Dave’s Head

Suzanne Palmer

I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, “Road trip?”

“I’m a senior porter now,” I say. “I can’t just skip work.” This is true.

“I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday,” Dave says. This is also true. “So, road trip?”

“You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long,” I say.

“Marty is at the party,” Dave says. “Throw him in the back seat and he’ll be fine.” Back seat of course because Dave’s head is fucking huge—life-size, as advertised—and he wants to see out the front window and “feel” the wind as if he had real fucking skin, real nerves, rather than just a better imagination than most actual people I know. Someday if I ever meet his maker, I don’t know if I’d hug them or kick them in the nuts.

If Marty is at the party, I wasn’t gonna get much done here at the house, because he’d always be milling around and in the way and he’d notice me moving or taking stuff. It’s much better when he’s at the garage, and mostly just sits on the couch staring at nothing and mumbling to ghostly coworkers, and then I can sneak off the nasty stuff, old food wrappers and anything likely to go bad or attract bugs or mice, and maybe even sort out and ditch some papers if I take a little from one spot and a little from another so the stacks and piles don’t seem to change much all at once.

At least my uncle never collected actual live animals; I’ve seen too many pics of those horrors and we’re not nearly so bad. The closest he got was Dave and a couple of Dave’s friends, the rest of which were too broken to fix. I think it’s because most of the animatronics were indoors when the fire took out their park, but Dave was so big he’d been built to be outside and weatherproof, sturdier all around. One of his knee joints is locked up from an exhibit collapsing against him, but he can still walk around with a stiff limp if he has to, and with Marty nowadays mostly forgetting there was an outdoors I’ve managed to get most of the junk out of the backyard so he has some room to roam.

Still, as Dave likes to remind me, the backyard wasn’t all that big to start with, and there wasn’t all that much interesting to look at even when your head is normally as high up as Dave’s is. And he gets lonely when Marty is somewhere out of his own head, which is most of the time now.

Dave knows when I’m vulnerable. My job at the airport carrying bags for the few rich fuckers who can still afford to fly anywhere, furiously trying to buy time for the status quo, makes me resentful, and half this week was double shifts. “Road trip?” he says again.

Whatever it was I had been thinking I should get done this weekend I can’t remember anyway. And I get lonely too; not like I can invite people over, with my uncle’s stuff everywhere and imaginary people taking up whatever room is left. “Fine,” I say. “But not too far.”

“Awesomesauce!” Dave answers, which, really, is a weird thing to hear from a giant detached theme-park dinosaur head, but at some point you just let the weirdness own you and go with it.

My car is an old retired police cruiser, which means nothing much except that it has a reinforced frame and when I get up a little too close to someone on the highway and get myself into a predator mind-set there’s a vibe that surrounds us and they get paranoid and move the hell over to the slow lane. Mostly I don’t do this because it seems a dick thing to do, but I have a personal bias against anyone driving a Luxauto because of my shit of a father, especially if they’re the fucking beige armored ones. And nine times out of ten when you overtake them and they glare at you, you can tell just from that one look that they’re just the sort of douchebro who needed, at some point in their life, to get owned on the road by a green-haired skinny chick with a lip ring and a grease-converted V8 and a fucking dinosaur head in the passenger seat.

Most people stick to the publics—around here in dead-end post-suburbia that means pretty much electric buses—so those out on the road in private cars are either loaded with money, or looking to take some. Or they’re taking their damned dinosaur head for an outing in a car their uncle pulled out of the junkyard and fixed you for your sixteenth birthday and you’re gonna drive it ’til the bitter end.

Sometimes Uncle Marty will start having conversations with people in other cars, even if we’re only actually beside them for a few seconds and the windows are up and of course they can’t actually hear him and aren’t even looking at him. Once we’re past he’ll tell us about it, but when it’s a beige Luxauto he doesn’t, or he’ll just tsk and look sad or upset, so I think that makes it clear my bias isn’t unreasonable. Family baggage distilled down to car brand hate.

Anyhow, the sun is still up, the roads aren’t crowded, Marty is happily chatting with four or five imaginary people in the back seat, still at his party, so we’re good. Last time we did this we went west, so this time we go east, and other than that we got no plan. Or at least, I don’t.

“I was thinking,” Dave says, all casual conversation, and I think right, here it is, “I’d still really like to see the redwoods.”

Yeah, so do I, but I don’t have the heart to tell Dave that some jackhole burned the entire damned forest down nine years ago. Scientists are working on new groves, in better places now that the climate has shifted so much, but they don’t want anyone to know where those are and besides they can’t be more than a few feet tall yet, right? “They’re off-limits,” I say.

“We could sneak.”

I snort, which doesn’t sound at all girl-like, but who the hell is gonna care? “You’re a sixty-pound robotic head, Dave. Sneaking is kinda beyond our means.”

“I just think it would be nice for me,” he says, and what he means is he likes things that are very old and very big, because—as he put it once—they resonate with him. He forgets he’s not real. Sometimes I think the fact that I’m the only one of the three of us with any kind of decent grip means I’m the one losing out. Meanwhile I’m dodging potholes and watching the yes/no machine stuckied to the dash get brighter, and it’s worrying me, so I’m not feeling too charitable about any of it.

“Yeah?” I ask. “Why’s that?”

“Because it’s hard when you’re two hundred million years old and everything around you is teeny tiny and fleeting,” he says.

When I cracked Dave open to see if I could fix him, after I moved in to take care of Marty and was exploring the junk in the yard, I’d found his serial number plate. Dave was made when I was two years old. But if I say that the rest of this trip will be sullen silence and now that we’re out and moving I’m kind of getting into the idea of the trip after all.

With reservations, though. We’ve had the redwoods convo a bunch of times and I always say no, and Dave knows this even if he doesn’t know why, which means it’s a dodge.

“We’ll see if we can find something else,” I say, and if that’s not the answer Dave wanted, at least he seems to be okay with it.

I tap the hexagon face of the yes/no machine, hoping it can give us the all-clear by the time we have to make a pit stop. It was an expensive thing, but I like to think it’s saved our asses a couple of times. It’s got a built-in GPS and it collates data about your location on the fly, economic data and crime data, education, air and water toxicity, and key words in social media posts from or about wherever you’re driving through, and it does whatever magic math it does with that and produces a six-metric rating that is displayed as colors. Right now we’re on the highway, but whatever shit place we’re passing through on the other side of the vine-strangled trees is hot red and yellow. The other colors are there too, but fainter. It’s funny that they called it the yes/no machine because it’s about as far as it could be from giving you a clear yes or no answer to whether you should stop somewhere or floor it ’til you’re out. I mean, I suppose if the hexagon stayed clear that would be a yes, but that never, ever happens. And if it did I’d assume the thing was busted.

“Maybe if we head more south, it’ll get better,” Dave says from the passenger seat.

“Yeah?” I ask. “What’s south of here?”

Dave fixes one big fake eye on me. “It was just a random suggestion,” he says, and by his insulted tone I can tell it wasn’t any such thing. But if he has more to say, he’s still not saying it. I fumble one of the new plastic dollar coins out of the collection of candy bar wrappers in my ashtray and, one hand still on the wheel, flip it. Heads I let Dave get his way and head south, tails I be the Girl In Charge and we go due north instead.

Head wins, damn him.

“Fine,” I say, “south it is.” When the next big interchange comes up I slow down and take the exit, bump over the vehicle scanner and scale, and then we’re merging onto another pothole-riddled highway heading south.

The yes/no machine fades to a lighter pink, paler yellow, and that’s at least something.

We drive for about two hours then stop at a roadside service stop so I can usher Marty into the men’s room; he can’t always tell me when he needs to go, but I noticed him being antsy in the back seat. Anyway I want to load up on some cheap packaged snacks. The old lady behind the counter seems nice enough, but with most food regs now entirely voluntary, I don’t trust anything not wrapped, stamped, and safety-sealed while I’m on the road, which is too bad because the pot of chili she has simmering near the counter smells really fucking good.

Another hour later and we’re nearing a gate city named Middleton, hidden from view behind the highway walls, and even though the yes/no machine is pretty optimistic about it, I know better than to stop. When everything went to shit and most of the middle class got stripped broke, those who were left circled their wagons into tight little protective clusters, though what they were protecting other than their schmancy boring-ass lawns and their inbred kids I dunno. Nonresidents routinely get targeted for all kinds of fees and harassment, and I’ve heard stories where if you couldn’t cough up ridiculous money you’d find yourself working for the city ’til you paid it off, which with compounding interest and fees on fees you never ever would. Middleton doesn’t have that rep, but I’m not keen on risking my own freedom on it; I’ve got things to do.

“How about here?” Dave peeps up, the first word he’s said in over half an hour, as we approach the first Middleton exit.

“Gate city,” I say. “Nope.”

Dave can’t purse his lips, because he’s fucking animatronic and no one thought he’d need that, even though they apparently thought they should make him smart enough to read and be argumentative as hell. For educating children, sure. So instead he does this thing where he just lightly clacks his jaws open and closed, tap tap tap tap, except he’s a giant head so it shakes the whole damned car. “We’re not stopping here,” I say again, just to be sure he gets that this is nonnegotiable.

Marty in the back seat has gotten quiet, and I glance at him in the mirror and he’s frowning and looking around as if he understands where we are. My uncle might be on another planet most of the time, but not long ago he was one of the sharpest people I knew, the only one who could go toe to toe with my mother in the brains department—macrotech versus nanotech—and he knew everybody and everything.

“We’re not going to stop here, Uncle Marty,” I tell him, and the anxious look eases. “Just passing through.”

Dave is silent for a bit, then starts clacking again, and this time I do glare at him. “You have a problem?” I ask.

And then, like a goddamned omen, up ahead, half-leaning on the guardrail, I see the falling-down highway billboard for Middleton Prehistoric Playland. I had totally forgotten about it, but I have doubts it’s coincidence that we’re here.

I keep driving, paying no notice to the billboard as if very busy instead of keeping a safe eye on the faded yellow lines on my side of the road. There is a small metallic chuffing sound I have come to identify as a cough, and then Dave says brightly, “Well, hey!”

“Hey what?” I say.

“I just saw a sign for another dinosaur park, right here. What amazing luck! We should stop.”

Yes, Dave sucks at poker, too. “Gate city,” I say again. “We’re not stopping. Besides, it’s been closed for decades, so it’s not like we could go inside.”

“We could look around, though,” Dave says. “Maybe we could sneak in.”

“Sneak in?!” I laugh. “You? You must be shitting me. No.”

“I heard they might have another Euhelopus there,” Dave says.

“You heard? So you knew this was here all along?” Of course I already know the answer, but it has to be asked.

“I saw a brochure,” Dave says.

“You saw a brochure? Where?”

“Somewhere in the house, in one of the paper piles,” Dave says.

“And you couldn’t just ask me if we could come here?”

“I knew you’d say no,” Dave says. “You don’t know what it’s like being extinct. It gets lonely.”

I’ve already gone down the argument hole with Dave about the Euhelopus thing, a name he picked up off some TV kid doco and decided was him (rather than the Generic Sauropod Model C (XXXL) his maker-plate reads) and I made the mistake once of telling him his kind wouldn’t be extinct until our toaster and microwave died, and that got ugly. Ugly enough that Uncle Marty got upset, which is where I draw the line.

“Look,” I say, “we can’t just go right into a gate city. I can try to find out who owns it and if we can visit, and then try to find us a resident to sponsor us—”

“I think it’s outside the gates, on the far side of Middleton,” Marty speaks up from the back. “I once tried to buy some parts off the guy who owns it, to fix Dave’s stuck knee, or maybe barter my time helping him for what I needed, but he wouldn’t even give me the time of day because he was gonna fix it all himself, even though everything in his park was just rusting to heck untouched.”

“Then he’s not gonna let us in anyway,” I say.

“Can we maybe just go look?” Dave asks. “I mean, even just drive around it even if we can’t get in?”

Marty is leaning forward from the back seat, and he’s one hundred percent here, which doesn’t happen too often anymore. “Fine,” I say. “If it’s outside the gates, and if we can get to it, and if the yes/no machine doesn’t give us a hell no, we’ll drive around it.”

“Okay,” Dave says, and is quiet after that.

Sure enough the Playland exit is right after where the high walls that line the highway finally taper down and away and we leave Middleton behind. Middleton, it seems, didn’t want to take the park with them when they redrew their town lines in concrete. I take the exit and the yes/no machine flickers only slightly brighter. Maybe we’ll even find somewhere independently certified to eat out here and a safe place to either stay or park the car overnight.

The sun is low in the sky; I’d forgotten how long we’d been driving. The yes/no machine is still not telling us to get out, as I pass over the road scanners and into the abandoned roads of old Middleton.

Playland is not hard to find. There’s a bunch of defaced billboards and signs pointing the way, and already I can see the big fake palm trees up ahead over the cramped streets and low buildings. Only a few houses have barbed wire around them.

When we hit the street with the park on it I slow down, and because there is no traffic behind me I brake in front of the wide front gates.

They are open.

“Can we go in?” Dave asks.

“No,” I say immediately. “There’s no way that should be open. What if someone is robbing or vandalizing the place right now? We don’t want to get in the middle of that.”

“It looks pretty quiet,” Dave says.

“Sure does,” I say. “Doesn’t make me like it better.” In point of fact, it made me like it a whole lot worse.

“I can’t see from here,” Dave complains. “Can’t we just, you know, pull in a little bit? Just enough for me to see if there are any more of my kind there?”

“No,” I say again. I pull ahead, and park the car on the side of the road just past the gates. There’s a convenience store across the street, lights on and open sign lit. “I’ll go ask if they know what’s going on here, okay? If the park’s not supposed to be open like that they can call the local police, if there are any. You two wait right here. Got it?”

“Got it,” Dave says.

“I’m trusting you,” I say.

“I know.”

“Okay.” I get out of the car, lock it, and skip across the street. The sun is below the skyline now and a streetlight comes on just as I run under it. I glance back and I can see Dave and Marty in the car right where I left them, so I go through the metal detector into the shop. The back half is all hard liquor and edibles, in a cage, with an employee on the far side who looks up from a magazine when I walk in, but I’m not interested in anything in there, so the man loses interest in me just as fast. The woman behind the counter barely moves from where she’s leaning against the counter as I walk up and put a few bags of snacks on the scanner. You get better info if you’re not asking just for free.

She rings it in, and scans my phone. We wait for it to report that it’s not a stolen ID, then report that I’m not a wanted criminal or a tax escapee, then finally sends the charges.

“You’re all set, honey,” she says when it rings through. Been a while since I’ve been broke enough to get declined, but I still have that sharp bite of relief every time I don’t.

“Thanks,” I say. “Hey, I was noticing the gates of the dino park are open. That guy didn’t get off his ass and finally start fixing the place up, did he?”

She snorts. “Kurt? Fix something? Not a chance. Sold it a month ago, though. Never heard someone complain that much about getting so much money for shit before, but that’s the kind of man he was. Haven’t met the new owner yet.”

“Thanks, I just wondered,” I say, and pick up my things.

“I loved that place when I was a kid,” she continues. “You could go in and talk to the dinos and they’d talk back to you and it was magical. Makes me sad every day to see it falling apart along with everything else in the world. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I say, even though I’m probably a third as old as her and the world’s been falling apart as long as I’ve been in it. At least I know what it’s like to have a dinosaur talk back to me, except mine is full of moping and complaints rather than handy, cheery facts about ginormous Pleistocene bugs.

I leave the store, and wait for a lone van, rusted out and smelling of old-school gasoline fumes, to pass. Dude behind the wheel is looking at me, and if I didn’t have my arms full of chips and candy bars I’d’ve flipped him the finger just on principle. But he keeps going, and I start across the empty street and am halfway across before I realize Marty is standing about halfway between the car and the gate, moving back and forth in agitation.

I run.

Marty sees me coming and recognizes me, and I get to him before he can run into the road to meet me and get him back safely on the sidewalk. “Cassie!” he says.

“You okay?” I ask. He doesn’t look hurt, just confused. “What happened?”

Marty points. The passenger car door is open, and Dave is gone. “He told me I had to help him,” he said.

“He went into the park, didn’t he?” I say. It’s not really a question. I check the trunk, and sure enough the modified furniture dolly with big rubber wheels that Dave uses to get his head around outside is gone.

“He told me I had to,” Marty says again. He is wringing his hands between bouts of flapping them, and I throw the junk food into the back of the car, get Marty’s sweater out, and wrap him up in it. It’s not cold, but the weight of it usually helps him calm down. This time, it takes a while.

It’s getting dark out, and there’s no way I’m leaving Marty in the car alone. “We can come back for Dave tomorrow,” I say.

“No, no!” Marty shouts, and starts shaking again. “We have to go get him now! What if we leave and they won’t give him back?”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “It’s all right. I’ll go get him.”

When Marty is calm again I lure him back into the car with a candy bar, and then I stare at those gates for a minute as if I can make Dave get his ass back out here on his own by force of fury.

When that doesn’t work, I get behind the wheel, back the car up, and I drive through those goddamned fucking gates to go get that goddamned fucking asshole dinosaur head.

The parking lot is larger than it looked from the outside; Playland must have been popular in its prime. I’m halfway across it when the sensors for the lot lights figure out I’m there and come on, lighting the place up one empty, Dave-less row at a time until I can see the actual park entrance, dead ahead, and next to it a far-too-familiar beige, armored Luxauto. I yank the wheel hard to the left and turn, accelerating, but already the gates we came in through have swung closed.

Bastard. I should have known it was a trap, but I didn’t think even Dave would be this dumb. Or this selfish.

I turn again and head toward the Luxauto. I can see my father now standing beside it, arms crossed over his chest, and even though it’s still too dark I know all too well the smug-ass smile he’ll have on his face. For a half-second I think about just ramming the Luxauto—pretty sure my ex-cruiser is a decent match for it—but I’ve got Marty with me, so I don’t. I do park close enough that he has to get out of the way or get trapped between the two cars; I missed kissing his side mirror with mine by about a centimeter, because I’m that good.

I get out, and so does Marty, and it takes a second for Marty to figure out what’s happening. “Ted,” he says, and the word is as close to a swear as anything I’ve ever heard him say.

“Martin,” my father says. “Still alive, I see.”

“At least one of us has to outlive you, so someone can spit on your grave,” Marty says. “I owe my sister at least that.”

My father shrugs, as if to say he doesn’t care, which he doesn’t and never has. I don’t know how my mom fell for him at all, much less for so long, since it’s clear as day to me that all he ever wanted was to undermine and steal her work to preserve his own stupid empire, but people can be incredibly smart and stupid at the same time, especially when the heart is involved.

Like driving through those big open gates after Dave.

“Your mechanical friend is inside, looking for family,” my father says. “I should have warned him that family is always a disappointment.”

“That’s funny, coming from you,” I say.

I pat Marty reassuringly on the shoulder. “Wait in the car. I’ll go get Dave,” I tell him.

“Uh-uh-uh, no you don’t,” my father says, and waggles a finger at us. “Private property.”

“I’ve got permission from the owner,” I lie.

“Really? When did I give you that?” my father asks.

“You have to be shitting me,” I say. “You went and bought an entire fucking dinosaur park just so you could lure us here? Why? What the hell do you want?”

“You know what I want,” he says, and it’s true that I do, but now it’s my turn to shrug like I don’t care. He frowns. “I’ll make this easy, no more games. I know about your little secret safety deposit box in Fairham. Give me the key.”

“How the hell do you know about that?” I explode. “You cheating, scheming, murdering son of a bitch—”

“Shut up!” he commands. Oh, he looks so fucking proud of himself, too. “And you know perfectly well I didn’t kill your mother.”

“You didn’t save her, though. You could have. You knew there was a hit out on her.”

“So? Life isn’t fair, Cassie,” he says. “Get over it. I want what’s mine. I want the key.”

“Couldn’t find it when you had Marty’s house tossed, huh?” I ask. “How many times now? Three? Four?”

“Four,” he says, “though how you could tell with that mess I can’t begin to guess. Seriously, how can you live like that? You could have so much more, Cassie, if you just used what you’ve got and started thinking like a winner.”

“So that’s how Dave found out about this park. You left a brochure around for him to find? Or did you just arrange this visit directly?”

“Ask him yourself,” my father says. “The key?”

He holds out his hand.

“It’s hidden back at the house,” I say. “Guess your guys just suck at looking.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not at the house,” he says. “If you knew we’d been inside, there’s no way you’d leave anything valuable there. I know you have it on you, so hand it over and I’ll let you collect your dinosaur head and go on your way.”

“No deal,” I say. “You want me to think like a winner, well here it is: the key is worth a lot more than that, certainly way more than one dumb robot dinosaur head that leaks oil on the carpet and sold me out to you.”

“And what do you want in return? Don’t expect to get much.”

“Never got anything except pain from you anyway,” Marty interjects. He’s still with us, not drifting, and for once I wish he was because the look of grief on his face is like a gut punch.

“I want you to stay out of Marty’s house,” I say. “And I want two hours to go do some parts shopping in the park, after I find Dave.”

“One hour, including finding your dino head,” my father says. “Then you hand me the key before you leave the park. Take the offer: I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll do whatever I have to. Think of your uncle. Or what’s left of him.”

“I’ll hand you the key at the open gates,” I say.

“Deal.”

“Deal, then,” I answer. “Marty, grab the toolbox out of the trunk and come with me. You coming, Ted?”

“Hell, no,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”

I lock the car and set the three separate alarm systems I’ve got on it, and we head into the park to find Dave. It’s full-on twilight now, and the park’s working lights few and far between, but I have flashlights in the toolbox—a big rolling thing with a handle, one of my better investments—and hand Marty one. “You okay?” I ask him.

“I’m okay,” he says, and flips the light on. “Sometimes, though, it feels like I’m here and then I’m there and I’m not sure where or when, or what’s happened already or not happened or I dreamed it, you know? I thought I gave Ted a black eye.”

“You did, and it was a beaut. But that was three years ago,” I say. “Might need to re-up it on our way out of here.”

“I can do that,” he says.

We walk forward into the park, look at the fading signs. “Sauropods that way,” I say and point.

Marty starts to walk, then meanders to a stop and looks back at me. “How’d you get so big, Cassie?” he asks. “Where’s Jennie? Did she save the world?”

“Mom’s gone,” I tell him, and I’m glad it’s dark because I don’t want to see his face and I don’t want him to see mine either. We’ve done this too many times before—remembering is a bitch and a half. “Hey, we’re here in Middleton Parkland and we have to find Dave and we can grab some parts, okay? Stay with me, here.”

“Middleton? But the owner—”

“It changed hands. We’ve got an arrangement. But we only have an hour. Look around. Focus, okay? What do we need?”

“Dave is here?” he asks, but he’s walking forward again now without the hesitation of moments before. “All of him?”

“Just his head,” I say.

“All on his own?”

“You built him a motorized cart out of a furniture dolly, remember?”

We’re nearer one of the working lights, so I can see him grin back at me. “Right!” he says. “That was a clever bit of work on my part. Had to make him promise not to get into trouble with it, though.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, and wave my hands around us. “Welcome to trouble.”

The Sauropod Swamp is up ahead, past a collapsed snack hut, and I can see the long, unmoving necks of three of Dave’s model sticking up into the night sky like strange smokestacks. I follow along the low wall, Marty behind me, until around a curve we find Dave, on his dolly, staring up at the nearest sauropod robot.

“They’re all dead,” he says, when we are near enough to hear, and he sounds so sad and heartbroken that just for a second I almost forgive him for walking us into a trap with my father. Almost.

Okay, not really very close at all. But a little tiny bit.

“Marty, you think you can see if we can get a knee motor out of one of them?” I ask, and he’s already pawing through my open toolbox. He’s been centered for longer than I’ve seen in a while, and maybe it’s just all about keeping him with a new challenge in front of him. Or we’re lucky.

“Be right back, Cassie,” he says, and climbs over the wall into the weeds and garbage.

Can a giant animatronic robot dinosaur head avoid looking you in the eye? Yes. Yes, it can. So I went over and gave him a good, solid, totally ineffective kick.

“I’m sorry,” Dave says.

“You knew it was my father?”

“No,” Dave says. He’s still not looking at me. He clacks a few times, then adds, “but I could have guessed, if I’d thought about it. I just wanted to come find another Euhelopus, and when the cable guy said there were some here, dug a brochure out of his truck—”

“We don’t have cable,” I say. “We’ve never had cable. And you said you found the brochure.”

“Yeah. I lied a little bit,” he said.

“And when you saw him? You still came in?”

“I only saw the Luxauto,” he says. “I thought maybe there was a chance it wasn’t his. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just a stupid, selfish head and you’d be right to just leave me behind here.”

“Hell yes I would, and I would have,” I say. “But then Marty would be upset, and I’d have a giant headless dinosaur in the backyard. With my luck raccoons or some shit would take up living in your neck and it would be a goddamned health hazard.”

“That would be terrible,” Dave says.

“Yeah.” I look at the time. Thirty-eight minutes left. “I’m gonna go see if I can help Marty, and you’re going to stay right the fuck here, right?”

“I will,” he promises.

This time he does meet my eyes, so I climb over the fence and head for where I can hear Marty banging around. I find him and he’s chatting with the other guys in the garage, totally lost as to where he is and what’s going on, but he’s got most of the rusting plating off one of the sauropod’s legs and is up to his shoulders inside, working the socket wrench.

“Marty?” I ask.

He pulls his head out of the cavity. “Jennie!” he says. “You came by the shop to help out? And what did you do to your hair?! You better not let Mom see that.”

“I came to help,” I say. Grandma was dead before I was even crawling, and sometimes it feels like everything I know about her is from her guest appearances in Marty’s wandering mind.

“Great,” he says. “The strut on this truck is totally shot, and rusted to boot. Can you hand me the adjustable wrench? The big one.”

I hand it to him, and his head disappears back inside. “Greg and Barry are gonna go on a coffee run; machine is busted again. If you want anything, tell ’em I’ll cover it.”

“I’m good, thanks,” I say.

He emerges again, a giant smudge of grease across his nose, and hands me a sauropod knee motor. “No wonder this is all messed up,” he says, “you ever see a wheel strut like that?”

“Couple of times,” I say. “It’s a knee. We’re in the Middleton Prehistoric Playland, looking for parts to fix Dave. I need you here now, okay?”

Marty blinks at me, then looks around, looking for Greg and Barry and Linda and Scoops, the garage dog. Then he seems to deflate, his arms hanging down by his side, wrench dangling from his hand. “We were happy then,” he says.

“It’s okay.” I take the wrench from his hand, put it back in the toolbox, bungee the salvaged joint motor across the top. “We’re happy now too, just a different kind of happy. But we’ve got about fifteen minutes to get out of here, and it’s almost that long a walk back to the entrance. Anything else you want to grab, do it quick.”

“Nothing,” he says. “That’s all we need.”

We climb back over the wall to where Dave is still waiting. “We gotta go,” I say. “Keep up as best you can.”

We run for the entrance. Marty is not any slower than me while I’m hauling the toolbox along with me, and Dave has the control lead for the dolly in his mouth and is zooming along behind us. We are most of the way there when Marty swerves off to one side and around a big, fake, graffiti-covered rock into the Precambrian Picnic Place. I’m trying to stop without running myself over with the toolbox or getting crushed by Dave when Marty comes running out past the far side of the rock, smiling his best smile, and his pockets and shirt are bulging.

“Trilobites!” he exclaims. “I can program them for all kinds of things!”

Sure, whatever. If it keeps him busy and present, I can handle some creepy-ass robot bugs around the house. Maybe he can program them to clean.

We reach the entrance with about a minute and a half to spare. My father watches, still leaning against his armored car, as I load Dave, Marty—who I swear dropped at least a dozen hockey-puck-sized trilobites on the seat around him—and the dolly, toolbox, and knee back in the car.

“We have a deal,” he says, when I’m done.

“Safety deposit box key and then you leave us alone,” I say. “You gave your word.”

“To be specific, the key to your Fairham First box,” he says. “Number 131. No switching it up. I don’t trust you to not play me on the details.”

I take a deep breath. I always knew, eventually, he’d get ahead of me, and I always thought I’d be able to play it cool, but my hands are shaking as I reach over my shoulder and down the back of my T-shirt, and break the tiny stitches where the little flat key has sat snug along my bra strap for years now. I hold it out in the palm of my hand.

My father reaches for it, and I close my first. “First, open the gates,” I say. Dammit, I am not going to cry, not in front of him. “I know better than to trust you, either.”

He signals to someone I can’t see, and a moment later the gates at the end of the parking lot open. I make a show of getting in my car, and backing it out and turning around, and he walks over to stand in front of me. He knows, despite everything, that I won’t kill him. Mostly because I’ve had better opportunities than this.

I roll down the window, and I hold the key out. He steps out from in front of the car and takes it, and the moment the key is out of my hand I floor it, my good ol’ grease-V8-cruiser, and we’re out of there like a fucking cannonball. We swerve out onto the street hard, which we’re lucky as hell is empty, and I can just see the woman in the store across the street peering out the window as we tear away from there, back toward the highway and away from Middleton as fast as we can go.

Damned fucking yes/no machine ought to have a color just for proximity to my father.

“I hate him,” Marty says quietly in the back seat.

“He didn’t give us a choice not to,” I answer. “But he’ll leave us alone, at least for a little while. Bastard likes being a man of his word, the magnanimous leader, until he figures out the loopholes in whatever he promised.”

“At least we got away,” Dave says.

“At what cost?” Marty asks. “What is it that he wants from you so badly as to go through all of this?”

“Something of Mom’s,” I say. Something she left for me, to save it from him, save me from him.

“And now he’ll have it,” Marty says. He leans forward and whacks Dave’s head, although not hard. “This is your fault.”

“I know. I said I was sorry!” Dave complains.

“It’s all done now,” I say. I can see a drive-through ahead, one of the more reputable chains, and I’m tired enough that I swing into the lane and get food for everyone. If we have the shits tomorrow, well, we’ll suck it up. I don’t want to stop again until we’re home, even if I have to drive all night.

It’s close to noon before I get out of bed and find Marty aimlessly wandering around the living room, and I’m not sure if he’s here or not, but he’s not talking to anyone else, so maybe? “Morning, Uncle,” I say.

“Cassie,” he says. He points to where I dumped all our crap on our way in at four AM. “The fellows at the garage dropped off a new knee for Dave.” He holds up a trilobite. “Also they brought me a bunch of these! I think I can reprogram them . . . ”

“I bet you can,” I say. “What are you going to have them do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll need to dig into their code set. I haven’t had a project this fun in a long time.” His face falls. “But I should fix Dave’s knee, first. He’s been so very patient.”

I don’t comment on that. Instead, I pick up the knee motor. “I’ll do it,” I say.

“Thanks, Cassie! You’re the best. I wish the guys would get back here with the coffee, though. Machine is busted again . . . ”

“It’s okay, I’m sure they’ll be along soon,” I say. Greg died of stomach cancer four years ago, and is buried only a few rows over from my mom. I don’t know where the others are. The garage itself is now a dry cleaner.

Dave has put his head back on his neck, and is looking out over the neighborhood. “Hey, Cassie,” he says.

“Hey, Dave. I’m going to put that joint motor in. I need you to not move, because if you think I’m mad about the road trip, you have no idea how pissed I’ll be if you squash me,” I say.

“I didn’t want to be alone,” he says.

“We don’t count? Thanks a lot,” I say, as I pull off the leg plate. There’s a little bit of rust on the edges, and I’ll have to get out here with a wire brush and some touch-up paint in the next month or two.

“That’s not what I meant,” Dave says.

And I know what Dave meant, but I also know sometimes you gotta adjust your expectation of what counts as alone and what doesn’t, because nobody has a perfect picture life, or not for very long.

Dave still has his neck craned all the way up. “What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Beige cars,” he says.

“Not today,” I say. “My father will be on the road to Fairham by now, if he’s not there already. Gonna go personally, too; can’t delegate that to any of his flunkies. Now hold still.” I grab the floor jack designed for house joists and I wedge it up under Dave’s butt crack to keep him steady, just in case.

Dave doesn’t really have a butt crack, of course, but there’s a plate up under the base of his tail where there’s the vague, diplomatic suggestion of something of the sort, and up inside above that plate there’s a small box wrapped in brown paper and tied with green ribbon, with my mother’s handwriting on it: just my name, the words you will know when to use it, and a heart. If I close my eyes I can picture it exactly, and feel the weight of it in my hands, remember the paper cut I got when I wrapped it back up too fast after I realized what the vials inside held, and what my father would do to get them.

Like buy an entire falling-down park so he could weasel a key out of me. Fucking ridiculous, this long game of ours.

When I was eight, he came to our house where I was playing in the backyard, and gave me a little plastic pony with rainbow hair and told me how much he loved me and what a smart girl I was, and then asked me if I knew where Mommy’s secret hiding place was. I showed him a recently-dug spot in the garden, where I had insisted my mother help me bury a roadkill skunk a few weeks earlier. Didn’t tell him that part, though. I was a smart girl even back then.

I wonder if he’ll recognize the pony toy, when he finally gets my safety deposit box open. He may have left Dave a Playland brochure, but I left a receipt for the box rent for him to find, ’cause I knew eventually he’d search the house. Girl’s gotta have lots of extra cards up her sleeve, right?

Or right in the palm of her hands.

The hand sanitizer bottle I keep at my porter station at the airport is getting low, and by fall I’ll need to refill it. For now, though, my mom’s package can stay safely where it is, as her work, little by little, goes bon voyage around the world.

It takes me an hour and a half to get the knee replaced, then I let Dave back down off the jack and step back, wiping sweat from my forehead with the greasy back of my hand. “Give it a try,” I say.

“Are you sure?” Dave asks.

“Just do it, dumbass,” I answer.

He takes a tentative step, and the knee actually bends, just like it’s supposed to, and thirty seconds later I’ve got a gigantic metal robot sauropod frolicking in the goddamned yard.

Marty comes out and puts an arm around my shoulders. “You did good, Cassie,” he says. “Definitely got the family engineer genes. Your mom would’ve been proud.”

“I know,” I say, though it never hurts to hear. Well, maybe a little.

“Come on inside,” he says. “The guys are bringing over beer and pizza tonight, and we’re going to discuss what to do with the trilobites. You don’t want to miss it.”

“Not for anything in the world,” I say. “I just need to clean up our tools and I’ll be in.”

“Okay. Don’t take too long—you know how Barry is around unguarded pizza.”

“I sure do,” I say.

Marty heads inside, and I can hear him talking to one of his memories, excitedly explaining about the trilobites. I take out my device and order a pizza to be delivered, along with a six-pack of root beer, then pack up the rest of my tools.

Dave comes back over and bends his head way down to where we are nose to nose. “What if he comes back?” he asks.

“He will, sooner or later. He has to, once he realizes he still hasn’t won. Just try to be less stupid next time,” I say.

“No, I mean, what if he finds that thing he wants?”

“He won’t,” I say. I pat him on the nose. “Don’t worry about it. And I need you to stop stomping around out here for the night; we don’t need the neighbors complaining.”

“But I just got my leg working again! That’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair,” I say, and I roll my toolbox with me back into the house, back to Marty’s party, and wait for the pizza guy to show.

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.

Amorville

Bella Han

She had known that she would end up like this, but she gave in. Lights. Music. She closed her eyes. In a sea of beautiful visages, she reached out to the one and only beloved face.

“Thoreau—I know it’s a meaningless name to you all. Yet this Thoreau was the founder of our economy today. Imagine a world two hundred years ago, when the sky was blue and the grass green, and people just idled about. This Yankee, Thoreau, lived by a lake for two years, doing nothing, and suddenly came up with an idea—we don’t have to have anything!”

She put down the pen. Yes, a pen, a real pen, inputting words by handwriting. It was slow and tiresome to write, yet she believed that it was inspiring. Words floated in the air above the piano-shaped desk. On the left there was product information. Behind, the openings of famous speeches. On the right, the video of her CEO making a speech, his audience marked by different colors indicating their emotions. And aside, two digital tips displaying Thoreau’s biography and excerpts from his works. This was all generated by Bill. Her company had bought this “digital bard,” and it was diligent, but she hated it. Now it told her the literary allusion she chose would be too unfamiliar to the audience. Yes, she agreed, because the audience was white-collar workers suffering from overtime, and middle-class couples exhausted by their kids—how could they know who Thoreau was? Still, she hated Bill. This digital writer would sooner or later take her job away. She took a pull from her mug. The coffee tasted like cinder.

“Hey Eva, here’s your catalog. Don’t forget to mention the new products.”

An avatar leaped out. “Eva,” it had called her, making her a little uncomfortable. Everyone had an English name at this company, though most of its employees were Chinese. She shook her head and looked at the avatar. It was Anna’s avatar, translucent, about the size of the mug, with a big head and small body. It looked like Anna, but a little prettier. Its words were hard to understand, as if the speaker was chewing something. Eva looked through the glass panels of the working booth, and saw a piece of bread on the neighboring desk. Bold.

She opened her hands. The circuitry on her fingertips glimmered, and a flood of images rushed in. A flow of digital pets, all alive and kicking: a chicken-sized kitten, licking its paw with a pink tongue; a snow-white doggy, rolling over and wagging its tail. For each species, there were dozens of color schemes, several personalities, and customizable sizes. Each pet had its proportions adjusted, to have larger eyes and a smaller body, to be cuter. The best-selling ones were of course mini cats and mini dogs, and then rabbits and squirrels, and then . . .

“What kind of freak would buy a life-sized sheep?”

She stared at a fat sheep under a blue sky. It grazed, and baaed stupidly. Sheep, life-sized, three available colors, with a free two by two by two meters cubed pastoral background.

Anna rolled her eyes. “Rich folks. Rich enough to buy a house in which to keep a life-sized sheep and a pastoral background. Marketing says it will be the hit of the year.”

Eva rolled her eyes, but only in her mind. “Why don’t they just buy a real cat?” No, they wouldn’t. Just like what she had emphasized in the speeches she wrote—it was better not to have anything. The cat they would keep would be forever clean, healthy, friendly, and funny. Instead of giving, they’d only need to take. Just like . . .

Her heart ached. She took up the pen and continued to write.

An awkward age, an average face, a mediocre salary, and a meaningless job. She walked in the crowd during rush hour, meditating on her small life without slowing down a bit. Outside, gray sky flashed between the glass panels of the transportation tubes. She stepped onto the auto walk and glanced at the crowd. They looked bleak, the cold light of the ads above providing the only colors in view. She had not seen the sun for a long while; this winter had been particularly cold. Was the heating broken? She wrapped herself up in the coat, thinking about home. Home, sweet home, a small fire in winter. Just thinking about it made her feel warmer. She recalled walking in the streets of Rome, with new sandals and a fresh haircut, her back warmed up by the sun, her hand holding an ice cream cone, her pockets empty, but her heart free. She recalled walking in Vienna on a summer night, along a sparkling river, listening to a poem, leaning on his shoulder, into his arms—

She felt something cold and hard. People rushed out, pressing her against a screen door, almost crushing her stomach. She quickly regained her composure, joined the crowd, and raced to the High Speed Rail. Her glasses planned a route for her, drew a huge holographic arrow at every turn. This was unnecessary; she could find her way eyes closed. She picked the shortest line and queued up behind a clean, small, agile girl. The HSR came, its headlights cutting across the air, its carriages running through years of air pollution. Doors opened, and people swarmed in from every direction. She squeezed into a corner before the crowd could crush her, and couldn’t move from then on. Three men in nanocoats pushed their way in next to her. She hated nanocoats; they were waterproof, stainproof, cold-proof and cheap, with only one disadvantage: ugliness. Colors flickered on these men’s glasses, their fingers jerked in the air. Ads floated on the windows and the ceiling and flew down to her when meeting her eyes. She waved her hand to drive them away. She didn’t need anything, except . . .

She grabbed the ad. Music began to play, a familiar logo emerged, and a handwritten SPRING FESTIVAL SALE spread out.

She threw away the ad and opened her inbox. Yes, there was neglected mail. Phantasus’ ad looked classic in the shape of a sealed envelope. The seal broke after verifying her fingerprint, and a brave new world rose before her eyes.

There were several remakes of old Hollywood classics and a new release. She had watched, or at least heard of, many of them, and she knew he would fit them perfectly. She smiled and swiped down. Charming actors and actresses, brooding, smoking, laughing, and blinking, were on sale this winter. But she could only look at those pretty actresses because she didn’t have any spare money. She flipped through each sexy actor looking for one face, but ended up sighing. Danny, always so haughty, always so expensive. She’d have to eat man-made meat next month.

He had shown up without warning. She had discovered him in a list in a similar email last month. She stared at him for three seconds, moved on, but came back. She saw a thumb-sized man reading. Feeling her gaze, he looked up, and narrowed his eyes. Of course, indifference could be a strategy, nothing special. Still, she clicked on him and opened his page. Her glasses switched to Closed Vision, the page extended to full-screen, and she saw a life-sized man sitting under a tree. Seen in the virtual reality generated by her glasses, this scene was much lower in definition than it would be at home. Yet, when the man narrowed his eyes again, she felt a pain in her heart. “Danny M. Amor?” A strange name, she couldn’t tell whether it belonged to a real person or a digital star. No score. No discount. Excellent compatibility with her favorite movies. She verified her fingerprint on the arm of her glasses and applied for a free trial.

Then everything got out of hand.

A scarlet “DISEMBARK TRAIN” broke into her vision. The train took a deep breath, and spat out the passengers.

Her capsule apartment was no different from other capsule apartments. Ads hovering overhead, she got off the auto walk, went through a gray exit, entered a cement hall, and got on an elevator. The crowd separated; she stopped at her room, and the door rattled open. This was the moment she had waited for all day long.

There was nothing unnecessary in this room; there was no room for it. A palm-sized window hung on the wall. She opened the delivery box in the wall. Several packages fell down: the towels and bodywash she had ordered in the morning. Dinner was in the food box. She opened the boxed dinner, it heated itself. Wednesday: curry chicken and rice, with a slice of canned orange. She savored the orange; she wouldn’t have such luxury next month. She took off her glasses, took a quick shower, and walked to the corner of the room. For her, this place was where the day began and ended.

It waited for her at the place where a bed should be. The egg-shaped machine provided her all her happiness. It shouldn’t be here: its tranquil curves, ceramic surface, and soft glow made everything else in the room feel cheap. Its brand, Phantasus, and its logo, an abstract butterfly, gleamed on the top. Below was written the model of the machine: Psyche Alpha Divine, a premium model of Psyche Alpha, with better configuration, and an ergonomic, aromatherapeutic cabin, and it was of course much more expensive. It was worth it though, since she spent so much time inside the machine every night, and so little in her sleeping bag.

She touched the cabin. It opened silently, its interior a relaxing light gray. The ergonomic seat supported her body perfectly, the aromatherapy began, and music started to play. She felt safe and curious, as if on a rolling boat. The brain sensors embedded in the cabin wall lit up. She closed her eyes.

She floated in the dark. It felt like the dark before a movie began, she thought; she had read about those old-fashioned cinemas. Lights glimmered, a butterfly landed on her hand, shimmering impossible colors. She watched it for a moment, and a logo emerged from the colors. She waved her hand, and the butterfly flew away. A group of smiling men and women reached out; she walked past them, looking straight ahead.

She could draw his face eyes closed. He might be a mixed blood, with an elegant profile and a slightly tougher jaw. When he laughed, he looked like a happy beast, golden skin shining in the sun. When he was quiet, he was a statue under the moon. He always frowned a little, looked a little melancholy, showing that he was not just a pretty face. He was refreshing and charming and heartbreaking. He was innocent and sophisticated and cruel. Meeting his eyes, you could do nothing but fall prey. She could do nothing but fall into those black holes, where something horrible crouched. Fall, and meet him at the bottom of the abyss.

He held her hand and smiled—almost a sneer. Full-length mirrors emerged before them, each showing a different him and a different her in a different setting. Holding his hand, she walked to the mirror they used last time, and sank into it.

She surged upward. Water streamed down her hair and eyelashes, her clothes stuck to her body, and gooseflesh prickled her skin in the night air. At least the summer night wasn’t cold. She raised her hand, watching the water flow down her arm. Everything was so real that one might get confused at first glance. But when you looked at the oil painting-like lights along the riverbank, you could tell the truth. Old movies usually had poor definition when they became neuromersive. But instead of a high definition repair, Phantasus took advantage of this lack of definition to create a dreamlike effect. She and Danny thrashed their way to the bank. He held her from behind, her heart skipping a beat, her head turning blank. His suit covered her body, his warmth transferred to her through the damp clothes. She raised her eyes and saw the golden lights across the river. She raised her eyes to meet his. She saw herself and the lights and the Roman night in these beautiful eyes. Inevitably, they got closer.

Overslept. She jumped out of the sleeping bag to get washed. The elevator was crammed, and so were the auto walk and the HSR. She couldn’t squeeze into a corner, but could still move her fingers, so she should be satisfied, she thought. Sentences looped before her eyes and in her ears: NO PUSHING. NO FIGHTING. HERE STARTS CIVILIZATION. Face pressed to someone’s nanocoat, she imagined life in another carriage. Twenty more yuan, and she could get first class. There would not necessarily be a seat for her, but there would at least be more space. But forty more yuan a day would add up to the price of a movie, or that of a month’s real meat. The HSR ran around the gray skyscrapers. She saw a Super HSR fly by. It looked like a green train from the old times, and rumors said it provided a seat and a drink for each passenger, but she couldn’t know whether they were true or not.

She dodged and squeezed and ran into the office at the last minute. Some colleagues shot a glance at her. No sooner had she sat down on an empty stomach than Lulu’s avatar jumped out.

“Lulu Ouyang and Jiaming Chen would love for you to join them in celebration of their marriage.” Dressed in a white dress and a garland, the avatar handed out an invitation.

She took it, blocked the view of others with her back, and whispered, “You never told me that you were going to marry him!”

The smile faded from the avatar’s pretty face; exhaustion took place.

“I have to marry someone.”

Lulu had been struggling with her boyfriend for years. He left her, and then begged her to come back, and blah blah blah. Eva had never understood them, so she asked Lulu, “Do you love him?” She only got a look. So she never asked again. Thinking about it now, that guy was a good for nothing, yet was still the optimal solution for the marriage Lulu sought after.

Eva let out a sigh. She went back to her pile of digital documents. Today she had to write an introduction to each updated pet. Dozens of pets, hundreds of temperaments. Running smoothly, Bill opened engineering documents, listed customer reviews, and selected a reservoir of adjectives for her. How damn intelligent this program was!

Bored, she spun her pen with her fingers, and stared at the mini sheep in front of her. It strolled around her mug and stared back. What temperament could a sheep have?

It was much easier to describe a cat. Yuanyuan, Nana, Tiger, and Cookie each had distinctive features, as long as you didn’t play with them for too long. Too long, and they began to repeat themselves. But after all, they were only cats. Nobody would pay too much attention to a cat; besides, they were only cheapos. But you would always pay attention to a person. Those digital idols, no matter how charming they were, could not hide the fact that they were simulations. Without a person to imitate, a blink, or a slight movement, not to mention the way they talked, could betray them. She tried digital stars once in the Psyche Alpha. They were perfect angels, but often made her uncomfortable, making her feel that she was kissing a mirror. After that she had never used them again. Her collection consisted only of real person stars, one of them being her beloved. Of course, they were not really “real people,” but only their neuromersive avatars, capable of reproducing their performance in certain movies and recording their voices and movements in order to be compatible with other movies. She could also connect to other players, but she wasn’t interested in that. Nothing could be worse than playing with a strange-looking, strange-behaving stranger. She would rather spend every minute with Danny.

Neuromersive devices were not popular yet. Most owners used them to play games. Those who were willing to perform in neuromersive movies were either superstars who needed a campaign, or new faces unknown to the public. Danny was among the latter, yet once he was in the spotlight, he would no longer be hers.

She was a little jealous of his future fans, as if she had already lost him to them. It was in that moment she realized how much she relied on him, or his avatar rather. He was no longer her escape from reality; he was her reality. Another realization struck her like a thunderbolt: there might be another kind of happiness for Lulu.

She sank into her chair and took off her glasses. Made of aerospace alloys, this pair was featherlight, yet in her hand it seemed to weigh a ton. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she calculated her balance after giving a cash gift to Lulu, then suddenly leaped to her feet. She put on the glasses and looked at the food box. A menu appeared in her vision; she skipped the premium, the standard, and the economic, and stopped at the eco-friendly food plan. Eco-friendly indeed: not to mention fruit, there wasn’t even any meat. She tapped on the arm of the glasses and changed next month’s plan. She’d have to make a budget cut for movies next month too. There would come a day when she wouldn’t even be able to afford the rent on the stars. What to do then? It was hard enough for her to deal with the day job. She wouldn’t have time to sleep if she worked part-time too. What about looking for another job and selling herself to a mega corp while she still could? A chill went down her spine when she thought of Bill the Digital Bard.

She never thought of the future. She was uncertain whether there was a future. There was only another day and another night, only a total blank before her. How long could she work here? How long could she struggle? Could she meet someone and fall in love? It was hard to imagine any changes in her life, but changes were inevitable. She smelled dampness in the air, raised her head, and saw night falling. Light pollution blended with dampness, making the city look like a sham.

Mom called.

Mom didn’t use avatars. She only made phone calls, and sent fake news and stupid videos to her daughter. “Sweetie,” she ask timidly, “will you come back for the Spring Festival?”

“I will.”

Mom smiled, and prattled about how Eva should take care of herself. Eva just nodded. She felt as if she were under a spotlight, exposing how self-abandoned she was. But she could not give Mom a clue.

“Have you found a boyfriend?” Mom asked.

“It feels good to be single, really.”

“Really? Do you think so? You could always come back, you know. A life all by yourself . . . ”

Eva forced a confident smile. It felt good, she told herself. It was the only way she could enjoy her life . . .

She went into the dream machine. Seagulls cast down their shadows. A boy came to her with the smell of salt. She ran through gardens and courtyards, and saw herself in the mirror. Ten years old, blonde hair and emerald eyes, sap green dress and olive bows: it totally differed from her real looks, yet it was still her. Proud as she was, she was inevitably attracted to the boy. Ten years old, eyebrows speaking of curiosity, eyes murmuring innocence: he was still him. He painted her. She watched him and kissed him by the fountain, tasting salt on his tongue. She wouldn’t let him go. Innocent as he was, he had everything she lacked. She wouldn’t let him go, grabbed his hands, and danced with him, her taffeta dress rustling. Forward, backward, swing, turn around: it was a dance for ten years. They became a man and woman, fully grown. He turned her around into his arms.

He locked her in his arms, saying the words he shouldn’t say.

“I know you. I knew you at first glance. Everyone says you’re pretty, but I know that your heart is cracking. Rather than a young and beautiful heart, I prefer yours. Ravaged.”

She pushed him away, ran out of the illusion, and escaped from the cabin. She could not breathe. Slapped by the cold air, she found tears on her face.

Danny Murong Amor. What the heck.

She had watched thousands of neuromersive movies, used hundreds of neuromersive stars, yet had not seen improvisation once. The player could improvise, yes, but improvisation was limited to a few scenes and dialogues. After all, movies were not like games, and the player should not stand in the way of the plot. Maybe that movie had a new edition? Impossible. Antiquated as it was, this movie was lucky enough to become neuromersive. How could it dream of a new edition? She tried another actor in the movie. He said exactly the same words as what was written in the script. Maybe there was a system update? She went through Phantasus’ official website and its BBS, and no words were said about it. It could only be Danny’s problem. Maybe he had a bug. Did neuromersive stars have bugs? Even if so, she didn’t dare try again with him, fearing his words would break her heart.

She wrote to Phantasus and got no reply.

Danny M. Amor. He was a mystery himself. Outstanding as he was, he had no introduction, no comments, and no scores. Blocking others’ view with her body, she searched stealthily in the office. There was no relevant information except an almost empty official website. It consisted only of his photo and filmography, and had not a word about his personal life. He must have used a pseudonym, she bet; maybe there would be some problems if he revealed his identity. Maybe even his face was fake. She joined the army that marched to lunch and chitchatted in the elevator while sending messages to her cyber friends. “Have you tried this actor?” She sent Danny’s picture to $outhPoleFlamingo, the founder of their neuromersive movie fan club. It was small, yet its members were hardcore.

“No,” $outhPoleFlamingo curled her lips. “Never seen him. Cute. Where did you find him, you hacked their database?”

“I found him in my machine.” She felt a little wronged.

Clouds cast down their shadows from the gaps between skyscrapers. She was seized by a fit of panic—what if Danny wasn’t supposed to have appeared on her machine in the first place? What if he himself was a bug, a secret she should not have discovered, and like the rumors had said, was the property of some princess, some millionaire, and had smiled on her accidentally. She was frightened. If they found out this mistake and took him away, her heart would be pierced through, would fly about like a balloon . . .

“Eva!”

She raised her head and looked at her lunch buddy. Amused and vexed, Seb spoke with bread crumbs on his face. “I called you a thousand times . . . You’re always like that, dream walking. Sometimes I think you’re not you, but some—some—” The digital interpreter finished for him, “holographic projection.”

She had fallen too much into it.

“It’s just a meet-up, won’t cost you anything. And it’s fine dining,” said Lulu.

She stared at the cinemagraph. A man waved vigorously from a snowy mountain. He had a good build. He wore a pair of sunglasses, so it was hard to imagine his looks. Maybe he had seen her at Lulu’s wedding, and had asked Lulu to introduce them afterwards. The guy was her husband’s friend, was Lulu guaranteed, and was handsome and funny, a good match indeed. “How long have you been single? They say you are a nerd now. No, you can’t go on like this.”

No, she couldn’t go on like this. Maybe she had forgotten how to talk to strangers already. She had knocked open a cloud castle, and if she took one more step, she wouldn’t be able to come back to reality. She let out a sigh and opened the home page of this Qiao Xin. Travels, parties, and game achievements. At least he and she had one similarity: an addiction to virtual reality. She searched the meeting place: a fancy restaurant, where a dinner could cost her a month’s food budget. Holy cow.

She went home ten minutes earlier than usual, took a shower, dressed up in her only little black dress, and chose the top-rated makeup for blind dates. The makeup printer stuck for a second, and sprayed too much red on her eyelids. She cursed the printer, and smeared the eye shadow with her finger. She took her most expensive purse and went to the taxi tube for the first time in a long while. A self-driving taxi was waiting for her. She squeezed in, and it joined the traffic automatically.

Night had fallen. City lights went through the floating ads, surrounding her like deep-sea fish. Cars overwhelmed the highway like sea monsters. She hadn’t seen the city at night for a long while; now it felt strange to her. It was alive, an efficient, blind, cruel C/Fe creature. She closed her eyes and lay back.

The taxi stopped at the belt of a glass skyscraper. She held her head high and walked through a dark passage. A waiter took her coat at the end of the passage and led her to a door made of light. The restaurant, just like the building, was of post-contemporary style. Trees grew out of black and white checkered tiles; lights gleamed on the ceiling and shimmered in the air. This midsummer night’s dream was shaken by many light curtains, each with a different, iridescent color, cutting the hall into irregular spaces. She lowered her head, went past a curtain, and saw a man by the table.

“Mr. Qiao?”

“Call me Jo. Enchanté, Miss Liang.”

Without sunglasses, this Jo was just a big boy. It was hard to see him as a man in his thirties. He was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur, which looked familiar and expensive. She took her seat and touched the tree bark. It felt rough, just like how it felt in the movies.

“Is this a real tree?”

“Nope. A nanotree.” He grinned, “But I promise, what you’ll eat tonight is all real food.”

He looked much cuter when smiling.

The hors d’oeuvre came. Freshly-picked pea sprouts, dipped in sauce and decorated with purple flowers, lay on a ceramic dish. Jo tapped his finger on the table. “I like it here. Their dishes are crude—you can’t find this in other restaurants.”

That’s because you haven’t tried anything actually crude, she thought. She had a bite. The sprouts were incredibly crisp, and the flowers a little spicy.

“I heard you and Mrs. Ouyang were classmates?” Jo asked.

“Yeah, at Peking University. We were roommates.”

“Ah! The old buildings there are impressive. Few colleges still have classes in low-rises, although lots do abroad.”

The topic naturally shifted to his life abroad when the entrée came. Eggs baked in butter and served in a cocotte. “Oeufs en Cocotte with Black Truffle,” she read in her vision. So this was truffle. It smelled so good that she almost forgot to listen to Jo’s lecture. Thanks to the ChatMaster, she could handle most conversations about travel. She talked about the places she had experienced in movies as if she had been to the real ones. She got his family background out of his words—a grandson of new money, he lived his life not only playing games, but also investing in them.

“Do you play games?” Jo cut the steak. It lay on a paddle resting on a mini meadow made of foam and flowers.

“Not really.”

“So what are your hobbies?”

“Watching movies.”

“Movies . . . Few people watch them now. The industry has gone down since video games were born; it’s only a matter of time before it dies. Have you played neuromersive games? C’est fantastique. They say the hyper mode of Psyche Alpha is ‘more real than reality,’ but I only have an iFeel.”

“There’s no such mode,” she said abruptly, then added, “I have a Psyche Alpha.”

Jo dropped his fork.

“You have—you have one? But . . . how? I’ve wasted so much money on scalpers—”

“I was an early club member of Phantasus.”

“Ah. So desu ne.” The man nodded and regained his pride. “Why, you were talking about neuromersive movies. Well, Phantasus started up with them. But using a Psyche Alpha to watch movies . . . ” He shook his head.

“What?”

He shrugged. “Voilà. It’s taking a musket to kill a butterfly. Nothing is impossible in games. A world more real than reality, but you can do whatever you want in it. Freedom! That’s the meaning of virtual reality. Is there freedom in movies? Everything is predestined. What’s the difference from the real world?”

“There’s a great difference!” she protested. “Don’t you think life is already too chaotic? Movies provide a storyline, a guideline that gives meaning to life. Without stories, games are but heaps of loose sand. Good for nothing at all.”

The man gaped at her for a second, then burst into laughter. She smiled too; was it because of him, or the wine?

“Touché!” He grinned. “Miss Liang, you are so interesting. Always surprising me. But if you don’t try them, you’ll never know the charm of games.”

Eyes glinting, he talked about his favorite games. She listened, admitting that some sounded like fun. Still, it was unlikely that she’d ever play them.

“You must tell me if there is a Psyche Alpha purchase quota. I dream of playing with one every day.” Jo fiddled with a cherry tomato like an upset kid.

She was amused. “You could borrow one.”

His eyes lit up. “Can I borrow yours?”

It seemed an innocent question, yet she choked. She looked at his bright eyes, and then at the flowers on the plate. Was she a little drunk? Her face was hot on this fake summer night. Why not say yes? After all, she should give reality a chance . . .

“Well . . . Perhaps.”

She talked about her favorite movies. Interested or not, he listened carefully. Lights flickered on the candles, in the air, and in his black eyes. His face blurred, and turned into one of her beloved faces . . .

“Charming,” he commented. “No wonder you people like movies so much—it’s easy to get lost in them. You know, someone did get lost in a movie once.”

“Oh?”

“Hyperreality, remember? Neuromersive devices have three modes: low, medium, and high. In fact there’s a fourth, a hyperreality mode. No other device can support it, except Psyche Alpha. I heard a bro cracked the system, turned on this mode, and got into a movie. He ended up in a hospital, not knowing who he was for a whole week.”

“How brave.” She was a little tipsy.

“N’est-ce pas?” he shrugged. “Life is a challenge.”

They drank to the brave.

Time for dessert. A perfect orange sat on a gilded plate like a little sun. The waiter picked it up with a gloved hand to show that it was a real orange, then cut it into halves. The air was bursting with citrusy happiness. She took a deep breath, almost tasting the orange with her nose, and suddenly stopped when she realized what she was doing. Embarrassed, she took a glance at the man, only to see him smiling at her. Why, maybe this smile was the beginning of a brand-new life . . .

Jo spoke. “Miss Liang, would you like to take a challenge?”

“What challenge?”

“Let’s be frank with each other from the very beginning.”

She stared at him. He swayed his hand, expensive rings shining on his fingers. “You know how painful it is to deceive oneself? Like my parents. Several decades they have done it just to keep face . . . Marriage is ridiculous. There are dozens of sexual preferences nowadays; how could one be chained to only one person for the rest of his or her life?”

“ . . . Why not?” She was trembling.

He laughed. “I thought you could understand . . . Alors, after so many movies, you still don’t know that love is but an illusion? Illusion or disillusion, we have to go on living. If I have to get married, it won’t start with any illusion. I’ll get married, I’ll take the responsibility, but I’ll have the right to be with someone else, and so will my wife. See, here is a stage. Now we only need a heroine. Miss Liang, what say you?”

She bit her lips. The man studied her expressions. He suddenly backed off, for she stood up and stormed out.

“Miss Liang—”

He sounded helpless.

She stomped out in high heels, running through the citrusy air. She wasn’t angry at him. She was just afraid, fearing she could not resist the temptation of the orange.

She hated herself.

“Is love a transient illusion?” She grabbed his sleeve, not expecting his answer. Danny M. Amor smiled. They immersed into the mirror when she heard a whisper, “But life is transient already.”

Illusions. She immersed her head in water, and looked at her floating blonde hair. He would soon appear in the next scene behind a fish tank, where corals swayed and clown fish flashed about. Smiles glistened, glances exchanged. He ran through a night of gunpowder and into her garden. Dripping wet, the two of them no longer belonged to this space-time. Moonlight swayed on his face, in his blue eyes, where years and decades were condensed into an instant. My cruelest friend, my dearest enemy. All is condensed into your eyes, not on your lips. “Romeo, O Romeo, Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name—”

Who are you? He was so beautiful and innocent. His lips so cold and burning hot. She could not speak.

He grabbed her hand and pressed it onto his chest. “Come and find me.”

They fell into water.

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
which, as they kiss, consume

She saw blue, white, and red. Moonlit pond, floating dress, his lips, and his blood. Maybe this was love, just like tears in rain.

She didn’t dream of Verona that night. She dreamed of a gray city, where words disappeared one after another. She opened her mouth, but forgot what to say. She dreamed of a glimmering city, where she had a strange hairstyle and strange clothes, her eyes were that of a sad deer. He sat in front of her, soaked by the rain. She saw herself in his eyes. A unicorn ran through the ashes.

“Take me away,” she said.

Mist devoured the city and its residents. Mist carried her forward. She had a dream last night, and said something in it, but now she could not remember. Catching a dream was like catching the mist. The more strength you used, the easier it escaped. How about dreaming in a Psyche Alpha? Theoretically, it was impossible. It would wake you up when you almost fell asleep, play a song, and politely ask you to go to bed. This was not only a concern for your psychical health . . . What would happen if you dreamed in an electric dream?

A sharp pain, and she almost screamed. In a battle for the handgrip, someone’s fingernails clasped into her hand. She dared not to speak, only glared at the person, and then squeezed deeper into the crowd. Now she couldn’t move, she could only take deep breaths and endure the pain. The pain was sharp as light. Ads lit up the ceiling. Passengers ebbed and flowed. People were quarreling somewhere. She suddenly felt afraid, because everyone was her enemy. She suddenly felt afraid, because there was no end to this life. She struggled to press the super noise-reducing button on the arm of the glasses.

Electric waves went through her ears like thunderbolts. The pain soon passed, and the world became quiet. She looked around: people were acting pantomimes. Middle-aged women carried fake designer handbags and wagged their fluorescent fingers. A girl, immersed in rock and roll, closed her eyes and danced to herself. A foreigner spread his long legs that touched others’ knees, gazed at his glasses, and laughed silently. The train kept swaying. It was blank outside.

They arrived. People sleepwalked out.

She and Seb sat on the barstools on the street, eating sandwiches. The lunch that dropped out of the vending machine was no different from the self-heating dinner. The mist at noon was but slightly thinner than in the morning. They sat in the mist, as if on two isles. Seb glared at the remaining lettuce. “I think I’m gonna get fired.”

“Nonsense. Look how your sheep sell.” That digital sheep had become an inhabitant of her desk. She gradually understood why it sold so well. Because it had no expression, no personality, nothing at all, so it was pleasant to everyone.

Seb dumped his sandwich on the table. “They don’t need me anymore. That Pablo thing knows better than anyone, knows customer pre . . . preferences . . . and learns tren . . . trendy styles all by itself, and makes ten designs every five minutes. What can I do? I can only pick out pretty pictures to feed it.” He had lived in China for five years, yet the digital interpreter wouldn’t let go of him, and picked out vocabulary words he didn’t know: “customer preferences,” “trendy styles”.

She lowered her eyes. “It’s the same for me. It’s only a matter of time I’m replaced by Bill the Digital Bard.”

“Oh, that’s not the same. You can find people like me everywhere, but it’s hard to find someone like you. AI can’t tell jokes. There was a video clip in the last speech you wrote. It made me laugh for twenty minutes!”

“Thanks,” she smiled.

“What was it again?” Seb asked enthusiastically. “A cartoon about a cat and a mouse? It was super fun, but a little, well, ancient.”

“Ancient indeed. My ex worked at a library, or, you can say, an archaeology institute. I often snuck into its warehouse to watch movies—movies that weren’t even holographic. You know what, the cartoon you just mentioned was even handmade!”

Seb took a deep breath; his reaction made her quite satisfied. She added, “Now that I’m thinking of it, I don’t know what it was that I actually liked, my ex or the library.”

Seb struggled. “As if it matters.”

She sipped her Coke. A figure suddenly came to her, knelt down, and opened a little box, a handsome face shining with pride, the latest movies and games shining in the box. She waved her hand; the figure disappeared.

“I’ll never get used to holographic ads,” she said. “The first time I saw one was at night, which really freaked me out.”

Seb was more interested in pretty faces. “Who was that, in the ad?”

“Pierre Yamazaki.”

“Sounds like my . . . my . . . ” Ignoring Seb’s struggle to find the word, the digital interpreter claimed one for him, “Fellow townsman.”

Indeed, they were both of French and Japanese origin.

“Let me see.” Seb leaned forward, and linked his vision with hers. A bunch of windows jumped out. Seb took Yamazaki’s photo. “You like this kind of guy?”

She looked at that familiar face. A month ago it was her favorite, but she had no special feelings towards it now. She thought of her dozens of “favorite” stars, several ex-boyfriends . . . The face in the photo soon became misty.

“Have you ever been crazy in love?” she asked.

Seb raised one eyebrow. “I’m crazy in love with . . . ”

He drew out a little window. A beautiful young man stood in front of her, with close-cropped hair, deep eye sockets, dry and sexy lips, wires entwined in his arms and legs, and metallic joints. He looked at her with piercing eyes.

“ . . . him. His name is Hal,” Seb said with pride.

“What about your boyfriend?”

Seb’s face paled. “We broke up. He couldn’t accept Hal.”

She examined the boy. He was pretty, but . . . Was he a machine, or a man dressed up like a machine? Regardless, there was a strange beauty in him, which attracted Seb like a magnet. She thought of another mysterious “man” who was as heartbreaking as this Hal. A program full of errors, but speaking out truths. An unhuman being, invading her human heart.

Or vice versa?

In her mind’s eye, there was a man in a trench coat and a hat at the next table. He was reading a book, a real book. Feeling her gaze, he raised his eyes. She remembered—it was the movie she saw in the warehouse, it was the dream she had lost. Suddenly she felt that everything around her was tiny and pathetic. Only the rays of his existence pierced the mist.

She said, “I’m afraid. Now that I’ve seen you, I’m no longer normal. Under the reign of the machine, words are disappearing every day. Help me, where can I find them? What can I tell you?”

He closed the book, Capitale de la douleur.

“You must recall them yourself, Princess. Or you will become one of those ghosts, lost forever in this city.”

She thought.

She thought, the mystery is solved. I don’t need to suffer anymore. The answer was so simple, so simple that it made her laugh. Who she loved was never an avatar, or some video clip; it was a man, a soul cowardly but true, hiding in that beautiful shell. That was why there were so many bugs: there were no bugs at all, but an improvising player, who somehow disguised himself as a neuromersive star. Maybe he wasn’t charming at all, his pretty looks merely a weapon against reality. Maybe he was also looking for someone, someone who could drag him out of everlasting loneliness. Would she be that person? Would she be the one who found the lost words and escaped from Alphaville with him?

She thought, I’m crazy. I don’t know who he is, whether he’s young, or old, or even a she. Maybe only his expressions, his movements, and his abrupt words were true. She only knew that he was not far away, because there was no time lag. She only knew that he was willing to be with her, that he understood her better than she did herself. If it was a gamble, the odds were horribly small. But she could only stake her all.

And she thought, gamble? Don’t disgrace him. If he was water, she was a dying traveler in the desert, not knowing how to open her mouth and receive the grace. If he was fire, then she was a moth. Would a moth count its odds? Did water and fire have names?

She thought she was in love, but had never loved. She had done nothing but stand in front of a closed door.

“I’ll see you in hyper mode next time. Will you come?”

She looked at Danny with pleading eyes, not knowing whether she could see through those optical fibers, electrons, and nerves to see his heart. Shadows danced, his green eyes flickered and dimmed. He narrowed them.

Sunday afternoon, stormy. It was inky black outside the window; wind whirled and shook the buildings. Lying in the cabin she thought the end of the world was coming. The end indeed: the Danny’s lease ended tomorrow, and maybe she would never see him thereafter. Her glasses were connected to the Psyche Alpha, which was put in developer mode, waiting for her to put in the code. The code was incredibly easy to find; it was everywhere, yet no one knew how to use it. It was $outhPoleFlamingo that told her where to look. In a mysterious BBS she saw a tutorial, followed by some ambiguous comments. This was it, her instinct told her.

She pasted in the code with trembling hands. Rebelling for the first time in life, her first thought was that the lifetime warranty was gone. Her precious club membership was probably gone too. The State Administration of Internet was definitely watching her . . . She thought about all this, but didn’t think about how she might end up in a hospital, or even worse. Though deep down, she was crystal clear about it.

It was her farewell to him, no matter what it might cost. Maybe she would forget the world. Maybe she would forget herself. Yet in an illusion more real than reality, love would be more true. If he was willing to come, she would open her heart, let him see how burning hot and desperate it was, then grab his hand and escape with him.

Restart. The breathing lights had never flashed so fast, and looked as if they were a warning. She took off the glasses, laid back in the chair, thrilled. Was it fear or excitement? She was dragging herself to her doom. She knew she would end up like this, from when she saw him for the first time . . . No, from when she first saw neuromersive stars . . . But she couldn’t resist the temptation, and reached out a shivering hand, and touched the soft interior of the cabin. The places she touched lit up, their lights almost burning hot. Then the lights went off and the cabin closed, locking her in vast darkness.

A butterfly fluttered its wings, on which a word appeared:

HY-RE

A world opened up its superfluous being, and squeezed into her body. Suddenly she was blind, and deaf, and could only grope her way along. Who am I? She saw a yellow-green river, smooth as velvet. She saw a girl stepping on the rails, gazing at the water. A girl wearing a celadon dress, lipstick, and a hat, only fifteen. Ah. It’s me.

It was windless. Always so hot, as hot as eternity. The sky was yellow-green, a sky she had known since she was born. The Mekong River splashed its dirty waves. Fifteen, she was only fifteen-and-a-half, and the world was too big for her. She almost got lost in it, in its Möbius loops of time. Just like now, she knew that this moment would last long, last for the rest of her life.

Fifteen-and-a-half. A silk dress of the river’s color, threadbare, almost transparent. A pair of high heels with golden lamé, worn-out. A foot on the rails, wiggling. And a man’s fedora, with braids hanging down in front, so rebellious, so right. She was proud.

In this eternal moment, everything except the ferry was still. Her mind was also a river, the future and the past swimming in it: mother, the elder brother, the younger brother, poverty, hatred, the doomed seawall, the upcoming deaths, and finally, the man. Yes, he was what was to happen. The man in the white suit inside the black car would come upon her body like an unstoppable sea tide and leave traces, and tears.

He came. It was a heavy moment. She saw him in the future, in the past, and in the now. It seemed that he didn’t belong to this world; she must have seen him somewhere else, maybe in a dream. He came. He finally came. Why, she wanted to cry. This elegant Chinese man in a light tussore suit had golden skin and dark eyes, which were sometimes sky green. He was trembling. He took out a cigarette as if it burned his fingers. But he was always smiling, as if afraid of her.

They strolled in the humid air, the sound of voices, the quacking of ducks, the noise of the engine, and the vapor of the river. As a Chinese, or maybe a mixed blood, he was handsome. He smelled like English cigarettes. He lowered his eyes, lights dancing on his eyelids like butterflies.

“Excuse me, mademoiselle. Do you smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

He spoke, and she only smiled. He said the hat suited her, and that she was so pretty she could do anything she liked. He offered to drive her to school. The door shut, the daylight dimmed, a barely discernible distress seized her, and a fog rolled in.

His skin was sumptuously soft. She was seeing stars. The world had been vivid, and was unbearable now. She saw herself in a kaleidoscope, floating on a sea of colors, being knocked over by waves, and sinking down. On the skin there was sweat, fruit, and honey. A neck craned up like a cathedral. Muscles moved slowly like sand dunes. Ebbing and flowing, she was all at once a grain of sand and the whole desert. Somehow she realized this wasn’t the first time she knew the secret of the body. Deep inside, she must be a woman instead of a girl, grown old too early because of insatiable desire. Love me, she said to his body. It was a beautiful body; she had never seen such a beautiful thing, so beautiful that it would burn at the touch. Love me, she begged again. She had just met him, but felt that she had known him for centuries. Finally in his arms, she held him so tight, as if he would disappear once she let go. Desire burned down her veins. Tides rose and fell in her body. The sea was formless. She fell to the infinite.

Happiness was painful. A horrible kind of happiness, it consisted of too much self-destruction, and was therefore addicting. He said she would deceive him, and whether she loved him or not, it would be fatal to him. She listened, head in the clouds. How strange it was for him to say it, because he was the cruel one, and she was the begging one. The world was cruel, and her sadness was no longer the mother, the brother, the sadness that was born along with her, but another kind of sadness, superficial and deep at the same time.

Whose sadness was it? Maybe she was dreaming. She dreamed of a kind of upward gravity, a figure emerging from its cocoon, or her body. Moments flashed in her mind. Beautiful bodies, beautiful eyes, an unforgettable afternoon. Smells, noises, a yellow-green river. A kiss fallen on the car window was all she could give him, and all they could have. They had no future, and even no present. Finally he married a Chinese woman with pearls and jades on her head. And she would not admit her love until on an ocean liner, in piano music and blue moonlight. It was with this love they built the seawall against the Pacific. Tell me you love me, would love me once again. Say it right now. Cold as she was, she should not say something like this. But was she really her? Her head was filled with phantoms: his face, his eyes, his poems, a sky hopelessly gray, a woman running after him, la capitale de la douleur.

Say it right now. Say the words forgotten by the city of pain.

She grabbed his hand. A beautiful hand, which she had known in many other lives. “You’re not the lover. I’m not the girl. You’re not Danny. I’m not Eva.” She couldn’t read his eyes. She spoke her real name in his ear. “Come to me, just once! I’ll wait for you at Café de Flore every noon, until you come.”

She saw storms in his eyes, C-beams glittering in the dark, and a sea of butterfly wings. She fell in, and caught a glimpse of reality.

It was a good day. The sun shone from the small window and lit up the room. She got up early and sat down to have breakfast. She didn’t dream last night. It felt good.

Danny Murong Amor disappeared from her Psyche Alpha. Strangely, she didn’t feel too sad. It was as if she had had a dream for a month, and now woke up to reality. She was lucky, luckier than “the brave,” luckier than most people. She looked at that square of sunlight, and somehow felt that Danny didn’t go far.

Blue sky flashed between transportation tubes. She was the first to the office. Seb’s avatar jumped out, and told her he got another job. His sheep sold so well that Phantasus invited him to join their marketing team. She congratulated him, and opened an empty document. The digital writer began to work; it even looked less repulsive today. It was an efficient morning for her. She finished all the boring work enthusiastically.

She didn’t think about the future. That person might come, or might not. She was ready to pay the cost the moment she took the adventure. But like all women, she always hoped for the best.

Her high heels clattered on the stone, yet she felt she was walking in the clouds. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the café, people rushing in and out from its wooden gates. It didn’t have good food; it was but a name, a place. Still, she was willing to come here every day, imagining she was the heroine of a movie. Imagine—there was nothing to imagine from now on. From now on, she would see reality as it was.

She hadn’t opened the gate to the café yet.

News broadcast: “Phantasus says: intelligent stars are coming. Phantasus lab says a brand-new generation of neuromersive star has completed its alpha test, and will soon start a public beta. Dr. Murong: ‘It’s beyond imagination. It will shape itself into what you really want, and will become more and more intelligent with time. It knows your desires even better than you do . . . I see it as a great product, a product that will revive the cinematic arts . . . ’”

The man was still speaking, but she could no longer understand his words. She began to cry; cold eyes were cast on her, for she was in the way. The sun was shining bright, warming up her body. But she felt as if a rib had been taken, and it felt cold. Yet, the sacrifice had been made; somewhere, somewhere far away, gods of love had come to the world.

With special thanks to Giuliana Alfinito.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2017.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Bella Han is a Chinese science fiction and fantasy writer. She earned a MA in English from Peking University and won the 2018 Galaxy Award with her first sci-fi novelette “Amorville.” She writes in both Chinese and English, translates, and draws.

To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things

M. L. Clark

1

In the giant arachnid’s shadow, her silken face mask—Uranian-blue, luminescent, and vaguely human in countenance—was always a welcome focal point. With my first mate at my side, I spoke slowly in the direction of that glow to compensate for the wobble in my voice—a wobble for which the Spinners of Drasti Prime, for once, were not entirely responsible.

“Kurrick, a terrible crime has been committed on your makers’ land.”

Tic-tic-tic-tic came the answering sound of her legs: four massive pairs shifting to the species’ private calculus. Kurrick’s servant-nest had served my colony since the Partnership’s first contact, two generations before I became security liaison, but I never could get her name right, with the right roll of the r’s and a full guttural component on the ick. Kurrick didn’t seem to mind, though. Spinners were patient. I suppose any biocomputer had to be.

“Explain,” she said.

I glanced at Jinx, whose orange-glossed lips hadn’t so much as twitched since the Spinner’s shadow fell over us. In my first mate’s visor I could still see a reflection of Kurrick’s mask, but we both knew what lay behind it: that gaping maw, those salivating mandibles, a wide array of bright-red eyes. I know, I know, so much for the Partnership’s anti-xenophobia training—but there wasn’t so much as a slug or feline sentient on our local crew, and the tug of primal human fear came easily when not routinely challenged. And then . . .

“Genocide,” I replied, with a polite cough at the pungency of Kurrick’s breath: a sweet-sour mix of vinegar and recent-victim decomp. “You let the Obys lay down his egg, the last of his kind, in the honeycomb caves beyond our perimeter two moons ago—but someone’s just obliterated it, which is a crime for which . . . well, to be honest, the Partnership’s never seen a genocide so complete before. In the past, there’s always been survivors to speak for their dead. So I need to know—do you even have laws for this sort of thing? If we find the perpetrator, did your makers leave any formal protocols we could enact against them?”

Tic-tic-tic-tic went her legs again: the joints visibly bending even under heavy robes.

Probably, too, Kurrick’s calculations weren’t as loud as I thought—but I couldn’t help but listen for them, and not just because all my senses were tingling from the revelation of this murder. My first week on site, our team watched local Spinners spring high from nearby cliffs on those shrouded legs, shrieking in midair to further startle prey along the canyon floor. And sure, their prey was mostly insectoid—but some species not far enough from human-sized for my liking. Plenty big enough, too, that you could hear even from the summit when their exoskeletons split. After that incident, it hardly mattered that the Spinners wore masks spun after first contact, as per their makers’ ancient protocols for showing courtesy to guests. That shrieking . . . those blurs of shadow overhead . . . that crunch could never be unheard or unseen. Not for anyone on our harvest team, at least.

“Atypical circumstance,” said Kurrick, at length. “Convention necessary.”

“Convention?”

“We must spin on this.”

Jinx and I exchanged glances in Kurrick’s steady shadow. Finally, a twitch of intrigue on her lips—followed by a resolute shake of her head. I allowed myself a second’s sulk, but she was right, of course; I’d never seen the tunnels either, where the Spinners housed the vast bulk of their species’ algorithmic outputs, but this was hardly the time to pry.

“Understood,” I said. “But do we have permission to seek out the culprit beyond our borders, while you consider the legal consequences?”

I thought I saw movement behind the blue mask’s holes—three in total, with a tear from age and constant use running from one of two eyes to the wide, shocked “O” of the mouth. (The shape of the first human’s, I’d wager, at first contact.) Jinx certainly jumped as if she’d seen eye movement behind them, too.

“State your investment in such an action,” said Kurrick.

I hesitated. It was easy to forget that the Spinners were, at heart, constructed beings—fusions of natural DNA with specific computational imperatives, capable of accepting inputs and processing them in-line with their ancient operator-gods’ first protocols. The Spinners also had names, after all, and personalities that revealed themselves the longer they walked among us—so where did the personal end and the purely mechanical begin? After two human generations on the planet, the Partnership still had no good answer—but then, we’d been busy setting up energy converters and farming operations. Adapting to the arrival of other foreign species. Taking the Spinners, more or less, for granted.

“Well, ah . . . ” I tried to choose my inputs with care, wondering which half of Kurrick had really asked this question. “The Partnership has generally found the other arrivals here to be peaceful. The Feru. The Saludons. The Esh. The Obys, too, before he detached his egg sac and died. We wish to continue together on your world in that spirit, but I’m afraid we cannot until we’ve understood this latest tragedy and its causes.”

“So you will . . . war with them . . . until you have made your determination of fault?”

A misstep on my part: the perils of decisive language.

“No, Kurrick. We will not war. But we will act in all future negotiations from a place of distrust more conducive to escalating violence, until we know who is safe again. Because the Obys’ egg was without defense, its destruction suggests a dishonorable party on the surface of your world. We seek to prevent that party from doing further harm.”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.

Did Kurrick believe me? The pause felt much longer than reasonable, but in the end . . .

“Acknowledged. You may proceed.”

So I should’ve felt relieved, I know. But after Kurrick scuttled off with the rest of her cluster, their bodies together blotting out the setting sun, I felt the squeeze of my first mate’s gloved hand on my shoulder and simply shuddered, then kicked up dirt.

“Stars above, Jinx,” I ground out. “We just gave the Obys his death rites—”

“Yeah, we did.”

“—last red moon rising. Two moons ago, we heard him sing his egg survival songs!”

“I know, love. I know.”

“Two generations here and the only suspicious death was, what—”

“The silo-keeper’s daughter.”

“—the silo-keeper’s daughter, and even that was just—”

“An accident.”

“—a horrible accident in the end. Stars, Jinx, this is—it’s just—”

She touched her visor to mine. Gloved hand inching up my neck, that sweeter human stench rising in the Spinners’ wake. “I’m sure we’ll get the bastards,” she said.

“Oh, you’re sure, are you?”

And just like that, she stepped away—never one to tolerate trespass. Understandable: the edge in my tone also left me feeling cold and embarrassed. But then, perimeter patrol didn’t usually have us parsing the implications of smoldering wreckage, let alone the attendant grief and horror of having failed a death-oath to a friend maybe as old as the owners of this world had been gone. Who could break a promise to any such monolith of constancy?

Before I could amend things, though, Jinx nodded to the honeycomb caves, the brutish damage to one of their cells visible even from our border.

“I’m sure of your stubbornness, Greysl,” she said. “For one.”

And then she passed from the safety of our perimeter net to the territory beyond it—the uncolonized land of the Spinners’ makers, beings who’d built massive energy drives around the local sun before departing, leaving not even their name or record of their faces behind. Even the spider-servants left to mind their empire never called them more than the obvious.

Our makers, the Spinners had told the Partnership’s first ambassadors. The Makers.

I thought I heard Jinx say something else from beyond the net, but she only looked baffled at my sorry, I didn’t get that last bit once I’d caught up. Perhaps I’d misread the silence—but then, all sorts of things were known to flit about this planet’s wilder air. Surely some, like that of the eradicated Obys, were bound in time to take another form.

“Oh for the love of—”

Half an hour on, while picking through the rubble of the thoroughly blasted honeycomb cell that had once contained the Obys’ egg, I laughed to see Jinx slip and fall while swatting at her leg, and land thigh-high in the cave’s gold-crimson dust. My laugh turned to a yelp, though, as I too felt the pinch of another of Drasti Prime’s native nanobots. In the shoulder, of all the nuisance places—and after all our success in dodging the first Chigger swarm to greet us when we came upon the remains of the Obys’ ill-fated nest.

Jinx pointed and laughed in turn—but then, you had to, didn’t you? Because there was no sure protection from these little rotters outside Partnership territory. None of the suit materials we’d yet tested guaranteed immunity from another of the ancient operator-gods’ major works of biotech: flea-like nanobots with automatic routines for seeding native genetic material into any non-native organisms they came across.

Spinners giveth, Jinx liked to say, and Chiggers giveth too much. If their makers were still here, you gotta wonder if their giving would be the end of us!

The Obys had managed to ward them off during his dying stint here, but only thanks to the radioactive parasite deep within: killer of his species one lone star space-worm at a time. Talk about your silver linings, right? And even then, the moment he’d breathed his ragged last, a more aggressive decomp protocol kicked in among the local biotech. Our weary old friend was turned to mulch in minutes, his egg’s protection maintained only by an equally irradiated shell—not something the Partnership was entirely keen on emulating in our own suits’ design.

Our human solution wasn’t bad, though. My alliance of species might be faulted for establishing a farming colony on such a dangerous world to begin with, but at least we had the tech to recover from Chigger bites—just, not beyond the perimeter net, where its use risked triggering a widespread adaptive response. If we got back to base before the transformation took full hold, though, all would be well, and since most of us wanted to return to being human after tasting life, say, as a giant millipede or six-winged beetle from the waist down, few ever pushed the genetic countdown.

So after we got the nervous laughter out of our systems, I stood and stretched and nodded at Jinx’s forearm touchpad, its display still active. “You got everything you need?”

“Sure as hell hope so.” She switched her visor to full—another nervous tick; a futile effort to try to prevent what had already come to pass—and dusted herself off. For a breath, the stillness of the honeycombs seemed to swell between us. Difficult to imagine, wasn’t it? That an already fragile voice in the universe’s chorus, a species with but one egg through which to stage a full recovery, had been so violently silenced mere meters from where we stood. And only, what—three hours ago, maybe four?

My first mate cleared the air: “So what’re we wagering this time, that you’re the less human by the time we get back? I could go for a proper foot massage, I think.”

Another path to atonement for my earlier, brusque tone—and one I’d readily take her up on either way. But for now I thumped my chest with a baiting smirk.

“Please. You and your theory that my genetic code’s easier to crack.”

We hopped together out of the crater formed by the impact blast. “47% last time,” she countered. “38% the time before. What can I say? Those little critters love you, and they’re getting better at their lovin’, too.”

“You jealous?”

Jinx snorted as we fell into step beyond the ring of rubble. “Of what? You’ve always had an affinity for the tough cases.”

“Oh, so Dirk’s just too tough for you, is that it?”

No, too far. And again I’d heard my misstep the moment I spoke. Nice one, old man.

With Jinx’s visor on full, I couldn’t see the usual shift in her features whenever I mentioned his difficulties, but it was there. I knew it was there. I could feel that careful, patient smile of hers forming as clearly as I did the crawl of transformation algorithms all up one shoulder to the neck, not far from where she’d set a reassuring hand on me less than an hour past. By the time we’d returned to base my smile would surely be arthropodal at the edges, while Jinx’s leg was already turning clawlike, maybe crustacean, and causing her to limp enough that she didn’t resist my offer of aid on the last stretch.

Still, neither of us would ever be as easily consumed as the human waiting at the gate, and that, at its essence, was the crux of her judiciously quiet response: the sheer fact of Dirk—my second mate, colony medic, and undisputed champion of the internal wound.

2

“You realize, don’t you, that we lost another this week?”

Dirk fumed in the main lab while our regeneration treatment ran its course in the iso-chamber. You could tell his mood from the furious re-sanitizing of already-sanitized medical equipment. The relentless opening and shutting of storage lockers to check their contents against the med-bay manifest while he waited for our human parts to return in-full. But I didn’t comment. I wasn’t the sort to acknowledge tantrums, which was what this was, especially when something so much more devastating had just occurred on Drasti Prime—though I recognized, too, that this was also how Dirk processed his fears for me. And for Jinx, though all three of us knew his concern for her was less intense.

But even as Jinx employed tacit correctives with me, she took a more direct and redirecting approach to Dirk’s poorly-managed concern. There was less on the line, perhaps, when love in the deepest sense was not involved.

“Hoover from the drill squad, right?” she said. “He became, what, a scorpion?”

Dirk looked up from his workstation, fleetingly animated by the taxonomical question, then remembering to scowl once he caught sight of us through the glass. The wayward twosome, One-Grey-Cell and Trouble, he liked to call us when scared of his own helplessness—which, from his post in med-bay while we patrolled the farm sites, was often, granted, but we were working on it. At least, the three of us had twice-lunar talks with a nice kid well-read in Partnership counseling protocol, and Dirk was taking solo sessions, too.

“Scorpioid,” he corrected. “In the botanical sense. Hoover didn’t end up with just a tail unfurling like a flower—all his limbs do that now. He’s like a starfish, except with bones and a scuttle. And near the end, when he refused treatment, he got himself some religion, too. Said Chiggers offered gifts from their makers. Chances to be one with the ecosystem of this world.”

“Not entirely wrong, though, was he?”

I stifled a smile. Jinx spoke while studying her newly reformed leg with satisfaction—and relief, I’d learned the fun way, made her playful. Baiting, too. But Dirk only rolled his eyes.

“They’re rogue algorithms, nothing more. Maybe leftovers from a terraforming project set up millennia ago—or maybe from a warehouse of lost species, like a living record of the dead, that opened after the ancients left. Either way, their tech is directionless now, but the Spinners’ll never consent to clearing them out. It’s just not in them to move past first protocols—so we’re left with the bio-debris of a vanished civilization . . . at least, until we stop indulging the whims of a leaderless, pseudo-sentient servant fleet.”

I also ignored Dirk’s suggestion that the Partnership break some of its most fundamental rules for relations with non-allied species. With him, that sort of bluster was all smoke, no fire—unless you challenged him on it, and then he had a tendency to hold his ground just for the sake of saving face. Another item on our trio’s “needs-work” list.

“That aimlessness, you know,” I said instead, “is probably why some of our people revere the Spinners’ makers as gods in the first place.” I nodded to Jinx, testing the flex of my rehumanized neckline. Much better. I did miss the sensory depth, though, of the exoskeletal hairs that had been growing there. “It’s weird as hell to me, but some of us need to believe there’s something deeper going on, so they’re always spinning theories about how ancient civilizations are secretly pulling the strings, just because they desperately want to believe that someone, somewhere, is orchestrating all of this—for better or for worse.”

“Well, yeah,” added Jinx. “Because what’s the alternative? No grand journey. No epic purpose. Just random losses, setbacks, and decay. More hard evidence of nature’s indifference to anything even approximating ideal design, especially where sentience is concerned.”

Dirk, I knew, didn’t disagree—but neither did he reply all at once, and when he did he kept his head bowed, eyes hidden. Classic fear of vulnerability. Yeah . . . our group sessions were packed with works-in-progress, and I could tell that the restless heat of my current, angry grief over the Obys wasn’t going to help us reach the end of that list any time soon.

“Hoover was a good man,” my second mate said at last. “Helped everyone around him without question, without complaint. Everyone liked him. Everyone always wanted to . . . ”

Dirk worked his jaw, unable to finish that sentence, but it clicked for me anyway: Hoover was a friend. And something pinched then, harder than the native nanotech, at all that human muck still lurking in my rib cage. Dirk never talked much about his own community here—or maybe I never asked. Too busy, lately, watching the Obys’ egg while on patrol. And look how much good that had done any of us, in the end.

“Where is he now?”

Did I sound gentle enough? Too gentle? Patronizing?

Dirk shrugged. “Creeping and crawling somewhere in the canyon. Happy, I hope.”

“Oh ho! So maybe we’ll see him on our way to the Feru, eh?” I turned to Jinx through the glass in our pods, trying to keep the tone lively, but she just shot me the eye-roll equivalent of easy there, bucko.

Too much?

Too much.

“I mean, that’d be the place to start, right?” I regrouped aloud. “Since they were the last to talk to the Obys before he passed?”

“Agreed on the Feru, love, but there’s no ‘we’ about it.” Jinx yawned and rapped knuckles on the glass of her regeneration pod. Tac-tac-tac-tac. “I’ve still got data to crunch from scans of the debris. It was a pretty thorough hit, but who knows? With any luck, someone left their grubby fingerprints—or spore-prints—in the dust.”

“Oh. Okay, fair enough.” I missed her company already, though, and made a mental note to tell her as much after I’d returned.

Or maybe my tone conveyed the sentiment already, because at once her expression softened, and after studying me intently, she turned to Dirk with a greater generosity of spirit.

“Hey . . . look, buddy,” she said, propping herself on an elbow in her regeneration pod. “You know the Chiggers aren’t psychologically manipulative, right? Hell, you’ve treated the junkies we sometimes get. You know they’re getting bitten just for the thrill of transformation, but that it’s never as glamourous as they think it’ll be, and eventually they all change back—because it’s not at all like gaining superpowers, is it? So if Hoover chose to ride that particular set of blueprints to its end, then . . . that wasn’t by force, you know? That was his choice, and he must’ve been happy with it. Or happier, at least.”

“Yeah, but that’s just it . . . ”

And Dirk looked up with such urgency then that I wanted to be on the other side of the iso-chamber; to press a hand to what I knew was probably the knot between his shoulder blades, the shudder held high in his back, as Jinx had been there for me with mine.

Ah, but there it was again—the messy problem of Dirk that made me such a sucker for him even in his lesser moods. It was a shame that Jinx and Dirk had never shown much interest in sharing a bed, because Jinx was way better at the whole reassurance gig—but since she’d first shot down the suggestion, telling me she tried to limit the number of fixer-uppers in her life, I was left to my fantasies of everything automatically being easier for all three of us if those two could only soothe each other, too.

“I thought that Hoover was happy,” my second mate continued. “I mean, we all did, but I’m the bloody medic. So if I missed all the signals with him, then . . . then maybe . . . ”

Oh Dirk, you can’t be there for everyone, I wanted to say.

But that would’ve been some rich counsel, coming from someone still hot with the shame and fury over their own failure to keep a promise to the dead.

“I didn’t realize that Hoover’s transformation had hit you so hard,” I said instead. “I’m sorry, love. I’ll be back soon. We can talk about it more then, if you’d like.”

Dirk threw up a hand in his classic no, it’s fine—I’m fine. Which meant it wasn’t, of course, but our regeneration pods were now flashing green and releasing us into the iso-chamber at large, so we all knew it was time for me to return to the field, to avenge the Obys if I could. You can keep a whole damned outpost running smoothly, Greysl, I could just hear our mission coordinator bark at me, but by god, man, would it kill you to set your own house in order, too?

Jinx and Dirk were decent friends, though, at least—so maybe their measured camaraderie would be enough to ease his grief until I returned. Only one last parting look from Jinx, joined with another reassuring squeeze as she bolted past me for the comp-lab, seemed to signal that I was missing something deeper. Something more.

3

The canyon floor was thick with an afternoon mist that parted around every footfall, but held no sign of Hoover in his new form—or anything else, really, in the way of local fauna. Still, I surveyed every distant crevice and shadow through max-enhanced specs as I crossed from Partnership territory into the outskirts of the Feru. Not just Feru territory, but the Feru itself, its fungal fronds extending to the absolute limit of claimed land, while its more intricate components dug into and exulted in the richness of the planet’s soil.

I tried not to envy the Feru its efficiency, but up close the emotion proved as difficult to suppress as primal dread around the Spinners. Though all the planet was home to raw ores, minerals, and other pertinent deposits, the Spinners only permitted foreign extraction in one sector, where representatives for four major alliances tried to harvest as much as they could from Drasti Prime’s microbial engine: an energy source that simple specimen-transfer could not yet replicate off-world. And yet, against the brute force of Saludon laborers and Partnership machinery, the Feru and the nebulous Esh made extraction look like child’s play . . . which invariably reminded me of how many worker deaths might’ve been spared on our end, at the outset of our efforts here, if either species had subcontracted with the Partnership instead.

The presence of a local Spinner cluster, at least, made for decent distraction from the added grief of such thoughts. The Partnership knew of five face mask variants in total, each spun on a new species’ first contact with the Spinners, and never replaced thereafter. Plenty speculated that the fifth might have been for the ancient operator-gods—and good for them, I guess . . . but I preferred to study the other three whenever the opportunity came along. The behavioral psychology wound up in each relationship for which they stood.

The face masks for the Feru’s servants, for instance, looked like spore bundles: a sign of how little the Feru must have valued their presence on first contact. When the Feru wanted to speak to an entity of interest, it did so by entwining numerous protrusions into a body sized to match its guest—unless seeking to intimidate, in which case it made itself far larger; or bored, in which case it dispersed into a field of unresponsive stalks. So did the Spinners have egos? Could their egos be wounded by realizing their unimportance to the Feru?

But also—no wonder, then, that the Obys had befriended the Feru with such intensity in his last days on Drasti Prime (wounding my own ego, a touch, in the process). By that late hour, heavy with the radioactive ailment that had already taken all his distant cousins in the stars, he’d been alone among his kind, and so spoke for a whole people. What better company than another monolithic species that did the same?

As I entered its domain, the Feru rose up before me in triplicate, a spore-form emulating three humanoids joined at the torso. Well, then. This signaled I was of interest, sure, but possibly as no more than a joke. For all I knew, its more advanced sensory array had picked up traces of both Jinx and Dirk on me once, and was now reacting to my presence with all the amusement of a species that propagated with far more abandon and inclusivity.

Only three? its mock-up seemed to say. Ha ha ha! How droll!

If a joke, though, its notion of what Jinx, Dirk, and I had together lacked finesse. But our relationship, I reminded myself, was not just then a relevant matter for interspecies debate.

“What—cause?” the Feru asked from those three benignly smiling mouths: the words half-greeting, half-demand. I knew better than to waste the time of a being whose essence surrounded me, and whose growth rate stymied even the Chiggers’ invasive native blueprints: another defense mechanism, sadly, that Partnership suits could not easily replicate.

“I’m here about the death of the Obys’ egg.” I said. “The end of its line. A genocide.”

“Aaaaaah.” The Feru’s mock-form visibly shrank from—was that grief? Confusion? Shame? Jinx had more xenobiological savvy, or at least more confidence in her hunches. I had the strategic planning, but always more on systemic levels than one-on-one.

“Did the Obys speak of threats?” I continued. “To you, his greatest friend?”

“‘Friend!’ Human.” The Feru pantomimed a laugh in triplicate: further amusement at my use of alien concepts in its domain. Okay, fair enough.

“Reliable communicator,” I amended. “You shared the tastes, sounds, and signs from your respective terrains. Did the Obys’ convey fear? Perhaps of imminent danger, or death?”

Was that bristling I saw along the whole of the Feru’s communicative construct?

“The Obys did not fear death.”

Not surprising, really. I considered the raggedly breathing leviathan I’d met three moons past: its core physiology ill-suited to being planet-bound for long. The Obys had sailed the stars with a fanning solar tail for centuries, and always with a sense of every other member of its species on the cosmic map: a whole array of brilliant quantum-signatures lost point by point as the species eroded from parasites within. Little did those passengers know, of course, that their own success would be their downfall, with the last of the Obys spelling the last of their carriers, too. The parasite never having quite mastered the feat of zoonotic transfer.

(Not that I had any intention, mind you, of calling its eradication a genocide in turn.)

So, okay, the Feru was right: of course the Obys wouldn’t fear death the way so many humans did—not with its tremendous life span, and all it had witnessed on its journey through the cosmos. Not after living so long with the knowledge of his species’ impending doom, and a slow, steady march towards that lonely end. It took the Obys’ kind centuries just to reach mating maturity, and then to find a mate so far across the stars? Another lifetime, surely. Who was any human—who was I?—to talk to the Obys with any gravitas about death?

But still, when he had found his obet, his truest counterpart, the Obys I knew reported that he’d gained in that instant a world of novel feeling. And after their courtship of mimicry, after a decades-long coupling that unfolded over a distant galaxy; after months of nursing her clutch of fertilized eggs between their clinging folds . . . the papa-to-be had proudly taken their half-formed offspring to finish the job alone: to weather the arduous descent to a planet secure enough to serve as a nest. And no other feeling, he’d told me between the agony of his dying breaths, had ever felt so right to him. He’d almost burned to a crisp on landing, but land he had, to lay upon Drasti Prime the single survivor of his species’ final brood . . . And then, quite unexpectedly, to grieve with full intensity for the first time in his ancient life span. To feel, for the first time on his people’s cosmic grid, the absence of a being he had truly loved. His obet’s quantum-signature giving out at such a distance from the parasite inside.

“Not fear, then,” I tried again for the Feru, while grieving anew the memory of the Obys’ living loss. “But did he sense death coming?”

“Of course.” The Feru rippled, a shiver extending to fronds all around me.

I hesitated at the reminder of the Feru’s fearful reach. Its swiftness, and its power.

“ . . . Do you?”

“Always.”

Right, that was silly: fungal species thrived on the intersection between life and death.

“Just—in general?” I pressed. “Or from something specific? Or someone?”

But the humanoid form before me maintained three neutral smiles while swaying in a gentle breeze. I couldn’t tell if it understood human physiology well enough to replicate our emotions accurately, but before I could try again my communicator beeped, and Jinx’s head bloomed neon-yellow over my forearm-touchpad.

“Hey love. Good news and bad,” she said. “Saludon equipment definitely took the shot against the Obys’ nest, and you’ve got a call waiting to patch in. It’s HQ.”

“Wait, which part’s the good news?”

But Jinx only winked before the screen switched to INCOMING CALL. Always damnably efficient, that one—with work and so much else.

“You see, I can’t always tell what’s worse,” I explained to the Feru, while tapping in ACCEPT. “Talking to Saludons or my boss. You’re lucky you move in unity, you know.”

“We are,” the Feru agreed. “Ask the Saludons about the ancients in the honeycombs.”

“The—what?” I started, but when I looked up from my touchpad the Feru’s representative form had dispersed into a field of nonresponsive fronds. Apparently neither genocide nor my relationship dynamics had been enough to hold its interest for long. Well, so be it. I watched four local Spinners darting along the canyon ridge, at the hard border where the Feru ended and the Esh began. This servant-cluster, at least, seemed to be in a hurry—called, perhaps, to join the grand convention Kurrick had mentioned? Meanwhile, beyond both the Feru and the Esh, at the end of the boxed-in canyon and bordering the other side of the honeycomb caves, sat the heavily scorched territory of the Saludons. Waiting.

“All right,” I muttered, when the patch signaled READY. “Let’s get this over with.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but, well . . . you had to know my mission coordinator, Essen. Not every ex was easy.

4

Essen’s bright, bald head loomed over my communicator, and gave my surroundings a thorough 360-degree scan before settling on me.

“So! Jinx tells me you got itchy for something new again.”

“I highly doubt that’s how she put it, Commander.”

Essen shrugged. “All the same in the end, isn’t it? The hell were you doing babysitting the egg in the first place? That’s not Partnership jurisdiction. We’d no treaty with the Obys.”

“Professional courtesy. Plus, we were nearing the end of its incubation period.”

“Curiosity, huh? What, you couldn’t observe it hatching from a safe distance?”

I chose not to point out that, even at a distance, we would still have noticed the impact crater and investigated. “Now you sound like Dirk,” I said.

“Yeah? There’s a shocker. You do have a type, Greysl.”

“Willing to waste my time with lectures instead of just saying ‘I was worried for you’?”

“Like you’d do anything but dismiss us even if we did.” Essen hesitated before adding, “But I am worried, Grey. Jinx tells me the Saludons have a hand in this, but why would they care about the Obys? If their tech obliterated the egg I wouldn’t even bet it was personal—just an aggressive attempt to claim new territory. And you know we can’t let them do that.”

“The Spinners wouldn’t let them do that, either. They’ve been quite firm about keeping us all near the honeycombs and within our designated zones. But also, trust me, Commander, we didn’t see signs of invasion in the rubble. Jinx just pinned some of their equipment to the act, and you know how they travel—in massive military brigades. If this murder was actually a Saludon-led initiative, there should’ve been way more indications of them in the surroundings. No, this sounds more like someone borrowed or stole their tech.”

“Or maybe they collaborated with someone else to throw off suspicion, just as it’s working right now for you. Maybe the Esh?”

I caught myself about to disagree with Essen out of habit, but he was right: I did tend to dismiss him—and Dirk—more often than perhaps was kind. So instead I tilted my head in a show of consideration. “You know, I do remember some of the Esh being fascinated with Saludon body armor. It’s not impossible that they made a trade.”

Essen looked surprised, plainly having braced for a dispute. Was that part of the appeal—treating my seconds like emotional fools, then rushing in after to soothe and offer aid when they were injured by it? If so, maybe a solo session was in order for me, too.

“All right, great,” he said. “So you’ll look into it, but . . . carefully, yeah? Because we can’t afford to have any other players allying here without us. Either we all collaborate or—”

“Trust me, Commander, no one wants another resource war like Yura Six.”

Essen grimaced in agreement. I took the opportunity to push.

“But you know, boss . . . even if they’re not involved, and that’s not what’s going on . . . I’m still going to find out what really happened with the Obys’ egg. You know I have to. There’s an ethical component that doesn’t disappear just because the investors are appeased.”

And now it was my turn to be surprised, having also expected more pushback—but evidently my concession had earned me a touch of charity in turn. “Wouldn’t expect any less,” said my mission coordinator. “Just . . . try not to lose yourself in the process.”

“Figuratively, or literally?”

Essen smiled—and it was a warm smile, too. How curiously generous of the cosmos.

“I’ll be sure to keep a lookout for snarky butterflies,” he said.

That very tenderness undid me, though, in the end. When my ex’s projection switched off, I surveyed the field of Feru, feeling at once alone and pointedly surrounded.

“Did you hear any of that?” I said to the stalks still swaying in a light breeze. “Is this all a cover? Are you in fact always listening in?”

But the Feru gave no response—consciously, or otherwise—and with a twist of disappointment, plus a keen and sudden longing to be in the vicinity of Jinx’s touch, and laugh, and smarm again . . . I started for the frontiers of the Esh. It figured, too, that I’d be descending next into the nebulous, when that was precisely how I felt inside.

5

Apparently I wasn’t the only one having a tough time with my feelings, though. On the border between the Feru and the Esh, I found a local Spinner cluster restlessly dipping in and out of Esh territory, swapping face masks as they moved from one territory to the next. The Esh, having no faces to speak of and not even emulating such forms for company, had proven a serious aesthetic challenge for the local servant-species. Each sentient nebulosity ranged in size and intensity—whole relentlessly churning clouds of sparkling purples, greys, and pinks—so if the Spinners’ Esh-mask looked more like a star map, a perfect disc of Uranian blue riddled with holes of varying shapes and diameters . . . well, I doubt the Spinners’ algorithms could have done much better.

That pinprick design didn’t hold up well to wear after three Drasti Prime decades, though, so I took deeper, slower breaths when the cluster-leader approached me: her mask no more than a few dangling fragments after its extensive use among the Esh, and all her bright red eyes giving way to an acrid and heavily salivating lower maw.

“Accounting,” she said. “Are you here to make accounting, too?”

There was a surprising sense of urgency in her voice, so I didn’t answer so much as I introduced myself, and listened for her name in turn. Urrig. The “g” with an aspirated ending, closer to a “k,” that I definitely didn’t land on my first attempt.

“Urrig,” I said. “My primary Spinner’s name is Kurrick. Has Kurrick not informed your cluster of my permission to investigate a crime committed outside Partnership terrain?”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“Affirmative, but we are still spinning on this question of a crime.”

“Well, there’s no question of the crime,” I laughed, half out of nervousness and half from surprise. “It’s obvious. The caves were obliterated. The Obys’ egg has been destroyed, and everything around it for good measure. But once I find the perpetrator, or perpetrators, I hope your fellow Spinners will have reached a verdict regarding fitting punishment?”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“Yes,” said Urrig. But she did not move, and did not offer further comment, and I was hesitant to tread any deeper into this terrain without it.

“So—may I see them? The Esh?”

“Unclear.”

“My query, or the answer?”

“The answer. The Esh are . . . restructuring. Accounting is difficult.”

Two revelations in one go. Restructuring—yes, I’d heard of this behavior from the Esh. Every now and then the species, having drifted into increasingly divided nebulous forms, sought to reconstitute itself as a whole. The idea was to gather together all the distinct insights the species had developed during dispersion—but it wasn’t an easy affair. Many of the Esh’s divided forms had gained personalities antithetical to cohesion, and those forms regarded reunification as violence: a sacrifice of the emergent individual to a tyrannical majority. It was a striking sight to behold, I’d been told by others in the Partnership—the mass subsuming its dissidents and, over time, reconciling even their righteous indignation with the whole.

But also, accounting . . . Was that what the Spinners did when they moved about us? Account? I’d always thought of them more as user-interfaces, readily available if ever we had queries about the planet and our permissions as guests upon it. But of course there would be background processes for the Spinners as well—security functions, at least, in anticipation of future threats. Accounting for us, though . . . Was that mere census-taking, or something more?

“Well, I’d like to try to speak to the Esh, then,” I said. “If still permitted?”

Urrig’s bright eyes darted from side to side, and I could hear the restless shift of her eight legs under those massive robes. Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“Still permitted,” she said—but before I could thank her, she was already returning to her plainly agitated servant-cluster, chittering together in what seemed an argumentative cadence. Could a biocomputer grow frustrated? Was there an algorithm for that complexity of emotion, too? Or for grief? Maybe the Spinners had also been unsettled by the violent loss already of one guest in their collective care, and feared further with the Esh. But then again—

Feared? Human! I could imagine the Feru’s amused rejoinder.

And I agreed—though even among fellow humans, I often felt I was missing something far more important when I ascribed certain emotions to the surface of their speech.

But—there were better times for such doubts, perhaps.

As the Partnership’s security liaison for Drasti Prime, my most critical discovery just then was the Esh, transformed: a writhing electrical storm near the center of their terrain. The Spinners had given them a patch of sheer rock absent even sand, let alone flora and fauna—an untenable plot for us or the Saludons, whose long-term crews did best with greater environmental variety. But the Esh’s nature had made it easy for them to adapt, and more importantly, to extract: slipping through the slightest fissure to feast on the planet’s internal ecosystem without damaging the surface. In theory, then, I understood Essen’s suspicions, because how easily so much else seemed to come to the Esh . . . but all his conspiracy talk seemed far less plausible the closer I came to the actual spectacle of that reunification storm. The colony of Esh seemed far too busy with internal affairs to be colluding with anyone else.

Still, I tried to maintain a healthy level of suspicion. Maybe this chaos was merely for show—or maybe the chaos itself gave them stronger motive for the murder. Maybe a few Esh dissidents had destroyed the egg on the Saludons’ behalf, for a chance to occupy body armor that might in turn protect them from their species’ reunification pressures.

Would such a tactic even work, though? As I walked the perimeter of the furious storm of the Esh, letting my specs record and upload as much of it as possible, I considered each species’ relative strengths. Saludon craftsmanship was second-to-none for military attire, but then again, I’d seen the Esh apply enough pressure to crush combat suits before—and on those occasions, I’d only been watching small Esh-forms at work. What were the Esh like—in temperament, in physical capacity—as a reunified whole? An internal boom like thunder gave me to suspect that, if the Esh wanted its dissidents badly enough . . . it would get them, in time.

And yet, that one hard fact didn’t entirely preclude the possibility of collusion, because an entity desperate not to lose its independence might take the risk anyway, no matter what the odds of success. So there was no point to rejecting Essen’s hypothesis just yet.

Having toured the whole of the massive storm without seeing anyone, more distinctly primary-side than the rest, though, I finally gave up and used my touchpad to whistle a traditional greeting at the giant cloud of gas and lightning in general. Behind me, the towering shadows of the Esh’s Spinner cluster continued to pace restlessly, and I could see now why they were having such a hard time accounting for the charges. Was this storm an act of species-wide addition, or subtraction? A positive, or a negative? I couldn’t get a lock on it, myself: human notions of autonomy as irrelevant here as our relational values were among the Feru.

“Greetings, ah . . . Esh? I’m sorry, I do not know your reunification name.”

Instantly, the writhing mass thrummed with bright energy from which sound emerged, like the buzz off a damaged light panel back on base.

“NO. NAME.”

“Right, right—you’re all about the absence of distinction just now, sorry. Do you remember mine? Greysl, of the Partnership?”

“REMEMBERED.”

“Good. Good. Well, I’m . . . I’m seeking answers about a murder. You might have heard? The Obys’ last egg was recently destroyed in the honeycomb caves.”

“DESTROYED. OR. REUNIFIED?”

I laughed despite myself. The Esh would debate the term in its present context.

“The Obys aren’t like you. Each Obys maintains its distinction.”

“NOT. IN. DEATH.”

It took me a beat to grok the storm-cloud’s meaning. “Well, okay, sure, when the last Obys died, his corpse was consumed by local nanotech, but that’s a different kind of reunification. His sentience wasn’t perpetuated. Those were just his nutrients and other base materials, absorbed by the native ecosystem. Conversely, his egg was blasted to bits before the Obys inside it even had a chance to begin its more interactive life cycle.”

The shape of the Esh-cloud changed—shrank, sharpened, then expanded and softened again. A sign of emotion? Damn, but I missed Jinx’s stronger hunches. Plus, the quirk of her smile would’ve helped to alleviate the pressingly human smallness I felt while standing between so many giants—the one before me sparking wildly; the ones behind me skittering rapidly along the nearest border. A quick glance at my touchpad, though, and I could see that Jinx’s life-sign was no longer within Partnership territory, but returning to the honeycombs. No doubt looking for traces of more recent Saludon presence. Attagirl.

“WAS. THE EGG. AWARE?”

Well, at least the Esh’s curiosity hadn’t flagged amid its internal struggle. Nothing seemed to be watching me from within that cloud, exactly, but after booming these words the Esh seemed to wait attentively on my answer.

“Honestly? No idea. But generally the young in such species are dormant until they need to transition to life outside the shell. So if you’re asking if the Obys’ offspring was conscious of its impending death . . . hopefully not?”

The mass flickered and shrank again, but said nothing.

“Look,” I went on, “I also don’t know why anyone would do such a thing. I just hope it was accidental, because the alternative is that one among us here on Drasti Prime intentionally brought another species to its end. And I don’t know about you, but that worries me—that worries the Partnership. So I know you’re busy, but if you know anything that—”

“IN. THE. CAVES.”

I waited for further pulses of light and sound, but none followed. “Is that—are you asking for clarification, or telling me? Did you see something in the honeycomb caves?”

“EVERY. THING.”

It wears on a body, really, to have to fill in the blanks in every conversation—but the Feru’s equally cryptic remark gave me an idea. When in doubt, Jinx liked to say, bullshit.

“Oh, you mean the ancients?” I toed the sheer rock of the Esh’s territory. “Yeah, they’re something, aren’t they? No wonder the Spinners never allocated that land to any of us. I mean, don’t want to piss those guys off, am I right?”

The Esh, still silent, deepened internally to a bruise-purple—lightning strikes still bolting pinkly along its warring periphery. Well. This was a stupid time to remember that I had no idea if the Esh was one of those species that considered bullshit an executable offense.

“THE INSECT,” the storm-cloud said at last. “SEALS IN. ITS GREATEST. TREASURE.”

Now, some people don’t do well with cryptic remarks, but how does that saying go? One species’ mud is another’s water? And so my preceding discomfort in Esh territory turned instantly to envy, with a touch of laughing petulance. Where was my flash of lightning, I wanted to know, to boast the feat of my epiphany?

“You’re kidding,” I said, grinning widely beneath my visor. “And here we thought the caves were, like, used for mines or something by the ancients.”

“EXTRACTION. YES. BUT ALSO. REBIRTH.”

“So that’s why they let the Obys set his egg down there? To help his kind recover?”

But apparently the Spinners had finally had enough of the Esh’s disorienting transformation, irrespective of its obvious coherence when addressing me—and in a rush the whole cluster appeared suddenly around me, chattering with input requests: Urrig’s fragmentary mask and vicious mandibles foremost among them, gnashing at storm-cloud air.

Meanwhile, there I still stood between these giants: so tiny a relative specimen that either none heard me or none were interested in paying me further mind.

On the not-so-distant horizon, Saludon territory now looked temptingly quiet by comparison, ominous cave readings be damned. With an uncertain heart, then, and a quick touchpad request for Dirk to pick up, I set out towards another sort of silence. Not the first, perhaps, that the Saludons had created on Drasti Prime today . . . and maybe, if I wasn’t smart about my words and footfalls there, also not the last.

6

“If you’re looking for Jinx, she’s gone back to the honeycombs.”

My second mate’s head bloomed above my touchpad in the same bright, neon-yellow lines as Essen’s and Jinx’s, but Dirk’s was half-turned from me, an etching of an ear and a ragged slash of his hair all I could make out through his slice of viewscreen.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve got her lifeline on my tracker.”

“Right, of course you do.”

I smiled. “Just like you’ve got mine on yours.”

Dirk faced the screen directly. He seemed more distracted than annoyed, though, and at once I regretted the teasing remark.

“Hey. Everything okay?”

He ran a hand through thinning, grey-black coils. “Trying to figure that out, to be honest. Spinners showed up after you left. Kurrick gave me a package and asked if I could analyze the contents.”

Well that was new. I tried to remember the last time the Spinners had asked anyone in the Partnership for a favor. “Is this part of their spinning on the crime?”

“No idea, but—maybe? I mean, I’ve got . . . DNA samples, but also ancient tech, not something I’ve seen before.”

“Did Kurrick give you any other instructions? Guidelines? Anything?”

Dirk shrugged, and from the creases around his eyes, I could tell that he’d been furiously in thought over this when I called.

“The DNA—that’s easy,” he went on. “Even a quick glance tells me it’s from the Obys’ species. I’ve got it in processing now, while waiting for Essen to deliver Partnership files on any other Obys we’ve encountered. But the rest of this stuff . . . ”

Definitely related to the spinning, then. I’d declared the matter a complete genocide, but if viable DNA remained, and the Chiggers could reconstitute lifeforms from basic blueprints . . . well, yet again I knew I should’ve been relieved, but there seemed a world of difference between witnessing a last egg flourish or falter at nature’s hands alone, and choosing to bring a sentient species back from the dead. Did we even have the right? On whose authority? Had Kurrick solved one problem just to pose, for us, another?

Even so, the matter of the egg’s destruction remained tantamount. You might not think an ancient space-worm’s singing could have much range to it, especially during its land-bound final days, but the Obys I knew . . . he’d sung out for his egg every note of wistful hope I knew, including plenty I’d never even known I knew, until I’d heard them issued from him, too.

“Did Kurrick say where these contents came from? Was it the honeycomb caves?”

“Yeah, but how did you—”

I hurried my second mate through a quick debrief of my conversation with the Esh, up to their remark about where an insect buried its treasures.

Dirk quirked his lips in what looked like pride for the first time all day.

“Kind of a big leap,” he said. “I thought Jinx was the master of following hunches.”

“Hah. Yeah. She’s rubbing off, I guess.” I quickly changed tacks, though, before her mere mention complicated his mood. “Hey, but Dirk—could you also look into the records from our first conversations with the Spinners about the honeycombs? I can’t tell if we were misinformed from the start, or simply misreading whatever the servant-fleet was saying.”

Dirk nodded. “Our first conversations, or—”

“The Partnership’s, if you can. It’s funny, isn’t it? After all our own time in counseling, it never occurred to me that even bigger relationships might need checking in on, too.”

Well, that earned me the mother of all puzzled frowns.

“Not the same thing, though, is it?” he said slowly. “Unspoken contracts between partners, unspoken contracts between whole species and alliances . . . ?”

“But not so different, either. Sure, one has more text involved, but why shouldn’t we check in even on the fundamentals for our primary alliances? You know the old theory that you have to choose love every day—that you can’t just stick to having promised it once and ride on that goodwill for the rest of your life?”

But Dirk didn’t look entirely convinced. “We don’t really get to choose the bigger social contracts, though, do we? Not as individual members of a species, at least. It’s not like we ever get to opt out of being human, for instance—except by dying.”

“Well, yeah, traditionally, that’s true. Although here, with the Chiggers . . . ”

But I didn’t need to finish my counterpoint. From the look on Dirk’s face, I knew that Hoover’s example now hung painfully in the air between us. And . . . there was that damned pinching beneath my ribs again, to see him plainly hurting over it. Hold on, kiddo. Not long now.

“Look, love, all I’m saying is, we have a history of struggling with society-sized contracts, even if we maybe don’t treat them the same as we do our implicit contracts with direct partners. But maybe we should. Maybe it’s worth making a habit of revisiting our baseline beliefs—starting with what we assumed about this world when we first landed here.”

“Okay, fine.” Oh, but Dirk looked tired now. Was he taking this as an argument? It wasn’t meant as an argument, but there it was . . . his defeated “I’ll add it to the list, chief.”

Eesh. I especially didn’t like it when he put extra distance between us.

“Love,” I said, firmly.

“Hm?”

“I’ve got you on my tracker, too, you know.”

Dirk didn’t look up, but his expression softened. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Lots of excitement there—food dispensary, bunk, exercise room, commons . . . ”

“Life-saving med-bay runs, emergency search-and-rescue at the harvest sites, brilliant resuscitations of idiot thrill-seeking staff members in the landing bay . . . ”

The tacit praise pleased him, I could tell—but also plainly jarred, so he waved a dismissive hand before I could go on. “Anyway,” he said, loudly. “Jinx is in the honeycombs and probably wants a word with you. I’ll message after I’ve run the searches you asked for, but—in return—no more bites in the wilderness. Understood?”

“Understood. We’ll save a few of those for when I get home.”

I winked, but Dirk’s screen cut out just at the beginning of an eye roll.

“Ah yeah, old man,” I said into the ensuing silence—flexing my fingers after so much time holding up the touchpad. “You still got it.”

7

After the land of the Feru—filled to its limits with interconnected constituents—and the land of the Esh—where the Esh had gathered more or less into one massive whole—the land of the Saludons seemed downright disordered, even as the people upon it moved in rigid formations from one work site to the next. Doubtless, though, they, the Feru, and the Esh would all have called the Partnership’s the messiest of all foreign-owned territories on Drasti Prime—and they wouldn’t have been wrong in their assessment, either. We humans went where we pleased, by and large, as I was doing just now. Hell, even the Spinners consistently moved in packs, so only the Chiggers’ wandering flight paths even approximated our individual movements across the landscapes. And the Chiggers were technically classified as pests, so . . .

I waved with affected confidence all the same, once I’d reached the Spinner cluster on the Saludons’ border. Here, the servant-species’ Uranian-blue masks resembled the soldier’s helmet that every Saludon, regardless of her species of origin, wore while on duty in its ranks. But these Spinners also made no sign of recognition—so caught up were they in what looked like a display of species mimicry, a matching of their behavior to that of nearby troops. Did the Spinners do that for us in the Partnership, too? Copying, emulating, trying to fit in with human life through more than the mere wearing of those masks?

It would certainly explain why the Spinners for the Esh had been so agitated by the act of reunification, for how in blazes was an invertebrate species supposed to emulate that? Meanwhile, the Feru seemed not to give them much in the way of behavior to replicate in the first place, so swaying in the fields of those unresponsive fronds would surely suffice.

But as I considered how the Spinners might be trying to mimic what they knew of the Partnership, a squad of five Saludons approached, their visors open in a preliminary show of trust. And I admit, it was a relief to talk to beings more or less my size again, even if I currently had more reason to fear them than all the rest. First, though, we went through the usual rigamarole between our peoples: I saluted, they saluted. I sent clearance codes to their touchpads, they sent clearance codes to my touchpad. I reaffirmed my commitment to speak in peace, under the conditions laid out by Partnership-Saludon treaty. They reaffirmed the same.

Tedious crap—but reassuring, too, in its familiarity. Maybe there was something to a more algorithmic approach to life after all.

“Greysl,” said the squad leader, Da’l, when we had finished. Da’l had been Restuvian—I could tell from the yellow-brown mottling under his cheekbones—before the Saludons had conquered his species’ wide-ranging fishing colonies across the stars. Now, though, to mention his ancestry would be as much an insult as a pain: Da’l was Saludon now, nothing more. Did an alliance like the Saludons’ even recognize genocide as a crime the way we did—or was it simply another tool in their quest to assimilate all the cosmos’ most useful forms? The Obys certainly couldn’t be put into service as foot soldiers if captured in battle . . . but maybe as vessels? Cavalry for further conquest in the vacuum of space?

“Thank you for speaking with me,” I said. “It seems like the work goes well with you.”

“Affirmative,” said Da’l. “Quite well. Our replication experiments have succeeded off-world, so we should complete our mission ahead of schedule. Saludons—FOREVER!”

He beat the crest of his body armor, and the rest of the squad echoed the cry. How did the full saying go, that the Saludons used to rally their captured peoples? “Grieve not the fall of your line, for Saludons choose combat only with the very best. Our pride is your pride. Our victory, your victory. Saludons—a unity of strength—FOREVER!”

A pang of envy cinched in my chest, though, at the rest of Da’l’s comment. Replication experiments meant the ability to reproduce Drasti Prime’s microbial engine elsewhere. If the Saludons had already mastered it, then they stood to benefit greatly from its use in their stellar fleets, while the Partnership would continue to use the microbes only for on-site materials processing and energy conversion. I tried not to think of the long-term implications, too, for such a technologically emboldened Saludon military; our peace, I had to hope, was still secure if the Saludons felt confident sharing their latest achievements with me. (Or maybe, for now, the Partnership’s myriad of alien members simply remained “unworthy” of Saludon attack.) But also, as I chewed over the ramifications of their triumph, there went Essen’s idea, didn’t it? So much for expansion pressures possibly motivating Saludon involvement in the Obys’ destruction. If their peoples were planning instead to leave, they’d no reason to bother.

Well, that at least left me feeling a touch safer on their turf.

“Praise be to your triumph,” I said to Da’l. “As for me, I’m investigating the destruction of the Obys’ last egg—what the Partnership would consider a significant crime.”

“Ah yes, that. Or, you know, a mercy,” Da’l shrugged. “Can you imagine the life awaiting a single, radioactively decaying organism compelled to exist as the last of its kind?”

I don’t know if my expression conveyed surprise or judgment. Either way, Da’l continued with all the confidence of someone who’d hashed this out a dozen times before, perhaps with others in his crew complement over the last three moons:

“Hey, no offense intended. We suspect that the Obys had no other choice, limited sentient being that he was. When he and his mate created their last brood, they were driven by propagation pressures without thinking about the larger consequences. But still . . . from our more evolved perspectives, you have to admit that it was a cruel and selfish act, conceiving another sentient being under such awful circumstances. Saludons would never be so wasteful—never take a people we couldn’t use; never leave a dying breed to suffer further. And yet, what could we do here? It wasn’t our territory, or our responsibility.”

I parted my lips to respond, all instinctive defense of the Obys giving way to a surprising level of agreement with the horror story the Da’l was suggesting would’ve taken place either way. Still, Da’l’s eagerness to talk—or boast—was only mounting.

“We were honored, though—right, squad?—truly honored by the Spinners’ request for aid with this affair.” Da’l glanced at his team, which answered with a rousing HOO-AH! that left Da’l practically beaming. “So we gave them what they needed. What a world this is, huh? Filled with bioweaponry, brilliant nanotech we’re also hoping to crack soon . . . but not a single projectile weapon in all the Spinners’ arsenal. And sure, they could’ve leapt upon the egg the old-fashioned way, with those brilliant legs and those mighty mandibles of theirs—have you seen them in feeding frenzy? It’s inspiring. We have them down for consideration, you know, for future combat. But they insisted that the Obys’ code needed to be eradicated, not even a scrap remaining, and who were we, as guests here, to dispute our hosts’ accounting?”

If Jinx could’ve seen the look on my face . . .

“Thank you,” I managed, working the words through a mouth gone painfully dry. “We did note the presence of Saludon tech on site, but without all the troop movement that usually accompanies its presence. The Partnership was . . . concerned that your tech might have been the victim of theft, or perhaps that some among your number had broken from the—”

But Da’l snorted, and the rest of the squad burst into resonant laughter, before I could finish. I offered a weak smile that conceded the foolishness of such speculation.

“But of course not,” I conceded. “The Saludons are strong and unified in all things. There would never be a dissident faction running rogue among you.”

Da’l tipped his head in acknowledgement. “We thank you, though, for your concern. A worthy sentiment from an ally, especially delivered by hand so as to maximize discretion, in case something more serious had been in play. And, yes, we realize what an atypical spectacle a piece of our tech might have seemed to you. Rest assured, though, that when your Partnership finally proves its worthiness for combat, you’ll be met with the sight of far, far more.”

Stars above, this job sometimes.

“And for that . . . courtesy,” I said through gritted teeth. “We thank you.”

Da’l and I then formalized the end of our communications with another affirmation of our peace, and an uploading, on the Saludons’ end, of a recording of our exchange. I gave a wary salute to the Spinners at the border, but still they gave no answer. Good. I just hoped that I could reach Jinx before I had to talk to—or rather, confront—the dishonesty of my own.

8

I scanned the canyon before making my descent: a far more efficient beeline to the Partnership’s border with the honeycomb caves. The earlier mist had parted, and in the cool evening air, with Drasti Prime’s brown moon rising, floral life was at last beginning to glow and feed in-full. Insect activity followed suit, and soon I froze at the sight of a large scorpioid perched atop a cactus. Too many limbs to be Hoover, I thought, and I didn’t think there’d be any Hooverness left in the real one anyway, but I gave it a friendly howdy just in case.

A bigger doubt arose, though, as I neared the center of the canyon, and looked up at signs of life from all the surrounding colonies: frond fields swaying in the wind; flickers off an electrical storm briefly illuminating plateau flora in adjacent territories; troop movements marking increased activity around specific dig sites behind me. We four species essentially surrounded a giant, oblong pit—the Partnership, then the Feru, then the Esh, then the Saludons, and finally the honeycomb caves, which shared another border with the Partnership to complete the circle. But no one had been given the canyon itself. To create a buffer? That was one possibility, but the thought of the Spinners taking aim at the Obys’ egg and blasting a hole clean through surrounding structures presented another: perhaps we weren’t the first here after all. Perhaps there’d been another foreign species—right here, right in this gap turned lush over time and with the Chiggers’ help—and maybe its end had also been delivered by a Spinner cluster. Perhaps that was the species that explained the servant-fleet’s fifth mask.

But even if so, what did I have to fear from the Spinners, really? Apparently they’d been honest with the Saludons about everything. Why not with me? What had I done, my kid-counselor might have encouraged me to think upon, to limit the amount of genuine openness possible in my interactions with their fleet? I replayed my initial conversation with Kurrick about the Obys’ egg—first in my thoughts, and then on my touchpad, for confirmation.

Genocide. You let the Obys lay his egg, the last of his kind, in the honeycomb caves beyond our territory two moons ago—but someone’s just obliterated it, which is a crime for which . . . well, to be honest, the Partnership’s never seen a genocide so complete before. In the past, there’s always been survivors to speak for their dead. So I need to know—do you even have laws for this sort of thing? If we find the perpetrator, did your makers leave any formal protocols we could enact against them?

Atypical circumstance. Convention necessary. We must spin on this.

Well, that sure as hell sounded declarative on my part: imposing a given narrative from the outset, without giving Kurrick any opportunity to contribute to the framing of the problem itself. But if I’d instead asked her directly if she knew anything about this matter, or had had any part in it, would she have told me the full story right away?

Understood. But do we have permission to seek out the perpetrators beyond our borders, while you consider the legal consequences?

State your investment in such an action.

We’d never know. Instead, Kurrick reacted to the questions I’d asked, and no more. But what else was a biocomputer expected to do? Offer unsolicited information? Under what parameters? And if they were emulating us as other Spinner clusters sought to emulate the rest, then their algorithms for mimicry might even have required them to go along with the narratives we imposed—to learn from our ways, not dispute them, so as to serve us better.

Because the Obys’ egg was without defense, its destruction attests to a dishonorable party on the surface of your world. We seek to prevent that party from doing further harm.

Acknowledged. You may proceed.

And, okay, maybe my wording had been in error—but in more ways than I’d realized at the time. The Spinners had their own diagnostics tests—their accounting, as it were—so maybe, as far as Kurrick was concerned, I’d simply been proposing a similar test of my own. If so, what risk could I have posed for her species, if “harm” was all I was looking for—and if the Spinners surely didn’t view what they’d done to the Obys’ egg as that?

I admit, then, that as I reconsidered this whole conversation, I was also congratulating myself for willingly accepting so much potential blame for our communications failures . . . which was all well and charitably good, until I heard the light but significant thump of a Spinner on the canyon floor behind me—no midair screech in forewarning. Nervous tension gathered in my arms, my fists, as Drasti Prime’s night-sky light went out—or so it seemed, at least—and I turned to greet Kurrick, her face mask glowing in the brown moon’s stead.

“Checking up on me?” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage in the wide sweep of her shadow. “Or have you finished spinning on the matter of genocide?”

“In process,” said Kurrick. “Awaiting the outcome of a request.”

“That’s two requests in the last few days, huh? First to the Saludons, then to us.”

Eye movement behind her mask. “Atypical circumstance,” she replied.

“Look,” I tried again, swallowing hard. “The Saludons told me they gave you a weapon. And Jinx—my partner—she knows a Saludon weapon was used to the destroy the Obys’ egg. What I don’t understand, Kurrick, is why you invited the Obys to lay his egg in the honeycomb caves at all, if you were just going to destroy it anyway. Why give him hope?”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“At the time, we did not know.”

“Didn’t know? What, that you were going to destroy it? That doesn’t even . . . ”

But oh yes, now I really heard it. Now I heard how I was complicating the Spinners’ ability to answer clearly and precisely, computers that they still were—no matter how many roving red eyes they had; no matter how wet their hungry, arachnoid maws. I breathed out and started over—slowly. Simply. One input at a time.

“Kurrick, did you destroy the Obys’ egg?”

“Yes.”

I felt at once chilled by the confirmation and calmed by how readily it had been given, once I could keep my damned questions to the point. “Why?”

“To protect our accounts.”

“Your—accounts?” But her meaning dawned on me so suddenly I laughed. “Us. We’re the accounts. Is that it?”

“Yes. The Partnership and the Saludons.”

I frowned—feeling the pinch of something on my leg and swatting uselessly at it. Not now, Chigger. “Just the Saludons and us? Why not the Feru and the Esh?”

“Neither the Feru nor the Esh were at risk.”

But . . . the Saludons and the Partnership were on opposite sides of the canyon. Yes, technically we both shared a border with the honeycomb caves, but by raw distance within those territories, the Feru were closer to the targeted cell site than the Saludons. What could have threatened both of us and not them?

“It was an egg, Kurrick. How could it have harmed us?”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“The egg alone could not.”

I whistled low and slow, a sharp ache under my knee letting me know that another bot had, in fact, delivered its reprogramming protocols to my system. Dirk would not be pleased.

“Buddy. Kurrick. You’re not making this very—”

But a beep on my touchpad signaled another incoming call. Well, speak of the devil.

“Oh, right—and that reminds me,” I said to Kurrick’s luminous blue mask, before raising my forearm to answer my second mate. “We’ve gotta talk about this favor you asked of Dirk, my partner. There are safety protocols you bypassed. We have rules, too, you know.”

“Acknowledged,” said Kurrick. “Apologies.”

And the Spinner stepped back a touch—just enough that I could feel, again, the warm, muted light of Drasti Prime’s night sky while I took my call and tried not to scratch the latest infection site with the heel of my other boot. Now, what in blazes was I supposed to do with such a polite, if occasionally murderous, biocomputer like Kurrick?

9

“I was wrong,” said my second mate, the moment I answered.

“Good evening to you, too,” I laughed—half out of relief just to be out of Kurrick’s shadow; half because of how much I enjoyed the sight of Dirk when he was this intense without being petulant or grumpy. “You got something for me?”

“Lots. We were wrong, too—the Partnership, I mean. But first, okay, I know I said the Spinners had given me the Obys’ DNA, but that wasn’t quite right. The Obys’ corpse was completely devoured by nanobots, right? Too soon, maybe—but then, how could the decomp team have known to wait? They’re just simple machines following pretty basic algorithms for automatic reprocessing of organic materials. Meanwhile, what’s in this kit the Spinners wanted me to analyze? DNA from the egg.”

“Well, okay, but that could just be—”

Dirk impatiently waved me off. “Greysl, look—the Obys’ egg was nonviable. I mean seriously unsuited for life, probably from the radioactive parasite that took out mom and dad. So, sure, maybe it would’ve gasped a few awful breaths after hatching—but in days, at most, it too would’ve given out.”

“Oh, the poor thing.” And thank goodness, I realized, that its father hadn’t lived to see it suffer so. Better that he went to his end with even a flicker of hope for his kind on whole.

“Worse, though,” Dirk went on, with a renewed confidence I was invigorated to see in him. “I went through the early recordings, and, well—listen. This is from one of our first conversations with the Spinners. Two of ours talking, one of theirs.”

I nodded into the viewscreen, and Dirk started the audio.

—but the name. There’s got to be . . . everything has a name.

Yes. The makers.

An exasperated sigh. No, that’s not what I—

And then the second human voice: Ah, they can’t help it, Silv—they’re just computers. Big, kinda scary-looking computers. And whoever made them, they’re like their gods. So of course they’re going to—

It’s just so frustrating that there’s nothing else here, no imprint of them anywhere. Hell, there isn’t even a handle or limb-hold on any of their buildings or equipment to give a sense of how big they were, how they moved, whether they were insectoid, too. Look, can you describe them at all? Is there anything you can give us?

And even the recorder caught the answering tic-tic-tic-tic with perfect clarity. Maybe their legs were just that damned loud, and not just a trick of my primal instincts after all.

Yes, said the Spinner. We are permitted to bestow land upon our guests. There are units near the makers’ caves where we can best give account and ensure your safe continuation for many generations.

Well all right! said the second human voice. Now that’s more like it, eh, Silv? We can—

But at this last Dirk stopped the audio, a great big smile daring me to make the same leaps he already clearly had.

I decided to let him have . . . well, half of them, at least. I grinned back.

“The Spinners answered the questions they were given. The problem was the questions themselves. Could they describe the ancients? Yes, the Spinners could. And was there anything else they could give the Partnership—in general? Land. Oh, love, you realize this means—”

“Yeah, yeah, all true—but even more importantly, listen Grey: that means the Spinners also answered our first question honestly, too. ‘The Makers.’ Not, like, deities . . . but literally, a species that specialized in making life. It was their name because that’s what they did here. Not just with the Spinners, but with everything. That’s what the honeycomb caves are for. That’s what the tech’s for, that the Spinners gave me when it dropped off the egg’s DNA.”

“What do you mean they—”

“The Makers rebooted species to restore natural balance.” Dirk shook his head in obvious professional admiration, and damned if I didn’t enjoy seeing him this passionate again; not just helplessly awaiting another opportunity to react to a medical emergency. Speaking of the latter, though—I had to set one leg against the other to suppress my latest transformation’s itch. Something slippery this time . . . Mollusca? But Dirk was still going on: “The Spinners kept their accounts by actively monitoring local species, and The Makers produced blueprints for the Chiggers to distribute in the ecosystem, targeting anything that seemed out of balance with the rest. So Grey, Grey—don’t you see? The Makers’ way was always to transform life, not destroy it. So if they were still here, I’m sure that’s what they would’ve done with the Obys, too . . . except they aren’t, and that’s the real imbalance now. Only their brainless replication tech remains, which just works with whatever it’s given—good quality source material or not.”

I inhaled sharply at this last, his eager speech almost as infectious now as the native blueprints along my leg. “So there were blank-template bots in the honeycomb caves, and they were already trying to save the Obys’ species by mass-replicating the egg’s DNA.”

Dirk snapped his fingers, head bouncing temporarily out of sight in his excitement. “Exactly. But remember—the egg was nonviable. So the Chiggers’ programming, running essentially on autopilot, would’ve released massively deformed DNA into the wild.”

“And since the Feru have excellent defenses and the Esh can’t be infected the same way . . . that means only the Saludons and our people could’ve been transformed by it.”

“A severely deleterious bit of code, released by another bit of code that’s just responding to initial inputs established by creators who abandoned it eons ago.”

I almost didn’t recognize my answering, triumphant cry. “One-Grey-Cell,” my second mate was still going to call me, once I told him I needed to regenerate a second time in one day . . . but hell if I didn’t make that one grey cell earn its bloody keep.

“Which also means, love—don’t you realize? Dirk, this means that the Spinners did something outside their first protocols. I mean, not much outside, but still, a little. A start. Because they were just supposed to keep the accounts in balance, right? And the Obys was one of those accounts. Nevertheless, they chose to prioritize our own. They understood the danger of the Obys egg’s DNA, and put greater value on the actual viability of a given lifeform, rather than a simple maintenance of raw numbers for each species on their roster. Kurrick destroyed anything that could’ve had defective DNA on it . . . to save the rest of us.”

And from the look on Dirk’s face, I knew he didn’t disagree—but still, I was a little deflated by his immediate response.

“Well, maybe,” he said, bringing the whole register of our conversation down a notch. “To a point. I mean, we don’t know the exact nature of their original orders—but also, even if you’re right, it might not have been as big a deviation from protocol as you’re making it out to be. Because, sure, Kurrick eliminated the egg, but she also left these materials with me, yeah? And, fine, she can’t order me to do anything with them . . . but maybe what she was trying to say—what the Spinners haven’t quite got the means to say—was . . . ‘Can you fix it?’”

My breath hitched. “You mean the Obys’ DNA?”

Dirk nodded, barely containing his own burst of excitement. Aha. So no wonder his mood had deflated slightly at my connecting of a few other dots; this was his professional baby now. But—fine, fine. Pick your battles, old man. Focus, Greysl.

“You mean there’s a chance that you can . . . ?”

“Well, I mean . . . ” Dirk scratched his temple as if to deliberate, but there was no ignoring the spark in his eyes, already at least three steps into the bioprocess in his thoughts. “It’ll be a hell of a challenge tracing all the damage the radiation has done, but yeah, the Partnership has enough on file that I should be able to reset this specific DNA sample without losing our Obys’ contribution. Or the contribution of his obet.”

I smiled at that final addition. Not entirely a lost cause, this one.

“I’m sure they’d both have appreciated that very much.”

“Yeah . . . ” said Dirk. “Only thing is, who’s going to be the carrier for the blueprints if I do pull it off? Or carriers, since it wouldn’t be fair to just make one.”

“Oof. For sure. Stars, if only Hoover had known before he’d—”

But my second mate’s eyes grew pained before I could stop myself.

“Hey,” I tried again, wishing I could more concretely make amends through the viewscreen. “This is awesome, love. You’ve done a great job, and you’re going to continue to do a great job. Just—take care of your side of things, okay? I’ll find you volunteers.”

Kurrick’s shadow fell upon me again, though, before I could so much as say goodbye.

“I have received word from the tunnels,” she said. “We have reached a verdict.”

Was it the whirlwind thrill of my conversation with Dirk, or the irritating crawl of my latest infection all down my left leg? Either way, my one grey cell had apparently given out.

“A verdict on what?” I said in perfect ignorance.

“Our crime,” the giant arachnid before me replied.

10

A few weeks on, as sixteen adolescent Obys prepared to launch into the stars, Jinx was finishing up diplomatic rounds with the attending Feru, Esh, and Saludon representatives, while I listened to Dirk go on for the umpteenth time about the enhancements he’d made to protect our first joint offspring from further radioactive parasites, as well as . . .

“—‘a whole host of other infectious diseases, the likes of which they probably can’t even imagine yet.’ Yes, love, I heard you the first twelve times.” But I smiled and patted his arm, and, well, Dirk was too much in his element to be offended by my impatience anyway.

“Next up,” he said, positively glowing as he surveyed the canyon floor, which had been converted for the last two moons into an Obys nursery. “I’m going to start tackling the native nanotech. Kurrick walking me through the honeycombs’ controls was all I needed to start to figure out how the Chiggers can be hacked, and maybe made a touch more refined in their transformation protocols for any species out of balance with the local ecosystem.”

I clapped a hand on his shoulder and shook my head. “Stars, the strides our colony might’ve made together earlier, huh? If only we’d bothered to ask the Spinners directly, and with more patience, about their needs in relation to our own.” But I was shaking my head more in wonder than in lament—because it wasn’t just the first generation of Partnership staff that had taken their interactions with the servant-species for granted. It was our generation of colonists, too. Me. And I, of all people—considering what Jinx, Dirk, and I had so painstakingly built together over the years—should’ve known better than to assume. Right?

But, ah, always room to grow, as our counselor had warmly suggested during our first group session after I’d recovered from becoming part slug, and been ready at last to start talking out my grief over the old Obys and his struggles here on Drasti Prime. Smart kid, that one. Sometimes the future seemed in remarkably good hands.

The memory did twinge a bit, though, as I scanned the canyon floor and tried to make out which of the sixteen creatures below had once been Kurrick. It wasn’t easy, because in place of the stately and self-controlled Spinners’ bodies, you had a bunch of floppy, awkward beginners attempting minor takeoffs that had them gliding meters high, at least, before crashing to the ground anew. According to Jinx, one among their number had apparently crashed so theatrically just the other day that a whole host of local fauna—one massive scorpioid among them—hadn’t had time to escape the descending space-worm’s shadow. Wincing at each other in the retelling, we’d made a solemn vow not to mention it to Dirk—and now I realized I’d miss my Kurrick at least a little like he still clearly missed his Hoover.

I mean, obviously, these sixteen Obys were far less unsettling than the local Spinners’ forms had been—and for this reason alone I know I should’ve been happier, at least on some deeper and more primal level, about the whole transformative affair. But when Kurrick had first come to me with her species’ verdict, the result of careful spinning on how best to handle her kind’s complicity in another species’ complete destruction, “aesthetics” had funnily enough not even warranted a mention in their final deliberations.

“We are—out of balance,” she had explained instead. “As such, members of our own account will provide the necessary adjustment.”

“But—you’ll lose yourselves in the process,” I’d countered. “You’ll become Obys completely. One life sacrificed for another—that can’t possibly be a fair accounting either.”

Tic-tic-tic-tic. The last of those damned spooky calculations I’d ever hear her make.

“It is—no less than The Makers did, when they too erred in their accounting.”

And with that . . . well, whew, talk about your offhand remarks containing multitudes. But even without pressing further on this accord—even without accidentally losing myself again to my species’ relentless need to impose narratives on everyone around them—I understood at once the gist of what she must have meant. The canyon. The Spinners’ fifth face mask. A whole other species lost to some ancient error on The Makers’ part—either of a moral nature or purely accidental. A whole other slice of alien history on Drasti Prime.

“Your makers—The Makers—they’d have been proud of you, you know,” I said instead, though I hardly knew if Kurrick even needed encouragement for what she was willing to undergo. Did the Spinners have functional algorithms for fear? So much still for me to learn, that now I’d never have the chance to learn from her. But so it went with every ex, I guess.

“Even after all this time—all this emulation of other guests,” I continued, just in case it might have mattered after all, “you’re still attending to their needs and wishes above all else.”

And even if fear was off the table, maybe Spinners could still feel puzzled, because—

“But of course,” Kurrick instantly replied, eyes darting curiously behind her mask. “The Makers are—primary. Our first account to attend to, as the rest of my kind always will.”

Weeks and a whole whirlwind of species transformations later, I looked across the canyon ridge at the small dark dot of Jinx’s uniform, and felt the weight of those words even more acutely. Jinx had clearly just finished up with the Saludons—who after extensive and tediously ritualistic bargaining had finally confirmed a solemn vow not to consider the Obys worthy of combat for at least another millennium—and now my first mate was making her way back to our territory by way of the honeycomb caves.

Soon one of the Obys under all our watchful eyes (and cloud-forms, and spores) would manage the trick of it, I knew. Soon one of the sixteen converted Spinners—each not too long ago a frightful, shrieking sight when it descended upon its prey—would launch successfully into Drasti Prime’s sky, rising higher and higher until it broke clean through the planet’s upper atmosphere, and set off on new adventures in galaxies maybe centuries away.

Meanwhile, Jinx had been right, of course, to avoid taking on too many fixer-uppers in her own day-to-day practice. One clingy security liaison, forever deflecting from personal needs and anxieties by fixating on the supposed problems of another mate’s behavior, was more than enough for even the most open-minded first mate to handle. But hey, maybe she got off on the difficult cases, too. Maybe Essen would’ve teased her about having a consistent “type” as well. Either way, I watched her stride towards me with her visor only half down: the twist of an orange-glossed smile, along with a confident pop of her hip, revealing even at a distance her growing sense of relief that all this nonsense was finally at its end.

And relief made her playful.

Relief made her baiting.

So I smiled and held up Kurrick’s old mask—that brilliant Uranian-blue glow, that shocked human countenance, that thin crack from eyehole to gaping mouth—over my own.

How best can I serve you, madame?

About the Author

Canadian by birth, M. L. Clark now calls Medellín, Colombia “home.” Clark is the published author of science- and speculative-fiction stories in Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, as well as in three year’s best anthologies, and has more work forthcoming at Analog and The Future Fire. Other writing projects include poetry, reviews, essays (especially for a secular-humanist column at Patheos.com: “Another White Atheist in Colombia”), and a novel-length work of Soviet-era speculative history, currently seeking representation. Clark is also collaborating with local Colombian creators in the hope of promoting their own, tremendous output across languages in the coming years.

Lapis

Sara Saab

Florid Park

Szanna, do you remember this game from the twentieth century? Skip along the informational alleys of realspace, leap the archives inter-generationally. A descending white cascade of snow. #FFFFFF. Pixelated scrub. You’re a miniscule skier. Your motor control is dampened by four low-acuity arrow keys, by the graphics cards and CPU speeds of antiquity. You ski, swerve, ski down the glare of a screen, until a yeti emerges from an offscreen hideout to devour you.

Doesn’t everyone struggle to beat the impoverished algorithm earthed in a singular fatality? You know now, as they knew then, that death is absolute, though life may be manipulated, stretched between fingers like tree gum, thinner and thinner until translucent. You’d tell this to Nouri if he asked you again: to subvert death is an abomination. You missed your opportunity to say it long ago. You’re here to give yourself a second chance. Maybe give him a second chance.

In the distance, the habitat is color-saturated, washed in light. You stop a moment to look, breath fogging. The saturation has nothing to do with the late afternoon light and everything to do with the habitat’s shortfall of nanos. You’re trekking east through Florid Park, veering away from the half-mile-wide cusp of bioshacks on the horizon, navigating toward the Park Service outpost you are obliged by permit to check into by sundown.

Under your feet, small life crunches. You are cold. Your baselayer, nanoblocker, windproofing—none are Florid Park rated. It’s been hard walking since you entered by Lesha Gate, an unbroken afternoon of it. But the trekking is not the challenge. You have walked the parkland trails down to dirt. You’ve traveled the informational frontiers your whole adult life, mapping bonespace into realspace, stone and dirt and fabbing into archival infinities. You’ve got 880 hourcreds of rough terrain hiking to show for it, two royal trailwalking Nods, and if you cared enough about such things you could qualify as a walking guide to galactic-iso standards. You don’t.

The immortal who meets you at the outpost doesn’t greet you or give a name.

“Agent, Park Service,” is all she says.

“Szanna. On the Hectare Lab permit.” You push the permit to her in realspace.

It’s hard to tell for sure, but she seems to be waiting. She finally nods. She is uninterested in you, but you are very interested in her. You study her face. You note the long-growing ears, sculpted lobes, and aquiline nose indicative of immortality, the lack of folds around the smile packed tight as the patchy snow beneath her polydown-stuffed boots. She approves the permit and sends you maps of Florid Park, all its leafless copses and crops of boulders and snowy open fields. You remember the ancient game, Szanna. The game with the skier and yeti.

“And the assistant you registered?” asks the Agent. In realspace, she pushes you Maschou’s card.

“She couldn’t come.” The permit, which you worked a personal contact to obtain, didn’t extend to two. “But we should go,” you say. “I have three days to fill the whole habitat in.”

The Agent looks at you dully. You test out a smile.

“This map is the main distraction at a Lapis Colloquium in a few nights, according to the client brief,” you elaborate. “Hectare Lab builds these playable archives all the time. We find you can’t skimp on detail.”

“It’s a short walk there,” she says. She hefts a pack and does not offer to supplement your thin outerwear, your scant supplies. But neither does she challenge the rating of your blocker or prophylaxis. For that you’re grateful.

Szanna, you march behind the Agent and do not look too closely at the birds stark against the trees, at the evidence of nanofuzzing like static between their feathers. You do not want to know how the intelligent selection plays out, which colonized birds will live, and which succumb. Which of them are intended, and which mistakes.

You squint. In the distance, specks resolve into people moving near the edges of the habitat. And in realspace, you’re unlocking the Agent’s locale packet. It’s sparse, some waypoints, a main track, some habitat zoning. But if it were any less sparse, you wouldn’t be here with the mapping permit you’ve got.

In bonespace and realspace, you search for Nouri.

Do you remember this game from the twentieth century? They called it the Game of Life. Drab gray board, yellow tiles. Gray for death and yellow for life. Each round of gameplay would step forward a simulation of natural selection, proliferation, population decline. You imagine each yellow tile unpacking and spreading wings and taking to the treetops; you imagine Nouri a solitary blip in one corner, huddled in on himself.

And how many rounds does it take to flip Nouri’s tile to gray? The answer is too many rounds. As many as the grid endures.

Avicenna Park

There was a game you’d play with Nouri before you were grown. It was called The Immortals, and in the nonsense way of games it had nothing to do with life or death, but also everything to do with both. Once, with bare hands, the Nouri of your childhood scalloped a den inside a hedgebush on the border of Avicenna Park. The park beyond was golden and hazy with airborne sand. The royal desert, you two called it, because it was maintained by the private park service of the ruling family. (Somewhere inside, the foundations of Hectare Lab had just been poured, though that was nothing to you yet.) It was nearly nightfall and you were warm with chasing and falling, and with imagination. In you went, into the heart of the hedge-den, Nouri first, you squeezing in after. The prickly bush left lazy welts along your arms.

“We’re the immortals now,” said Nouri in the perfect quiet. He was forty-three days younger than you and you never let him forget it.

You began to skip through the realspace archives, looking for some suitably regal concerto to fill the silence.

“In their hideout, the immortals do not go to realspace,” Nouri chided.

You snapped back to bonespace. “What do they do?”

“They make life better,” he said, “for everyone.”

Nouri did not explain the practicalities of making life better. You remained there with him for hours, fighting cramp, disappeared from the world. You leaned back on your elbows and stomped your feet when they deadened. The sun began to set outside. The humidity was brimming with the scent of eidergraze sap. Nouri fell asleep against you. You didn’t wake him. Later you were reminded that the desertland of Avicenna Park was freezing at night, cold as an atmosphereless planet, as cold as you are now, aged thirty-nine, and mortal.

You did not leave bonespace until Nouri woke and led you back, shivering, into purple night.

“Next time, we’ll go all the way in,” he said, turning to face the Ghosh Gate of Avicenna Park.

You felt the cold then as a burning. Only your heart kept going through it.

Florid Park

You choose the first of the habitat’s structures to map, a bioshack on the outskirts of a domestic zone. With the Agent trailing you like this, the pestilents don’t come near. They are preparing meals, immersion meditating in ones and twos, fabbing clothing, quietly conversing. You squint downcast eyes, dazzled by the light—it’s like nothing you’ve experienced. All varietals of nano from the Upgrade onward are programmed to avoid the pestilence—you know this—but what shocks you is how different the world looks unfiltered. It scares you, makes the usual presence, somehow, loom.

You stop when the bioshack is within arm’s reach. The Agent is unceremonious. “Begin.”

To start a map from bonespace to realspace is as easy as forming a new thought.

You informationally lasso the bioshack, taking a rough model of it for your realspace map. Then, walking around it in bonespace, touching it with your hands, examining, you lance it, sampling informational layers, the textures and movable parts, the doors and windows and latches.

(This, to you, is a kind of freedom, is expansive. Is, perhaps, a variety of immortality.)

In moments, the outside of the bioshack is mapped in. You’ll do the interior later. You turn to the Agent, gesture toward the next structure, a water generator behind the grilling station where pestilents are gathered, stirring something thickly bubbling. A scent like molasses carries in waves with the breeze.

A few look up at you. Their hands slow. “They’re cooking homemade nanoblocker for their eyelids and nostrils,” says the Agent from behind you. Her voice comes from a great, unaffected distance. “They’re trying to lower the load in their cortical matter, and since their nanos conduit over mucous membranes—”

“I know,” you interrupt, gently.

When you see Nouri among the pestilents at the grilling station, you don’t recognize him at first, and you think your dazzled eyes are to blame. You would have sworn you’d know Nouri anywhere, any way. You know his face better than your own, even this changed face of an immortal-gone-wrong, the blanched-brown nanoburn patches up his neck and across his brow. He’s older, but not yet immortal-old, not so old that the elongated ears and nose have given him that vertical countenance.

You turn away before you know whether he’s seen you too, before his reaction betrays you. But your own face must be enough of a tell, because the Agent snaps, “I will supervise interactions.”

In realspace, you receive a line clipped from the permit agreement you didn’t bother to read. The Park Service’s data-chained signature is a golden plait in the corner.

“For your safety,” the Agent adds. Not for the safety of the pestilents. That ease of abandonment, from one immortal to a lesser other.

Out by the water generator, the wind slices. You begin to map. Szanna, you’re very cold. To your fingertips the world is gauze and extruded foam. You tamp down the urge to call Nouri’s name, to walk right up and tug him to your chest. Your prophylaxis is experimental, and Nouri must be teeming with pestilence. Still. If not for the Agent, you know what you would do.

Instead, you visualize a gauze-stuffed throat. Call it silent. And call it your own.

And then you build him a game.

You map in the water generator. There’s a condensation pole of four spires, a sectioned moat, a graduated filtering chamber. You map the spires into realspace, and in your own private instance of the map you add colored pennants. To each of the moats you add game pieces in the shapes of the finest lapis cuts: brilliantine, princess, convex, diamantine. To create movements of play, you add a truth-detector sensitive to tone of voice, a series of debate topics, a role of interlocutor and respondent controlled by a pair of badges. You declare the rules of the game: it’s a race to lower the pennants down the pole. The debate topics, you store in the filtering chamber, embossed on the bellies of golden fish: About immortality. About the flesh. About desire. About secrets.

Then you embed the prize: the package of code you and Maschou have been developing at Hectare Lab for the past five years. You tie it in a bow.

This is the game you design for Nouri, Szanna. You finish the official map of the water generator, closing it with your maker’s plait. And there, over your shoulder, is the Agent, pacing. Wherever she goes, the pestilents leave a wide berth.

If you could get Nouri to handshake with you, exchange cards, you could give him the game. And if you two could find somewhere to immersion meditate without arousing attention, you could play a round. And if he wanted to win, you could help him win.

When you look for Nouri this time, you’re subtle, the movement of your gaze a movement of clouds. And when you spot him again, he’s almost gone: heading out past the edges of the habitat in a group, in the grips of nanofever, driven by an imperative he can’t resist.

Later, as the day dims, the Agent shows you to your bioshack. You stab praying hands into the nanofat membrane, let yourself in. Two foam pallets, a wet corner, a bidet, and a clothes cycler. It smells of new fabbing layered over the burned milk of the nanofat.

You lie down without undressing. You drift off chanting: about immortality, about the flesh.

Florid Park

Do you remember this game from the twentieth century? Cast back. A game board is scattered with hidden mines. Concealed in the game board are clues. Heed the clues and you’ll know how many mines to look for. Sometimes, the game unravels for you, satisfying as a snarl of rope. Sometimes, your very first touch is doomed, a fate you are helpless to prevent.

Szanna, on the second day, you ask the Agent for a pestilent. You’re heading for the habitat’s hospital, a silo towering over the bioshacks. It’s the biggest structure you’ll need to map. “Can one of them help with the ladder?”

“If you like. You’re waivered; you’ve declared blocker and prophylaxis,” the Agent says. There’s no danger to her, after all, only to you. Florid Park is her home. Her nanos will of necessity be an impervious blend, made by Royal Warrant and restricted by Decree.

You scan intently for Nouri—the Agent sees this, thinks you’re scowling at the desolation.

“The Park Service thinks in centuries, not years,” she says. It’s the first time she’s volunteered information. “Florid Park will spawn fantastic ecosystems in the future. The mix of evergreen life and nano. The temperature range is perfect for spawns of modded bios. Low precipitation too.”

You run your hand over the door fob of the hospital. It’s defunct, undiscoverable in realspace. A manual lock has been installed below it.

The Agent says, “The pestilents are happy here. They could live here forever.”

“You mean, you’ll make sure they live here forever,” you say before you think.

The Agent’s eyes, when you meet them, are intrigued for the first time. “What is it you think we’re doing here?” she asks wryly. “The pestilence is as resourceful as it is corrupt. You hate immortals. Do you envy us? Resent the sureness of your death? Feel noble to have a beginning and an end? Or are you sorely tempted to live forever, but terrified of what you might become?

“Whatever it is you think—Florid Park’s nanome is a barrier. You might not trust the mechanisms that are protecting you. But the fact remains—they are protecting you.”

You point across the habitat. In the industrial zone, Nouri is scooping and sorting something into three different sacks. “I want him. The tall one.”

Avicenna Park

And here is a game which is not a game. You are young, Szanna, though older than the evening you spent nestled in the hedgebush. You’re old enough that the game in the hedgebush makes you blush, the thought of you tucked in, your joints and corners and angles, and Nouri right there.

This game is: you and Nouri and Maschou walk together from Partridge Perch to the small gazebo in the Pasture of Buffalo. The game which is not a game is that you do everything to avoid Nouri’s eyes, though sometimes his eyes seek yours, all of him craning over, his new adolescent frame long and undernourished and potent with hungry bones. Nanos have never yet touched his marrow.

“So would you?” he asks you both, looking from your face to Maschou’s. “Live forever?”

Immortality has only newly cut away from the banquet halls and ballrooms of the royals. The immortals are, for the first time, on the streets. Szanna, you’ve known from very first awareness that it will never be for you to cheat death. But you do not say this.

“If I was sure it was safe? If I was sure I’d still be me,” says Maschou, after solemn consideration.

“Well?” says Nouri, turning to you. He does something he’s never done before. He takes your hand. Your lungs quiver and the walking cadence of your breath stalls. You look at neither of your friends. Ahead of you, the small gazebo in the Pasture of Buffalo appears on the horizon, its decorative curlicue spearing the sky’s flank. Also on the horizon: a whole, full life yet to be settled on. This particular game, Szanna? Holds a thrill you’ve never felt.

“Maybe,” you stall. Your bluster seems an evident fake in your ears. “Would you?” you fire back.

“Have this forever?” says Nouri, spreading his arms. “I’d do anything.” And he cranes over, and smiles directly into your eyes.

Florid Park

You and Nouri handshake privately. In realspace, he blooms, immediately there. A negative space you’d scarred over since the expiry of his last handshake returns to presence.

In bonespace, he is aloof, even a little rude, ruder to you than to the Agent. He sneers at you, airgaps your bodies, which of course he’s obliged to do—the public health Decree. But he exaggerates, seems all too willing to keep his distance.

When you request it, he allows you to form a sensory chain, awkwardly scales the sandy rungs up to the hospital’s silo roof, runs his hands over and under panels and ports and receivers.

You think maybe it’s that he has forgotten. But then in realspace he tunnels to you, and blurts, “Szanna. It’s too late.”

You don’t ask what late means to an immortal.

By way of apology, you send him the game you made—with the water generator, the pennants, the fish.

“Maschou tried to be here too,” you say in realspace.

Nouri replies with that old deep-bass pulse, his version of an affirmative.

“This game looks fun,” he remarks after a while. “We should find a moment to play.”

In bonespace, he’s squatting on the roof of the hospital, gently lifting insulation foam, lancing down to the rusty layer below. You chain his informational feed into the realspace map, hungrily painting in the structure. It’s satisfying the way a long-awaited meal is satisfying.

“We’ll certainly play it,” you say. “We’ll need a bit of privacy to immerse.”

His affirmative pulse comes with a lilt at the end. In realspace, this is how Nouri grins.

“I’ve missed Maschou,” Nouri says. “But I think I’ve missed you more.”

Avicenna Park

There is a corner of the royal desert that feels to you like home.

The path is badly marked, the trees pristine and unmodified. The wind makes a racket of the branches and throws flights of dust into your eyes until they stream beige tears.

In this corner of Avicenna Park is Hectare Lab, commissioned twenty years ago under the Royal Family’s Realspace Charter, decommissioned ten in favor of centralized governance. Your work permit, long expired, unlocks the gate for you every morning. A miracle.

You meet Maschou there. Every day should be the day she does not come. To be children together, to happen to be selected under the same Decree, was one thing. But for her to come daily to a decommissioned Hectare Lab, to do what you ask, uncompensated and unenlightened? She helps with both the covert real work and the public front for it—the realspace maps that you sell to private sponsors, affording you both operational legitimacy and income. You expect Maschou to steal the pestilence cultures, the prophylaxis cocktails, the permits, or the thermal cycler, any one of which she could sell on the gray market for enough to live on for a year. Szanna, you would not fault her if she did. She is owed a lot. But she comes. And does not leave, and does not take. For five years, she has come.

It took you half of those years to tell Maschou why you were doing this. What Nouri’d done. Before that, what did she think? And when she understood, what did she think? You see the way she looks at you. And you think you know why she stays.

Florid Park

Hours later, in the middle of the night, when the Agent’s breathing beside you has slowed, you stretch your nanoblocker over your body, arrange the windproofing on top, stand, and urge yourself back to life. Szanna, you are so much more expectant than afraid. You emerge into freezing cold, into pitch dark. You navigate in realspace, using the rough habitat map. In bonespace, you are shivering so hard you’re amazed to be moving forward. You crouch-run the length of your domestic zone. When you find Nouri’s bioshack, you kneel, widen a space in the nanofat. Crawl inside, violently shaking, reckless and punch-drunk with proximity.

In a belated heartbeat, Szanna, it will occur to you that the Nouri you’ve found here is not the Nouri you once knew. This Nouri stirs on his pallet. You pull your blocker as far up your neck as it will go, take a step forward. Not for the first time, you doubt the prophylaxis that Maschou fabbed for you. Neither of you knew exactly what versions of the pestilence might be in Nouri’s colony. Your cocktail is educated guesswork.

“Can I touch you?” you ask from beyond the airgap. “I’m protected.” You sound so dangerously sure.

Finally, his muffled voice in bonespace. Beloved. “Szanna—”

He sinks into quiet and you are drawn by the silence, drawn bodily forward. You’re on your knees when you see the feathered mess he’s holding against his flared nostrils. He is streaked with avian blood and nanofuzz.

“A pre-Upgrade varietal?” you ask. “How’d it get into Florid Park?”

In realspace, his voice is steady. “Park Service calls this a closed system. The pestilence encircled by impervious varietals for miles.” He shifts minutely, creating an overhang of space on his pallet. “But no open-air quarantine could ever be fully tight. Not one enforced by aversion.”

Nouri scoots a little further, Szanna, ’til the space on the pallet is the width of your body. He does not disturb the placement of the dead bird he’s siphoning to diversify his colony. You know that inside of him, something is happening: first, the pestilence reprogramming the new arrivals until they too are the pestilence. Then, that formality dealt with, there’ll be round after round of selection. For more efficient algorithms, new imperatives, a faster colonization drive.

The goal of his colony is to keep Nouri alive forever. A side effect of this goal—swiftly traced to a bug in the orchestration routine of pre-Upgrade varietals, corrected in new varietals during the Upgrade, but never demonstrated to be patchable in an established colony—is making him sick.

“Remember the game I sent you?” you ask, and mark it for him in realspace. “Can you immerse here? With me? I need to show you something.”

“I don’t think I can right now,” says Nouri. “I’m too activated.” You note that he chooses that word, activated, over the other, aroused.

He sets the dead bird to one side and holds out a bloodied hand.

Maybe it’s his lucidity, the fact that he seems there, seems himself. Whatever it is: you let yourself fall. Your knees hit padded nanofat. You fill the space he’s left open for you, let his heat smother the trembling, and you pray that Maschou’s prophylaxis will hold, that the nanoblocker will be better than useless. Because otherwise you are defenseless, Szanna. Are, as you’ve always been.

Avicenna Park

Summer is your season. It turns Avicenna Park rouge and planetary. You return from six months of tutoring at the Royal Science Boarders’ House, a whirlwind of cramming and barely edible canteen meals and experiments failed and retried. This half-year, you’ve taken your first ever round of prophylaxis against the pestilence—and by broad spectrum, against immortality too. Adolescence and prophylaxis are all mixed up in your bones. Nanos are a fact of life now, and so is the mutability of death. Immortality slowly permeates your list of acquaintances, then friends, then distant relatives, dribbling down from the wildly wealthy to the lavishly well-to-do. So far, their gambles are paying off. You know of nobody with the pestilence, but lots of somebodies who won’t ever die.

You’re so tired your first night back from boarders’ that you elect to eat dinner pacing the long carpet in the dining room to keep from nodding off. You split gravied dumplings with a tine, plate balanced on your forearm, while your mother and sister catch you up on their news.

After updates on the weather, the gardening, and any local interest rumor your mother has found credible enough to share, this—“Nouri came by this morning.”

Wakefulness blossoms, brain stem up. “He hasn’t spoken to me in a while,” you say tentatively.

“He said that if you have time tomorrow, you ought to meet him out at Ghosh Gate. He said his day is free.”

Your ribs tighten like a belt, Szanna. His day is free spirals into a hundred lives that Nouri lives, here, where you both grew up, on the border of Avicenna Park. You know he refused his placement at boarders’ house, and also that he has been living with his mother and her younger children, his mother who stuns the neighborhood with her extravagances, her stone-sequined coats and deliveries of handcrafted furniture and her bloodline stake in at least one of Avicenna Park’s lapis mines.

Nouri, the eldest, the forgotten, but forty-three days younger than you, green plum of your heart. (He doesn’t know that. Can’t ever know that.) You meet him in the dripping croaking heat of dusk. He gives you a generous hug that tells how he hasn’t been worrying about this moment all day. The idea of you through his eyes gives you uneasy double vision.

You two enter Avicenna Park through Ghosh Gate. Nouri looks like he’s been sweating in the weather, something thick about his cheeks, his rise of color a desert sunset. His lips are wide and behind them his teeth sparkle. He’s grown up. The effect is intoxicating.

“It’s wonderful to see you,” he says in bonespace. “How has your year been?”

You tell him. About the time you ate an entire celebration cake on a dare and were so severely ill they had to nanoflush your guts in the infirmary. About the group of girls who were unkind because no one in your bloodline had ever received a Nod from the royal family (at this, Nouri rolls his eyes), about the boy you thought you secretly loved (Nouri, attentive, what happened?) but who turned out to be an emotional celibate on exchange from the Royal Priesthood, about the endless rounds of prophylaxis—the transient nanococktails teaching your bones and blood something of resistance—

“Prophylaxis? You?” says Nouri, stopping.

Around you, Avicenna Park is this peach-skin landscape. You’d forgotten the citrus and alkaline scent of the yellow dust, here. An ibis calls out, shrill and short, from one of the many streams burbling through the rocks.

“Yeah, me. I mean, me and everyone. We had no objectors.” You didn’t think this was controversial. “And . . . you?” You spit it out before you have time to be afraid of the answer.

Nouri laughs, now. “Not me.” He half-steps onto a jutting rock, bounds into a circle of dust, stamping two boot prints, and circles back. There’s always been something springy about how he carries his body. Still true, you note, now that he inhabits the body of a man.

“Honestly? I went somewhat the opposite way,” he smiles coyly, and he’s walking over, breathing a little hard, and you stop strolling, and he comes over, and you can smell his skin and see the row of fine hairs between his eyebrows. He licks his lips and you stop breathing. You have dreamed this more than once.

Then he does something you’ve never seen anyone do, only heard about. He furs his tongue against his front teeth, and sticks his tongue out flat as a pounded fillet, and you see them, his colony. Among the pink tendrils of his taste buds, a prismatic wave of metal.

“No,” you say. Because you never thought he’d—because the risk. Because the pestilence. The cerebellum deactivation, spinal fluid clots, loss of sense of smell, ocular colonization leading to visual artifacts, the dun pigmentation of the skin presenting with cyclical fevers and a progressive degradation of executive function . . .

“Do you want to live forever so badly that you’d risk eternity in a body that isn’t yours to control?” you whisper, heartbroken.

Nouri rakes his hair back. His eyes twinkle. “Small risk, big reward. And that makes it a good game,” he says.

Florid Park

The Agent walks you to the immersion theater—a bio-fabbed structure about four times the size of the domestic shacks. You’ve already mapped the outside; today she keys you in. In about half the seats, pestilents are in gecko pose or vertical repose, immersion meditating. The white noise in the background is barely audible. You think it’s supposed to be the sound of the padded drills in a lapis mine, but it might be wind in the leaves.

You’ve hidden last night’s realspace archives, obfuscated your conversation with Nouri, the long stretches afterward when neither of you said a thing—to your guilty conscience, just as telling—but when you ask the Agent for Nouri’s help again, she shakes her head no.

“Do it without help.”

You work, Szanna, your body replaying more than your realspace archives hold. Never before has bonespace felt this much richer than the world of information.

You’re thinking of the hours you spent as close to Nouri as the barrier of skin would allow. Szanna, there’s a tumult inside you. You wonder whether your touch was too intimate, the skin-to-skin interface too perfect, too slick, your prophylaxis too weak.

A note from Maschou snaps you back. “Permit extended.”

And a moment later, the Agent elaborates, “Your assistant sent her approval through. She arrives this afternoon.”

You meet the question in her statement head-on, and with complete honesty. “That’s lucky. I didn’t think she’d make it. We have a lot left to do, and not much time.”

So. Maschou managed to work her personal contacts too. Maschou’s always been resourceful. She could beat an immortal at a game of resourcefulness.

“Your assistant has asked for a walking guide. I will meet her at an outpost midway,” the Agent says testily.

She edges between you and the communal table you’re filling into your map, forcing your hands off the polished, fabbed wood. Every peaked bone in her face, every missing blemish, the oil slick of her nanocolony on the wet dipped crease of her lip, is suddenly yours to pore over. You can’t hide your fascination.

“I don’t trust you, Szanna from Hectare Lab, but I don’t care about you either. Immortality is yours to take or leave, the pestilence yours to risk. My duty is only to protect the parkland.” She hitches her pack, readying to leave. “As a kindness, I remind you to value your life. These unfortunates—” the Agent gestures at the pestilents meditating or communing in hushed tones “—are not in control of themselves. Any one of them could end your life without meaning to.”

She heads for the door. Pauses. “Death must seem a trifling thing to someone like you,” she says, “but even then. It is a trifling thing with no hope of return.”

Do you remember this game from the twentieth century? The armored tank will be protected at all costs. A brick wall surrounds it. A bevy of defenders trawl the game board, hunting intruders. You are an intruder. Your objective is to breach these defenses. Your objective is to eliminate every defender, restore normalcy. Your objective is not to be blown apart yourself.

Bahr Khalyy Openspace

Maschou and Nouri knew each other first. You piece together a mercantile family relation dating back to before your friends were born—Nouri’s mother trading rock lapis through a network that shipped off-world; Maschou’s family managing allowances for the tradership, specializing not in the operational side of this, but in the shadowy art of influence that generated a reliable stream of Royal Decrees and Nods.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Nouri says, slowing as you approach Ghosh Gate.

You’re nine years old, just old enough to think of your life as a ribbon on which you are in motion, one with a beginning and an end.

Last week you’d asked Nouri if you were his best friend, and he said yes, but Maschou a close second. “But who is Maschou?” you asked.

“You don’t know her,” he’d sniped, and a foul-smelling flower blossomed inside your rib cage.

But today, you will know her. Nouri takes you to a dry lake bed called Bahr Khalyy. The kids never choose it over the royal desert, finding the barrenness here boring. But what Nouri shows you is that the openspace is rich in surprise: the eggs of amphibians pearl everything. Gnats cloud the air, iridescent in the beam of his blacklight torch.

He takes you to a hole in a hedge. “I told her to meet us here. Maschou!”

Here she comes tumbling out to the sound of snapping twigs: a girl big for her age, a sprig tangled in her fringe, and with a smile so unguarded that when she meets your eye it takes you momentarily aback. She sends her card in realspace; you’ve got a weird reflex to bounce it. But you don’t. You handshake. She sends a pulse of pleasure.

“How many hedges have you carved into hideouts anyway?” you ask Nouri, shy from the newness.

“You never know when you might need a place to lay low,” Nouri says, pulling you by the hand.

“An immortals’ court,” Maschou corrects him. She turns to you. Her smile is bold. “Check it out inside.”

“Wait,” says Nouri, blocking you with his body. It’s unfair that he’s stronger than you, though you’re the same height. “You have to swear to keep the secret. Hideouts only work if no one knows about them.”

“I promise,” you say. Maschou grins. The three of you Pact in realspace.

Florid Park

As soon as the Agent is gone, you go looking for Nouri.

Inside his bioshack, the air is settled. He’s not there. You emerge again into that glaring light. You check the grilling station. Behind the squat silo of the hospital, a group of pestilents chants in dissonant choir. No Nouri. You swing wide of them, head for the perimeter of the habitat, thinking you’ll go around once, scan for him.

You don’t need to go far. Nouri, there. At the back of a group heading for the tree line with that unmistakable cant of nanofever. You up your pace, catch up, and fall into step with him. Ahead of you, the pestilents walk briskly, favoring their forefeet, that well-documented cerebellum colonization, the overbalanced stride.

You consider your own feet, blistered and weather-burned despite your meticulously high-fastened boots. You consider the shape of your footfall. You think of Nouri’s body right against your own. Nanocolonization takes an instant or a year: it’s programmatic, not proliferative. You look around you. You fear the pestilents and fear yourself.

“I need to talk to you,” you say to Nouri, in realspace. “There isn’t much time.”

“Do you remember the first day of your life?” replies Nouri in bonespace, answering himself without giving you a chance: “Yes. The sun path was twenty-two degrees and four hours; the moons were both waning; the temperature was above average for the day. Rain misted in my hair. My mother was a celestial body.”

“Nouri,” you insist in realspace—you grasp his arm, and in the bravest motion of your life, tug him away from the group, into the dappled shadow of an outlying tree.

(You had no idea what strength to expect of this different Nouri, immortal-in-nanofever Nouri, but he’s so yielding, Szanna. So very like dough. His bones could be jelly.)

“Do you remember the second day of your life?” Nouri asks. “You immediately crawled. You immediately hid. The game began, the hourglass turned.”

“Look at me,” you say with sudden certainty. Your breath mists, swirls into his. His bottom lip is trembling. Nanoburns crawl in elaborate fractals into his hairline. “Take me there. Take me to the hideout.”`

Caesura

Szanna, do you remember this game you’d play? Every day, you’d swap one ugly thing for a beautiful one. You began in the world of information: every item you touched in realspace, you made better. You pored over every archival game from the twentieth century, enriching wikis. You built emulators to run primitive code, added secret levels, kinder enemies. You overlaid several archival layouts of early lapis mines to create fuller composites, added anecdotal waypoints to maps of off-world caravan routes.

Some days you looked to bonespace. You were not as miraculous as a colony of nanos, but you could make the world better in your small ways. You collected replicas of playing cards and game pieces. Printed textured maps on archival paper. Knitted gloves for the lapis miners. Every day you planted a seed. Most were informational, but some were organic. You ended up in your thoughts. You would clear out the ones that hurt, and give their scars several days to scab over. You’d come back from your rough terrain hikes reeking of your body, meet Maschou for mixed fry or dumplings in yellow broth. She held her nose, exiled you to the far side of the table. You went and did not protest. A feeling jabbed your mortal heart, a good feeling, metronomic. It said: beat until you can’t.

And some days, in the distance, beyond these vistas of your life, did you think you spied infinity?

Florid Park

Nouri takes you to a copse of trees gnarled with tendrils of fern. Nanofuzz sparkles on every patch of moss, every brush of kir, in every teardrop of tree gum.

“Is it safe for me here?” you ask in bonespace.

“Safe? Safe is a fallacy,” says Nouri, trudging ahead of you, breathing loudly, dripping fever sweat. You sense him trying to project sobriety, but everything about him is a giveaway. “No one is safe anywhere,” he adds. “Even immortality doesn’t mean safety.”

—In realspace, Maschou opens a tunnel, pings you a locator. She has entered Florid Park by the north gate. You ping a locator back—

“Remember, a Pact is a Pact,” says Nouri, and waves you toward a fern curtain hanging from the interlocking root system of a trio of kir trees, each tree immense, building-sized. “In here.”

The fern crackles with nanofuzz. You cover your eyes and nose, dive through it, bend and crawl, barely breathing.

And in a moment you emerge, Szanna.

What has Nouri built?

An immortals’ court.

Towering hall, bubbly nanofilms moving like animated stained glass on wounds in the tree trunks. Thrones of moss and rock. Intricate tapestries stitched from the delicate bones of birds. The light here is soft and the air rich with sap. Tiles embedded into the earth under your boots are scales from pine cones and scales of kir, dark brown and light, inlaid in hoof patterns around a central medallion.

It’s the work of a lifetime, Szanna. The project of a life that has many chapters left, even if it’s a life warped thin and translucent between two fingers.

You breathe a heavy breath. Your heartbeat is irregular. Gullible, fallible.

“Do you think this makes life better?” asks Nouri, looking around. Even refracted through his fever, the sincerity of his question bruises your heart.

“Immerse with me,” you say softly. It’s quiet here, and safe. You open a realspace tunnel, obfuscate your conversation stream, hide the both of you as well as you can.

In realspace you mark the game again. You flutter the pennants on the condensation poles, rock the gleaming game pieces in their moats. “Maschou and I. We designed this for you. You just answer the questions. If the prize is what you seek? Then the prize is yours.”

“You designed a whole game for me?” asks Nouri. “Why? How long did that take?”

“How long did this take?” you counter, evading, spinning around.

“Years,” he says in bonespace. “Years.”

He says it so sadly you almost forget how many years he has left.

Bahr Khalyy Openspace

The first game Nouri ever showed you from the twentieth century was the paper fortuneteller. He taught you how to make one from the flat papery leaf of the basalt tree growing by the creek in Bahr Khalyy. You were one day older than ten. He was forty-three days younger than you.

It remained your favorite game into adulthood. Out hiking, to distract yourself from cold or blisters, you ordered laser cuts of stiff silks and vegetable paper and oliosheet, dyed pastel colors. You made hundreds. Spelled enough fortunes to fill a royal almanac. One fortuneteller you encrusted with lapis pebbles Nouri’s mother had gifted you. They shone when the origami flared open. You held your fortuneteller pinched tight, a universe before inflation, and asked it about Nouri, about Maschou, about immortality. About every unlived year of your surprisingly persistent life. You picked numbers, picked colors. Picked death, picked life, picked death, picked life.

Florid Park

You open your eyes to Maschou’s face. You think, half-dreaming, that you are at boarders’, that Maschou is here to wake you so you don’t sleep through canteen again. You itch where your skin sticks hot to skin; you itch where pine cone scales have pressed wedges into your hip, into the small of your back. You untangle from an unconscious Nouri and the remnants of the coupled gecko pose you’d both been in, immersion meditating. Your body is sore.

“Szanna,” says Maschou. She reaches out an arm. You take it. Her grip is sure. Has always been.

“We don’t have long,” she says. “They’re looking for you both, but they’re looking out toward Lesha Gate. Let’s head east.”

Maschou pulls you up. Your legs are crowing pins and needles. You do not feel much like yourself. You turn to look at Nouri, twitching, nude, his chest rising heavily. You trace backwards from the last thing you remember, then push forward, analyzing the game you and Nouri just played. Your questions, his answers. About immortality. About the flesh. About desire. About secrets.

But you’re too startled, your placid mind suddenly stormy with fight or flight. You remember playing, but you can’t remember who won.

“Did it work?” you ask Maschou.

Her brow furrows. “Give it some time,” she says. “We’ll know eventually. So will he. Then maybe we can just ask him? Ask him plainly if he’s happy.”

She puts an arm around your shoulder, cloaks your body with Florid-Park-rated windproofing.

“He will live, one way or the other,” Maschou says.

“Thank you,” you say. Sensation begins to return to your limbs.

You cover your eyes and nose as you crawl out between the tree roots.

When you uncover your face, you look behind. The immortals’ court is an absence. A hollow, a heavy appearance. The calm sway of the disturbed fern, the gyring tinsel of its nanofuzz, is the only sign that some misguided someone—here, and everywhere—has been trying and failing to make life better.

You pick your way toward the east gate of Florid Park, Szanna, with Maschou at your side. Living or dying, mortal or not.

About the Author

Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She now lives in North London, where she has perfected her resting London face. Her current interests are croissants and emojis thereof, amassing poetry collections, and coming up with a plausible reason to live on a sleeper train. Sara’s a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have recently appeared in Shimmer and The Dark. You can find more of her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara.

Malinche

Gabriela Santiago

The Eagle Knight came like a star in midday. I looked up, and I saw the profile of his helmet’s beak so sharp against the light, the golden feathers of his wings so bright in the glare of the sun. As though he were Huitzilopochtli himself.

And then he fell.

“What are you doing?”

The Eagle Knight was staring at me, his eyes almost as wild as his helmet-free hair. The light of my lantern cast dancing shadows on his face. He tried to prop himself up, but fell back onto the bed.

“When you die, it will be my duty to dismantle your wings to make useful mechanisms for the village,” I said. I turned my back to him, felt around the other wing for its daughter-of-tlaloc. Ignored the heat of his gaze on my shoulders. My fingers closed around the daughter, a small round pod; prized it away from the struts of the wings. “One of these will power a farmers’ clayslave for a year.”

His voice spat contempt, even through his pain. “What would a peasant girl know of daughters-of-tlaloc and tollani?”

I could have told him of the days I spent in the calmecac out on the frontier, one of the few girls so honored, watching as the priest-scholars conducted their first experiments with tollani. The thin copper wires connecting the potato to that small airtight lantern with windows of pale pink quartz. That burst of light, how my breath caught in my throat as we became small gods in that temple room.

I said nothing.

“I will not die,” he said. Now his voice was a whining plea. “I have a holy duty. I must warn the caravan . . . they must warn the city, the tlatoani . . . ”

His fingers scrabbled more at his blankets, and a deep hacking cough, wet with blood, rose in his throat as he tried to stand. An Eagle Knight, weak as a child before me.

I could feel my own tollani rising in my veins, bright and sparking and heady as octli gulped in secret from my father’s stores.

“Tell me,” I said. “I will pass on your message.”

“Why should—” he began, and then, for the first time that night, he truly looked at me. “Ah. Of course. It is your city too.”

It had been my city, though I had never seen it. We had been rich, had become richer when copper soared in price and our mines in the north had tripled in worth with the spreading knowledge of the ways tollani might be captured in lanterns, or in the daughters-of-tlaloc that could power more wings and mills and clayslaves than any man might desire.

My stepfather lost it all over a round of ullamaliztli.

“Tell me,” I repeated.

The ship creaked and groaned in the wind, men scurrying back and forth, pulling levers and turning gears. Entirely mechanical—not one span of wire, not one spark of tollani. But it flew over the waves, carrying the . . . they were not men.

They wore metal shells like the carapaces of beetles, and beneath, monkey hair sprouted out of skin that glowed with sickly light. They gabbled like monkeys too, when they saw me, and they brought forth their weapon—a sound like thunder and pain, like nothing I have known—they tried to catch me as I fell—

There was such pride in his voice, even then, even dying. I tried to remember what it had been like to feel such pride.

“I promise,” I said. “I will pass on your message.”

All the breath went out of him then, a sigh like the night wind outside the hut, and it carried away the last of his tollani, so that his eyes dulled and his heart slowed and stopped.

What a strange still thing a body is. To once hold an Eagle Knight and all that pride. To now be nothing but spare parts, flesh and bone. Less than a clayslave even, for those I could repair and call to rise again.

And in the morning, I did not say a thing.

I swept the floor of my owner’s house. When I was a child, I was told that it was the sacred duty of women—even noblewomen, such as I would one day grow to be—to sweep the floor. It kept the house clean not just of dirt, but of malicious influences; in that moment when dawn swept up over the horizon, a woman with a broom was a soldier against all the forces of chaos.

Now, I swept the floor only because my owner told me to, and if I did not, I would be beaten.

But once, I had wanted to sweep the floor.

I could remember wanting things, but not as if it had been myself who wanted them—no, it had been some other girl, some bright, loud, foolish girl, jumping up and down, hopping from foot to foot with the whirling force of all the things she desired.

To run away from my lessons and join the pochtecha and journey far and wide, perhaps even to that fabled capitol, Tenochtitlan. Or else to please my parents with my weaving and my lessons, so that they might arrange a good marriage for me and I might have many strong children who would earn honor in glorious battle. Or else so that I might become a scribe, or one of the rare women who stayed on to work in the temples, assisting the priests with their studies. I even wished at times for a life ending in childbirth or in picking up arms—the consolation my place at the warriors’ table in the heavens with the men instead of being consigned to the cold emptiness of Mictlan.

Where did she go, that girl?

I remembered how my mother said, “At least this way you will be fed, Tenepal.” My second name meant “she who speaks with liveliness,” and my mother had always smiled when she said it. She smiled then, but it was stretched tight and strange, and I did not believe I knew her.

By the time I finished the rest of my duties, others had already stripped away the feathers to add adornment to the cloaks and shields of the village, leaving the skeleton of hollow wooden rods and deer sinews and cactus-cloth string and rubber-coated copper wires for me to strip apart, and around them the muscles of small interlocking gears of iron. And of course, the daughters-of-tlaloc, heavy with power.

I dragged out the first of the broken clayslaves set aside until trade or plunder brought us parts to repair her—a field hand, the mechanisms within her legs corroded and crumbling with rust. I removed them and set them aside—perhaps our smith could yet salvage some scrap of iron from them—and attempted to replace them with gears and pulleys from the wings. It was a trickier job than I first supposed, as the replacements were of different sizes and gear ratios, and there was much makeshift jerry-rigging before I could make her walk in a straight line without her legs buckling beneath her.

“You have done good work today,” the priest said over my shoulder. “Will there be any parts to spare for the home lanterns when you are done?”

“It is doubtful, my lord,” I said, keeping my head bowed. “If you have need of the materials, perhaps it might be best that you take them now, and that I wait for another opportunity to finish my work here.”

“And risk our mayor’s wrath?” A dry chuckle. “I think not, little one.”

“More home lanterns could be installed,” I said—though I did not recognize my voice at first— “and much farther from the city square, if I were allowed to look at the son-of-tlaloc beneath the city square. I have an idea—it would take more wire, surely, and greater current of tollani, but if you look at my equations—”

“That is enough, Malinalli,” the priest snapped, and his voice was hard now, granite and marble. “You are good enough with your hands to do repairs. But leave the tollani to those ordained by the gods.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said, bending my head further. Who had spoken those words of defiance? That little girl, perhaps. I often thought her long dead until I heard her voice from my lips.

The next day, the priest and three warriors went into the jungle.

A week later, they returned with the aliens.

The creatures did not remove their armor, and I wondered if it was shelter from our sun, or supplied some element of their native land not to be found on our shores. The parts that could be seen through the armor were pale as the moon, reddening like the blush on a fruit. Their eyes were pale as jade, and their fur glistened like copper and gold.

Their leader was almost human, until he looked at you.

There was ice in his eyes, and lightning. I felt the field of his tollani animate not only his body, but the bodies of his men, moving them to do his bidding as he barked orders in his harsh tongue. There was power here, coursing beneath this strange exterior. He was a son-of-tlaloc, its wires wound tight, turning and turning and sending tollani coursing outward from him.

None of the strangers spoke Chontal, and so they and our warriors had made do with signs until this point. But when they sat down to feast, I was taken from my post. Their ice-eyed leader would speak in his monkey-babble, and then the old man next to him would speak, haltingly, in Nahuatl, and then I would repeat his words in Chontal. And then our mayor would reply, and the process would repeat itself, in reverse.

“We, ah, thank you for the—the, the bounty you have spread before us.”

“We thank you for the bounty you have spread before us.”

I looked around the gathering, at all who were assembled there. Proud provincial warriors, chafing under the dominion of the empire. Farmers grown lean but no less proud under the order of tribute to be sent to the capitol. Priests, stung by the fact that all their knowledge of the workings of tollani came from their conquerors.

And I tasted words like blood pooling on my tongue and pressing against my lips.

I was their slave. They had given me menial tasks beneath a noblewoman, they had beaten me, and now the slightest change of a word I spoke could make them nod, or shake their heads, or leap to their feet with javelins ready.

They were wires and circuits and switches in my hand.

“The Mexica are invaders in this land. They came as beggars before you. Who are they to set themselves up as kings?”

“The Mexica are invaders in this land,” I repeated, and the words were salt rich in my mouth, a swift dagger, lightning. “They came long ago, starving, broken. Yet now they lord themselves over the true sons and daughters of this earth.”

The alien leader’s eyes gleamed, and he leaned forward, and words poured from his mouth like a flooding stream. They came to me through his old advisor, slowly, haltingly, like beads sliding one by one down a chain. He spoke of the gold in the capitol city, a crucial ingredient in a cure for the great sickness that afflicted his planet. He spoke of a vision of the sons of Potonchán fighting side by side with his men, knocking open the storehouses of Tenochtitlan, punishing the foreign interlopers who had forgotten their place and bleeding the natives dry with their tributes and their sacrifices to thirsty gods.

“We will need, ah, servants. Twenty or so clayslaves. Whatever you can spare.”

“They request twenty of our finest clayslaves accompany them.”

Even slowed by the halting speech of the priest, the words were coming too fast. My mind was racing to keep up, to find a weak point, an advantage—

And then they gave it to me.

“We, ah, wish to purchase the—girl slave. As a translator.”

“You will need a new name,” Aguilar, the old one who spoke Nahuatl, told me. “For Hernán to call you.”

I shrugged. “Name me as you wish.”

And so we set out from Potonchán, and I did not look back.

One thought did strike me with something like sorrow: I would not be able to finish the repairs on my clayslaves.

Who would set their broken limbs now?

In the pale light of his primitive lantern there was only the glint of his teeth, sharp like a wolf. Hernán was heavy above me. He did not see me. I could be any woman. I could be any clayslave.

This, then, was not so different.

The strong took what they wished.

They did not notice what the weak stole from them.

“Our commander requires your presence,” Aguilar spat.

“One moment, my lord,” I replied in his own language, rising and following him, my face blank and my heart serene. I could speak it almost perfectly. Aguilar knew that soon, he would no longer be needed. He would be left behind at some encampment, and no longer have the bulk of the army to protect him.

If he had ever been a slave, he would have known better than to let himself become useless.

The scent of smoke grew stronger as we neared the center of the ruined village. There were still smoking embers in some of the places where huts had once been, and bodies lying hacked in half in their doorways. Hernán’s soldiers were rounding up the others, the women, the children, the infirm. They gazed at all around them in shock at all they had lost, their faces pinched tight, their shoulders hunched inward. They could not believe that the strangers had broken the rules of war.

The village had been going to send messengers to Tenochtitlan. They would send none now.

Oh, what was that feeling in my heart? It went so fast, like running hoofbeats, and everything around me was horror and beauty. My hands—my hands were shaking, but why? I longed to pick up a stone—the remnants of the city were beautiful, the fragile carvings of the calmecac, and the beauty made me want to smash them—and I could smash them—

And there was Hernán, casting off his helmet in weariness. His hair was plastered to his skull with sweat. There was a long red line along his cheek, angry against the ghost-paleness of his skin.

“Marina,” he said, “you claimed to have some knowledge of the workings of these infernal devils?” He gestured towards a pile of broken clayslaves. “I have some gunnery officers not unskilled in artificing, but the black magic that powers these clay demons makes Christian men such as they wary. Can you change their workings? Can you make them fight for us?”

My heart beat so quickly that I was surprised it did not burst through my chest; I could feel my blood so surging with tollani that I wonder I did not glow.

“Yes, my lord.” I had to keep my face blank. I had to keep him from seeing. “I could do such a thing.”

“Good,” he repeated, and gazing into the distance, into trees. “I grow tired of listening to Moctezuma’s tributaries telling me that he will not accept a meeting. We will come to him, and if he does not wish to meet then, it will be to his sorrow.”

He did not look at me while he said it. He looked to the trees. He was thinking of those unfaithful soldiers who had not followed him, of the man he had opposed in his own strange power struggles, of the faraway king who would call him a traitor if he did not bring back gold to justify his disobedience. He was speaking to them, not me.

He turned and left without further words, leaving me with Aguilar and the clayslaves. Aguilar began to speak, but I ignored him. He was less even than these smashed fragments of counterfeit humanity.

I ran my hands over their cracked clay skins, stroked their mangled wires and unmeshed gears. Their faces, so empty and lost and somehow plaintive.

Oh, my little lost ones. Oh, my little broken dolls, so eager to serve.

Let Hernán fight his little battles. You will fight for me.

Three months we marched, the autumn deepening, and what a sight we must have been to the inhabitants of Cholula as we swept down upon their city. Hernán and I at the head of the advancing wave, six hundred of the strangers in their heavy armor, riding atop their tall deer and pulling over a dozen of their cannons that shot thunder loud enough to put Tlaloc himself to shame. And shot through them like the warp and weft of cloth were the men of Potonchán and Tlaxcala and Cempoala, who had been won to our side by Hernán’s promises and the honeyed phrases I had put them in. And all around them, their bodies barely scratched by spears and arrows, my clayslaves, shielding them.

At the edge of the city, Hernán halted and called out over its walls, across the expectant hush before the storm of battle. My voice followed his, translating, an echo that rang out over that valley and remained somehow even in the silence, and I felt a roar welling up inside me in response, exultation.

Slowly, haltingly, an old man climbed the steps of the city wall to face us, and gave a harsh croak of surrender.

Hernán turned to me. “Shall we make the empire fear us, my love?”

He was looking right at me. He was looking right at me for the first time, and he saw me, my face left open to reveal my heart, and even if he saw only a fraction of the blood and knife edge joy I felt in my spirit, his own face showed that he recognized it.

“Yes,” I whispered.

We rode into the city, and made it bleed.

“Moctezuma will reply to this message,” Hernán said. There was blood on his face. Mine also. I could taste it when I wet my lips.

We surveyed the city square, packed with the Cholula’s minor nobility. They clutched their children to them, or if they were alone they clutched small treasures and trinkets, or their own arms, as if trying to impart some small measure of warmth. Hernán’s soldiers surrounded them in a tight circle, their tall deer neighing and snapping teeth if any noble strayed too close.

“And how will you send this message, my love?” But I already knew. Some of these people would be cut down. The rest would carry hearts or limbs to Tenochtitlan.

Hernán did not seem to hear me. “I have heard that they slaughter thousands upon the steps of their great temple in the capitol. Is this true?”

Suddenly I was not certain that I had calculated all my variables correctly.

“I have not seen . . . that is, my lord, I have never been . . . ”

“But you have seen sacrifices,” he pushed.

“Yes, my lord,” I said. “It is an honor—it repays the gods for the gift of life, of our tollani—”

He cut me off with an impatient gesture.

“Then let us give your gods a feast.”

In the crowd, was that—no, it could not be—he would have been sent to the capitol by now—he would never have been here in the first place—

And older. Yes, of course. By now, my little brother would be much older.

Hernán raised his hand, and thunder erupted.

My little brother had been solemn beyond his years. He smiled only for me, and even then he would not speak. He was small, so small my mother worried he would not live to see his third year.

Yet somehow he took up more room than me, and so I had to go.

My father lost our fortune, and I was sold into the hands of those who had once been only fit to be my servants.

No one ever suggested sending away my little brother instead.

And so we come to Tenochtitlan, the jewel of the empire, the fulfilled promise of the gods, the sanctuary of the long-wandering Cualha-Mexica.

We crest the hill just as the sun is rising, and in the morning light the buildings look as though they are made of gold. From the way the breath catches in the throats of the aliens, I know they think so.

I have no body. I am made of light, of fire, of tollani. I do not ride but float through the gates of the city, the soldiers around me like the long folds of my great cape.

I have come home, Mother. Are you proud of me? I have made my way home to your birthplace, to my birthright. I am home at last, Mother.

The people on the streets gape up at us, openmouthed, those suave city folk who would have called my family country bumpkins had we come here in my youth. They have never seen such a thing. Not just the aliens, though that would be enough. No, their mouths stay open at the sight of my army.

Clayslaves. Dozens upon dozens. They march in perfect unison, their singular tramp shaking the earth like an immense hand on the drum of the world. They each hold a single sword and what would be oddity in one is menace in a hundred. Their steps are clockwork, their eyes are a cold concession to human form, and stare straight ahead. They have no concept of betrayal.

They are my children, and they are beautiful, and I am bringing them home.

Ah, but this is the part of the story you already know, of course. How could you not? I have overseen the creation of the codices personally.

There was the bureaucrat—and he is only ever just “the bureaucrat”; I made that choice, cut his individuality from the narrative and reduced him to a type, one small piece of my large revenge—whimpering and trembling before Hernán, spouting some drivel about Quetzalcoatl. A child could have seen through this artifice—Moctezuma admitted us only in the hopes of learning our weaknesses.

And here was one weakness already, the light in Hernán’s eyes as I relayed the bureaucrat’s words. Oh, he liked being a god. He liked it a great deal.

(If he had known more of our faith, he might have guessed what was to come. The gods depend on humans, on their sacrifices. The great lean on the small.)

There was the banquet, and surely if you recall no other scene from the codex, you recall this one, lavishly illustrated, dishes piled high with roast dog, tadpole, maize, turkey, fish, mangoes, roast cactus. Ornate cups of strong octli. And the gifts.

The foolish, foolish gifts.

Were I to plot for a thousand years, I could not smear Moctezuma’s name more thoroughly than he did himself, in this moment of naivete.

He gave them gold.

It was what they wanted, was it not? Gold cups, gold plates, gold earrings and necklaces and figurines.

Oh, their eyes at the sight of the gold, like blazing suns set in their faces, their hands twitching eagerly at their sides . . .

Perhaps I should not blame Moctezuma. He was a soft citizen of Tenochtitlan, not of the northern frontier. He did not know what happened when you dangled fresh meat in front of wild dogs.

But in those days, blame rested sweet and warm on my tongue, slid satisfyingly down my throat, burned bright and jagged as lightning in my stomach.

So then there was the pretext. A letter arrived from the coast: a few of Hernán’s allies there had been killed by soldiers of the empire for supporting the Totonacs. Reason enough to take the emperor hostage.

Why should Moctezuma have expected it? He had welcomed them into his home, feasted them, given them honor and gifts.

I could have told him: you must always expect the least likely thing. You must always know that the unwritten rules will be broken. You must never be surprised when your entire world turns upside down.

I could have told him that many, many years ago.

So then the most powerful man in the world was Hernán’s captive, and through him the aliens ruled the city. The people quaked before Hernán as he walked through the streets, issuing his dictates.

And there, so slight as to almost be forgotten, whispering translations, whispering praise, whispering suggestions, changing only the few, the smallest, the most important words—

There, always, was I.

We won, and this should have been the end.

But humans are clumsy things, always outstretching their stories, always lingering on past the end of ink and parchment.

The taste for victory had taken me the way some are taken by coca or octli. It was not a lust for blood, though if blood were spilled in its pursuit I never minded. No, it was victory that I craved, pure and simple, that rising up and up and far above all those who had once towered over me.

At first it was enough to be by Hernán’s side, taking sips of the power that was his. And then later it was enough to step away from him, to organize the distribution of food, of slaves, of gold and other trophies.

And then Hernán left Tenochtitlan—we were, in the end, only one piece of the power struggle he was engaged in across the planet, and his opponents marched ever nearer, bringing censure from his king—and I feared that my hunger would overwhelm me, that I would snatch too much, too fast, that I would blunder my way from my anonymity.

So I turned instead to a different kind of victory.

Tollani.

Tenochtitlan had possessed its secret for generations now, and its wealth lit the city, even the poorest citizens with home lanterns dangling from their ceilings. But beyond its border the people were plunged into darkness. Oh, perhaps a temple here or a mayor’s house there had a son-of-tlaloc in the earth below; perhaps there was occasionally a good enough harvest to charge a few daughters-of-tlaloc to power clayslaves to cut down the maize in the next one. But with these small exceptions, the moon and stars brooked no competition when night fell. After all, sons-of-tlaloc were expensive, and there was only so far the wire could be extended from them before the cost became prohibitive.

So the common wisdom went.

Having already solved the problem of mass-producing daughters-of-tlaloc for my clayslave army, I did not feel that common wisdom had much more to teach me.

And so I turned for a time from politics and instead to my quarters, where I ordered soldiers to bring me wire and star-iron and smiths’ tools—sometimes even the smiths themselves, for neither a noblewoman nor a girl slave has much cause to be taught metalworking. I took care to say little but imply much, and each soldier was convinced—though I never said the words—that I was creating for Hernán a new weapon, one which would surely win their kings’ favor, and their passage home.

I was, of course, doing something much more interesting.

Who says that the tollani must flow only in one direction? Oh, in a daughter-of-tlaloc it made perfect sense. Its huizilopochtli and its xipe totec terminals must always be huizilopochtli and xipe totec, as north must be north and south be south. But in a son-of-tlaloc—

If its tollani could flow north and then south, and then back, and then again, and again—

If you placed a Four Gods Box along the line, sending the tollani not all at once, but cut into pieces with an increased potential difference—

Then only a very thin wire was needed. Then very little power was lost to heat.

Then, suddenly, it became cheap to send light streaming across the empire.

I called it the Two-Lord-and-Lady current, after Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl, who contained all opposites within theirself, and thus created the world.

And, perhaps, I named it after myself as well.

I have made it sound easy. It was not, of course. Nothing worth having is. I sweated and labored, did and redid the calculations. There was a time I had to have a new smith brought in nearly every two weeks, their predecessors executed as they learned too much.

Thank gods it was never difficult to give the aliens an excuse to spill human blood.

And I made mistakes. There were fires. There were poor materials. There were my hands shaking as I took the last of the coca brought imported from the south, needing to stay up one night longer, needing to know the truth, to know I was right, to know that it could be done.

There were broken machines, there were moments I almost forgot myself and screamed at the soldiers to go away and leave me in peace, there was the light of the tollani next to my shaking hands, taunting me with how close the solution must be, if only I could see it!

There were many, many mistakes.

There was the festival.

The people in the streets were joyful. I could hear their laughter, their eager footsteps. I could not see them. How could I? I was in my quarters. I was on a mission.

Hernán was still far way, embroiled in his struggles, little knowing how soon he would need the strength they sapped from him. Moctezuma had begged Alvarado for permission to celebrate Toxcatl.

Alvarado had asked me.

“It can do no harm,” I told him, my eyes downcast submissively. “And while my lord Quetzalcoatl is gone, it might be best . . . ”

He decided then, the moment I said the god’s name. If I had said “Hernán” it would only have fired his determination to forbid it, cast in stone his desire not to be overshadowed by his commander.

But I said “Quetzalcoatl,” and that made him think of thousands of chests cut open, hearts offered up to the gods. Made him remember how many of us there were, and how few of them.

Sometimes, it was even easier to direct people than clayslaves.

I gave so little thought to it. I had so many more important things to pursue.

And so Toxcatl began.

You have seen the codex. There is no point in telling this part of the story.

It was important to keep Alvarado on my side, so I smiled and pretended to believe him when he said he had only consented provided that there were no human sacrifices, and that none carried any weapons. I agreed that there could have been no other action than that which his valiant men had taken. I concurred that while the massacre was regrettable, these savages must learn their lesson.

I smiled, and nodded, and pretended I did not see the stolen jewelry draped over the aliens: the necklaces of gold, silver, pearls, mother-of-pearl.

And the taste of my victory over the flow of tollani was ashes in my mouth.

The massacre called Hernán quickly back to Tenochtitlan. But it was too late.

Events had been set in motion, and I had been too blind to stop them.

There were riots. Hernán pushed Moctezuma out on a balcony, demanded that he calm the people.

Moctezuma had never had to calm people before. No one had dared question his power.

His body was left like a crumpled rag in the corner of his apartments, the blood staining the floor below, a broken clayslave that no daughter-of-tlaloc could bring back to life.

The aliens’ tall deer buck and rear, the whites of their eyes wide and panicked as the spears fall like rain on us, trapped on the Tlacopan causeway. A soldier to the right of me falls with a scream that becomes a gurgle, a javelin buried in his throat. There is so much screaming that I almost cannot hear the sound of my clayslaves shattering, ceramic shards bursting outwards under the blows of the people of Tenochtitlan. They have remembered who they are, and they are coming for the aliens and traitors.

Are you ashamed, Mother? Your daughter is fleeing the city of her birthright.

A javelin slams into the skull of the alien to my left, and blood splatters across my face.

Tell me, Mother, are you ashamed to see me driven from the city like a common whore?

“Onward!” Hernán cries, grabbing my reins slick with blood and viscera. “We must make it to Tlaxcala!”

Behind us, the backguard is falling, has fallen, is being hacked to pieces, is a river of meat and blood. I imagine I can see light glinting in the blood, the lost gold and jewels, the lost artillery.

I dig my heels into my tall deer, and an arrow clangs off the shield Hernán has raised over my head.

I will be back, Mother. I will be back.

Months later, I came back to a city of the dead.

We were ghosts.

Our footsteps rang too loud in the streets. The walls were lined with dead. New walls had been built of bodies stacked like stones. The bodies were covered in sores that wept, and the stench was a living thing that wrapped its body around the buildings and sank its claws into my flesh and pulled me down, down, down into the dirt.

Even the aliens were silent. Even they had never seen so much devastation.

We entered a house. A commoner and his family lay on the ground. Their features were crowded and melted and blurred from the oozing spots.

We left.

We entered another house. It was the house of a noble, richer than ever my family was, and so brightly painted that the colors seemed to sing.

All of the household were dead, and their corpses make no prettier a picture than those of the commoners.

The first survivors rose like wraiths at the edge of our sight, thin and shaking as they propped themselves upwards, their mouths gaping in soundless pleas for water. I bade the soldiers attend to them, and I wondered what had spared them? What spared the aliens? What spared me?

And then I saw the other survivors.

They had always been there, but they only now began to move.

The clayslaves.

They had marched behind us the entire time, slowly, steps faltering as their daughters-of-tlaloc dripped their last dregs of tollani into unoiled gears and springs, powered by small-tlalocs slowly being drained of energy. They stared with their unseeing eyes of malachite. They held their earthen hands up to me.

They blended into the walls, and no one else saw them but me, and no one else saw what I planned to do with them.

I waited until Hernán’s return.

He saw me when he entered, and he paused one second at my smile, but he did not see the clayslaves with the clay carefully chipped from the palms of their right hands, their wires exposed.

The strong do not see the weak.

This is my favorite page of the codex. The clayslaves rise—the weavers, the potters, the field hands, the scribes—their right hands grasping at the skin and armor of the aliens, the great torrents of tollani coursing through them with such strength that they seem almost pushed off the page.

There was no time for a proper sacrifice, and so the dead were tied with weights and cast into the lake, and the still barely living were dragged up the steps of the Great Temple and their beating hearts cut from them in the old fashion to feed the gods and cause them to smile on our enterprise. It was priests who did this last work, for already my clayslaves were busy on the next task, smelting ore and melting metal instruments down, searching out copper and iron wiring in every part of the city and bringing it to the craftsmen’s quarters, where the dead craftsmen’s clayslaves drew it into long, fine wires. These wires were picked up by other clayslaves and taken to the borders of our city, where they were woven into a great series of fences, nearly invisible, but coursing with tollani drawn from the turning wheel of the newly repaired son-of-tlaloc in the Great Temple.

Oh, how the aliens thundered across the bridge on their tall deer, the glint of their carapaces in the sun as though they were a stream of silver. Clayslaves shot arrows for the look of it, and they came all the faster, the wooden beams glancing off that armor, that thick, strong, impenetrable, metal armor—

They hit the first row of fencing and there was a scream, and a flare of light, and the sweet scent of sizzling fat—

And others broke past them, but there were so many gates—and some took to the water, but they should have looked to see the fish floating dead on its surface, the wires dangling down to its depths—

The clayslaves took those last few that fell from their horses before that last gate, smote them with their exposed hands—

And watching it all, clasped tight in the left hand of my personal clayslave, was Hernán.

“You taught me much, my lord. You had great weapons, true, and we never could have stood against your plague, but even without these you might have triumphed. Your genius was your alliances. The empire made too many enemies with its old habits of sacrifice.” I let my hand wander down Cortes’ face, tracing the rough skin. “And yet the gods must be thanked. How are we to reconcile?”

Hernán glared at me from where he was bound, tears streaming down his face from the pain that I could not entirely keep at bay with coca leaves, the rock beneath him already long bloodstained even without that shed by his exposed heart, his chest shredded by clay left hands.

“You have a cold heart, Marina,” he said through gritted teeth. “I have often wondered if your people did not sacrifice it for you, long ago.”

“I am not cold, my love,” I said. “Have I not given you a glorious last sight to behold?”

Hernán looked out from the pinnacle of the Great Temple, Tenochtitlan spread out in ruins like a body hacked to pieces. “I see nothing.”

He never had.

But perhaps I wanted him to, for I answered:

“Tenochtitlan has become a city of ghosts, but life will spring from it once more. We shall be as the king in the story Aguilar told me, waiting across the sea for the time that we are needed.” I left him behind on his pedestal for a moment to gaze out at my city, swarming with clayslaves, and dotted with a few pockmarked humans. Oh, my city. “There is some strength in the survivors we do not know. Our priests will study it and unlock it, as we unlocked the tollani of copper and iron. Our children will inherit this strength, and our children’s children, and we will build clayslaves until each house in this city is full once more. Across the sea your name will be forgotten until the day we come in our ships, bringing cleansing lightning to your land of death and disease. And home we will bring our prisoners, and sacrifice them atop our temples, and the gods will suckle at this water of life, and we will not provoke our neighbors.

“But do not think us ungrateful for what you brought us. We will not be wasteful.

“This will be a new age.”

Hernán’s heart jumped in its cradle of flesh and bone, its tempo speeding as I expounded my plans.

“You bitch,” he whispered. “You whore bitch.”

“You will die, my love,” I said, and I kissed him, and the blood as he bit my lip was sweet, as sweet as resistance always is compared to surrender. “You will die, but the tollani will keep your heart beating for months, and the gods will drink long and deep and delight in it. You will be a slow feast to be savored.”

“I loved you,” and the words were a demand to restore a world that I had already killed.

“Your love is dominion and death,” I said. “I thank you, but I do not accept it.”

And then I cut his throat.

I pulled his heart loose from the shelter of his chest, settling it in a new cradle of copper wire before him where it beat, evenly and ecstatically and for me, for the gods, for the future of Tenochtitlan.

He saw me then. He saw all of me.

I kissed him once more as the dawn light spilled over my city.

“I know it hurts, my love,” I whispered against his lips. “It is the birth of a new sun. And birth is always painful.”

About the Author

Gabriela Santiago is a writer, performer, and museum professional living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota. A graduate of Macalester College and the Clarion 2013 writing workshop, her short fiction has previously been published in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!, and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror!, among others. She is also the creator of the annual science fiction cabaret Revolutionary Jetpacks. You can follow her @LifeOnEarth89 if you enjoy retweets of everything Katy Manning has ever said.

Staying with the End of the World:
SF Futures of Hope during Ecological Devastation

Eleanna Castroianni

By the end of the twenty-first century we might lose the majority of all species. Worse, this widely read academic paper claims that we have only about a decade left before facing irreparable consequences of climate change (that is, before everyone faces them. The underprivileged already do).

Landscapes of ruination constitute the effects of what some call the Anthropocene: a geological epoch in which humans have become a determining force of the planet’s future. Ecological change also has vast social consequences, creating waves of environmental refugees and geographies of uneven development and ecological injustice. McKenzie Wark defines the Anthropocene in a striking way: it is “a new metabolism” in which the waste products do not return so that the cycle can renew itself.

These landscapes of ecological devastation feature prominently in works of science fiction as writers of the genre have often been concerned with futures that are the direct consequence of today’s actions. As early as J. D. Beresford’s “The Man Who Hated Flies” (1929) to Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels, SF has been, in Wark’s words, “a kind of realism of the possible” that imagines environmental futures like no other fiction genre.

In such a dark ecological landscape, how does one sustain hope for the future?

And, if one writes about it, how can one imagine a realistic possibility of a recovering future on a damaged Earth?

Learning to Stay with the Trouble

Anthropologist Anna Tsing speaks of a “patchy capitalism” that can no longer promise progress; it only extends devastation. The failure of its promises renders precarity the only common feature of all creatures on Earth. This shared precarity is key: it can create new, unexpected alliances. For example, in places suffering from environmental injustice the local human community has more to gain by aligning with the local nonhuman species.

With this in mind, biologist and cultural theorist Donna Haraway suggests steering clear from efforts of restoring the Earth’s past condition (we are, after all, beyond a certain point of no return). Instead of ambitiously hoping to undo the trouble we have made, she recommends that we commit to what she calls a partial recuperation of our world. This partial healing is guided by (sometimes unexpected) collaborations between species. These species we live with and die with are the species we need to relearn how to be with, if we wish to build more livable futures. In other words, we need to learn how to stay with the trouble.

What is “Trouble”? “Trouble” is a force that adds layers and creates entanglements that further complicate our world. Capitalism, colonialism, our uses of technology and, of course, climate change are all examples of troublemakers, makers of realities that add complicated, hard-if-not-impossible-to-undo layers to our existence. Staying with the trouble is about finding ways to more livable lives without ignoring the effects of the damage we have caused.

Deborah Bird Rose writes in Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics of Decolonization that white settlers brought with them an idea of time: Future. Future became a justification for ruthless ambition and projects of destruction; a rationale to ignore the extinction of peoples and ecologies as collateral damage to progress. Trouble is often created by looking towards the future, the topic SF readers and writers speculate about. Reconsidering how we look at the future might be one way not to undo Trouble—since this is not possible—but to create collaborations between the subjects affected by Trouble and work together towards these more livable futures.

How do we get there?

What Stories We Choose to Tell

Haraway also speaks about the importance of storytelling. She says that this is a time of urgencies. Not emergencies and the pending apocalypse they entail; a time of urgencies means a time when we must think. For Haraway, these urgencies need new stories, new concepts. New ways to tell the story of our world.

What has been the story we have been telling ourselves so far? Ursula K. Le Guin and Haraway would agree that this is very often the story of Man the Hero who alone overcomes all difficulties, especially those imposed by nature. This story places humanity on top of a world it is only part of. Shifting our storytelling practices means telling stories of us being not in the world, but of the world. Shifting perspective means thinking with other species. Although “Anthropocene” sounds like a suspiciously anthropocentric name, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that considering humanity as a geological force actually blurs the distinction between natural and human history. It forces us to think of history in new ways.

Changing how we think means changing the story of ourselves that we tell ourselves. SF would be ideal to achieve this, right?

Yet much of old and new SF specifically relies on human exceptionalism: humanity conquering space, humanity overcoming all odds—some of them environmental. For Le Guin, science fiction is the myth of technology we tell ourselves and the fiction of this myth is either triumph or tragedy, either conquering the stars or creating the apocalypse. Indeed, Amitav Gosh notices that environmental fiction, SF or not, often is a narrative of destruction where some survive and that the purpose of these stories is to make us feel better about ourselves. He argues that, effectively, we have entered an era when fiction conceals rather than articulates the issues of our time. Climate fiction often only reassures our worries rather than urging us to think. One reason for this apparent impasse would be the concepts we’re using to express concepts: the Man the Hero backstory of many (although not all) stories.

A more grounded approach to the future—the par excellence subject matter of SF—would not be about one person’s survival in a destroyed Earth. It can be about figuring out how to live with the trouble we have caused on this planet we share with other species. This is an already existing narrative that we need more of, urgently.

Stories as Multispecies Bundles

Le Guin had a theory on how to make SF more grounded, more realistic: the carrier bag. A concept borrowed from natural history, it describes storying as a carrier bag, a bundle holding things—a technology probably much older than sharp blades, much more essential to everyday life. The carrier bag represents another way to tell stories. Instead of a Hero making the future with their bare hands, the carrier bag collects. It contains a bunch of elements, entangling horizontally. It is relational, communal, has no Heroes. It is the story of many people and many species. Things exist in relation to each other and not to illuminate a Hero’s achievements. Consciously redefining our stories about science and the future as “carrier bags” could make our SF more about how we can live with the trouble.

The carrier bag of fiction also points to alternative modes of storytelling. Le Guin says that the elements contained in the bag might be in conflict—the dear element of contemporary Western storytelling—with each other, but a narrative is not reduced to conflict. A story is not its conflict, nor is it necessary to have one in order to be a story. I have good news: these carrier-bag narrative modes already exist all around us. They have survived in oral traditions (where Heroic narratives were also born, yet coexist with numerous folktales that do not rely on conflict or rising action, but on emotional and social thresholds that signify changes instead). These narrative modes also thrive in shorter form, where their articulative power is often more potent than in novels. They also thrive in shorter and longer fiction from underprivileged and marginalized communities and in all the places where these perspectives meet. It is more vital than ever to learn how to listen to those voices.

SF can do more than Man the Hero—it is already doing it, in fact it has been doing it since the beginning. The only difference is that, in our urgent times, we need to notice more, think more; to consciously use the tools of this tradition to teach ourselves the living-with other species, the staying-with the trouble. The growing recognition of the richness in SF writing, expanding internationally and across marginalized subjects and communities, contains the very elements of the carrier bag. Part of our mission as writers, editors, readers, is to learn and teach how to read these stories, how to see the backstory behind the story, to see the value in an SF story that uses narrative modes different than those we have been used to. It is about rewiring our brains, about finding the new concepts telling concepts.

Writing SF That Stays with the Trouble

Older work, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as well as recent work (most notably The Sixth World series by Rebecca Roanhorse, as well as a number of short stories appearing in anthologies and SF magazines) cast rays of light on the methods, crafts, and arts we need to stay with the trouble; on how to relate in post-disaster worlds.

My favorite among these is Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, an anthropological account of the Kesh, the people that live in the far, far future of California. Its structure is unique: threaded by one longer narrative (the story of Stone Telling) the book is bits and pieces—poems, folktales, notes on food and clothing, even musical scores of folk songs, painting a world where humans and other species have developed new relations with the world. These bits create smaller narratives within and along the longer narrative, smaller stories within stories, which one can discover if one is mindful to notice the relations. It is the written account of a fictional oral culture, so the modes of storytelling are often oral too. The book is a partial account of a world recuperating from damage—to echo John Scalzi in his introduction of the book, it is not a utopia, but certainly a place I would love to live. Truly a carrier bag of a book.

John Crowley’s lesser known yet thrilling work, Engine Summer, is a dreamy account of a quiet life after ruin with unexpected animal-human collaborations at its heart. In the time of the novel, our Anthropocene world is but stories upon stories, wrapped in more stories, and then myths, so that the entire novel seems, sometimes, a bunch of entirely charming (although bleak) scraps of our world, wrapped in the tattered memories of those who will live many years later. This is very much a novel about collective memory: how we recall a past so far away we can only remember it as myth, but also how we have internalized what this past taught our worlds.

How to Nourish Radical Hope

“We need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish—again, or maybe just for the first time—on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered”—Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p.116

By the end of the twenty-first century we might lose the majority of all species. This extinction will leave traces, as previous extinctions did. Like the memory of an extinct bee that is preserved in the orchid species whose flowers resemble the female bee.

These are memories of relational lives. These histories of the dead existing along with the living can tell us stories about how to live again, together with other species.

The idea of “living with the trouble” contains, with no doubt, hope. It tells us that partial recuperation is okay and that it is possible. It is what Jonathan Lear calls radical hope: a kind of hope that “anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” Radical hope is what has enabled us to face the end of our worlds many times. As Arkady Martine mentioned in a recent article, everyone’s world is ending all the time. We have faced ends before; this is not new, at least for us that have been part of communities that have faced deeply traumatic ends. Suyi Davies Okungbowa, writing on the socioeconomics of the post-apocalypse, says that the underprivileged have experienced disasters many times and so they are more likely to face forward rather than yearn for a lost past. Radical hope is about our current ways of life ending, while there is faith in a future subjectivity that does not yet exist.

Hope is not optimism; it is about acquiring the skills on how to live with current and future trouble. SF becomes a way of illuminating the already existent ways of being and storying, to help us hone these essential skills in a way science itself cannot. Isabelle Stengers writes that SF stories might be the “missing thought experiments” of science that dare to explore the “settled, authoritative distribution between the possible and the impossible” and, thus, they are a way to provide precisely what scientific imagination demands: exploring our capacity to imagine other possible ways to exist.

About the Author

Eleanna Castroianni is a writer, poet and oral storyteller from Greece. A cultural geographer by training, Eleanna tells stories from the margins of history and the far futures of the Anthropocene. Their written work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. They live in Athens, Greece, with a growing number of string instruments.

Science Fiction Heist:
A Conversation with Derek Künsken

Arley Sorg

Science meets space opera meets heist in Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Evolution series. It all starts when con man Belisarius Arjona—a homo quantus (his mind and body have been engineered to be able to see directly into the quantum realm) and his “ensemble-cast” crew have to move a squadron of secret warships across an enemy wormhole. Trouble—and lots of cool science fictional ideas—ensues.

Derek Künsken left science to work with street kids in Honduras before joining the Canadian foreign service. Now, he writes science fiction in Gatineau, Quebec. To his surprise, his first novel, The Quantum Magician was nominated for the Aurora, the Locus, and the Chinese Nebula, and has been or will be published in Japanese, French, and Chinese. Its sequel, The Quantum Garden, will be on sale in mid-October. His latest story, “Tachyon Hearts Cannot Love,” is a Petit Prince-type story of dealing with heartbreak and will run in the Mar/Apr issue of Asimov’s.

Your first short story sale was “Tidal Maneuvers,” published in On Spec in 2006. You recently had “Ghosts of Ganymede” published in the January 2019 Clarkesworld, and had a number of stories between them. Has your writing changed since that first sale? Or your approach to writing/publishing?

After “Tidal Maneuvers,” I sold a story to Asimov’s, but followed it up with a dry period. The next three years netted me a lot of rejection letters. One from Sheila Williams said, “there’s not enough story here.” That feedback was one of four or six important ones in my career that triggered an epiphany. In this case, I looked back on my previous work and realized that the layers, the symbolism and themes in my stories were thin, or worse, not even there. Since then, I’ve tried to attach multiple meanings to story elements, and to link them by multiple connections. Any story can still be read as a series of events, but for readers who want a bit more to ponder, I hope my stories now offer more. This is true, I hope, for “The Ghosts of Ganymede.”

Are there themes or topics that often come up in your short fiction? “The Ghosts of Ganymede” is full of tension; cold, rocky imagery creates a sense of strangeness and bleakness, while adding to the tension. Do you vary things like style, voice, and so on, or is there a consistency to your writing that readers will always recognize?

I feel like I’m not done exploring the cruelties humans inflict on each other. Whether it’s magical street kids in my PodCastle story “Juan Caceres in the Zapatero’s Workshop” or the Puppets in The Quantum Magician or honor killings in my PseudoPod story “The Dog’s Paw” or the refugees in “The Ghosts of Ganymede,” I suspect I’m trying to come to terms with the cruelty.

On style or voice, I think I’m able to vary voice sometimes depending on whose point of view it is, but I think I also have an authorial voice that I default to (to my disappointment; I’m often envious of writers who create captivating, fascinating narrative voices).

For readers who haven’t read “The Ghosts of Ganymede,” what is it about?

In a nutshell, Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees are resettled to Ganymede to found a corporate outpost after their nuclear war left both countries uninhabitable. On Ganymede they find quantum ghosts of a species gone extinct. The ghosts exacerbate tensions between the refugee groups, and also constitute a scientific mystery the refugees have to figure out before they can make a home.

Are there risks or challenges specific to writing characters from other cultures, such as Eritrean and Ethiopian, and how do you manage these challenges?

Of course! I think it’s easy to misrepresent the feelings, concerns, attitudes, and values of people other than you. I did a great deal of research on the cultures, and specifically set the story about 150 years in the future to give me a bit of a buffer for inevitable cultural change. But at the same time, I’ve worked with Canada’s refugee program for almost a decade, one which at times included refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia. I was very happy to hear that in the last few years, relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia were normalizing, but for this story I needed peoples who were culturally close, and yet had histories of conflict, so I projected some past conflict and tension into a future story. The Sub-Saharan Union, a future federation of large states in Africa, featured prominently in both The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden. In the case of the Union, their culture is five hundred years in the future, so I had more latitude to imagine where cultural fault lines might evolve.

You also have a webcomic, Briarworld, that you put together with Argentinian artist Wendy Muldon: “A Flash Gordon-esque world where our jetpack-wearing mercenary Manuela, with the help of her cousin Teresita, would try to rescue a wayward prince Simon from his captor, Sheriff Joaquina on Briarworld.” Can you talk a bit about the ways in which writing the webcomic is different or similar to other work?

Thanks for bringing up Briarworld! It’s been a lot of fun to work on, and is certainly a different creative experience from prose. In a short story, I’m the writer, casting director, director, and set designer. Writing a webcomic or a traditional comic book makes me the writer, but the artist is the director, special effects expert, lighting and sound tech, set designer, and so on. And Wendy Muldon is amazing at all of those things. Her art is light, energetic, emotive. The empathy in her art forced me to rethink the kinds of stories I wanted to tell with her. Wendy is going to have a huge career in comics and illustration.

How does your background in molecular biology or your work for the Canadian Federal Public Service impact your writing?

I spent seven years studying the biology and biochemistry of the really tiny, which I think gives me lots of inroads into making aliens, or genetically-engineered humans! I think it gave me some anxieties too. I’m sure that climate scientists have trouble sleeping at night. Or nuclear physicists find themselves imagining the apocalypse because they know exactly how it would go down. My professional scientific anxieties relate to what the rich and the majority will do to the poor and the minorities with the power of genetic engineering. The scariness of those anxieties found their way whole cloth into The Quantum Magician in the forms of the Homo quantus, the mongrels, and the Puppets.

I worked for fifteen years as a Canadian public service official, about five of those on diplomatic postings to Latin America, and another six of them in refugee policy in Ottawa. Policy analysis is one of those jobs that rewards the clarity of scientific thinking, the boiling of problems down to their essentials and being able to communicate them clearly. It also teaches you how decisions are made, how government serves the public, and sometimes the limits of governmental levers. I think many of the moral and social problems I try to tackle in my novels and short fiction benefit from the kind of clarity I learned in a policy analysis environment.

Does your approach to writing change if you are working on a shorter piece of fiction?

I think all world builders enjoy a big canvas, whether the novel or the novel series, because any exploratory detour is fair game as long as it’s executed well and survives the editor. I write short fiction with the drastically reduced size of canvas in mind, though. My natural short fiction length seems to be about 10,000 words, and going much longer than that risks not getting published. I think I can do a lightly world-built story in 5,000-6,000 words, so I guess about half of any story of mine is setting?

Many writers put all their hopes into one project and will feel like giving up if it doesn’t hit the measures of success that they are looking for. Was there a point at which you considered giving up on writing; or, how did you keep hope alive?

I was raised to think that hard work and practice leads to results, so no rejection letter ever made me think of stopping. I got fifty rejections before my first acceptance and if we don’t count comic books, I’m probably at about 350 rejections and counting in my career to date. Every rejection is disappointing, but I knew if I just kept at it, I would eventually learn.

“It” and “eventually” are probably the most important words in that last sentence, by the way. What should we keep at? It’s not just writing. If I’d only written, I’d still largely be writing the same way I’d been writing when I was 30. I feel I had to keep at the reading, broad reading, deep reading, analytical reading, reading that deconstructs and reverse engineers. I also had to keep at building my community. I don’t mean the kind of networking we all feel is gross. I mean meeting other writers whom I could encourage and who could encourage me, writers whom I could critique and who could critique my writing. So, I could get better. And writers who would introduce me to their friends and writers I could introduce to my writer friends. Because we all need all the support we can get; I’m very much about helping those around me.

How did The Quantum Magician (or perhaps the series, The Quantum Evolution) start for you? What was the inspiration and did the direction change after you went deeper into writing the books?

I subscribe to the idea that one of the best ways to start a new project from scratch is to make a list of all your favorite reading/watching/listening experiences—greatest hits of scenes, characters, climactic moments, etc., and to look for commonalities. I did that in the summer of 2014 while I was camping.

I knew I wanted to try to make a person with quantum perceptions, inspired by a short story of Stephen Baxter’s, and that I would probably call the novel The Quantum Magician. And due to reading collections by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, I knew as well that I would like to get to a point where my Asimov’s and Analog stories would be in the same universe.

The possible interactions between the cultures in my short stories were tantalizing. I wondered about how to put together the Sub-Saharan Union from my novella “Pollen From a Future Harvest,” the Homo eridanus from “Beneath Sunlit Shallows” and the skates from “Schools of Clay.” I had a lot of new ideas too. I wanted to expand my Quebecois pan-stellar empire. And I wanted to do a heist, because I really enjoy heist stories. And I wanted to work through some of my worries about the risks of genetically engineering humans, which manifested in their worst form in the Puppets.

I started to get a lot of possible ideas, more than just one novel, and many short stories and novelettes. I spread the most likely character-plot sequence out and found I probably had enough for 3-4 novels, and started shaping The Quantum Magician. The rest of the ideas I left on the side, and some of them became The Quantum Garden. I’m (very, very slowly) writing The Quantum Temple right now, but it isn’t due for a while, so my Act II problems are sort of staring me in the face, telling me to work on other things. But most of the origin conception of the shape of the story was there before I started drafting the first novel.

The Quantum Magician introduced readers to con man extraordinaire Belisarius Arjona, who assembles his crew for a science fictional heist/smuggling job. Book 2, The Quantum Garden, is scheduled for October 2019. Where does the story take Belisarius and the reader?

If The Quantum Magician is structurally an Ocean’s Eleven in space, then The Quantum Garden is a bit of a space opera Back to the Future. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say The Quantum Garden opens with the Congregate nuking the Garret, the home of the Homo quantus. To save his people, Belisarius needs something from forty years in the past, in the history of the Sub-Saharan Union that I created in my novella, “Pollen From a Future Harvest.” To do that, he needs the help of Major Iekanjika, whom he didn’t leave on exactly wonderful terms at the end of the first novel. I’m very happy with the way the second book turned out. I hope readers feel the same way :)

What is your favorite thing about The Quantum Evolution? What was the hardest thing about writing it, and what do you really want readers to know about it?

I have a lot of favorites. My writing process is to throw all the favorites together. I’m a sense of wonder junkie, so all the weird space and science and alien places, and all the different ways different subspecies of humanity will experience the world are my jam. While writing and editing, I loved living in Stills’ head. In Marie’s head. I loved trying to balance Belisarius’ conflicting internal worlds. I loved writing parts of the Puppet Bible and the Way of the Mongrel. And who doesn’t like to write a heist?

On the hard side, I really don’t like hurting my characters. That’s probably a professional liability for a writer? In The Quantum Magician, Will Gander got the worst of it, but he knew he was the fall guy. He just hadn’t known how far he would have to fall. In The Quantum Garden I hurt Belisarius and Iekanjika more deeply than I hurt Gander, and that didn’t make me feel good. That’s something I have to get over? Characters are just electrons in a hard drive, but still I find it hard to hurt people or watch them get hurt. That more than anything else is probably why I have a hard time watching TV and movies.

What else are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

I really want to talk about it, but we’re finalizing some details in one of the contracts, so I have to sit on it officially for a bit. We’ll probably be able to announce in late September.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

The Future of Shame and Hope:
A Conversation with L.X. Beckett

Arley Sorg

Not all is bad and terrible and grim in the future. Sometimes disaster means change, and change means growth, and growth means a future full of cool ideas and good-hearted people. Hopepunk as a genre creates an opportunity for writers to explore positivity and kindness within the context of science fiction. Beckett’s “hopetopia” does just that, offering a kind action hero in a grounded but optimistic vision of the future.

Cherub “Rubi” Whiting is a VR action star turned lawyer. Luciano “Luce” Pox is an embattled client, said to be outspoken, controversial, and downright rude, in a society where bad behavior has social and financial consequences. But when Rubi shows up to their first in-person meeting in Paris, Luce is missing. Worse, the authorities think Luce is an ecoterrorist. He may be on the run from the authorities, he may be under psychological attack, or he may be caught up in a far-reaching conspiracy. Whatever the case, Rubi has to find out what’s really going on and, perhaps more importantly, who Luce really is.

L.X. Beckett is a “feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherin” science fiction author and editor. Their novella, “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” a biting critique of the gig economy, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July/August 2018 and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4. Their novel, Gamechanger, is scheduled for publication with Tor Books in September 2019. They live in Toronto, Ontario with their wife, Kelly Robson.

What books did you read growing up and how did that transition into writing?

The first chapter books I read were biographies of famous American women, from a series written for school-age kids. They mostly fell into three categories: authors, the wives of presidents, and suffragettes. (In the latter case, the books almost never actually talked about the suffragette/feminist part.) So I read about Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Jane Addams, Clara Barton, and Dolley Madison. A single book from the Lives of the Saints series had also crept in there . . . and that one was about Joan of Arc.

The cumulative effect was to make me deeply interested in history, perhaps especially US history, and to give me an idea of women as authors, warriors, movers, and shakers. (And yes, occasionally martyrs.) People, basically. Despite the fact that marrying a president has never been one of my ambitions—the effect was to create a sense of possibility. It certainly never occurred to me that I couldn’t or shouldn’t write!

When I was about seven my mother handed me A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. A few years after that, I was reading whatever I could get my hands on—school library books plus whatever bestseller was lying around the house. I seesawed from Nancy Drew mysteries and The Witch of Blackbird Pond to Roots and Jaws and Raise the Titanic!. Then on to Andre Norton! (Also there was a lot of crime fiction and horror in the mix.)

This sometimes makes me a writer who wants to be all genres, all the time. I write SF hopetopia thrillers, procedural eco-fantasies, and horror stories about time travel.

How did you develop as a writer? Did you take classes or use crit groups or did you just read tons and try to learn from what you read?

Both! I was writing and submitting short stories to places like Asimov’s from the time I was 16. But in time I went to Clarion West because I just didn’t feel like I was getting better fast enough. And a few years ago I started feeling strongly that I wanted another level-up, so I embarked on an MFA in creative writing.

Has your focus always been speculative fiction or have you/do you write other kinds of fiction as well?

It was only after I felt like I had figured out how to write a good speculative story or novel that I branched out. The first experiment has been writing straight up literary mysteries, sort of Canadian versions of the books I love by Brit crime deities like Tana French and Minette Walters. I wanted to see if I could write a murder story without mashing it up with ghosts, spaceships, or a time warp.

Now, because I have dipped my toes back into going to school, I have recently had lots of opportunities to write other things: literary flash stories and TV pilots and horror movies and poetry and creative nonfiction pieces. There’s a whole pile of experiments in progress sitting on my desk, waiting to see which one I will dive into next. But all of that takes second seat to my SF writing—the current book, specifically.

How does your background in acting and theater impact your writing?

Lots of ways! I lean hard into dialogue—all my books are talky—and sometimes when I’m writing a tricky scene I will specifically think in terms of direction or blocking or even lighting cues. When I’m reading, if I can’t set the characters on a stage, it creates a big disconnect. On the other side of it, I often write about performers. Rubi, in Gamechanger, has a side gig as a performance VR player, and her father Drow is a has-been rock star.

Does your approach to writing change if you are working on a shorter piece of fiction?

If I think I am writing something that will turn out to be short, I spend a lot of time praying this will prove to be true. I like complicated things and given the slightest bit of rope, my stories tend to expand. I always start by saying “This one will be under 5,000 words . . . well, 6,500 . . . well . . . ” Every writer has hang-ups and my biggest one is an idea that I ought to be capable of brevity.

Some of my best short work has, therefore, been for theme anthologies where someone else has set very particular limitations for both length and topic.

How did Gamechanger start for you? What was the inspiration and did the direction change after you went deeper into the writing?

Gamechanger’s initial seed was an obsession with Internet shamings. I had tried three or four times to write a story about a journalist who’d written a true story that got them vilified online. After a bunch of false starts, this idea became my novella “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling.” (Which is a Best Science Fiction of the Year pick and reprinted in Forever!)

The journalist is Drow (who is an old man in Gamechanger) and once I had found him and shattered his life, I decided I wanted him to have an artificially intelligent sidekick that actually worked. I was very into Gotham at the time and had a lot of passionate fannish feels specifically about Sean Pertwee’s Alfred Pennyworth. So I imagined a couple of Batman fans who’d created a piece of sentient fanfic to more or less raise their son for them and Crane was born.

My final inspiration came from the environment. I’d moved from the West Coast to Toronto, and was experiencing real Canadian Winter™ for the first time in 22 years. They weren’t quite the winters I grew up with in Northern Alberta but my reaction to bundling up and schlepping through snow drifts connected to a lot of thoughts I was having about climate change.

After I wrote the novella I knew I wanted to think beyond the Setback-era world it imagined, building forward through a few more generations. I imagined the Clawback period and then the Bounceback. Then I came to Rubi.

As for direction, by the time I got to Rubi the idea had come full circle. Rubi is a public defender representing Luciano Pox, who is at risk—just as Drow once was—because he’s unpopular on the future Internet. Thinking about what our current online honor/shame culture could do if it was rigorously channeled in positive directions, and existed in a world where we were making massive efforts to address climate change. That lead to a lot of extrapolation for Gamechanger.

Gamechanger is really chock full of ideas. There’s a lot of SF going on. But everything blends seamlessly, makes sense to the world, and is important to the story. How did you manage all these ideas, along with making them relevant?

Seamless—thank you!!

I think the biggest challenge with keeping it relevant was not falling behind! I had started writing about the likes and strikes economy before Black Mirror did a similar riff, and before I found out that China was test driving an equivalent of the same idea.

Every day I go online and see people in STEM working their asses off to find ways to stabilize our ecosystem, often in the face of corporate, government, and public indifference. They are inventing marvels as we speak—nuclear diamonds! Tree planting drones!! All I had to do was imagine a future where we develop and deploy these technologies with heart, intelligence, and yes, sometimes a bit of desperation too.

There’s a visionary element to this story, in that everything has this sense of . . . potential realism. By that I mean, we don’t necessarily expect life in the future to be the way it’s depicted on Star Trek, but Gamechanger seems grounded in more realistic extrapolations of current situations, in terms of climate, politics, and culture. At the same time, the narrative leans less “fantastic” because of it. Can you talk a bit about the purpose, the drive for this; or perhaps the challenges of it?

Star Trek was hugely optimistic and aspirational, and it changed a lot of lives. I wanted some of that sense of hope and aspiration, even though we live in a time when it’s so much easier to be cynical. We hear about or imagine something good, and there’s a temptation to dismiss it as impossible, without even examining it. It’s because we’re scared to hope, essentially. We’ve been encouraged to be super-scared and give in to helplessness.

Me, I decided: screw that!

The Bounceback future is our world in a hundred years(ish). It’s a world where we find a way to make our current techno-encroachments on privacy a social good. It’s a world where built-in cameras and consent assessment apps radically reduce the incidence of sexual assault and other acts of interpersonal violence. It’s a world where we don’t futz around wasting police time on property crime or drug prohibition, where we instead police wage theft and triage corporations with rapacious environmental practices. It’s a world where we don’t give up everything we have and value now—though we do lose some things! It’s the opposite of descending into fascism, cannibalism, and dystopia.

This is an optimistic future, and I’m not saying we can achieve everything in my book just as I imagined it, but a lot of what’s in it is possible. It’s a world our current crop of high-flying tech bros could go a long way to building, if they cared to consult stakeholders widely, think about the knock-on effects of humanity’s remarkable achievements, and imagine harnessing our best ideas in the cause of extraordinary good.

Cherub Whiting (aka Rubi) is a great, complex character. Do you see yourself in her, or did you draw directly on specific people as models for her?

Thank you! I know a lot of crusading lawyers and social activists. (I don’t know so many people who do parkour, but I do know a lot of sporty folk and gamers.) Rubi had lots of inspirations. She’s a naturally generous do-gooder, from a generation of people who have begun to renew the world.

Rubi does, as the book opens, have a dose of what is sometimes called compassion fatigue, and that is something I’ve experienced as an activist. And she’s pulled in multiple directions by the demands of her multiple work gigs, which is a problem I think will resonate with a lot of readers in the here and now. Plenty of us have two (or three or four!) jobs instead of one, and even though on paper the hours are supposed to come to a full work week and a decent standard of living, we all know the bite of having the week run long and the money run short.

What is your favorite thing about Gamechanger, what was the hardest thing about writing it, and what do you really want readers to know about it?

I want readers to know it’s fun! Fun fun fun! It has an old rock star chasing a conspiracy theory. Rubi has an awesome love interest/archenemy out in the gaming world. It has megastorms and a big fight at a small Piccadilly theater and a strange mystery at its heart. Also shrink-wrapped Manhattan, giant nuclear-powered pyramids covered in LED artwork, and very flexible ideas about how many people belong within a legal marriage.

The hardest thing about writing it was definitely keeping all of my balls in the air—it is quite the juggling act, with lots of POV characters. Even being sure the reader and I knew where any given scene was taking place, and whether it was in the real world or VR, was sometimes a challenge.

My favorite thing about Gamechanger is that it’s a story about how we survive, how we keep being lovers and parents and gaming fans and activists and friends and lawyers and artists. We don’t all get taken over by oligarchs and racists. A century from now, in my world, compassionate, cool people are living smart, productive lives in an ecosphere they worked incredibly hard to preserve . . . and they’re even beginning to see the big first hints of a chance to re-wild other animal species.

(My second favorite thing is the happiness management app, Happ, because everyone who has read the book has adored him.)

What are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

I am so close to having the sequel to Gamechanger finished! It’s called Dealbreaker and it also jumps forward . . . not quite a generation in this case. I can’t tell you anything else because: spoiler spoiler and more spoiler. But! It also has all of the above fun things, plus a global push to develop both FTL spaceships and viable wormholes. At speed. And to do it, no less, in the midst of my personal nightmare, a worldwide coffee shortage.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
A Journey “Home”

Neil Clarke

When Dublin first announced its bid to host a Worldcon, something weird happened: my family’s ears perked up. My parents were born and raised in Ireland—Navan to be precise—and immigrated to the US in the 1960s. While my grandparents were still alive, we made regular pilgrimages “home” to visit family and I have many fond memories of staying with my grandmother and spending time with aunts, uncles, and cousins. Back home, it was usually just us, but in Ireland, it was a bit overwhelming how much bigger our family really was, particularly for an introvert like myself.

There was a long gap between visits after my grandparents died. My parents managed to visit a bit, but by then life was pushing me in other directions and honestly, I think knowing my grandparents wouldn’t be there made it that much harder.

In 2014, I had plans to attend the London Worldcon. My heart attack had been two years prior and my family wasn’t quite on-board with me traveling long distances on my own just yet. My dad volunteered to join me and we decided to stop in Ireland while we were in the neighborhood. It had been over twenty-five years since I was last there and so much had changed. The fields across from Grannie’s old house were condominiums, the town was so much bigger, and the family had grown considerably larger. We stayed in Navan and in a few days saw as many people as we could before heading to London. A brief, but enjoyable, whirlwind tour.

I think all of that set the stage for their reaction to the Dublin bid. For years now, this trip loomed as a possibility. In the end, ten of us made arrangements to go to Ireland last month: my parents, my sister and her family, Lisa, my sons, and I. Unfortunately, my brother and his family were unable to join us.

All ten arrived at the airport on the same day, but were slated to travel on two different airlines. My sister and her family made it out late, but the rest of us embarked on a travel nightmare sponsored by Aer Lingus. Long story short, it was the worst experience I’ve ever had with an airline and I’m never flying with them again and there’s a whole laundry list of reasons I won’t go into here. The short version is that after many errors on their part, it was days later before we could join my sister in Ireland. It was only through the actions of my cousins—who called some contacts at the airline—that we made it there in time to attend the first of several family reunions.

But we made it. (Again, no thanks to Aer Lingus. Yeah, I’m still furious with them.) That first night—and most others—we were up late laughing and talking with family I hadn’t seen in ages. It was just what we needed after the travel ordeals of the days before. Over the course of the next few days, this scene would repeat itself over and over with other branches of the family stopping by. We like to joke that if you throw a stone there, you’ll hit a family member, and at times it felt  that way. (To illustrate this point: While we were in the hotel pub, we were talking about who would be visiting and how they are related. One of the employees overheard the conversation and she proclaimed “I think we’re related.” It turns out that we are.) While Lisa and the boys have met some of the family that has visited the US, they’ve never experienced the full-on extended family in their native habitat. They fit right in, but it was fun watching them in this environment. It’s nothing like this at home.

It wasn’t all family time though. We traveled around, visited castles and historical sites, were shown places that featured in my parent’s stories, and wandered around town. I was happy that I could share some of the things I experienced as a child with them, particularly with my parents along for the ride. This was something I’ve wanted to give them for a long time and I was sad when that portion of the trip came to an end. My sister and her family went home, my parents traveled to Galway to visit some more family, and we headed to Dublin for the convention. (It would be more correct to say that I was headed for the convention and Lisa and the boys were going to explore Dublin.)

The first thing that struck me on arriving in Dublin was the sheer number of cranes that dotted the landscape. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much construction happening in a city before. Our hotel was just down the street from the convention center—also relatively new—so we split up and I headed off to register. The lines were short and I soon had my packet, badge, and Hugo finalist pin. It didn’t take long before I started running into friends and colleagues.

Much like the London Worldcon, this felt very much like a WORLDcon. There were multiple languages being spoken, authors and fans from around the world that I rarely, if ever, see, and panels that covered that territory well. I’ve never seen anything quite like this when the convention is in the US and that isn’t a slam. Each venue has its strengths/weaknesses and I’m not sure we’ll ever see that balance out. It does, however, make the case for the need to have more international Worldcons. While the distant venues may make it more challenging for some to attend, the variety is a strength for which there isn’t a substitute. If any convention should be the center for that variety, it’s this one.

The panels were very well-attended, often to capacity. Unfortunately, the convention center was a bit heavy-handed in making people line up in advance and cutting it off when they ran out of seats. This caused a number of people to miss panels they planned to see. Given the number of attendees, the room sizes were probably a bit too small. I met a few people who were locked out of a couple of my panels, but as happens at Worldcon, we ended up talking about some of those things at parties, in hallways, and at meals. The trick with a con this spread out was finding where people were. For example, it was several nights in before I found out that a group of people I hadn’t seen much of had set up camp at a hotel bar down the road. On the plus side, I ended up getting to meet many others I probably wouldn’t have met. That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons that I attend Worldcon.

Worldcon is home to the Hugo Awards and as a finalist, I was looking forward to Sunday evening. My parents returned from Galway to attend the ceremony with my kids and Lisa joined me as my plus one at the reception, ceremony, and loser’s party at the Guiness Factory. The results are online and as I expected, I lost to Gardner Dozois. I’ve seen some people grousing that Gardner didn’t need one more Hugo—and other more insulting things—simply because their chosen editor—all of which could be on the ballot again someday—didn’t get it. (Shame on you.) I finished second behind Gardner and I’m perfectly fine with losing to him. He was an amazing editor and someone for whom I had a great deal of respect. If you are going to lose, that’s the optimal scenario. Sure, Gardner isn’t around to appreciate it, but his family is and it was a pleasure to see Christopher accept the award. Congratulations to Gardner and thank you to all the people who voted for me this year!

After all of this, there was one more day of the con after the ceremony, but I only put in a few hours, choosing instead to walk around Dublin with my family and soak in whatever I could before we returned to NJ. It was a beautiful day and a fantastic trip. Sure, there were problems along the way, but I have many more fond memories and new friends to make up for it. It joins a long list of pleasant experiences when our family returned “home.”

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; 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, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His latest anthology, The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Homage

Beeple

About the Artist

Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Charleston, SC, USA who does a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, everydays, and VR/AR work.

After he began releasing a set of widely used Creative Commons VJ loops he has worked on concert visuals for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and many more.

One of the originators of the current “everyday” movement in 3D graphics, he has been creating a picture everyday from start to finish and posting it online for over twelve years without missing a single day.