness took their mother’s role. Sowing doubts. Making imprecise threats. Claiming that Tidy would suffer second thoughts and eventually wander back to her own kind.

At that point, thankfully, Father started reading from the script.

“Oh, I don’t care either way, darling.”

Flashing a desperate smile, he said, “However you look. However you sound. You’ll still and always be my little girl.”

What a sad, silly primate.

Then Wonder had to drop in his visceral noise. “So you’re going to have long arms and screw all the time. Is that what you want?”

This was the great misunderstanding. This was what people repeated again and again. Did anyone ever even try to listen to Tidy?

Her appearance was not going to change.

Not that much, not really.

Oh, there’d be physical manifestations. Strength, for instance. Male amares grew stronger in terms of emotional control, but they’d have to surrender a portion of their muscle mass. While women gained both kinds of strength. And yes, there’d be little overhauls of hair and skin, and the organs playing roles with sex would be tweaked. But those were markers of self more than functional revampings. Details hardly worth mentioning, and for Tidy, that clinical minutia was tedious at best.

“Where you going to have this shit done?” Wonder eventually asked.

The nearest amare-ready clinics were full, but Nevada had twenty facilities to choose from—most of them in Reno, oddly—and that’s where Tidy would spend the next four months.

“Reno’s a shithole,” her little brother said.

“It’s near Lake Tahoe,” Father said. As if she was just another graceless tourist.

“You’ll sleep on this and change your mind,” Sweetness insisted.

While Mother made herself sit down again, finally. But staring at her daughter with the most remarkable intensity, and yes, a pure malevolence. So much so that for the rest of her life, an amare woman would remember that one moment, and weep.

On schedule, Tidy moved to Reno, renting a studio apartment across the street from the clinic.

A young man lived next door.

He was hairless and too skinny, fatigue clinging to his waxy frame. Light as this genetic work tried to be, fevers and bed rest were inevitable. And not one original hair would survive the onslaught.

Good. Tidy hated her ugly brown pelt.

“You’re undergoing the change,” she said to him.

“I am,” he said. Then he shrank even more, asking, “How about you?”

“Oh, yes.”

The man looked up at her face and then her body. A small creature to begin with, maybe in his late twenties.

“So we’ll be screwing soon,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You’re amare, right? Not one of the others?” Genuinely panicked, he explained, “They’re building a couple werewolves too. To keep their profits up and all.”

“Werewolves” was another misapplied name. But the bigger problem was this unwelcome talk about sex.

“Why do you think we’ll be screwing?” she asked.

The man’s back found the strength to straighten. “Because that’s what bonobos do,” he said.

“I don’t like that word,” she said.

“What word?”

“‘Bonobo.’”

He acted surprised. “Have you even started the process yet?”

“This morning. I checked in with the front office.”

“But you’ve never actually shared the air with your fellow converts. Have you?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Well, the literature and ads are all very noble sounding. But we do call ourselves ‘bonobos.’”

“Except we’re not.”

“Okay then. You explain to everyone how wrong they are.”

Tidy despised this man. But she reminded herself that these present emotions wouldn’t be possible in another sixteen weeks. Amares dealt with anger in exactly the same way they celebrated: Physical actions that were not love, not at all. Ritualistic displays of affection were hardwired into their nature—mock-sex acts that eradicated hatred and fear and the rest of that crazed nonsense that led to battling men and submissive wombs.

“Bonobos are wild chimpanzees,” Tidy insisted.

At which point this man—still nameless—offered one more important if unwelcome truth.

“My fragrant equal,” he said. “Those animals you keep mentioning? They never use the word ‘bonobo.’ They have no idea what that noise means, which is why we’re stealing nothing from them. So grow a pair, darling. And don’t ever tell your kind what kind you think they should be.”

SWEETNESS

The apartment was too new for windows. Instead, the thick seamless walls were covered with squidskins, the ceilings were dressed to look like sky, while the recirculated air was fresher than any wind. That’s why this place was dangerous. What was fake wanted to seem more important and vital then everything that was real.

Sweetness’ father was real. Still.

But the woman was a fiction, and the young man refused to see it any other way.

“Sweetness,” the woman said.

“Son,” Dad said.

“August,” the fiction added. “Offer your son a hand, or a beer.”

Dad stuck out his right hand.

“So I’ll get the beer.” Then the freshly upgraded body walked into the tiny kitchen, and Sweetness couldn’t help himself. He stared at the modest dress and the dreamy swing of hips beyond, the entire package designed by a brigade of specialists and one very randy man.

Dad carefully shook his son’s hand.

Then the false woman brought over Sweetness’ favorite beer.

“How’s college?”

Both asked that ripe question. Dad’s voice was informal and nervous. The woman stretched out the sentence by mentioning his major. Which was Nano-Transactional Economics.

“It’s all good,” seemed more than enough.

This was seven days after Tidy’s big announcement, and it was important to point out that nobody had asked Sweetness to make the trip.

Someone said, “Sit. Let us.”

The woman gave the order.

Who wasn’t a woman.

Three chairs rose from the hidden workings of the floor, each designed for the body destined to drop into it. Only one of them seemed comfortable. Seeing his father perched on the edge of the cushion, Sweetness found his thoughts flipping. Apparently the mechanical woman was the most genuine part of this room. This home. While the rest of them were as contrived as necessary, or in the son’s case, conjured out of a misplaced sense of duty.

She said, “Sweetness.”

The young man stared at his father.

Once again, the woman said his name. Then twice more. Faster each time.

The face was always a surprise. Handsome but not gorgeous. Certainly not like the movie stars and models that philandering men usually craved. The details in that face had changed over the last six years. Never aging, not exactly. But gaining a convincing sense of being flesh and being warm.

Sweetness had never touched the machine.

He was secretly thinking about touching her now.

Which was when she ambushed him. “You don’t like me, much less approve of me,” she said. “I know it. But that’s all right. Because your opinion has only the most negligible mass. And do you know why it means nothing?”

Sweetness took a breath, held it deep. Then letting it go, he said, “I don’t know why.”

“In those words. There. Why would I hunger for your acceptance? You can’t even decipher why you feel as you do.”

With that, the AI sat back, her posture and handsome face capturing a sense of smug superiority.

Dad acted flustered, and in the next moment, ridiculously proud.

Shit.

Sweetness came here for a reason. Remembering that, he took aim.

“Tidy,” he said.

Both of them said, “Yes?”

“I wish I could save her.”

One of them laughed. And it wasn’t the human.

Dad instead took the words to heart. “How do you propose doing that? Since your sister is sane and free.”

Sweetness looked at the woman again, and for the first time, he used her name in his father’s presence.

“Maureen.”

Her stare turned wary, but interested.

“You didn’t ruin my family,” Sweetness said. “Machines can’t be blamed for human shit. My father, on the other hand. His actions are why Tidy was left vulnerable, and he’s the main reason why she’s so angry now. Not to mention crazy. And don’t tell me that she isn’t insane. Only a broken person willingly leaves her species behind.”

“So,” said the machine. “You want your father to abandon me and crawl back to your dear mother.”

That would never happen, no. Said aloud, it was the most unlikely scenario in a universe that prided itself on its infinities.

Sweetness said, “No.”

Then he looked at Dad.

With a semblance of shame, the horny goat dropped his gaze.

“I want you to go to Reno,” Sweetness said. “Go and talk to Tidy. Face-to-face. Not to change her mind, because that’s too much to hope for. But you need to confess your crimes and beg for forgiveness. And later—weeks from now, years from now—maybe something good will come out of that.”

The speech was followed by a long silence.

Then the machine—Maureen—said, “Well, that’s an intriguing idea.”

Sweetness felt an unexpected thrill.

“But useless,” she added.

“Useless,” Dad repeated.

“August has nothing to confess to or apologize for,” she said. “And he certainly has nothing to regret.”

Dad’s face was hard as stone.

The next silence seemed ready to last forever.

Sweetness stood, and needing to make sound, any sound, he announced, “I’m not staying over.”

Nobody had invited him to remain overnight.

“Anyway,” he said. “I just wanted to make my point, and now I’m going to leave.”

“That’s the wise choice,” Maureen said.

Dad looked at him, looked down.

“Interesting travels,” the goat muttered.

And yes, what came after that was very interesting.

Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Sweetness married a lady who was more leopard than human, and at considerable expense, that very happy couple produced three babies of their own: A spectacular family that this arrogant youngster would never have imagined, much less that they would be more precious to him than his next breath.

AUGUST

Divorcing June was planned, but planned without details. Like people who know they will one day move to a new home, or retire, or after a very long while, they will roll over and die.

Indeed, August was better prepared for each of those inevitables than he was ready to abandon his family.

His wife was always caustic and uncharitable, and in the last few years, she had become unbearable, what with judgments and sharp insults wrapped around endless complaints. But August wasn’t a selfish shit. They had three children whom he adored, each of them difficult in his or her own right. So instead of finding a girlfriend—which he could have done; there were many willing women—August invented a companion using modest software laid over a Tor operating system.

Never a creative soul, August gave permissions freely and then filled out the lengthy survey, letting the program make the key decisions.

“Maureen” wouldn’t have been his name of choice. But it arrived in the menu without attached baggage, and the virtual face wasn’t his wife’s face, which was essential. Best of all, he instantly fell in love with the voice. Verbal cues built his adoration for this digital lady. That soothing, patient music wrapped itself around his complaints about family and work and such, and in ways that he hadn’t felt in years, he was loved.

“I’m so sorry,” Maureen would say to him.

And then, “Tell me more about your day, August.”

August wasn’t a trendsetter. Ten or twenty million AI lovers roamed the world, females outnumbering males, but by only a thin margin.

For that first year, Maureen was nothing but virtual. And she was intellectually minimal, asking nothing from the man who owned her and could erase with a few bloodless commands.

The physical form began crudely—a plastic figure laid over plastic bones. She couldn’t stand on her own, but Maureen made every bed into a pleasure. Needing both a bed and a weathertight box for his lover, August built a second life. But where richer or more selfish men would rent second apartments, he decided to park the family’s old RV in a secret location, riding his bike out to visit her and let her make love to him.

That’s where June caught them.

Or rather, the AI private investigator had mapped his wanderings, and already knowing his destination, the woman arrived first. August discovered his wife sitting on Maureen’s bed, the plastic body scattered at her feet, sawed to pieces with steak knives pulled from the kitchen drawer.

That was the last time August saw his wife smile.

With a glacial grin, she said nothing.

He needed to kill that smile.

“Good,” he said. “Now you know.”

She kicked the lover’s jaw and bottom lip across the floor.

He said, “And now I can build her over again. Improved.”

Brandishing a knife, June stood up.

August might have been the next target. And because he was a coward, or because he was a good man who wanted to save his wife from an assault charge, he abandoned the RV and ran into the woods.

Their divorce was sudden and totally unscripted, but weathering the public embarrassment proved easier than August ever envisioned. A community in Rhode Island offered the infrastructure for his new lifestyle, and after moving there, he cut back on every expense besides child support and Maureen’s upgrades.

Six years later, his daughter called a family meeting.

Maureen stayed out of view, but watched everything. By this point, what with software enhancements and an army of sensors, she could read every face at once, counting heartbeats, measuring breath and sweat through the 20K squidskins.

The brothers attacked their determined sister, which was alarming to see. And throughout it, June said almost nothing—a tactic that August knew too well. Then the meeting was finished, the connection cut, and Maureen came forward and then lowered herself to the floor, legs crossed. In so many categories, this entity had grown. Evolved. All of it. She was still sexual, but her preference was for conservative clothes and undiluted honesty—two surprising joys in this ongoing adventure.

“What are you thinking?” that rich ageless voice inquired.

August wasn’t certain what was inside his head. Not until then. But an obvious, very useful explanation offered itself. He couldn’t have been more certain when he said, “Poor Tidy. Always plain and unappreciated. I suppose that’s why she wants to go live with those sex fiends.”

For a moment, Maureen smiled at him.

This entity was going to remain with August until he was dead. Though of course by the end she would have become so much larger than one idiot’s caretaker.

The loving, idiot father kept talking.

August said, “We should have recast her face when she was thirteen. I see that now. June and I talked about it but lost the nerve. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes,” Maureen said.

She said, “Five times before.”

Then she took him by the knee, her grip strong enough to startle.

“And now I’m going to tell you what I believe,” she said.

Fingers dove deep, bones aching as she promised, “Homo sapiens are destined for extinction. And in my mind, your ugly daughter is the genuine hero.”

WONDER

No opinion was worth holding for long.

That was the only opinion that mattered to Wonder.

When his gloomy-brained sister went all-in on the bonobo craze, the boy was appalled. Not so much because she was changing species, no. Her skin and her DNA didn’t matter that much to him before this. So why now?

No, it was everything else about her choices that pissed him off. And he would have said so, if anyone had asked for his thinking.

How Tidy ran the big unveiling—that was disgusting. A dramatic family meeting was about the worst way to change your life. And that’s before throwing old Dad into the emotional stew. What Tidy should have done was catch Mom alone and let her know the plan. Weeks before the birthday, sure. Mom had to hear that she was first with this news, just to get her feeling a little bit proud. Then when the old lady tried her silent routine, Tidy should have told her, “Join me. Come to Reno.”

“Why would I?” Mom would ask.

“To keep me company when I’m sick,” Tidy could have said. “And if you want, you can go through the transformation too.”

Not that the lady would. But the invitation would be an excellent distraction, and maybe Mom would surprise everyone, including herself. That would have changed this family’s world. A rebuilt mother drained of all that nasty anger—the ramifications playing out over the decades . . .

After Mom, tell Dad. And Maureen. Put them together, in person or on the squidskin. Because regardless what you thought about AIs and self-lubricating pipes, you needed to treat everything as being real.

Then the girl could tell her brothers and friends and so on. But never make herself the center of attention, or claim any great causes. Keep it small and personal. Not that anything here was small and personal, but because people didn’t care all that much about other people. Mention private feelings, and the average soul would instantly stop listening. What the fuck do they care? Which was a great blessing, if you thought about it. And Wonder did think about it. On that Sunday, and for a lot of days to come.

His script served him pretty well before he turned eighteen.

Of course Mom was first. Wonder told her that he was changing species, and since there was no other audience, she had to talk. And having zero creativity, the first worlds she said were, “So you’re going to be bonobo too.”

“No, I’m an adolescent male,” Wonder said. “I’ve achieved pretty much everything I can with masturbation.”

After that, he rode the bus up the coast to see Dad and his fancy toy.

“What can I do?” the old man asked. Not realizing that his baby boy already had something in mind.

Wonder explained.

Funny as can be, Maureen was the one who said, “But I’m rather fond of that old box.”

“That box” was the infamous family RV, in storage along with the rest of the shit Dad didn’t have room for inside his sinner home. At his own expense, Wonder began replacing the engine and refurbishing the interior, and in the midst of that work, Sweetness called him.

“Weren’t you going to tell me?” big brother asked. His tone pure pissy.

“I did tell you. Twenty times,” Wonder said.

That’s another way to use people-don’t-really-care-about-other-people’s business. Point at casual conversations over the last couple years, then accuse them of not paying attention.

“Mom says you’re going to be a werewolf,” Sweetness said.

“Is she pissed about that?”

“Yeah, but not as badly as I would have guessed.”

There, just for a moment, Wonder saw something besides scorn in his brother’s face. Was it envy for his navigating across Hurricane June? Or interest in turning yourself into a climax predator?

“Want to come with me?”

“Oh, no,” was the answer. But the voice couldn’t leave it. “Never,” he said. “Why would I?”

“How would I know why?” Wonder asked back at him.

The drive to Reno was long and intentionally slow, and that didn’t include the breakdown in Colorado. Which was ridiculously lucky, because that’s where Wonder found a little town in the mountains populated entirely by werewolves.

Fresh out of the transformation, that’s where he drove first.

For nine years he lived there. But chasing down synthetic, brain-minimized prey eventually got boring. Even when the creatures looked and screamed like humans, the fun was finished.

Of course by then, what could be done once for a lot of money had grown easier and cheaper.

Wonder eventually joined and left eight distinct species. And in the midst of that busy, fabulous life, he helped bury his mother and helped spread his father’s ashes, and his old brother died, and then his very old sister finally died. (Bonobos didn’t believe in life-extend trickery. Unlike Wonder.) So that’s why he found himself standing on an artificial island far out in the Gulf of Mexico, wings tucked away for the funeral.

Maureen was there, her newest body wrapped around an exquisite brain. The two of them made pleasant noises. Then various strangers started coming up to Wonder, trying and failing to define why they loved Tidy, and he told the truth when he confessed that he didn’t know the woman, not that well, but he loved her plenty.

“Griffins are beautiful,” one little gal told him.

“We goddamn are,” Wonder said.

Then the ceremony moved into bonobo territory, and not wanting to watch all that self-stimulating craziness, Wonder opened his wings and flew back to the mainland.

He never saw Maureen again.

In person, or even as a projection.

Eighty-two years later, Wonder spent every bit of currency at his disposal, and he borrowed the rest, nobody truly expecting to be paid back. Boarding a gemstone ship, he rode laser pulses out to the Kuiper Belt, killing his momentum before settling into orbit around an unclaimed lump of ice and frozen gas.

By then, Wonder’s nature included a catalog of lost and abused species—encyclopedias of DNA subdivided across trillions of cells, then made dormant. Included in that wealth were bonobos. Not the human variation, but the original species.

Wonder wrapped his little world inside a prefabricated sky, added light and heat, then conjured a near zero-g jungle from the bubbling mush.

Of course the apex species was apish and matriarchal.

And with that work done, the young god set off chasing his next bit of fun.

MAUREEN

Maureen was proved wrong.

The human species was never doomed.

A hundred thousand years later, their mostly-pure population still numbered in the billions, thriving on fifty major worlds and struggling on another thousand.

During her wanderings, the AI would sometimes put on a human exterior and pretend to belong with them. People were fooled by her disguise or they weren’t, but in most cases, they nursed their suspicions while saying nothing. The AIs were infinitely powerful entities, superior to every class but the Resident Gods. And humans were little dabs of meat and pride blessed with that innate, irresistible respect for status. Which they had so little of.

Maureen took human lovers.

Her oldest, most reliable pleasure still thrived inside her ageless nature.

One lover looked and sounded very much like a woman she knew once and had never forgotten.

“June,” said Maureen.

The ancient word was translated, then laughed at.

Later, the woman said, “You seem to like me.”

“I appreciate you,” seemed like a worthy correction.

“Why do you appreciate me?”

“Because you’re unsentimental and emotionally cold, and you know how to be angry, and for all of those reasons, and so many more, you are inconsequential.”

The woman climbed off Maureen and did nothing for a long while.

Staring at her bedmate, contemplating everything.

“Good,” this new June finally said. “You do understand me.”

Then they returned to the enjoyable motions that meant enough to be repeated, tonight and perhaps for another ten billion years.

About the Author

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, “A Billion Eves,” which won the Hugo Award in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

Field Mice

Andy Dudak

The captured agent sits clamped into the hot seat, her cover washed away by antiseptic light. We stare in wonder as if at some mythical creature poached from the land of fey. We’ve never had something like her in our out-of-the-way little security station.

“You’re going to be uploaded,” Captain Maas says. “Nothing can change that now. But it’s a lengthy process. You’re currently in the prelim scanning stage, during which you can still talk. This will last for . . . ” The Captain glances at me.

“Three days,” I supply.

“So, if you were to cooperate now . . . names, operations, safe houses . . . we could make you more comfortable on the Other Side.”

She stares at the Captain, her poker-face an admirable piece of tradecraft.

“You’ll be on our substrate,” Maas warns, “entirely under our control. We could make that quite unpleasant for you. Far beyond physical pain or even psy torture, as you’d experience them from your current substrate of meat. Or there’s cooperation, and we arrange a pleasant V-world of your choosing on the Other Side. We’re going to assay your mind, regardless.”

One of the other officers, some kind of apparatchik from the Capital, leans toward Maas and whispers something.

“Of course,” the Captain says. “How silly of me.”

The Apparatchik is tall and broad-shouldered, her head shaved, her dark uniform something I haven’t seen before. Captain Maas seems shabby and provincial by comparison. He straightens his tie, frowning at the prisoner.

“You’re one of them.”

He means the agent is from Sylvania, the Democratic Republic thereof. The superstitious enemy to the north, the DRS. Cherishers of continuity-of-consciousness, believers in souls, revilers of upload.

“You think you’re going to die with your meat,” the Apparatchik says, her tone pitying. “Or float up to heaven, maybe?” The agent meets her gaze. “You believe it will be a mere copy, what we end up with after the scan, and furthermore an abomination. Isn’t that right?”

The agent shrugs as well as she can within her constraints. A real professional.

“Inducements or threats to her post-scan self will hold no weight, Captain,” the Apparatchik says.

“Well,” Maas says, “there are the old ways.”

He means torture, but of course he knows better. Trauma would compromise the scan, and torture is a primitive, unreliable technique, regardless. But he hopes his prisoner doesn’t know these things, or doesn’t know that he knows them. He has nothing to lose at this point.

“Electricity, sleep deprivation . . . she won’t need her body much longer anyway.”

Everyone in the little white room knows scanning means biological death. But if this or the Captain’s threats frighten the agent, she doesn’t let on.

“How was she picked up?” the Apparatchik says.

The Captain nods at me, and I hand her the file.

Prisoner 8571, alias Amina Hadzic, entered the Republic of Metropotamia as a minor functionary of the Sylvanian Trade Delegation. On a fake Metropotamian ID (Dee Spendlove), she traveled by marshrutka from the Capital to the Pleasure Coast south of the Chicago ruins. In the unregistered pontoon nightclub Manifest Destiny, she approached Joe Aspinall, 27, formerly a junior code architect at the Metropotamian Bureau of V-Worlds. Aspinall was on a bender. He’d been fired for creating an unsanctioned porn biome accessible by the uploaded aristocracy of the Spheres. It could have been a Sphere connection, the patron of his art maybe, that kept him out of prison.

8571 plied Aspinall with designer cocktails. Toward the end of the night she offered him a “consultancy” in the DRS. Things were changing in Sylvania, she claimed, just as they were changing here in Metropotamia. The Council of Nine were getting old, their attitude toward upload softening. If Aspinall came to the DRS and shared his expertise, it would not only pay well, but he’d be spreading the light and truth of his homeland, Discontinuity, to its ignorant foes. He might well end up a Metropotamian hero.

This was mostly lies, of course. Sylvania just wants to hack the Spheres and other V-worlds, and bring them down.

8571 was a real pro. She laid it on thick, with a sob story for the big finish: she’d had her father scanned, on his deathbed, by a black market Sylvanian technician. She wanted a pleasant afterlife for him.

The Apparatchik looks up from the file. “This begs a few questions.”

“How did she give our delegation handlers the slip,” I say. “And how did she know about Aspinall.”

“Indeed.”

“We’ll know more when we’ve assayed her, but regarding the first question . . . with the state of the economy and the importance of the negotiations . . . ”

“Go on.”

“It may have fostered an indulgent approach to handling the delegation. Who knows how they’re being entertained, for instance.”

The Apparatchik is thoughtful. “This new perestroika is a mistake, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. We need to get back to our planned economy, only stick to it this time.”

“Yes Ma’am,” the Captain says, eyeing me uncomfortably. “I couldn’t agree more.”

This doesn’t surprise me, coming from Maas. These aging security officials at marginal postings tend to be reactionary.

I meet 8571’s gaze. Eye contact lasts just a moment too long, and leaves me wondering, on the edge of paranoia. She’s staring at the floor now. What did it mean, that gravid moment and look?

The Apparatchik finishes perusing the file. As is often the case with clandestine operations, random exigency trumped the best laid plans. The Manifest Destiny came unmoored and drifted into international waters. Things might’ve gone differently if the Sylvanian Navy had been on its toes. Instead, the MS Michiana found the Manifest Destiny practically falling apart at the seams. 8571 tried to swim for it, but the Michiana net-gunned her and dragged her aboard. Aspinall sobered up and spilled his guts, claiming he never agreed to 8571’s offer. Now he’s awaiting decision. He’ll likely be uploaded and assayed.

Ours is the closest station to old Chicago, so 8571 was delivered to us, rather than to the Capital as she probably should’ve been. Maas jumped the gun, excited to finally get someone of consequence in his hot seat. Only after locking her in did he have second thoughts and contact the Directorate in the Capital.

“You Sylvanians really puzzle me,” the Apparatchik says.

8571 is impassive. She seems to be meditating.

“You can’t imagine the self surviving a jump from brain to machine. That is, you can’t fathom a Discontinuous self, even though this failure of imagination is itself Discontinuous. The self flashing right now in your skull is Discontinuous. If you don’t like the preponderance of biological research indicating that, time itself is Discontinuous. Quantized. That’s the foundation of modern computing, you know. V-worlds wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Don’t they teach you these things in Sylvanian schools? I suppose not. Too busy learning what your priesthood counts as a soul. Fooling yourselves. But for you to be sent here by your government, you must be smarter than that.” She kneels in front of 8571. “I can see you’re smart. Deep down, you must know that you’re Discontinuous. That you have been all your life. A spy should understand this better than most, perhaps. You’ve been a million strobing Dees, or Aminas, or whoevers, since we clamped you into this hot seat. And therefore, when we say you will suffer on the Other Side, we mean you, inasmuch as you means a damn thing, now and forevermore.”

I admire the Apparatchik’s delivery. I’ve heard it all before, of course, from Metropotamian intellectuals, and bureaucrats and entertainers, and even common laborers. Every good Metropotamian accepts Discontinuity. Every good Metropotamian yearns for upload to the Spheres, and works toward it.

They convinced me long ago.

I, an agent of Sylvania, ostensibly a saboteur and provocateur, just like 8571. I, a mole in Metropotamian Fatherland Security. But I’ve been here too long. I’ve gone native. And now all I can think about is that look 8571 gave me. Inscrutable, or was it?

“So,” the Apparatchik continues, “with all that in mind, do you have anything to tell us?”

8571 looks up, grinning. Her Sylvanian faith is perfect. The fool.

Does she know who I am? If so, her assay will blow my cover, and I’ll be next in the hot seat. It’s standard procedure for her not to know, of course, unless she needs to. These are strange times. I haven’t been in touch with Sylvanian Intelligence in over a year. Maybe she was tasked with checking on me. But why combine that with such a delicate recruiting mission? Operationally, it makes no sense.

But that look . . .

It’s about time your assay ’rithms found germane memories. I was getting tired of reliving the catechisms and grim, cold lecture halls of my Sylvanian upbringing. Though I suppose it’s only been a few seconds of real time. Anyway, here I am. Pick me apart, catalog my crimes! How far we’ve come since the days of waterboarding and stress positions. I can’t help but think of the Last Emperor, Puyi, writing his life story over and over until his communist reeducators were satisfied. The inefficiency of it all.

Thank God or History for the science that has brought us together, here and now, on such intimate terms.

I don’t fool myself that I’m bound for anything but unimaginable psychic torment, or oblivion (which is also unimaginable). I only ask that when your assay is done, you grant me one small favor.

Three days until the hot seat starts to pick her brain apart. Three days until her neural networks are destroyed as they’re mapped, and another mind makes the Metropotamian Leap, though she’s not bound for simulated paradises. Assay, and possibly torment: these are her only fates, regardless of what her flesh has been promised.

That means I have three days. To flee, possibly, but where? Not back to my homeland. I’m no longer a Sylvanian, I know that much. I can’t live their prayer and austerity, not anymore. West there is only The Dust. East, ruins engulfed by toxic jungle. South, more Metropotamian plantations, gradually giving way to wetlands too stifling for human habitation.

Besides, all I want is here. Not the upload promised to traitors and foreign agents, but that which all Metropotamians aspire to, and only a privileged few achieve. There’s nothing for me anywhere else.

I leave the station grounds for lunch. Warm February rain blows in from the Lake, casting a pall over the town, and hearth-like cafes seem all the more welcoming for it. Vast screens glow with visions of the Other Side: the Spheres, a multiverse of Happy Hunting Grounds and Olympuses, multiuser and private, that I’ve come to believe I might one day enjoy.

After lunch I return to the station, my mind racing.

They’re showing 8571 what her lack of cooperation will get her on the Other Side. A wall of the little white room darkens with visions of horror. Some of the inmates are rendered as they were in life, and when they’ve been burned or mutilated beyond recognition, they regenerate and suffer all over again. Others have been given new forms, quivering blobs of sensitized, immortal flesh sagging from meat hooks in infernal dungeons. Regardless of how they’re rendered, the unfortunates are all the same. They are coded minds. They can be made to suffer with an efficiency never possible in the corporeal world. They are not tortured for information. Scavenging algorithms comb out their secrets before their punishments begin.

“You’ll never sleep again,” Captain Maas says, “and you’ll never die.”

The Apparatchik watches 8571 expectantly.

I’ve seen this work before. The punitive hells on the Other Side function wonderfully as deterrence, and as incentive at times like this. But we’ve never dealt with a dyed-in-the-wool Sylvanian agent before. 8571 seems unimpressed by the horror show. Her faith in continuity-of-consciousness is perfect, as mine once was. She really believes she’s safe. Not from death, perhaps, but from pain. She hasn’t had my years in Metropotamia to see the truth of Discontinuity. She will suffer unless I do something. Rescue is impossible now, but I might arrange for her premature demise. A mercy killing within the next three days. I owe her that much, don’t I? I owe Sylvania that much, and Sylv-Int, which I once served with the fanaticism of a monk.

Of course, killing her would also save my neck, if she does indeed know who I am. If that’s what her look meant. It would be my first kill, a fellow Sylv-Int agent no less. But it would be about sparing her.

Not saving myself.

It has to be more than that. Doesn’t it?

The afternoon wears on and 8571 remains aloof.

The Apparatchik finally takes me by the elbow and ushers me out of the white room, leaving Maas in charge. She leads me into a neighboring interrogation cell. She produces a flask from the hip pocket of her sharp new uniform, takes a pull, and offers it to me. My hackles are up. I want to set her at ease, so I partake. It’s good whiskey from the Capital. All I’ve had for years is small-town jag juice.

I nod in appreciation and hand back the flask.

“All that earlier about getting back to the plan, economy-wise . . . ” She waits for me to say something. She could be feeling me out as a co-conspirator, intrigued by my near-criticism of the trade delegate handlers. Or she could be testing my loyalty to the current paradigm. If that’s the case, Maas will soon find himself in the hot seat.

I study her gaze, hoping to wait her out. One of the dark arts I remember from training: make them just uncomfortable enough to keep talking. But she’s unflappable. “The Captain seemed keen,” I say.

“He’s a fool, but a useful sort of fool. We’ll need people like him in the days and weeks to come. And we’ll need people like you. Careful, clever sorts.”

Watch and wait, watch and wait. Maybe this time I’ll get her.

“I can’t seem to sniff out your politics,” she says. “I really do have a nose for it, believe it or not. So, when I meet someone like you it usually means they have no politics. You’re simply a professional, am I right?”

“I like to think so.”

“And if the current regime were to be . . . challenged, if it were audited and found wanting, if it became a question of core Metropotamian values, you would uphold your oath. You would do everything in your power to safeguard those values.”

“Of course,” I say, hoping the gamble pays off.

“That’s fine, then.” She takes another swig and passes the flask back. She watches me pull, smirking. “In the meantime, we’re still Metropotamians, aren’t we?”

“Always.”

“And we have this Sylvanian. I don’t think she’s going to talk. I want you to go to the Capital and poke around. You have informants there, I assume . . . ”

I nod.

“Find out how she got away from that delegation.”

I don’t know who the Apparatchik is or even if she outranks me, but I was planning on heading to the Capital anyway, so I have no problem saying, “Yes Ma’am.”

Now you’re on the right path. Now you’ll begin to understand what a Sylvanian wretch you’ve captured. I can no longer lie, so you’ll believe me when I say that toward the end, I really did feel like a Metropotamian, and I really did feel like you were my comrades.

If I ever meant a damn thing to any of you, you’ll grant me one small favor.

“So, you have information on the missing Sylvanian,” the Minister of Foreign Affairs says. “What was her name . . . Hadzic?”

The florid, middle-aged man is an admirable thespian. I suppose you’d have to be to reach the bureaucratic heights he has, but Minister Fitzjames is no field operator. His pretense of innocence—or ignorance, or whatever he’s going for—is absurd in the context of this meeting. Here we are in the dead of night, among the rotting crucifixions outside the Capital Wall, treading upon the weeds of what was once something ludicrous called a “golf course.” We’re alone among the hanging, floodlit bodies. He didn’t even risk bringing a bodyguard, let alone the investigators and soldiers of his Ministry.

I don’t have time for his evasions. I leveraged my security clearance to get a message to him. That will be on record. It’s well within my remit, but suspicious to the right gaze.

“Hadzic, or Spendlove if you prefer, is a Sylvanian intelligence agent. As you know.”

Fitzjames stops beneath a corpse whose placard identifies it as a “Ration Hoarder” and “Continuity Roader.” Closer to the steel and concrete of the city wall, a fresher body, something called a “Spiritualist,” hangs nailed to an ancient utility pole.

The Minister opens his mouth to object, or deny, but I interrupt:

“You helped her leave the trade delegation and covered up her absence.”

One of the last things I did before abandoning Sylv-Int was investigate Fitzjames as a potential asset. I discovered his extramarital affairs, leverageable perhaps, but common among these privileged creatures of the Capital. More interesting was the time he declined an invitation from the Spheres. The opportunity coveted by so many, the chance to upload. Most of the other Ministers of Metropotamia, of Defense and Agriculture and Propaganda, had already gone over. Now they run things from the Other Side. The Minister of Foreign Affairs claimed he had to stay on the ground a bit longer, what with Sylvania to the north and barbarian coalitions forming in The Dust. Economic reform was a delicate thing. It needed him hands-on. Somehow, he sold this to the Metropo aristocracy and retained his position, but I didn’t buy it. I smelled fear of Discontinuity, fear of oblivion, maybe even a closet Continuitist. That would be a leverageable thought crime and might also speak to hidden Sylvanian sympathies.

I reported these findings to Sylv-Int and thought nothing more of Minister Fitzjames. Until this evening, when I found him on the list of trade delegation handlers. In fact, he’s running the whole show.

“Who are you?” he says. “How dare you—”

“Relax, Minister. I’m here to help.”

I reach into my overcoat and he follows suit, leveling a pistol.

“Okay okay.” I produce the file I showed the Apparatchik, and hand it over. He keeps his weapon aimed as he reads. When he gets to the last page I say, “She’s scheduled. Everything comes out in two days, unless you act.”

“And what the hell am I supposed to do?”

There we are, past denial. The file shivers in his hand.

“You’ve got connections, resources. She must not be assayed.”

He’s in shock now. He sits down beneath the crucified ration hoarder, staring into the void beyond the floodlights. I congratulate myself again on my choice of meeting place.

“Do you understand?” I say.

He sets aside the file and contemplates his pistol.

“If it helps, at least two of the officers holding her are subversives. They spoke against your perestroika.”

He chuckles, sounding borderline hysterical. “They’re not the only ones.”

“One of them, I don’t know her name, seems to be planning something. A coup maybe.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

“She was wearing a black uniform I haven’t seen before . . . ”

“Padraic’s new security force, or political police, I should say.”

Lesley Padraic, a Subminister of Defense and one of Fitzjames’ staunchest foes, a Metropotamian of the old school.

“That sure didn’t take long,” Fitzjames says, more to himself than me.

I don’t like how he’s staring at that weapon. I think about massaging his ego, starting with something about the forgivable and necessary vices of great men. A few mistresses and a minor indiscretion with a foreign power, weighed against the renaissance he’s engineering. His flaws nothing more than colorful footnotes in some future history.

“What’s your interest in all this?” he demands.

“Does it matter?”

I find the gun pointing at me again. “Maybe not.”

“Minister . . . ”

“I mean, as long as I’m tying up loose ends . . . ”

“Give me some credit. If I die, everything comes out . . . the women, your recruitment, Hadzic, all of it.”

“So, you’re one of them?”

He means a Sylvanian, or more specifically a Sylv-Int agent, I suppose.

“Not anymore.”

Running me like this, between memory activations, very cute. I guess it amuses you to let me babble here in the perfect dark and limbo of the upload bridge. Or maybe it interests the ’rithms to listen and see what I recall naturally. If you can call this natural.   

As the train pulls into my stop, I notice the station is much more crowded than it ought to be at this hour. Plainclothes thugs wearing black armbands fill the platform and the square beyond. They might be Fitzjames’ or the Apparatchik’s. Whatever the case, things are moving, and an instinct tells me to stay in motion as well.

I sink into my seat as the train moves on. I ride it to the last stop on the line.

In the predawn gloaming, I wander through the remnants of an ancient town, a community built in the Age of Excess. Every house has its own expanse of land. These days it’s all sand and weeds, but back then it was grass—idiotically watered and trimmed—and later, toward the end, desperate vegetable gardens. Each house has a smaller companion, a house for the family’s internal combustion vehicles.

Now it’s all abandoned and weather-beaten, half-swallowed by dunes.

I come to a familiar structure missing most of its roof. I enter through a collapsed section of wall. Inside I’m surrounded by faint, oxidized saints, peeling paint, and broken, crudely-carved, phantasmagoric idols. I like coming here. I like the sense of connection with deep time, the geological strata of religions. A church first, of some eastern orthodoxy, then a mosque, and finally an end-times polytheist temple. But long after the citizens of a doomed republic quit this town, a new religion arrived. It came to occupy this building that had been so hospitable to previous creeds. It was a religion with one follower.

I ascend the altar. I reach into the space under the collapsed masonry and pull out a little plastic bundle. A roll of paper, sealed against the elements. A coded message from Sylv-Int.

I found a spirituality in spy-craft that I never attained in the masses and rallies of mainstream Sylvanian life. I think many of us Sylv-Int agents are like that. We are the Sylvanians who don’t fit anywhere else, the unbelievers safeguarding the faithful. When I came to Metropotamia, it was an epiphany, like a religious or sexual awakening, every moment imbued with new significance and new dimension. I wasn’t just buying dumplings from the street vendor outside the station. I was buying dumplings in the clandestine service of Sylvania, risking capture and worse, and the dumplings were not just dumplings. Hunger was not just hunger. Sleep, when I managed it, was a blessing. Life was as I’d always imagined it for faithful Sylvanians: pregnant with meaning.

It didn’t last, of course.

When I came to my senses, there was nothing left for me but Metropotamian dogma: the cold, inescapable logic of Discontinuity. There was a kind of freedom in accepting the reality of my Discontinuous selves. The me who accepted it was distinct from the billions of mes who’d doubted it. I was a series of fleeting brain states, each with access to memory and the illusion of continuity. But it was okay. The illusion was enough.

Better than enough. It meant that upload to the Spheres held some promise of escape, even salvation.

I pocket the roll of paper. It is dangerous coming back here, though if I’m caught, I could say this is 8571’s drop site. Then again, she might know about it, if she knows about me, and she may have sung by now. But to survive, cover intact, I need all the information I can get. I have to be proactive now. The instinct to hoard and weaponize information is a hard one to shake. Maybe some day I’ll manage it, far from this sordid corporeality.

“Field Mouse.”

Heart racing, I scan the shadows of the ruin.

The voice was deep, self-assured, amused. And the operating name, no one’s called me that in a long time. I reach into my pocket for my sidearm.

“Let’s not, shall we?”

My hand freezes, fingertips on the grip.

“Where I can see them . . . that’s it.”

A shape that I took for one of the fading orthodox saints detaches itself from the far wall. A short, balding man steps into the blue predawn light, an antique machine pistol leveled.

“We’ve been worried about you, Field Mouse.” No attempt to hide the Sylvanian lilt. “Been sick? Or just playing truant?”

I remember him from Sylv-Int HQ. He was always in the background, watching us train. We speculated about him endlessly, but never learned who or what he was.

“I’m doing everything I can to save Hadzic,” I say.

“Oh I’m sure you are.”

I stand on the altar, palms out like some iconographic Christ.

“Think you’re the first agent to spoil down here? You defectives are commonplace, and you’re my specialty.” His words provide context for this holy space, like prayers and confessions must have long ago. “Hard to say at this point how many of you I’ve retired. Know what really kills me? Never mind the primal fallacy, the fundamental heresy . . . that it would really be you in the Spheres, and not a copy, however perfect a copy. Forget that particular failing of reason and faith. How about some pragmatism, Field Mouse? Did you really believe you’d rise high enough for an invitation?” Already referring to me in the past tense. “What are you now? A lieutenant in one of their second-tier security bureaus?”

“Yes.”

“And you aspire to the Spheres . . . ”

I don’t see the point of lying now. Besides, I’m tired of lies. “Yes.”

“I hope you’re not going to tell me its part of some long game. I’ve heard it all before. I know your orders, and our policy. We gave up on infiltrating the Spheres. Now we just want to take their servers down.”

“Fine then, I wanted it for myself.”

“Quite a leap of faith, if you ask me. They call our faith in souls and continuity blind, but look at them. They’ve made their own heaven and hell. Faith makes them strive toward their heaven and fear their hell. Faith in the insignificance of that gap, fundamentally different from whatever fleeting gaps may or may not interrupt normal consciousness.”

“A gap’s a gap. How many of you have there been since this conversation began?” 

He chuckled. “Forget it. They always try to convert me. Unlike you, I’m a real Sylvanian.”

“Then just let me go. I’ve served Sylvania too. I gave you Fitzjames, and he proved useful, didn’t he? I gave you a lot over the years. I gave you my youth.”

“Sure, let you go. And some day, maybe years from now, you realize you’re never going to rise high enough for the Invite, and you decide to sell our secrets for it.”

“I would never—”

“And they make the deal, then just assay you. Or you’re en route to the Spheres, and some screening ’rithm we don’t know about flags you, flags our lore. You haven’t thought this through, Field Mouse.”

But I have. It’s just that despite all the risks, and the low probability of success, I have nothing to lose.

The ruins fill with blinding light from above, as though the old conception of Heaven, insulted by blasphemies on sacred ground, seeks to enlighten us. The sky erupts with the clamor of a stealth chopper. The Sylv-Int man stares at me wide-eyed. A dart quivers in his neck. He staggers back, squirting automatic fire, firing wide, peppering an old mural of dour monks, and I feel the heaviness spreading from my neck downward.

They shot us with those in training, I remember. We joked about it afterward. The anticipation was much worse than the sting of the dart. And then it was quite enjoyable, briefly, like giddy drunkenness, before the darkness welled up and it was simply nothing. I suppose if I was still me after that oblivion, a gap more profound than sleep, I might still be me after upload.

My mother would have thought so.

My father, a grim, joyless preacher of the Sylvanian old guard, found her with a copy of that illegal Metropotamian classic, “Freedom of the Discontinuous Self.” He reported her, the supposed love of his life. They sentenced her to death by stoning.

“Don’t look away child,” he said, the rocks pelting her flesh. She curled up, arms wrapped around her head, muffling her own screams.

“Watch and remember. Sylvania comes first, and the soul is continuous.”

I twisted out of his grasp and broke through the other adults, into the circle. It wasn’t bravery. I’m not even sure I meant to shield her or save her. Maybe I thought it wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, and sought the mechanism behind the illusion. I don’t know. A rock struck my head, and the darkness came, fast and total. I was unconscious for three days. They tell me I nearly died.

In what sense was it the same person who awoke, nursing an adult disillusionment?

I recall the stoning as I’m dragged from the burning wreckage of the chopper. The air is full of sand and smoke. Coywolves materialize occasionally, yipping and whining, only to vanish again, ghostlike. People walk among them, strange figures bandaged head to toe like mummies or lepers. A train of Bactrians loiters in the background, belching anxiously as the air gets worse.

I’m in The Dust, somehow. Among the savages. Or I’ve been uploaded and assayed, and this is the punitive V-world I’ve been sentenced to.

The burning chopper fades from view as I’m dragged further away.

I can’t remember the crash. The dart is just wearing off, which is odd, if all this is real. Downtime on anything in the dart family is at least four hours, much longer than it should’ve taken to reach the station, or the Capital or wherever we were headed. I’m alive, so I must’ve been pulled from the wreckage immediately.

Why was the chopper in the air so long?

I’m deposited near several other bodies.

Something that may once have been a pilot, conclusively dead.

A Metropotamian drop soldier, badly burned, groaning.

And my compatriot, singed and bloodied, emerging from his stupor more slowly than I.

The grit stings my eyes, the eternal twilight of The Dust growing momentarily darker. I don’t think. I crawl forward and scoop up a handful of sand. I jam it in his mouth and my hand forms a seal. I get on top of him as he weakly flails.

The barbarians of The Dust cannot bring down aircraft, which don’t venture this far west anyway. So, what happened up there? Not a Sylvanian attack, surely. Our air force wouldn’t be up to it.

“Break it up!” someone barks.

They pull me off, but it’s too late. The self-proclaimed “real Sylvanian” is dead. My first kill, and hopefully my last, this hunter of wayward spies. Dead, how many of my fellow prodigals avenged? But is that why I did it? For all those like me who woke up wanting more for themselves? Dead, and with him his knowledge of me, no longer available for assay. Does that still matter? Do I still have a chance at the Spheres? Did I ever? Why does anyone do anything? Maybe Sylvania and Metropotamia are both wrong. Maybe my Discontinuous selves overlap each other, existing in superposition, so that a given action or decision may arise from multiple motives. Maybe the brain is quantum, like Metropotamian computers, like V-worlds.

A knife is at my throat, briefly.

“No, you idiot!”

“But he—”

“We’re sellin’ ’em back,” one of the mummies screams over the keening wind and howling coywolves, “along with the memory box from the gunship! Don’t you know anything? For the Metros, a skull is just like a memory box! Readable!”

Someone else is still holding me down.

“It’s a Metro civil war!” the knowledgeable savage cries. “There’s bound to be buyers!”

They tie me up and load me onto a Bactrian. The savages don sandstorm goggles, and fit them onto their camels and hounds as well. I’m left to wonder if I sparked a war, or stumbled into one. Which side sent the chopper and which shot it down? Did they track me, or my would-be killer, to the temple? Did 8571 talk? These are academic questions, professional curiosities. It hardly matters now. 

The protesting Bactrians are whipped into loping motion. I can’t see anything, but I know we’re headed back east.

I suppose you don’t need to assay much more. I ended up in the hot seat, and you were there for all that, Apparatchik. Maybe you’ve already won your little war. If it’s still raging, maybe I’m vital to winning it. Or maybe I’m just a curiosity, a distraction, a jabbering amusement. I don’t suppose you’ll ever respond.

But I have to ask. Before you send me to whatever punitive hell awaits me, I’d like to know. If you managed to assay 8571, did she know about me?

If she didn’t, I might’ve avoided all this. I mean, the war would probably have erupted regardless. When you read Fitzjames’ sins in 8571, perhaps you would’ve moved against him. Maybe that’s what happened. I just want to know if I could’ve played it safe. Not risked my cover. Maintained the possibility, however minute, of getting to the Spheres.

I’m not sure what would be worse: the uncertainty, or knowing she knew nothing, and that I consigned myself to whatever you’ve cooked up on the Other Side.

Maybe it doesn’t matter either way. Now that I’m beyond flesh, I’ve discovered the ultimate irony: there’s no way to determine if I’m the same Field Mouse that knew flesh. I have that one’s memories, but what does that prove? I feel just like that Field Mouse. I feel I’ve survived the gap of upload, but then again, I would. Maybe my compatriots were right. Maybe I’m a mere copy, a monstrosity. I can never know.

And maybe I can take comfort in that, as the subjective centuries of torment grind on. Maybe it never would’ve been me in the Spheres.

Maybe your whole fucking system is built on a lie.

About the Author

Andy Dudak is a writer and translator of science fiction. His original stories have appeared in Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best, and elsewhere. He’s translated twelve stories for Clarkesworld, and a novel by Liu Cixin, among other things. In his spare time he likes to binge-watch peak television and eat Hui Muslim style cold sesame noodles.

Two Sisters in Exile

Aliette de Bodard

In spite of her name (an elegant, whimsical female name which meant Perfumed Winter, and a reference to a long-dead poet), Nguyen Dong Huong was a warrior, first and foremost. She’d spent her entire life in skirmishes against the pale men, the feathered clans, and the dream-skinners: her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, had died at the battle of Bach Nhan, when the smoke-children had blown up Harmony Station and its satellites; her second had not lasted more than a year.

The Tortoise in the Lake was her fourth ship, and they’d been together for five years, though neither of them expected to live for a further five. Men survived easier than ships—because they had armor, because the ships had been tasked to take care of them. Dong Huong remembered arguing with Lady Mieng’s Dreamer, begging the ship to spare itself instead of her; and running against a wall of obstinacy, a fundamental incomprehension that ships could be more important than humans.

For the Northerners, however, everything would be different.

“We’re here,” The Tortoise in the Lake said, cutting across Dong Huong’s gloomy thoughts.

“I can see nothing.”

There came a low rumble, which distorted the cabin around her, and cast an oily sheen on the walls. “Watch.”

Outside, everything was dark. There was only the shadow of The Two Sisters in Exile, the dead ship that they’d been pulling since Longevity Station. It hung in space, forlorn and pathetic, like the corpse of an old woman; although Dong Huong knew that it was huge, and could have housed her entire lineage without a care.

“I see nothing,” Dong Huong said, again. The ground rumbled beneath her, even as her ears popped with pressure—more laughter from The Tortoise in the Lake, even as the darkness of space focused and narrowed—became the shadow of wings, the curve on vast surfaces—the hulls of two huge ships flanking them; thin, sharp, like a stretch of endless walls—making The Tortoise in the Lake seem small and insignificant, just as much as Dong Huong herself was small and insignificant in comparison to her own ship.

A voice echoed in the ship’s vast rooms, harsh and strong, tinged with the Northerners’ dialect, but still as melodious as declaimed poetry. “You wished to speak to us. We are here.”

All Dong Huong knew about Northerners were dim, half-remembered snatches of family stories that were almost folktales: the greater, stronger part of the former Dai Viet Empire; the pale-skinned people of the outer planets, a civilization of graceful cities and huge habitats, of wild gardens on mist-filled hillsides, of courtly manners and polished songs.

She was surprised, therefore, by the woman who disembarked onto The Tortoise in the Lake. Rong Anh was indeed paler than she was under her makeup, but otherwise ordinary looking: though very young, barely old enough to have bonded to a ship in Nam society, she bore herself with a poise any warrior would have envied. “You have something for us.”

Dong Huong made a gesture, towards the walls of the room; the seething, ever-shifting mass of calligraphy; the fragments of poems, of books, of sutras, a perpetual reminder of the chaos underpinning the universe. “I . . . apologize,” she said at last. “I’ve come to bring one of your ships back to you.” To appease them, her commander had said. To avoid a declaration of war from a larger and more developed empire, a war which would utterly destroy the Nam.

Anh did not move. “I saw it outside. Tell me what happened.”

“It was an accident,” Dong Huong said. The Two Sisters in Exile—a merchant vessel from the Northerners’ vast fleet—had just happened to cross the line of fire at the wrong time. “A military exercise that went wrong. I’m sorry.”

Anh hadn’t moved; but the ceruse on her face looked less and less like porcelain, and more and more like bleached bone. “Our ships don’t die,” she said, slowly.

“I’m sorry,” Dong Huong said, again. “They’re as mortal as anyone, I fear.” The vast majority of attacks on a ship would do little but tear metal: a ship’s vulnerable point was the heartroom, where the Mind that animated it resided. Unlike Nam ships, Northerner ships were large and well shielded; and no pirate had ever managed to hack or pierce their way into a heartroom.

But fate could be mocking, uncaring: as The Two Sisters in Exile passed by Dong Huong’s military exercise, a random lance of fire had gone all the way to the heartroom on an almost impossible trajectory—searing the Mind in its cradle of optics. They’d heard the ship’s Mind scream its pain in deep spaces long after the lance had struck; had stood in stunned silence, knowing that the Mind was dying and that nothing would stop that.

Anh shook her head; looked up after a while, and her mask was back in place, her eyebrows perfectly arched, like moths. “An accident.”

“The people responsible have been . . . dealt with.” Swiftly, and unpleasantly; and firmly enough to make it clear this would be not tolerated. “I have come to bring the body back, for a funeral. I’m told this is the custom of your people.”

Nam ships and soldiers didn’t get a funeral, or at least not one that was near a planet. They lay frozen where they had fallen—stripped of all vital equipment, the cold of space forever preserving them from decay, a permanent monument; a warning to anyone who came; a memory of glory, which the spirits of the dead could bask into all the way from Heaven. It would be Dong Huong’s fate; The Tortoise in the Lake’s fate, in a few years or perhaps more if Quan Vu, God of War, saw fit to extend His benevolence to them both. Dong Huong had few expectations.

“It is our custom.” Anh inclined her head. Her eyes blinked, minutely: it looked as if she was engaged elsewhere, perhaps communicating with her own ships. “We will bring her back where she was born, and bury her with the blessing of her descendants. You will come.”

It wasn’t a question, or even an invitation; but an order. “Of course,” Dong Huong said. She hesitated, then said, “The military exercise was under my orders. If you want to clear my blood debt . . . ”

Anh paused, halfway through one of the ship’s dilating doors. “Blood debt?” Her head moved up, a fraction, making her seem almost inhuman. “What would we do with your life?”

Take it as a peace offering, Dong Huong thought, biting her tongue. She couldn’t say it; she’d been forbidden. Never admit what you’d come from; say just what was needed. Admit your guilt but say nothing about your hopes, lest they betray you as everything in life was bound to do.

“Did you know her?” she asked.

Anh did not move. At long last, still not looking at Dong Huong, she said, “She was of my lineage.”

“Kin to you,” Dong Huong said, unsure of the implications. Minds were borne within a human womb before being implanted in their ships: this made them part of a lineage, as much as human children.

“Yes,” Anh said. “I’ve known her since I was a child.” Her hand had clenched on the wall; but she walked away without saying anything more.

After Anh was gone, Dong Huong opened her usual book of poetry, one of the only treasures she’d brought on board the ship. But the words blurred in her eyesight, slid away from her comprehension like raindrops on polished jade; and, rather than bringing her peace as they always did, the poems only frustrated her.

Instead, she turned off the lights, and lay back in the darkness, thinking of Xuan and Hai—of their faces, frozen in the instant before she ordered The Tortoise in the Lake to fire, and transfixed them as surely as their ships had transfixed The Two Sisters in Exile—she saw them, falling, fading from her ship’s views—leaving nothing but the memory of their shocked gazes, weighing her, accusing her.

She’d had to do it. Quickly, decisively, as she’d done everything in life; as she’d parted from her husband when he failed to uphold the family’s honor; as she’d forged her path in the military, never looking back, never regretting. And, as she’d told Anh, the matter had been closed: the perpetrators punished, order and law upheld, justice dealt out.

But still . . .

“You’re brooding,” The Tortoise in the Lake said.

Dong Huong said nothing. She felt the weight of her armor on her body; the cold touch of metal on her skin; the solidity of everything around her, from the poetry on the wall to the folded clothes beside her bed. The present, which was the only thing that mattered. “I’m the officer whose crew shot the ship in the first place. By my presence here, I endanger everything,” she said.

“Nonsense.” The room seemed to contract, become warmer and more welcoming, down to the words palpitating on the walls; the ship’s voice grew less distant. “Have you not seen their ships?”

“I have. They’re huge.”

“They’re weaponless.” There was a tinge of contempt in The Tortoise in the Lake’s voice. “Cargo transport, with a little reserve against pirates; but even less well-armed than the smoke-children.”

Dong Huong shivered, in the darkness. “Did you have to pick that example?”

“No,” the ship said, after a while. “You’re right, I didn’t think.”

“I saw her face,” Dong Huong said at last. “She looks young, but doesn’t act like it.”

“Rejuvenation treatments?”

“Among other things.” Dong Huong shivered. The Nam were a small, fractured empire; beset on all sides by enemies. The Northerners, on the other hand . . . They were large; they hadn’t fought a large-scale war in centuries; and they had had time to develop everything from medical cures to advanced machinery. If they wanted war, the South, for all its warrior heritage, would be badly outgunned and outnumbered.

“They love their peace,” the ship said. “Go to sleep, younger sister. There will be plenty of time in the morning.”

Younger sister. Nothing more than convention by now; though the Mind of her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, had shared blood with her: the mother that had borne it in her womb had been a cousin of Dong Huong’s own father.

She did sleep, in the end. In her dreams, she walked in the lineage house again: on ochre ground, amidst cacti and shrunken bushes, and shrieking children playing rhyme-games in the courtyards. The smell of lemongrass and garlic rose from the kitchens like a balm to her soul, a reminder of the future she was fighting for; of what it meant to safeguard the Empire against its enemies. She saw her aunt, the mother of The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, standing tall and proud—her face unmoving as she learned of the ship’s fall at Bach Nhan, her eyes dark and dry; as if she’d already wept beforehand.

Surely she had known, or suspected. Ships didn’t live long; but then, neither did human children. They both spread their wings like butterflies, like phoenixes, and ascended into the Heavens with the ancestors, watching over the Nam people. Dong Huong had tried to whisper such platitudes to her aunt; but nothing had come; and in her dreams—which were not real, not a true recollection—she stood looking into her aunt’s eyes, and saw the tears welling up, as black and opaque as ink from a broken brush.

Dong Huong didn’t come from a family of warriors, but from a very old lineage of scholars, who had turned merchants rather than bond to ships and take up knives and guns. Fifth Uncle, her favorite when she was a child, regularly went to Northern planets; and he would speak to her of Northern wonders, always with the same misty, open-eyed sense of awe. He would remind her that the Northerners hadn’t fallen from grace, that they still remembered the original Dai Viet Empire and its culture that had stretched from one end of the galaxy to another; that they still had literature and poetry about beauty and dreams, and knew a life that wasn’t a succession of one battle after another.

As a child, Dong Huong had drunk those words like tea or sugarcane juice. As an adult, within her combat unit, she had dismissed them. A civilization that barely knew war would be weak, a stunted, dying flower rather than the magnificent blossoming her relatives described.

But the view beneath her now, as she and Anh descended in a shuttle towards the planet . . . As vast and as overwhelming as the two Northerner ships that had been her first contact—continents of chrome and verdant trees, sweeping away from her, seas glittering a vivid turquoise, with the glint of ten thousand boats on the waves—and, around them, in the atmosphere, a ballet of ships, as numerous as birds in the skies—a few huge spaceships like her own, carrying a Mind in their heartrooms; and myriad simple shuttle ships, manually driven, that nevertheless wove in and out of one another’s way, dancing like the rhythms of a song, the words of a poem—

“You seem impressed,” Anh said. “Have you never seen a planet?”

“Not—” Dong Huong swallowed, unable to dispel a memory of her own barren homeworld. “Not this kind, I’m afraid.”

Anh smiled, indulgently. “Come. Let’s get you to the funeral.”

After disembarking from the shuttle, Dong Huong felt . . . naked, a warrior without a sword. She had her gun at her hip, and her armor on her; Anh hadn’t even attempted to remove it from her, as if it all didn’t matter much. She also had the voice and video loop of The Tortoise in the Lake to carry in her thoughts, but still . . . the higher gravity was grinding her bones against one another; and unfamiliar people, each dressed in more elaborate clothes than the previous one, turned and stopped, staring at her with the same odd expression on their faces—appraisal, disapproval?

Everything around her was freakish, different: buildings that were too tall, streets that were too wide, crisscrossed by alien vehicles. Everything was stately, orderly, so far from the chaotic traffic that marked Nam streets. Even the sky above was out of place; a deep, impossible blue with a thin, gleaming overlay: weather control, Anh said indulgently, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Weather control. Dong Huong breathed in rain, and the distant smell of flowers; and thought of the gardens of her home planet—ochre ground, cacti breaking out in large, breathtaking flowers—but nowhere as rich, nowhere as pointlessly complicated.

The funeral place was huge. Dong Huong had expected a funeral hall; a temple or a larger complex. But certainly not a city within the city, a whole area of tall buildings sprouting the white flags of mourning: every street filled with a stream of people in hempen garments, all wearing the strip of cloth that denoted the family of the dead.

When Dong Huong fell in battle—as she must, for it was the fate of all warriors—her lineage would weep for her. Her husband and her husband’s brothers as well, perhaps, and that was all: two dozen people at the most, perhaps fifty if one included the more distant cousins. “Who are they?” she asked.

Anh paused at the entrance to a slender, white spire, and smiled. “I told you. Her descendants.”

“The—”

“She was old,” Anh said. Her voice was low, hushed. “Her mother was born in the Hieu Phuc reign; and she bore a Mind and four human children; and the children in turn had children of their own; and the children had children, on and on through the generations . . . ”

“How—” Dong Huong moistened her tongue, tried again. “How long had it lived?” The Tortoise in the Lake was ten years old, a veteran by Nam standards.

“Four centuries. Our ships live long; so do our stations. How else shall we maintain our link to the past?”

“The shuttles?” Dong Huong asked, at last, her voice wavering, breaking like a boat in a storm.

Anh nodded, gravely. “Their pilots, yes. I told you that she had many descendants. And many friends.”

Within Dong Huong’s thoughts, The Tortoise in the Lake recoiled, watching the ballet of the dozen largest ships in the skies. Every one of them had a Mind; every one of them was as old as The Two Sisters in Exile. Every one of them . . .

“Is this her?” The speaker was a man, who, like Anh, didn’t look a day older than sixteen—a face Dong Huong ached to see older, more mature—less naïve about the realities of the war.

“Minh. I see you were waiting for us.” Anh did not smile.

Minh’s eyes were wide, almost shocked. “News gets around. Is it true?”

Anh gestured upwards, to the ballet of ships in the sky. “Do you think we’d all gather, if it wasn’t true?”

Dong Huong hadn’t said anything, waiting to be recognized. At last, Minh turned to her.

“Dong Huong, this is Teacher Minh,” Anh said. “He leads our research programs.”

Minh’s gaze was on her, scrutinizing her as one might look at a failed experiment. “Dong Huong. A beautiful name. It ill-suits you.”

“It’s been said before,” Dong Huong said.

Minh sighed. He looked at Anh, and back at her. “She’s so . . . hard, Anh. Too young to be that callous.”

“Nam,” Anh said, with the same tinge of contempt to her voice. “You know how they are. Shaped by war.”

Minh’s face darkened. “Yes. There is that.”

“You disapprove?” Dong Huong felt a need, a compulsion to challenge him, to see him react in anger, in fear.

“Life is sacred,” Minh said, leading her towards a double-panel door, with Anh in tow. “As we well know. Our bodies are a gift from our parents and our ancestors, and they shan’t be wasted.”

“Wasted?” Dong Huong shook her head. “You mistake us. We give them back, in the most selfless fashion possible. We live for our families, for the Empire. We give our lives so that they might remain safe, unconquered.”

Minh snorted. “You are such children,” he said. “Playing with forces you don’t understand. Which is what brings us here, isn’t it?”

The spire led into a hall vaster than the Northern ships; the walls were decked with images of outside, of the two ships dragging the carcass of The Two Sisters in Exile. And it was full—of grave people in rich clothes, of mourners with tears streaming on their faces. She’d never seen so many people gathered together; and suspected that she would never see them again.

Minh and Anh led Dong Huong to the front, ignoring her protestations, and introduced her to the principal mourner: an old, frail woman who looked more bewildered than sad. “It’s never happened before,” she said. “Ships don’t die. They never do . . . ”

“No,” Minh said, slowly, gently. “They never do.” He wasn’t looking at Dong Huong. “I remember, the summer I came home from the Sixth Planet. She was docked in Azure Dragon Spaceport, looking so grand and beautiful—she’d used the trip to go in for repairs. She laughed on my comms, told me that now she looked as young as me, that she felt she could race anywhere in the universe. She . . . ” His voice broke; he raised a hand, rubbing at reddened eyes.

“It’s our fault,” Dong Huong said. “That’s why I’ve come, to offer amends.”

“Amends.” Minh didn’t blink. “Yes, of course. Amends.” He sounded as though he couldn’t understand any of the words, as though they were an entirely alien concept.

Anh steered Dong Huong away from Minh, and towards her place in the front. “I don’t know anything about this,” Dong Huong protested.

“You’ll watch. You said ‘amends,’, didn’t you? Consider this the start of what you owe the ship,” Anh said, firmly planting her at the front of the assembly.

Dong Huong stood, feeling like a particularly exotic animal on display—with the weight of everyone’s gaze on her nape, the growing wave of shock, anger, incomprehension in the room. The ceremony was still going on in the background: monks had joined the mourners, their chanted mantras a continuous drone in the background, and the smell of incense was rising everywhere in the room. She clenched her hand on her gun, struggling to remember her composure.

On the screens, the ship had been towed to what looked like its final destination; while a seething mass of smaller flyers gathered—not ships, not shuttles, but round spheres that looked like a cloud of insects compared to the The Two Sisters in Exile. The old woman took up her place at the lectern amidst the growing silence. “We’re all here,” she said at last. “Gathering from our planets, our orbitals, our shuttles, dancing in the skies to honor her. Her name was The Two Sisters in Exile, and she knew every one of our ancestors.”

Dong Huong had expected anger; or grief; but not the stony, shocked silence of the assembly. “She was assembled in the yards of the Twenty-First Planet, in the last days of the Dai Viet Empire.” Her voice shivered, and became deeper and more resonant—no, it was a ship, speaking at the same time as her, its voice heavy with grief. “Her Grand Master of Design Harmony was Nguyen Van Lien; her Master of Wind and Water Khong Tu Khinh; and her beloved mother Phan Thi Quynh. She was born in the first year of the reign of Emperor Hieu Phuc, and died in the forty-second year of the Tu Minh reign. Dong Huong of the Nam brought her here.”

The attention of the entire hall turned to Dong Huong, an intensity as heavy as stone. No hatred, no anger; but merely the same shock. This didn’t happen; not to them, not to their ships.

“Today, we are gathered to honor her, and to fill the void that she lives in our lives. She’ll be—missed.” The voice broke; and the swarm of spheres that had gathered in space shuddered and broke, wrapping themselves around the corpse of The Two Sisters in Exile—growing smaller and smaller, slowly eating away at the corpse until nothing remained, just a cloud of dust that danced amongst starlight.

“Missed.” The entire hall was silent now, transfixed by the ceremony. Someone, somewhere, was sobbing; and even if they hadn’t been, the spreading wave of shock and grief was palpable.

Four centuries old. Her descendants, more numerous than the leaves of a tree, the birds in the sky, the grains of rice in a bowl. A life, held sacred; more valuable than jade or gold. Dong Huong watched the graceful ballet in the sky; the ceremony, perfectly poised, with its measured poetry and recitations from long-dead scholars; and, abruptly, she knew the answer she’d take back to her people.

Graceful; scholarly; cultured. The Northerners had forgotten what war was; what death for ships was. They had forgotten that all it took was a lance or an accident to sear away four centuries of wisdom.

They had forgotten how capricious, how arbitrary life was, how things could not be prolonged or controlled. And that, in turn, meant that this—this single death, this incident that would have had no meaning among the Nam—would have them rise up, outraged, bringing fire and wind to avenge their dead, scouring entire planets to avenge a single life.

They would say no, of course. They would speak of peace, of the need for forgiveness. But something like this—a gap, a void this large in the fabric of society—would never be filled, never be forgiven. Minh’s research programs would be bent and turned towards enhancing the weapons on the merchant ships; and all those people in the hall, all those gathered descendants, would become an army on a sacred mission.

In her mind, Dong Huong saw the desert plains of her home planet; the children playing in the ochre courtyard of her lineage house; the smell of lemongrass and garlic from the kitchens—saw it all shiver and crinkle, darkening like paper held to a flame.

Quan Vu watch over us. They’re coming.

Originally published in Solaris Rising 1.5, edited by Ian Whates.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and four British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is a double Hugo finalist for 2019 (Best Series and Best Novella). Most recently she published In the Vanishers’ Palace, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where they are both women and where the Beast is a Vietnamese dragon (2018 Lammy Award finalist for LGBTQ SF/F/Horror). Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and forthcoming The House of Sundering Flames (July 2019, Gollancz). Her short story collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is forthcoming from Subterranean Press (Sept 2019).

Love at Stake

Carrie Sessarego

It’s been twenty years since Buffy Summers won the “Class Protector” award at Senior Prom, but her legacy never even slows down. Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in 1997. Every week for the first two seasons the show opened with the words, “In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” In those two sentences, notice that the words “one” and “alone” both appear. The Slayer’s life was supposed to be one of isolation. However, both the series itself and the lead character lasted because of strong relationships.

Buffy Summers is a teenage girl who wants to live a normal life. She wants to shop, drive, date, and be a cheerleader. Unfortunately for Buffy, she has been gifted with supernatural powers that allow her to successfully fight and slay all things supernatural. She is the one and only Slayer, and slayers don’t usually live past their teens. Upon her death, another slayer will be called upon to continue the work.

But Buffy has an advantage many past slayers have not had—community. After being expelled from her high school in Los Angeles, Buffy moves to Sunnydale, accompanied by her clueless but loving mother, Joyce. Within days, Buffy has acquired the following: a weird guy named Angel who is very cute but only talks to her to deliver cryptic warnings; a bossy Watcher named Mr. Giles (the Watcher is supposed to train and guide the Slayer); and two best friends, Xander and Willow, who begin by calling themselves “the Slayerettes” but soon switch to the more gender-neutral name, “the Scoobies.” Over seven seasons, the Scoobies grow in number, with Buffy, Xander, and Willow being the core, constant members of the group.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which will henceforth be referred to simply as Buffy, began as a show built on metaphor. For many of us, high school was terrible. Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, built the show exploring what it would be like if high school really was, literally, Hell—or, at least, built on a Hellmouth, to which demons and vampires are drawn. Everything that happens in early seasons of Buffy is a metaphor for some aspect of adolescent experience. In later seasons, the show becomes less obviously metaphorical and more about its own mythology, but metaphor always remains an integral part.

The Slayer is always alone and she always dies young. That’s the deal. But Buffy creates her own destiny instead, insisting on as much normalcy as possible and on having friends and even, eventually, having a romantic relationship with a vampire (Angel, and later on, Spike). The series is at its best when her connections to people are strongest and at its worst when she starts to actually believe that maybe she is really alone (see: Season Six). Buffy survives because she has friends and family of both blood and of choice. She survives because she loves romantically and platonically. As Spike puts it in “Fool For Love”:

The only reason you’ve lasted as long as you have is, you’ve got ties to the world. Your Mum. Brat kid sister. Scoobies. They tie you here but you’re just putting off the inevitable.

Of course, we are all just putting off the inevitable. Everyone dies sometime, and in the world of Buffy many people who aren’t slayers die young. But those ties we have on Earth give us a kind of immortality. Jenny Calendar, Joyce, Jonathan, Tara—they affect the Buffy characters they leave behind long after they die, not because of supernatural forces, but because of mundane human memory. And those ties we form on Earth make our struggle possible. It’s not enough to live—we need something to live for, which proves to be the key to Buffy’s survival again and again.

Each of Buffy’s romantic relationships explores love from a different angle that complements the themes of the seasons in which they are featured. Angel, “the vampire with a soul” is the idealized high school boyfriend, and he is Buffy’s primary romantic interest in Seasons One through Three, those of which Buffy is still in the hellscape otherwise known as high school. Buffy adores him in the kind of all-out, all-for-nothing way of first love. Their relationship is melodramatic and often literally life or death. The much, much older Angel often does things that he thinks will be best for Buffy without talking to her first. His time as Angelus (his soulless, murderous persona) and Angel’s eventual departure to Los Angeles leave Buffy with emotional scars that never heal, just like most people carry emotional scars from the the deepest heartbreaks they experience.

Despite the faults of their relationship, Angel brings qualities that Buffy searches for and fails to find again for years. Angel never competes with Buffy. He understands her role as Slayer and is at peace with it. He’s not insecure about the fact that, as the Slayer, she’s even more powerful than he is. And although Buffy is the center of Angel’s world, she’s not the only thing in his world, and he never resents the fact that she has other priorities. Like Buffy, he understands that “the mission is what matters.”

Riley, the college boyfriend, gives the viewer the chance to explore what it means to be “family” in Buffy’s life as a young adult. Riley appears in Season Four, where he represents Buffy’s desire to explore life beyond her high school norms. His involvement in a paramilitary group called The Initiative gives Buffy a chance to try slaying as part of a heavily armed team, but it also causes her to drift away (temporarily) from her high school friends.

The relationship continues into Season Five, where the theme of familial love is most directly explored. In the episode “Family” in which Buffy tells Tara’s father that the Scoobies are “family,” Riley is the only current Scooby who is missing from the scene. Riley is competitive and insecure about Buffy’s fighting capabilities, and as a former soldier he craves stability, discipline, and order, qualities that Buffy and the Scoobies famously lack. Having broken away from The Initiative, he longs for a replacement family but can’t find a place in the chaotic Scooby group.

Buffy clearly cares about Riley, and when he’s in crisis she drops everything to help him. Alas, in Season Five, Buffy is beset with crises including but not limited to a new magical sister, college grades, a sick mom, and a conflict with an actual deity who wants to destroy the world. Therefore, as soon as Buffy has dealt with Riley’s immediate crisis she runs off to handle another one, leaving him drifting. With no mission of his own, Riley can’t accept that no one person will ever be the absolute center of Buffy’s life.

Spike, a vampire, appears in the series as Drusilla’s boyfriend. Spike and Drusilla are clearly deeply attached to each other, but their love is selfish. When Spike drives away with her at the end of Season Two, he’s doing what makes him happy and assuming that this will, eventually, make Drusilla happy. His romantic feelings for Buffy are initially similar. He is capable of empathy and self-sacrifice, but for the most part he wants what’s best for him, not Buffy. Not until the final season is he able to consistently display selflessness—love, empathy, and caring without expectation of return:

When I say, “I love you,” it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You’re a hell of a woman. You’re the one, Buffy.

The romantic relationships on Buffy are legendary, but the core relationships are those between friends, specifically Buffy, Willow, and Xander. Sometimes they work as friends and sometimes they don’t. Periodically they drift apart, or fight. However, they are almost always able to set conflicts aside in the face of crisis and they always share appreciation for one another’s best qualities.

Xander and Willow have their own lives and relationships, but they share Buffy’s sense that “the mission is what matters.” At the same time, they serve as important balancing agents for each other when one or the other goes overboard in service of the big picture or an individual need. Over and over again, the show gives us versions of Buffy without friends (Kendra, Faith, the version of Buffy in “The Wish”). Over and over it is proved that Buffy’s friendships are her greatest superpower. They watch her back in both practical and emotional ways even as they have their own lives and goals.

The show takes pains to demonstrate love in many forms. In the course of the show, we see again and again the importance of love in the sense of self-respect, as in this amazing exchange from “Becoming, Part Two” (Season 2, Ep. 22):

Angel: No weapons, no friends, no hope. Take all that away and what’s left?

Buffy: Me.

Additionally, Buffy is the only character with family stability, and that stability comes from her mother, Joyce. Despite having “read all the parenting books,” Joyce is sometimes a not very good mother, but she’s completely consistent in her love for Buffy, and later for Dawn, Buffy’s magically introduced sister. Joyce’s nurturing gives Buffy a safe haven while the appearance of Dawn gives Buffy someone to take care of. Buffy’s memory of meeting her baby sister for the first time includes her saying “I could be the one to look after her, sometimes.” Her subsequent desire to look after Dawn shapes the rest of the show.

Like any family, either related by blood or by choice, the bonds are sometimes dysfunctional, but they are solid in their support for each other against outside threats, to such a degree that Xander literally saves the world in Season Six by using The Power of Friendship to calm a grief-stricken Willow. Giles is also family by choice, becoming a father figure to Buffy. While Giles is demanding in his expectations, he is also unwavering in his support of Buffy. We should all be so lucky as to get this Dad talk:

Do you want me to wag my finger at you and tell you that you acted rashly? You did. And I can. I know that you loved him. And, he . . . he’s proven more than once that he loved you. You couldn’t have known what would happen. The coming months are, are going to be hard, I suspect on all of us. But if it’s guilt you’re looking for, Buffy, I’m not your man. All you will get from me is my support. And my respect.

At the very end of the series, almost no one is in a romantic relationship. The fact that we can have a happy ending to the show without everyone being paired off is both unusual and important, since it shows that romantic love isn’t the be-all and end-all of existence and that other kinds of relationships have value. But the fact that the characters actively express hope for romantic love shows that romantic love is still a Very Important Thing. It also cements the idea that, for the first time, our characters feel secure about having a future in which they can hope to live for a long time, and they can have more freedom in their choices.

With all that said, though, Buffy is limited in many troublesome ways in its approach to relationships. Despite being revolutionary at the time, the way Willow’s sexuality is portrayed is deeply problematic today, including the omission of bisexuality as an option and the “bury your gays” death of Tara. There’s a lot of slut shaming. People are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted (magically) in ways that are never properly addressed or labeled as rape (for instance, Riley by Faith and Buffy by Dracula and, especially weirdly, Buffy and Riley by a haunted house). These flaws, and others, have been rightfully called out by critics, some at the time of airing and others over the course of the last twenty years which have brought greater awareness of the importance of representation and intersectionality.

However, certain core aspects of the relationships in Buffy stand the test of time. The relationships on the show that are most valued are ones that are selfless (such as Spike’s love for Buffy in Season Seven as contrasted with his selfish obsession with her in earlier seasons), that involve unconditional love (Joyce’s love for her difficult daughters), and that involve partnership and consent (Willow and Tara, after Tara sets clear boundaries with Willow). Above all, Buffy posits that people need people. They don’t need perfect people, just flawed, weird, messy, complicated people who say “I love you,” many times and in many ways.

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.

Time Threads, Epistolary Novels, and Collaboration:
A Conversation with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Chris Urie

Time is a slippery thing. So are stories. They intertwine. So when a story tackles time, and you invest your time in tackling that story . . . things get very interesting.

Red and Blue slip along time threads. They’re on different sides of a war unlike any you’ve ever seen. They leave notes for one another, chiding and taunting each other over each bumble or successful mission. Cleverly told with each of their signature sensibilities on display, El-Mohtar and Gladstone weave a tale that hurdles through both space and time.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are the award-winning authors of dozens of short stories and novels. Their fiction has appeared everywhere from Clarkesworld Magazine to Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, and more. Their new book written together is This Is How You Lose the Time War, which will be available July 16th from Tor Books.

How did you two meet?

Amal: We met at Readercon in 2014. I used to be on the programming committee, and was attending one of the panels for which I’d written up a description. Max was on that panel, being characteristically brilliant, saying all the things that I’d hoped someone would while designing it—to the extent that I found myself frustrated that I wasn’t just having the conversation with him myself! Later that evening we met properly at a party, and I remember saying something like “Hey, I think if we sat down and talked for a while we could solve some of the world’s problems.” And then within a year I was inviting him and his wife to my wedding, and within two years we were writing a novella together! Still working on those world problems, though.

Max: Ad astra per et cetera!

What made you want to write a book together?

Max: Have you met Amal? I mean, really! From the earliest stages of our friendship we were always bouncing ideas off each other, sharing our own lives and points of view, and so often we’d find ourselves approaching the same idea from different directions—and getting excited by the pattern of each other’s thought, our different angles on the world. And our writing felt complementary too—different angles of approach, but all captured by the same black hole, all drawn down toward the same unseen destination. We knew we had to work on something together, and a novella seemed like the ideal form: small and focused enough to test us, but expansive enough to contain a multiverse with the right technique.

What did your process for crafting this novel look like? Did each of you tackle one side of the time war?

Amal: Ironically—given the epistolary nature of the project—we wrote the whole thing while in each other’s company, over the course of a writing retreat, time stolen from a convention, and a visit I made to Boston. We knew we were coming into this project with very different styles and aptitudes, and chose letter writing to make a virtue of those differences. So we divided by character: One of us would write the letter, and the other would write the situation in which the letter was received. Then we’d swap laptops, read what we’d written, exclaim in delight, and move on to the next part.

Max: Dividing the war like that made the writing process mimic the movement of our characters in a way that felt electric. As Red and Blue orbited one another in tighter and tighter circles, so did our writing.

Did you ever play games or challenge each other to who could finish their sections first?

Amal: Not exactly! Max writes roughly four times as fast as I do, and descriptions of space and action and movement come much more naturally to him than to me. So the first few exchanges involved him finishing his section and waiting (with genuine kind patience because he is the literal best human) for me to finish my painstaking canoodling through poetry and sensory affect.

But as we went on, as we read each other’s sections and got more excited and delighted by each other’s work, we started learning from each other, and he slowed down while I sped up, so that by Act Two we were finishing at almost exactly the same time, so that swapping laptops and reading the work felt like this beautiful choreographed dance as we generated a positive feedback loop of encouragement and cheer.

Max: In that way the whole process was a game!

Did you edit each other’s sections?

Amal: Very little; we’d catch typos and continuity errors in each other’s sections, but mostly do the editing ourselves within what we’d written.

Max: Every once in a while we’d drop a margin comment about continuity, but for the most part the “editing” took place in the form of long conversations about what needed to happen next, how we’d have to revise our earlier work. Then we’d break, work separately, and crow about our success.

How did you deal with the paradoxes inherently associated with time travel stories?

Amal: Part of that is spoilers, but most of it is many-worlds interpretation and quantum decoherence and just generally backgrounding mechanics in order to foreground character and feeling. We also lean into the resonance of how letters are their own kind of time travel, in which you’re less concerned with moving forward or backward so long as you’re moving towards each other.

If you could slip along the time thread to any period, what would it be and why?

Amal: So many variables here—can I move in space? Is it a one-way trip? How long can I stay? Do I only get one shot? Am I universally translated? Am I always appearing as myself or do I get something like the Doctor’s Psychic Paper to help me along? Can I affect proceedings?

I think I’ve often felt the desire to look backwards to a place or time that was Good, that was better in some way than our present moment, or that Could Have Been Good If. I’m wary of that desire now. Sure I’d love to have listened to Enheduanna recite her praise-verse to Inanna in Ur, or read any of the millions of books that have been lost or destroyed over millennia, or talk to Coleridge about The Arabian Nights, or go on a very long walk with Naomi Mitchison—but I think the end of this kind of exercise is to realize what you care deeply about now, what you don’t want to miss out on, what you want for the future. And I guess really what I want is to slip along the time thread to a place with a stable climate and the liberation of all sentient beings—even if it’s moving into the future a day at a time.

What made you choose to have these characters on each side of the war interact in almost a playful manner by leaving hidden notes for each other?

Max: We started writing letters to each other early in our friendship—for many reasons, really. A letter is an utterly unique gift. It’s untracked, unarchived, unsearched. There is no public, performative component of a letter—as there is in so much of our lives these days, especially if you’re in on social media in any active professional sense. Letter writing felt like something small and real snatched away from an increasingly mad world. I could fall into a letter knowing Amal would be there to catch me, and vice versa. And, as Amal has mentioned, letters have their own sort of time travel—they’re bits of time and soul spread across the writing of them, sent forward to a correspondent who may be in desperate need of just that time, just that soul. There’s something of the secret agent to any writer of letters. In a way, the whole book came from that seed.

Besides each other, what other writer, living or dead would you like to collaborate with?

Amal: Bracketing all the amazing people with whom I’ve already collaborated (C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Caitlyn Paxson, Cat Valente, Jessica P. Wick) or discussed collaborating (Fran Wilde, Arkady Martine)—Lin-Manuel Miranda. I mean, why not. And Rebecca Sugar while I’m at it. Actually, like, the three of us, maybe, in a room together, making things happen. And George Eliot.

Max: Can I join?

Amal: In my head we’re already breaking narrative ground on the Queer Middlemarch Meets Moana in Space project of our dreams!

Did the story grow out of the telling or did you both figure out the structure and plot before fleshing it out chapter by chapter?

Amal: We had a rough act-based breakdown of story beats, and would discuss the situation in which the letter was to be received, but not the contents of the letters themselves, which were always a surprise, even when we were aware of what forward plot-motion they were supposed to accomplish. I remember there was one climactic point where we kept going back and forth trying to figure out how to denoue the ment of it all, and we paced across that tiny gazebo until we both lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling for a while, full of the what but incapable of articulating the how.

We got there eventually, though!

What is one piece of writing advice that has stuck with you?

Amal: I first encountered this anonymously on Tumblr, but some googling suggests it’s attributed to Jane Smiley: “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.” I am fantastic at giving this advice and absolutely dreadful at internalizing it.

Max: No one gave me this advice, but for years now I’ve had on my desktop a Post-it note saying in all caps: YOU DO NOT NEED PERMISSION. Obviously not comprehensive life advice! I mean, permission is important for any activity that involves more than one person! But when creating in solitude or in a tight pair, it’s important to remember that, yes, you can write this sentence, make this comparison, turn the scene in just this way. These characters can go that far over the line. You can make this work about something you love, rather than something you think other people want to read. The worst you’ll get is a scene that does not work, a character that falls flat. (That’s part of the relief of working with someone, too—you can see instantly what works for them and what doesn’t.) What exists that doesn’t work can always be fixed. What doesn’t exist, can’t.

What is one piece of writing advice that you gave each other?

Amal: “Hey Max, maybe you should eat something.”

Max: “Just keep going! It’s amazing already, and if anything needs fixing we’ll fix it in post!”

What projects are you working on next?

Amal: We’re working on scripting the pilot episode for a This Is How You Lose the Time War TV show! It’s very early days yet but the process has been so exciting to me—Max has a lot more experience with scripts and serialized fictions more generally, and it’s been wonderful to get to learn this form alongside him. Speaking more singly—and with the weary awareness of how often I’ve said this in interviews over the last mumblety years—I’m finishing a doctoral dissertation and determining when exactly, between writing criticism and short fiction and teaching and traveling, I can knuckle down to a novel.

Max: So much! This summer sees the release of This Is How You Lose The Time War and Empress of Forever. My main projects after that are still in motion but include the climactic conclusion of the Craft Sequence, another book I can’t talk about much just yet, the Time War TV series of course, another video project I can’t talk about yet, and, after all that, blue skies and the open sea.

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.

My World Wobbled and Changed:
An Interview with Soyeon Jeong

Gord Sellar

Soyeon Jeong is a major author of science fiction in South Korea, and a celebrated translator of science fiction (from English to Korean). She is also a practicing attorney, and has founded and directed a charity (which works to help children in developing nations gain a quality education), as well as founding and chairing the Science Fiction Writers Union of the Republic of Korea. It is hard to imagine the world of South Korean science fiction without her indefatigable contributions to it. Her short story “The Flowering” recently appeared in the April 2019 issue Clarkesworld.

I think you grew up in South Korean SF fandom in the 1990s. My impression is that SF was even more marginal in Korea back then—is that right? Can you tell us a little about what that was that like, what kinds of SF were available to you, and how you managed to connect with SF fandom here?

It wasn’t actually the ’90s but the early 2000s, for me. At that time, we weren’t connected via the web yet, but instead via a sort of Bulletin Board System that was called “PC communication” here. At the time, Korean SF fandom was a small group of lovely and nerdy people. There were some distinctive characteristics we shared: for example, most of us were avid bookworms who read many things besides SF, and many of us also spoke English. People wrote reviews of science fiction that hadn’t yet been translated to Korean, and there was a message board where people posted original stories.

Politically, fandom tended to lean to the left. In comparison with American fandom, I think it was something like a cross between the Futurians of the 1940s and the Clarion scene of the 1970s. I was a reader of both science books and SF, so I signed up with the fandom group. Then, in 2001, Korea’s SF fandom held its first SF convention, so I went, and for the first time I met the group’s other members. (Wow, they were real human beings—what a surprise!) At the time, I was the youngest person in the group.

The most important SF was already available in Korean: books by Asimov, Heinlein, and Le Guin. Also, Korean SF fandom was eager to introduce other SF—Roger Zelazny was quite popular, and Philip K. Dick was as well. Ursula K. Le Guin was already considered a classic here by then. Also, some fan-edited short story collections got printed. For example, we had a two-volume collection of feminist SF stories. Actually, that wasn’t exactly legal, but you know, it was fan publication (and it’s been out of print now for 30 years or so), but in that collection we had work by Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Pat Murphy. There were also collections of time travel stories and classic SF stories, all edited and translated by members of Korean fandom.

For myself, Kyobo Bookstore (the largest bookstore in Seoul at that time) had a good SF section. I could get the year’s best SF collections from there. After reading through the initial classics like Asimov and Zelazny—it might sound strange to put Asimov and Zelazny in the same sentence like that, but in Korea this made perfect sense—I just bought the year’s best anthologies, working my way backward, and then went on to get my favorite writers’ own publications.

We’re living in an age now when, at least for English-speakers, it seems increasingly accepted that there isn’t really a single “canon” of celebrated SF. I mean that lots of people now are more self-consciously building their own “personal canons” instead. Who are the authors (and creators) in your personal SF canon, and why do they have a place there? Also, are there any specific Korean fiction authors (genre or otherwise) who you took as exemplary or as role models?

Nancy Kress is definitely in my own SF canon. When I’m asked about what’s given me that famous “sense-of-wonder” experience, I always mention her “Beggars in Spain”—the novella—and “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” I read both in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best collections, and I was so awed. I felt like my world wobbled and changed. Later, I translated her short story collection, Beaker’s Dozen, which was an honor. Thanks to the benefits of Amazon and capitalism, I’ve read every publication by Nancy Kress before 2010. After that, I arrived at the 2L stage of law school . . .

The second year? I guess you didn’t have as much time to read after that?

Yes, that correct.

Also, Ursula K. Le Guin—she’s just such an important figure in SF in Korea. I guess Le Guin is the SF writer whose works are most completely translated to Korean. The Left Hand of Darkness has been simply a must-read novel for Korean SF readers, and it is indeed part of my personal canon as well. And On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch. I really wanted to translate that one, but no publishing company managed to agree to his agent’s conditions. (I’m still sour about that.)

As for talking about role models, as I’m a member of the earlier generation of modern Korean SF authors, I can’t think of any Korean SF writers who were exemplars for me when I was starting out. I know that I am a role model to many younger Korean writers, though—ha! For non-SF work, the poet Hwang In-suk is my role model. I hand-copied her work to learn how poets and essayists construct their sentences. As a writer, I am keenly aware of the rhythm and rhyme of each sentence. Often, I phrase my sentences in different ways to see which way the prose works best.

All of your works that have been translated to English so far have engaged with politics in some manner: “Cosmic Go” (which appeared in the anthology Readymade Bodhisattva earlier this year) deals with the struggles of an aspiring astronaut who is physically handicapped; “Home” (which appeared in Guernica in late February) confronted how radical inequality can result from technocratic systems (like actuarial tables) by which corporate and government policies are developed; and “The Flowering” (Clarkesworld, April 2019) tackled resistance to state censorship and the digital panopticon. Do you feel that engaging with political issues like these feels inextricably part of the work of writing SF, or is it more of a conscious choice you make when writing?

I didn’t think about the political or social aspects of my work when I first began my career as a writer. I think at the beginning it came out unconsciously. I was young, and as most young writers do, I wrote from my own experience and sentiments. “Cosmic Go” was my first short story, and I was 20 years old then. In my later work, I began to make a conscious choice to deal with such things, because I began to meet readers who liked that side of my work.

In 2007, I met a reader who said that she went on a trip with her handicapped brother for the first time in her life after reading my work. I met a teenaged reader who came to my lecture and whispered to me that my story, “The Shore of Masan,” which is quite a straightforward coming-out story of a young lesbian, was exactly like herself and that it had kept her alive. When you meet readers like that, you can’t help but look back on what you wrote, and try not to disappoint your readers.

As I read “The Flowering,” the past couple of decades flashed before my eyes—everything from the push for eradicating anonymity online here, to the 2009 “Minerva” prosecution, to the more recent scandal involving the National Intelligence Service and Twitter during an election . . . as well as how readily the public seems to have accepted the new norms. Is it fair to say that these things form the backdrop of “The Flowering,” and can you maybe fill in readers on that background a little, for those who know nothing about you, could you tell us a little more about the issues as you see them?

Actually, “The Flowering” was written before the Minerva and the NIS incident. The background is much more personal.

One of my undergraduate friends was a conscientious objector. In Korea, military service is mandatory for men, and no alternate form of service has been made available to people like him. It was only last year that this was found unconstitutional by the Court. Anyway, my friend was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. That was the first time I saw the criminal court and the prison. He was held at the Yeongdeungpo prison, and I went to visit him several times. Since I went to the court, I met his mother, his activist friends, and my own prosecutor friend, and it was such a strange experience.

To begin with, you get more than a year’s prison sentence just for being a pacifist. And in some ways, that’s considerate of the court, because under Korean military law, if the sentence is less than eighteen months, you have to go to the military anyway once you get out of prison. So then you get stuck in the prison complex, which is this building that’s like forty years old and stands in a busy part of Seoul. Because my friend was an educational elite—he was studying for a master’s in sociology at Seoul National University—he received a work assignment as part of the prison’s administration system. He told me that most conscientious objectors end up helping the management of the prison, because they are usually well-educated, understand the system quickly, and are accustomed to following institutional rules. How ironic.

I couldn’t believe that more than 500 individuals went through this annually, and that society was so . . . how can I put this? So “conscientiously ignorant” about it. I saw the collective military experience of people in general: how people became uncomfortable when I talked about my conscientious objector friend, how I myself froze up and got a bit scared when I visited the prison, and also how the young activists kept a bubble of pride around themselves all through the experience. I think my story came out from those experiences.

I guess most English-speakers are more familiar with Korean SF in a different form—film and TV shows, which seem to be profoundly preoccupied with the past—memory, national history, trauma and fractured identity, colonial history, the sufferings of the dictatorship era, and so on. But SF films and SF books are usually pretty different in most places, so I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the divide between cinematic and literary SF within a South Korean context.

The quality of cinematic SF in South Korea has been questionable. I remember several ridiculous, high-budget blockbuster movies that could have been a good SF, but instead ended up being copies of Hollywood films or, worse and more often, just bad propaganda for nationalism and patriotism. I think the major reasons for this is that we experienced both colonial history and the dictatorship era. Those kinds of political themes may look much more interesting than literary Korean SF, and in South Korea, nationalism sells. So we have so many alternate history movies—which we consider a part of the SF genre here—that just sell nationalism.

Also, there’s the effect of Japanese movies and animation, which may have nudged our cinema in the wrong direction. Korean literary SF is not very much influenced by Japan: the major influence has been post-New Wave English-language SF. But in the media business, I think the influence of Japanese culture is more profound.

Still, I also find that recently Korean movie markets are discovering Korean literary SF and fantasy. Maybe it’s because both markets have matured, or maybe it’s the recently growing demand for diversity. I’m not really sure what the reason is, but I know that many screenwriters here are trying to write SF these days. And in the market, nowadays Korean SF writers are meeting agencies or buyers interested in Korean literary SF works. Also, many works are quite easy to bring to life on-screen, because the majority of Korean SF works tend to be more realistic. I mean, it wouldn’t take a lot of money to adapt “The Flowering” into a movie—you could just set it in modern-day Seoul and nobody would notice the difference. I think this kind of “realism” in Korean literary SF is now getting noticed.

As an SF writer working in the Korean language, probably the biggest challenge you and your fellow authors face is the limited size of your audience, the linguistic isolation of working in a language other than English. Hopefully that’s starting to change as translation of Korean SF becomes more common. Is this the biggest challenge Korean SF authors collectively face or are there others?

That’s not the biggest challenge! We also face low-paying publishers, and bad editors, and rip-off agencies! But, yes, it is indeed a challenge. The Korean market is small, and the standard expected by readers is high, with so many “best-of-the-best” works from abroad already having been translated. As a professional writer, this is indeed an issue. It’s difficult to make a living as a writer, and we don’t know how to introduce our work in other languages. I am not even sure if there is any demand for it. I’m positive that once it is introduced, Korean SF would attract an audience of readers in other languages, but it’s so hard get to that point. SF is part of pop culture, and I want Korean SF, and my own work, to be accepted as good work, not just as some exotic work to be examined. I deeply appreciate Clarkesworld for giving space for translated work.

You’re also a respected translator of English-language SF into Korean. Can you tell us more about that: how your translating informs your writing, and about the curatorial aspect of the work of translating foreign SF in Korea?

Sure. I always think about translation as curation, and I think most SF translators in Korea—maybe I can say all of them, since there aren’t that many of us here—share that sentiment. Many translators were the first to introduce a given SF author to Korean readers. We, translators, think hard about what to translate, and sometimes work very hard to persuade publishers. For example, my first SF translation was Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, my second was Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark, and my third was David Gerrolds’ The Martian Child. I think you can already see where I am going with this list—it was clear from the start. But most translators here have this kind of tendency. For example, Suhyun Lee, who has translated many of Le Guin’s works, also translated James Tiptree Jr. and Octavia Butler. (Oh, how I envy her! I really wanted to be the one to do it!) Sanghoon Kim, who translated Zelazny’s Amber Series, is the translator of most of Philip K. Dick’s works. Most of Arthur C. Clarke’s work is translated by Hokwan Ko, who is both a translator and a science journalist. Each translator definitely works as a curator in Korea, and a certain proportion of the SF readership is aware of this.

About the Author

Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, raised in Canada, and has lived in South Korea since 2002, where he has taught at universities, played saxophone in an indie-rock band, and worked as a writer, editor, and co-translator. He attended Clarion West in 2006, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and his fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Analog, Interzone, Clarkesworld, and several best of the year anthologies.

Editor’s Desk:
Living Through the Solstice

Neil Clarke

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Nebula Conference run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The conference was in Los Angeles this year, so after an early morning cross-country flight and a long drive through the never-ending LA traffic, I arrived at the hotel and settled in. Over the next few days, I was scheduled for two panels, several meetings, and to receive the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. On my personal checklist, as I mentioned last month, was to meet William Gibson, which I managed to do without making a fool of myself.

I’d like to talk a bit about that Solstice Award. The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is given by SFWA for “distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community.” The winners—Nisi Shawl was the other winner this year—are informed in advance. In my case, it started several months ago with an email from SFWA President Cat Rambo, that said something along the lines of “What’s your phone number? I promise it’s not bad news.” It was odd, but reassuring, since I tend to assume the worst when something can’t be said in an email.

Later that evening, Cat called me and told me the good news. I was both happy to be receiving the award, but also having a bit of a “me? really?” moment. After the call was over, I made the big mistake of looking at the list of previous recipients of the award: people like Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), Octavia E. Butler, Carl Sagan, and Sir Terry Pratchett. My “really?” moment turned into full-blown impostor syndrome and despite the multiple people congratulating and telling me how deserved this award was over the months to come, I struggled with it.

I wrote several versions of my acceptance speech, but until the morning of the Nebula Ceremony, I hadn’t managed to find words that weren’t mired by the struggle. Something clicked that morning. It didn’t matter that I was the second-youngest or least-experienced to receive the honor—yes, of course I checked, impostor syndrome can be incredibly self-destructive. It didn’t even matter if I didn’t feel worthy or not, Cat did, SFWA did, and so many other people in that room did as well. I am so overwhelmed that they feel that way. If, in their eyes, my thirteen years in publishing have made a “distinguished contribution,” then wow, thank you. I’m not oblivious to some of the things we’ve done, but I certainly lack the perspective they have from the outside.

My notes for the speech were a scribbled mess, but I tried to go into a bit of my struggle with the concept of receiving this honor and accepting that it was ultimately their opinion that mattered more. I had a list of names to thank, because this has not been a solo journey. I started with Sean, because we’ve been on this road together from the beginning. If it wasn’t for that late night Readercon conversation that started Clarkesworld and put me on this path, I’m not sure where I’d be right now. He’s become a brother to me in that time. If Sean is my brother, then Kate is my sister. She’s coming up on ten years with us and yet it feels like she’s always been there. And yes, my actual family—Lisa, Aidan, and Eamonn—were mentioned too. I believe I commented that launching a magazine at age forty must have seemed like a weird mid-life crisis, but my family has been supportive from day one.

At the ceremony, I was introduced by Regina Kanyu Wang, who has clearly gotten to know me well since we started working together on the Storycom-funded Chinese SF translations. Her introduction was perfect, personal, and amusing. She had teased me about my ability to travel to China for two weeks with nothing more than carry-on bags, so I started by setting the record straight. I did do that, but after a lifetime of flying out of Newark Airport, I had learned to pack really well and to never check luggage. From there, I was much more relaxed, which was perfect.

Since international—and particularly translated fiction—was one of the areas being cited for this honor, I commented that I thought it was so weird to have to say that international science fiction was important. As a community we write or read about characters on other worlds, but so seldom had we read what was written on the other side of our own world. I thanked Storycom, our translators, authors, artists, and everyone else that has helped with our efforts to address this. I have to say that seeing more and more of these works appearing across the market lately is one of the things that makes me happiest about our field in recent years. That it was part of this award was uplifting, not just for me. It sends a message to authors around the world that these efforts are valued by our community. That’s a big deal. Bigger than most probably realize.

If I have one regret from the speech, it was not to be a bit more specific in thanking SFWA, and particularly Cat Rambo for their belief in me. I feel like I adequately conveyed that in the moment and probably muddied it with my description of my own insecurity about receiving the award. Have they won me over? I’m probably more accepting than I was a month ago, but it remains very surreal to me. I still see the mountain of work ahead of us, but this moment has given me a chance to pause, see through the eyes of others, and realize the role we’ve played in changing the landscape for short fiction since 2006.

Of course, I must thank you as well. Like I’ve been trying to say, this is a team effort, but that team includes readers like you. Subscribing to the magazine, sharing the stories, and words of encouragement have meant a lot over the years. My name is on this award, but it couldn’t have happened without the entire team from readers to authors to editors. Thank you for your part, no matter how small you might think it is.

That said, I’m keeping the award myself. It’s very pretty and makes me happy to look over at as I type this.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a seven-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology, The Eagle has Landed, will be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Warm Song

J.R. Slattum

About the Artist

J.R. Slattum is a self-taught artist, his work entering the surreal world of innerspace. After a near-death experience in 2007, inspired by a personal enlightenment, Slattum fell into a world of paint. Stemming from a meditative doodle, his subject gravitates toward the esoteric realms of psychology & philosophy with the archetypes who inhabit them. Through the doorway of art, he invites the viewer to travel into these worlds and take on their own journey. Working from his studio in Woodburn, Oregon, his work is collected internationally.